Quote from: ForgottenF on December 11, 2023, 10:25:38 PM
Games where the GM is the only one who knows the rules pose all kinds of problems both on the "fun" and "playability" fronts. I tried the experiment once of rolling all the dice behind the screen, not telling my players how much damage was done to them or their current HP, and they absolutely hated it. Most people don't enjoy playing a game if they're not given the data they need to make informed decisions.  There can be a lot of mileage in withholding the game logic behind how certain items or effects work, but once the players have their "gamer-brain" on, they're going to want to experiment with it until they figure out the rules, or internalize it as another random dice roll. That, I suppose, is where the advantage of more abstract games (whether "storygames" or not) lies. If the whole game is played at that more narrative or meta level, the players don't need to understand the mechanics to make choices, are therefore less incentivized to question them.

I've gotten some decent results through the old Dark Souls trick of giving players an environment full of hints about its former purpose and backstory, and getting them to try and guess at the history. Not really the same thing, though.

I agree that the players definitely need to have enough information to make good decisions within the game.  Usually the rules provide this framework, so if you're going with a "only the DM knows the rules approach" there needs to be something else.  The best alternative I've found is to play in a setting that all of the players are familiar with.  Frex, if everyone is in the group is familiar with Star Wars (which I would expect) and you have rules that do a decent job of modeling the action in the movies, then your players could make reasonable decisions in a Star Wars game.  You also need to have a shared framework for rules constructs that aren't part of the setting but are important to the game, like health mechanics.  An easy way to do that would be to just use specific words to describe a range where a character is on a health scale, ranging from "great" on one end through "beat up" and on down to "bleeding out."

I like my settings to be coherent. How weird it gets is contextual to whatever you as an individual considers "normal". Typically we think of pseudo-medieval Ren-Faire D&D as normal.

Spelljammer - it exists both as a meta-setting for all of the TSR settings, but also stands on its own. It's effectively Star Wars in D&D, but it actually has a lot of coherency if you accept its conceits. And it's about as *weird* as it gets in D&D. Cube Worlds, Water Worlds, Flying Whaleships, literally anything you can imagine is here.

Talislanta - which has always been criti-praised for being weird. It's remarkably cohesive. I helped write the post-apocalyptic prequel edition that's even more weird, but retains its coherency.

Weirdwars/Deadlands - pretty weird relative to what we consider their genres (intentionally), but because they leverage historical elements, they have coherency.

The problem with homebrewed settings that try to get weird is they lack elements of coherency that cause the weird aspects to seem silly.