How Visible To players Should The Rules Be?

Reynard said:

Thank you for the detailed response. One of these days I need to pick up a copy of a BW game (probably in the form of Torchbearer).

But I still don't understand how this "scene as a basic unit of play" mechanism removes the kind of GM author stance you seem in your posts to be so opposed to.

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By itself it doesn’t. Whoever has the power to frame scenes has unilateral situational authority, and unilateral situational authority IS story authority. Well kind of, it’s more complicated than that. Here’s an extreme example:

So a snippet from my post earlier in the thread:

A player is playing a Paladin and he’s conflicted about helping the poor vs serving the law. So the GM decides the next scene is a poor urchin who was stealing food, has been captured by the City Watch.

This plays directly into the characters priorities and so it seems great right. There’s going to be another scene though, what’s to stop the GM invalidating the choices made in the previous scene. Let’s say the GM just doesn’t want to. There’s still got to be another scene.

So the GM creates another charged situation. All-right great, but there’s got to be another scene right. So how does the GM know when to stop? If they just decide, then they’re exercising the whole unilateral authority thing.

In this exact set up, barring other methods, you basically just shunt the story authority over to the player. At some point they decide their paladin is irrevocably on the side of law or helping the poor.

Say in Dogs in the Vineyard, when a player character just takes off his coat and walks way.

Also as Aramis just put it:

The GM is not there to impart his/her story, but to facilitate the players' stories

And even within this strand of Narrative play there are multiple nuanced mechanisms to naughty word with everything (in a good way). The ascension mechanic from The Shadow of Yesterday comes to mind. Beliefs in BW act as both an opening flag AND a closing flag. The actual aesthetics of the players is really important and prevents my caricatured version from ever happening. And so on.

pemerton said:

The jargon term "campaign" has its origin in wargaming.

I don't do wargaming RPGing very often, but I don't complain about the use of the term every time I see it turn up on these boards.

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Do you object to it's use? Or it's origin in wargaming?

darkbard said:

So, by this logic, you're fully on board with every PC knowing that fire or acid defeats a trolls regeneration ... because conflating character and player knowledge is the desiderstum here? At the very least, I assure you, @Lanefan is not on board with such!

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Memory check successful, @darkbard !

That said, where possible I very much do want player knowledge and character knowledge to align in order to nip metagaming in the bud. Which means, for things like bog-standard trolls vs experienced players I reulctantly have to assume their fire issues are fairly common knowledge among adventurers whether I want it so or not.

What I don't like is experienced players ruining these "aha!" moments for new players, if in the same group.

Reynard said:

You seem to take issue with the GM deciding stuff. But by your definition of scene framing, the GM decides that. How do you square those? Or am I misunderstanding you on some level?

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I don’t think it’s aboutGM authorship, so much as what prompts the GM to author something.

I think that’s the big difference in many games, and it can be difficult to notice. Especially in online discussion rather than in play.

Someone earlier (@TwoSix I believe, please correct me if I’m wrong) talked about a GM framing a scene at a wizard’s tower because that’s what the GM had prepped, or framing a scene at a wizard’s tower because one of the PCs had a reason to go to the tower.

Of course someone immediately said “what’s the difference, it’s still a wizard’s tower”. But that’s just because of the nature of the example.

Suppose none of the PCs had any reason to be at a wizards tower? In that case, for many games, it would be poor form for the GM to frame a scene there. Not without some compelling reason for one of the PCs.

In many games, the GM is free to introduce such a scene by any means they like. Either because the hex the PCs have entered indicates a wizard’s tower is there, or because a random encounter table says it should happen, or because the GM had a cool idea for an encounter and wants to use it, or because the GM stubbed his toe last Tuesday.

It’s not THAT the GM authors elements and introduces them into play, it’s WHY they do so.

thefutilist said:

By itself it doesn’t. Whoever has the power to frame scenes has unilateral situational authority, and unilateral situational authority IS story authority. Well kind of, it’s more complicated than that. Here’s an extreme example:

So a snippet from my post earlier in the thread:

A player is playing a Paladin and he’s conflicted about helping the poor vs serving the law. So the GM decides the next scene is a poor urchin who was stealing food, has been captured by the City Watch.

This plays directly into the characters priorities and so it seems great right. There’s going to be another scene though, what’s to stop the GM invalidating the choices made in the previous scene. Let’s say the GM just doesn’t want to. There’s still got to be another scene.

So the GM creates another charged situation. All-right great, but there’s got to be another scene right. So how does the GM know when to stop? If they just decide, then they’re exercising the whole unilateral authority thing.

In this exact set up, barring other methods, you basically just shunt the story authority over to the player. At some point they decide their paladin is irrevocably on the side of law or helping the poor.

Say in Dogs in the Vineyard, when a player character just takes off his coat and walks way.

Also as Aramis just put it:

The GM is not there to impart his/her story, but to facilitate the players' stories

And even within this strand of Narrative play there are multiple nuanced mechanisms to naughty word with everything (in a good way). The ascension mechanic from The Shadow of Yesterday comes to mind. Beliefs in BW act as both an opening flag AND a closing flag. The actual aesthetics of the players is really important and prevents my caricatured version from ever happening. And so on.

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When in all of this did a player frame the scene?

hawkeyefan said:

It’s not THAT the GM authors elements and introduces them into play, it’s WHY they dodoo.

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Sure, but that's completely independent of game system.

Reynard said:

When in all of this did a player frame the scene?

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They didn't, they can request scenes but the GM has authority, same as in any game that has the kind of trad GM/Player split. If people are letting players actually frame scenes (rather than just saying I go here, or I see this person or whatever), then I'm not sure what to think. I've only ever had rotating scene framing authority in Gmless games and actual shared scene framing authority, in my experience, turns to story boarding. Although I cant speak for others on that, there may be ways to solve the issue.

Interesting. In a very different thread on reddit's PF2E forum I gave an answer to my perspective on this.

Over there the question was about power gaming, etc...

That got me thinking about how in video games and especially MMOs a very frequent theme is to 'build for the meta'. To build for the meta means you have to know how the 'game mechanics' of your game of choice works. In the MMO community NOT doing this is seen as being a bad player; a hindrance to your teammates.

tRPGs half exist in the old paradigm and half in the new. I started this hobby in 1980. Back then a player who was too focused on the rules and good builds was a 'rules lawyer or power gamer' and that was a bad thing.

Now we have several post MMO tRPGs and a lot of post MMO players. These are people who look at the game and want to build an "effective team composition". Knowing the rules is going to be required to do that well. For many games this is a good thing. Other games that are not on this 'new paradigm' might easily break when players do this (I've never played 5E - but I keep seeing people say you can make powerful characters or weak characters in character creation - that it's not balanced. If true, this would be an example of a game that works best under the old paradigm despite being a newer game).

Me personally. I took almost 20 years off from tRPGs to play MMOs. MMOs made more sense to me with the team comp idea because I'm a veteran. I know that people in a combat situation should either be trained to work together and have organized tactics - or the ones that survive will get replacements that do.

I also enjoy not just the story, but also the game. So I want to explore the meta. I want to "power game" and "rules lawyer" and I prefer game systems that don't break under pressure and that entertain these desires of mine.

First generation MMOs often hid the numbers from you. I remember when in World of Warcraft you couldn't see the numbers for anything. Modders started adding in damage meters, numbers on health bars, and floating damage, numbers, parsers were added so you could see the math across 1000s of attacks, and people just spent years working the numbers.

For gamist players, this is a whole thing. We love this part of the experience.
For story players, it's a drag.

But the "answer" - depends on the group. And you then need to pick your tRPG based on what answer you come to.

If like me you enjoy "digging deep into the meta, mechanics, and rules" you're going to want games like Pathfinder2E and GURPS 4E, and you might enjoy reading a game like Hero System but also see that it's too weighty to be useable by the very style of player it's made for.

If you want story and don't want players 'playing the meta', then you might be enjoying the new Daggerheart playtest, or like games like Big Eyes Small Mouth (tri-stat), and if what people tell me of it is true maybe D&D (but D&D also has too much detail to work for this style - how do you say "not delve on the rules guys" and then hand them a 30,000-page list of spells? ).

Reynard said:

Sure, but that's completely independent of game system.

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That depends on what you mean by system.

Many games outline actual principles for playing and for GMing. While perhaps these are not rules in the technical sense, I think the general expectation is that they should be observed.

Other games don’t really provide such clearly defined principles. Or, as is the case with D&D 5e in my opinion, they don’t want to alienate any of the various play cultures to which they are trying to appeal, and so never commit to such principles in favor of a “do whatever works for you” approach.

Neither method nor any others we may consider is better than the other (except as a matter of preference) but they are different.

If I frame a scene in Stonetop, I’m doing so based on the intent of the players, and I’m framing it in such a way to reflect their Instincts (a chosen goal/ethos) or other elements that I know they care about.

I’m never going to just say “ohh a wizard’s tower would be a cool thing for them to find on their way to the next town”. Instead, I’m going to wait until the dice indicate something should happen, and then I’m going to frame a scene that speaks to the characters in some way.

Lanefan said:

With this I agree.

However, folklore and myth aren't necessarily consistent from one place/culture to another; meaning that what one culture's folklore and myth (and even current knowledge!) says about such circles might be very different to what another's says.

hus, a faux-Roman might look at such a circle and scoff at the childish scribbles on an otherwise nice clean floor; a Dwarf might look at the same circle and see it as a demon ward; and an Elf might look at it and wonder where its teleport leads to.

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“Aren’t necessarily consistent” doesn’t mean “are never accurate”.

I have done the whole gating information behind rolls thing. Decades of it. I am choosing the way I do things not out of some sense of misplaced “realism” but rather because I find it boring as hell and would rather play be fun.

I’m uninterested in keeping the nature of things from my players unless there’s a compellinng reason. For me, with this loosely sketched example that won’t die… I don’t care about the purpose of the circle. I care about why it’s there and what it means for the characters and what they’ll do about it.

Can one of them disrupt the circle safely and render it powerless? That’s the interesting mystery to me, and that’s what I’m going to drive toward. Something more meaningful.

Micah Sweet said:

I prompt them in a naturalistic way. What I never do is ask, "so are you guys ready for the next scene?"

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So what? That’s still what you’re doing. How you do it is a personal choice, but it’s all the same thing.

“Has everyone done what they want to do in town before you get on the road?” is the same as “Are we all ready for the next scene?”

Gee whiz, Micah.