Why Jargon is Bad, and Some Modern Resources for RPG Theory

[Thomas Shey]

I don't think it is odd at all and I fully get where @Lanefan is coming from. Have you ever been at a LARP? There almost never is rules for social stuff yet that tends to be the main part of many LARPs.

That doesn't actually change his point, you know. The fact some people draw a sharp line of demarcation between social or mental tasks and others does not change how odd that looks to those who consider the whole point in game rules being to resolve how things occur in games. It just says the first group is not the second group.

 

[Malmuria]

Is resolving those issues an inevitable cost of RPGing? Some people think so. Edwards doesn't.

What do you mean by this?

 

[pemerton]

That first sort of incoherence that Ron and most of us at the Forge saw - that of players playing fundamentally different sorts of games - that does not happen at the vast majority of tables. What we missed is that despite rules pulled from wargames the vast majority of games lacked differences of creative agenda because they didn't use the rules in their 500-page books.

<snip>

This is fundamentally why power gamers and rules lawyers are looked down upon - they're trying to play the game in the book. Not the game we are actually playing.

I think this first sort of "incoherence" - playing different games - still seems to manifest in PC gen. That seems to be where the issues around powergamers ("optimisers") mostly show up.

That second sort was pretty widespread and still kind of is, although less and less with games like 5e, Numenera, Edge of the Empire, Conan 2d20, Vampire 5e, L5R 5e. They largely drop a lot of the war gaming stuff they don't care about. They can be played in setting/story exploration mode mostly without ignoring the rules. There's a whole lot less getting in the way of GM curated play. The resource management minigames in 5e are a sort of proud nail that way, but can be finessed much more easily than AD&D.

I think that last sentence is right - the 5-minute/6-8 encounter issue hasn't gone away.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I don't think it is odd at all and I fully get where @Lanefan is coming from. Have you ever been at a LARP? There almost never is rules for social stuff yet that tends to be the main part of many LARPs.

Sure, I was explaining the difference in view. That there are people and games that do things as @Lanefan described is not in doubt. I’ve never LARPed, but I’ve played plenty of other games that have such a system.

I was explaining why such a system may seem odd to folks who play differently. And I kind of posed the question of what it accomplishes.

 

[Malmuria]

I don't understand why damn near 20 years later we are so caught up on the words of one man who has said lots of things since and designed a lot of games. It's not as if Ron being wrong about thing would make him wrong about everything. That's not the way any of this works.

I'm just trying to understand the thesis or arguments being made (and thanks for your clarification). I think I understand, but I was confused in the other thread because it seemed like "incoherence" specifically was not referring to the arguments RE made about dysfunction. I would agree it's not necessarily useful to get hung up on words; but then, to the OP's point, that perhaps demonstrates the limited usefulness of terminology/jargon absent context, especially when a particular term can be interpreted in quite different ways.

 

[pemerton]

What do you mean by this?

I mean that it's not an inevitable feature of RPGing that the GM, or the table, have to work out how to resolve the issues I described.

Consider the extended rest issue in 5e D&D. Depending on the rate (relative to encouners) at which players are allowed to regain all their resources, the game will play quite differently; and if daily-limited casters are allowed to regain their resources with the same frequency as short rest-based fighters, their nova-ing will overshadow or crowd out the fighters (and rogues) unless the GM uses various techniques (spotlighting, "job for Aquaman", etc) to deal with the issue.

This is not inevitable. 4e D&D, for instance, doesn't have this issue. Burning Wheel is a very different mechanical chassis from 4e D&D, and in many ways is more traditional with "at will" warriors and recovery-based casters, but it doesn't have the issue either.

Or consider the issue of players building PCs that will fit the GM's campaign and take up the GM's hooks. The AD&D 2nd ed PHB has no instructions or advice to players about how to build PCs that will (i) fit together (other than some light-touch stuff in the alignment section), and (ii) fit the GM's game. Edwards describes the phenomenon this way:

individually-conducted character creation often produces differing conclusions about the point of play from player to player, which is to say, the characters are fully plausible and created by the rules, but are also manifestly incapable of interacting in terms of any one person's desired genre/setting. The classic example in fantasy-adventure play is the party including a paladin and an assassin . . .​

And in the context of 5e play, I still see discussions online about players building PCs that don't fit the game or whose Backgrounds get ignored of whatever.

This isn't inevitable either. The rulebooks can set out instructions differently, tell the GM to nominate the PC backgrounds to the players, etc. Eg Torchbearer tells each player to "write a goal" for their PC at the start of each session, which "should be appropriate to the adventure". And the sample adventure elaborates: "After introducing the rumor and framing the first scene, instruct the players to write their goals or choose from our examples". The basic procedures of the game make sure that there will be no mismatch between what the PCs' goals are, and the scenario the GM is framing them into.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't think it is odd at all and I fully get where @Lanefan is coming from. Have you ever been at a LARP? There almost never is rules for social stuff yet that tends to be the main part of many LARPs.

LARPs and TTRPGs are very different beasts. When participating in a LARP there is necessarily a type of total immersion, you literally ARE your character, physically. There may be conventions related to resolving things that people cannot obviously risk doing, like lethal combat and whatnot, but the WHOLE IDEA is to play out the action as closely as possible to reality, any other action is simply a 'kludge' that is required because we're in the real world still.

The situation in a TTRPG is entirely different. It is quite possible, and IMHO often quite desirable to have uniform resolution processes. It really IS quite odd when they don't exist. I mean, odd in the sense that social situations, for example, in D&D aught to be as potentially lucrative and also dangerous as anything else, but yet we just say what happened, no hard adjudication at all. Its actually pretty weird when you think about it. I mean, why not just resolve combat that way too? lol.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't understand why damn near 20 years later we are so caught up on the words of one man who has said lots of things since and designed a lot of games. It's not as if Ron being wrong about thing would make him wrong about everything. That's not the way any of this works.

That first sort of incoherence that Ron and most of us at the Forge saw - that of players playing fundamentally different sorts of games - that does not happen at the vast majority of tables. What we missed is that despite rules pulled from wargames the vast majority of games lacked differences of creative agenda because they didn't use the rules in their 500-page books. They used unwritten rules that were socially enforced to keep games centered on story and setting. We kept looking at the rulebooks, instead of the actual play when it came to coherence. To a certain extent people like Vincent Baker absolutely understood that Vampire, Shadowrun, Ars Magica, AD&D Second Edition were all pretty much expensive paper weights outside of the setting material.

The actual game structure, reward systems and expectations were all part of a system of elaborate mostly unspoken social norms. This is fundamentally why power gamers and rules lawyers are looked down upon - they're trying to play the game in the book. Not the game we are actually playing.

That second sort was pretty widespread and still kind of is, although less and less with games like 5e, Numenera, Edge of the Empire, Conan 2d20, Vampire 5e, L5R 5e. They largely drop a lot of the war gaming stuff they don't care about. They can be played in setting/story exploration mode mostly without ignoring the rules. There's a whole lot less getting in the way of GM curated play. The resource management minigames in 5e are a sort of proud nail that way, but can be finessed much more easily than AD&D.

So, how do you square this with the fact that more than half of the Forge is ACTUAL PLAY being analyzed? I mean, go read White, he literally breaks it down. Honestly, I wasn't there, and I have surely not read through 10's of thousands of posts, but it is 100% certainly true that a huge number of them were exactly diagnosing people's real play. Yet you assert that everyone on the site was entirely mired in some textbook analysis of rulebooks and paid no attention to that. Heck, White even elaborates on how RE himself spent considerable efforts on these analyses and was quite adept at dissecting play and explicating what it consisted of and why it worked a certain way. Not rulebooks, play.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

What do you mean by this?

He means exactly what he said. There is a vast ocean of ink on this site that has been spent asserting that these issues of coherence in D&D are simply "the way RPGs are." I mean, sure such posters assert some nostrums in terms of 'fixing' individual instances of them. Often various parties at the table are vilified for being stubborn, disruptive, too rigid, whatever. The factors in game design and organization/process of play that actually lead to them? Those are literally assumed to be gospel of RPGs. I cannot tell you how many times I've read posts that LITERALLY state "This is how RPGs are, the GM has to do XYZ, and the player must do ABC, that's how it is!" in response to some suggestion that this is not all there is to RPGs. Usually, but not always, its some variation of common play of D&D, with trad GM/Player roles, etc. I will literally put money on we can go to the D&D threads and find one where virtually exactly this was posted TODAY, because it happens every single day. Its common as rain.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

Celerity gave extra actions when you activated it. Besides meaning you were resolving multiple actions for those with it, anyone who didn't have it was twiddling their thumbs waiting for those who did.

(This is over and above the fact that Vampire had a combat system that seemed to be belong in a different game with a different avowed focus).

Oh man this brings back memories. In the one VTM game I played in long long ago I was the only PC without celerity. When combats started I would just leave the table for awhile and declare myself to be cowering in the background.

Bad game design, that bit.