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I think RAW and RAI are really just weak vs. strong Chesterton's Fence conjectures. You know:G. K. Chesterton posted:There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.” It should be assumed that institutions exist for some reason, rather than for no reason. So let's suppose there seems to be an inconsistency in the rules for, I don't know, industry-leading RPG product Dungeons and Dragons, Fifth Edition. Sculpt Spell posted:Beginning at 2nd level, you can create pockets of relative safety within the effects of your evocation spells. When you cast an evocation spell that affects other creatures that you can see, you can choose a number of them equal to 1 + the spell's level. The chosen creatures automatically succeed on their saving throws against the spell, and they take no damage if they would normally take half damage on a successful save. So, suppose Wizzrobe detonates a fireball at point-blank range, with Fightgar and Shanksworth and Clericsdottir all in. Fireball is a third-level spell, so Wizzrobe can exclude four creatures. That's everyone, right? Well, no, it's not. Wizzrobe can exclude four other creatures that he can see, and Wizzrobe is not another creature from themselves. But you've kind of got to play games with pronoun referents to get to that point, and the description just mentions creating pockets of relative safety. Why can't you create a pocket of safety for yourself? It isn't clear. If there was a statement explicitly about that, like "As the source of the spell, you are unable to exclude yourself. Stand clear." it would cover this corner case, but instead there's nothing. The RAW posture can be summarized by a guide linked from the parent thread: Treantmonk's Guide to Wizards posted:Sculpt Spells: Remove the sting out of AoE spells that would include an ally (Evocation only naturally). This makes blaster style Wizards actually good, as now you can blat with impunity. By RAW, you can not exclude yourself from damage (which is pretty weird if you ask me), but you can move before you cast, so its not as big a deal as you think. Basically just saying "well, to the extent there's an inconsistency it must exist for a reason" and not taking it any further than that. The RAI posture is that we need to know the reason, so that means going to look for developer commentary on the issue, see if anyone else has asked after the same thing. If there's an official-looking statement about whether or not evocation wizards should be excluded from their own spells, they'll be happy. So, Arivia: what is a useful posture for approaching the question of whether or not Wizzrobe should be able to create a safe pocket for themselves in their own point-blank fireball?
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Mar 29, 2021 04:28
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FrozenGoldfishGod posted:So I have a question: what are the general thoughts on deliberate rules ambiguity as a game design concept? I've seen a lot of discussion here in just the few posts there have been about accidental ambiguity, but what about a theoretical game where that ambiguity about how precisely the rules are meant to work (beyond, perhaps, the very basic mechanical concepts underpinning the game) is a feature, not a bug? Somebody else mentioned it before, but I think there needs to be an important distinction here between whether something is ambiguous as opposed to whether something is open-ended. For example, Pathfinder 1e has a combat maneuver called Dirty Trick that lets you perform a check to inflict one of a list of different conditions on a target, with the effect lasting a number of rounds based on the check's result or until the target ends the effect by spending an action. This seems pretty easy to read as Pathfinder's attempt to structurally support the whole creative tricky "I smash up glass into a bag and then throw the shards in somebody's face" or "I tie the target's bootlaces to the table so he can't move" combat shenanigan stuff that lots of people got up to in old-school D&D. The feature itself is very open-ended with a "do whatever, GM gets final call on what's permitted" clause as you might expect for something intended to function as a catch-all for creative actions, but it's all very clearly described out in unambiguous language. An even stronger example of this is FFG's Edge of the Empire/Genesys systems, which have a core gameplay component of rolling funny custom dice with results along multiple axes of Success/Failure and Advantage/Threat. Though a bunch of tables can be found all over the books as examples of effects the players can spend these resources to achieve, the core of the game is a clause of "just come up with whatever sounds cool you want to happen and get the GM to slap what they think is an appropriate resource cost on it", which is massively free-form despite having a clearly set structure. With this distinction made, I don't think there's any value to making rules ambiguous; it doesn't provide freedom, it just makes things confusing for players and causes rules arguments. If you want to give players freedom to get creative within a part of the game, then specify that freedom clearly and provide some guidelines for coming up with or adjudicating new ideas.
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Mar 29, 2021 04:54
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Going into ambiguity I think if the rules are left open-ended, it means that it’s truly up to the generic table to find the best use case for their specific context. Using the word ambiguity thus far in this thread is defined as something being unclear in its instructiveness from a rule. Thus, to put it to the original question, if the target audience of the rules is solely the GM who has a much wider context for their own interpretation, vagueness will likely be acceptable, but ambiguity to any group or player role is the source of the RAW/RAI instances. For all the games out there with their different things the more rules are taken in a vacuum without surrounding connections in the same text tend to become nonsensical in isolation because many of them were inspired by or come from a variety of source material or are at the end of an iterative loop where an unknowable amount of hands have direction in it. This is often the case in the largest market share of works that have multiple contributing authors and designers for the core ruleset, but I’m not sure that I know of a game that was authored by one or two people that had as near a deep level of rules dispute and interpretation gap as the elephants in the room that have multi-edition, multi-company, and multi-media work. Regarding RAW/RAI if the idea is to again attain some kind of rigor to such a discussion, alignment of RAW in a narrow band among all discussion parties is generally driving towards a binary conclusion (at least it feels like that) - is specific interpretation of RAW true, or false - but there are intermediate steps to get there to define if whatever rule is observed has a specific interpretation being true or not. In a mostly linear fashion of discussion like on forums where many can participate, it never really seems that people have this kind of alignment. I think intent behind prompting the questioning of a rule also ought to be considered as well or general philosophical qualification of a thing, since most often the RAW/RAI concept has come up because there was a table dispute which some of the group has thus taken to sort out by presenting it to a wider crowd. Or, it may be part of a wider criticism of the overall value judgment of a given rules engine. Or, it may be a comparative analysis between other rules that are in the same category but are from different systems or revisions/editions of a given system. This is one of those situations though where if there is no clear path to arbitration as there is in most boardgames and there are only the most correct answers, then the acceptance of tabletop RPGs not being that points to there meaning a rule must have multiple correct answers, or no correct answers. To give a nod to the thread title, RAW/RAI, deceptively named, is really a philosophical battle than a scientific one for the majority of those conversations. I have a penchant to rumble and ramble at length but the main takeaway is that attempting to leverage RAW as part of a wider discussion means that there was some kind of failing of the source text to accurately define rule - if it was clear enough, then it would not need group acceptance or interpretation by a wider community, since the rule’s truth is self-evident from the text. How then can rules be made in this way in a reliable manner for aspiring designers? There is no specific manual of style for presenting rules in a logical and unambiguous fashion that I’m aware of, but attempts have been made to mimic the framework of rules that make sense through the concept of “hacks” - PbtA hacks, FitD hacks, OSR hacks, what have you. These extend and reinterpret and clarify rules, such as Old School Essentials effectively taking the B/X D&D ruleset and then putting a fresh layout and simplification of game text as its primary focus.
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Mar 29, 2021 08:13
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I've been optimistically reading this discussion about "ambiguity" in rules to be something like, to draw a giant contrast just for the purpose of example, PBTA-style giving you some prompts and you work out what the fiction is at the table vs. 3e flubbing the rules on drowning and just being an obvious mistake. One of these is clearly intended and leads to good gameplay, and the other is obviously some kind of editing gently caress up or something and most people will ignore it except to have a giggle about how weird that would be before moving on.
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Mar 29, 2021 08:30
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Glazius posted:<D&D spells> My favorite framework for approaching D&D spells, in particular is that spells are intended to be self-contained single-use exceptions to the general rules. Thus, they do only what they say they do, and unless otherwise indicated do not interact with other rules. That is, three different spells with the effects 1) "A target you can see within 30' of you takes 2d6 damage, and may make a dex save taking half damage on a successful save" 2) "Make a spell attack on a target within 30' of you, on a hit deal 2d6 damage" 3) "A creature of your choice within 30' of you takes 2d6 damage" are three completely different things that don't interact with each other, and you shouldn't try to figure out if the "intent" was that that last one must mean a target you can see (as the text from 1, and as "spell attack" in 2), or to make an attack roll (2), or that the target gets a save (1), or that you must have line of effect to the target ("target" from 1, "spell attack" from 2), or. whatever other thing. I think this fits in thematically with D&D spells being little rote-learned routines that produce their effect when you perform them. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 09:12 on Mar 29, 2021 |
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Mar 29, 2021 09:09
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Arivia's argument, based on later posts, seems to be that RAW's approach to finding out what has actually been W is fundamentally flawed because objective interpretation is impossible:Arivia posted:No, it's not a good thing, but it's just part of how humans read and interact with language. There's always an innate subjectivity to reading, comprehending, and responding, it's just how communication as a process works. This is why I don't think RAW is good - because the whole idea of the text of the rules having a singular objective meaning is not how we engage with text at all as people. And we can and should strive to be clear and consistently understood, but the techniques we use to make ourselves consistently understood can't be conveniently siloed into "this text solely as printed here without any external reference at all" (RAW) or "this text solely as printed here with the only external reference being the designer as Word of God" (RAI). We need to consider the reader as a respondent, we need to consider different purposes or audiences in the text (is this for players or GMs), etc. RAW/RAI doesn't do that, so it really just makes things worse. Splicer fucked around with this message at 15:59 on Mar 29, 2021 |
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Mar 29, 2021 15:55
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I think the utility is in recognizing that it's true; I have seen, not here recently but in the past elsewhere, people who didn't seem to or explicitly refused to understand that finding a dictionary definition of a word that suits the interpretation you already decided to make, does not in fact "prove you right" in the current argument over a rule or rule set or game book or what have you. Because as elaborated in an earlier post, unlike alignment in earlier editions of D&D, the definitions of words are are not universal truths built into the cosmos, they're just "what a dictionary's authors, upon some amount of research, understand a majority of users of the word, today, intend by this word." That research itself being imperfect and fraught. And that's just for individual words. So it's fair to preface any RAW question with an understanding that nobody is authoritative about RAW. We may or may not reach a consensus, and that's cool, but if there's an outlier that doesn't agree, there's no way to "prove them wrong" - it is, in fact, valid for human beings to have different understandings or interpretations of the meanings of symbols of meaning, even if they're in a minority with that understanding. This can also be reduced ad absurdium; I have had conversations with people who have invented their own personal definition of key words which they then rely on within an argument, sewing confusion and chaos in their wakes, and when after pages of stupid back and forth we finally arrive at the realization that that word doesn't mean what you think it means, it all feels like that person sure was being stupid! They may or may not shift from their definition even in the face of that, too. And yet. That's just how language works. Meaning, and symbolic representation of meaning, evolve, and do so exactly by the mechanism of some non-zero number of people using those symbolic representations in novel ways which either do or do not "catch on" with others. So from that perspective, I'm sympathetic to calls to reject the use of the term altogether, if it carries that sort of baggage of misunderstanding what language is and how it works. Yet, it's unhelpful to reject entirely the idea that we can reach a shared consensus about what a rule or ruleset means via a collaborative or deliberative process of interrogating the text and one another's interpretations of it. "gently caress the text just do what you want" is perhaps a rallying cry that some people need to hear, but at it's absolute it just means "there's no point trying to understand anything written down" and if that's where we are, well, throw away all your RPG books and freeform everything because there are no rules, man. Me, I'm gonna hang on to my books and I wanna chat with folks about what they think and I think the rules say and do, like the actual written-down rules. There is a broad happy medium in here, where we can all perhaps take as read that both: language is tricky and fluid so nobody "wins" via appeals to the dictionary, and, ultimately you and your tablemates get to do whatever you want, and suggestions about what to do that diverge from the text are cool and fine and helpful as well, but don't replace or erase a reasonable desire to still try and figure out what the text says or the authors intended to say.
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Mar 29, 2021 18:40
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I think that the text and the interpretation to do what you want at a table is the best approach since really (sweeping statement that will make people disagree time) games and their rules engines are there to provide an experience and a certain feeling to the people participating at the table. Very few games if any are made to be intentionally unplayable except to prove a point about something outside of itself like OSRIC, which was a loophole in allowing people to publish content compatible with older versions of D&D. You can still play games like the drivel out there even if the experience is not totally unplayable as long as you get the feeling right like with Valherjar or whatnot. I feel that there is a certain need to be right in discussions, particularly internet ones, when it comes to games because of the rules engines thereof which plant a specific mindset and bias that unless it is written in the rules it is impossible, and if the writing is unclear and unambiguous then my interpretation and no one else's is correct, and to go against that again is an attack on my personal values and experiences. That said, if a group is comfortable with deeply internalizing the feeling of the experience you get at the table, a lot of those people will unlikely see problems or at the same level of severity that others might given the same rules engine.
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Mar 29, 2021 20:16
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Leperflesh posted:There is a broad happy medium in here, where we can all perhaps take as read that both: language is tricky and fluid so nobody "wins" via appeals to the dictionary, and, ultimately you and your tablemates get to do whatever you want, and suggestions about what to do that diverge from the text are cool and fine and helpful as well, but don't replace or erase a reasonable desire to still try and figure out what the text says or the authors intended to say.
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Mar 29, 2021 20:56
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Yeah, I'm risking delving into technicalities of my profession that are less interesting to gamers, but: there are practices in technical writing in which we recognize that a sentence that is technically correct in the sense that if the reader parses it according to the generally-accepted "rules" of English construction and the dictionary definitions of the words, they will understand the meaning; but which we deem "awkward," meaning, the phrasing is jarring, likely to cause confusion anyway, challenging to parse correctly, etc. In the copy editor's profession, the standard notation of "awk" on a sentence or phrase, means "consider rephrasing this for clarity" while not denoting any specific grammatical error. Given that we recognize this as a common occurrence, we can also be a little sympathetic to someone who stakes out some rule the rest of us are quite certain doesn't mean what they think it means, and chooses to die on that molehill. What seems clear to you and to me may not be clear, or may seem clear in some other way, to another human being. Perhaps, for them, it was awkward, and led them astray, even if we can get out our sentence diagramming tools and show that their interpretation was "definitely wrong" and ours is "definitely right." aldantefax posted:I think that the text and the interpretation to do what you want at a table is the best approach since really (sweeping statement that will make people disagree time) games and their rules engines are there to provide an experience and a certain feeling to the people participating at the table. I think that one of the things people want, from a game, is to discover the experiences the rules were intended to produce, especially if they originally bought into that game specifically seeking a promised experience. If we presume that these rules are at least competently written, then it's reasonable for people to want to know what the "actual rules actually are" - whatever synthesis of RAW and RAI you'd like - in pursuit of that specific experience. I will take an example from a board game, even though you have previously suggested RPGs should not be read like board games, but only because it's a real-life example and I think it's still illustrative. When my brother and I learned Terraforming Mars, by sitting together and reading the rules and playing a few games, we got a rule wrong. Basically we misapplied a rule that had a narrow scope, believing it had a wider scope. Later, I played Terraforming Mars at a friend-of-a-friend's house, and I was one of two among five who "knew the rules." When we got to the point where I was explaining this rule, the other person contradicted me; and on reference to the printed rules, they were right and I was wrong.
If the overriding principle is "do whatever you want at your table," then arguably us playing the game "wrong" was the preferred outcome, because we arrived at it, and played the game, and had an experience that we enjoyed already. Yet, discovering via other people teaching us the actual rule, and adopting that, we found the game improved. Surely this shows that a discussion of the rules, in which the rules as written (or as intended), has value even to those who are readily able to enjoy the game using a houserule or home-interpretation? OK, so RPGs aren't boardgames, but there are aspects where they overlap. I dunno, this may be too reductive, but: if my table somehow thought that PCs die when their hit points hit zero, but it turns out we're misundertanding and actually (unlike enemies) PCs have a whole set of rolls, negative hit points, saves, rescue options, etc. and we forgot or misread or skipped or whatever: we may still be enjoying our RPG, but we may enjoy it more by finding out the actual rules of the game, we may find our ability to go play at someone else's table enhanced, and of course if we adopt the actual rules and find we hate them, we are still totally free to modify them for our house game anyway. If someone comes into a forums thread and says "this rule as we read it is bad," or "...is vague," or "...is surprising," it is reasonable and potentially helpful to discuss what the game's rules are, as-written, at least as a starting point. This does not erode the principle that one may play at one's table however one likes.
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Mar 29, 2021 21:45
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I always thought RAW/RAI was about two things. 1: RAW can be used either mockingly or for the game that is CharOp (and most people who play CharOp at high level know it's a game) to use unintended murphy's rules that would never be allowed at the table. 2: It's Death of the Author (or the fandom version "Does Rowling's Twitter feed speak authoritatively about Harry Potter?"). If the author's stated intent outside (or even inside) the book disagrees with the actual rules what do you go with?
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Mar 29, 2021 22:21
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I was on the road earlier so perhaps I communicated something in a wacky way about the concept. To put it more clearly: Table interpretation reigns over a strict rules interpretation to leverage the feeling and experience a rules engine is attempting to deliver. However, the rules engine as an entire package along with its aesthetic presentation should provide the framework for the feeling and experience to structure the interpretations. Thus, people who read a given set of rules for a tabletop RPG should take into consideration the feeling and experience where the rules are ambiguous through poor writing or design. Attempting to interpret rules for a table in the RAW/RAI format is only as useful to understand the intent of how the rule contributes to the feeling and experience of the rules engine you are leveraging. However, it requires some level of surrounding context and understanding to intuit what those rules might be, and the onus is on specific groups where the rules are not clear on those points intentionally or otherwise. Or, to put it more succinctly: "Solve it at the table with your interpretation" generally requires a certain level of mastery not in the specific rules or approach to them but in understanding the feeling and experience those rules are meant to deliver. If someone is unable to grasp the feeling and intent of the surrounding rules engine before needing clarification or understanding of a specific rule, then there is a critical failing of the rules engine -- bad design. That said, in games such as boardgames and videogames where the rules are much more rigorous, they still do need to be clear to read and easily understood in the context of the game (or for the interpreter to understand), but for boardgames (particularly eurogames) the rules themselves do not inherently need to prioritize the actual feeling or experience of that game. If they do so, it is sometimes by accident, but the rules making sense and being tight to play are the primary focus in a lot of boardgames (again, particularly like eurogames) and the thematic and experience part takes a backseat (or is assumed to be self-evident). Let's take a tabletop games portion just to be more illustrative of this. D&D 4e has a very specific way it organizes its rules for clarity's sake and is designed to work in a very specific way. However, it prioritizes rules and their functions over the 'feeling' and 'experience' that other versions of D&D to date had. It was a large enough departure that it represented a fundamental shift, particularly in the assumed reliance of a game board instead of using other units of measurement and turning weapons etc. into dice functions to plug in to abilities and much more clearly outlining the numeric progression and expectation of magic items at specific levels that the immediate response was "huh. This is D&D, maybe, but this is a really big departure." There was also an era of PBP here where people freely and liberally made 4e D&D games that had nothing to do with its original core themes - sci-fi 4e D&D being the most common of those things. To hell with whatever the setting was, the rules were good enough to translate over into another aesthetic and setting entirely divorced from the core high fantasy setting of that edition. Also, since the rules were so tightly designed, there was a minimal need for RAW/RAI interpretation tableside (anecdotally) except to go from a collection of grogs "it REALLY works like that? gimme the book. holy moley!!!" I think the main thing though (and really diverging away from RAW/RAI at this point i dunno if we're "done" with that conversation at the moment) is that when we're talking about boardgames vs. tabletop RPGs the prioritization of rules vs. aesthetic and feeling in the modern era is generally a bit different. Lords of Waterdeep under the hood is a worker management boardgame with the D&D aesthetic, but no one will mistake it for an actual D&D RPG engine, and arguably, one specific interpretation of that D&D aesthetic which may not even line up with the latest versions of that system.
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Mar 29, 2021 23:20
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The other issue is when the intent is given and then the rules effect is totally different. Pre-spell text "When you take 20 you spend a lot of time to do your best on a skill check, guaranteeing a 20 instead of rolling. But sometimes you are in a hurry and need to do your best. This spell lets you do that." Then the actual spell rules are very unambiguous and straightforward: it gives a +20 bonus on your next skill check. At that point, if you want to play it as intended you have to basically make the spell yourself, and answer questions like 'can you do it while being attacked'
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Mar 29, 2021 23:42
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aldantefax posted:I was on the road earlier so perhaps I communicated something in a wacky way about the concept. To put it more clearly: I think you raise a good point here, but I also think that the use of D&D as an example opens up a potential hole in this philosophy and that is that the feeling and experience associated with a particular game can sometimes vary quite significantly from one player to another. One of the big problems that D&D has long had, as a system, is that there are multiple different and sometimes antithetical game experiences that different players associate with D&D. This is a game that different chunks of the fanbase think of the game's aesthetic as a fantasy home-invasion game focused on resource management, turn tracking and mapping; while others associate D&D as a game of high fantasy heroics. Neither of these styles are inherrently better than one another, but it can lead to conflict and confusion as to what actions the rules should be meant to support at the table.
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Mar 29, 2021 23:50
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It isn’t just in one sentence. A classic example is where spells must target things “that you can see” but are available to monsters with only tremorsense, etc. Pathfinder 2e’s favourite on this is giving spells with components to monsters that are incapable of performing them. No, there’s no exception in the rules as written, so the scary floating eye demon has to somehow be carrying a component pouch..
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Mar 29, 2021 23:52
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Tunicate posted:The other issue is when the intent is given and then the rules effect is totally different. I think that's a good example of poor construction, in that the text you quoted is likely intended as descriptive of the authorial or wizardly reason for this spell existing, rather than descriptive of what the spell itself does. The spell gives you a +20 on your next check, which is a lot better than taking 20, since it adds 20 to the result of a 20-sided die plus your skill bonus. But what was "intended"? I disagree that we can divine with certainty based on the text you provided. Perhaps the author intended that the spell work this way. Without additional evidence, we cannot know. How does this affect play? As fax would ask, does the spell as written provide the feeling and experience the table was looking for? Is it way too good?
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Mar 29, 2021 23:55
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Personally, I would tend to see the fluff text as indicative of the intention, and if the rule given is inconsistent with that assume that the designer just plain botched the maths. Classic example would be a game where a skill rating that was described representing as a world-beating, top class level of expertise in a skill still finds you failing at unopposed rolls most of the time.
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Mar 30, 2021 00:02
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aldantefax posted:I was on the road earlier so perhaps I communicated something in a wacky way about the concept. To put it more clearly: I think this is only true in the sense that if everyone at a table agrees a houserule makes the game more "post-apocalyptic" or "Victorian" or "metal" or whatever, then it "does." So if everyone at the table agrees that each player starting with a million post-nuclear dollars, enough for each to buy three settlements, makes a game feel more "post-apocalyptic" than the rules as printed, then the table interpretation did indeed better leverage the feeling the rules were attempting to deliver. If those players came to me and said "hey, we have this great houserule for making it more dystopian: everyone starts filthy rich," then yeah I'm not going to put time into plumbing their other game insights. They're not playing the game wrong, though: they are not misunderstanding or misapplying any of the game's rules. It's clear to me that you have enormous faith in the free-flowing houserule-heavy experience. It's also clear to me that I have enormous cynicism directed at that experience. There are legions of players who make their high-handed table interpretations without actually knowing, let alone understanding, the actual written rule (cf. Leperflesh's story). I trust groups to move generally toward experiences they enjoy as they interpret the rules for RPGs; I do not trust them at all to make informed, thoughtful choices (i.e. between the printed rules and their table interpretations) that would work well for others. I agree that a well-informed referee can turn any system into an incredible campaign that appears to flow almost without rules. If that referee is rolling behind a screen and fudging appropriately, that referee may actually be making the campaign flow without rules entirely. In that sense, a perfect referee's campaign with a crap system will always be better than a crap referee's game with the perfect system--but only because the perfect referee responds perfectly to the interests of the players at that one table.
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Mar 30, 2021 01:19
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Leperflesh posted:I think that's a good example of poor construction, in that the text you quoted is likely intended as descriptive of the authorial or wizardly reason for this spell existing, rather than descriptive of what the spell itself does. I double checked and the lead-in text is more blatant in that it's supposed to be a rushed take 20 "How many times have you wished you could make a skill check with the benefit of "taking 20" but didn't actually have the time? ...Well, fret no more!" But in terms of ingame effect, having a binary on/off +20 ability that pushes you off the RNG for any skill that's triggered by the players at-will is absurdly bad design. Instead of 'you will do the best you can', it's 'you will do as good as a character 10-20 levels higher'. For a second level spell that's pretty bonkers (and heaven forbid the players decide to craft wands of it). And from the DM side, if you're trying to design a dungeon, now for every single skill check difficulty, you have to factor in 'do I want them to be able to achieve this without using this specific spell' (for reference, the easiest 'open lock' DC listed is 20. The hardest is 40. Easiest trap to disable is DC 15, hardest is 34)
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Mar 30, 2021 01:33
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Yeah and I think that underlines several issues with that particular ruleset and skill rolls that extend beyond the spell in particular. We may agree (and I do) that as-written the spell is bad, and perhaps that's additional evidence that the RAI would be different: but we are guessing, making at best educated guesses, and in the meantime, what should we actually do? Which as you suggested, goes back to "you have to basically make the spell yourself" - or ban the spell from the table - or perhaps lift in a system entire from some other game, as Fax has amply recorded in his other deep dive threads recently - or just play a different game altogether. We've still got two threads we're intertwining here: "how best do we talk about games, what are the tools for doing that" vs. "how best do we talk about specific mechanics problems people want to raise and analyze within specific games." I'll maintain that in both cases, suggesting alternatives is an appropriate and good contribution; but, critiquing the entire game is only appropriate in the first case and not really in the second. E.g., "am I understanding this +20 skill right?" ought not to be slapped immediately with "play a better game," or especially, "play a better game, idiot."
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Mar 30, 2021 03:04
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homullus posted:I think this is only true in the sense that if everyone at a table agrees a houserule makes the game more "post-apocalyptic" or "Victorian" or "metal" or whatever, then it "does." So if everyone at the table agrees that each player starting with a million post-nuclear dollars, enough for each to buy three settlements, makes a game feel more "post-apocalyptic" than the rules as printed, then the table interpretation did indeed better leverage the feeling the rules were attempting to deliver. If those players came to me and said "hey, we have this great houserule for making it more dystopian: everyone starts filthy rich," then yeah I'm not going to put time into plumbing their other game insights. They're not playing the game wrong, though: they are not misunderstanding or misapplying any of the game's rules. I think part of taking it to the outside world with a given table's mannerisms and practices trends towards things ending up the way it does with something like how we have fantasy heartbreakers from D&D or Talislanta which is a game that is very proud of saying it has no elves. The idea that something cannot be changed as a result of interpreting game text is something that began happening somewhere in the mid-2000s where brands became more zealous in production of content so there was invariably a rule for everything everywhere but you just needed to find it and take it to its logical absurdity, so you get janky combos that would fail scrutiny at a cohesive table even though they would be technically correct 'as written'. Attempting to explain a thought process rather than the end result is laborious when attempting to present house rules to other people, particularly to an audience who may be more interested in pure debate over a handful of sentences, since usually what rules arguments boil down to is a single specific rule or cluster of rules in the core rules engine rather than a criticism of the entire game at large. However, rules absolutely can and should inform the various qualities of a given game, it's just that the vision gets a bit muddy after many years and iterations of cruft. To use a non-D&D example, we might use something like Microscope or Legacy: Life Among the Ruins, neither of which have anything to do with D&D. Legacy tells of a multigenerational post-post-apocalyptic sci-fi society where there was a cataclysm but now things are generally chill and people traipse about as clan leaders dealing with clan problems and shared resources. Even down to the naming of the statistics they use to define those resources the rules language informs what this game is like. The triggers for when rules take place in that game also drive toward a certain sense of togetherness or adversity where it is not the individual but the tribe which must overcome. Plus, even not knowing its precursor, Apocalypse World, the game text still clearly states when and where to make poo poo up. How did your world fall? What is left over from that before-time? These are all rules that drive that narrative and experience during character and world creation, and just because they don't involve math or numbers specifically doesn't make them cruft - they are key things in defining the actual world. Microscope, on the other hand, makes no attempt to use its rules to define a specific world or feeling and isn't really considered to be a tabletop RPG, though it is adjacent. The rules framework there provide prompts about how to use it as a tool and contextual examples of how to leverage its rules in an attempt to provide clarity to the usage of a given rule. Both games have a clear thing to provide the context for players. homullus posted:It's clear to me that you have enormous faith in the free-flowing houserule-heavy experience. It's also clear to me that I have enormous cynicism directed at that experience. There are legions of players who make their high-handed table interpretations without actually knowing, let alone understanding, the actual written rule (cf. Leperflesh's story). I trust groups to move generally toward experiences they enjoy as they interpret the rules for RPGs; I do not trust them at all to make informed, thoughtful choices (i.e. between the printed rules and their table interpretations) that would work well for others. I agree that a well-informed referee can turn any system into an incredible campaign that appears to flow almost without rules. If that referee is rolling behind a screen and fudging appropriately, that referee may actually be making the campaign flow without rules entirely. In that sense, a perfect referee's campaign with a crap system will always be better than a crap referee's game with the perfect system--but only because the perfect referee responds perfectly to the interests of the players at that one table. I don't know if I call it faith in that idea but it does form a large amount of what experiences make games work from original experience and at scale for me - if I have to stop and externalize a rules argument for even 10% of my sessions or fight a tool for that amount of time then for the most part it will be larger beef. I feel that the internet is not really a place that has appropriate rules of engagement when talking about rules unless you go in, and clearly look for a binary "is this rule and interpretation pairing accurate" - to which if it is, the discussion is over, but people will want to add more in a discussion left out to the people. I also grew up "not knowing any better" and instead entering a social ecosystem where many people ran games inside of the local community and it was just a given that one table worked one way, another table worked another way. You didn't necessarily need to worry about the rules themselves being precise and clear in those points because the experts were tableside who had used their mastery of the game text to provide a solution that kept the game running. If we're taking it to critical analysis of a game's rules engine rather than the specific bits and bobs on a rule or collection of rules ought to provide, then it also need be said that unless those rules were there in the first place, it would be very difficult to know what needed to be changed about them. I would draw similarity to being able to do improv in music, since you need to know what sounds good first before you start making those improvisations away from it that feels good to keep flowing. Part of the problem with the most popular game systems by market share is that it doesn't take nearly as much authorial license to provide a structure for tableside arbitration and empower game masters to do the things they need to do to keep the game moving, nor does it provide a particularly good way for players to challenge arbitration. Neither does it have anywhere to structure an argument about rules interpretations either, it simply provides rules and maybe "roll a die to see what happens if you don't know and then move on, look up the rule details later". Having easier access to discuss rules means that you go online to a non-authoritative source seeking approval that a given table's interpretation of the rule is right (and thus, they themselves are right), but if the question is looking for solutions in how to handle a situation the rules do not provide enough structure to improvise off of, then where does that leave a referee who is then being presented with a whole bunch of different interpretations? In other words, we need to make better referees and better structures for those referees to understand the world at large. And yeah - referees should be experts at the table they are running, or at least be working towards it on the craft and philosophy side. If they were bitter about having to run a game and don't derive satisfaction in helping to facilitate a story for their table and their specific nuances, those tables will very often fall apart after less than a year unless something clicks for them and they go from viewing it as a burden to something enjoyable. KingKalamari posted:I think you raise a good point here, but I also think that the use of D&D as an example opens up a potential hole in this philosophy and that is that the feeling and experience associated with a particular game can sometimes vary quite significantly from one player to another. One of the big problems that D&D has long had, as a system, is that there are multiple different and sometimes antithetical game experiences that different players associate with D&D. This is a game that different chunks of the fanbase think of the game's aesthetic as a fantasy home-invasion game focused on resource management, turn tracking and mapping; while others associate D&D as a game of high fantasy heroics. Neither of these styles are inherrently better than one another, but it can lead to conflict and confusion as to what actions the rules should be meant to support at the table. Sure, we can use any other system which has multiple editions and a wide amount of leeway for interpretation as a result, but as you might know from the various things in the 5e thread (not to import drama, just for illustrative purposes) there are way more people that discuss and kick the tires of D&D which has tried to be all things to all people (or did so accidentally) and thus generates a large amount of this everything that we consider for the purposes of understanding intent, mastery of context, and so on. Just thinking back on something like GURPS for example which is a toolkit that is designed and edited by a significantly smaller team but also makes an attempt to be all things to most people, or maybe Legend of the 5 Rings which is up its rear end aesthetically but has generally remained consistent with Roll-and-Keep and its other associated rules - the scale is a bit different but the modes of play are generally as varied. For me, D&D's rules across the various editions impart a very different feeling when run as just those rules engines in a vacuum. Character mortality rate and stat generation are two of the biggest differentiators from one edition to another. Because it was fundamentally easier to just eat it, characters were by design easier to make and discover, rather than be exhaustively curated for the long haul. In order to respect that effort, it made characters superheroes from the get go that do wonderful things and mortality never truly enters the concept, particularly at low level, unless there is some kind of true danger (but encounter balance tunes it so there is a smooth ramp at each level, and it does a pretty okay job of it in 4e and 5e). D&D's primary failing is that there have been so many people pissing and making GBS threads into the rules from an authoritative perspective across so many editions for so many years combined with its need to be a marketable product meant that it has filed off what made it a distinct system to now become a generic one instead. That said, it is certainly not the only monolithic game which has constructed itself in that way before. I have a bit of a crush on GURPS because it makes no qualms about having an authoritative way to handle its system but it is well equipped and well edited to empower referees to think in a highly detail oriented way about their games before the game launches. It promotes careful planning and thorough examination of a game world and its underpinnings because it also understands no two games will ever be truly the same, that way leads to madness. While it has had a whole host of problematic content (and still pushes more out there in the modern era) its core rules system has not had any major revisions since the 90s, whereas D&D has had a revision of its system six times since then (BECMI, AD&D 2e, 3.0, 3.5, 4, 5). Relative to the response to homullus, GURPS actually does empower referees to be true experts at their table and specific interpretations of the game, and the language is very consistently edited most of the time that unless someone doesn't want to admit a rule goes one way or another, the majority of arguments are well settled and play moves on.
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Mar 30, 2021 03:36
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Xiahou Dun posted:I've been optimistically reading this discussion about "ambiguity" in rules to be something like, to draw a giant contrast just for the purpose of example, PBTA-style giving you some prompts and you work out what the fiction is at the table vs. 3e flubbing the rules on drowning and just being an obvious mistake. PbtA games are ambiguous about the stuff they can't define. Like, Act Under Fire says "On a 7-9, you flinch, hesitate, or stall: the MC can offer you a worse outcome, a hard bargain, or an ugly choice." What makes sense for the MC to do depends on the state of the game, what the fire is, and how bad you're in it when you act. There's guidance offered for how the MC can parse what's going on and what they should do, but ultimately the call has to be up to them at the point of use. If players aren't satisfied with what happens it's usually more down to the MC's judgement than confusion about the rules. Sculpt Spell, on the other hand, is ambiguous about the stuff it has to define. There's no expectation that Wizzrobe can sometimes exclude themselves from their own evocations and sometimes not, depending on the situation. Sculpt Spell should give you a definitive answer, and if players aren't satisfied it's because of a confusion about the rules.
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Mar 30, 2021 06:39
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Tunicate posted:The other issue is when the intent is given and then the rules effect is totally different. I'm... not sure what's ambiguous about that? It references a standard mechanic, taking 20, then provides a spell effect that counts as taking 20 without the limitations of using the basic rule to do so? It's not good design from a game balance standpoint, but D&D and related systems have never made any bones about magic being unbalanced.
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Mar 30, 2021 09:47
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Liquid Communism posted:I'm... not sure what's ambiguous about that? It references a standard mechanic, taking 20, then provides a spell effect that counts as taking 20 without the limitations of using the basic rule to do so? A spell that lets you take 20 and a spell that gives you +20 are not the same thing, though. The former means your result is always going to be 20 + your modifier, while the latter will be at worst 21 + your modifier and at most 40 + your modifier. senrath fucked around with this message at 10:40 on Mar 30, 2021 |
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Mar 30, 2021 10:36
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Leperflesh posted:We've still got two threads we're intertwining here: "how best do we talk about games, what are the tools for doing that" vs. "how best do we talk about specific mechanics problems people want to raise and analyze within specific games." Sure, but specific mechanics problems are sometimes such an inherent* part of a game that it'd be impossible to discuss them without critiquing if not the entire game then large swathes of it. For example, the current discussion about the wording of certain spells in D&D almost necessitates a broader discussion about what's supposed to be going on with spells in D&D - because trying to figure out if this one spell where the text clearly says "someone else" was really intended to also mean "or yourself" seems completely pointless without some consistent framework in which to talk about how we're intended to understand spells (ie, are they self contained rules that interact only when they say so, or are they supposed to have an overarching consistent logic to them? Or something else?) Because if it's the former, then trying to infer the intent of one spell from another spell (or non-spell rule) is pointless, while if it's the latter you should almost always be able to do so. *I think this is the wrong word but I can't figure out the right one - sometimes the cause of a mechanics problem is an intentional design decision broadly regarded to be either or both of "cool/good/fun" and "what sets this game apart from other games". Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 13:03 on Mar 30, 2021 |
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Mar 30, 2021 11:34
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Wisher Theurge Fatalist is intentionally hard to understand as a silly joke, and I read it as Jenna Moran doing loving self-parody. I guess one way of putting it would be that it presents to you a game that, intentionally, has glaring holes in it - contradictory rules, sparse setting, and whose basic emotional and thematic thrust is a paradox. (Basically, "A deserving wisher who reaches the end of the game reshapes the world entirely. Doesn't that make you responsible for everything bad having-had-happened, when your future omnipotence could have, potentially, have retroactively prevented it? But if none of that stuff happened to prove your goodness, are you still deserving?") And then it gives you three character skills, explicitly presented as magic powers:
All three of these skills are of course, completely ordinary things that get used in the course of ordinary RPG play - discussing how the game works, how the world is, and what we care about and want - but formalizing them as a trio like that always struck me as a neat bit of RPG insight. I mean, there's other neat things in it too. It perhaps has, in its comic fashion, one of the most surprisingly rigorous "how to play roleplaying games" section ever, laying out the different ways of making statements about the game: "speaking as your character", "Making a statement about what your character does", "stating what you wish to accomplish", and so on, and the drawbacks of each.
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Mar 30, 2021 13:40
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DNE posted:Wisher Theurge Fatalist is intentionally hard to understand as a silly joke, and I read it as Jenna Moran doing loving self-parody. I guess one way of putting it would be that it presents to you a game that, intentionally, has glaring holes in it - contradictory rules, sparse setting, and whose basic emotional and thematic thrust is a paradox. (Basically, "A deserving wisher who reaches the end of the game reshapes the world entirely. Doesn't that make you responsible for everything bad having-had-happened, when your future omnipotence could have, potentially, have retroactively prevented it? But if none of that stuff happened to prove your goodness, are you still deserving?") That's how I initially understood it. But it was then suggested that actually it's a deconstruction of a play expectation that's impossible to reach - that the "Jewel of All Desiring" represents a particular RPG experience in which the world is fully realized, consistent and "real" and yet also provides a targeted experience for the players. The suggestion is that this explains all the statements throughout the text that things will "stop the players gaining the Jewel..". The ur-toads, for example, represent that if there is genuine challenge in the game then the players may fail to meet that challenge and have a negative experience, but if there is no genuine challenge then the world feels unreal. In the case of the fairies it's explicitly stated: if the players join their stories then the world is not real because narrative logic reigns, but if they don't, the world is not real because actions lack consequences.
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Mar 30, 2021 15:50
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hyphz posted:That's how I initially understood it. But it was then suggested that actually it's a deconstruction of a play expectation that's impossible to reach - that the "Jewel of All Desiring" represents a particular RPG experience in which the world is fully realized, consistent and "real" and yet also provides a targeted experience for the players. Let it be said that I love talking about this game and we should probably spin this one off into another thread if want to keep talking about it, but in short, I feel that that you do have a valid reading, but I stand by my personal more hopeful interpretation of the game due to the stated themes of the game (sudden enlightenment, accidentally creating meaning with friends, three butterflies, etcetera) and of the themes of Jenna Moran's other works! I think you're supposed to untangle the impossible stuff (impossible rules that don't work, impossible setting that says you die, impossible moral and thematic dilemmas with no solution) with magic, where magic is just "coming to an agreement with your group on how it ought to work". But I mean, matter of taste.
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Mar 30, 2021 18:31
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DNE posted:Let it be said that I love talking about this game and we should probably spin this one off into another thread if want to keep talking about it, but in short, I feel that that you do have a valid reading, but I stand by my personal more hopeful interpretation of the game due to the stated themes of the game (sudden enlightenment, accidentally creating meaning with friends, three butterflies, etcetera) and of the themes of Jenna Moran's other works! I think you're supposed to untangle the impossible stuff (impossible rules that don't work, impossible setting that says you die, impossible moral and thematic dilemmas with no solution) with magic, where magic is just "coming to an agreement with your group on how it ought to work". But I mean, matter of taste. I mean, Jenna's just put out a new game and is playtesting Nobilis 4e; she can probably hold up a thread of her own if we wanted to make one.
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Mar 30, 2021 19:19
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DNE posted:Let it be said that I love talking about this game and we should probably spin this one off into another thread if want to keep talking about it, but in short, I feel that that you do have a valid reading, but I stand by my personal more hopeful interpretation of the game due to the stated themes of the game (sudden enlightenment, accidentally creating meaning with friends, three butterflies, etcetera) and of the themes of Jenna Moran's other works! I think you're supposed to untangle the impossible stuff (impossible rules that don't work, impossible setting that says you die, impossible moral and thematic dilemmas with no solution) with magic, where magic is just "coming to an agreement with your group on how it ought to work". But I mean, matter of taste. I agree, but I think that the impossibility of the task, the inaccessibility of the Jewel of All Desiring, is a brilliant bit of rhetoric in the metafiction. Because the point as I read it is that no formal system can create the 'spark of life' that exists in a shared fantasy story, can make the ritual acts have meaning and reality to you. That's always a question of the interaction at the table, which JKM is presenting as a kind of satori - and WTF is a koan intended to make that happen. So everything about the setting and system is laying out all the reasons that tabletop RPGs cannot exist, while constantly and directly affirming that they do exist and people do attain the Jewel of All Desiring by the fact of play. I can fairly say that my usual gaming group regularly attains the Jewel of All Desiring in games of Mage, Exalted, homebrew things, all sorts of stuff. Also, for the record, I was the one who suggested to Hyphz that the metaphorical content of the JoAD is 'the investment of meaning in play' which cannot be attained through the pure formalism of a game, though obviously the formal qualities of a game matter to the experience of play.
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Mar 30, 2021 19:57
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Splicer posted:Arivia's argument, based on later posts, seems to be that RAW's approach to finding out what has actually been W is fundamentally flawed because objective interpretation is impossible: Yeah, I disagree with the RAW/RAI paradigm, but not the task of trying to interpret/understand the text of a rulebook. Better approaches (like what Leperflesh has outlined) where we're respecting the inherent ambiguity and subjectivity of language are more productive and useful. RAW/RAI has that load of baggage from its years of use online (which you can still see on GitP/Paizo's forums/5e places), so it's really critically useless.
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Mar 30, 2021 20:08
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Rand Brittain posted:I mean, Jenna's just put out a new game and is playtesting Nobilis 4e; she can probably hold up a thread of her own if we wanted to make one. By all means, make a Jenna Moran Games thread, that'd be cool and good! Elector_Nerdlingen posted:*I think this is the wrong word but I can't figure out the right one - sometimes the cause of a mechanics problem is an intentional design decision broadly regarded to be either or both of "cool/good/fun" and "what sets this game apart from other games". Intrinsic? Elemental? Central or constitutional, maybe? I think I understand what you mean. If we think of a whole game as a tree of mechanics, with basal nodes (roll a d20 to do things), branches (roll a d20 modified by your skill value, against a target difficulty, and if you meet or exceed the difficulty, you succeed) and leaf nodes (to climb a wall or cliff, roll an Athletics check, and get bonuses from equipment such as ropes and iron spikes; if you are being attacked, apply a -5 penalty to your roll). Then, some rules questions are answerable within a narrowly-scoped conversation because it's just one rule that has a weird phrasing or whatever (what constitutes "being attacked" exactly? What if someone's shooting at me, but I know they can't hit me because I have a Belt of Arrow Deflection for example?) but other rules questions can't reasonably be addressed in an isolated way, because the problem derives from mechanisms further towards the trunk of the tree (DC progressions in this game seem to create scenarios where the trained always succeed and the untrained always fail, and once the players notice this situation, it starts resulting in play that we don't prefer). Still: I'd say that a poster asking about a "leaf" type rules question isn't necessarily assisted by a series of posts assaulting the trunk... OK, maybe some users need to hear "this game has a severe flaw further up that you should consider house-ruling" but some posters really just would like to know when they should apply a penalty, either by hearing other people's interpretations of the rules as they're written, or finding out that there's some evidence of what was actually intended, perhaps elsewhere in the rules ("the acrobatics skill section applies x penalty under y conditions, that's perhaps what was intended for athletics as well"). I think it's interesting that you point out that some design decisions are intentionally there as differentiators: "this is what makes our game unique", in addition to the more obvious case of a design decision intended to create a particular experience "this is what makes our game more wizard-piratey". I definitely think that's true... lots of fantasy heartbreakers basically exist because someone thought their new mechanics were clever, and then plastered standard fantasy dungeon crawl tropes into the gaps to make a complete game. But also some products just need to try to stand out in the crowd, and having a unique system or twist may be a legit way to draw interest?
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Mar 30, 2021 20:31
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Glazius posted:
Clearly, RAI. You use your theory of mind to work out that, if the author had intended something funky and weird like always damaging yourself but not allies, then they would have explicitly said so, not left it as a possible strained interpretation of the text. You can back that up is comparing the damage done by such spells and other spells without that drawback. Are they significantly more powerful ? Does that type of caster have available fats or abilities designed to help them soak or avoid the damage they are doing to themself? Are there illustrations showing them as signed or burnt by their own spells? Does there exist some essay where they talk about how cool the idea of a self-damaging caster is? If none of that exists, you can make the working assumption that the intent was to allow excluding the caster. Which means that playing it that way is following that intent, as opposed to introducing a house rule.
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Mar 30, 2021 20:52
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I don’t particularly care about RAW/RAI, but I do have a particular bone to pick with a lot of games: I don’t like the d20. It produces too much randomness for my taste. This can be mitigated by having potentially high modifiers and the way that critical successes work in PF2e, where you get a crit success on rolling ten above the target number, but even then, having a character be specced to succeed in something (like diplomacy) on to fail because you rolled a 5 sucks rear end and feels awful. D20 games with low modifiers like 5e and Lancer make the rolls feel particularly swingy (Lancer having the usual target number be 10 helps but doesn’t fully deal with the problem). Really, I much prefer games where you roll multiple dice and add them together because a bell curve feels a lot less awful
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Mar 30, 2021 21:34
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thetoughestbean posted:I don’t particularly care about RAW/RAI, but I do have a particular bone to pick with a lot of games: I don’t like the d20. It produces too much randomness for my taste. This can be mitigated by having potentially high modifiers and the way that critical successes work in PF2e, where you get a crit success on rolling ten above the target number, but even then, having a character be specced to succeed in something (like diplomacy) on to fail because you rolled a 5 sucks rear end and feels awful. I had this problem with 13th Age, where my first play experience felt horrible as all my abilities were counting the d20 roll, not a modifier, and it loving sucked to just miss my "I need a roll of 11 or higher" or whatever. 13th Age is fine overall, but that was the one time where I really went "yeah, a d20 sucks for this."
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Mar 30, 2021 21:39
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In terms of creating a vocabulary to categorize rules, I'll submit the stuff I came up with in order to more accurately describe how I cross examine rules to include into my megadungeon game: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?action=showpost&postid=510785135 Without looking at the above, the taxonomy is as follows: - Rules engine: the entirety of the game with all rules considered into it ("Forest", to use Leperflesh / Active Directory terminology) - Core rules: the things in the game where if you change them it will fundamentally alter the game ("Tree" or "Trunk") - Connectors: structural rules that, if changed, will cause a cascade of other rules. If you knock out these rules or change them, the rest of the game starts to lose integrity and may have unexpected consequences ("Branch") - Bells/whistles: rules upon which no other dependencies rely on and are at the terminal of the design tree ("Leaf"). Spells and character abilities are usually falling into this category, but not always - some rules or structures for characters may actually be connectors instead or core rules that define that character's mode of play. In understanding the above taxonomy we can then use it to start analyzing rules as part of a larger system and then add the additional dimensions of experience/aesthetic. In most tabletop RPGs rules attempt to influence these meta-qualities as noted earlier, so understanding what the intrinsic value in relation to the rules engine is important in discussing it with whatever model you want to use. For the majority of discussions that I see or have participated in, the more practical debates tend to focus closer to the bells/whistles part of rules taxonomy rather than core or connectors. In general, my willingness to house-rule and act as a judge tableside on these is much higher because understanding their place inside of the rest of the engine means that they can be changed mostly freely without impacting the overall integrity of the system. Or, if I want to import/export rules, these are the ones most likely to be easily massaged to get where I want them to go. Despite my overall musings, connectors and core rules are ones that I usually rely on the specific system to resolve for me because I assume they work fine. The amount of things which are actually connector or core rules are deceiving though and may require more critical reading and possibly critical discussion at a table or online. These are a bit more rare but (again leveraging anecdotal experiences) I have found that when people start picking these things apart, adding the additional dimensionalities of purpose, experience, and aesthetic becomes a lot more important. Eg. most games can have their tones shifted dramatically by determining how easy or hard it is to die as a player character, and death/dying mechanics would be a core part of those games. The easier it is to die, the more characters have to influence their conditions to avoid it as it represents permanent loss of that character. That also implies a certain kind of genre as well when combined with some other factors. When analyzing specific rules texts and attempting to ascertain how they ought to be interpreted, then, if we're driving towards a common framework for critical discussion, certain things ought to be qualified: - What is the actual intent of the discussion? If it's for clarification's sake on a given work of interpretive text, that's very different from the philosophic authorial intent (RAW vs. RAI or what have you) - What is the expected outcome of the discussion? Sometimes this gets super muddy where someone is not actually attempting to "solve" whatever conundrum they're in, but rather attempting to just point at something and make a value judgement on it. This can cause a great deal of misunderstanding in and of itself. - What is the context surrounding the rule? What is the category of the rule? These things are to make sure that the surrounding taxonomy is taken into consideration and also helps to structure the intent of a given rule (or spell). - What is the expanded historic context to consider? How has this rule been interpreted elsewhere? This is hoovering in further details from other sources in understanding how this rule even exists in the first place, and can provide context where there otherwise would be none. A rule that is imported to a hack of PbtA could be informed most likely by Apocalypse World, or design notes from the authors of Apocalypse World, etc. - Are there specific research and data excerpts which further contextualize this rules question? This is usually assumed but should be provided in detail to ensure people understand OP's intent for asking like all the other questions. - (Optional, only if the intent and goal of a rules discussion is to provide a solution) What is the solution path? What happens if nothing is done? What existing solutions exist for this thing? What new solutions exist for this thing? To then reframe the question about the spell thing: Tunicate posted:The other issue is when the intent is given and then the rules effect is totally different. The intent of the above is to seek clarification on the rules text of a specific spell which simulates another mechanic but is ambiguous about what it actually does. Should the spell grant a bonus of +20 to a roll, or should the spell grant the effects of "take 20", which sets your skill check to a 20? Should it inherit all the other rules and restrictions of "take 20" except modify the time taken?
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Mar 30, 2021 22:08
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thetoughestbean posted:I don’t particularly care about RAW/RAI, but I do have a particular bone to pick with a lot of games: I don’t like the d20. It produces too much randomness for my taste. This can be mitigated by having potentially high modifiers and the way that critical successes work in PF2e, where you get a crit success on rolling ten above the target number, but even then, having a character be specced to succeed in something (like diplomacy) on to fail because you rolled a 5 sucks rear end and feels awful. This isn't the D20's fault: it's the fault of any system in which you roll a single die to find results, because each result is equally likely, vs. systems where you roll multiple dice that create a probability curve. Modiphius' 2D20 system, for example, has you rolling at least two and as many as five D20s, with a chance of up to two successes per die, plus a chance of up to one complication per die. The result is a probability curve of successes, which the player has some control over (rolling additional dice is always an option the player can take, since they can add tokens to the GM's pool to buy dice if they're out of tokens in the players' pool to buy them with). An additional issue with the D&D/D20 style of play is the hard success/fail nature of those rolls, as Arivia pointed out: you miss your target number by 1 or by 10, doesn't matter, you failed. You made it by 1 or by 10, doesn't matter, you succeeded, with the exception being crits. In a "accumulate successes" system, you can succeed or fail by several margins, and can generate complications independently of success/fail, and that makes for a more dynamic and satisfying range of outcomes. Combine these two, and the power is in the players' hands to judge that the stakes are particularly high for a given roll and spend resources to push the probability curve hard in their favor; or, conversely, conserve resources when the stakes are low and enjoy the flavorful options of a more probable "didn't succeed" result.
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Mar 30, 2021 22:16
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thetoughestbean posted:I don’t particularly care about RAW/RAI, but I do have a particular bone to pick with a lot of games: I don’t like the d20. It produces too much randomness for my taste. This can be mitigated by having potentially high modifiers and the way that critical successes work in PF2e, where you get a crit success on rolling ten above the target number, but even then, having a character be specced to succeed in something (like diplomacy) on to fail because you rolled a 5 sucks rear end and feels awful. Like any die, a d20 is just a tool to create a random number from a uniform distribution at a certain granularity. Plugging a single uniformly distributed number be it anything from a coin flip to a d20 into a pass/fail system is what creates the swing, not the die itself. I don't think swinginess is inherently bad in that it can be used to create dramatic moments, but making swing ubiquitous is a specific design choice that is cross purposes with player agency.
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Mar 30, 2021 22:19
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Leperflesh posted:An additional issue with the D&D/D20 style of play is the hard success/fail nature of those rolls, as Arivia pointed out: you miss your target number by 1 or by 10, doesn't matter, you failed. You made it by 1 or by 10, doesn't matter, you succeeded, with the exception being crits. I want to make clear that that actually wasn't what I was talking about. I was playing a ranger or something I think, which was noted as a class with a high amount of randomness and abilities to mitigate that randomness. The abilities I was struggling with were not roll + bonus against a target number, it was just strictly the roll - it was something like "roll to hit, and if you get a 11 or higher regardless of hitting you deal a d6 of extra damage if you hit. If you get less than 11, regardless of whether you hit or not, you can't use this ability again today." (this is my memory, don't have 13A at hand to check right now) But the particular nature of the ability made the d20's wide range really noticeable, instead of the roll + bonus versus DC that many of us are used to from 3e and its descendants.
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Mar 30, 2021 22:24
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Ah, I see. Yeah, still a binary result from a die, but basically a coinflip result using a d20 to get it.
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Mar 30, 2021 22:34
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