Quote from: Glazer;545334Very well put - spot on. The whole point of an RPG is that player characters should be able to attempt anything, and to allow such freedom a GM is needed  as an arbiter of success or failure. The more rules or legislation constrain this freedom of choice, the less like an rpg the game becomes.

I do not fully agree. I was talking about interaction schemes, they are pretty independent of the legislation. Having a lot of rules can actually be a kind of freedom itself. But yes, the whole reason for having a DM is to provide a possibility for true surprise and true freedom of action which no rules-system can ever provide.

And it is the very nature of the DM-fueled freedom that he is the arbiter. If he would not need to decide, he could be done away with. So if one is using only written rules and minis in combat, you are failing to use the DM-driven RPG concept at all.

Nota Bene: I have DMed many sessions with 2D gridded terrain and minis and very strict adherence to the 3.5 raw. Especially during weekday gaming, they do prevent the collapse into 1D and into the realm of tired and unconcetnrated confusion. But using the strengths of a DM in combat we did not at that time.

Quote from: Caesar Slaad;545344Ah, from reasonable observation to BS false dichotomy in a heartbeat.

Well, Gleichman definitely is calling something complex and demanding in the realm of interaction and guesswork impossible. And without asking he talks about his beloved mother (did no one but me find this weird?). Also he prefers strict rulings. A perfectionist.

That is what used to be called the 'migraine personality'.
http://submittedforyourperusal.com/2011/10/05/migraine-personality/

In short I am insulting him like this:

Only because YOU cannot make it work, does not say it is impossible.

Quote from: Glazer;545334Very well put - spot on. The whole point of an RPG is that player characters should be able to attempt anything, and to allow such freedom a GM is needed  as an arbiter of success or failure. The more rules or legislation constrain this freedom of choice, the less like an rpg the game becomes.

People have this misconception that unlimited freedom is a good thing. But the truth is that it's creativity of operating within limits that sparks true imagination and progress.

There are no free lunches in life, there should be no free lunches in RPGs.


Edit: as an side and to everyone, the person you quoted (Settembrini) has been in my ignore list for years. I won't be read is posts directly or replying to him. True of a number of people here.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;545376I took a look at that essay and I'm not drawing the same conclusion you are. There's nothing about facing, ganging up, range, or terrain features that require non-verbal depiction in order to use them or take advantage of them.

That's because you brought your own bias to the articles and elevated them above what I wrote.

Gleichman, I disagree with you about nearly everything and I'm glad you're here.

Quote from: Aos;545387Gleichman, I disagree with you about nearly everything and I'm glad you're here.

That's my view.  I rarely if ever use the ignore feature either.  Because even though I may have a polar opposite view on this and think Gleichman's view is absurd and borders into ridiculous I'm always open to understand if not  learn from different points of view.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;545364Now it seems to be getting applied to any circumstance in which the DM is actually doing their job. Complete idiocy. It's people saying, "Compared to a video game, the great thing about an RPG is that you can do anything." And people replying, "Yeah, and that's a problem."

That's not the problem, as I see it.  The problem is a matter of degree.

When Steffan O'Sullivan wrote Fudge a couple of decades ago, he deliberately left things like drowning rules (an example he gives in his designer's notes) out of the system because one of his design goals was "never to have to look anything up during play". which is basically a "rulings not rules" argument.  From his designer's notes (I recommend reading the entire section titled "Looking Things Up", from which these quotes are taken, which is relevant to this discussion:

QuoteSo what does go on? Well, you're trying to simulate either the real world or some non-real, fictional world. Wouldn't it be helpful to have rules for every contingency? Well, yes and no:

• Yes, it would be helpful to have easily-remembered meta-rules that covered every contingency.
• No, it wouldn't be helpful at all to try to have specific rules to cover every contingency because the undertaking is impossible. Any list you could make would be incomplete and would fail at some point. In addition, you'd constantly be interrupting your game looking things up, and the GM would never feel comfortable just winging it to keep the game flow going, because it might turn out that the rules contradicted her.

[...]

But why doesn't Fudge have rules for common things, such as falling damage, or how much damage it takes to knock a door down, or time to drown, and so on? Don't these things come up often enough to make it worth your while to include them?

My answer is simply: no, they don't. If they came up often enough, you'd never have to look them up. If they only occur now and then, you'd have to stop the game to look up the rule, then calculate the damage, etc. In the meantime, the role-playing mood is broken as index-searching, rule-reading, and technical calculations are made.

In short, that's not role-playing, that's simulation. And here's where Fudge fails the "good game" test for many players: it's aimed at role-playing rather than "realistic simulation."

So at one extreme, we have rules for everything and a game that looks like ASL: The RPG.  At the other extreme, we have rules for nothing and the GM just makes it all up as they go.  Since most role-playing games exist between those extremes, one should conclude that there is both a value to having rules and a point at which the rules will hit a point of diminishing returns and some things will have to be handled on an ad hoc basis.

In those Fudge designer's notes, Steffan O'Sullivan makes the case for leaving most rulings in the hand of the GM to avoid time-consuming rule referencing during the game, which is a big part of the "rulings vs. rules" argument.  But if fixed rules only made games worse and had no corresponding benefit, one should conclude that role-playing games should toss out the fixed rules and just handle everything through GM ruling and interpretation.  I've played in games where the only rule was "high rolls are good, low rolls are bad" and one can role-play that way.  So why don't most people role-play that way?  Because there are benefits to having fixed rules and liabilities to the "rulings not rules" approach, too.  So what a system needs to do is to find a balance between those extremes  where the benefits are maximized and the liabilities minimized and that sweet spot will, of course, vary quite a bit by group.  

The "Mother May I" or "20 Questions" arguments here are an illustration of the primary liability of leaving things up to GM interpretation.  The problem is that it limits the ability of players to make independent judgements about situations and to know the implication and meaning of choices without consulting with the GM first.  But there are other liabilities as well.  In this old Usenet message Mary Kunher discusses how players and GMs may assess situations differently and how relying on the GM to make that assessment can be unsatisfactory (her example is one-on-one games played with her husband, not some random jerk GM at the local game shop, so it's not a GM quality problem).  Having important successes or failures hinge on a GM judgement call can leave the impression that the GM made the success or failure happen.  And, finally, I think experienced role-players underestimate the degree to which beginning role-players often lack the real world knowledge to make judgement calls.  In those cases, having detailed rules actually tells the GM how to do thing in a reasonable manner.

What concerns me for 5e, especially after reading Frank Trollman's message above, is that Mike Mearls is making the same sort of mistake that they made with 4e, which is that rather than trying to find a balance between the benefits and liabilities of various styles, that they are listening to a single noisy extreme and producing rules that go to an extreme at the expense of other concerns.  In the case of 4e, the noisy extreme was the Forge gamist ideal.  In the case of 5e, it seems like it's the "rulings not rules" OSR.  While I think Mike Mearls and the 5e design team can learn some very valuable things from the OSR about how D&D can be played and D&D rules can work, I don't think embracing any single style to an extreme is going to produce a successful edition of D&D.  

D&D 3e was specifically designed to appeal to a broad range of styles rather than a single style at the expense of others.  While I don't think it was entirely successful, it did well enough in that regard that it was quite successful.  D&D 4e emphasized a single style of play at the expense of others and suffered because of it.  D&D 5e will also suffer if it emphasizes a single style of play at the expense of others, even if that style is the OSR.

Morrrow I do agree with you that a game like D&D needs to strike a balance in the core if they are too attract the most gamers possible. Right now all we have is a glimps of how things work and no idea how modules fit in. If the options are done as they were in say 2E (where a lot of people just use them as core because they are there) it will be a lot easier to layer more involved mechanics ontop of a rules light core (picture the 3e book with all the same stuff in it but a parenthetical "optional" next to grid related rules and deep skills.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;545376I can't speak for Benoist, but in my experience there is generally a point where players stop interacting with the game world and start interacting with the limited representation of the game world presented on the tabletop.

Yes, this can happen, but why not take a look at why it happens rather than take the tool away?  It's similar to the complaint that Steffan O'Sullivan makes in his Fudge designer's notes about a player who would insist on looking up precise modifiers rather than leaving it up to GM fiat.  Why is the player doing that and is simply taking the tool away the right solution?

Quote from: Justin Alexander;545376This is why I don't use products like Dwarven Forge unless they precisely match the game world: I find that, given that level of detail, virtually all players perceive the game world as being the model terrain regardless of what physical description may be given. (For similar reasons, I only use monster miniatures if they're a precise match for the monster I'm using. I've literally seen players who fought a vividly described hook horror remember the monster as being an ogre because that's the miniature that was used.)

I agree with this and it matches my experience.  It's why I prefer pawns to miniatures and dislike using inappropriate miniatures because I personally have that problem.  So here we have some advice to mitigate the problem of the player limiting their mental image of the scene to what's on the map board rather than throwing the tool away -- use sketches rather than terrain and pawns or markers instead of miniatures.  And that was pretty much what I was trying to get out of Benoist.  What is really causing the problem such that a sketch works OK but a sketch on a grid with markers fails for him.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;545376With my regular 3.5 group I use a Chessex battlemap and draw room outlines using magic markers. That group has no problem continuing to interact with the game world in this situation: In other words, they don't mistake the map for the territory.

But I've played with other people for whom that isn't true: As soon as the grid lines are laid down, they're interacting entirely with the map. And anything that isn't on the map stops existing for them.

While I can see that happen, I think the same thing can happen with verbal descriptions, where the players interact only with what the GM describes and  if it's not in the description, it doesn't exist.  There are KotDT strips that make fun of this -- for example, if the GM describes a cow in a field, it must be important because the GM doesn't describe things that the characters aren't meant to do something with.  The players mentally reduce combat to the 1 dimension that I talked about, picking a target and attacking it.  And as soon as a player does visualize the scene in a complex way and wants to interact with it in complex ways, that's where I've seen the "20 Questions" problem inevitably occur.  

What commonly happens in the game's I've been in is that the GM may start describing an encounter verbally but as soon as a player starts asking about details, the consensus is to go to the erasable map  grid.  And that's not unlike Benoist's example, where such questions lead to a sketch.  

The fundamental problem is that there is only so much information that can be conveyed about a scene verbally before a drawing becomes a more efficient and effective way to convey the information.  So that leads me to question whether the verbal-only description is really a richer and more detailed experience instead of being a simpler and less detailed experience where the players simply don't interact with anything the GM doesn't explicitly describe.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;545376I've taken these same players, removed a layer of abstraction, and gotten them to start interacting with the world again.

Can you give a specific example of what they did that you didn't like with the map and markers and did differently without them?  

Quote from: Justin Alexander;545376Complicating this, of course, is that there are people who want to play on the map and don't give a damn about the territory. There was a 4E game I played where the DM was using preprinted battlemaps. At one point during the battle I wanted to circle around the bad guys and I asked, "What's off the map here?" And the response was, "There's nothing off the edge of the map. That's the edge of the map."

Ugh.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;545376I took a look at that essay and I'm not drawing the same conclusion you are. There's nothing about facing, ganging up, range, or terrain features that require non-verbal depiction in order to use them or take advantage of them.

The problem is not that non-verbal depictions are required to take them into consideration.  The problem is that it can be incredibly difficult to take all of those things into consideration and make sure that everyone at the table has a common understanding of those factors and to keep them consistent over many rounds verbally rather than representing them physically.  It's why people use diagrams and maps in the real world rather than simply describing everything in text.  There is a point at which maps and diagrams are simply a more efficient way to convey the information accurately and consistently.  As a result, the verbal descriptions can wind up simplifying and abstracting the situation to the point where details aren't considered.  Do you commonly see players engaging in sophisticated movement, taking advantage of facing, ganging up, and taking advantage of range and terrain features in verbal-only combat encounters?  In my experience, once players start heading down that road, the GM quickly switches over to a map grid and counters to manage it all.

Quote from: Marleycat;545399That's my view.  I rarely if ever use the ignore feature either.

I use it as a tool to remind me that specific posters are not worth replying to.

And as a measure of changes in site population between visits. With but a couple of exceptions, most the people I put into the ignore list a few years back during my last visit have left this board or been banned from it. It's an interesting result, but I'm not sure it means anything other than there is significant turnover on these types of boards.

Quote from: John Morrow;545235My contention is that it's more efficient to accurately convey the information visually than verbally (I think your diagram also illustrates this) such that getting an accurate and rich understanding of a complex situation will be easier and more reliable with a diagram than with a verbal description, (B) diagrams with some sort of grid or hex convey scale and proportion better than a diagram without a grid or hex, (C) unless the player has a comprehensive understanding of the situation and what their character is and isn't capable of doing it will inevitably require a lot of questions to the GM to determine what their character can or can't do if they want to assess a variety of options (in effect, "20 Questions" or "Mother May I"), and (D) the primary way of escaping the problem of conveying details between player and GM seems to be to not have them, to make them mechanically irrelevant, or for the choices and decisions of the players to be very simple.

(A) is a statement I think nobody disagrees with, in the sense that a grid helps in regards to the accuracy of characters placement, terrain features and the like. Whether it is more efficient depends on what we are talking about. More efficient towards which goal? If it is "accurately tracking various elements on the battlefield" then yes, I'll agree. If it is "actually immersing oneself in a situation and playing a role playing game" then that's not true for everyone. Some people will feel visual representation and grids and rules going into details to track all the elements of a battlefield will actually detract from the immersion in the game world.

(B) in particular is a point of contention, even amongst people who have no trouble using visual aids in a role playing game (such as myself). For some, the grid is a sine qua non condition of accuracy. I have seen the grid being detrimental to some people's immersion however, when the abstraction of movements and actions on the mat become the game instead of the events in the game world they are supposed to describe. The board becomes a side-game aside from the game world for these people, and that's a problem. I find it for this reason much more efficient towards immersion to not use a grid or have the grid (like it appears on Dwarven Forge pieces) and just not care about it as such, beyond a sense of scale, and/or use rulers and strings if some exact movement rates or ranges are in doubt.

(C) if I felt I must have a comprehensive (as in complete, involving all possible variables) understanding of a situation before being able to make any meaningful choice in the way to approach it, I might agree with you there. This is, however, not what I require to make decisions, for one thing: what I require is the critical information my character ought to know, and nothing more. I actually feel that in situations where it takes split seconds to take decisions, it is actually more conducive of immersion to me to not have a bird's eye view on the situation but instead to have a description of the important factors and elements of the situation so that then I can precise the picture in my mind by asking targeted questions. I feel more in situation that way. Visual representations and information overload are actually more likely to put me out of character in the position of a general moving pawns on a chess board, and that is not what I am looking for when playing a role playing game. I must also precise that I have never, ever seen the back-and-forths between GM and players assessing a situation verbally going on to the point you would reach that mythical "20 questions" theoretical issue. It's just something I have never witnessed myself.

(D) What amount of details and relevant elements you want in the resolution of a particular situation will vary from situation to situation in practice. There is an excluded middle between the complete lack of information that leads to players having no choices at all and having all the elements exposed in a bird's eye view so you can manipulate your puppet on the battlefield as though you were a God's eye general above. The DM will strive to propose situations that can potentially be dealt with in a variety of fashions, the players will then act or ask for key precisions to help them make a decision, and lest we forget, they will do absolutely anything they want from there, because this is a role playing game, and part of the fun, for players and DM, is that you can get out of the map, out of the boundaries established by the situation on paper or in the original plans of the DM to get off the rails and deal with it as though it was real in your mind's eye.

Quote from: John Morrow;545235And that is very different problem than the grid or miniatures, themselves, slowing down the game or replacing imagination.  It also raises the question of why players would behave that way if it didn't give them something that they wanted and are, in effect, being denied by the elimination of the tools.

I guess I disagree. I have seen the grid and five foot steps and attacks of opportunity, the board and miniatures themselves becoming the game, with the actual game world being a secondary consequence from what results when you play that mini-game primarily. I'll repeat myself that it's fine for me if some people don't have a problem with this and don't feel like there is a discrepency or change in the focus of the game occurring at all, but that does not change the fact I've seen it occur several times with my players. This is a fact, as far as I'm concerned. And taking the grid away (or ignoring it when it's there), acting in the game world first, as you picture the situation in your head, to then either resolve the situation live using various means of adjudication (including the rules obviously) or represent these actions at the level of the visual representation used at the game table if any (miniatures, tokens, sketches whatnot) frees these people's imagination. The rules become a secondary tool of adjudication, they are not the focus of the game. That's actually what a role playing game IS, to me.

Quote from: John Morrow;545235One of my pet peeves with this hobby is how strongly games and GMs work to restrict the environment and options of the players to limit what they can do.  Adventures happen in dungeons that have restricted pathways through them and which have to be entered and exited in a specific way.  Characters are restricted to classes, professions, or clans that fill certain roles.  Characters are often assumed to be traveling through places they've never been before so what they know is restricted to what they learn in the course of the game and they can't use information that they might already know.  Combat effectively boils down to a handful of optimal choices that the players choose again and again.  All of that, to me, is what truly stifles the choices that players make.

I hear you. I think many people actually like it that way, in the sense that the game's rules and design propose a structure you can use to imagine yourself in the game world doing something exciting. The key word here being "structure". Classes and archetypes, the dungeon and the wilderness, and so on basically provide a structure to visualize the game world. There is such a thing as "too many choices", where a game becomes so open it becomes vague and, in the end, useless to most people who want to have a starting point and aids for them to build the games of their imaginations. I think, for instance, that the structure of the dungeon, the fact that the DM builds one with a sheet of graph paper in one hand and a pencil in the other, is a fantastic element of the game that is nothing short of a stroke of genius that makes it stand apart compared to any other type of game (role playing and otherwise) out there. I think people enjoy playing with games that provide them with these types of structural elements they can grab and use for themselves, however they see fit, even if that means breaking them and looking beyond them after a while. That's the power of role playing games right there.

Quote from: John Morrow;545235I can see that and I've even been guilty of it, myself, but the problem isn't the tools but how players use them.  But the alternative has negative side effects, too.  Consider the pejorative "Mother May I" as the flip side of the pejorative "minigame" and claims of it destroying immersion.  Where you see players dropping immersion to game the combat to their advantage, I've seen GMs game judgement calls over things like range and movement to manipulate the outcome of the combat.  When the player asks, "Can I charge through that gap in the middle of the guards and attack the evil priestess?" and the GM has to subjectively decide whether the character can reach the NPC and attack in a single turn and subjectively decide whether it draws attacks from the guards who might close to stop it, the temptation for the GM to make those decisions based on how they want the combat to go rather than simply the situation at hand is strong.

OK couple of points. I don't think my argument here has anything to do with a power struggle between players and DM. I did not say that players were "dropping immersion to game the combat to their advantage," I said that the players just didn't immerse anymore to instead play a different kind of game, which is the interaction of the rules on the board in front of them. Some players like to play that way evidently, if we judge by the affection some of the 4e fans have for that aspect of their game, while others will not like it and feel like they're playing a different game, a tactical board game, that isn't what they were signing up for in the first place. Both approaches exist, and remember my contention is that because you feel a certain way about it doesn't mean that everyone else ought to see it your way.

As for GMs taking advantage of situations that are described verbally and manipulating the game behind the scenes with elements in mind that have nothing to do with actually representing what happens at the game table, basically engaging in a form of illusionism, bait and switches and the like, sure, there is a possibility of that occurring, if the GM doesn't have his act together and acts like a poor referee.

Quote from: John Morrow;545235And you need to physically get rid of the map board and markers to do that?

As far as the actual example I gave goes, that you just tell them about the abstraction and to make an effort to visualize stuff first in their mind's eye to then apply it on the diorama, no, you won't need to take those tools away. It'll work with some people (worked with the people I played 3.5 Ptolus with).

In some other instances you might have to, however. It totally depends on the players who are sitting at the game table and what they're actual needs to feel immersed in the game are. If I was playing with you a D&D game, for instance, I would know I have to incorporate some form of visual representations in a regular basis for you to feel like you can visualize stuff and make meaningful decisions regarding what your character is doing. I'd work with that, and blend it with what the other people want, to come up with a consensus hopefully working for everyone involved.

Quote from: John Morrow;545235I don't doubt that it works, but how complex are their choices?  What kinds of tactical choices to the players typically make in combat and how much information do they need to make those choices?

I'd guess it varies from player to player. Usually, I'd say players might ask one or two questions before starting to either strategize about what they're going to do, which might spawn one or two more questions, or starting to actually act on the spot. My experience is that it doesn't take much to convey the key points of a particular situation. The imagination of the players fill in the blanks, if they feel something's lacking or they'd better know about a particular point they ask, and I try to answer fairly and thoroughly. It works well. As for the actual choices players have in combat, I'm honestly tempted to answer "whatever choices they come up with", because I really don't script events in the game in such a fashion as to make it some type of check list of available choices before hand. I basically respond to whatever the players choose to do as I'm basically visualizing and role playing the environment myself, much like a player does with his or her character. I feel that players generally feel pretty confident that their choices are open in the way they choose to approach the game world.

Quote from: John Morrow;545235I've seen quite a bit of it, even with people I've played with for decades.  Heck, one of the two retcons that I remember was the result of a verbal-only encounter where differences between how the GM understood the situation and how I understood it led to my character's death.  After realizing the misunderstanding, we replayed the scene.  See also the Usenet message by Mary Kuhner that I referenced in this reply in the other thread for another form of the problem, in that example between a husband and wife who played one-on-one games extensively together.

That must suck when that happens. I can honestly say I have never experienced this type of situation myself, and you'll just have to believe me I guess when I say I played with tons of people myself, as I'm sure you did. Judging by most role playing games in France and the US actually not using grids and miniatures as a baseline of game play, I'm tempted to say that's the experience of a lot of people out there, and that the complete communication breakdown you guys are talking about actually does not occur nearly as often as you suppose or imply it does here on this thread (which seems to be "systematically" to me, which is where I'm saying "hold on a minute here, no").

Quote from: John Morrow;545235What are the meaningful tactical choices that the players in your room-with-a-pit example could make without asking for more detail from the GM (i.e., "20 Questions") about the situation and the rules implications of the choices?  And how many of the questions, including a few that you gave in your example, would they not have to ask with a scale drawing on a grid or hex map where they could see the terrain and character positions and calculate distance and range on their own?  I'm not seeing that point as a matter of mere opinion or taste.

Well based on what's being talked about in the example, they already have multiple tactical choices I can see as a DM: they can retreat in the corridor where they came from; they can engage the cultists around the pit in any particular manner they want, with range weapons, spells, in contact and so on; they could ask if it's possible to sneak past the cultists as they concentrate on the pit in front of them, to which I'd say something like "Yes, they seem to be focused on the pit, you might have a chance at sneaking past the room without being seen at all", they might wait until the ceremony is over to interact with these people, or interrupt whatever rite they are performing in hopes to do the same... and certainly other choices depending on what occurred before in other areas, the particular imagination and inclinations of the players, and so on, so forth.

In my experience, most people just get along with the make-believe, visualize the situation fine with a sketch like this, ask maybe one or two questions that seem relevant to them about the situation and then decide to do something about it. Moments of confusion might occur occasionally "wait, as here, or there?" which is addressed in the same manner as any other question by myself as DM or other players who were following what was going on, but nothing anywhere close to the communication breakdown you guys keep talking about.

Quote from: John Morrow;545235No.  I'm making the claim that understanding options and the implications of choices come from understanding the situation and the rules that will be used to resolve those choices.  If I know how far my character can move in a turn, I can understand which movements options are possible and what their implications might be.  If I know the range of my character's weapons and whether or not I can shoot through other characters obstructing my target, I can understand what my target options are and how those choices might turn out.  If can't assess a choice unless I know it's possible and what it might mean and if I can't know that without querying the GM, the choices are either "Mother May I"/"20 Questions" to assess what my choices are or keeping those choices really simple based on the limited facts that I do know.

Assessing range and possibilities doesn't take, to most people, a zillion questions really. In my example Xarbathos's player could ask "would it be possible for me to shoot the leader of the cultists in the back from here?" and I would answer "yes, you are about 20 feet away, you absolutely can take that shot". Most players I know are content with such information and can decide from there whether they want to take the shot or not. It's really not rocket science.

Quote from: John Morrow;545235Great, but what about the players who don't know that high ground offers than an advantage or doesn't think flaming oil is an option to hold an enemy at bay, either because they assume the oil fire will be small and ineffective or they assume the enemy willing and able to jump through it?  Those are exactly the sorts of problems I've seen with assumption clash, even when dealing with casual players who don't care much about the rules.

Well when you are playing the game for the first time you explore not only the game world but what your character can and can't do. It'll happen whether you use miniatures and boards and diorama or not. Some of the things we mention are actually common sense to some people (fire burns) which leads to questions from the newbies (can I use flaming oil on the ground to create a barrier of fire?), which is also mitigated by any veteran player being already there to answer these questions at the game table (most groups I've played with in the last 10 years included a large number of newbies, actually). I've not run into any particular problem of the sort for the past .. oh I don't know. Maybe 15 years? So can you have a clash of assumptions or something like it occurring from time to time? Sure. Does it take long to resolve? No. Does it critically break the game when and if it occurs? Not especially that I've seen, no. If it does break the game critically, doesn't it mean that people can't possibly play that way at all? Don't be silly now.

Quote from: John Morrow;545235Then don't use rules that take that level of detail into account.  I've used maps and markers with pretty vanilla Fudge.  That's not a problem with the map grid and markers but with the rules being used with them.

Some people have a problem with the map grid and markers themselves. I explained that above.

Quote from: John Morrow;545235And if the rules don't explicitly have things like Whirlwind Attacks and Cleaves, how often do you see players use them, what mechanical effect do they have on the game, and who gets to decide that?  How does a GM decide how a Whirlwind Attack or Cleave works without rules defining that and how do those rulings remain consistent?

Actually, when the players understand they actually can attempt anything that comes to mind, and that the immersion/emulation is effective for them at the game table, you'd be surprised to see how long it takes for a complete newbie at RPGs to get it and start doing stuff like throwing bottles at people, swinging from chandeliers, using planks and tables to charge several people at the same time and so on. Answer: really, really fast, as a matter of fact.

I'd actually add that for some people, being able to do exactly that, i.e. whatever comes to mind, is actually the point in them playing and enjoying playing a role playing game in the first place.

Quote from: John Morrow;545235I'm sure it's true for some people and I even gave you an example where it was true for me.  But it doesn't change the fact that if it were really true for a significant number of people that radio dramas wouldn't be a largely dead art form which suggests that quote is of limited value.  Nobody is tuning in their radio at 8PM to listen to the latest episode of Gray's Anatomy or Once Upon A Time.  Why do you think that is?

For a variety of reasons that escape me. What I do know is that a lot of people playing role playing games actually feel that way, that the theater of the mind actually provides them with a better picture than any visual aids would provide them. Whether these are the descendants of people who enjoyed radio drama and genes would be somehow involved in this phenomenon is unknown to me, but the fact remains.

Quote from: John Morrow;545235I'm not claiming it is.  What I'm saying is that it's a choice with consequences and things are lost when accuracy and consistency are sacrificed and when it comes to immersion in character and setting, there seem to be plenty of people who find immersion difficult to maintain without detail and consistency.

Well sure, I don't deny these people exist at all. Now whether you are ready to stop denying that people might actually feel the opposite way, that the theater of the mind actually frees them from the constraints of the board and rules and buffers between them and the game world, and that they feel like they have a greater freedom of choice when they are imagining what's going on in their mind's eye, I'd like to know.

Only the DM should know the rules because otherwise the players might get ideas about what they can do.

ITT: textwalls textwalling textwalls that don't even know they're textwalls.

Quote from: John Morrow;545426Yes, this can happen, but why not take a look at why it happens rather than take the tool away?  It's similar to the complaint that Steffan O'Sullivan makes in his Fudge designer's notes about a player who would insist on looking up precise modifiers rather than leaving it up to GM fiat.  Why is the player doing that and is simply taking the tool away the right solution?

Thanks for posting this, John - I found some of it quite interesting, albeit not primarily for the bits currently under discussion.

Quote from: John Morrow;545410So at one extreme, we have rules for everything and a game that looks like ASL: The RPG.  At the other extreme, we have rules for nothing and the GM just makes it all up as they go.  Since most role-playing games exist between those extremes, one should conclude that there is both a value to having rules and a point at which the rules will hit a point of diminishing returns and some things will have to be handled on an ad hoc basis.

I think we can all agree to this, thread closed, yay?