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This thread is for talking about how Pen and Paper RPGs are put together, how they work, what and why their structures are or should be as they are. What even is an RPG? What is best practice, what is bad practice? How should rules be written, organized, presented? What is good or poor practice in play; are there innovations to discuss, ancient practices to resurrect, avoidable traps to bypass? What kind of play does a particular ruleset encourage? What kinds of rules encourage a particular kind of play? Just a few questions discussed in the previous thread included:
Feel free to re-discuss any of the above, or some other things!
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Mar 26, 2021 23:24
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I guess to bring it over from the other thread, what do people think are GOOD methods for analyzing and criticizing RPGs? Do we have good critical frameworks? What sources would people recommend?
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Mar 26, 2021 23:29
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Here, let's talk about Rules As Written (RAW) and Rules As Intended (RAI)!Arivia posted:No, it's not a good thing, but it's just part of how humans read and interact with language. There's always an innate subjectivity to reading, comprehending, and responding, it's just how communication as a process works. This is why I don't think RAW is good - because the whole idea of the text of the rules having a singular objective meaning is not how we engage with text at all as people. And we can and should strive to be clear and consistently understood, but the techniques we use to make ourselves consistently understood can't be conveniently siloed into "this text solely as printed here without any external reference at all" (RAW) or "this text solely as printed here with the only external reference being the designer as Word of God" (RAI). We need to consider the reader as a respondent, we need to consider different purposes or audiences in the text (is this for players or GMs), etc. RAW/RAI doesn't do that, so it really just makes things worse. I'd like to separate out: A) the use of these terms as a shorthand for a particular sort of critical analysis of games, and B) the use of these terms within the context of a focused discussion or question of a specific rule or ruling within a particular game. For A), I'm 100% in agreement with Arivia's statements here. Scientists and engineers and doctors (i.e., people acting in highly technical capacities where misunderstandings can kill) have powerful motivations for creating documents about mechanisms, structures, processes, and rules that have no ambiguity whatsoever, and will always be interpreted and understood in exactly the same way 100% of the time. Despite centuries of development of technical language in all three areas, they consistently fail to achieve this goal; and the reason is because language itself is merely a model, the use of symbolic shorthand to convey ideas from one brain to another. We acquire language through a mostly informal process of observation (others model and we interpret via context) and collaboration (we interact and use cues to determine if we've succeeded at mutual understanding). Occasionally we may look up a word in a dictionary or otherwise be presented with a formal definition, but even then, that definition is itself composed of additional symbolic representations of ideas, which again we must attempt to glean via mental models and categories and memory and other messy brain stuff; and different sources often differ in exact wording of definitions. Additionally, see: denotative vs. connotative meanings of words. There are arenas where a level of precision can be achieved that is close enough to 100% successful communication that, for practical use, we can treat it as 100%: pure mathematics, for example. Even there, concepts such as "what is a whole number, actually" lean on some philosophical basis, but once we get past the marijuana-infused college teenaged "woah, what if like, 1+1 didn't really equal 2, and we're all just equally confused about that" stage and get to the place where everyone dealing with mathematics at a practical level has a common understanding of the foundational concepts... and also can somehow be certain of no typographical errors... it's reasonable to say that mathematics is a "pure language" within which misunderstandings of intent or idea are rare. (Let's ignore confusion about units, inconsistent notation, and other erosions of this premise, lol.) Computer languages may be another area, where a machine interpreter will either do what you intended to or not; a string of bytes is that string of bytes, everywhere. But as soon as we step beyond a handful of narrowly defined, limited-vocabulary, highly technical languages? Yeah, there's no such thing as perfectly clear writing, ever. There is always some amount of misunderstanding, by which I mean, the idea as it existed within the mind of the originator is not a perfect duplicate of the idea as it exists in the minds of 100% of an audience, having attempted to communicate that idea from the former to the latter via language. In this respect, "rules as written" is a flawed approach to evaluating a rules text. If you are discussing a situation in a roleplaying game, and referring to rules governing that situation, saying "always just use the rules as written" is not helpful, because some nonzero number of readers will not understand those "rules as written" exactly as you do. Even the most simple of rules constructs, such as "roll 1d6" can be deceptively variable in interpretation, or have edge-cases that are not anticipated. "Rules as intended" is even more problematic, in that it attempts to discern exactly what authors intended; there are at least three issues here.
A rules document is a tool, not an authority, at least as far as games are concerned. A good discussion of a game text or parts thereof ought to cleave to that premise. We use the game rules so that we all have a similar understanding of the structures of this game, and therefore can play it together and succeed at our gaming goals. We do not use the game rules because the game rulers are forcing us to follow their laws, or suffer consequences. Therefore, if we cannot agree on RAW, the only reason to resort to RAI is if we regard that intent as being likely to be better for us in achieving our goals, than any other approach, such as by agreeing to a new interpretation or rule ourselves, or discovering a common interpretation made by others and adopting it. In other words, it's an appeal to authority. "What did the author intend with this text" might, I suppose, have some literary-criticism value, if you want to discuss the merits of an author's rulescrafting within the milieu of the art of RPG games... it's certainly been considered a valid question in the art world, albeit a contentious one (see: death of the author, etc.). I rarely or never see that sort of discussion, though. In practice, when used for discussing whole works/games, it's been a way for one person or faction to attack another person or faction's stated interpretation of the text, as if the appeal to authority ought to win the argument. But this takes me to B: focused discussion or question of a specific rule or ruling within a particular game. In this context, a person may ask a question, like "I don't understand this rule" or "it seems vague" or "my player thinks this works one way, I think it works another"; or several players may discover incompatible interpretations among themselves. In any case, a resolution is sought and desirable. We can and often should take it for granted that of course all discussants understand that, at the table, the players can just decide what to do themselves with a custom rule or house rule or adjudicated decision if there is a judge (the referee or GM). Nevertheless, out of a desire to: be compatible with other table's play, adhere to any possible balance decisions made by the author that the players themselves could be unaware-of but still might matter, or simply out of curiosity, players can reasonably discuss: firstly, did I fail to understand what was written, because of a mental slip or oversight on my part? (Rules As Written) and/or secondly, is there clear evidence of authorial intent with regards to this rule, which we might default to, especially if we otherwise have no strong feelings about how best to resolve this question? For example, an FAQ by the publisher/authors, a comparable parallel structure elsewhere in the game which we can use as a model for this situation, an example we missed? I think using the terms RAW/RAI within the context of such a discussion isn't inherently wrong or stupid. Especially if I consider myself still a novice, asking "what is RAW for this situation" and, then, if that answer isn't found or isn't satisfactory, "OK, what's RAI here" is a reasonable way to kick off a discussion with others who have more expertise. Suppose we take as read that this author has made a good game, or has a reputation for making good games; discovering evidence for what they intended may make me feel more secure in bringing that back to my table, in that I can be more confident I'm not going to create problems later by using this interpretation of the rule, now. ...Anyway, that's my feelings on it. No, there's no actual such thing as the Perfect Written Rule, nor ought we to always defer to the author's authority even if we think we can discover the Rule As Intended (and we frequently cannot). It is better to approach a game text as being inherently open to individual interpretation and misunderstanding. Still, yes, "did I understand RAW for this rule incorrectly?" is a legitimate question to ask experts, and shouldn't cop a hostile response. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 00:14 on Mar 27, 2021 |
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Mar 27, 2021 00:05
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For me the difference is pretty plain: is there rule text explicitly covering the issue that led me to look up the rule? Then we are talking about RAW. It's RAW even if readers will interpret it in more than one way (because they will). If there is no rule text explicitly covering the issue that led me to look up the rule, but I can infer what the rule might be from the text either on the subject or from analogous rules, then it's RAI. The need for RAI is a failure of the game. A game rule that says "if you have a situation that needs resolution and it's not otherwise covered, do [resolution mechanism]" is RAW, as would the hypothetical game with a rule "characters can only do the actions written on their character sheet." A game without such text would worse, and require RAI. As far as what's good criticism, this is what I care about : does the game have a coherent theme or themes to explore? How aware of the game's themes, and the heritage of those themes in earlier creative media, is the game's creative team? How inclusive and accessible is the game? Do the rules (RAW!) support the exploration of the game's themes, or do the game's rules support the exploration of other things instead? Are the rules of the game (RAW!) sufficient to resolve the kind of gameplay it purports to be about, or do I have to resort to RAI?
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Mar 27, 2021 02:01
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I have been fed a healthy diet of "tableside refereeing" rather than following the letter of the law of the golden texts. This was the norm in the groups I played in and RAW or RAI didn't really enter lexical favor until around the D&D 3.5 era for our groups. We came up with stuff all the time and didn't particularly question if it was "in the rules" because the game was really more of a social construct for telling specific stories rather than attempting to do a very specific and rigorous simulation like a scientist. This is also why I tend to get somewhat confused when someone struggle with rules like in other threads - you can just change the rules to suit your table, and that's an implicit expectation of tabletop RPGs, at least, all RPGs that I have looked at and ran. 5th edition D&D is a good example - while Tasha's Cauldron explicitly goes out of its way to spend word count reminding people they should tailor the game to what works best for their specific tables, the wide amount of people have instead opted to complain about the mechanics which don't work in general for all tables. That text was also in the DMG for that edition of D&D, but having it so succinctly said that "do what works best for your table" is not useful for attempting to act on a specific game scenario at a specific game table. That also tends to be why I find the most tried and true advice to provide to people when asking about situational table-specific things like ruling is: talk to the table about it, because it's okay to discuss things in a meta-game format if you're trying to tell a collaborative story. The more you try to follow rules rigorously the more you end up with something that very much starts to approximate a boardgame, where following the rules is really paramount because there is no referee for the boardgame (maybe someone who owns it). Some boardgames might have someone in an adversarial role, but it's still not quite the same as getting people together for a tabletop RPG, which is collaborative by design instead of truly adversarial. I also think that when attempting to interpret the intent of a rule to understand the surrounding context because cherry-picking rules in a wider system of other rules has certain problems with interpretation, such as calculating line of sight and so on. Also, the phase of 'the rules say ABC, we interpret it as X, but find out later that it was actually Y instead' means that a table regularly will end up accidentally breaking the rules. By strictly going off of RAW, there isn't an enforcement of the simulation breaking down, nor would a group suddenly roll progress back to correct the rules discrepancy. A game does not fall apart because of odd rules interpretations, even if they run counter to authorial intent. There's also the idea that RAW is gospel and immutable, but this also dutifully ignores errata...Also, hi thread!
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Mar 27, 2021 02:32
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Also on the RAW/RAI debate, having binary interpretation causes a certain amount of shoeboxed thinking since taking a rule as written is an implicit understanding that those rules at some point were thought up enough to be entered into a text vs "this is what I think the author meant"; but adding a nonbinary outcome to a rules argument is already a headache in and of itself because when you attempt to have that conversation in a wider community, you ostracize yourself by saying "this is what has worked for me, and it may not be the rule as written or as intended, but my player group finds that this is acceptable and enjoyable". I'm projecting a bit, of course, but it's not a unique experience when someone attempts to come up with a nonbinary interpretation of elfgame texts because people want to have an absolute final word on a specific thing and it's gotta be their word -- for some, to go against that may be tantamount to a personal attack, and then discussions get real muddy and angry. I had written some framework in terms of analyzing specific rules and then proposing changes similar to systematic troubleshooting thinking and breaking apart components for further analysis in rigorous study. I don't know if that's what Arivia is looking for specifically in their question of "is there an accepted general framework for discussion or critical analysis", but it's a start and I'd be happy to share what that might look like in this thread.
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Mar 27, 2021 02:55
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Yeah I think part of the deal with "RAW" is when different people honestly disagree about what a given rule actually is, as written. In other words: does this text mean X, or does it mean Y? This can be the "fault" of an author (or a company style) if they were especially or unusually or unnecessarily vague; this can be the "fault" of a reader, who missed a word, or misapplied some other governing principle, or remembered wrong. But, in my ridiculous essay, I hope I made it clear that even a "good" author of rules, combined with a conscientious "accurate" reading of a rule, will still not result in 100% agreement across all cases of what a rule was (how it worked, how to apply it, its result, etc.) Examples may prove fruitful here. As a technical writer it is painful for me to intentionally write ambiguous rules, but perhaps I'm well positioned to do so. It is also hard to write a useful isolated brief example outside of the context of a specific game, but I'll try. an example I made up posted:Characters should rest daily, and will suffer a penalty that becomes more severe for every day of missed rest. Unless they have a racial traits that says otherwise, all characters need at least six hours of rest per night. OK, so, this is a "natural language" rule, with no numbers in it. It seems like a reasonable thing to say. It's also immediately ambiguous in several respects:
To try and figure out this poorly written rule, a person might say "well, for that first point, RAW, it says "per night" and that second rest happened from 6 to midnight, and it's "night" for at least part of that second rest, so that means no penalties the following day" while another person might disagree, saying "well actually it says 'every day of missed rest' in the first sentence and so on that second day, they don't count as having rested at all that day so they take penalties" and now we have a fight about what exactly is RAW. Whereas then another interlocutor might object to all this nonsense and say "well clearly, RAI are that you should sleep every night or take penalties, and the GM is being a jackass if they don't let you sleep basically any time roughly corresponding to the time you last slept yesterday, plus or minus some reasonable amount: it's obvious the rules are intended to be flexible or they'd have made them more solid. If you apply this too strictly, you're unbalancing the game with all these penalties." Now, a fourth person might say "you're all being silly, it can't really matter all that much which interpretation you use, as long as everyone at your table understands and is on the same page; who cares what the author intended, who cares what the rule actually says "RAW", just do something that suits your game." I find that last bit to be fairly convincing in isolation. At the very least, it's a practical answer that avoids a lengthy discussion. If you find you have to do this for a hundred different rules in a single published game book, though, there's a good argument to be made that this implies bad things about the quality of this ruleset: why couldn't the authors have just written clearer rules, and relieved the players from the burden of making a ton of house rules? And, if someone plays at one table, where one set of 100x different house rules apply, but then goes to play "the same game" at another table, now their expectations about a bunch of those rules are no longer solid, and they may have to learn up to 100 new house rules just to know what the rules of this game are. This is not good! Portability of game from one table to the next is generally desirable? And I'm pretty sympathetic to that viewpoint as well. In terms of comparing relative quality of games, if one game requires tons of houseruling and another doesn't, that's IMO a point in the latter's favor. So, to put all that together:
Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 03:35 on Mar 27, 2021 |
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Mar 27, 2021 03:27
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I don't think anybody's said anything, here or in the previous discussion, about whether you are somehow obligated to follow the rules as written. If you want to play basketball such that the adults score 1 point per basket and the kids score 3 because that's what works really well for your family then by all means do that. It's not weird to have houserules or other adjustments that everyone at the table agrees to.aldantefax posted:We came up with stuff all the time and didn't particularly question if it was "in the rules" because the game was really more of a social construct for telling specific stories rather than attempting to do a very specific and rigorous simulation like a scientist. This is a little weird though. Yes, you could play Polaris except your group has added THAC0, MERP's critical fumble tables, and GURPS point-buy character creation because that's your gaming group's social construct for telling a specific story, but following the RAW is not "attempting to do a very specific and rigorous simulation like a scientist." I reject completely your suggestion that RPGs with too many rules become boardgames. Even in the most robust and thorough refereed RPG, the referee is always called upon to know the rules, enforce the rules, decide edge cases, and author some non-player components of the world. Kyle Cease, turning the Ship of Theseus into a joke posted:I hate people at Halloween they don’t carve their pumpkin out, they’ll just like paint a face on it; you know what I’m talking about? But some people won’t even do that, they’ll paint a face, but it won’t even be on a pumpkin, it’ll be like on a piece of paper. But some people won’t even do that, they’ll take like a bunch of words and put that on a piece of paper, and it’ll be like an essay on Ben Franklin or some poo poo, you know? And then they’ll hand it in at school and it won’t even be Halloween! It’s like, pffft, nice jack-o-lantern, jackass.
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Mar 27, 2021 03:50
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RAW or RAI interpretation itself does not equate to the quality of a ruleset thereof. A rule could be featured in multiple rulesets with the same interpretation, such as hit points or armor class handling, but if we're ascribing a general value to the worth of rules in context or in a vacuum, I feel like this is where you end up in circular arguments where people start internalizing responses as character attacks rather than a cross-examination of rules and their structures. I generally agree with the observations in summary. Part of the 'philosophy' part of the old thread was that of all things, tabletop games hold a special place in people's hearts precisely because they are malleable, but the tone, phrasing, and intent of rules in the presented game text may make one think otherwise. A unified standard for actually talking about game philosophy and design could potentially prove useful and it was thought about in brief in the previous thread, but then you end up in a separate ball of yarn which is attempting to ascribe a taxonomy whereby someone will join a discussion guns blazing without conforming to that specific standard. For example, having a statement of value judgement if rules that are historically controversial are "bad" or "good". What is "bad"? Is it universally "bad"? If so, why was it there in the first place? And, if it is bad, how may it be changed to be better? What can be learned from such a thing? There are many examples of what might be considered bad but only to a select group of people because of a very specific definition of the idea construct. This also assumes that it treats the idea as rigid and unmalleable - because the rules are designed thus, and a given thing in the context of that rules which is unchangeable is such, and given a comparative analysis of all the other things that other people consider to be "good", it is so less "good" then it is "bad". I think it may be important when talking about taxonomy to leave summary value judgement of a rule being absolutely good or bad as a core agreement may help in further understanding the design aspects and mechanics of the rule itself and how it looks when socketed into all the other componentry it ought to be. I can also talk about how I compartmentalize rules when house ruling since I found that to be useful in my musings on megadungeons in the other thread, but I will need some time to compile those thoughts since it might be useful for doing this kind of taxonomy for rules categorization and understanding. Or, not, I guess we can talk about some of the more loaded topics in the OP
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Mar 27, 2021 03:59
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If the context of the discussion is: first, "hey we found this rule confusing" and the answer one poster gives is "well nevermind RAW or even RAI, we houseruled it and this was our houserule and it was p. cool we loved it at our table" or "hey maybe just houserule it instead of worrying too much, here's a suggestion for something you can do" Reasonable responses to that might be anything from "hey that's great, maybe we'll do that" or "well that's nice but we want to figure out what this rule actually says or means so we'll maintain game compatibility or at least all understand how the game is normally played" or maybe there's other ways to react. But a really unnecessary and pointlessly hostile response would be "oh god there you go again, why can't you just accept this game is bad and you should feel bad for playing it, instead of endlessly making excuses for it? Also you're not even playing this game any more, you've houseruled it so much." Maybe that last post scores you some points in the contest to see who "just gets it" with regards to Good Game Design Principles or whatever, but if the context of the discussion is just figuring out to do with rule 137.5, all you're doing is attacking someone for their honest attempt at being helpful. If I may be somewhat presumptuous, I think this context is informing some of what Fax is saying, given it's played out like that recently in one or two threads. Anyway, homullus posted:For me the difference is pretty plain: is there rule text explicitly covering the issue that led me to look up the rule? Then we are talking about RAW. It's RAW even if readers will interpret it in more than one way (because they will). If there is no rule text explicitly covering the issue that led me to look up the rule, but I can infer what the rule might be from the text either on the subject or from analogous rules, then it's RAI. That is a split for RAW/RAI that I have not come across before, and may be a source of the confusion about the terms? If a game doesn't cover a situation at all, how can there be an "intended" rule? It sounds like a clear oversight. We wrote rules for combat, and our game setting is one in which flight would seem to fit (say, "modern earth"), but we didn't write rules for aerial combat: so, there are no rules for aerial combat, intended or written. You're on your own there! I can see cases where a "intended" approach could make sense: there's rules for weapon reach, we gave reach statistics for all the weapons, and weapons with "no reach" like fists or knuckle dusters exist; but a supplement introduced a new kind of spear and forgot to include its reach. Clearly it is not "intended" that this spear therefore has no reach and should be treated like brass knuckles: so, using a "RAI" approach, players would be justified in applying the reach statistic from an average spear in the core book. In a discussion about this case, people might refer to RAW vs. RAI... but perhaps it's a good point, already made, that neither approach has special value over another, especially compared to utility: just decide how much reach that spear has and move on, who cares if you can justify it by reference to some other intended rule or not? Specifically, if people are disagreeing on how much reach the spear should have, neither party should rhetorically claim victory based on appeals to RAW or RAI. That's nonsense. The shared goals ought to be things like, what works best in the game, what's balanced, what's more fun, what's fast or easy or simple or integrates well with other rules of the game? And why do we have to have a winner and a loser in this conversation about playing games?
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Mar 27, 2021 04:17
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homullus posted:For me the difference is pretty plain: is there rule text explicitly covering the issue that led me to look up the rule? Then we are talking about RAW. It's RAW even if readers will interpret it in more than one way (because they will). If there is no rule text explicitly covering the issue that led me to look up the rule, but I can infer what the rule might be from the text either on the subject or from analogous rules, then it's RAI. The need for RAI is a failure of the game. A game rule that says "if you have a situation that needs resolution and it's not otherwise covered, do [resolution mechanism]" is RAW, as would the hypothetical game with a rule "characters can only do the actions written on their character sheet." A game without such text would worse, and require RAI. Leperflesh posted:That is a split for RAW/RAI that I have not come across before, and may be a source of the confusion about the terms? If a game doesn't cover a situation at all, how can there be an "intended" rule? It sounds like a clear oversight. We wrote rules for combat, and our game setting is one in which flight would seem to fit (say, "modern earth"), but we didn't write rules for aerial combat: so, there are no rules for aerial combat, intended or written. You're on your own there! I think what homullus was trying to get at isn't quite that broad in scope, for example: Where the game includes unarmed combat, and There is a rule about punching people, headbutting people, elbowing people, and kneeing people, but there is not a rule about kicking people, then We can infer (or interpret if you prefer) that kicking people is something that should be included in RAW but wasn't, and also that we have enough contextual clues ("kicking" should be to "kneeing" what "punching" is to "elbowing") to come up with RAI to fill the gap in RAW. And also that this could only possibly count as a flaw in the game - that is, that it'd be disingenuous to say "this is not a game about kicking". The IRL example that springs to mind is TMNT And Other Strangeness, where the combat rules were lifted from other palladium games but didn't include all the rules they referenced, so you'd run up against actual gaps where after some thought and comparison with other rules, you could figure out what should be there, sort of. And I get that that's not the usual meaning of RAI, but it's so close to "it's obvious that they didn't mean that a spear has no reach" that I don't know how else you'd describe it. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 05:02 on Mar 27, 2021 |
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Mar 27, 2021 04:59
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At least personally and the way the people I've played with used the term RAW was mostly "as close as we can get to figuring out what the rules literally mean", which on multiple occasions was "we're not gonna try to claim what RAW is here because it's ambiguous enough no one can agree", while RAI was typically brought out when we either knew what the person who wrote the rules said they'd meant (typically because they'd made a typo or misunderstood how a core game rule worked, which was fairly common in Pathfinder freelancers) or when we felt what we had decided was RAW was sufficiently dumb enough that it couldn't have been intended (to use an example that got brought up recently, a weapon enchantment in 3.5 that is legal to put on a ranged weapon but lacks the standard text that it bestows its property on the ammunition, making it entirely pointless). In that last instance it was less "what did the authors intend?" and more "what's a sensible way to handle this?"
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Mar 27, 2021 05:13
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Usually my process for understanding how a specific rule happens in actual play goes through some specific process: - First, is the rule needed and nobody knows anything about it, or has a plausible enough recalling of it (whether or not it's accurate): this is for expediency as rule referencing tableside is cumbersome in all aspects and stops the flow of play - Second, what does the text of the rule say: This is seeing the rule as written but not executing on necessarily the letter - Third, group interpretation: If it is not a succinct self-explanatory rule, then turn it to the table to understand. Rather than "Rule as Author Intended", it's "Rules, As Interpreted by Players" - Fourth, judgement: If we haven't arrived at some kind of agreement at this point, GM has the final say on the outcome of the rule and it can be cross-referenced in the future for challenges after the game session - Fifth, challenge: If there is an unclear ruling or outcome, all previous judgements still stand, but seek to understand the rule moving forward in case it comes up again. Pulling in external resources for RAW/RAI is typically at this step, but it does not attempt to retroactively fix something unless there was a gross error that impacts the game in a big way. Using this process typically by the time a given rules dispute gets to the fifth step we all have cards on the table about a given topic and it does not disrupt the flow of the game tableside. However, in the greater sphere of philosophical discussion where we're leaning back and talking on the forums, you only see the fifth part, and in explaining parts one through four, you expose yourself as someone who engages in the rules in a way that prioritizes expediency rather than accuracy. New GMs may be very uncertain of their own rules workflow because a lot of games bury the texts about conflict resolution usually in a paragraph somewhere and do so somewhat dismissively ("Just figure it out, you're all in it to have fun!") but in terms of more rigorous arbitration the major grievances people bring to wider discussion like the forums has to do less with tableside usage and more of an intrinsic failing of the system. Get a load of this guy playing a non-optimal character, or playing a fully optimized character, or whatever, the rules are the ones to blame for the behavior. Ultimately any given rule is designed to make a game work in a certain way, since in absence it's just playing pretend or what have you. Since the general conceit of RAW/RAI is that both have their usages but neither are absolutes, then really I would just encourage people to stop relying on solely them as points of discussion that trend invariably into people "taking a side" like that's a moral imperative. Taking a rule in a vacuum is also sometimes a consequence of hyperfocusing on specific things. Games featuring character classes will likely have complex balancing nuances that cause a specific class to have distinctive strengths and weaknesses. Acknowledging those items and then working through them in the context of the game system is part of what defines the archetype of that class, moreso when you ascribe optimization to the class and their statlines. Ergo, there are no 5e D&D Barbarians who are outstandingly fast, smart, or charismatic; unless you want to play sub-optimally (which, while acceptable socially, can rapidly skew game balance when using published modules), if you isolate this and say 'barbarians have weak stats in X Y Z -- thus, they are bad' in making a value judgement, those kinds of conversations have careened off a cliff.
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Mar 27, 2021 06:09
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That's part of what I see as the divide between RAW and RAI. Rule as written is the rule as presented in the material. Rule as intended is that text filtered through the wider knowledge of how that rule fits into the overall system of the game, and what you can infer about how it should work based on other parts of that system. Shadowrun 6e is a good example. There are several parts of the system as written that refer to mechanical systems that are flatly not present in the rulebook. As written, there's no context to determine what the rule is supposed to do. Those familiar with the prior edition can see where the text is actually referring to mechanics from those editions (as it was brought over verbatim and the line editor is a useless hack who can't proof his way out of a tweet), and infer how it was intended to work. There is no way to make that inference from within the text itself.
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Mar 27, 2021 06:48
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Arivia posted:I guess to bring it over from the other thread, what do people think are GOOD methods for analyzing and criticizing RPGs? Do we have good critical frameworks? What sources would people recommend? Rules density per game modality. To put it another way: the page count dedicated to mechanics around a particular aspect of a game tells you far more about the game than anything it claims about itself. By this metric, most recent editions of D&D and derivatives are not about three pillars, or even about combat - they are about combat spell casting.
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Mar 27, 2021 06:53
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So I have a question: what are the general thoughts on deliberate rules ambiguity as a game design concept? I've seen a lot of discussion here in just the few posts there have been about accidental ambiguity, but what about a theoretical game where that ambiguity about how precisely the rules are meant to work (beyond, perhaps, the very basic mechanical concepts underpinning the game) is a feature, not a bug?
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Mar 27, 2021 06:55
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FrozenGoldfishGod posted:So I have a question: what are the general thoughts on deliberate rules ambiguity as a game design concept? I've seen a lot of discussion here in just the few posts there have been about accidental ambiguity, but what about a theoretical game where that ambiguity about how precisely the rules are meant to work (beyond, perhaps, the very basic mechanical concepts underpinning the game) is a feature, not a bug? As in, "the ambiguity of a subset of the rules is a core gameplay function"? I love the idea, I don't see how you'd execute it, but if you can do it you will be taking my money. As in "Uh, it's like that on purpose, Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 08:25 on Mar 27, 2021 |
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Mar 27, 2021 08:21
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Well, I did earlier say:Leperflesh posted:
...but I'll modify that. Written works are often intended and/or taken as works of art; and art need not be functional to have value. On that basis, if an artist chooses as their medium "written work resembling a roleplaying game" and then adopts a stylistic approach that is intentionally vague, I can buy that it's valid*; and moreover, as a performative or social art practice, it might even be interesting (intentionally transgressive artwork can be "interesting" to some audiences) to market and sell such a thing to people as if it were a perfectly "normal" game (if there is such a thing). However: I suspect more frequently, what is going on is an author is adopting stylistic choices intended to convey a theme, and the imperative of faithfulness to those stylistic choices is chosen as paramount over the imperative of telling people how to play the game. Intentionally or otherwise, the author undermines the playability of a game in service to presentation that they hope to better convey: feeling, an exotic or alien sensation, a conceit of having been translated from a magical or exotic place imperfectly into our modern language, an (actual or pseudo-) archaic linguistic form to evoke ye olden times, or somesuch. I would be interested in examples of the former. For the latter, I've heard extensive negative feedback of a few examples, the names of which tend to escape me as I do not own any that clearly fall there. I am not at all convinced that for the second case, the writers have made a wise choice, although it might be a marketable one. I have said very recently in another thread that the first priority of a commercial game's sale is to the primary reader, which tends to be a GM for all GMed games: it is therefore appropriate to include material purely for the enjoyment of the GM if one wants to sell more books. It may be that writing your entire rules manual in Wizard Piratese actually results in more sold copies of Wizard Pirates than if it was written in completely plain modern English? I cannot say for certain without some kind of controlled experiment, the design of which is beyond me. But, I can say with a fair degree of confidence that the idea one must choose between evocative language as an artistic expression, and clearly-written game rules, is horseshit. The proof is as near at hand as any number of extremely well-written game products that simultaneously include clearly written rules, and evocative art, flavor, design, style, etc. Doing both may be beyond some particular author or another, which is fair... we can say "well, Susan can't manage to do both, but her books are so lovely and inspiring I'll buy them anyway, they're worth the money" and OK, cool, I won't begrudge anyone such vanitites as recreational nonplayed RPGs on their shelves. But if we are going to actually play a game, surely some burden lies upon the game designer to sell us a game that can be reasonably played, and we can fault them if they clearly fail to do that, right? There is another aspect you might mean? It may be an intentional aspect of a game, that players are supposed to be somewhat confused by a game, flailing around a bit, unsure of how things work? If you made a game with a theme of "people feeling disoriented and unsure," using the disorienting, confusing experience of not really knowing how the rules work or what they are, could I guess help to convey that feeling. But I'm pretty skeptical that this is sustainable. I'd love to see an example of this, too. *"Validity" is an old argument in the art world. The principles are argued in the classrooms of art schools routinely. I'm superficially familiar with some of them. "Is this art valid" is the kind of question that marks you as a neophyte in the art world, anymore, I think. I typed two paragraphs about it and then deleted it because gently caress it, we really probably do not want to delve into that, at all. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 08:35 on Mar 27, 2021 |
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Mar 27, 2021 08:22
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Leperflesh posted:There is another aspect you might mean? It may be an intentional aspect of a game, that players are supposed to be somewhat confused by a game, flailing around a bit, unsure of how things work? If you made a game with a theme of "people feeling disoriented and unsure," using the disorienting, confusing experience of not really knowing how the rules work or what they are, could I guess help to convey that feeling. But I'm pretty skeptical that this is sustainable. I'd love to see an example of this, too. Paranoia sounds like an example of this. Perhaps it's not well enough executed to be obviously intentional, but the impression I got from the versions I read was that players are specifically not supposed to know the rules (either of the game, or of the setting) until told by the GM / Computer, and are to be penalised for questioning the rules in or out of character.
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Mar 27, 2021 08:30
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Paranoia sounds like an example of this. Perhaps it's not well enough executed to be obviously intentional, but the impression (interpretation lol) I got from the versions I read was that players are specifically not supposed to know the rules (of the game, or of the setting) and are heavily penalised for questioning the rules in or out of character. This example was in my head; the players are told in the Red section of the book that they are not allowed to read any of the rest of the rules. However, this is a humorous conceit: they're supposed to surreptitiously read the rules anyway, and then never admit that they have, but probably demonstrate that they have at some point due to sheer incompetence, which will obviously lead to their execution for breaking the rules. That exactly parallels the character experience in Alpha Complex, so it's thematic! However, the rules for Paranoia - at least the original and XP editions I read - are pretty solid, well-written, and clear. So it's not so much an example of rules ambiguity, but rather, an example of rules asymmetry: much like how the PCs in a game of dungeons and dragons don't need to know (perhaps should not know) exactly what this next monster can do, at least until it's revealed in play, and even then, perhaps they don't know the mechanics... the GM rolls behind the screen and describes effects, damage, etc., but you may still not be able to exactly infer the text of the monster's statblock or abilities. I don't think Frozen was asking about rules asymmetry, although that's an interesting topic for the thread!
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Mar 27, 2021 08:34
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I think it's deeper than just "asymmetry" with Paranoia, but I'm only really familiar with XP, I don't know if it's different in other editions. The central conceit is not "haha, the players are punished for demonstrating that they know the rules", it's that the players actually can't know whether the rules are currently in play or not, because the very first GM rule is "the rules are only for when you don't already know what you want to happen", which is what drives most of the confused uneasiness of the game. "They're punished for asking or even visibly wondering about the rules" supplements that, but they're separate things. I can't think of a term for that. It's definitely not rules ambiguity as you've described it, but it's different from asymmetry in that it's neither about players not knowing what the rules are, nor about players and GM following different rules. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 09:21 on Mar 27, 2021 |
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Mar 27, 2021 09:18
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:As in, "the ambiguity of a subset of the rules is a core gameplay function"? I love the idea, I don't see how you'd execute it, but if you can do it you will be taking my money. To be fair, that IS what initially got me thinking about it. Though it would be less after-the-fact than that, and more built into the core design from the ground up.
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Mar 27, 2021 12:33
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As a GM I generally feel that ambiguous rules are just tasking me with doing the game design the author couldn't be bothered with. Ambiguity in a setting is wonderful, but the mechanics should be clear and unambiguous so that working around the holes doesn't consume play.
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Mar 27, 2021 14:25
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Kevin Crawford writes in character for the majority to entirety of Wolves of God, which is treated as an apocryphal translated text of a monk from the Middle Ages. The authorial perspective and voice there talks mad poo poo about everybody who isn’t a Briton but still goes on to clearly discuss the rules in each passage and chapter while still adding a measure of artistic flair to the text. There are other such games which have callout boxes that attempt to clarify authorial intent; or, as you get into supplements that are meant for a wider variety of audiences instead of it being a self-contained game (ie. a module) then you can get highly prosaic. In OSR land, Patrick Stuart is a good example with Fire on the Velvet Horizon and Veins of the Earth, but they are not written from the perspective of someone living in the world. For more on this theme, other OSR modules tend to do this (and published supplementary content as well). Hot Springs Island has a game master reference manual but also a player facing one that is actually fully in character that allows for players to look through and assess elements of the game world as a real world artifact like a lost journal. Shadowrun has things like Mr. Johnson’s Black Book and Dunkelzahn’s Last Will; older editions of Shadowrun tended to have books that had fiction added in to clarify rules in greater detail. I guess that’s not unique to Shadowrun but thinking of goofy BBS entries that are posted in line with the game text, which in itself was considered “in universe” is an interesting approach to it. I think when we’re talking about intentional vagueness it will be good to describe taxonomy for rules, because while rules are rules, there are optional rules, non-rules, house-rules, and so on. When determining what things require table-side judgement versus clarity in a game text, making sure there is a system to categorize rules and their type is clear. I typically refer to game systems as ‘rule engines’ during this kind of analysis. As in, it serves a vehicle to provide storytelling tools and makes the game itself run. There are components that make the engine work or make that engine make sense, but other parts are there for aesthetic purposes. When thinking about ‘acceptable vagueness’, the core rules that actually make the engine run and the connector rules that glue the core rules into a cohesive system should be carefully considered and likely left as clear as possible for an actual usable game. Aesthetic rules, though, can be plenty vague or leave blanks for tables to fill in to better suit their needs. To contextualize, you can take something like random dungeon generation from AD&D 1e. While there are rules for random dungeon generation, it does not make any specific concessions to make the random results cohesive; you could get a 10x10 room with a dragon or ooze or something that’s bigger than the room. The rules themselves probably say somewhere to just reroll that encounter placement, but some GMs chose instead to put a monster in that room larger than the room’s capacity as a novel encounter - the monster spills out into other rooms, weird space, what have you. There are other games out there which have rules and are generally interpetive and playable but prioritize aesthetic over playability, even if they’re not mutually exclusive. However, it does feel historically games were more obtuse about rules presentation from the earlier decades as they were closer to technical manuals in nature or reference material, and as we get closer to the present, you end up with games and rules that are more prosaic and themselves works of art but strive towards clarity. For other examples of rules presentations that do have evocative prose and imagery associated with them, I would recommend to look at LANCER RPG - all of the rules that are contained in there are flavorful and chunky and relevant to the setting for mech combat. In narrative play (which copies Shadow of the Demon Lord) the rules are very sparse by comparison and are left wide open intentionally for handling any number of situations. Any skill can be used in any situation, but it’s up to the table to decide how that skill is used, and so on.
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Mar 27, 2021 15:05
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I was nodding along and agreeing until you said old D&D reads like a technical manual. Have you read either? 1e D&D reads like something out of the first part of Canticle for Leibowitz.
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Mar 27, 2021 15:45
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Xiahou Dun posted:I was nodding along and agreeing until you said old D&D reads like a technical manual. Have you read either? 1e D&D reads like something out of the first part of Canticle for Leibowitz. AD&D Player's Manual posted:Assassins are evil in alignment (perforce, as the killing of humans and other intelligent life for the purpose of profit is basically held to be the antithesis of weal). on an unrelated note, ahahahahahahahahahahaha he typed that last bit with a straight face in the dungeon's and dragon's player handbook.
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Mar 27, 2021 15:56
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FrozenGoldfishGod posted:So I have a question: what are the general thoughts on deliberate rules ambiguity as a game design concept? I've seen a lot of discussion here in just the few posts there have been about accidental ambiguity, but what about a theoretical game where that ambiguity about how precisely the rules are meant to work (beyond, perhaps, the very basic mechanical concepts underpinning the game) is a feature, not a bug? Comedy serious answer: oh, you haven't heard of Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist? (CAUTION: contains a substance known to be Jenna Moran by the state of California.) Serious comedy answer: yes, it's called D&D 5E. A sprawling, confusing, and contradictory ruleset means people are constantly asking questions and arguing about rules on the Internet. This increases the game's online presence, which is good for sales.
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Mar 27, 2021 16:19
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Glazius posted:Comedy serious answer: oh, you haven't heard of Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist? (CAUTION: contains a substance known to be Jenna Moran by the state of California.) I've had some discussion on Discord as to whether or not WTF is a disguised work of RPG theory (or a satire of it) or not, and I'd be interested in others' views on that topic. But looking at it, I tend to refer to RAW vs RAI when there seems to be a conflict between a written rule and the sense of the environment. I'll give some concrete game examples: In Pathfinder 2e, there's a spell Animus Mine. If someone has an Animus Mine, then anyone who "uses a Mental effect against.." them triggers it and takes mental damage instead. The meaning of that is clear enough. The conflict is that Mental is a formally defined effect tag, and "mental effects" include just mundanely persuading or lying to them, since it's used to indicate any effect which requires the target to have a mind as opposed to being a golem/object/etc. On the one hand, the magical nature of Animus Mine suggests that it is intended to trigger on someone making magical contact with the target's mind, not on just talking to them. On the other hand, the concept of a spell which explode people's heads if they talk to someone with any self-interested intent other than just chatting is an interesting one to consider experimenting with. Going further, it could be argued that nothing in the wider setting allows for the effects this would have on politics and similar, but that kind of mistake is all over the Pathfinder setting, so it's not clear to go with. Or the previous example. Rather than naming the specific feat, it's a general comment: does the existence of a feat related to something indicate that it cannot be done by someone without that feat? One thing that's notably about this is that as a beginner's RPG guide, Pathfinder 2e is appallingly written. The text on feats reads that "Some feats grant the ability to use special actions.", and the section on Game Mastering states how to resolve actions, but at no point does it actually say that you cannot do anything that is not a documented action except in combat. Outside combat the only comment is "...the acting character (or characters) will be asked to attempt a check to determine whether or not they succeed...." but there is no statement of the relationship between a check and an action. And it's interesting that it was considered that Pathfinder 2e's default should be "if a feat exists, you can't take that action unless you have it" because certain PbtA games have exactly the same problem and nobody would think of those that way. (I later found out that it's only badly written PbtA games that have that problem, as the actual AW is careful to make sure that all playbook specific moves are either obviously exceptional or supernatural or only improve other, universal actions.) And it's not unique to RPGs. In Block Mania, the Judge Dredd-themed board/wargame, the rules state that you "can trace line of sight to, but not through, an Interior square". This means that if you are shooting into a block from the outside, you can only target the first square inside the block. But does it also mean that if you are inside the block, you can only fire at targets 1 square away, because that will be an Interior square and you can't trace through it? There's enough arguments that "it's just a mistake, of course you can fire down a corridor of a building you're in" vs "it isn't a corridor, the inside of a Judge Dredd block is a hive-like mass residence so there's no long lines of sight" and no answer from the author (who is now in an old folks' home). So here, RAW is actually the one invoking an argument related to the setting. So RAW and RAI are both subjective, but they're treating subjectivity in different ways and that subjectivity may be shared with others or not. hyphz fucked around with this message at 18:25 on Mar 27, 2021 |
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Mar 27, 2021 18:23
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A text that does not, within itself, contain a guide for understanding that text is not a great text imho
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Mar 27, 2021 21:59
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A decent principle to live by, but I'd say there's exceptions. At the extreme: the Voynich Manuscript is IMO an incredible piece of art, and it's completely incomprehensible, almost definitely by design. (I've seen suggestions the creator was mentally ill or something but I don't believe that.) Of course, as far as we know, the creator of the Voynich manuscript didn't tell people it was a playable game and then make them pay for it, but you take my point. I think there's room for artistic choices that include making things difficult for the reader. Going back to the principle to live by, though: it seems clear that most cases of difficult-to-understand rules weren't intentional... at least, it seems that usually the authors didn't realize they were making their rules difficult to understand when they did whatever else they were doing at the time. That boils down to some combination of poor writing skill, lack of budget (to afford testing & editing), or unwise style choices.
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Mar 28, 2021 07:40
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Also worth bearing in mind that there are games out there that, for whatever reason, come alive only in play, and no amount of explanation by text seems sufficient to make people understand them. Jenna Moran's games are the most obvious example, and it's not her writing style that's at fault there: literally hundreds of pages of forum posts by non-Jennas on RPGnet and elsewhere fail to make games like Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine click for most people, but it's common to see posts like, "We started playing and it all just worked and made perfect sense." Ironsworn was similar for me: it seemed not just unlikely but actually impossible that the rules as written plus its tables of inspiration-prompting Oracles could provide an experience so close to actually playing one-on-one with a GM, but it absolutely does, and it's frankly spooky how well it works. RPGs are a strange medium, because so much of the experience of actual play emerges from the imagination of the people at the table, and the text has to leave deliberate, well-engineered gaps for that. Sometimes that seems to result in a game where the text is not, and very possibly cannot be sufficient to explain how all the mechanisms turn together to create narrative, like reading a novel with all the adjectives removed. FrozenGoldfishGod posted:So I have a question: what are the general thoughts on deliberate rules ambiguity as a game design concept? I've seen a lot of discussion here in just the few posts there have been about accidental ambiguity, but what about a theoretical game where that ambiguity about how precisely the rules are meant to work (beyond, perhaps, the very basic mechanical concepts underpinning the game) is a feature, not a bug? If it was well-designed, I'd play the hell out of it just to see what happened. You'd want to tailor the ambiguous gaps veeeeery carefully, maybe in a way that escalates: play begins with clearly defined rules throughout the first chapter(s) that you're allowed to read and use, except for one important thing that is deliberately ambiguous. As play proceeds ambiguity increases with each chapter or set of mechanics that are unlocked. Sort of a The Wizard's Grimoire thing.
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Mar 28, 2021 18:36
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I've deliberately left rules ambiguous or unspecified in stuff I've written. Not because I like forcing the DM to paper over holes in the text, but because I wanted to avoid loading the game up with special cases and exceptions that make things hard to remember for everyone. I'm thinking about my experiences with Pathfinder, and how having clear rules for each use-case resulted in very complicated situations: Me, Playing Pathfinder posted:Okay, I'm in trouble here. I need to drink a potion. But I'm within 5 feet of the guy, so if I pull it out and drink it, that'll provoke an AOO. So I need to 5 foot away. But I'm also prone, so I can't 5 foot, so I have to stand up first. But doing that might ALSO provoke. And to be perfectly honest, I also don't remember which combination of standing up, 5 footing away, pulling out the potion and drinking it I can actually do in a single turn What's funny is that, if I remember correctly, Pathfinder's Combat Maneuver Defense system was itself designed to provide a unified resolution mechanic to the endless special cases and exceptions in 3.5 for grappling, tripping, shoving, etc.
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Mar 28, 2021 20:43
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Shifting this from industry thread as requested:Arivia posted:That may be your interpretation, but the thousands of endless arguments it has spawned over the years on the internet are overwhelmingly in my experience "RAW is that only the written words mean anything and nothing else is valid at all." RAW is ultimately a useful concept because if we are discussing the design of a particular game we all have our own personal interpretations, but the only concrete thing available to us - the only thing which will not vary regardless of who is posting on the topic - is what the actual book says. We can't reasonably have a conversation about the initiative rules in D&D&P&X&Q 7.8th edition independently of the text of the rules as written. We don't have to agree with what's written down - we can even come to the conclusion that it was an outright mistake, that whoever designed the initiative rules didn't really understand the rest of the system and combat is completely broken! - but we can't come to that sort of conclusion without looking at the actual text, and I think it's fair to say that if a game is, RAW, contradictory or broken or just less fun than if you apply a particular patch to it, then that's a flaw of the game - maybe not a flaw of the game as the community plays it, if that patch is widely adopted by the community, but certainly a flaw of the game in the sense of the product people are being charged money for access to. The real, crucial difference is whether people say "RAW says this thing which does not make sense, so we are stuck with this and cannot do otherwise" - which I agree is bullshitty and moronic! - or whether they say "RAW says this thing which does not make sense, this is clearly a mistake on the part of the publishers and we need to figure out what was actually intended" - which is actually helpful. And having RAW in the lexicon makes it easier to say the latter. Flipping out, rolling your eyes, shrieking and pointing like you're in the 1970s Invaders of the Body Snatcher movie or otherwise reacting excessively aggressively when you see someone say RAW is you reacting to the phantom of a bad discussion you had elsewhere, not engaging with what the person you are talking to actually wrote, and is kind of assy.
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Mar 28, 2021 20:54
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mellonbread posted:I've deliberately left rules ambiguous or unspecified in stuff I've written. It sounds to me - and this is 100% semantics - that what you're describing is rules flexibility rather than ambiguity. An ambiguous situation is one in which we are unsure of what to do. A flexible situation is one in which we are given permission to choose a variety of solutions. So in your own example, an improvement to the AoO and Prone rules might be something like changing the 5' step rule to permit any character to move 5' as a (minor? move?) action regardless of standing/crouching/prone/climbing etc.; now if you're lying on the ground, you can shift 5', take an AoO for doing so (or not, depending on system), and now you're able to quaff safely. E.g., the 5' move rule is made more flexible, and this reduces the number of edge cases the rules need to explicitly anticipate and mechanize. You can present an extremely-well designed role-playing game on a single sheet of paper, by using maximally flexible rules, and even then, avoid ambiguity. And ambiguity can arise from a single rule, not even necessarily from rule interactions, if that rule is written in such a way that many different, reasonable, fluent people do not easily or immediately agree on the meaning of that rule. For example, let's suppose a rules text uses a canonical character for all of its text, because the author thought that would be better or more fun or something. The character's name is Leigh: "As Leigh's Fortune points are exhausted, they need to earn more by succeeding at an Inspiration check." One faction reads this as meaning: at the time a character runs out of Fortune points, they should immediately roll an Inspiration check to earn more. Another faction reads this as meaning: because a character has run out of Fortune points, they will not have any until the next time they decide to take an Inspiration check." Both readings are supportable by the text, because the word "as" can mean either of "at the same time as" or "because of," and also because "they need" can be descriptive of a player's strong desire to get more, or prescriptive, a requirement the player must immediately satisfy. And the use of the example character muddies the water further, because it might be that this situation is applicable only because of something about Leigh, rather than universally applying to all characters; this unique thing could be a status or imperative or desire previously expressed about Leigh, or perhaps a character attribute (Leigh's class?). The ambiguity of this rule might be resolvable by reference to other things in the rules text, or not, but either way, the ambiguity could be eliminated by the author or an editor noticing the problem (via proofreading or playtesting for example) and re-writing it to be clearer: "Characters can only recover Fortune points after they have used their last point. Characters may then spend a standard action to attempt an Inspiration check; a success refills their Fortune to its maximum." I argue this is an option irrespective of stylistic or artistic prerogatives exercised by the author. I believe a rule can be unambiguously stated even if it's written in Pirate Wizardese, or iambic pentameter, or "natural language," or Trollish. It may be difficult, or beyond the author's capabilities, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Mar 28, 2021 |
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Mar 28, 2021 21:24
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Warthur posted:Shifting this from industry thread as requested: I've been discussing RPGs online for the better part of 20 years, and I very much remember RAW and RAI as terms spinning out of 3e online discussions in the restrictive senses (including "only RAW is valid and nothing else matters"). The thing is that people still use RAW and RAI to mean these restrictive philosophies (in the 5e and Pathfinder communities especially), and they're still ongoing. As Splicer pointed out in the industry thread, there have been a multitude of different meanings and ways people take RAW/RAI to mean, it's basically been a game of internet telephone and definition drift - but it hasn't all drifted in one singular way, there's no coherent meaning for any invocation of RAW/RAI any more. Fine. But there's also no way to differentiate the meaning an arbitrary invocation of the term then takes, especially because these invocations can often have different meanings in the same sentence. (If I write "According to RAW, this feat gives you a +2 bonus but only to turn attempts against hippos" the meaning of that sentence and its argumentative value specifically hinges on what the definition of RAW is to me.) We, as critics and people reading text in English, already have a term for reading a written document to determine what the document says and only that: it's called close reading. That's what it was called in high school English class, and it still applies today, even if you don't have the further English reading/writing academic skills to really sharpen your ability to do a close reading. So we can just say "I closely read the rulebook and it does say drow are savage evil monsters on pages 74, 89, and 126." We don't need RAW/RAI as a theoretical term. It's got a ton of baggage, it's incredibly unclear, and it doesn't actually offer any benefit that we don't already have available to us with other critical terms that are commonly understood. So I'm not flipping out at a bad conversation - I'm responding to the actual argument that RAW/RAI made originally and which people continue to make using it as a framework, even if that's not what someone intended to say. The onus isn't on me to assume someone's arguing something different than what they are, but it is on the person making the argument to understand what they're actually saying. RAW/RAI in this way is just shorthand - but shorthand that saves you like ten letters and is actually critically meaningless due to its ambiguity, even in the most generous reading of someone's statement of it. I get the point that you, and Splicer, and Leperflesh have made, that there are a population of people unfamiliar with its framework and meaning, but that doesn't make it any more valid to use it incorrectly. Using better language helps all of us understand each other better, and ultimately isn't that what this whole discussion is about?
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Mar 28, 2021 21:38
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Arivia posted:I get the point that you, and Splicer, and Leperflesh have made, that there are a population of people unfamiliar with its framework and meaning, but that doesn't make it any more valid to use it incorrectly. Using better language helps all of us understand each other better, and ultimately isn't that what this whole discussion is about? Also, frankly, since you seem to be the one arguing for a very narrow interpretation of the term which doesn't fit with how a whole lot of people on here use it and have seen it used, I'm disinclined to take your recollections of those original conversations on faith.
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Mar 28, 2021 22:11
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So, for full context on this discussion, here is the original exchange that prompted the RAW/RAT discussion:Arivia posted:
So, the specific use of the term here is basically being used to mean "situations specifically mentioned in the text used to describe the rules" to argue that Pathfinder. RAW/RAI is, I think, a useful and valid term when discussing how effective rules text is at conveying the rules it is trying to teach: We are not referring to the rules as written for adjudication, we are referring to them to measure the rules' effectiveness as a teaching tool. It's also a useful term when distinguishing between rules as described in the accepted rule books and house rules used at a particular table (ie ("Mr. DM, how long does a short rest last?" "Well, rules as written, it's an hour, but I usually have them take 15-20 minutes in-game instead") I also think taking issue with a common, if variable in meaning, term and putting the onus on the other party to adhere to your unspoken standards of language is a weirdly solipsistic and unproductive way of approaching a discussion? KingKalamari fucked around with this message at 23:22 on Mar 28, 2021 |
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Mar 28, 2021 23:18
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Leperflesh posted:A decent principle to live by, but I'd say there's exceptions. 
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Mar 28, 2021 23:24
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FrozenGoldfishGod posted:So I have a question: what are the general thoughts on deliberate rules ambiguity as a game design concept? I've seen a lot of discussion here in just the few posts there have been about accidental ambiguity, but what about a theoretical game where that ambiguity about how precisely the rules are meant to work (beyond, perhaps, the very basic mechanical concepts underpinning the game) is a feature, not a bug? If there's a general case that'll cover it, it's not really an ambiguity, just the system not diving into depth mechanically on that aspect. Which is often the right choice to make. A game with honest rules ambiguity written in doesn't seem like my jam, because as much as I like discussing game design and rules theoreticals online, it's the last thing I want to do when sat down at a table trying to run a session for friends.
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Mar 29, 2021 01:16
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My favorite dumb RAW vs RAI argument was an ability that gave immunity to 'magic and nonmagical sleep powers' Rules As Intended, this is an obvious typo where they messed up a parallel structure, and it makes you immune to magical and nonmagical sleep powers. Rules As Written, it makes you immune to magic, because that's what the ability says.
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Mar 29, 2021 03:31
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