Quote Originally Posted by Telok View Post
Well it came out of the stuff about if it was the setting, game, or GM making things grit/hero/myth. Sort of semi-tangential since some people were describing PCs with social status using that to hero/myth with characters that were mechanically in grit.

Basically if the game mechanics lack or punish stuff then the GM may override that or insert anything that crosses their mind. Some GMs may do it as a matter of course or habit, others on a case by case basis, others may want to follow the rules. Players learn from that and tend to develop habits based on early experiences. Playing with less experienced GMs & players who were introduced to gaming from video games there is, in my experience, a tendency among most to start from a point of using and trusting the rules first.

And this ties back into the original point I made: That games with weak or no social rules or structures are dependent on the GM to make that stuff matter. D&D, being these days a game generally lacking such rules for the players to engage with, rewards murder-hobo style play with more time spent on combat and more powerful pizza characters because less freeform GMs will more often nope or ignore stuff outside the core rules.

Anyone can chime in with "well i dont play like that and players at my table dont either", but that just means they're a GM who uses freeform rp to reward the players or have homebrewed something to use instead of the weak/missing rules. This applies to any game and to and missing rules or obscure optional rules subsection.

I noted that in my area the majority of muppets & GMs are comfortable following a game's core rules, uncomfortable modifying game state based on freeform rp, and have negative opinions of homebrew & optional rules as things like "too op" or "too fiddly". Its taken years to get some of these people to start trying more rp stuff that's not codified in the rules in games I GM, and I can sometimes tell when another GM in another game has slapped them down for trying to go outside the rules. Therefore, if the games doesn't mechanically enable something and the GM isn't proactively pushing for that thing, then players revert to the things they can count on being rewarded by the game mechanics.
And all of these are fair points! But acting as though all preference for certain elements to be handled in this more freeform manner comes from a place of ignorance or trauma is not, and I chafe at the suggestion that it is.

Likewise, I'm always fundamentally going to disagree with the idea that a system which does not provide tools for some pastime is automatically a bad tool in and of itself for that very pastime. It comes in with the assumption that a tool is necessary or desired, which simply is not the case for a sizeable amount of players and GMs.
And, I do wish to point out, I actually am a huge fan of systems that provide softer tools for these sorts of activities. Things like random tables for rolling up social scenarios and characters, GM advice on how to run them, etc. There's plenty of alternatives to having fully fleshed out rules, most of which even trend towards being system agnostic.

There's also an argument to be made that there's a difference between mechanics that run counter to an intended activity and mechanics that don't or only loosely interact with an intended activity. Plus, even in the former case, there are multiple degrees of difficulty that a system can cause, any of which could be ultimately dismissed by the individual player or GM for other perfectly valid reasons of preference.

I would also question whether players who are hesitant to RP and try things outside the codified rules are really going to be fixed by codifying more things, but that's a pretty large discussion that I don't think I'll have the time to really delve into. My main issue was with RandomPeasant's idea that somehow a preference for a lack of rules stems from a purely philosophical point of view.