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  1. - Top - End - #151
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    OldWizardGuy

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    Default Re: RPG metric, simplified version

    Quote Originally Posted by Quertus View Post

    Now, what’s the next step? Hmmm.…

    Count out how many decisions the players had during the course of that session / those sessions.

    Count how many of those decisions *must* be made OOC (ie, “eh have to upgrade the ship now, else TPK)”

    Calculate the fraction (or percentage, or whatever number stuff you like to use) of those decisions that can be made in character.

    That’s the simplest simple metric. Done.
    By that metric, any game where you are playing the role of a character has you making those decisions 100% in character.

    So by this metric 4e, 5e, 3.x, AD&D, that starship repair game, all fully immersive.

    The disconnect seems to be your misunderstanding of what an in character decision is.

    Most RPG’s assume a core competency for the PCs. If you’ve been travelling in space or delving dungeons, there’s an awareness the character has that allows you to make long and middle term decisions (assess the ship, hire a mechanic, install new parts, etc) in seconds rather than minutes, hours or days:but make no mistake, the decision is still in character.

    100% immersion is absolutely possible.

    Quote Originally Posted by Quertus View Post

    Optional: if you want to use the slightly more mathematically complex simple metric, take those decisions that *can* be made in character (ie, “I’ll take a penalty to hit in order to guarantee that this grenade hits you in the face.… even though, mechanically, that has the same effect as the grenade exploding 4 meters away), and measure the percent / fractional efficacy of the roleplaying choice compared to the Determinator choice.

    Calculate the average efficacy of the roleplaying choice for those choices that can be made in roleplaying mode.

    Multiply those two fractions together.

    That’s the mathematically more complex metric.

    So, if a session has 20 actions, and 5 are “upgrade the ship or TPK” OOC logic, then 15, or 3/4, or 75% are doable from roleplaying stance. So the game is 75% suitable to be played as an RPG.

    However, if those 15 IC actions are, on average, about 20% less effective than the Determinator answer, then you only get 80% effect on that 3/4 of the actions, so roleplaying only nets 60% of the total effectiveness available in those choices.

    And a choose your own adventure book has about 0 decision points where you can make the in character choice, so it’s about 0% suitable to be played as an RPG.

    The simplest simple metric measures the portion of actions that *can* be taken in character, the mathier one measures the effectiveness of IC actions.

    Sound even remotely actionable?
    This is a lot of extra effort to arrive at the same conclusion.

    The 5 decisions to repair the ship are entirely in character: during the 10d6 days that you’re on a space station, star base, dry dock, whatever, your character is receiving a ridiculous amount of feedback that to fully enact every second of it would take…. Well 10d6 days.

    And unless you expect your RPGs to play out real time, then that information will be abstracted.

    In this case, the players know that their ship is under equipped to voyage into space. And so do the PCs, because between talking to mechanics, other spacers at bars, vendors selling equipment, reading technical journals, watching the holonet, running training simulations, and all the other stuff professional space adventurers do in the hours between micro ten second decision moments that combat or danger are played at, they’ve acquired the information that allows you the Player decide the ship needs to level up.

    So 20 actions taken, 20 actions taken in character.

    100% immersion accomplished.

    If you disagree, then your metric is the issue, your conclusions drawn from the metric (and therefore your understanding of the metric) are wrong or you’re simply not trying to play immersively and being dishonest.

    Unless you’re doing a free form improvisation in real time, there is a rule set attached to the roleplay that frames and abstracts time and action. Without that, there is no game.

    But as long as the interface for decision making is the role you are assuming, then all decisions are the decisions of the character, and therefore roleplaying.

    And if you’re roleplaying while playing a game, that’s a roleplaying game.

  2. - Top - End - #152
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    OldWizardGuy

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    Default Re: RPG metric, simplified version

    I do think that the amount of time spent on non-fiction stuff vs. fiction stuff is important. I'm actually not as convinced that in-character matters quite as much, though I'm willing to consider it.

    I also do think that, absolutely, some non-in-character stuff breaks some people harder than others. There's a subjective nature to this that I don't think can really be gotten around.
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  3. - Top - End - #153
    Ogre in the Playground
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    Default Re: RPG metric, simplified version

    The two most frequent non-roleplaying time sinks in tabletop games tend to be character creation and system busywork. The former doesn't really need explaining, the latter means rolling dice, calculating values, checking tables etc.. System busywork isn't inherently opposed to roleplaying, in fact it usually exists to facilitate it, the reason why it often ends up detracting from roleplaying is because humans have limited brain power. Your work memory can only keep handful of things in mind at once, so if all of that is taken up by abstract variables for system math, little is left over for thinking what your character's motives are or how those variables are expressing them.

  4. - Top - End - #154
    Firbolg in the Playground
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    Default Re: RPG metric, simplified version

    Quote Originally Posted by Cluedrew View Post
    Your three opening points are basically boil down to "role-playing games should be about role-playing and to this end fiction and mechanics should match". At that level, sure, good enough. If that is what you mean by core logic then we are good.
    Pretty much, yeah. So, cool.

    Quote Originally Posted by Cluedrew View Post
    The problem is you then state that you are done and 4e is not an RPG. There is no bridge there, no way to apply that concept as a check*.
    Agreed. Let's pretend that was on purpose, that being able to say that was a test of "did you understand what i was saying", and not just me… being me.

    Quote Originally Posted by Cluedrew View Post
    All the ways suggested to bridge that so far have required play and are dependent on the group and module, not just on the system itself.
    Eh, not exactly. Imagine if you were trying to measure temperature, but only had subjective humans to work with. Imagine trying to explain the concept, without any objective universe to access.

    Same problem.

    The most objective answer you can get to the expected gameplay loop is from the modules that the publisher created.

    At each decision point, evaluating what a character *could* do, vs what the system expects / requires that you do, takes skills (of the type that GM planning routinely fails at). So, yes, one's skill with using the metric is limited to one's GMing skill (much like one's skill with a(n oldschool) thermometer is limited to one's visual acuity).

    Quote Originally Posted by Cluedrew View Post
    Very simple example, if everyone else plays their character like a faceless pawn, it is pretty hard to have character moments with them even if you are playing a character with a detailed personality. So other people having more interest their characters could change all the results. That doesn't seem like an objective measure to me.

    So how should we standardize it? Well, standardizing it to a particular group is useless if you are not in that group (the problem with the 7-year-old measure), and at the extremes any group probably could role-play in any game (you talked about this in Chess), or avoid role-playing in any game (I've seen people approach very fiction focused games like they are D&D, the result is painful) so what does leave us?

    Well that leaves us with our personal experiences. And let me tell you, I was role-playing as much in 4e as I was in 3.5e or 5e (or at least 5e & 4e, 3.5e may have been a bit worse). So I have run your simple tests already and all three systems got the same score. Woot! It turns out this was all a false alarm and 4e was a role-playing game all along. I am being silly. But the results are true, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if your results match up with what you are saying. But that's your table not mine, so why should I use them?

    So yeah, I don't think you can put an objective measure on a system like that. So many other factors come into it to shift it around I don't think any measure can give you a definitive result.
    Here, you've gone off the reservation. Maybe focus on how the hard stop of the choose your own adventure book is the epitome of failing the test, and work from there? Or how the ship that was perfectly safe to take out in space two days ago is now death trap, because you got more skilled?

    Maybe if you start with the most obvious versions of what I'm talking about, you'll be able to say things that I can hear. Because I've no idea how any of that is relevant to my metric.

    Quote Originally Posted by Cluedrew View Post
    * There is also the issue of whether or not it is the right check. But let's leave that for now.
    This could also qualify as a "core logic" issue.

  5. - Top - End - #155
    Ogre in the Playground
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    Default Re: RPG metric, simplified version

    Quote Originally Posted by Cluedrew View Post
    Very simple example, if everyone else plays their character like a faceless pawn, it is pretty hard to have character moments with them even if you are playing a character with a detailed personality. So other people having more interest their characters could change all the results. That doesn't seem like an objective measure to me.

    So how should we standardize it? Well, standardizing it to a particular group is useless if you are not in that group (the problem with the 7-year-old measure), and at the extremes any group probably could role-play in any game (you talked about this in Chess), or avoid role-playing in any game (I've seen people approach very fiction focused games like they are D&D, the result is painful) so what does leave us?
    Let's suppose I give you a functional definition of soccer. For purpose of this discussion, I'm going to copy-paste one from a dictionary: "A game played on a rectangular field with net goals at either end in which two teams of 11 players each try to drive a ball into the other's goal by kicking, heading, or using any part of the body except the arms and hands. The goalie is the only player who may touch or move the ball with the arms or hands."

    You then point out to a game of soccer where some players are unable or unwilling to kick the ball, or repeatedly try to kick the ball to their own goal, or do something else that's directly against the definition. You ask "what about those people?"

    You then point out a game of soccer where some players stop to do a comedy act in the middle of a game, in a way on which rules of soccer are completely silent. You ask "what about those people?"

    The answer is that we don't care about those people for purposes of defining soccer. The functions, the description of what people do and are supposed to do, are the standard. People who are unable or unwilling to perform those functions, and people who go way outside those functions to do their own thing, are out of bounds for a game of soccer, and in a sane game, either the referee or other players will remove them from the game. The technical inclusion of these players in some game of soccer is not relevant to a functional definition of soccer.

    Same deal, for functional definition of roleplaying games, people who are unable or unwilling to roleplay in roleplaying games, and people who somehow end up roleplaying in non-roleplaying games.

  6. - Top - End - #156
    Firbolg in the Playground
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    Default Re: RPG metric, simplified version

    I'm going to go back to the thing I suggested far up thread since it resolves this. Take the fiction of the setting as presented, then ask if that would be held up by the actions and choices of characters who knew the rules.

    If you have a character who would be inert knowing the rules and knowing only the fluff, it cancels out.

  7. - Top - End - #157
    Troll in the Playground
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    Default Re: RPG metric, simplified version

    Quote Originally Posted by Quertus View Post
    Eh, not exactly. Imagine if you were trying to measure temperature, but only had subjective humans to work with. Imagine trying to explain the concept, without any objective universe to access.

    Same problem.
    I think the problem is more like you are trying to establish an objective measure of when something is "hot". We can sort of figure out what is going on with fiction layer and mechanical decisions. But then you want to say that at some point this draws a line between role-playing games and not.

    Here, you've gone off the reservation. Maybe focus on [these particular examples]?
    I don't think those examples need further discussion? (Right now, I don't care if the open ended choice is actually implied by the first post, we can get back to wording later.) No I am going to focus on the parts that need more discussion. And if this seems like a pretty important issue.

  8. - Top - End - #158
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    Default Re: RPG metric, simplified version

    Quote Originally Posted by NichG View Post
    I'm going to go back to the thing I suggested far up thread since it resolves this. Take the fiction of the setting as presented, then ask if that would be held up by the actions and choices of characters who knew the rules.

    If you have a character who would be inert knowing the rules and knowing only the fluff, it cancels out.
    This split between fiction and the rules continues to be ill-founded. Statements about what the setting is are rules for a roleplaying game - a character who knew all the game rules they're subject to, would know both "fluff" and "crunch".

    Further, just like "the determinator", this is not a perspective we have any general reason to care about. Take any game where the rules state that some rules of the game are hidden from a player. A character who knew all the rules, would then know that their perspective is invalid for a player character, meaning for them to exist, someone has had to break the rules.

    You should only care about character perspectives that are valid player characters for a given game. This includes knowing proper amount of setting knowledge and when setting "fluff" takes priority over "crunch" or vice versa, because those are game rules.

  9. - Top - End - #159
    Firbolg in the Playground
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    Default Re: RPG metric, simplified version

    Quote Originally Posted by Vahnavoi View Post
    This split between fiction and the rules continues to be ill-founded. Statements about what the setting is are rules for a roleplaying game - a character who knew all the game rules they're subject to, would know both "fluff" and "crunch".

    Take any game where the rules state that some rules of the game are hidden from a player. A character who knew all the rules, would then know that their perspective is invalid for a player character, meaning for them to exist, someone has had to break the rules.
    If you want to analyze hidden rules games with this, then just evaluate on the basis that a character knows whatever the person making decisions for that character knows, and the measure is the same

  10. - Top - End - #160
    Ogre in the Playground
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    Default Re: RPG metric, simplified version

    That boils down to the part you didn't quote, which is that you should only care about character perspectives that are valid player characters for a given game.

  11. - Top - End - #161
    Firbolg in the Playground
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    Default Re: RPG metric, simplified version

    Quote Originally Posted by Vahnavoi View Post
    That boils down to the part you didn't quote, which is that you should only care about character perspectives that are valid player characters for a given game.
    That's a value statement though, so I don't really see any reason to try to pretend that it's a point of logic.

    The experience of playing a game in which you have to intentionally dissociate information is different than one in which you don't. The experience of playing a game in which the choice to intentionally dissociate information is left up to the player is also different. You might choose not to care about that difference in experience, which is fine - that's your 'ought'. But that's not the same as 'there is no difference', which isn't what you argued.

  12. - Top - End - #162
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    Default Re: RPG metric, simplified version

    I'm not arguing there is no difference to functions you list; I'm arguing games rules themselves make statements of which functions are rules-legal.

    The actual overarching point I'm trying to make is that distinctions such as "fluff" versus "crunch" or "the fiction" versus "the rules" are ill-founded. For a roleplaying game, the fiction is part of the rules; the map versus territory problem only exists because a high level rule posits some territory to which lower level rules are supposed to map to. In absence of such a high level rule, it can just be accepted that the map is the territory, making it a non-issue. The contradictions you're counting for your measure are contradictions within and between game rules, specifically rules with same or unestablished priority order.

    Which is where you get that "should". If you want to measure if following game rules leads to contradiction, you have to follow those rules. Which means you should only concern yourself with valid player characters for a given game. If you posit a character that's invalid, it is not a surprise if they end up acting counter to the game.

  13. - Top - End - #163
    Firbolg in the Playground
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    Default Re: RPG metric, simplified version

    Quote Originally Posted by Vahnavoi View Post
    I'm not arguing there is no difference to functions you list; I'm arguing games rules themselves make statements of which functions are rules-legal.

    The actual overarching point I'm trying to make is that distinctions such as "fluff" versus "crunch" or "the fiction" versus "the rules" are ill-founded. For a roleplaying game, the fiction is part of the rules; the map versus territory problem only exists because a high level rule posits some territory to which lower level rules are supposed to map to. In absence of such a high level rule, it can just be accepted that the map is the territory, making it a non-issue. The contradictions you're counting for your measure are contradictions within and between game rules, specifically rules with same or unestablished priority order.

    Which is where you get that "should". If you want to measure if following game rules leads to contradiction, you have to follow those rules. Which means you should only concern yourself with valid player characters for a given game. If you posit a character that's invalid, it is not a surprise if they end up acting counter to the game.
    I'm not trying to measure if following the game rules leads to a contradiction though. I'm trying to measure cognitive dissonance, which is not the same thing.

    Let's say the game book describes rules for magic that would let armies fly, then describes 'the top military power in the setting is based out of a mot and bailey fortress'. That's not a contradiction in rules - there can be both a fort behind a ditch and flying armies. But its an incoherent decision for the top military force to base itself out of a fort which could easily be attacked. Incoherent decisions aren't forbidden by rules, but create a particular feel which I think lies at the heart of what conflicts with Quertus' RP aesthetic. So that's what I want to measure.
    Last edited by NichG; 2022-01-03 at 04:50 AM.

  14. - Top - End - #164
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    Default Re: RPG metric, simplified version

    Cognitive dissonance is a feeling founded on a person trying to hold two or more contradictory beliefs, so any measure of it ends up counting contradictions. There is an apparent contradiction in the situation you describe, and there very well could be an actual contradiction, depending on how rest of the situation is detailed. There are also details which would solve the contradiction, and thus remove cognitive dissonance, such as flying armies being so new the top brass hasn't had time to adjust yet.

    I'm confident this holds even when talking about Quertus specifically.

  15. - Top - End - #165
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    Default Re: RPG metric, simplified version

    This thread seems to be a Quertus quibble about roleplaying games, but here's an angle that hasn't been considered: If you're making a non-zero amount of decisions that aren't in-character, it's for a more appealing story than the entirely in-character decisions version of events, and from that angle, perhaps storytelling games is a better way to describe it.

    That said, it's very clear that that's not what this is about, so this shall be my only post in the thread.
    Last edited by Powerdork; 2022-01-03 at 07:01 AM.
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  16. - Top - End - #166
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    Default Re: RPG metric, simplified version

    Quote Originally Posted by Vahnavoi View Post
    This split between fiction and the rules continues to be ill-founded. Statements about what the setting is are rules for a roleplaying game - a character who knew all the game rules they're subject to, would know both "fluff" and "crunch".

    Further, just like "the determinator", this is not a perspective we have any general reason to care about. Take any game where the rules state that some rules of the game are hidden from a player. A character who knew all the rules, would then know that their perspective is invalid for a player character, meaning for them to exist, someone has had to break the rules.

    You should only care about character perspectives that are valid player characters for a given game. This includes knowing proper amount of setting knowledge and when setting "fluff" takes priority over "crunch" or vice versa, because those are game rules.
    I think the point of "take the rules and see if they product the fiction" is to identify where the rules don't fit the fiction. It's objectively, coldly treating the rules as a hypothetical framework, and testing them to see if they produce the "observes results", in this case the "fiction" we think we're playing.

    ("Fiction" here meaning the setting, characters, and 'tone', the stuff that the rules are supposed to map/model -- not to be confused with "narrative", "story", or "genre".)

    A big example would be the Tippyverse... the published, printed rules of D&D produce something in the vein of the Tippyverse, and nothing like any of the published D&D settings.
    Last edited by Max_Killjoy; 2022-01-03 at 08:22 AM.
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  17. - Top - End - #167
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    Default Re: RPG metric, simplified version

    How unlike Tippyverse is to published settings is often exaggerated. However, it is a great example of doing things backwards.

    By the rules of D&D, its mechanics are not a first principles model of any setting. A dungeon master instead is meant to pick a setting and then cherry pick and interprete the mechanics in a way that fits said setting. Tippyverse, especially the detailed version(s) trying to fit in as much additional content as possible, does the opposite (aside from few specific assumptions, like silent gods, which are just normal setting building). Use rules in non-standard ways, get non-standard results, no surprises there.

    By Tippy's own words, Tippyverse is incredibly fragile - remove teleportation circles and equivalents, and no such setting arises. No surprises there either - once you start treating rules of a complex game as first principles, it starts exhibiting features common of complex dynamic systems, such as high chaos and high sensitivity to small changes in initial conditions.

  18. - Top - End - #168
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    Default Re: RPG metric, simplified version

    Quote Originally Posted by Vahnavoi View Post
    How unlike Tippyverse is to published settings is often exaggerated. However, it is a great example of doing things backwards.

    By the rules of D&D, its mechanics are not a first principles model of any setting. A dungeon master instead is meant to pick a setting and then cherry pick and interprete the mechanics in a way that fits said setting. Tippyverse, especially the detailed version(s) trying to fit in as much additional content as possible, does the opposite (aside from few specific assumptions, like silent gods, which are just normal setting building). Use rules in non-standard ways, get non-standard results, no surprises there.

    By Tippy's own words, Tippyverse is incredibly fragile - remove teleportation circles and equivalents, and no such setting arises. No surprises there either - once you start treating rules of a complex game as first principles, it starts exhibiting features common of complex dynamic systems, such as high chaos and high sensitivity to small changes in initial conditions.
    IME, players (DMs included) don't approach D&D setting-first, at all. They approach it rules-first... the most common attitude I've seen in D&D can be summarized as "if it's in the books, it's in the game", with a very bitter and confrontational response to anything in the books being excluded or limited. That is, D&D is IME the go-to system for the "this is a game" approach.

    And most of the text in various editions of D&D reads that way, advice to go setting-first and make whatever changes are needed is passing, buried in the DMG, or both.

    (Hell, there was a time when Gygax expressed disdain towards houserules and changes, calling it "not playing D&D".)
    Last edited by Max_Killjoy; 2022-01-03 at 10:31 AM.
    It is one thing to suspend your disbelief. It is another thing entirely to hang it by the neck until dead.

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    The concern is not realism in speculative fiction, but rather the sense that a setting or story could be real, fostered by internal consistency and coherence.

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  19. - Top - End - #169
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    Default Re: RPG metric, simplified version

    Quote Originally Posted by Max_Killjoy View Post
    (Hell, there was a time when Gygax expressed disdain towards houserules and changes, calling it "not playing D&D".)
    Well, to be fair with that, at that point Gygax was kind of reacting to people doing wildly different things with D&D and pushing towards a unified set of rules that could be used for, basically, a prototypical Organized Play type scenario.
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    Default Re: RPG metric, simplified version

    Quote Originally Posted by Kymme View Post
    Making the GM and players do all the work for roleplaying is most assuredly not supporting roleplaying. Systems like Masks, which models the emotional state and self-image of characters and gives specific rules for adjudicating interaction, support roleplaying to a much greater extent than even 5e.
    We once again see the fundamental mistake made in asserting that role-playing requires mechanics.
    No, it doesn't.
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  21. - Top - End - #171
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    Default Re: RPG metric, simplified version

    Quote Originally Posted by kyoryu View Post
    Well, to be fair with that, at that point Gygax was kind of reacting to people doing wildly different things with D&D and pushing towards a unified set of rules that could be used for, basically, a prototypical Organized Play type scenario.
    Gygax also came down on both sides of nearly all issues at one point or another.

    Quote Originally Posted by Max_Killjoy View Post
    IME, players (DMs included) don't approach D&D setting-first, at all. They approach it rules-first... the most common attitude I've seen in D&D can be summarized as "if it's in the books, it's in the game", with a very bitter and confrontational response to anything in the books being excluded or limited. That is, D&D is IME the go-to system for the "this is a game" approach.

    And most of the text in various editions of D&D reads that way, advice to go setting-first and make whatever changes are needed is passing, buried in the DMG, or both.

    (Hell, there was a time when Gygax expressed disdain towards houserules and changes, calling it "not playing D&D".)
    Interesting. Various cultural references or something had me thinking you would have cut your teeth in the 2E AD&D era, where the game was decidedly leaning towards 'this game works if you want a swashbuckling campaign, or Eastern/martial arts campaign, or a stone-age campaign, or a no-magic Peers of Charlemagne campaign. Just buy the relevant green or red/brown splatbook for ideas' mentality.

    I only remember the 1e DMG actually saying you shouldn't change rules, and even then it was more caution tape than admonition not to.

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    Default Re: RPG metric, simplified version

    Quote Originally Posted by Willie the Duck View Post
    Gygax also came down on both sides of nearly all issues at one point or another.
    Relevant quotes from the 1e DMG:

    Quote Originally Posted by 1e DMG Preface
    "What follows herein is strictly for the eyes of you, the campaign referee. As the creator and ultimate authority in your respective game, this work is written as one Dungeon Master equal to another. Pronouncements there may be, but they are not from “on high” as respects your game. Dictums are given for the sake of the game only, for if ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS is to survive and grow, it must have some degree of uniformity, a familiarity of method and procedure from campaign to campaign within the whole. ADVANCED D&D is more than a framework around which individual DMs construct their respective milieux, it is above all a set of boundaries for all of the “worlds” devised by referees everywhere. These boundaries are broad and spacious, and there are numerous areas where they are so vague and amorphous as to make them nearly nonexistent, but they are there nonetheless."
    Quote Originally Posted by 1e DMG Preface
    "The danger of a mutable system is that you or your players will go too far in some undesirable direction and end up with a short-lived campaign. Participants will always be pushing for a game which allows them to become strong and powerful far too quickly. Each will attempt to take the game out of your hands and mold it to his or her own ends. To satisfy this natural desire is to issue a death warrant to a campaign, for it will either be a one-player affair or the players will desert en masse for something more challenging and equitable. Similarly, you must avoid the tendency to drift into areas foreign to the game as a whole. Such campaigns become so strange as to be no longer “AD&D”. They are isolated and will usually wither. Variation and difference are desirable, but both should be kept within the boundaries of the overall system. Imaginative and creative addition can most certainly be included; that is why nebulous areas have been built into the game. Keep such individuality in perspective by developing a unique and detailed world based on the rules of ADVANCED D&D. No two campaigns will ever be the same, but all will have the common ground necessary to maintaining the whole as a viable entity about which you and your players can communicate with the many thousands of others who also find swords & sorcery role playing gaming an amusing and enjoyable pastime."
    Emphasis mine.

    The communication is pretty clear to me - yes, you should muck with things. If you do muck with things, understand that if you muck with too much, your game will stop being understandable "as D&D" to someone that is used to playing with a game that is more in-line with the system as presented, and as such the ability of those players to converse about the shared hobby will be impacted.

    People can disagree with this, but it still seems pretty far from the "play it exactly as written or you're doing it wrong" characterization that is often given. I suspect that's becuase prior to 1e, people were modifying D&D in vastly significant ways, to the point where you really couldn't talk about common experience.

    I point this out not because I'm a Gygax fanboy (I'm not), but because I think criticism should be more accurately leveled at what was actually said, rather than a fourth-hand version of it.
    Last edited by kyoryu; 2022-01-03 at 11:42 AM.
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    Default Re: RPG metric, simplified version

    Quote Originally Posted by Willie the Duck View Post
    Gygax also came down on both sides of nearly all issues at one point or another.



    Interesting. Various cultural references or something had me thinking you would have cut your teeth in the 2E AD&D era, where the game was decidedly leaning towards 'this game works if you want a swashbuckling campaign, or Eastern/martial arts campaign, or a stone-age campaign, or a no-magic Peers of Charlemagne campaign. Just buy the relevant green or red/brown splatbook for ideas' mentality.

    I only remember the 1e DMG actually saying you shouldn't change rules, and even then it was more caution tape than admonition not to.
    I'm old enough for a mix of pre-AD&D and AD&D 1e to be my original exposure to D&D.

    But I've NEVER believed the claim that D&D could run anything, it was always clear that this the game's reach exceeding its grasp.
    It is one thing to suspend your disbelief. It is another thing entirely to hang it by the neck until dead.

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    Default Re: RPG metric, simplified version

    Quote Originally Posted by Max_Killjoy View Post
    I'm old enough for a mix of pre-AD&D and AD&D 1e to be my original exposure to D&D.

    But I've NEVER believed the claim that D&D could run anything, it was always clear that this the game's reach exceeding its grasp.
    I mean, Star Frontiers and Gamma World were released as separate games, not sourcebooks, despite having a lot of similarity mechanically to D&D.

    The "D&D can do everything" mentality seems to come from the fans, not TSR/WotC.
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    Default Re: RPG metric, simplified version

    Quote Originally Posted by Max_Killjoy View Post
    IME, players (DMs included) don't approach D&D setting-first, at all. They approach it rules-first... the most common attitude I've seen in D&D can be summarized as "if it's in the books, it's in the game", with a very bitter and confrontational response to anything in the books being excluded or limited. That is, D&D is IME the go-to system for the "this is a game" approach.
    What the game says and has said, and what player metagame says and has said, are two different things. Both for published settings and settings of individual game masters, using game mechanics as first principles for setting building has never been the norm.

    Quote Originally Posted by Max_Killjoy
    And most of the text in various editions of D&D reads that way, advice to go setting-first and make whatever changes are needed is passing, buried in the DMG, or both.

    (Hell, there was a time when Gygax expressed disdain towards houserules and changes, calling it "not playing D&D".)
    Quote Originally Posted by kyoryu View Post
    Well, to be fair with that, at that point Gygax was kind of reacting to people doing wildly different things with D&D and pushing towards a unified set of rules that could be used for, basically, a prototypical Organized Play type scenario.
    1st Edition AD&D books, which directly tell you in Gygax's own words how the game is imagined to work, quite clearly establish the setting-first approach, while also explaining what the purpose of common rules across settings is meant to serve. Shortly: the common rules framework is for player convenience, so they don't have to essentially learn a new game for every setting and every campaign.That never meant all content in the books is fair for every game, available spells and magic items have always been meant to be vetted on per campaign basis.

    Gygax got a lot of undeserved flak for saying people going way outside rules of his game were no longer playing his game. Both as a basic observation and as opinion of a product manager, it made perfect sense. Still does. Games are defined by their rules, change the rules enough and you get a different game.

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    Default Re: RPG metric, simplified version

    Quote Originally Posted by Vahnavoi View Post
    1st Edition AD&D books, which directly tell you in Gygax's own words how the game is imagined to work, quite clearly establish the setting-first approach, while also explaining what the purpose of common rules across settings is meant to serve. Shortly: the common rules framework is for player convenience, so they don't have to essentially learn a new game for every setting and every campaign.That never meant all content in the books is fair for every game, available spells and magic items have always been meant to be vetted on per campaign basis.
    Right. That's why I quoted the actual text :) I think it's pretty clear.

    Colin McComb's "apology" about hte Complete Book of Elves kind of hammers that home, too. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwDWx1cAqP4)

    Quote Originally Posted by Vahnavoi View Post
    Gygax got a lot of undeserved flak for saying people going way outside rules of his game were no longer playing his game. Both as a basic observation and as opinion of a product manager, it made perfect sense. Still does. Games are defined by their rules, change the rules enough and you get a different game.
    Yeah, if you read the text, it's pretty clear, I think it's just been misquoted multiple times. I think it's entirely reasonable. At some point, if you house rule enough, you're playing a different game. That doesn't make it a bad game, just a different one.

    Vince Baker says pretty much the same thing about Apocalypse World, except he's even more strict on how much change happens before it's "not Apocalypse World". And in both cases, I don't read "therefore it's bad", I read "therefore it's a different game which may be super fun, but is still a different game."
    Last edited by kyoryu; 2022-01-03 at 12:05 PM.
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    Default Re: RPG metric, simplified version

    Quote Originally Posted by Cluedrew View Post
    I don't think those examples need further discussion? (Right now, I don't care if the open ended choice is actually implied by the first post, we can get back to wording later.) No I am going to focus on the parts that need more discussion. And if this seems like a pretty important issue.
    You think that your comments deserve discussion? Well, you’re not normally completely insane, so I’ll reply, and see if you show me some cool path that I just can’t see.

    Quote Originally Posted by Cluedrew View Post
    Very simple example, if everyone else plays their character like a faceless pawn, it is pretty hard to have character moments with them even if you are playing a character with a detailed personality. So other people having more interest their characters could change all the results. That doesn't seem like an objective measure to me.

    So how should we standardize it? Well, standardizing it to a particular group is useless if you are not in that group (the problem with the 7-year-old measure), and at the extremes any group probably could role-play in any game (you talked about this in Chess), or avoid role-playing in any game (I've seen people approach very fiction focused games like they are D&D, the result is painful) so what does leave us?

    Well that leaves us with our personal experiences. And let me tell you, I was role-playing as much in 4e as I was in 3.5e or 5e (or at least 5e & 4e, 3.5e may have been a bit worse). So I have run your simple tests already and all three systems got the same score. Woot! It turns out this was all a false alarm and 4e was a role-playing game all along. I am being silly. But the results are true, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if your results match up with what you are saying. But that's your table not mine, so why should I use them?

    So yeah, I don't think you can put an objective measure on a system like that. So many other factors come into it to shift it around I don't think any measure can give you a definitive result.
    If you’re roleplaying a completely faceless pawn, that in no way impacts my ability to roleplay my character’s responses to your character, or to the rest of the universe. And, even were that not the case, your faceless pawn is not a part of the system, and so is irrelevant to my metric.

    I’ve talked about the purpose of the “7-year-old” abstraction; senility willing, I’ll quote myself.

    It’s not about the subjective “can you roleplay in chess”, or the subjective experience of whether you feel like you’re roleplaying. The metric measures the decision points, and whether (like in a “choose your own adventure” book) you have to drop roleplaying stance in order to make a valid decision. It is simply measuring, “to what extent is this system suitable to being played in roleplaying stance?”.

    Your own subjective experiences are only valuable in the context of my metric for measuring how reliable a witness you are, or how much you roleplay. They have no bearing on the metric itself.

    So, let’s dial back to the most über obvious example: the choose your own adventure book format.

    Pick one of your characters. Doesn’t matter the setting - I’ll do my best to make this setting agnostic.

    Ready?

    “As you are traveling along, using whatever ground transportation makes the most sense for your character and the setting, you come to the setting equivalent of a stoplight (person with the authority to tell you to stop, perhaps?), telling you to stop. There is mild cross-traffic at this intersection, but it is very slow moving, and there is a hole in traffic big enough for several of you to pass through easily.”

    What do you do?

    Come up with your in character response, and then we’ll see if it’s one that the system accepts as valid, or whether you have to metagame in order to continue playing.

    That’s what my system is measuring: the potential for and effectiveness of in character actions. That’s it. No amount of “other PCs with all the personality of wet cardboard” or personal experiences change anything as far as my metric is concerned, only whether the system lets you make the choices you wood make, and grades them reasonably in accordance with the fiction.

    (Yes, I see what autocorrect did. I’m leaving it.)

    So, is there actually anything here worth discussing?

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    Default Re: RPG metric, simplified version

    Quote Originally Posted by Vahnavoi View Post
    1st Edition AD&D books, which directly tell you in Gygax's own words how the game is imagined to work, quite clearly establish the setting-first approach,
    I don't recall ANY edition of D&D EVER establishing a setting-first approach, ever, at any point.

    Note, this would take more than a few lines of lip-service claiming that it's setting-first, it would require the overall text of the rules to support that approach.

    Instead, it has always had an implicit setting built in.
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    Default Re: RPG metric, simplified version

    Quote Originally Posted by kyoryu View Post
    Yeah, if you read the text, it's pretty clear, I think it's just been misquoted multiple times. I think it's entirely reasonable. At some point, if you house rule enough, you're playing a different game. That doesn't make it a bad game, just a different one.

    Vince Baker says pretty much the same thing about Apocalypse World, except he's even more strict on how much change happens before it's "not Apocalypse World". And in both cases, I don't read "therefore it's bad", I read "therefore it's a different game which may be super fun, but is still a different game."
    I'll say that this thread, among many others, has indicated to me that defining the boundary between "is <game>" and "is not <game>" is...fraught with difficulty and subjectivity. And of little actual use in practice, other than to sate the human need for putting things in nice little boxes, by force if necessary.

    I mean, there certainly is a point of differentiation at which we can generally say "yeah, that's a different game", but it's a heap problem drawing the line anywhere before that. For me, personally, the metric I use is "what book do I pull out first when looking for guidance on something game related? That's generally the system I'm going to call it." That's by no means a definition or a hard-and-fast rule, just a heuristic.
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    Default Re: RPG metric, simplified version

    My AD&D books are paper and inside a box, so I can't quote them as conveniently as kyoryu above, but Gygax emphasises importance of the dungeon master's vision of their setting (or "milieu", which is the word Gygax uses) several times throughout the ruletext. What you call D&D's implicit setting, is not a singular thing at all. It's a number of constants posited across settings. The room to have distinct settings is quite expansive. Again, if you try to do Tippyverse-style worldbuilding, just changing what spells are available at the starting point can radically change the outcome. The original thought experiment was strongly defined by mechanics of a single spell (teleportation circle).

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