Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1040732Congratulations, you've just made it utterly obvious that you've never actually played Diplomacy.

(q.v. "ultracrepidarianism")

Are you denying the rules now?

Quote from: Hastur-The-Unnameable;1040730How many of those spells are purely combat spells? how much of that treasure is just upgraded combat equipment? how many character options are purely combat focused? How many of those monsters are fleshed out in a noncombat setting? are there actually rules for tricking, taming, or otherwise integrating those monsters for noncombat uses, or do they just exist as obstacles for the PCs to stick with their pointy metal sticks? (actually this is half serious, I haven't picked up a D&D book for a very long time)

Oh man, you're talking about the whole reason I play OSR games.


-The minority of spells are combat spells. Like, 1/5th or 1/10th in the spell lists that I have. Most of them are things like repairing items, floating disks, summoning water, talking with animals... Y'know, magic! It really encourages non-combat problem solving. It also gives the early-level wizards a larger contribution to the party before they get those fireballs rolling and become living tanks (though that's fun too!)

-I have a supplement that dedicates *pages* of text to the load-bearing capacity of various monsters and creatures. Later, in that same supplement, there are logistics rules for construction projects. We're talking dozens of pages of useful, 100% utility rules-text, none of which is combat

-Equipment like helms of telepathy and cloaks of invisibility *do have* combat uses! But, that's not really their primary utility. Things like horns of plenty and flying carpets abound in D&D

-A fighter clearly has a "combat focus", but I rarely see "charge in to every fight!" in OSR games. It's generally wiser to set up traps and ambushes, negotiate, or avoid dangerous encounters, and you totally can! Because characters are assumed to be able to operate like humans; they can interact with physical reality (well, the game's reality anyway) and talk and negotiate. You just need to know how to run that as a GM (The Alexandrian is a great place for advice on that very thing)

-There are indeed rules for taming, tricking, negotiating with, and otherwise interacting with monsters. Many of them (especially in older editions of D&D) are governed lightly, by things like reaction rolls and discussions on dropping treasure or food to distract monsters during a chase. There's a persistent assumption in the OSR (and it is a reasonable one) that "you can do what a person can do"; you don't need each of those interactions detailed numerically, it's much better to have guidelines or rule by common sense. This isn't a post-3.0 assumption; that edition tended to over-detail things (leading to pathfinder and it's laughable rules-bloat). Modern OSR games, ACKS at least in my experience, do a good job of riding the complexity-line and giving somewhat stronger guidelines in this regard.

Examples!
-My wife tamed a bear. A bear! As a level-1 Elf. That game got gory fast.
-Then later? She tamed a Troll. Welcome to the OSR, kids
-My players keep making friends with the big bad guys. They've got so many happy vampires that they routinely feed and bribe.
-In my most recent campaign, the players tamed a trio (a TRIO) of dragons and used them to lay waste to 400 hexes of alien landscape. That's how you end a campaign, folks

Quote from: Azraele;1040734Oh man, you're talking about the whole reason I play OSR games.


-The minority of spells are combat spells. Like, 1/5th or 1/10th in the spell lists that I have. Most of them are things like repairing items, floating disks, summoning water, talking with animals... Y'know, magic! It really encourages non-combat problem solving. It also gives the early-level wizards a larger contribution to the party before they get those fireballs rolling and become living tanks (though that's fun too!)

-I have a supplement that dedicates *pages* of text to the load-bearing capacity of various monsters and creatures. Later, in that same supplement, there are logistics rules for construction projects. We're talking dozens of pages of useful, 100% utility rules-text, none of which is combat

-Equipment like helms of telepathy and cloaks of invisibility *do have* combat uses! But, that's not really their primary utility. Things like horns of plenty and flying carpets abound in D&D

-A fighter clearly has a "combat focus", but I rarely see "charge in to every fight!" in OSR games. It's generally wiser to set up traps and ambushes, negotiate, or avoid dangerous encounters, and you totally can! Because characters are assumed to be able to operate like humans; they can interact with physical reality (well, the game's reality anyway) and talk and negotiate. You just need to know how to run that as a GM (The Alexandrian is a great place for advice on that very thing)

-There are indeed rules for taming, tricking, negotiating with, and otherwise interacting with monsters. Many of them (especially in older editions of D&D) are governed lightly, by things like reaction rolls and discussions on dropping treasure or food to distract monsters during a chase. There's a persistent assumption in the OSR (and it is a reasonable one) that "you can do what a person can do"; you don't need each of those interactions detailed numerically, it's much better to have guidelines or rule by common sense. This isn't a post-3.0 assumption; that edition tended to over-detail things (leading to pathfinder and it's laughable rules-bloat). Modern OSR games, ACKS at least in my experience, do a good job of riding the complexity-line and giving somewhat stronger guidelines in this regard.

Examples!
-My wife tamed a bear. A bear! As a level-1 Elf. That game got gory fast.
-Then later? She tamed a Troll. Welcome to the OSR, kids
-My players keep making friends with the big bad guys. They've got so many happy vampires that they routinely feed and bribe.
-In my most recent campaign, the players tamed a trio (a TRIO) of dragons and used them to lay waste to 400 hexes of alien landscape. That's how you end a campaign, folks

cool, although I was mostly focused on core rules stuff not supplements. (I also didn't realize that Moldvay basic spells was a things, to me it just sounded like some 5e chapter header, if the supplements are any indication)

Although, I will say I don't mind comprehensive rules for things... especially taming animals, since that's not exactly an easy thing to do in real life. (I actually prefer more complex rules for noncombat actions like crafting and the like, just because it lets you make that out of combat time feel more worthwhile, and lets you actually make interesting things in the meantime)

There are other reasons I don't like or play OSR very much (but I do enjoy reading and borrowing from the SWN and LOTFP books), but they don't really relate to the combat or "what the game is about."

Quote from: Hastur-The-Unnameable;1040735cool, although I was mostly focused on core rules stuff not supplements. (I also didn't realize that Moldvay basic spells was a things, to me it just sounded like some 5e chapter header, if the supplements are any indication)

Although, I will say I don't mind comprehensive rules for things... especially taming animals, since that's not exactly an easy thing to do in real life. (I actually prefer more complex rules for noncombat actions like crafting and the like, just because it lets you make that out of combat time feel more worthwhile, and lets you actually make interesting things in the meantime)

There are other reasons I don't like or play OSR very much (but I do enjoy reading and borrowing from the SWN and LOTFP books), but they don't really relate to the combat or "what the game is about."

The terrifying thing is that most of the above is and was derived from the original wood-grain. Whenever you use real-world physics and social interactions as your judgment mechanism for how and why things happen, this is the result. Most modern games treat their reality as derived from the rules, rather than the other way around, and it just causes so many problems. So many.

The idea that the page count dedicated to something correlates with its relative importance to the game comes from exactly the same impulse that thought you could measure productivity of software developers by counting lines of code.  It's one of those things that sounds plausible on the surface, if you don't really think about it very much.  

Fortunately for gamers, for sake of understanding this idea, in software it was pushed hard by people for years, who simply would not give it up despite any contrary evidence or reason.  It was so pernicious, that finally it was scientifically measured multiple times, and found to be utterly without merit.  Even now, though, it still rears its head when some manager has to be educated on reality.  I suspect that the next fad we will see in gaming will be the equivalent of counting "function points" as a more complex, sophisticated way of ... counting things that don't really tell you anything outside of a particular context.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1040738The idea that the page count dedicated to something correlates with its relative importance to the game comes from exactly the same impulse that thought you could measure productivity of software developers by counting lines of code.  It's one of those things that sounds plausible on the surface, if you don't really think about it very much.  

Fortunately for gamers, for sake of understanding this idea, in software it was pushed hard by people for years, who simply would not give it up despite any contrary evidence or reason.  It was so pernicious, that finally it was scientifically measured multiple times, and found to be utterly without merit.  Even now, though, it still rears its head when some manager has to be educated on reality.  I suspect that the next fad we will see in gaming will be the equivalent of counting "function points" as a more complex, sophisticated way of ... counting things that don't really tell you anything outside of a particular context.

well... that's a bit of a faulty analogy... the closest thing I can compare this to is a play script. Sure, you can interpret the script so far from its actual text that it could mean something completely different to what you might interpret on a first reading, but ultimately the script is still a story with clear intent and content, adding things on to make it a performance makes it better, but generally speaking, sure, you could make Hamlet into a comedy of errors if you try hard enough, but most people would rather change the script (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, for example).

At least as important as rules focus is what behaviors the game rewards. If you give most of the xp for treasure earned then you'll have a different play style to a game where killing things is the major form of advancement.

To use editions of D&D as an example 2E was the edition where the focus from xp for gold and do for killing things started to significantly shift. By 3E you got virtually all your do from killing things so surprise, surprise, that became the default MO for the game.

Beyond that there are other incentives like what the game makes fun. If you have a detailed and exciting set of combat rules then you can bet people will want to use them. If a game makes other activities really fun the players will want to do that.

Now we know why Vampire the Masquerade was played in Superheroes by Night mode.

"In this game you should be ready to face your inner fears, as if looking at the mirror, and come out changed from the experience".... but we don't clearly explain how you achieve that, so instead take these extremely detailed rules for combat, including long lists of guns and powers, that makes combat take 1 hour minimum each time it comes up.

Quote from: Hastur-The-Unnameable;1040741well... that's a bit of a faulty analogy... the closest thing I can compare this to is a play script. Sure, you can interpret the script so far from its actual text that it could mean something completely different to what you might interpret on a first reading, but ultimately the script is still a story with clear intent and content, adding things on to make it a performance makes it better, but generally speaking, sure, you could make Hamlet into a comedy of errors if you try hard enough, but most people would rather change the script (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, for example).

Actually.  I think it's good analogy as far as it goes.  Page count is a bullshit metric.  That should be obvious on the face of it, given how overly simplistic it is.

There are things that the rules highlight, things that the rules enable and things that the rules place centre stage and rules (such as random tables) that many critics fail to see are rules at all, and all of these things influence the game in a multitude of ways and reveal the assumptions behind the game and help to bring about emergent styles of play.

Lack of rules for certain situations is more telling.  Older D&D doesn't need rules for searching in a dungeon environment because the situation is generally simple enough that the players can just describe what they are doing.  However, if I want to run an urban mystery game where the players search an entire house for clues, then it's going to become tedious pixel bitching if I make the players describe going through all the sock and underwear drawers one by one.

What matters is what the rules can abstract, and what they bring into focus - and you certainly cannot tell this from page count.

Quote from: TJS;1040759Actually.  I think it's good analogy as far as it goes.  Page count is a bullshit metric.  That should be obvious on the face of it, given how overly simplistic it is.

There are things that the rules highlight, things that the rules enable and things that the rules place centre stage and rules (such as random tables) that many critics fail to see are rules at all, and all of these things influence the game in a multitude of ways and reveal the assumptions behind the game and help to bring about emergent styles of play.

Lack of rules for certain situations is more telling.  Older D&D doesn't need rules for searching in a dungeon environment because the situation is generally simple enough that the players can just describe what they are doing.  However, if I want to run an urban mystery game where the players search an entire house for clues, then it's going to become tedious pixel bitching if I make the players describe going through all the sock and underwear drawers one by one.

What matters is what the rules can abstract, and what they bring into focus - and you certainly cannot tell this from page count.

that's fair, but I think the idea is less the literal page count and more just the content itself, the page count is just being used as an abstraction do quantify the volume of content related to specific elements. Searching rooms is something you will do in practically every rpg, but if an RPG has clearly defined mechanics for searching a room, and dedicates a large volume of information towards those rules, would it not be correct to assume that a significant focus of the RPG is searching rooms? Sure, individual tables might do away with or avoid using these rules, but that isn't exactly playing the game the way it was clearly meant to be done, in essence, what the game was "about".

Although, I seem to remember there being a search skill roll of some kind in AD&D (of course, I haven't played it since middle school, so perhaps I'm miss-remembering, but I clearly remember our thief rolling some kind of search the room roll whenever we entered one).

Quote from: Hastur-The-Unnameable;1040762that's fair, but I think the idea is less the literal page count and more just the content itself, the page count is just being used as an abstraction do quantify the volume of content related to specific elements. Searching rooms is something you will do in practically every rpg, but if an RPG has clearly defined mechanics for searching a room, and dedicates a large volume of information towards those rules, would it not be correct to assume that a significant focus of the RPG is searching rooms? Sure, individual tables might do away with or avoid using these rules, but that isn't exactly playing the game the way it was clearly meant to be done, in essence, what the game was "about".

Although, I seem to remember there being a search skill roll of some kind in AD&D (of course, I haven't played it since middle school, so perhaps I'm miss-remembering, but I clearly remember our thief rolling some kind of search the room roll whenever we entered one).

It may be ok as tentative first assumption but not as dogma.  Why are there such involved searching rules?

I can imagine a Police Procedural game in which most of the game actually involves talking to witnesses and getting into gun fights and doing lots of other stuff, and there might only be one room searched every adventure - but that search usually comes at the murder scene at the beginning of the adventure and experience points at the end are based on criminals actually being convicted - and that depends on police procedures being followed closely, which is why there are such involved search rules (it's a crucial possible point of failure for the players).

All this would tell us that the resolution of searches is important in this game - it says nothing really about how frequent they will be.  There might be one every session or 10 sessions may go by following up leads from a single investigation in which searches do not occur again.

Edit: However this example is a bit unnatural.  In my earlier example the search of the house in the mystery -would in fact be quicker than resolving a search in a dungeon - precisely because the greater abstraction involved in avoiding a search becoming a slog leads to faster resolution.  In that case the presence of explicit rules mean that search actually takes up less time in the mystery game than in D&D.

Quote from: TJS;1040763It may be ok as tentative first assumption but not as dogma.  Why are there such involved searching rules?

I can imagine a Police Procedural game in which most of the game actually involves talking to witnesses and getting into gun fights and doing lots of other stuff, and there might only be one room searched every adventure - but that search usually comes at the murder scene at the beginning of the adventure and experience points at the end are based on criminals actually being convicted - and that depends on police procedures being followed closely, which is why there are such involved search rules (it's a crucial possible point of failure for the players).

All this would tell us that the resolution of searches is important in this game - it says nothing really about how frequent they will be.  There might be one every session or 10 sessions may go by following up leads from a single investigation in which searches do not occur again.

A lot of that really depends on the pacing of sessions though. Regardless of the rules themselves, two groups using the same rules set can easily have vastly different experiences with their implementation. Using the content of sessions as an indicator of what a game is "about" doesn't really feel right because that can vary wildly from table to table. If we're trying to reach a conclusion, the only qualities of the game that don't change from table to table are the rules themselves, and the rules wont dictate the pacing of how frequently or infrequently a mechanic is used, it can only spend time explaining what rules the creators felt necessary to include. The why doesn't really matter at that point, unless the game specifically dictates when and how a rule set should be used. If that Police Procedural game just begins the searching section with "here is how you search for stuff" then the expectation is these rules will likely be used often, but if it instead specifies "these rules are for performing a detailed search of a crime scene at the beginning of a case" then the pacing is a bit clearer. But in either case, if, say, 70% of all text, rules and character options, are dedicated to performing those search rules, then no matter how frequent or infrequent you use them, the would seem to be really trying to push those search rules, especially if every character build possible is forced to contribute to that task in some significant way, regardless of character input.

Quote from: Hastur-The-Unnameable;1040765...if, say, 70% of all text, rules and character options, are dedicated to performing those search rules, then no matter how frequent or infrequent you use them, the would seem to be really trying to push those search rules, especially if every character build possible is forced to contribute to that task in some significant way, regardless of character input.

But here the analogy breaks down because no game is ever likely to devote 70% of its space to searching.

I can imagine a game, however, where a designer wants to encourage the emergent play-style of maverick cops who constantly push the line.  In that case we might have four pages of rules involved with the process of getting a warrant for a search.  However, the purpose of these rules might be precisely, to discourage using them, you can get a warrant if you really need to, but the game encourages cutting corners and bending the rules precisely because of the rules involved.

In any case, I don't think anyone would argue that no combat in any edition of D&D is an expected style of play.  PCs are expected to venture into dangerous situations and to be exposed to the presence of dangerous monsters - it is expected that combat will occur at some point and need to be adjudicated.  But there's still a misunderstanding.  The focus of D&D rules is not combat but dungeon situations.  A lot of the rules people say are "combat rules" are more widely applicable and most of the "combat rules" are spells, aside from the spells that are obviously not combat oriented "tenser's floating disc" for example, there are those explicitly useful for avoiding combat "charm person etc" and even many of those which are combat oriented such as "Web" or "Stinking Cloud" are just as useful for avoiding combat as they are actually in combat.   Even the fireball spell, while obviously intended for combat, is clear enough in what it does that you can extrapolate it to use in other situations (eg. burning down a barn - although this is more of an edge case).

Really the focus of Early D&D's rules is not combat as such but exploration of dangerous places, specifically dungeons (or other environment providing that they are capable of being treated in at least some way broadly analogous to a dungeon - which is a surprisingly wide range of situations).

In most cases however, the failure point in exploration is being eaten by a monster.

Quote from: Hastur-The-Unnameable;1040765A lot of that really depends on the pacing of sessions though. Regardless of the rules themselves, two groups using the same rules set can easily have vastly different experiences with their implementation. Using the content of sessions as an indicator of what a game is "about" doesn't really feel right because that can vary wildly from table to table. If we're trying to reach a conclusion, the only qualities of the game that don't change from table to table are the rules themselves, and the rules wont dictate the pacing of how frequently or infrequently a mechanic is used, it can only spend time explaining what rules the creators felt necessary to include.

It seems to me that the difficulty of deciding what the game is about based on play doesn't entail that we should then go and make such decisions based on the ruleset alone.

Maybe we should just accept that it's really difficult to straightforwardly say what a game is about and accept that some degree of indeterminacy in this regard is precisely a characteristic of rpgs.

It always pays to stand back and be extremely skeptical about reductionism.

Quote from: Hastur-The-Unnameable;1040762that's fair, but I think the idea is less the literal page count and more just the content itself, the page count is just being used as an abstraction do quantify the volume of content related to specific elements. Searching rooms is something you will do in practically every rpg, but if an RPG has clearly defined mechanics for searching a room, and dedicates a large volume of information towards those rules, would it not be correct to assume that a significant focus of the RPG is searching rooms? Sure, individual tables might do away with or avoid using these rules, but that isn't exactly playing the game the way it was clearly meant to be done, in essence, what the game was "about".

Although, I seem to remember there being a search skill roll of some kind in AD&D (of course, I haven't played it since middle school, so perhaps I'm miss-remembering, but I clearly remember our thief rolling some kind of search the room roll whenever we entered one).

That's precisely the point of the analogy with counting lines of code.  It's being used improperly to measure something in a way that does not work.  It implies a precision that is not there.  In the same way that you can say that a developer who writes zero lines of code is probably not being productive, while a developer who writes some lines of code may be productive--and now you've exhausted the useful precision of the measurement.  

Now, as I noted in my first reply on this topic, if a game spends a high page count on a particular thing, then that is a good indication that the game seeks to be somewhat about that.  A good example would be the amount of pages and focus spent on magic in D&D.  The problem comes in assuming that there is some kind of ratio, and that the game can't also be about things without such an obvious indication.