No More Massive Tomes of Rules

[hawkeyefan]

So, I'd just about decided not to bother responding, but since the thread seems to be dying and no one has anything else they want to say compared to the fun of disagreeing with me, I thought I'd address the complaints that have arisen from a half-dozen or so posters collectively. If you read through those comments, you find a couple of common unifying themes. Some of those themes are obvious fallacies, and some of them are more subtle with important half-truths hidden in the complaint. There is actually a surprising lot we agree on, but let's get rid of the fallacies so we can look at the good stuff:

1) "The Oberoni/Rule Zero Fallacy": Probably the most famous informal fallacy in RPG design and who does it show up big time in this thread. A ton of the objections are of the form, "If the rules are bad, well you can always just change the rules." or else, "If the rules are missing, you can always just add the rules." Some posters have even gone so far as to make a virtue out of bad rules or missing rules because it allows the GM to exercise their creativity. The nice thing about the Oberoni Fallacy is that it sets up an unfalsifiable standard. No amount of evidence that the game would be better with a better rule or fewer holes in its resolution mechanics can prove that the game would be better with a better rule given the Oberoni test. If a game is good because it is bad, then we have nothing to say about it.

2) "The My Rulings Aren't Rules Because they Aren't Written Down Delusion": You could also call this the "Common Law isn't Law, Only Constitutional Law" delusion. This almost always comes alongside the Oberoni Fallacy. The idea is that if a table deals with the silence of the rules by implementing a large number of ad hoc rulings and procedures of play that somehow this isn't adding to the rules, the cognitive burden, the number of things that are memorized, just because they aren't written down. This particular delusion is often really common amongst people that have been playing 1st AD&D since the 1970s or early 1980s. I've talked with multiple 1e AD&D GMs that whenever you ask them about how they deal with something, they immediately can answer you with a procedure of play. "Oh, yeah, we just roll under strength when that comes up. Sometimes we just roll straight up under 1D20 but depending on how I judge the difficulty of the action, I might ask them to roll under attribute on 1d8+1d12 or on 2d12, and then...." And I'm not kidding, they can go on like that for literally hours. I've at one point listened to a 1e AD&D GM list his processes of play he'd developed over 30 years of gaming for over four hours. It's really impressive, but if you actually tried to document those processes of play what you'd realize is that they amount to having memorized basically another 270 pages of extra rules that form part of the core mechanics of this post 1e AD&D game system. This is actually a vastly more complex system than what I'm advocating for, because those 270 pages of methodology for how you deal with the lack of a unified skill system and challenge resolution system in 1e A&D by tacking one on with house rules ends up being a lot more elaborate if you just rebooted around a clean unified core challenge system with like a single common fortune test system instead of 20 diverse subsystems each rolling different dice combinations against different targets. The fact that you haven't documented your complex processes of play doesn't mean that they aren't rules. They are just rules you haven't written down and which the group collectively learns (or doesn't) as you communicate them to them (or don't). Your system doesn't get smaller when it depends heavily on rulings. It's bigger. Bodies of common law set by precedent tend to be much larger than constitutional or legislative law. You're actually advocating for a system that I find too complicated.

3) "GM rulings are always better than rules, so why do we need rules" fallacy: The argument could be made that since humans are capable of sophisticated reasoning there is no need for a large body of law. We could just rely on the GMs judgement to handle everything and run this like a Braunstein. And this is true. We could dispense with the rules and run everything by GM fiat. The question this raises for me is why have rules at all? The problem with this argument is that it doesn't just kick in when you hit 1000 pages of rules or 3000 pages of rules. This argument is equally valid against the first rule you propose having. After all, any rule is likely to have exceptions where the GMs judgment is better than the unreasoning judgment of the rules. So if you can think of any reason to have a rule, then that reason equally applies to the first rule or the second or the three hundredth. This fallacy really is tangential to the debate over how big our tomes of rules need to be. Instead, the real truth underlying here is that we do have to have reasons to add a rule to the system. There are in fact costs and tradeoffs involved in having rules. The system gets physically more expensive to produce and purchase. It gets harder to play test. It gets harder to track. I'm aware that there are tradeoffs in having more rules. But I want to point back to my first couple of posts in the thread here. I argued right from the start that the core engine, the core resolution mechanics, of a system should probably occupy no more than about 30 pages. So when I'm advocating for rules to cover 1000 or 3000 pages, I'm advocating for rules that are something other than core resolution mechanics. All the rules that I'm talking about beyond those first 30 pages are not part of the typical ordinary proposition->fortune->resolution system that will come up repeatedly and most often in play and which forms the backbone on which all the other rules are built. I'm arguing in fact that some sorts of game play and some sorts of game needs are emergent above and beyond that core gameplay loop and that there are reasons why you build rules for that emergent gameplay instead of trying to resolve it just by simple recourse to the game core challenge resolution mechanic. And I'm arguing that there is a vast body of supporting material that describes the game play universe you are playing in, which ought to be documented in a way that interfaces with the rules. And if you go back and look at the questions I had about what a system provides for, what those other 970 to 2970 pages of rules look like ought to become clear. Because I'm certainly not calling for a core resolution mechanism to cover 1000 or 3000 pages, and if you act like I am, well you aren't taking this (IMO important) discussion very seriously.

More to follow about the actual more serious complaints against my position when I get a break.

The biggest fallacy is the claim that anything less than 1,000 page of rules is somehow insufficient for an RPG. We can show how this is false by presenting the majority of RPGs as evidence.

It’s cool that you have that opinion, but that doesn’t make it fact. As has been pointed out several times in this thread, people are mostly disagreeing with you because you’re presenting it as fact.

Oh, and your manners… people seem to not like those, either!

 

[Swanosaurus]

Sure! I absolutely concede the truth of that. So what? Do you think the sort of situations you find yourself in are always covered just by a core resolution mechanic? The only mechanical support you need for your games is just a core skill system mechanic? Everything is just process simulation referencing a core skill system, and that's the whole of your problems and verisimilitude issues? You never find the need to tack on sub-systems?

For example, your reference BRP. If that's so, then you are telling me that you don't need say 2000 words worth of rules describing a secondary system like CoC's Insanity rules that tell you concretely what sort of shocks and terrors impact the fragile reasoning of the heroes because you can just infer that and by rulings and fiat build it out of a core skill/challenge resolution system? Why have SAN rules for CoC at all then?

The thing about a skill/challenge resolution system is that it might can tell you pass/fail or occasionally even degree of success, but it can't really tell you how the profit you make carving a stool differs from smithing a crown. It can't tell you whether you want to be close or long range against the balrog. It can't tell you how reasonable it is to rip the doors off the hinges of a carriage versus the prison door, or how much more unreasonable it is for the superhero to punch open the warehouse door versus the vault door. In combat resolution systems you start wanting to deal with time and space and terrain in ways that are easy visualized. Suddenly as a designer you have to deal with battlemats or abstract maps or relegate combat just to theater of the mind, and that matters in the tactical richness of the system in a way fiat resolution or a simple challenge resolution can't. Challenge resolution on its own can't tell you whether the outlaw biker in the wasteland should drive up the left or right side when fighting the semi turned war machine. It can't tell how much more difficult it is to inflict some grappled condition on an ox relative to a pixie. It can't tell you which is faster the - PX38 Lighting VII or the SoroSub Super-Slasher. It can't tell you whether the shotgun is a better weapon in this situation than the battle rile. Core 30 page resolution mechanics can't describe a menagerie of creatures each with their own imaginative wrinkles on how they impact combat. That's why game designers build rich and interesting subsystems and document in detail the setting that they are envisioning.

The reality is that there are routine situations that arise in play that require a wrapper of rules around the core system that provide a framework to imagine out that situation in a way is more concrete and engages more different aesthetics of play. Combat is the most obvious such system, and in most games that intend to highlight it occupies a special subsystem of at least another 30 or so pages that is built around the core challenge system but deals with the specifics of weapons and positioning and terrain that form the basis of a tactical challenge. The same core system that tells you how to spout lore and pick a lock probably doesn't integrate the effects of distance and positioning on those rolls, so that you know when a bow or a knife is better to attack with.

Combat is just one of several pillars of play that you can as a designer or game master want to specifically highlight as a fun part of the experience of play. I won't get into again why combat is so frequently a featured system, but it isn't the only possible system. And there are a lot of things out there that may seem niche to you that turn out to not niche if you change the assumptions of play. Crafting items may seem niche to you in a typically fantasy setting or a super spy setting, but that perception totally changes if the fantasy setting is a stone age survival game where nothing can be purchased. Suddenly the robustness of our crafting system matters and we might not just want to leave it up to a pass fail core conflict resolution system.

Okay, first of all sorry for the snark regarding knowing other systems than D&D. It's just that I feel that D&D is particularly bad at the whole "core resolution mechanism" thing; there wasn't one until 3rd edition, and I feel that until this day, it never really got the hang of it as well as a lot of other systems ... in AD&D 2nd, I actually didn't know what to do in a lot of cases. That's why we didn't play it very long.

(EDIT: I realize that this one ticked me off a bit:

Turns out based on the frustrated response to my questions is that Dragonborn is neither complete nor robust, but rather it just doesn't have to do everything. What it sets out to do well it probably does well, though I admit absolutely no knowledge of the game.

... took this as meaning something along the lines of: "I don't have to be familiar with any of your irrelevant other RPGs to know that they're inferior." I now realize that you mention other RPGs you are familiar with immediately after that; my bad.)


Apart from that: A lot of the hypothetical situations you mention above ... well, it honestly wouldn't cross my mind to spend a lot of thought on them. Warehouse door vs. vault door? If you have super-strength, the first one is probably no roll, the second one a normal one. Or pick a modifier. I usually don't bother with ranges. I don't need to know whether the biker should drive up from the left or the right, probably depends on what we intends to do (attack the driver? Left then), which is about the ficition, not about the rules. If you're a human, you probably can't grapple an ox, and if you want to grapple a pixie, well, it will probably dodge you (which will be part of most combat rules). I don't even know if I could tell you the difference between a shotgun and a battle rifle from looking at them, though I have a vague idea that a shotgun can target multiple opponents at short range or something like that. But none of these questions holds my interest sufficiently to be willing to memorize, look up or make up rules for them beyond saying "okay, that should be a +2" or "that's an advantage on your side."

And yes, I think CoC having sanity rules is fine, because they are thematically a core tenet of the game, as combat is for D&D. If an RPG has a thematic core (like most of them have), usually you'll have some more rules about it, because these situations will come up more often, and you want more variety and depth to them on a rules level as well. I'm fine with that. And while of course you can say: "Well, a good rpg should offer that variety and depth for ALL situations!", that might be your preference, but you can't tell me that the mental load of subsystems for any conceivable situation from sanity to playing baseball to having a long-term romance is less than the mental load of a system that just provides you with a robust core resolution system that will work for pretty much everything that's not the core focus of it. It doesn't limit what I can do with the system. It just means that some situations will be handled in a more general way; and if I really notice that a certain type of situation comes up frequently enough for me to need MORE depth than the rules provide, I would probably write a more extensive house-rule for it, yes. But as far as I remember, this never happened to me in nearly 40 years of gaming. I've only ever felt that I needed LESS depth than the rules offered.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

So, I'd just about decided not to bother responding, but since the thread seems to be dying and no one has anything else they want to say compared to the fun of disagreeing with me, I thought I'd address the complaints that have arisen from a half-dozen or so posters collectively. If you read through those comments, you find a couple of common unifying themes. Some of those themes are obvious fallacies, and some of them are more subtle with important half-truths hidden in the complaint. There is actually a surprising lot we agree on, but let's get rid of the fallacies so we can look at the good stuff:

You're missing a big, recurring pushback in this roundup, which is related to your sense that a game needs an essentially unlimited amount of ultra-specific rules that cover every single possible situation, or else it's not a full game. By that logic why stop at your 3000-page mark? A proper RPG should never end, just keep adding more and more rules for quickly opening and closing a butterfly knife, calculating the wind speeds and humidity levels that will snuff various kinds of torches, whole taxonomies of weapons and vehicles and armor that someone made a single prototype of but never field-tested. Get that page count to 30,000 or 300,000, or more, till you've settled the psi needed to squeeze a trigger and the xp needed to increase your finger strength not just for your dominant hand, but your off-hand, and possibly that third hand covered in roughly 500 pages of mechanics about gaining and managing mutations.

 

[Wolfpack48]

Something important to note about Call of Cthulu is that the combat rules aren't there to check a box. They're there to reinforce the theme of the game.

The effort to contrive a way to deal 800+ damage to Cthulu is meant to juxtapose with the fact Cthulu wouldn't even be phased by it. Your efforts are supposed to feel meaningless and that feeling doesn't get conveyed very well, if at all, if you try to abstract all of the effort out of it. You can't really drive home the point that its arrogant to try and impose man's will over the cosmic if you have no actual way to viscerally represent man's will to try and overcome, and especially the despair that results from realizing it.

Its one thing to say theres ways to say a character feels that despair, but its another to experience it yourself. Games are about doing things, not writing about doing things.

Thus, COCs combat mechanics, including all of its weapons all serve a collective point in the game's design. We can compare that to say, 5e Spell Components, which have no point beyond a very weak suggestion towards balance.

Well and to take out smaller baddies like cultists and Deep Ones...

 

[Emberashh]

Well and to take out smaller baddies like cultists and Deep Ones...

Of course. Who doesn't like going Old Man Henderson on some nerds in bathrobes.

 

[Celebrim]

Just to weigh in, for me, its the size of individual books. Buying a 500+ tome just isnt a turn on for me these days. I'd rather that be spread among 2-3, hell 4 separate releases.

I don't really care how it is spread out. That's an economic decision by the publisher. I'm expressing what I think is a rational and well-reasoned explanation for what I want publishers to plan on adding to a system beyond the core rules, because not only do the games and stories I run need it but if I had better support for other sorts of storytelling I could be free to introduce other elements into the game.

I did gaming in my youth with some pretty crude systems that could be improved upon where there were armies of 50,000 on each side, or 80 ships of the line engaged in a giant Trafalgar style history defining battle and I can't devote necessarily 40 hours of time to run out those battles like I did in my youth. But it bothers me that with all the advances in system design and all the things looking back I see as wrong with the resolution systems back then, that we can't in this day and age support that sort of epic gaming and that people are like, "But you could just run that theater of mind with no more than a skill challenge resolution system."

No, you couldn't. Sorry, but you couldn't replicate that experience with your theater of mind.

 

[Celebrim]

The biggest fallacy is the claim that anything less than 1,000 page of rules is somehow insufficient for an RPG. We can show how this is false by presenting the majority of RPGs as evidence.

No, you actually haven't. One poster tried that by citing Traveller and AD&D as examples and when I addressed that argument with facts they returned to their ad hominem attacks and red herrings.

Oh, and your manners… people seem to not like those, either!

Yes, I've never liked anyone else's manners in this thread from the beginning either, but I really didn't make that the core of my argument for my preferences either.

 

[prabe]

There is, of course, a vast middle ground between "all we need is a 32-page saddle-bound booklet, we're good" and "this 900-page tome that looks like a college science textbook isn't quite enough for us" and I think most tables will find their place in that middle ground and function just fine. I've finished a 500+ hour D&D 5e campaign, and a 200+ hour Cypher campaign: The second is definitely well under 1000 pages, even counting the very optional sourcebooks I had on hand. How much a given table needs for rules--and how available those rules are, and to whom--will be more about table preferences than about any sort of universal truth or ideal.

 

[Celebrim]

You're missing a big, recurring pushback in this roundup...by that logic why stop at your 3000-page mark? A proper RPG should never end, just keep adding more and more rules for quickly opening and closing a butterfly knife, calculating the wind speeds and humidity levels that will snuff various kinds of torches, whole taxonomies of weapons and vehicles and armor that someone made a single prototype of but never field-tested. Get that page count to 30,000 or 300,000, or more

Since I've started complaining about the logical fallacies in addressing my argument, surely this one ought to be obvious?

Which is related to your sense that a game needs an essentially unlimited amount of ultra-specific rules that cover every single possible situation, or else it's not a full game.

Again, this is hardly worth even addressing since the straw man fallacy here runs so deep, but as point of fact I didn't say that. I said it's not a full game until it has good rules for addressing and describing all the important aspects of a game universe. So if pirates are thing in the game universe, well then you need rules for handling nautical combat. And if armies are a thing in the game universe, then you need rules for handling mass combat. And in particular, if you look the genre fiction that inspires the game and you find things that are important to the genre, then you should be planning as a game designer to cover that or else you do have a hole in your design and its not yet a full game. So yes, you should be planning good rules for long distance travel and the effects of climate and weather on the game or you are saying "I can't handle stories like that with my game system so don't do them". There are a lot of systems out there that recognized "This is important to my story". The One Ring 1e recognized it needed long distance travel rules. Call of Cthulhu recognizes that it needs insanity systems. Traveller recognizes that it needs a basic economics system in order to play truckers in space. 1e AD&D recognized that it needed Battlesystem because battles are such a big part of the genre of fantasy.

But if I have an open world with protagonized player characters, it's not solely me as the GM deciding what's important to the game and where the players should find their fun. And so I need a system that isn't just pegging me into doing that one thing well but intends to give me a full game.

And I don't think it's a coincidence that the games that tend to succeed over the long haul are the ones that tend to big sets of rules, not just for the economic reality that as a publisher you need to publish or perish, but because they do a much better job of sustaining play and providing for a variety of aesthetics. So, yes, we need big tomes.

 

[Swanosaurus]

But it bothers me that with all the advances in system design and all the things looking back I see as wrong with the resolution systems back then, that we can't in this day and age support that sort of epic gaming and that people are like, "But you could just run that theater of mind with no more than a skill challenge resolution system."

No, you couldn't. Sorry, but you couldn't replicate that experience with your theater of mind.

Of course you couldn't replicate that experience with just some theatre of the mind and a basic resolution system; if you want a system that gives you highly detailed resolutions of epic battles, that is what you want and you should use a system that provides it. That's perfectly fine. But that doesn't mean that I can't play a big battle with just my basic resolution mechanism and theatre of the mind. It will be a different experience, but not a less valid one. If there's a big siege in my Dragonbane campaign coming up, I sure as hell won't say, "Oh no, there's siege rules, so we have to ditch that story element, I'm sorry!"
I just don't see how you arrive at the idea that using 100 pages of core rules and coming up with rulings based on the core resolution mechanism means a bigger mental load than using 1000 pages of core rules and knowing all the relevant procedures or looking them up. It's as if you're telling me that what I'm doing is actually impossible. And I'm pretty sure I'm not capable of doing the impossible, as much as I would like.