Quote from: GeekyBugle;1111938Needs = Food, Clothes, Shelter, Medicine

Wants = Entertainment, travel, finer clothes/food, bigger more comfortable shelter.

Jesus wept you have not seen the hysteronics of some board gamers over on BGG about how X company is gouging them. MAKING them buy a second copy of the game because they NEEEEEEEEEEEED some extra cards that absolutely 1billion% are vital to their ever being able to play the game.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1111949How dare you! The AD&D 1e grappling rules were perfect!!

Quote from: HappyDaze;1111966And the pummeling rules were...something else.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1111970Those were double perfect!

Quote from: yancy;1112095The grappling and pummeling rules were probably the best goddamn part of the game.

I legit love the core of the DMG non-lethal combat system, stripping away only the "roll a random-ish modifier and slow down the game to make a decision to on whether to use it on the success chance or the damage result".  Without that fiddly bit, it's just a cool little d% mechanic that I suspect a lot of people would like if it were stealth-republished as a BFRPG table.

Overall a great post. Sorry for the belated reply I had internet issues over the weekend.

Quote from: amacris;1111830Anyone who has read my games know that I'm no fan of "mother-may-I" type mechanics. My game gives you rules for as much as I can think of. But 2,000 years of organized practice of law has found that there are no systems of adjudication that do not require a human adjudicator's involvement. The only argument is over how the adjudicator should be involved.

Start with precedent:

...

On the other hand, "civil law" originated

Sound good as a summary of two different approaches of the adjudication process. I think what not being addressed is why the process of adjudication exist for tabletop roleplaying exists. Which has an impact on the mix of "common law" "civil law" techniques a referee uses as their personal style.

My opinion that the foundation is pretending to be a character having adventures in a setting. This is what makes RPGs different from board or war games. In boardgames the point is to play the game by the rules. What makes the game interesting as entertainment is the interplay of the players as defined by the rules.

In contrast RPGs are defined by the setting of the campaign. The rules of a wargame is a tool used as an aide to reduce what the players try to do as their characters into a series of procedures and dice rolls. But what a character can and can't do is described by the setting and what been described about their character within that setting.

Boardgames necessitates a "civil law" approach because that is the point of using them as a leisure activity. To play the game, like Settlers of Catan, Chess, etc by it rules.

Wargames predate RPGs but like RPGs wargames are distinguished from boardgame in that they have as their foundation a setting. Typically one involving the many wars and battle that mankind has fought. On in the case of science fiction or fantasy, battles that are imagined.

In general wargames are played by the rules, but where a boardgame is judged by the entertainment values of the rule design alone, wargames are also judge on how well they reflect the reality of the setting. Until the rise of the Euro-games the trend in wargames was to reflect more and more details of the setting within the rules. Both historical and more fantastic like Battletech and the Warhammer series (fantasy/40k).

The historicals declined and the fantastic (Battletech/Warhammer) became the dominant forms of wargaming by the late 80s. And while the fantastic wargames had rich setting detail it was usually after the details were defined in the rules. The rules became only source of "truth" about the Battletech and Warhammer settings.

This focus on the setting is why RPGs developed out of wargames. Why the intermediate step were scenarios and campaigns involving a referee and/or expansive scenarios compared the average wargame. By focusing on individual characters, by not restricting what the characters are allowed to do within the setting, RPGs manage to even more expansive than the above wargames.

Unlike boardgames, this nesseciates a "common law" approach as no set of rules can be written that could encapsulate everything a player could try as their character.

However as the hobby and industry developed RPG system became more detailed and comprehensive. Especially system that either were designed or evolved into "generic" system capable of being utilized for different genres and radically different settings. The same trend that afflicted wargames also started in RPGs. System became more and more detailed. Like the fantastic wargames, the rules started be treated as the only source of "truth" about the genre or setting the rules represented.

The rise of Vampire and the World of Darkness style RPGs acted as a counterpoint to this trend. AD&D 2e was a mixed bag because of TSR's focus on multiple setting. But for RPGs when D&D 3.0 was released the dominant view is that what character can and can't do is defined by the rules became entrenched. The Euro-games reinforced this because the source of their appeal was the clever designs they embodied that turned out to be a lot of fun to play. But often the setting of the game was just window dressing for these games.

All of this reinforced the "civil law" approach towards refereeing RPGs. That if something wasn't covered by the system then it was a inherent flaw in the system and new "statutes" i.e. rules needed to be codified to cover it.

As for the OSR's common law approach. I think likewise the novelty of "rulings not rules" overshadowed why referee need to make any type of ruling in the first place. Too many advocates just assume that many will get that you decide things by how the genre or setting operates. Thus leaving more than a few who try this unhappy because they feel like or their players feel like the ruling are inconsistent. Not when the same situation arises but when related situations are ruled differently.

I know for me, for decades I gravitated to RPGs like the Hero System, and GURPS because of the wealth the detail they possessed. That wasn't the sole reason, another was these system make it easy for me to connect their mechanics to just about anything players could reasonably do as their characters.

I never disliked D&D, but found the above better suited for my style of refereeing. That is until I read Matt Finch's Old School Primer. It wasn't the specifics that got me excited but the realization that I could leverage my life experience and knowledge about the history of our hobby to use the classic D&D rules to run my campaigns the same way I did with GURPS and the Hero System. I.e. the players doing the same things for the same reasons while having fun. Just with a different set of mechanics.

Later on, I realized that the consistency of my now "common law" rulings was shaped by the details of the settings I used. Hence my position now that irregardless whether one uses a civil law, common-law or hybrid approach, the foundation of any ruling is not the system of the game, but the setting of the campaign. With the corollary that because setting potentially represent entire worlds no system either designed or grown through precedent can encompass all that a player can do as their character within the campaign. That a pure civil law approach is not feasible in a RPG campaign.

Quote from: amacris;1111830That's how my own body of D&D jurisprudence, developed over hundreds of sessions of Classic D&D, ultimately became the Adventurer Conqueror King System. Of course, my efforts with ACKS are nothing compared to the old masters. After all, the entire corpus of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is just Gary Gygax and crew's common law rulings on Original Dungeons & Dragons. Even more impressive, the legendary skill-based RPG Runequest began as a set of house-rules for D&D! (The transitional D&D-to-Runequest house rules were called the Perrin Conventions, named for Runequest's lead designer Steve Perrin.)

I respect what you did with ACKS far more than I do than what Gygax did with AD&D 1st edition as far as being a RPG arising out of a common law approach. For me the ultimate example of the common law approach to design is OD&D itself.

Doesn't mean I dislike AD&D, but I respect it more for Gygax's design (and writing style) rather than a corpus of common law rulings. There are too many anecdotes both from back in the day and later that what Gygax used in his sessions was not the AD&D rulebooks. But rather his own continuation of OD&D. Likewise there are too many antecdotes of various AD&D subsystem being thrown in because Gygax thought it was a good idea when he was writing the books. Not because it was something he first tried in his campaign.

But as a designed RPG, AD&D 1st is overall is brilliant. However it's strengths are not in its mechanics. Rather than then in its list of stuff for D&D (classes, monsters, spells, etc), referee's advice, and campaign aides (random tables). Much of AD&D's mechanics are either incompressible or inconsistent especially the crucial sections on combat.

Likewise I respect Runequest as being a result of a common law process as well. And a brilliant merger of two designer's work, Perrin on mechanics, and Stafford on setting.

Quote from: EOTB;1112193I legit love the core of the DMG non-lethal combat system, stripping away only the "roll a random-ish modifier and slow down the game to make a decision to on whether to use it on the success chance or the damage result".  Without that fiddly bit, it's just a cool little d% mechanic that I suspect a lot of people would like if it were stealth-republished as a BFRPG table.

a) You are insano in the braino.

b) I am intrigued by your love for the core of the DMG non-lethal system. I know you actually play AD&D 1e and you're not new to the system either so I oddly suspect you're not joking.

c) Please start a thread about the system and what you find appealing and how you use the system in actual play. Also, I want to hear how you have altered the system. I am totally open to the idea that I've skipped over something cool because I didn't grok it properly.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1112395a) You are insano in the braino.

b) ... I oddly suspect you're not joking.

Guilty on both counts.  Let me think about a proper persuasive essay on why I find it to run pretty easy at the table, and why the design of it works really well in my experience.

Of all the mechanics in AD&D, this is one where Gygax's writing style works against him/it really hard.  The 1E weapon speed rule is the other.  Both are actually pretty simple once you strip all his jargon out (WS being an if/then rule instead of an always-on rule...some people don't like if/then rules even when clearly written).  I've toyed with the idea of simply rewriting them and putting it in a blog post for a while.

I wasn't lying about the grappling and pummeling rules, it's been years since I looked at them, but at the time I honest-to-God liked them better than the regular combat system :/

Wasn't lying about the random prostitute encounters chart either. Psionics, I might have been stretching it a little.

Quote from: estar;1112317I respect what you did with ACKS far more than I do than what Gygax did with AD&D 1st edition as far as being a RPG arising out of a common law approach. For me the ultimate example of the common law approach to design is OD&D itself.

Doesn't mean I dislike AD&D, but I respect it more for Gygax's design (and writing style) rather than a corpus of common law rulings. There are too many anecdotes both from back in the day and later that what Gygax used in his sessions was not the AD&D rulebooks. But rather his own continuation of OD&D. Likewise there are too many antecdotes of various AD&D subsystem being thrown in because Gygax thought it was a good idea when he was writing the books. Not because it was something he first tried in his campaign.

But as a designed RPG, AD&D 1st is overall is brilliant. However it's strengths are not in its mechanics. Rather than then in its list of stuff for D&D (classes, monsters, spells, etc), referee's advice, and campaign aides (random tables). Much of AD&D's mechanics are either incompressible or inconsistent especially the crucial sections on combat.

Likewise I respect Runequest as being a result of a common law process as well. And a brilliant merger of two designer's work, Perrin on mechanics, and Stafford on setting.

Thanks for the kind words. I agree with your entire elaboration of common and civil law in your early post. Really well said.

My copy of ACKs arrived today.  Thanks for the tip Trollman!

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Quote from: Shasarak;1113090My copy of ACKs arrived today.  Thanks for the tip Trollman!

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Today I learned that New Zealand isn't actually upside down, but Shasarak does tilt 90 degrees to the left.

Quote from: HappyDaze;1113103Today I learned that New Zealand isn't actually upside down, but Shasarak does tilt 90 degrees to the left.

So thats what happens when I take a photo with my left hand?

Quote from: Shasarak;1113137So thats what happens when I take a photo with my left hand?

Your accent changes.

Quote from: Shasarak;1113090My copy of ACKs arrived today.  Thanks for the tip Trollman!

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Cool! I didn't have the patience to track down a hard copy, so I just grabbed the PDF myself. I wonder how many people got this game because of this whole thing?

Quote from: GeekEclectic;1113391Cool! I didn't have the patience to track down a hard copy, so I just grabbed the PDF myself. I wonder how many people got this game because of this whole thing?

Quite a few, I'd bet. And once they read it and play it for themselves, word will spread further. Because ACKS is a damn good game.

Hey folks, special offer to RPG Site members!

If you've picked up ACKS (now or in the past), private message me with your email address and I will send you a doc of the latest updates for the domain rules. These have been playtested for the last two years via my Patreon and are a major upgrade from the already-good rules in the core book.