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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5354210" data-attributes="member: 4937">Says the snide snippy condescending eye-roller?  But as a matter of fact, no, I'm not.  I don't expect you to be all happy with what I'm saying, but if I wanted to be personally insulting I'd be a lot more direct about it than I am.That is just a huge can of worms, and I'd not want to open it here.   We had that one many times before, and its really interesting, but it usually ends with people shouting at each other.Suffice to say:a) Even if you can't possibly break your leg by jumping off a house in D&D, it doesn't necessarily follow that the game is improved if the player nows that.b) It might actually be excellent versimilitude with any heroic setting that a hero can jump off a house with no chance of breaking his leg, but depending on the setting it isn't necessarily also excellent versimilitude if the hero acts as if he can jump off houses (or skyscapers!) without breaking his leg.c) That assumption, if applied at my table, would likely get you the player in a lot of trouble in the long run.  While I don't feel any need to keep my falling rules secret, assuming you didn't know them, you'd actually be better off with the assumption that jumping off a house occasionally means a broken leg than with the assumption that, "Since this is D&D, I can exploit known limitations in the rules to jump off houses without breaking my leg."   And indeed, I feel this is true regardless of what the rules happen to be.d) The particular thing you site is such a notorious example, that not only is it the case that it has made people unhappy for years and years, but its been patched and altered from the base rules probably more than any other single rule.  Sitting down at a random D&D table, I'd pretty much assume that a house rule for falling was in play until it was demonstrated otherwise. I don't know.  I do know that I can't enjoy a movie without thinking about it and that I can't turn my brain off to do so.  I just guess I don't find it very distracting to work out the rules over time, and am in no particular hurry to do so.Ok, sure, but you don't need to know the rules in order to do that.  It's perfectly possible to separate rules for chargen from the resolution rules.   Most games are pretty up front about the chargen rules, and then have resolution rules in latter chapter which may or may not be perused by players but usually certainly do not have to be.  Why do you think you need to know the resolution rules in order to 'get my character to represent what I want to play'? ???   I'm not.  I don't however think you are typical of a new gamer though, and to be honest I think you are pretty far down the spectrum of how much rules/system mastery you feel you need to have as a player.   In your case, I'd hand you my 500 page house rules document and say, "Have fun.", and fully expect you to come back with, "The rules for X are incomplete.  What happens when..."  And that's fine.  It's just not what I'd expect of a new player and while it might be what you enjoy, for your average new player I'd probably tell them that they were worrying to much about knowing the rules.  This would especially be the case if I saw they were worried about knowing the rules but very unanxious to consume a 500 page densely written document.  Dogs in the Vineyard is neither badly written or a bad game.  It is simply a rules light game and so will have the inherent limitations of any rules light game, among which are "doesn't cover most of the situations that come up except with vague and difficult to apply references".  Good designers of course mitigate against this by matching the intended game to the rules light mechanics of the game so that this problem gets in the way as little as possible.   But, every rules light approach invariably involves heavy reliance on narrative versimilitude, DM fiat, and improvised mechanics. Let's take the Dread example.   Dread is interesting in that it uses an unusual fortune mechanic.  The particular fortune mechanic it uses causes the difficulty of a task to steadily increase over time, so that a 'pull 1' task early in the game is not nearly the same as a 'pull 1' task later in the game.  What this means is that we have a non-simulation.  We have a game where the difficulty isn't determined by the task, but by the needs of the story.   The GM is constantly fudging to achieve a particular story arc.  His constraints and interests aren't really in, "How likely is this to succeed?" or even in, "How much can be accomplished?" but rather, "How much time is left in the story?"  The fortune mechanic is such that virtually any task has almost a 100% chance of success very early on, but eventually the odds of any task succeeding approach 0% in the long run.  The art is in running into that high chance of failure at the right time - neither too late nor too early.  That's the expectation of the system. It's a fortune mechanic designed to run a story to a definite and tense conclusion.  You couldn't run the same game with a coin flip.Now, it should be perfectly clear then that the mechanic is in fact, "a handbook that doesn't cover most of the situations that come up except with vague and difficult to apply references", because the art of the game is in the pacing of the story and the challenges - inventing pulls where needed to pick up the pace and avoiding them elsewhere to slow it down.  There is no way that he rules can do more than give vague and difficult to apply guidelines for this, and so its up to the GM to come to understand and apply the art of the game. (Incidently, if you are living in the central Ohio area and think you've mastered this art, I'd love to be invited to sit in on a game to play and to learn.)  First of all, your computer can't run an RPG.  If it could run an RPG, it could also pass the turing test.   And if you understand the art of an RPG well enough that you can teach a computer to do it, then I suggest that your skills are very underused and that you should be applying for a faculty position at UT, GT, CMU, MIT, CalB, or the like ASAP for your own good and the good of mankind.Secondly, that "as long as I break it down enough" is the phrasing hiding all the art and complexity there, and within it is hid even things that make the most rules heavy system shudder.   The question is not whether any system is comprehensive, because it certainly isn't.   The question is whether the tools are there with good guidelines on how to use them.  In a rules light system, those guidelines must inherently be quite general and unspecific, and the rules themselves are likely to be of the same sort.   This doesn't make them 'bad rules', and they might even be better rules than heavier rules that consistantly give bad answers (especially in the hands of a good GM).   But it does mean that the GM has less in the way of guidance and must rely - like the users of the afore described school handbook - more on their own judgment.Yes, it is the very same standard that is used for programming.  But sometimes this means something incredibly complex and 'janky' looking indeed because the simple things just don't do the job.  Yes.</blockquote>

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