This little article caught my eye over on Tales of the Rambling Bumblers. In it Joshua attempts to define one of the great splits of our hobby over rules. Are rules little more than a simple abstracted and imperfect model of a 'existing world' that has it's own laws and logic, or do they define reality for a fantasy world?
Joshua and I go back a long ways, and he's a sharp guy worth listening too and I think that article is quite good in general. But even sharp people can error when trying to define viewpoints that aren't their own (I include myself here). And I feel that he made such an error in this article. Joshua you see is a solid member of the 'world drives imperfect rules' PoV. And I happen to be in the other camp- that 'rules define the results that are possible in the world'.
So let's take a moment for someone of my viewpoint to respond to the following assertion from the linked article:
- "In original D&D, for instance, the game explicitly took the view that the rules were approximations but in every case the referee was the final arbiter; nevertheless there were rules such as Magic Users being forbidden to wear armor which weren’t explained in terms of game-world logic, leaving different groups on their own to either come up with explanations to justify the rule so that causality still flowed from the game-world to the rules (e.g. “armor is too restrictive, MUs can wear it but any attempt to cast spells will fail”), or to reverse the direction for that rule and say “Magic users can’t wear armor because that’s the rule. There is no why." (Or perhaps by an appeal to a meta-game consideration, such as “MUs can’t wear armor because that would be unbalanced.”) Note that if the group followed the first tack, there would be further in-game consequences that flow from it, such as MUs having their companions carry armor around so that when they ran out of spells they could armor up. If the group took the latter tack, there’s often an awareness that the world is operating in strange and arbitrary ways. Much gaming humor (such as in Order of the Stick) comes from making the characters as aware of the flow of causality from the rules to their world as the players are.
Bolding mine.
Here Joshua betrays his own mindset when attempting to examine an opposing view. In attempting to define it, he insists on still viewing it in terms of the World instead Rules, i.e. he's looking for in-world reasons for the rules. That's not something someone who considers rules to define world does.
As an example, let's pull back a moment to a wargamer playing a WWII battle. He has all the rules needed to resolved a conflict involving German and American tanks- except of course anything that indicates why German tanks have better guns and armor. From Joshua's PoV, such a player (one who lacks any knowledge of the history involved, but yet is still a fan of games set in that background) should be asking 'Why?, what else does that mean?".
But the gamer doesn't care. He assumes it's correct, that it covers all he needs to know as far as results, and given that freedom he's able to focus on having a bang up time playing the game and acting within it's definitions.
Going back to D&D and Magic-Users having no armor- most of the questions and concerns Joshua insist that I have, I don't (or rather didn't, I don't play D&D anymore). The rules are clear, Magic-Users don't use armor. I don't need or even want to understand why. Nor do I need to worry about follow-up effects, for if there were any they too would be covered by the rules. Instead I play and role-play given that result, much the same that people generally go on with their lives living within physical laws they don't really undestand.
I should note here that any attempt to game the rules or the setting by nature reverses causality to match Joshua's viewpoint- not mine.
It's this line of thought at cause me to disagree with much of Joshua's following article about changing 4th edition to work for grognards. The only grognards he's concerned with are those like him- world drive rules types. There is little to no needed changes for 4E to work grognards for such a myself. All the worries and questions he asks have no meaning when the game is being played.
Now I should take a moment here to say something rather important about at least my own approach to this subject. While I'm "rules define world" in play, I'm the reverse when selecting what game to play.
And that's why I don't play D&D of any edition any more. Hit Points, AC, and all that doesn't match any world I'd want to game in. And thus before I ever sit down and play- I select the rules from Joshua's PoV. I also design games from that PoV. But I don't play them that way.
I think many players don't do this. They just grab the rules, take them as defining the world- and go. I also think people may well switch between the two viewpoints, often depending upon the exact subject as each person has different hot buttons. The fact that Joshua can live with games he does while I can't is proof enough of this.
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You and I think very much alike. What games do you play if you don't mind my asking?
That article also got me thinking about the "direction of causality" issue in gaming. I think that a lot of this discussion and disagreement comes down to people misunderstanding what the purpose of the "rules" in games actually do.
When we really boil down what game rules are for, it's very simple:
You want something to happen in the narrative - you determine how likely/unlikely that is to happen.
Factors that are commonly considered are the difficulty of the action and the skill of the people involved. Add randomization, and voila - you have determined an action.
Pretty much every game rule, in all systems addresses some part of this basic equation. Rules are just shortcuts to these basic questions, and different rules address or combine these questions in different ways.
As an example, lets look at AC (or any defense rating, really). It's a shortcut for "how difficult it is to attack something", and the shortcut includes factors like physical protection and agility and overall skill of the defender.
Attack modifiers are similar - they are a shortcut that say "this is how good I am at striking aggressively".
Different systems use different shortcuts and probability structures to organize this stuff, but the basics are always the same.
It seems to me that the whole concept of "direction of causality" is mistaken - the only causality that exists is the consensual one that the players agree to. Different styles and rulesets imply causality, but they cannot create it.
Maybe an example will help, if only for myself. Let's take one action and look at the different ways that it can be handled, using different shortcuts. In game, a player says "I try to knock the monster into the pit".
You need to determine how difficult this is going to be - factoring in how tough the monster is to knock around, how skilled the player is at knocking things around, adding some randomization (if you like) and then determining the actual in-game effects.
For OD&D, this process is going to be largely up to the GM, with input from the players, and will be primarily based on AC, to hit bonus and a generous helping of "common sense", which really means deciding what you think might be realistic and then arguing about it. This is because OD&D doesn't use a lot of shortcuts.
In 4e, there are more shortcuts built into the game system. Rule of 42 gives mechanical guidelines for determining how difficult things are generally, and the player may have a power like "Tide of Iron", which is just a shortcut for saying "this character is hella-good at smashing things around by running at them".
The difficulty here is that the shortcuts are implying possibility - things like the rogue power that hits as a close burst on multiple targets, and can be done with a crossbow. Now... I've used a crossbow, brother, and there ain't no bursts with em. The power is a shortcut for saying "this character is really good at shooting a bunch of people in the face with missile weapons", but it asks you to agree that the possibility is there in the first place - which is where people who like OD&D have issues with 4e, it uses shortcuts that imply possibilities that they would rather not have.
I like 4e because it's made the mechanics of determining lots of this stuff more transparent and easier to use, but you need to be willing to use the shortcuts they built as well, and those don't sit well with everyone.
@Helmsman: Age of Heroes which is my homegrown rules for High Fantasy gaming, and HERO System for nearly everything else although I tend to build things to a different standard than the company products.
The house rules links shows much of this.
@Wickedmurph: I think you go astray when you say this: "You want something to happen in the narrative", 'want' is a poor word choice for many people.
Beyond that, I would agree. Rules determine what can or can not happen- or they fail to address the question. I think that much is a given.
How people react to those rules however are not, and that is what the concept of causality is about.
I do think that people shift between different modes with ease. And there are other factors in play, too; fudging is one, in my opinion negative way, of social factors inflicting their causality on the gameplay ("Player wouldn't have fun if their character died, so I'll save the character by fudging.").
Curious. The concept of "wanting something to happen" is pretty much the ONLY thing that you are doing when you play RPG's. Shared narrative is about walking the line between what everyone wants. How can it possibly be a "poor word choice"?
@Wickedmurph: A lot of people have little interest in anything called 'narrative' and some are far more interested in "what would happen" than in "wanting something to happen".
Riight, but the job of the DM is to mediate (in effect) the interaction the gameworld that has been created, and the actions of the characters. Each player tries to effect the gameworld in certain ways (wanting things to happen, for lack of a better word), and the DM filters those actions through the ruleset to determine what DOES happen.
Conversely, the DM has to decide what actions the NPC's or enemies in the gameworld take (in effect, what they WANT to do) and filter those actions the other way, informing the players what has happened.
We might be getting bogged down in semantics here, though. Would you agree any action that a player or npc takes needs to go through this process like the one I've described?
Also, if you're not interested in discussing this, I'll leave it - it just helps me establish a conceptual framework that I use to think about the differences between playstyles and game systems.
I think the term 'want' is too loaded to use. I set into motion things that I don't want, indeed as a GM that is half my job.
Now deciding what has been attempted (for whatever reason) by various actors be they PC or NPC, and determining the outcome- that I do.
But 'want' may or may not enter into it.
Now my insistance on distance from the word 'want' is due mostly to wishing to distance myself from a certain style of play that one might label "narrative". I don't play that way, don't design that way, and don't want to be confused with it.
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