The Endless Debate

Directly connected to the 'rule for everything' mentality is the issue of player impact on the resolution of the game.

Along with expanding the rules to cover more things in a game, there comes comes a tendency to shrink the pool of possibilities to mesh more closely to what the rules cover. At its worst, this tendency leads to push button play.

Tabletop is unique because you can do anything in the game that can be imagined. There is no programmed code boundary to worry about. It is an ideal platform to highlight individual player imagination and creativity. If the entire game is codified into pre-defined moves then the impact of the player is washed away in favor of mechanical programming.

I can play videogames if push button play is what I wanted and would have graphics and all the special effects to go with it. The interaction with other people in an imaginative limitless medium is the draw of playing tabletop.

A character is a game component. It cannot enjoy success, feel the heartbreak of failure, or enjoy the overall experience of playing the game, thus its position during play is subordinate to that of the player.

The importance of character over player in tabletop game design is bass ackwards. Avatar based design is more appropriate to other mediums such as MMOs. As far as gameplay is concerned, when that WOW account gets logged on and a character enters play, the experience in the game is the same no matter what putz is sitting at the keyboard. The limitations of the medium make this a neccessity. Why would we want such a mediocre experience in a medium without such limitations?

Quote from: Lynn;746520The first edition of Runequest doesn't seem that rules heavy at 112 pages; very granular though with hit locations, armor damage, etc.

But Runequest did have a skill for everything, from spotting to oratory. It is what I call a comprehensive skill system, where every action has a skill associated with it. A comprehensive skill list can have 10 skills or 100 depending on how broad the skills are.

The comparison of Runequest and Chivalry&Sorcery provides some insight into another side of this whole issue: whatever your intention might be, there are better and worse ways to execute it. Design philosophy is one thing; actual design is another.

Runequest was at least partly inspired by 'a rule for everything' mentality and ended up being short, easy to understand, comprehensive and tight as a drum. It is probably the best 100-odd pages of game design you will ever see (and it would have been 50 pages if they'd used the tiny fonts of a lot of modern books). Chivalry&Sorcery was aiming at a similar sort of target but, while it has tons of character and is fun, the rules are bloated, hard to understand, and fill hundreds of pages (thousands if they had printed it in a font size readable by human eyes). One of these sets of rules turned into the foundation of a half dozen very successful games that are still going strong 35 years later, with little change in the core mechanics. The other went through several dramatic revisions, never really found an audience and is currently out of print. Design philosophy can be interesting to debate, but it's design execution that really counts.

Quote from: Simlasa;746465and pretty soon Chivalry & Sorcery was looking like the next level closer.
Eventually I ended up at Phoenix Command.

The first time I saw these rulesets, I thought it looked like they were written by rocket scientists.

Phoenix Command was. Barry Nakazono was a propulsion engineer for NASA.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;746474I don't think you can assume wargames are rules-light in a world where somebody wrote Advanced Squad Leader.

Which is why I didn't.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;746474I don't think you can assume wargames are rules-light in a world where somebody wrote Advanced Squad Leader.

No, but you also can't assume that wargames are all rule-heavy either.

Until the late 80s or so, most miniatures wargames were indeed rules-light and assumed the presence of a referee.

Many of them still are, and do.

Hexmap-and-chit boardgames have always been more rules heavy, in part precisely because they assume no referee.

Quote from: ExploderwizardAlong with expanding the rules to cover more things in a game, there comes comes a tendency to shrink the pool of possibilities to mesh more closely to what the rules cover. At its worst, this tendency leads to push button play.

This can be true, but a good DM can definitely avert this tendency towards push-button play.  I run games with quite a lot of rules, but my fundamental position has always been "tell me what you want to do, I'll tell you what to roll."  The presence of written rules for a lot of things doesn't preclude that attitude or player creativity, if the DM is presenting the rules properly; in fact, sometimes I think it can do the opposite.  

Like, for example, in a game with rules for swimming, if a character's sheet identifies them as a really good swimmer, the player might be more inclined to try whacky and inventive things that involve water because they can trust that the rules will be "on their side" - whereas in a game without any rules for swimming, a player might be a bit more cautious and hesitant because they're less sure of their character's capability, how difficult the current is to overcome, how the DM is going to make an ad-hoc ruling, etc.

If the DM is lazy, though, I totally agree that rules-heavy systems can degenerate into the kind of automated play you're describing.

Personally I prefer a full page table for everything to a rule for everything.  Not a universal table but a full page dedicated to a breakdown of modifiers and degrees of success and advantage carried forward.

Rolemaster Standard System for the win!

Quote from: DKChannelBoredom;746509Bah. D&D's nothing.

For some reason Kult, a super angsty and atmospheric  horror game about purgatory and the death of God, needs to have special rules for shit like air combat and the effect of carbon monoxide poisoning. Relevant much?

Absolutely, killing monsters by leaving the door to the basement open and the car running is right up my alley and if C'thulhu is coming out of the ocean I mean to fill him full of Harpoon missiles before he reaches shore.  But then I always did like Dark Conspiracy.

Horror is, of course, what happens when those attempts go horribly wrong.  You think C'thulhu exploding in a series of devastating blasts isn't horrifiying?  But then you realize you're in a confined space travelling at mach 2 and there's this portal behind him and there's colors there like none you've ever seen and...and this piping music, wild and sweet, calling you home and the guy at HQ is shouting "Can you hear me Major Tom?" at the top of his lungs as the prophet of the Elder Gods steps ashore out of fire and smoke and mist and the end of the world carries on without you.

Quote from: hedgehobbit;746567But Runequest did have a skill for everything, from spotting to oratory. It is what I call a comprehensive skill system, where every action has a skill associated with it. A comprehensive skill list can have 10 skills or 100 depending on how broad the skills are.

You are right - it just didn't seem to me to be grafted onto something else that was working fine.

Quote from: Omega;746399Some players and DMs want official rules rather than home-brew. Either because they dont have the mindset for it, or because if its official then a belligerant player cannot argue it.

Extensive "rules for everything" will not stop belligerent players and DMs from being complete asshats.

At minimum, "rules for everything" isn't much more than an easy ammunition for such belligerents.

Quote from: ggroy;746619Extensive "rules for everything" will not stop belligerent players and DMs from being complete asshats.

At minimum, "rules for everything" isn't much more than an easy ammunition for such belligerents.

Yep.  Rules won't fix asshole.

Quote from: Steerpike;746600This can be true, but a good DM can definitely avert this tendency towards push-button play.  I run games with quite a lot of rules, but my fundamental position has always been "tell me what you want to do, I'll tell you what to roll."  The presence of written rules for a lot of things doesn't preclude that attitude or player creativity, if the DM is presenting the rules properly; in fact, sometimes I think it can do the opposite.  

Like, for example, in a game with rules for swimming, if a character's sheet identifies them as a really good swimmer, the player might be more inclined to try whacky and inventive things that involve water because they can trust that the rules will be "on their side" - whereas in a game without any rules for swimming, a player might be a bit more cautious and hesitant because they're less sure of their character's capability, how difficult the current is to overcome, how the DM is going to make an ad-hoc ruling, etc.

If the DM is lazy, though, I totally agree that rules-heavy systems can degenerate into the kind of automated play you're describing.

Good Post.  You really can boil it down to - a Great GM will run a Great game, no matter what the rules are, a suckass GM is going to suck no matter what the rules are, but if the ruleset is heavy enough, the players can play without him if they need to.

As more and more of Mearls crap from the last ten years floats up into threads here, the more evident it is that Mearls design philosophy is for an RPG to function regardless of who sits at the table, the rules will carry a suckass GM and clueless players to a set result.

That's even worse than computer games and MMOs.  Those do require skill, even if that skill is twitch, social climbing or logistics.

Quote from: CRKrueger;746630As more and more of Mearls crap from the last ten years floats up into threads here, the more evident it is that Mearls design philosophy is for an RPG to function regardless of who sits at the table, the rules will carry a suckass GM and clueless players to a set result.

This seems to have been the WoTC design philosophy, almost a mantra. I think their massive-rules approach was intended to 'tame the GM' but completely failed at this with 3e; I can kinda see that they had some success that way with pre-Essentials 4e combat (not non-combat), but at a heavy cost. But Mearls was in charge of Essentials which reduced the emphasis on this approach, and 5e seems to be moving away from it too.