Quote from: Bren;903236No matter how lovely your campaign may be or how much you emphasize running it, if you are using a ruleset I don't want, I won't enjoy playing. (So I won't play.) Therefore your campaign emphasis benefits me not one jot. On the other hand, if you are using a ruleset that I like, but your campaign sucks rocks, I won't enjoy playing. Rules and campaign are necessary conditions to enjoyment. Neither is a sufficient condition.

It isn't a binary situation for individuals. Here the rules are good and there are the rules that suck. It is a spectrum. The focus needs to be on creating good campaigns regardless of the rules being used. Figure out how to run a good campaign first and then pick the set of rules the referee and players are happy with second. What has been advocated over much of the history of the hobby and industry is the opposite. Rules first and then the campaign. The culmination of that philosophy was D&D 4e. Paizo kicked Wizard's ass not just by catering to the 3.5 crowd with Pathfinder. They did by making exciting pre-packaged campaigns in the form of their Adventure Paths.

Quote from: Bren;903236However, rules are a much easier condition to assess than is the campaign. Thus many people first focus on satisfying the easier to assess of two necessary conditions before trying to investigate the more difficult to assess condition.

I agree. Campaign advice and techniques are inherently fuzzy. But in my view the most critical part of the whole package.

Quote from: estar;903293Figure out how to run a good campaign first and then pick the set of rules the referee and players are happy with second. What has been advocated over much of the history of the hobby and industry is the opposite. Rules first and then the campaign.

With few exceptions, (OD&D - which didn't come with a campaign would be one), in my experience the rules and the campaign are usually linked.

• Boothill=Old West,
• Gamma World=Crazy Mutant Earth,
• Runequest=Glorantha,
• Stormbringer=Young Kingdoms,
• Call of Cthulhu=1920s or 1890s horror,
• Pendragon=The Pendragon Campaign,
• FASA Star Trek=Star Trek,
• Hawkmoon=Gran Bretan, et al,  
• WEG Star Wars=Star Wars.

Even with my Honor+Intrigue campaign, my first decision was to run H+I because I found the dueling system interesting and second to set the place and time to 1620s France. That's not to say that one can't do it the opposite way, just that I seldom have done so and see no advantage to doing so.

QuoteI agree. Campaign advice and techniques are inherently fuzzy. But in my view the most critical part of the whole package.

I'm a product of the original DIY days of RPGs. We figured that shit out with little in the way of advice (literally very little). Advice and techniques are helpful, but I don't see them as any more necessary than the rules. And sometimes people's belief that creating a campaign is some difficult and esoteric activity for which advice is necessary is a far greater barrier to becoming a new GM than any lack of advice ever was.

Quote from: Bren;903362With few exceptions, (OD&D - which didn't come with a campaign would be one), in my experience the rules and the campaign are usually linked.

• Boothill=Old West,
• Gamma World=Crazy Mutant Earth,
• Runequest=Glorantha,
• Stormbringer=Young Kingdoms,
• Call of Cthulhu=1920s or 1890s horror,
• Pendragon=The Pendragon Campaign,
• FASA Star Trek=Star Trek,
• Hawkmoon=Gran Bretan, et al,  
• WEG Star Wars=Star Wars.

All the examples you give are rules system optimized for a particular setting. A setting is not the campaign, it is one of the elements of a campaign, another being of course the rules used for adjudication. Each of your example make it easier for a referee to run a campaign in that setting.

The Old West, Mutant Earth, Glorantha, Young Kingdoms, Arthur's Britain, Star Trek, Gran Bretan, Star Wars and especially the 1920s/1890s are worlds with a life of their own that can be use to run many types of campaigns. In Boot Hill does on play a group of cowboy attempting to keep the ranch alive? Or bandits preying on forgotten towns and stagecoaches? Or the Sheriff and his friend trying to uphold the law? Each the preceding are possible campaigns among many others that can be run with Boot Hiill. The same with the other games you mentioned.

Quote from: Bren;903362Even with my Honor+Intrigue campaign, my first decision was to run H+I because I found the dueling system interesting and second to set the place and time to 1620s France. That's not to say that one can't do it the opposite way, just that I seldom have done so and see no advantage to doing so.

My assertion doesn't address the creative process people use develop campaigns. Why shouldn't reading a set of rules inspire you to make a campaign involving dueling in 1620s France. After reading White Star and watching the Expanse I was inspired to try to make a go at running my first campaign set in the Majestic Stars, a sci-fi setting that I been messing with for 25 years. I am everybody reading this has their own sources of inspiration.

But it doesn't change the fact that once you have everything assembled if you want to run the best game possible for your players then your primary focus should be on creating the best campaign possible. For your campaign H&I is the  best choice for the rules. However another person running the exact same type of campaign, GURPS may be their choice. For another still, it may be OD&D.

But I am willing to bet that if all three of you were sit down and compare notes on how you each managed your campaign, you would have a lot to share regardless of the differences in rules. That it would dwarf the specifics caused by the rules themselves. That if you took that information and incorporated it into a second campaign about dueling in 1620s France using the H&I rules it would be a better campaign.

Quote from: Bren;903362I'm a product of the original DIY days of RPGs. We figured that shit out with little in the way of advice (literally very little). Advice and techniques are helpful, but I don't see them as any more necessary than the rules. And sometimes people's belief that creating a campaign is some difficult and esoteric activity for which advice is necessary is a far greater barrier to becoming a new GM than any lack of advice ever was.

The problem is the pervasive attitude that the if it not written in the rules then it is something that is not permitted to be done even if it makes sense in terms of how the setting of the campaign operates.

Quote from: estar;903373All the examples you give are rules system optimized for a particular setting. A setting is not the campaign, it is one of the elements of a campaign, another being of course the rules used for adjudication. Each of your example make it easier for a referee to run a campaign in that setting.

In that sense of the word campaign, I've never, ever created a campaign first and then looked around to see what rules or what setting to use for it. It's always rules/setting first, campaign second. Not being MAR Barker, JRR Tolkien, or Greg Stafford I really can't imagine creating a campaign first and then looking about to see what rules or what setting to set that campaign in. Maybe I am misunderstanding what you are suggesting as a reasonable process for GMs to follow.

QuoteFor your campaign H&I is the  best choice for the rules.

I think that Flashing Blades would actually be a better rule set in several ways. But it doesn't happen to be the rules I started out with.

QuoteBut I am willing to bet that if all three of you were sit down and compare notes on how you each managed your campaign, you would have a lot to share regardless of the differences in rules. That it would dwarf the specifics caused by the rules themselves. That if you took that information and incorporated it into a second campaign about dueling in 1620s France using the H&I rules it would be a better campaign.

Well I use a lot of stuff created by Black Vulmea for his Flashing Blades campaign along with stuff from most of the swashbuckling game systems written in English and a fair bit of real history. So I agree with your point that sharing campaign  information can be helpful. But to argue the other side, H+I is a fairly obscure system. I could profit a lot from rules discussions with someone else who knows and has used the rules. At this point in my campaign, that would probably be more beneficial to me than more campaign info.

QuoteThe problem is the pervasive attitude that the if it not written in the rules then it is something that is not permitted to be done even if it makes sense in terms of how the setting of the campaign operates.

Frankly that's a bizarre attitude.

As I said, I'm from the old school. The folks I originally played with did a lot of board game war games. That meant that we were used to reading, understanding, and following rules. Also arguing about rules. So we would first argue for what a rule said or how it should correctly be interpreted. But if the rule as written didn't suit the GM's vision, then the GM stated why not, what one preferred instead, and we moved on from there. Everyone house ruled RPGs to suit their individual visions of how their game world worked. (Come to think of it, we had several house rules for RISK. And I've seldom seen anyone play Monopoly RAW.) The idea that one couldn't, shouldn't, or wouldn't do that strikes me as an odd artifact of tournament style RPG play and people whose prior experience is with computer and console games.

Quote from: Bren;903386In that sense of the word campaign, I've never, ever created a campaign first and then looked around to see what rules or what setting to use for it. It's always rules/setting first, campaign second. Not being MAR Barker, JRR Tolkien, or Greg Stafford I really can't imagine creating a campaign first and then looking about to see what rules or what setting to set that campaign in. Maybe I am misunderstanding what you are suggesting as a reasonable process for GMs to follow.

The campaign is the implementation of the elements you mentioned. The rules, the setting, the players, and the referee combined into a thing called the RPG Campaign. The crucial element that makes this an RPG campaign, as opposed to say a miniature wargame campaign, is the focus. The campaign doesn't exist to play a certain set of rules. It exist to play a bunch of characters doing things in a setting with their actions adjudicated by a human referee USING a particular set of rules. And adjudication includes defining things, like a character, in terms of game mechanics.  Str, int, wis, dex, con, cha as one example.

If you read Playing at the World, Hawk & Moor, and the various personal anecdotes about the earliest days of the hobby, the stuff that even pre-dates even Blackmoor, they didn't have much in the way of published rules. In fact most were not even aware of the few published rules that were out there. Instead they knew that you could play out a wargames in a interesting way by using dice, miniatures, and rules. For each game they figured out what they wanted to fight. For example the Battle of Waterloo, they dug into the history books to figure out what did what. And then came up with the rules to run the session.

Slightly later folks got more ambitious and wanted to fight out whole military campaigns. Again they decided the what they wanted to play, did some research, and came up with some rules to run the whole damn thing. In the case of Minneapolis wargamers, the campaign turned out to be a grand Napoleonic campaign, using a Diplomacy variant to handle strategic movement and the local house system to handle the miniature battles.

Wesely's Braustein started out with him going, "Wouldn't be neat if we had a scenario where everybody was playing different factions trying to take control of a German town during the Napoleonic wars."  What made Braustein a crucial step towards RPG was some of those factions were comprised of individual characters. Then a little later Dave Arneson conceived of Blackstone and crafted/co-opted rules to run it.

The impression I get is that it is the idea of the campaign that initiates everything. Beginning with the statement "Wouldn't it be fun if we pretended to be....." the rule were chosen to suit what the campaign was about.

Now Greyhawk was different. Gygax, impressed by Dave Arneson demonstration of Blackmoor, typed up a set of rules first, and then created Greyhawk as the setting to playtest them in. This pretty much is the same process the majority of gamers have used to date. However when you read how the Greyhawk campaign unfolded, the main attraction was Greyhawk itself. That the rules evolved suit what the players were attempting to do in Greyhawk. That the players were not very clear on all the ins and outs of the rules and responded the only way they could, by acting as if they were there with the capabilities of their characters. (Which is not the same as a stage acting as a character).

Gygax's genius is in distilling what he did to adjudicate and manage Greyhawk into the three books of OD&D. But it is not a perfect work. Other than the presentation issues, the main flaw of OD&D is that it was written for the wargaming community he was a part of. He didn't put down everything he could because he figured his audience already knows it and why should they pay for him writing that down? However as history showed, OD&D didn't stay in the wargaming community and exploded into the wider world to people that knew nothing of miniature wargaming.

The result in the fullness of time is that people started arguing about what were the best rules. And started to trying to fix issues with campaigns by creating "better" set of rules. Even Gygax got in on this in order to handle the deluge of questions and comments that was flooding TSR, he created AD&D to be the STANDARD version of Dungeons & Dragons.

There is nothing wrong with creating rules or tinkering with rules. Everybody campaign is going to be different and as a consequence what needs to be adjudicated is going to be different. More importantly is the personal interest in the kind of details that are to be adjudicated. A bunch of Society of Creative Anachronism gamers in central California play D&D and found AC and Hit points really unrealistic. So from that group came the genesis of the Runequest rules. Which handled the details of combat differently from D&D and emphasized the things that Steve Perrin and his friends thought were important. Combined with Stafford's Glorantha and we have Runequest.

Because of the overemphasis on rules, for decade the standard response of the hobby and industry to campaigns that sucked is to make or buy a different set of rules. I will say, yes there are times when the rules do suck and you look for a better system or game. Or your interests change, in the 90s, you reveled in GURPS, but now in 2010s, with kids in high school and a nearly full life, you just don't have the interest or time to invest in that much detail so you returned to playing D&D.

But most of the gripes I seen are in my opinion are the result of three things, poor players in terms of social interaction, poor referees, or most commonly poor management of a campaign. All three of which rules can't fix. The only way to make things better is to shift the focus to teaching people how to be better referee and to better manage their campaign. As for the first, well I am personally not interested in writing self-help guides, there are people far more skilled than I at writing about how to get along and cooperate with your peers.


 

Quote from: Bren;903386I think that Flashing Blades would actually be a better rule set in several ways. But it doesn't happen to be the rules I started out with.

Well I use a lot of stuff created by Black Vulmea for his Flashing Blades campaign along with stuff from most of the swashbuckling game systems written in English and a fair bit of real history. So I agree with your point that sharing campaign  information can be helpful. But to argue the other side, H+I is a fairly obscure system. I could profit a lot from rules discussions with someone else who knows and has used the rules. At this point in my campaign, that would probably be more beneficial to me than more campaign info.

 

Quote from: Bren;903386Frankly that's a bizarre attitude.

As I said, I'm from the old school. The folks I originally played with did a lot of board game war games. That meant that we were used to reading, understanding, and following rules. Also arguing about rules. So we would first argue for what a rule said or how it should correctly be interpreted. But if the rule as written didn't suit the GM's vision, then the GM stated why not, what one preferred instead, and we moved on from there. Everyone house ruled RPGs to suit their individual visions of how their game world worked. (Come to think of it, we had several house rules for RISK. And I've seldom seen anyone play Monopoly RAW.) The idea that one couldn't, shouldn't, or wouldn't do that strikes me as an odd artifact of tournament style RPG play and people whose prior experience is with computer and console games.

I started by playing Avalon Hill and SPI wargames in 1976-1977. I was exposed to Holmes Basic D&D in the Winter of 77 and got to read the Monster Manual at winter camp in Boy Scout in early 78. It wasn't until the summer of 79 and the release of the AD&D DMG that i started playing RPGs more than wargames.  I too argued and debated rules with my friends. And everybody house ruled their campaign including me.

The reason I got onto the line of thinking that led me today is the fact that I was into world building. I loved the Return of the King appendices and D&D gave me the means to realize my own worlds and have people play in them. I made mistake, too much exposition, to much talk and not enough show.  But one thing I did was different than anybody else was the fact that I let players "trash" my world. They could topple kingdoms and kill emperors and I was OK with it. They had to earn the moment of course, I never gave it to them. But if they beat me fair and square at the end of the day, they would wear the crown, wield the power, and get the glory.

Then I hit on the idea of using what the players did in the last campaign as the setting for the NEXT campaign. And they went "Uh-oh" but really liked it. Not only they get to see past character be important NPCs, they knew that the challenge of doing what they did before was that much tougher and they liked it.

So unlike many of peers, I stuck with the same setting all throughout high school and college. Then during college I grew unhappy with AD&D and took the same campaign over to Fantasy Hero and then later GURPS. The players were still exploring dungeons, still trying to carve out their own niches in the setting while having adventures.  When D&D 3.X came out I ran a few sessions with that but went back to GURPS. I tried other system in various short campaigns.

Running my Majestic Wilderlands through multiple systems, has shown me through actual play, what people were wrong about the importance of rules. It is primarily a PERSONAL PREFERENCE and secondarily the amount of work you have to do to implement your setting using those rules. Everything else is about how you run your campaign irregardless of what rules you are using. For me it not theory but stuff I did over many many sessions of actual play over decades.

What crystallized all this for me is Matt Finch's Old School Primer particularly his point about ruling not rules. The crucial point for me is this.

If I play chess, or Tactics II, or AH's Gettysburg. My tactics and decisions are based solely on the rules of the play and how they interact with the board. Chess is complex but ultimately straight forward given the square board and the limited moves. AH's Gettysburg tries to reflect some for the reality of the actual battle so the rules are more complex in their application and you can use real world knowledge to a limited extent. But in end for AH's Gettysbug the game is going to be decided on mastering the rules and the map better than my opponent.

You can play tabletop roleplaying same way, where every action is based on something the rules say or do not say. But that is missing the point and true power of this type of game. What Matt's Finch Old School Primer point about rulings made obvious to me, that you start with what the player wants to do AS IF HE REALLY THERE AS THE CHARACTER.  The figure out the rules that apply to adjudicate it. It may be "Yes it happen." It may be impossible in which case the answer is "NO it doesn't happen." Or the result isn't certain in which case you roll dice to see what happens.

Now Matt Finch was writing a apologetic about classic D&D and why it minimalist approach doesn't suck. And while I agree that classic D&D a great game in its own right, the core of his idea is important to every system out there from the most lite to the most complex. It ALL about the same thing, the player say "I want to X as my character." and the referee job is figure out what rules apply to resolve X. And that it includes where X makes sense in terms of setting logic and capabilities of the character.

But wait doesn't the rules define the capabilities of the characters? Why yes they do. However they are a DESCRIPTION of what the character can do in the reality of the setting. Just like saying that stone weighs 100 lbs at sea level on Earth is a description of how mass that stone has. By using rules we can be more precise about what a character is capable of.

So why are we spending all this effort into defining settings and characters? It is to run a campaign where the players do hopefully interesting things as their characters.  Hence my assertion, RPGs are about playing the campaign, not the rules.

I play paper RPG games for 15 years now and we started as a bunch of guys trying desperatelly not to make a single mistake and do everything by the books and that was what we considered 'good RPG session'. As years came by and we started to get a firm grip on rules, we used less and less of them. For example we simplified combat system or banned some spells and so on and it allowed us to focus more on the role-playing itself and on the storyline. In the end we used rules only as a 'framework' for what was going on in the story.

RPG games shouldn't be played for rules, but for role-playing itself. But I understand there are some people who enjoy stats development of their characters and how much damage they can do and all this stuff. I just think this stuff can be found in any video-game, it's nothing special... Role-playing with bunch of ppl is something different.

Quote from: Brandybuck;903418I play paper RPG games for 15 years now and we started as a bunch of guys trying desperatelly not to make a single mistake and do everything by the books and that was what we considered 'good RPG session'. As years came by and we started to get a firm grip on rules, we used less and less of them. For example we simplified combat system or banned some spells and so on and it allowed us to focus more on the role-playing itself and on the storyline. In the end we used rules only as a 'framework' for what was going on in the story.

RPG games shouldn't be played for rules, but for role-playing itself. But I understand there are some people who enjoy stats development of their characters and how much damage they can do and all this stuff. I just think this stuff can be found in any video-game, it's nothing special... Role-playing with bunch of ppl is something different.

I think there might be a generational difference.

I started in 1979, and playing d&d and then ad&d, nobody I knew even conceived of playing RAW.  It just wasn't a known paradigm in my circles. In hindsight, it didn't seem possible.  Moreover, there just wasn't a good reason to try.  The game was best when it conformed to the players and GM's vision.  There wasn't even a thought of getting the group to conform to the game designer's vision.  I don't know if everyone played like this, but I would hazard to guess that the looseness of TSR D&D stemmed from the gaming culture of "let's play it this way" that was prevalent at the time.  D&D was likely both a cause and a result of that culture - I  think.

I also played a lot of Avalon Hill, SPI, and miniatures, and everybody I knew house ruled or created there own mechanics for those games as well.

To my memory, it was like this all through the '80s and 90's even as we played newer games like Runequest and MERP that had stronger and more coherent visions as well as tighter mechanics.  We used what we wanted, discarded a lot, and made up what we didn't have, just like we did in days of yore.

The first time I noticed an argument for RAW was in the the D&D revival of 3rd edition.  Players started started quoting rules to me, the GM, for the first time.   I scoffed at first, but then I joined in and started studying rules rather than writing them.   3rd had a published rule for everything, and that was new. The culture seemed to change to reflect it.

After third faded, in the post OGL era, and with the proliferation of games, we were more rule conscious and did a lot of searching for the right game experimenting with different rules sets.  I won't argue which culture is/was better, but today I often find myself in limbo, either unhappy with any published rule-set or paralyzed by too many choices.  I do a lot less gaming and a lot more prep work which includes searching for the right rules set, and meticulously articulating houserules for the many players (including some older ones who bought in) who are uncomfortable with going outside the box. Even I am less comfortable going outside the box then I once was.   Our shelves overflow with rules options, and that I think has changed the culture of how we approach the game somewhat.  IMHO.

Yeah I understand your point, we might actually get there too again, but so far we've just found our 'modest level' of how the game can still be played with rules that make sense and we don't try to push it too hard. In fact lot of decision making has transfered from dice and rules to GM who sometimes decides even things like how much a character is hurt when he jumps out of window. Yes there are clear and easy rules on that and it should be simple to just calculate it, but we often consider other factors relevant to the story (for example how important it is for the character to make that jump - if you know what i mean) and GM either decides on his own entirely or makes some modifications to the numbers. This approach of course requires a very good and objective Game Master.

Quote from: Brandybuck;903427Yeah I understand your point, we might actually get there too again, but so far we've just found our 'modest level' of how the game can still be played with rules that make sense and we don't try to push it too hard. In fact lot of decision making has transfered from dice and rules to GM who sometimes decides even things like how much a character is hurt when he jumps out of window. Yes there are clear and easy rules on that and it should be simple to just calculate it, but we often consider other factors relevant to the story (for example how important it is for the character to make that jump - if you know what i mean) and GM either decides on his own entirely or makes some modifications to the numbers. This approach of course requires a very good and objective Game Master.

Well, I personally think it is awesome that you and your group managed to go from slaves to masters of the rules you play.  I can't say that I know any younger groups (wow, is 15 years of gaming young?) in my neck of the woods who have done what you have done moving from RAW to a more flexible approach. It's encouraging to hear your story.  I completely agree with you that any video game can do rules, but the real essence of a face to face RPG can go well beyond.  You are also right that a flexible approach to the rules takes a great GM and players who trust him.  

I think there are a fair number of people here that have had nightmare experiences with "flexable" GMs who weren't really qualified to run a game.  They're naturally a little gun-shy to such an approach, but there is also large numbers of long-time GMs here who wouldn't have it any other way.  Different strokes I guess.  If nothing else, it keeps the conversation lively.

EDIT: This was supposed to have a preface sentence or two.

First, this ended up being a lot longer than I expected. I'll put replies to other posts in a separate message. Second, Estar I hope this doesn't seem overly contentious or argumentative. I think we agree on a lot of points, but in writing I tend to focus on the disagreements and points of nuanced meaning, rather than the points of general agreement.

Quote from: estar;903417

I started playing in 1974 and I’m aware of the pre-publication origins of the hobby. The people I first gamed with and DMed for came from a wargaming background mostly board games e.g. Avalon Hill and SPI and a few miniatures games, though mostly set piece battles not campaigns.

A campaign exists is a way of pleasantly passing time. For the GM that often includes time outside the group with the twin processes of world subcreation and maintenance. I use the word “world” here, but depending on the campaign the setting might be smaller than a world or include multiple worlds or continuums.

QuoteThe crucial element that makes this an RPG campaign, as opposed to say a miniature wargame campaign, is the focus. The campaign doesn't exist to play a certain set of rules. It exist to play a bunch of characters doing things in a setting with their actions adjudicated by a human referee USING a particular set of rules.

A miniatures campaign does not exist to play a certain set of rules, but to play a campaign which comprises a series of battles where each person controls a specific unit or units, army, country, etc. Like an RPG, the outcome of one table top battle influences the events of the next e.g. casualties lost are gone unless replaced, units tested in battle may improve in quality. And the off table activity e.g. troop recruiting and training, resource allocation, and diplomacy, effect the parameters and forces available of the next battle on the table top.

The difference between detailed miniatures campaign (as I understand them) and a RPG campaign has nothing to do with one focusing on rules and the other not, but is predominantly the different scale of forces under a given player’s control. For miniatures the forces are at minimum one unit of troops consisting of multiple figures or stands of figures where each figure represents some multiple of people, e.g. 10, 20, or more. Often a single player controls larger forces, even entire countries. For RPGs the forces are at minimum a single player character, but often consist of multiple characters and/or characters who have command of other characters e.g. hirelings and/or other resources.

QuoteThe impression I get is that it is the idea of the campaign that initiates everything. Beginning with the statement "Wouldn't it be fun if we pretended to be....." the rule were chosen to suit what the campaign was about.

I’m sure that happened. I pretty sure people also said, “Hey I have these rules here for running battles in the English Civil War period e.g. Cavaliers and Roundheads. Wouldn’t it be fun if we chose up sides and played out the whole English Civil War?”

QuoteOther than the presentation issues, the main flaw of OD&D is that it was written for the wargaming community he was a part of.

I don’t agree that this is a flaw only that Gygax, like most writers, especially most technical writers, had a particular target audience in mind. As it turned out, he underestimated the size and mis-guaged the composition of the eventual, total market for RPGs in general and D&D in particular.

QuoteThe result in the fullness of time is that people started arguing about what were the best rules. And started to trying to fix issues with campaigns by creating "better" set of rules.

My experience is that we argued from day one about what were the best rules and people started on day 2 to create rules that they thought were better, for some person’s version of better.

QuoteEven Gygax got in on this in order to handle the deluge of questions and comments that was flooding TSR, he created AD&D to be the STANDARD version of Dungeons & Dragons.

The evolution in the hobby to convention attendance and tournament play had a lot to do with the desire to standardize D&D. Fortunately, unless one was sucked into regular tournament-style play the shibboleth of standardization was pretty easy to ignore.

QuoteA bunch of Society of Creative Anachronism gamers in central California play D&D and found AC and Hit points really unrealistic.

I did too, but absent the SCA experience. That’s one of the reasons I like Runequest, its derivative games, and other games that eschew levels. I also dislike classes – so Runequest again for the win.

QuoteBecause of the overemphasis on rules, for decade the standard response of the hobby and industry to campaigns that sucked is to make or buy a different set of rules.

People in the industry, like any industry, want to remain in business. That requires selling product. For RPGs that has meant selling a series of packaged adventures and expansions and supplements for existing games, selling revised versions of existing games, and creating new games for sale – with adventures, supplements, and new versions of any game that achieves a modicum of sales success.

Different RPG rules do different things. When I feel like doing something different I change the characters, I change the campaign, but keep the same setting (which often changes the characters), I change the setting (which usually changes the characters), or I change the rules (which changes the setting and the characters unless the rules are just a new version of old rules e.g. when moving from Runequest 2 to Runequest 3 we converted the old characters.)*

QuoteBut most of the gripes I seen are in my opinion are the result of three things, poor players in terms of social interaction, poor referees, or most commonly poor management of a campaign.

I’d divide gripes differently. Most gripes in life are the result of two things: bad social interaction and a perception of unfair treatment. There is some evidence that higher primates, like humans, appear to be wired and socialized to expect fair treatment and protest against perceived unfair treatment. (One could argue that unfair treatment is a type of bad social interaction. Nevertheless, I think it is worth separating out.) Unsurprisingly, most gripes in RPGs fall into the same two categories.

• Player A doesn’t show up on time, misses sessions, leaves, early. A social issue usually tinged with a perception of unfair treatment.
• Player B doesn’t pay attention to the game session e.g. is on some PDA, surfing the web, playing a computer game, texting is making continual off topic out of character jokes and comments, e.g. can’t go 10 minutes without a Monty Python joke. Bad social interaction.
• Player C cheats – on dice rolls, character builds, XP, etc. Perception of unfair treatment.
• Player D argues constantly, about everything. Bad social interaction.
• Player F eats pizza and never pays, drinks all the Diet Coke, beer, etc. Perception of unfair treatment.
• Player G hogs the spotlight or wants to do everything. Perception of unfair treatment.

• My GM treats player A better or worse than player B. Perception of unfair treatment.
• My GM’s significant other gets stuff the other players don’t get. Perception of unfair treatment.
• My GM said the game was about X and it turns out to be about Y (and I don’t want Y). The basic bait and switch. Perception of unfair treatment.
• My GM’s unspoken, but assumed by me promise was that playing in their campaign would be fun for me (and it’s not). Perception of unfair treatment.

Rules don’t fix people problems.

QuoteAll three of which rules can't fix.

I agree. These are all people problems. Game rules don’t fix people problems.

QuoteThe only way to make things better is to shift the focus to teaching people how to be better referee …

You could try teaching people to be better players. It’s no more (or less) a social issue than is most of what is involved in teaching people to be better GMs.

Quote… and to better manage their campaign.

Tools and tips for better managing a campaign can be helpful, but I find they are far from universal. The techniques one person loves another loathes. In part that’s because people really don’t all want the same thing from an RPG campaign.

QuoteI started by playing Avalon Hill and SPI wargames in 1976-1977. I was exposed to Holmes Basic D&D in the Winter of 77 and got to read the Monster Manual at winter camp in Boy Scout in early 78.

So you are a bit younger and started a few years later than I did, but had some similar experiences.

QuoteThe reason I got onto the line of thinking that led me today is the fact that I was into world building. I loved the Return of the King appendices and D&D gave me the means to realize my own worlds and have people play in them.

That’s what I call world subcreation. (I think JRR Tolkien called it that first)

QuoteBut one thing I did was different than anybody else was the fact that I let players "trash" my world. They could topple kingdoms and kill emperors and I was OK with it. They had to earn the moment of course, I never gave it to them. But if they beat me fair and square at the end of the day, they would wear the crown, wield the power, and get the glory.

Every DM/Referee/GM I knew in the seventies did that. It’s my default assumption for GM behavior. I suspect, but cannot prove, that the proliferation of canned adventure paths combined with the mass entry of players who weren’t accustomed to winning and losing at wargames had a lot to do with players who couldn’t stand losing and GMs who couldn’t allow their setting to change based on what happened at the table. Also teenage and subteen boys.

QuoteSo unlike many of peers, I stuck with the same setting all throughout high school and college. Then during college I grew unhappy with AD&D and took the same campaign over to Fantasy Hero and then later GURPS. The players were still exploring dungeons, still trying to carve out their own niches in the setting while having adventures.  When D&D 3.X came out I ran a few sessions with that but went back to GURPS. I tried other system in various short campaigns.

I never do that. I get a lot of fun out of world subcreation so I like creating new settings e.g. two different D&D worlds, Glorantha campaigns in Balazar/Elder Wilds and Sarter, a randomly created sector of the galaxy for Space Quest, 1920s CoC earth with multiple interlocking campaigns and 3 major and 2 minor Keepers, Pendragon’s Arthurian Britain, a set of Traveller sectors that I probably never ran for anyone else, Hawkmoon’s Tragic Millenium earth, Tekumel (a setting I worked on but never got to run), the Star Trek Alpha Quadrant for FASA, the Star Wars Universe, 1620s Europe for H+I, and several other settings I can’t recall.

QuoteRunning my Majestic Wilderlands through multiple systems, has shown me through actual play, what people were wrong about the importance of rules.

I don’t know what “the importance of rules” means.

Different rules enable different styles and types of play. As an example, fighting two or three weaker opponents in Runequest, Call of Cthulhu, or Flashing Blades is dangerous, even deadly. In level-based systems like D&D, it is much less dangerous, at least it is in every version of D&D I am familiar with. Multiple weaker opponents in WEG Star Wars – not much of a problem as long as they don’t have time to combine fire and sufficient numbers to overwhelm the PC. Multiple weaker opponents for a starting character skilled in combat in Honor+Intrigue is nearly risk free.

As an example: last Saturday one of the duelist PCs, rapidly and safely defeated, 2 opponents, than 3 opponents, than 3 more opponents, then one poor bastard all on his own. At the end, in effect, his PC wasn’t even breathing hard. Try that in Runequest and you can easily get maimed; or dead; or exhausted, maimed, and then dead.

Quote

It sounds like you are addressing what I might call bounded, fixed-rule 2-player and multiplayer games like Chess, Risk, Monopoly, Tractics, Gettysburg, Civilization (the 1980 version), and most other board games and games that are not fully bounded, like refereed miniatures battles which may be slightly unbounded and include referee judgment or mediation or RPGs which are unbounded and which usually take place largely in an imaginary space rather than on a printed board on a table.

QuoteYou can play tabletop roleplaying same way, where every action is based on something the rules say or do not say.

You can also hit yourself repeatedly in the head with a hammer…but why ever would you want to do that?

There exists a minority subset of players who want not just to say, “my character tries to do X” but who also want to understand the rules of the setting and to have some idea of the likelihood of success for various actions. There are several reasons people want that.

(1) Some players want to maximize the chance that their character survives, prospers, and accomplishes whatever it is that the player wants the PC to accomplish.

(2) Some players are competitive and want to use the rules to help them outperform the other players and their PCs and/or the GM and the NPCs.

(3) Some players are afraid to make a ‘stupid’ move or to select a ‘dumb’ action for their character. They hope that improved rules mastery will prevent that. Usually they are wrong.

(4) Some players use understanding the rules as part of how they understand the setting, how it works, and what actions do or don’t make sense in that setting for a character to attempt. Three classic examples would be (i) how falling damage in a level based system works, (ii) how far my character can jump or how much they can lift, and (iii) how many opponents can my character fight at the same time and expect to win (or at least not get dead or maimed) in combat. It is no coincidence that these are three of the areas where different rules give some widely different answers and answers that often don’t align with real world experience.

(5) Some people enjoy learning and mastering game rules. Often, though not always, this is combined with (2).

QuoteSo why are we spending all this effort into defining settings and characters? It is to run a campaign where the players do hopefully interesting things as their characters.  Hence my assertion, RPGs are about playing the campaign, not the rules.

I don’t think this is a bad approach. I just don’t agree that it is a necessary approach, that it is always the best approach, etc.



* To clarify, I'm not saying that one can't covert characters and settings from one set of rules e.g. D&D to another, e.g. Runequest, only that this is something I've avoided doing. I know you have done that for your Majestic Wilderlands campaign.

I've also seen players who convert or reuse the same character (personality, name, etc.) in different settings and different rules. I almost never do that either. I guess in a way, that seems like the player version of the GM who wants to use the same world. Though I probably attach a bit of a pejorative judgement to the player that I don't attach to the GM.

Quote from: Brandybuck;903427Yeah I understand your point, we might actually get there too again, but so far we've just found our 'modest level' of how the game can still be played with rules that make sense and we don't try to push it too hard. In fact lot of decision making has transfered from dice and rules to GM who sometimes decides even things like how much a character is hurt when he jumps out of window. Yes there are clear and easy rules on that and it should be simple to just calculate it, but we often consider other factors relevant to the story (for example how important it is for the character to make that jump - if you know what i mean) and GM either decides on his own entirely or makes some modifications to the numbers. This approach of course requires a very good and objective Game Master.

(Bolding mine.)

It may be a bit nit-picky, but including story factors or things like "how important it is for the character to make that jump" when deciding if the jump is made is not the action of an objective Game Master, but of a subjective Game Master.

Whether one prefers an objective or a subjective Game Master is, of course, a subjective decision.

Quote from: Bren;903444(Bolding mine.)

It may be a bit nit-picky, but including story factors or things like "how important it is for the character to make that jump" when deciding if the jump is made is not the action of an objective Game Master, but of a subjective Game Master.

Whether one prefers an objective or a subjective Game Master is, of course, a subjective decision.

Welcome to the RPGsite, Brandybuck! Hairs will be split from time to time. It doesn't hurt much. I understood that you meant *fair* and/or *impartial* Game Master.

Is it possible to be subjective and fair? Close to it, I think.  It's seems more likely than finding an Objective Game Master. In fact I have my doubts if such a thing is possible.

Quote from: estar;888083What makes an RPG an RPG is not the rules but the campaign.

In practice though, it's more an adventure game at the table than an RPG.

Quote from: Madprofessor;903456Welcome to the RPGsite, Brandybuck! Hairs will be split from time to time. It doesn't hurt much.

Your post is either an odd way of agreeing with what I said, or you missed the similarity in meaning of the phrases: "nit-picky" and "hair splitting."

What Brandybuck said was that rather than follow the rules, the GM would allow Player A's PC to succeed in his jump because it is important. Here "important" seems to mean, (i) a successful jump is needed to set up or enable the next scene in a planned or predetermined story or (ii) a successful jump is important to player A for some other reasons, e.g. wish fulfillment, embodying a certain character concept, inability to accept character loss or failure at this point, or wanting or needing to succeed despite a lack of character ability or bad die rolls or both for some other reason. Each of these tend towards subjective, not objective determination of an outcome. Objective outcome determination of many actions is embedded in the rules e.g. how far or high is the jump, what is the local gravity, how much extra weight is the character carrying, is there room for a running start, and often some rule that indicates how far a character can jump or how to determine if a jump is successful. Having actual distances and following the rules of the system both tend towards an objective determination. Using the same method for determining success or failure for player A's PC as for player B's PC tends towards fairness and impartiality. It may or may not be objective. But using the word "objective" just made Brandybuck's intended meaning less clear.

Since Brandybuck isn't playing at my table nor I at theirs, it doesn't matter whether or not I agree with Brandybuck's apparent preference for the GM to be non-objective in determining outcomes. Some people like to play that way, some can take it or leave it, some just don't roll that way and hate it.

QuoteIs it possible to be subjective and fair? Close to it, I think.  It's seems more likely than finding an Objective Game Master. In fact I have my doubts if such a thing is possible.

Apparently you are interpreting the word "objective" when applied to human judgment, i.e. to game master determinations, as some sort of ideal or Platonic perfect form where either something is totally, completely, and infallibly "objective" or else it is subjective. Why would you do that? It just seems an incredibly useless and hair splitting interpretation of the of the word "objective" when applied to fallible humans and fallible human decision making. Using a similar hair splitting definition, no human can be fair or impartial. While that may, in a very narrow and pendantic sense, be true, it makes words like fair, objective, and impartial, as well as words like unfair, subjective, and biased meaningless and thus useless for discourse.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;903463In practice though, it's more an adventure game at the table than an RPG.

I have no idea what you mean by an adventure game. Would you please clarify?