/thread necromancy

Agree with the OP that emergence can be good.  

My 2c would be that alot of what some  players find interesting is using 'emergent properties' of the ruleset (weird ways of using the rules). They can be good in other ways as well e.g. outside of RPGs, you have games which have very simple rules but complex tactics appear emergently based on these (Go) and more complex rulesets (Chess).

Similarly, you can compare a combat system like Talislanta's with one where complexity is 'front loaded' (Rolemaster). A Tal character has surprisingly many combat choices with surprising depth - they must choose a) how many actions to take and b) whether to use those for offense, defense, or to attempt some sort of special manuever, possibly at a penalty. Factors like how many opponents you have, their skill level, whether you think your armour can take most of their blow (barring a critical), and your current HP/desperateness of the situation, help determine which option to take. -so tactics here is to a degree 'emergent'.

On the other hand, systems can have emergent properties that can break them, or that just do odd things. 3.5 has alot of these, some of which can in theory break it e.g. charop breaking of the Wealth By Level system - you can use elves with farming (we spend 300 years selling onions to save up for 10000 GP magical items at 1st level...then go adventuring) or at higher level Wall of Iron (selling conjured iron as a trade good). Or Feat X + Feat Y + Feat Z combos.

Removing stuff like that (and much besides) hence became a driver in 4E D&Ds design, so 4E is kind of a case study in removal of emergent effects. In many cases it killed min/maxing by simply removing sets of rules so that doing something instead required the GM nod of approval to attempt - swathes of readily abuseable spell rules got smited down by compressing them into the Rituals system, since increased casting times alone can reduce alot of creative spell application. That sort of thing would however be one contributor to the complaints that its an MMO though: alot of people enjoyed the creative spell use etc. The feat combo'ing actually doesn't seem to have stopped, though potential builds are much less insane.

Unrelated to the above, perhaps whether you consider emergent properties 'good' or 'bad' also depends on the definition you're using.
In general, I think you can distinguish between rules that operate directly, and rules that operate indirectly. 'Emergent' tends to be used for rules that apply indirectly due to designer oversight, but getting a rule to do what you want at a distance is actually really good design.

As a positive example from 4E D&D, take criticals. A critical hit here deals [maximum weapon damage] +an extra d6 per weapon 'plus'.
I only noticed this when I saw the efreeti description in the monster manual (they're typically armed with magical scimitars, +3 IIRC i.e. +3d6 on a crit which at a superficial glance seemed weird...). In actual fact what's going on is that most monsters don't have magical weapons since any needed equivalent plusses to hit are acquired more or less by fiat, or they use fang and claw. So what you have here is a system that gives the PCs critical hits but doesn't give the monsters critical hits.

Its hard to think of other examples unfortunately - these sort of effects are by their nature hard to detect and don't come up readily from casual reading of the rules.

So are random encounters emergent phenomena or  I misunderstanding this.

Quote from: B.T.;535144So are random encounters emergent phenomena or  I misunderstanding this.

I think random encounters themselves are just rules working as intended.

You could have emergent behaviour which arises from random encounters - like when people start slaughtering centaurs by the dozen because they can theoretically have million GP gems due to the way the treasure tables are set up, say...

(lengthy story here which is however more or less entirely tangential, apart from the centaurs)

http://www.rogermwilcox.com/ADnD/IUDC1.html

There's a thread over at tgdmb where they found another thing that could be classed as 'emergent' behaviour (of the screwed up kind); Living Greyhawk apparently had players who were building weird multiclass characters specifically to get favoured class XP penalties.

This let them run characters through 2-3x as many adventures and so have extra wealth/items when hitting level-appropriate adventures, before they got to the game's level cap.

(Cf. Ryan Dancey's comments on Magic players and how they found cards that made doing damage to themselves beneficial earlier in the thread...reminded me very much of that).