In praise of Heroic power-scale play

[Telok]

It's the difference between Linux and Windows. Yes, you can get your system to do what you want really exactly with Linux. I've done that. But most people don't do that. I don't even currently do that. What most people do is use Windows, and maybe try to tweak the settings it exposes to make things more like how they like, then give up if they can't. That means that what you are really asking for when you say "leave it up to the DM" is "most people don't get to do that". I am sure freeform social mechanics work for you. But...

I like the bookshed metaphore.
I am a 100% Linux scuzzer because I accept the responsibility for potentially nuking my hdd in exchange for getting to fool with open source network card drivers to blacklist certain IPs and packet headers.
I dislike freeform social non-mechanics because they don't work for me.

Off topic partial explain to avoid too much tangent

Spoiler

Show

As a player I have no idea what the GM is thinking and I can't see or hear the imaginary people at the other end of the conversation. If there aren't some sort of player facing mechanics I can engage then it's all dependent on the GM's acting, judgement, goals, biases, etc., etc. If the GM is great at it and I'm in good RP form that day, yeah it works great. But if anyone's doing less than great it invariably bogs down into an akward Q&A where people start getting confused, frustrated, or impatient. Then the dice come out as neutral arbiters at some point, but if there's still no mechanics for me as a player to engage then it's still all on the GM to do their best.

As a GM, all that stuff is work. If a system has some level of player facing rules for it then the players can invoke those cheeseburgers when stuff starts bogging down. Alternately, if I feel I'm not at my best for running pure freeform that night I have a fallback to the rules and the players aren't left guessing what they need to do. That's... not having to figure out how to run a "social encounter" from the game's base principals means less work for me to do while running the game and I'm left with more attention & energy to spend on keeping the pace up and stuff.

And that's getting into something for a different thread so I'll leave this incomplete.

[NichG]

Dagnabbit, I was with you until this part.

Well its just the usual 'don't mistake a classification system or ontology as saying that it is the duty for actual things to try to fit into the system'. That's backwards.

[Fiery Diamond]

Y'know I've looked at that book once or twice, and honestly could never wrap my head around what it was trying to do.

While the other poster who responded to this mentioned how it can easily be added or removed, from my reading that's not the primary purpose of it. It seems pretty self-explanatory to me: they're trying to evoke the "Aw, that's so awesome! That's so cool and powerful!" feeling. I suppose this wouldn't make sense to someone who 1) doesn't think power fantasies are cool; 2) doesn't think "coolness" or "awe-inspiringly fantastical" are desirable objectives; 3) sees a contradiction between super low optimization and high powered; 4) thinks blaster casters are uninteresting; 5) thinks martials should be happy with what they already have; or 6) thinks default high-optimization is already interesting and "powerful enough." As someone who likes power fantasies, hates high-optimization play, loves playing blaster casters, thinks fantastical (look at some of the mythic spells that aren't damage dealers sometime - they definitely can play into the fantastical; and look at the descriptions of how the setting should be for mythic play - that's far more fantastical than the default game) is cool and more desirable than game balance, that martials are completely shafted by default rules, and that high-optimization is uninteresting, tedious, and the wrong kind of powerful to be fun, I find Pathfinder's Mythic Rules to be a massive improvement over default play.

[Theoboldi]

Ah, but that's breaking the metaphor. When I assemble IKEA furniture, the goal isn't to do the assembly, it's to get a piece of furniture that does some particular task. But all those tasks are doable without furniture. I don't need a bookshelf to store my books, I can just put them in a pile. It may even be that I prefer the pile to a bookshelf that is sufficiently badly designed or assembled with sufficiently lacking tools. But the idea that such a situation negates the need for bookshelves is simply inaccurate. The goal of roleplaying is to produce a compelling story. It may be that you don't trust designers to do a better job framing that story than you expect to do by making things up. But the things you're making up are still rules. They're just rules that aren't tested very well and aren't predictable or accessible to other people.

You are still making assumptions here that do not hold for everyone. For instance, that the goal of roleplaying for everyone is to produce a compelling story. Or that a personal dislike for rules stems from a distrust in the designers to deliver a good framing for a story. These are not universally true, and unless you discard them nothing I can say will make sense to you.

Imagine saying this about any other subject. Is a printer that only prints standard 8.5x11 sheets not a bad tool for printing business cards? Is an oven that doesn't include a broiler not a bad tool for broiling? Is a table that can only support 50lbs not a bad tool for supporting 500lbs? Certainly, freeform play is a valid form of play, but it is one that every game includes, and indeed one no game can exclude. If you want to do freeform Chess or Magic: the Gathering, you can. Including fixed mechanics doesn't take that away from you, it just makes things easier for people who are not as willing as you are to play freeform.

But aren't you somewhat contradicting yourself here? On the one hand, you say that rules and a lack thereof fundamentally shape gameplay. Yet on the other, you say that existing mechanics can easily be ignored with no issue by anyone who wants to. Wouldn't the presence of these rules shape the expectations and culture of tables exactly the same way that a lack of them would?

And again, I like tools! I think they can be very useful! I've put away many RPG products and fantasy heartbreakers because they promised me games about one thing, but expected players and GMs to deliver those all on their own. However your definition of what a useful tool is appears to me overly simplistic and caught up in too many assumptions to be useful.

[Quertus]

I like the bookshed metaphore.
I am a 100% Linux scuzzer because I accept the responsibility for potentially nuking my hdd in exchange for getting to fool with open source network card drivers to blacklist certain IPs and packet headers.
I dislike freeform social non-mechanics because they don't work for me.

Off topic partial explain to avoid too much tangent

Spoiler

Show

As a player I have no idea what the GM is thinking and I can't see or hear the imaginary people at the other end of the conversation. If there aren't some sort of player facing mechanics I can engage then it's all dependent on the GM's acting, judgement, goals, biases, etc., etc. If the GM is great at it and I'm in good RP form that day, yeah it works great. But if anyone's doing less than great it invariably bogs down into an akward Q&A where people start getting confused, frustrated, or impatient. Then the dice come out as neutral arbiters at some point, but if there's still no mechanics for me as a player to engage then it's still all on the GM to do their best.

As a GM, all that stuff is work. If a system has some level of player facing rules for it then the players can invoke those cheeseburgers when stuff starts bogging down. Alternately, if I feel I'm not at my best for running pure freeform that night I have a fallback to the rules and the players aren't left guessing what they need to do. That's... not having to figure out how to run a "social encounter" from the game's base principals means less work for me to do while running the game and I'm left with more attention & energy to spend on keeping the pace up and stuff.

And that's getting into something for a different thread so I'll leave this incomplete.

I think it can be part of the main topic, but sure.

Spoiler: social mechanics

Show

The quick of it is, most social mechanics have fatal flaws, like, “I’ve convinced you that your best friend would be delicious, so now you have to kill and eat them” or “humanity died out, because babies couldn’t convince their parents to feed them”. Put another way, if you wouldn’t be willing to have those rules hard-coded in your brain irl (with the foreknowledge that people like me will be there to exploit them), I don’t want them in my games.

Now, on the one hand, I agree with a lot of what you said. I’ve had a few GM’s who actually get it, who can actually roleplay believable characters with believable, accessible motivations, and give the players enough… “description” (not always just of the NPC, but of the setting and the circumstances) for the players to be able to reasonably play the social minigame… but most GM’s IME are somewhere between “useless” and “detrimental” to the game. Most GM’s, when you find out what they think makes people tick, you realize that those rules I laughed at are actually looking rather good by comparison. I had a shopkeeper ask, “what do you know about a customer when they ask, ‘how much does this cost?’”, and I was shocked to learn that I was the only one at a table of roleplayers to be able to answer that question correctly. People just don’t understand people.

So, when you’ve got a good GM, who actually understands what makes people tick? That’s when it’s actually worth your time to interact with NPCs.

But what if you’re having a bad day? Wouldn’t it be nice to have some rules to fall back on?

On the one hand, I agree. In fact, in the general case, I’m all about the game being able to be played entirely via the rules, as well as (more or less) entirely via freeform, “outside the box” thinking. Like, I could get through combat in D&D by making attack rolls and dealing damage… or… hmmm… I think 3e actually has rules for collapsing the ceiling, and the effects of replacing the air with poison (suffocation + poison damage), so I’m failing my roll to give an actual “outside the box” Strategy for 3e combat. But you know what I mean, right?

But my issue is, when it comes to social interaction, there’s very few rules that are actually sufficiently unobtrusive that accepting “off the rack” clothes isn’t too containing compared to their custom-tailored counterparts. Where you don’t have people asking what the Diplomacy DC is to convince the king to trade his kingdom for a rock, or what the Bluff DC is to convince someone that the sky they’re looking at isn’t the color they see it to be.

So what tools are unobtrusive enough that I’ll accept them? 2e D&D “Reaction Roll”: if the GM doesn’t know what attitude the people/monster has towards the PCs, or if the PCs actively attempt to talk to them, this roll, modified by the speaker’s Charisma, determines the attitude they approach the conversation with (like “friendly” or “wary” or “punch you in the face” (I didn’t look them up)). Or 3e Diplomacy, if it’s used just like a 2e Reaction Roll. Sense Motive to get a feel for “why did the NPC suddenly start acting cagy?” / “Is it just me, or is that NPC acting cagy today?”. That’s about the level of unobtrusive I’ll accept from mechanics in a game.

I guess my question is, what mechanics do you feel you’d like to be able to fall back on, and why?

Also… how do you handle two PCs talking to one another? For me, the answer is the same as PC/NPC interactions, or even multiple NPCs interacting: everyone just roleplays, occasionally aided by something like a Bluff, Charm, or Intuition roll, if needed.

[Drakevarg]

While the other poster who responded to this mentioned how it can easily be added or removed, from my reading that's not the primary purpose of it. It seems pretty self-explanatory to me: they're trying to evoke the "Aw, that's so awesome! That's so cool and powerful!" feeling. I suppose this wouldn't make sense to someone who 1) doesn't think power fantasies are cool; 2) doesn't think "coolness" or "awe-inspiringly fantastical" are desirable objectives; 3) sees a contradiction between super low optimization and high powered; 4) thinks blaster casters are uninteresting; 5) thinks martials should be happy with what they already have; or 6) thinks default high-optimization is already interesting and "powerful enough." As someone who likes power fantasies, hates high-optimization play, loves playing blaster casters, thinks fantastical (look at some of the mythic spells that aren't damage dealers sometime - they definitely can play into the fantastical; and look at the descriptions of how the setting should be for mythic play - that's far more fantastical than the default game) is cool and more desirable than game balance, that martials are completely shafted by default rules, and that high-optimization is uninteresting, tedious, and the wrong kind of powerful to be fun, I find Pathfinder's Mythic Rules to be a massive improvement over default play.

While 1 and 4 at least are correct, that's not what I meant at all, and it's kinda weird you'd jump to those conclusions. I didn't mean "I didn't like the book's ideas and don't understand why anyone would," I mean I literally couldn't figure out what the book was trying to do on a basic reading comprehension level. Admittedly I was just skimming it in a bookstore or whatever, but still.

[Fiery Diamond]

While 1 and 4 at least are correct, that's not what I meant at all, and it's kinda weird you'd jump to those conclusions. I didn't mean "I didn't like the book's ideas and don't understand why anyone would," I mean I literally couldn't figure out what the book was trying to do on a basic reading comprehension level. Admittedly I was just skimming it in a bookstore or whatever, but still.

I wasn't saying that any particular one of those six possible explanations were true of you, I was suggesting possible reasons why what was completely blindingly obvious to me (that the intention was to evoke the "that's so cool and awesome and powerful and fantastical!") might not have clicked for someone, since, as you said, you simply didn't "get" what they were trying to do.

Since, like I said, it was really self-explanatory from my perspective. And, as it turns out, a couple of those possible explanations happened to be true of you! By your own admission just now. So, hey, it looks like I might have been onto something.

[RandomPeasant]

Yes, custom-tailored clothing fits so much worse than items bought off the rack. Rules - ones simple enough to play with, at any rate - impose limitations on the fidelity of such complex systems as are better handled by freeform. That’s the inescapable truth you seem to be attempting to escape.

But off-the-rack clothing fits better than something that is not trying to be clothing. Certainly, you can write specialized rules that do exactly what you want and those will, by definition, do more of what you want than more general rules. But those are still rules. Once we can accept that, we can get on to the question of "is it better for the system you are using to create something with other people to allow those people to make informed decisions about the outcomes of their actions".

For instance, that the goal of roleplaying for everyone is to produce a compelling story.

Perhaps, instead of asking me to simply take this on faith, you could explain to me what it is you think they want instead. Because it seems quite likely to me that this is going to end up being some sort of semantic argument where actually they want a "positive experience" or a "fun time" or something else that was already included in what I meant by "compelling story" (or that I intentionally excluded because I had the last version of this argument with someone who demanded the opposite set of shibboleths from you).

But aren't you somewhat contradicting yourself here? On the one hand, you say that rules and a lack thereof fundamentally shape gameplay. Yet on the other, you say that existing mechanics can easily be ignored with no issue by anyone who wants to. Wouldn't the presence of these rules shape the expectations and culture of tables exactly the same way that a lack of them would?

Does the existence of Shadowrun shape the way you play Dungeons and Dragons? If you change the rules they are different and they inculcate different expectations. Yes, if you change the rules ad hoc during play, you'll get dissonance, but doing that is a bad idea for precisely that reason. And, crucially, it is a bad idea whether your change is "there were these rules and we are ignoring them" or "there were no rules so I am making some up". In both cases, outcomes are necessarily disconnected from player expectations.

[Quertus]

But off-the-rack clothing fits better than something that is not trying to be clothing. Certainly, you can write specialized rules that do exactly what you want and those will, by definition, do more of what you want than more general rules. But those are still rules. Once we can accept that, we can get on to the question of "is it better for the system you are using to create something with other people to allow those people to make informed decisions about the outcomes of their actions".

Your question is invalid. The more accurate version of your question might be: “is it better to rely on Knowledge: rules or Knowledge: GM when making the determination of what the outcome of your actions might be”. And, at that level, in the general case, I do favor Knowledge: rules.

However, I can only assume that you’re assuming that freeform is devoid of rules. Rather than, say, custom-tailoring those rules to the situation at hand.

Once you can accept that such freeform can involve custom-tailored rules, we can get on to questions like, “are off the rack rules a) a good enough fit; b) better than what the idiots passing for tailors are likely to produce?”.

Of course, my answers wrt social rules in particular are “no” and “no, they’re both horrible”, because I live in the grimdark of generally talentless hacks with no understanding of humanity, no understanding of what makes people tick.

[Theoboldi]

Spoiler: Response to RandomPeasant that is drifting somewhat from the main topic

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Perhaps, instead of asking me to simply take this on faith, you could explain to me what it is you think they want instead. Because it seems quite likely to me that this is going to end up being some sort of semantic argument where actually they want a "positive experience" or a "fun time" or something else that was already included in what I meant by "compelling story" (or that I intentionally excluded because I had the last version of this argument with someone who demanded the opposite set of shibboleths from you).

Well, sure. To give an example, I personally am not looking to produce a compelling story when I roleplay, or do some kind of collaborative storytelling. Rather, I want to experience an adventure from the viewpoint of a character within a collaboratively imagined world. Whether that ends up being a compelling story is rather secondary to what I want.

To give another example, other people may wish to test their personal wits and ingenuity against dangers and perilous situations in this imagined world.

Or is your question what I think that PhoenixPhyre wants out of a roleplaying game? I do not wish to speculate on that, and it is somewhat irrelevant to my own stance on the matter anyways, so I will not attempt to speak for them on this.

Does the existence of Shadowrun shape the way you play Dungeons and Dragons? If you change the rules they are different and they inculcate different expectations. Yes, if you change the rules ad hoc during play, you'll get dissonance, but doing that is a bad idea for precisely that reason. And, crucially, it is a bad idea whether your change is "there were these rules and we are ignoring them" or "there were no rules so I am making some up". In both cases, outcomes are necessarily disconnected from player expectations.

I'm somewhat confused. I was not talking about changing rules ad hoc during play. I was questioning about whether the same argument that applies to lacking or non-existant rules shaping player expectations and behaviors would not also apply to existing rules that one wants to ignore, but which by their presence would still shape expectations.

Changing player expectations up front by clarifying houserules and explaining ones playstyle seems to me to be a separate topic, and one that as a method can be used to overcome disconnect whether you are going from lack of rules to rules or from rules to lack of rules. It seems irrelevant.

[Hytheter]

ywhat you can bring to the bargaining table matters a lot more than how well you talk.

I'm gonna try and hold onto this quote.