I think for some games the GM world-model should change if it disagrees with applications of the rules.
The GM’s world-model either already incorporates the rules (in which case, there is nothing to change)—or else the GM’s world-model fails to incorporate relevant information, which is a mistake on the GM’s part. The GM should, after admitting the mistake, now decide how to rectify it. Here several options are available, but the key is that this is a mistake—an incorrect application of the approach I described.
You went through my examples of questions for a hypothetical shapeshifting power, answering as though you were GMing a game I was in. That makes sense, but I want to point out that I wouldn’t expect every GM to answer the same way.
Yes, for two reasons. First, not all GMs play correctly; many are bad, and wrong. Second, different GMs will obviously construct different world-models of their respective game worlds. Neither possibility in any way whatsoever contradicts or undermines anything I wrote.
I mean, sometimes the designer didn’t say. As a designer, sometimes I don’t bother to say; pointing out how much fine control the ability gives, and every other unspecified question of similar importance that might come up, is one way to wind up with this ability taking up about a page of the rulebook instead of two sentences.
That it’s possible to write a full-page version of an ability description does not imply that the optimal version is one sentence long. If the designer omits some information which makes the text simply impossible to unambiguously interpret, even in the absence of any “rules lawyers” and with the utmost desire to “keep things simple” and full willingness to extrapolate, infer, draw reasonable conclusions, etc., then that is simply designer error. Sometimes that happens. It’s pointless to pretend that it doesn’t happen or that it’s not a problem that needs to be solved. “How do we play a game where some of the rules are genuinely and irreducibly ambiguous—and no, ‘fix the rules’ is not an option” is a completely useless question to ask.
While this depends on what TTRPG we’re talking about, I think in most editions of D&D you’re incorrect about Charisma not coming from appearance.
Granted, the exact count of how many editions of D&D there are is a little fuzzy.[1] Lets go with five, pretending for the moment that the current edition being called “5th edition” means everyone’s been counting normally. You’re wrong on three of them.
In how many of those editions does changing your appearance (in any way whatsoever, not just alter self or analogous abilities!) change your Charisma (or other mental stats)? As far as I know, none. (In 3rd edition, there is a disease that literally removes your face[1], and it doesn’t do so much as a single point of Charisma damage. It could’ve! We know this because there’s another disease, listed on the very same page, which does do Charisma damage. That disease is soul rot, which “eats at the victim’s mind and soul”. So a disease damaging your Charisma is possible. But deleting your entire face doesn’t do it.)
But I did say this was from the Onyx Path forums, and they don’t do D&D. They do (among other things) Exalted, where Charisma is an Attribute alongside Manipulation and Appearance. Offhand, the Lunar charm Perfect Symmetry is shapeshifting magic that changes the way you look and the way the Appearance attribute normally interacts with social combat.
Well, then obviously that would change the answer I’d give in the “form-changing magic” example.
So, you talk about the GM having “a consistent, coherent, and complete world-model” that they use to answer the players questions. I think that’s often useful, but as a designer, it’s also useful to emphasize to the GM what parts of the model aren’t important that they can mess with easily and what parts are important that they should be wary of changing.
It is almost always a designer mistake to consider some parts of the model to be unimportant. All the parts are important. A good GM should understand how all of them interact.
As far as your commentary re: “humanoid”, I agree, of course. (Indeed, I am personally not a big fan of the “creature type” system as used in 3e-like systems. I think that it’s fundamentally a design mistake in the same way and for the same reason as many—perhaps most—hierarchical classification systems, namely that tree structures are not a good match for modeling a diverse space of entities with many dimensions of variation. I think that creatures should be categorized by non-exclusive “tags” rather than exclusive “types”, and further, that these should be kept as informal as it is possible to make them while retaining clarity. My views on spell categorization into “schools” of magic is similar, by the way.)
This, however, is an excellent argument, not for artificially declaring that Thou Shalt Switch Off Your Creativity When Thinking About This Topic—but rather, for thinking more carefully about what exactly we’re trying to accomplish with the design of this ability, what we want to be true of how such things work in our game world, how those things should interact, and so forth. (Ideally, of course, professional game designers would do this for us, and we’d pay them money for the result. Alas, well-known financial incentives usually drive the design of popular games in a different direction.)
I start getting suspicious a player is up to something unbalanced when they start trying to access magical abilities of creatures from that broad of a range and ask what’s up
Uh-huh, and the answer to this is to ask: “should there be character powers that give you magical abilities of a broad range of creatures?”.
There is, in my experience, always a design that is firmly grounded in the world-model and neatly and elegant cuts through “balance” concerns. The task is to find it. The way to approach said task is, first and foremost, not to abdicate the challenge—but that is precisely what declaring “chicanery: no” amounts to.
I disagree that’s what we’ve learned from this exercise. What I take away from this exercise is that if you try to unambiguously specify a model sufficient for multiple GMs to rule consistently, this power winds up being multiple pages long.
This is only true if you are writing for GMs who are stupid do not fully grok the “query the world-model” approach. It is entirely possible to unambiguously specify things much more concisely than that. I’ve done it.
Of course, publishers of mass-market-appeal products like D&D are in fact targeting GMs who can’t be expected to think. (This is especially true if organized play events are taking place.) But the fact that the financial incentives for appealing to the lowest common denominator prevent the large publishers from doing things in the optimal way does not, in fact, make that way any less optimal (where “optimal” means “resulting in the best play experience”).
Assuming the GM isn’t new or uncertain and looking to the rulebook for guidance. The rulebook is often the teaching tool, after all.
Yes, it certainly is. The approach I describe makes it a better teaching tool, not a worse one.
It seems a bit like you narrowed in on one kind of TTRPG and one way to play that RPG, and assumed that’s how they all ought to work?
One kind of TTRPG? Sure, in the sense that I specified—what I called “traditional roleplaying game[s]”. That’s a reasonably broad umbrella. Indeed, I’d hesitate to call anything else a “TTRPG” at all.
One way to play? Sure, if by that we mean: I claim that this is the right way to play, in the sense that it satisfies all desiderata which are typically adduced as alleged reasons to favor other play styles, while avoiding the problems produced by those play styles. What I described is an extremely flexible approach, not a rigid and narrow one.
“Wait a moment,” you might be thinking, “Said established for this exercise that a player can’t turn into ‘something that they don’t know about or haven’t seen.’ Surely the character hasn’t seen an Arakocra?” “What do you mean, I haven’t seen an Arakocra?” the player asks, “Didn’t you read my backstory? I grew up in the Icewind Mountains. The Arakocra mostly live in mountains. I met some there.”
Is the player saying this because they read some tie-in novels you haven’t and just assumed it was obvious? Is the player saying this because they really, really like birds and want to turn into a bird person? Is the player saying this because they have some twelve step plan that ends in a Candle of Invocation and your campaign final boss dead from six towns away with no saving throw? Good question! It might be nice to have a conceptual handle for ‘I’m fine if you want to be a bird person, but if it’s the twelve step plan I’m going to go over this like it’s Al Capone’s tax records.’
That’s actually exactly the wrong way to think about these things.
First, some peripheral bits:
“Didn’t you read my backstory?”
Well, didn’t you? If you didn’t—how come? GM mistake!
Is the player saying this because they read some tie-in novels you haven’t and just assumed it was obvious?
The game world is fully constituted by what the GM declares to be the case. If the GM doesn’t know something to be true of the game world, then definitionally it can’t be true. The correct answer to this one is “why in the world would you think that something you read in a tie-in novel (or anything else whatsoever that isn’t an extrapolation from what has already been established) is true of this game without asking me if it’s true”. “Does this world have aarakocra” is something the GM decides.
Now, to the main point:
It might be nice to have a conceptual handle for ‘I’m fine if you want to be a bird person, but if it’s the twelve step plan I’m going to go over this like it’s Al Capone’s tax records.’
If the player has such a twelve step plan, then they should be exactly as free to determine any aspect of their character’s backstory as if they have no such plan, no more and no less. To do otherwise is to mix levels of description, and to severely undermine player agency.
Consider: are we supposing that the twelve step plan in question… works? Genuinely works, breaking no rules, requiring no obviously nonsensical interpretations, etc.?
Supposing that it does work: do we, as designers, think that it should work? If so, then there is no problem.
If not, then we should alter the rules in such a way as to make it not work. That alteration is nigh-guaranteed to not involve banning player character origins from regions inhabited by aarakocra. (Changes to rules that patch undesirable exploits basically never look like that.) But whatever the change ends up being, it should be a change that applies to everyone equally. (And if we can’t imagine a way to fix this bug without preventing people who just want to be bird persons from doing so, then perhaps we ought to find a different hobby, as that would betray a rather shocking lack of imagination.)
Does a fireball do more damage or go further if it’s in a confined space? The answer used to be Yes back in ~D&D 2e. The answer is No in D&D3.5. What changed, all of the GM’s world-models? Nah, the rules did
False dichotomy. A GM who adopts the new rules thereby changes his world-model; a GM who keeps the old rules… keeps the old rules. In other words: both changed, or neither, definitionally.
My world-model doesn’t really give me a principled answer either way.
If you have rules that give you an answer and you follow those rules, then your world-model absolutely does give you a principled, unambiguous answer.
The DM’s world-model is the ground truth. Answers to all questions flow from it.
Please go read Baron Munchausen, come back, and tell me if that sentence makes any sense as a global statement about tabletops.
See below re: scope of my claims.
There’s a lot of fluff, go ahead and skip it.
I’ve heard this sort of sentiment many times. I think that it’s wrongheaded. Did you know that the word “fluff” appears nowhere in the 3.5 or 5e PHBs or DMGs (excepting a box quote, in the 5e Player’s Handbook, of a passage from a tie-in novel)? What’s “fluff”? There isn’t support in the rulebooks for the notion that some parts of the rules are meaningless and skippable. Sure, modify whatever you like—that’s “Rule Zero”—but constructing this category of “fluff” is not the way to go.
If you aren’t trying to talk about all RPGs but just the subset that structurally resemble recent editions of D&D, that’s fine, but admit you’re talking about a much smaller subset of games.
Not “recent editions”, but basically all editions other than 4th (which was, as you are no doubt aware, a quite different sort of thing). I refer you once again to the term “traditional roleplaying games”, as I have defined and used it.
″...Maximum amount of player engagement and satisfaction”
″...The best at allowing newcomers to engage with the game...”
Those are confident and broad claims.
Yes.
Charitably, you’re accurately describing the players you’ve happened to game with, and the players you’ve gamed with are subject to some selection effect which explains the limited variety.
No, my claims are meant to be as broad as they appear to be.
My own experience has had a lot of players who light up when offered the chance to take the narrator spotlight, or who report they bounced off of games when they brought up that the GM wasn’t following the rules and the GM leaned too hard on Rule Zero. It’s a big hobby.
I do not doubt your word on this, but none of this contradicts what I wrote.
In some games, the GM’s world-model should lose if it disagrees with applications of the rules
See the start of this comment. The premise of this claim is fundamentally mistaken: either the GM’s world-model already incorporates the rules (and the GM has already decided to use that rule as written, or to change it—in which case he should of course apprise the players of this, in advance), or else the GM has made a mistake. Now, mistakes happen, but this cannot be a criticism of the approach I describe any more than it can be a criticism of a piece of music to observe that a novice musician has played a wrong note in his performance of it.
However, if your claim is that a TTRPG must have no or almost no dissociated mechanics in order to be well-designed and of comprehensive scope, that seems overbroad.
A TTRPG must have no or almost no dissociated mechanics in order to be a traditional roleplaying game. However, more broadly: yes, the games you list definitely have a smaller scope (some of them have a dramatically smaller scope) than, e.g., D&D (of most editions). (Some of them are also much more poorly designed, and often—though, of course, not always—this is precisely due to not fitting into the framework I describe.)
[D&D] trying to position itself as the Everything RPG for business reasons despite a design that isn’t nearly as general as its public perception sometimes suggests
On the contrary, D&D has a design that is much more general than most people perceive it as, and this is precisely because it is so amenable to the approach I describe. It is extensible and generalizable in a way that basically none of the other games you describe are—and this is exactly and directly a function of having (almost) no dissociated mechanics, and a design (and tradition) that supports “query the DM’s world-model” style play, backed by rules of varying comprehensiveness but unlimited scope. (If you doubt this last point, try making a list of all published adventure modules from just TSR or WotC, then make a list of all of the fiction genres encompassed by said adventures, and compare this list to the list of fiction genres encompassed by almost any randomly selected… say, twenty… non-“traditional roleplaying game” “TTRPGs”.[2])
You’re claiming TTRPG design and implementation as a topic on which you are quite knowledgeable. Based on what you’ve written here about TTRPG rules, my observation is that you have a narrow view of the field and where other players might be coming from, and you don’t even seem aware of that. From my perspective, you’re confidently describing what birds are like, and you’ve managed to make scope so narrow that not only have you excluded penguins and ostriches, you’ve ruled out chickens, seagulls, and hummingbirds, and I’m starting to think an osprey wouldn’t count.
I understand why you might think this. However, I have seen every single one of your counterarguments before (sometimes nearly verbatim, and certainly including all of the examples of other games which you mentioned[3][4]). I am very well aware of the games you describe, the play styles you describe, and the player preferences you describe.
Please interpret my commentary in light of the above.
- ↩︎
Faceless hate, Book of Vile Darkness.
- ↩︎
It is notable that the most widely acclaimed CRPG in recent memory (at least), with a development budget of many (unclear exactly how many) millions of dollars, when adapting its story from the source material, had to massively scale down the scope of the action.
- ↩︎
Except maybe Agon? That one is pretty new, it seems. I don’t recall if I’ve seen it described or not.
- ↩︎
An incomplete sampling of other games which I have seen mentioned and discussed in previous conversations I have had on such topics, based on a very brief perusal of some such: Technoir, Magical Kitties Save The Day, Lady Blackbird, Ten Candles, Hillfolk, Fiasco, Dogs in the Vineyard, Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, Primetime Adventures, Once Upon A Time, Sorcerer, Nobilis.
Definitely not. I second the complaint.