Quote from: Soylent Green;360254Should the GM take into account the player's attitude (good or bad) when making a ruling?

I'd say it depends on what is being ruled. For social interactions between NPCs and PCs, definitely. For combat encounters, not so much.

And just to stir the pudding here, in the context of the grenade decision. I had already decided that the PC was going to be killed by trying to block the grenade blast with his body. The only thing that the Player's attitude affected was whether ro not the Player got some perks when he rolled up his next character.

This whole thread is why I think the concept of the rules as the physics of the fictional world--pervasive as it is--is fundamentally retarded.

Quote from: two_fishes;360285This whole thread is why I think the concept of the rules as the physics of the fictional world--pervasive as it is--is fundamentally retarded.

Why ? This whole thread is about how gamers approach this concept from different perspectives. If you have something constuctive to contribute by all means post away. If you're just going to take cheap shots....post away too.

Regards,
David R

The idea that rules are the physics of the gameworld is fundamentally retarded because rules inevitably fail to accurately model reality, and some other set of expectations has to be inserted to cover the failure, whether that's genre emulation, or drama, or whatever. The illusion that the rules are the physics of the world allows players with conflicting expectations to come to the table together, and leads to conflicts like this one. Also, I think the whole idea leads too often to the sort of task-oriented "roll to climb the stairs" and "roll till you fail" sort of play that makes my teeth hurt.

Quote from: Soylent Green;360254Should the GM take into account the player's attitude (good or bad) when making a ruling?

I'd say no -- if the player's attitude is annoying, deal with it directly, man-to-man (this goes for women as well, naturally), not in your capacity as GM.

Dealing with real-life annoyance in-game escalates things rather than diffusing them.

Likewise, a "good attitude" shouldn't result in in-game favorable treatment...

All this said, in practice attitude is going to matter in games just like it matters in all social interactions. Being a GM isn't being a boss or a priest or anything -- when (not if) attitude winds up impacting GM calls, it's not the end of the world.

Cheers,
-E.

Quote from: Soylent Green;360254Should the GM take into account the player's attitude (good or bad) when making a ruling?

I'm not sure...
I didn't take this to mean a punishment/reward type of thing... more like, if I know the players I know which ones will respond well to certain things... and which one's will complain or take it personally.
Would/should I pull punches on characters where I know the player would throw a tizzy or start a long argument? While holding others to the consequences of their actions because I know that's how they like to play?

The GM of our Earthdawn games has mentioned how he'll let some players have powerful equipment because they won't go all crazy with it and wreck the game... but how he'll keep it out of the hands of certain players who will just use it to trash everything in sight.
Kind of the same situation... maybe.

Quote from: Ian Absentia;360234

Quote from: Elliot Wilen

Quote from: GnomeWorksI'm sorry that d20 shot your desire for "bravery" or "self-sacrifice." Don't like it? Use a different system.

Isn't that exactly the point of the thread?

Thank you, sir.  Case in point.

I didn't realize that you people equated trying to create literary themes or whatnot with roleplaying.

That seems idiotic to me.

Quote from: two_fishesThe idea that rules are the physics of the gameworld is fundamentally retarded because rules inevitably fail to accurately model reality...

How many times do I have to say it? Reality doesn't matter.

Quote from: GnomeWorks;360309How many times do I have to say it? Reality doesn't matter.

Reality ALWAYS matters... the rules can't cover every eventuality... and neither can the setting tropes.
No one throws themselves on a grenade in any of the Star Wars movies... or anything close.
At some point you're out on a limb where rules and tropes don't offer any reference and all you've got to pull a plausible ruling from is gonna be what you know of how things work. Reality is the baseline for all of it.
Otherwise it's just a big circle-jerk where everyone does whatever the hell he wants.

Quote from: Simlasa;360310Reality ALWAYS matters... the rules can't cover every eventuality... and neither can the setting tropes.

I disagree.

The existing rules can be extrapolated from. In my experience, situations that are completely not covered by the rules don't come up very often - there is almost always something similar that is covered, or at least partially covered, that you can work from as a base.

QuoteNo one throws themselves on a grenade in any of the Star Wars movies... or anything close.

I've already said that d20 is a piss-poor representation of Star Wars.

And even if no one did it in the films - so what? Are we going to limit ourselves to what happened in the films, then? That seems rather silly.

Simlasa, the way I say it is: if everything is covered by the rules, it's a board game.

Now, board games can have a strong roleplaying component, and what I mean by that is, they can put you "in the situation" as if you are in the shoes of one of the participants. (BTW, I think this is the first time someone in the thread has tried to define roleplaying for the purpose of their response to the initial question.) Many wargames have this, because they do two things:

1) They try to emulate real-world interactions, so that the things the player is trying to do are analogous and have similar considerations to their pretend counterparts.

2) The ones that best offer a "you are there" experience also emulate the limitations of information and communication/control experienced by the pretend counterpart. E.g. you'll have a better sense of standing in Admiral Spruance's shoes at Midway, if the game forces you to scout for enemy positions, deal with doubt arising from possibly inaccurate spotting and combat reports, and so forth.

But wargames still have a fair amount of abstraction which channels player action and limits flexibility. And in order to provide additional detail and verisimilitude within a rigid rules framework, they have to become increasingly complex to accurately cover more interactions.

Now, that's wargames. Other games make even less of an effort at representation and player-role identification; at the extreme you've got games like Othello or Bridge, where gameplay completely overrides other considerations. Othello doesn't hypothesize a fictional world beyond the abstractions of the rules. Even with a game like History of the World, which nominally represents real events, a player doesn't have anyone to really identify with.

Compared to wargames, RPGs offer the potential for enhanced verisimilitude, flexibility, and breadth by replacing detailed rigid rules with a GM. The difference is even greater in comparison to other games.

If you take an RPG and you try to define everything by the rules, removing the use of GM judgment, then you either end up making it more and more complex in order to consistently represent the pretend reality you're playing in, or you compromise one way or another on verisimilitude and flexibility.

Quote from: GnomeWorks;360312I've already said that d20 is a piss-poor representation of Star Wars.

I'm not sure if it is or isn't, having never played it. But if you can say this, then you should understand what I mean when I say that a system can get in the way of roleplaying.

QuoteI didn't realize that you people equated trying to create literary themes or whatnot with roleplaying.

That seems idiotic to me.

I'm not talking about literary themes. I'm talking about character motivations in the context of the imagined setting, which is what I equate with roleplaying. As I just wrote, you can do this to an extent with rigid rule sets--but only when the rules support it, and not very flexibly. RPGs add flexibility through the agency of a GM.

I should add: you might be able to get away with shared GMing. I personally think the idea is problematic for roleplaying, for other reasons, but here the fundamental issue is the use of human judgment in place of rigid, limited rules.

If you try to reduce the role of human judgment, informed by the responsibility to be faithful to the genre and setting, then you either have to make the rules very, very detailed and complex, or you make the game abstract and rigid with less verisimilitude and potentially less support for character motivations that make sense in the context of the imagined setting.

With regard to wargames, I remember reading the argument that abstraction in  wargames is more realistic, because that's how a commander receives information about what's happening (whereas, I guess, people think of realism as being realism from the point of view of the troops on the ground).

Quote from: Age of Fable;360315With regard to wargames, I remember reading the argument that abstraction in  wargames is more realistic, because that's how a commander receives information about what's happening (whereas, I guess, people think of realism as being realism from the point of view of the troops on the ground).

I agree with that for the most part, but whoever wrote that was thinking in terms of, specifically, abstraction of what's happening on the ground. Back in the 70's Avalon Hill published a game on tactical combat in North Africa during WWII, called Tobruk. When you fired a tank's main gun, you had to account for every shell, which might or might not be fun but it's completely unrealistic for a someone who's directing an engagement involving a dozen or more vehicles to have access to this level of detail, much less make decisions on that basis. In wargames it's a matter of choosing a level of abstraction that's appropriate to the level of command. But this does limit flexibility, and it potentially rules out those rare occasions when a commander was able to think & act completely "out of the box".

E.g. there are accounts of using flaming pigs or flaming camels in a couple of battles, to frighten elephants used by the other side, but I wouldn't call this a standard tactic requiring a general rule. If you're playing a game at an operational/strategic scale, the idea would basically be abstracted into the battle diceroll, possibly modified by a leadership bonus. Some games might offer a random strategy chit or card that you could draw and hold in your hand, so that if you fought a battle against an army with elements you could play the card and neutralize the elephants. This is still an abstraction. In an RPG, the player-general would be able to develop and execute creative ideas on their own, and the outcome would be subject to some combination of judgment, randomizers, and the methods used to insert the effect of the idea into the existing mechanics. (In other words: if you played the battle out with miniatures, then maybe the flaming pigs would be figures that'd move semi-randomly, forcing panic rolls on elephants they contacted. The result would be far from a foregone conclusion even though it would certainly impact how the battle played out.)

On top of all that, wargames abstract other elements which are very close to the commanders--such as, if you're Alexander, you might get wounded assaulting a city. And related to that, in an RPG you're generally dealing with things that are immediately around the characters, which isn't the same as abstracting the inputs and results of an engagement somewhere across the battlefield.

By the way, I've had a chance to glance over the Star Wars d20 revised rules, and what they say about characters providing cover to other characters is that the covering character will take the damage of the intended target (p. 163). So if you want to extrapolate from the rules as written without any regard to reality, then someone who "smothers" a grenade should take a damage roll for each person he protects. Now, this is kind of silly: it means you'll take less damage by jumping on a grenade when there's just one other person as opposed to a group. But this still reinforces my earlier point: the whole debate is based on an inconsistent argument. The rules simply weren't designed to handle the situation that arose; if the player wants to extend the rules by arguing from common sense ("grenades can be smothered"), then common sense also applies to the result of the player's proposed action ("if you smother a grenade, you take a lot more damage than if you just happen to be in its area of effect").

Quote from: two_fishes;360288The idea that rules are the physics of the gameworld is fundamentally retarded because rules inevitably fail to accurately model reality, and some other set of expectations has to be inserted to cover the failure, whether that's genre emulation, or drama, or whatever. The illusion that the rules are the physics of the world allows players with conflicting expectations to come to the table together, and leads to conflicts like this one. Also, I think the whole idea leads too often to the sort of task-oriented "roll to climb the stairs" and "roll till you fail" sort of play that makes my teeth hurt.

But you cannot avoid that to happen.