Why Have Rules At All?

While explaining the appeal of rules-light games to a friend who generally prefers a crunchier game, my friend asked me "then why have rules at all?"

I think the answer basically comes down to this:

A game is made more fun than just imagining through the limited introduction of rule. We use rules when we want to resolve things that are ambiguous, or when we want to abstract something, or when it is more fun to have a rule or constraint of some kind.

Ambiguity:

Some things are just ambiguous and dice mechanics are useful for those situations. Are you strong enough to knock the door down? It is hard to know, the player could say: "well I hit the door really hard." And we could try to work with that, but fundamentally this is an ambiguous situation and it is better to abstract it using a die roll.

Abstractions:

While in most cases in a rules-light roleplaying game descriptive exploration and activity is encouraged, there are areas where description is either too ambiguous (as above) or otherwise finicky or difficult adjudicate so we abstract that decision with a die roll. Combat, saving throws, and thief skills all fall into this category.

Rules are fun:

Rules ARE fun. They are fun to think about, they are fun to experiment with. Constraints can create challenge. Niche protection and spell memorization rules create interesting constraints. The many tables for spells, criticals, and fumbles in Dungeon Crawl Classics are a good example of rules being fun. They certainly slow the game a bit compared to what the game would play like in their absence. However, they provide a lot of fun without creating many constraints on what is possible in the game. What is problematic is that in many RPGs is that there are many rules because it seems to be that the "rules are fun" reason has been taken to extremes. Because we like rules for a few things or because a few rules are useful it doesn't mean rules are good or necessary when created to cover all situations.

A key to an excellent game is making sure that the rules are serving a specific purpose. The rules covering every eventuality is not useful to a good game. Common sense can serve a lot of the need that rules purport to. The referee was introduced into wargaming as a way to obviate the need for encyclopedic rules and to make it possible for anything to be attempted (see Playing at the World). Referees can still do this job without a lot of policing! That is because the referee is not the players' opponent.

Alternatives to Death

One of my goals for my over the table gaming is to spread the excellence of the OSR. However I find a lot of opposition to OSR games in my local community. One of the complaints is the lethality of the game. From a certain perspective  this makes sense. For those players who want to invest in their character but find the likelihood of death in a gritty game is an impediment to engagement then the game is failing. I don't think it is my role as the GM to educate my players about the wisdom of the OSR, but rather it is my job to facilitate a game that all can enjoy. So I began thinking about ways to reduce the likelihood of permanent character death without making characters invincible.

I'm not dead yet! After being brought to 0 characters survive and can be saved for 1 round per level, through magical healing, binding wounds, or inspiration.

Binding Wounds! As per S&W White Box. Trying to do this during battle is not advisable without a fighter standing over you, but you can of course attempt anything!

Inspiration! Any character can attempt to inspire a dying character to continue fighting. The character doing the inspiring makes a charisma check, if successful the dying character recovers to 1 hp and keeps fighting. This is a temporary hit point.

Deal with Death! Death is willing to bargain with heroic types. When a character dies death is willing to bargain with them. Death will resurrect the character in exchange for favors. Each resurrection incurs a debt with Death. If you roll a 1 on any d20 roll and have an outstanding debt Death calls in a favor. The favor would be determined randomly using the Tome of Adventure Design or similar quest table. If Death feels you are not making adequate process you might have to explain yourself. This is of course available totally on an opt-in basis. It is also rumored that other powerful beings have the ability to intercede and resurrect fallen heroes but they are not as predictable and even-handed as Death.

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons - sort of a review

So as I mentioned previously at long last I recently acquired a range of AD&D books. I have at this point read a great deal of the Players Handbook and Dungeon Masters Guide. I cannot claim to have read them in their entirety.

I'm not sure it is possible to read these books straight through. I am also not sure it would be possible to learn the game from scratch from them. While they are chock full of fascinating play tips, design notes, and other commentary, they lack the coherent explanatory framework that say, second edition or the Rules Cyclopedia have (they are my counter examples because they are the books I own). Both books seem to have been assembled at random. That being said, if you already know how to play D&D it is quite straightforward to look up rules on specific topics and to find a deep and thoughtful explanation of why the rule is what it is.

I also find it interesting how clear the wargaming roots show in these books. As a sometime Warhammer player things like random resolution of targets in mass melee and the one minute combat round stand out to me as perfectly sensible rules if you want D&D to accommodate or at least be compatible with unit scale wargames. Not to mention a choice between measuring in inches, hex, or grid combat. Or of course abstract combat, but there are an awful lot of rules for modeled combat. I would wager that Gygax had in mind something like what I've settled on for Pathfinder - abstract combat when it is simple, modeled combat when it is complex.

Now that I am thinking about it, I am not sure why D&D has moved to a grid, it seems like it would be more sensible to measure or to use hexes. Maybe it is to simplify things in the dungeon.

Back to the topic at hand: It may be a good thing I started playing with second edition. I had no older gamer friends to teach me the game. I did not know what the game was supposed to look like before I started DMing. The second edition rules did a very good job explaining what exactly all of this was about. The AD&D core books are inscrutable. Until the Player's Options and revised core books were published, none of the enormous bloat of second edition changed the fundamental character of the game (whereas by all reports - I do not own it yet - Unearthed Arcana destroyed the nature of AD&D). The second edition supplements were just useless (I should know, I have a decent sized collection of them). As a young player it is very hard to be discerning about what is good and what is bad - anything official is seen as good and required.

That being said, if I were to play AD&D now I think I'd be more inclined to play first edition (actually in reality I would probably use OSRIC, I don't want to pass my ancient books around the table). Why is that? Grognard group-think? Social shaming about my nostalgia for second edition?

I actually think it is the greater detail of first edition. Second edition is largely a streamlined version of first edition. There are some superficial changes but in terms of core rules the only differences seem to be areas where second edition reduced or removed rules - a good example being henchmen. There are extensive rules on how to acquire henchmen in first, second basically says roleplay it. Other than those sorts of things (and the slightly different list of races and classes, oh and the whole demons and devils thing) THEY ARE THE SAME GAME. This makes me wonder why the generally "rules light" OSR people have such loathing of second edition. In the core rules (excepting nonweapon proficiencies, which is one of three skill options) second edition is a substantially simpler game than first.

Can anyone explain that?

(side note: does anyone else find it weird when they see 3E adherents referred to as Grognards on the internet? 3E drove me away from the game for a decade, and I'm only 30).

Flight rules are terrible

In all three editions of AD&D there is a reliance of flying maneuverability classes to govern flying. From a game designer perspective this seems reasonable. Some creatures are more maneuverable flyers than others. However, the worst flyers are horribly bad at flying. For example, in AD&D a dragon can only turn 30° per round. That is 30° per minute. That means it takes a dragon after making one pass at a point 12 minutes to return to that point on the wing. Third edition appears to use similar rules with more paperwork involved, I haven't used them thoug. The problem is mitigated by a shorter round time, but dragons are still lousy flyers.

Let's take the dragon as our example in think in terms of Gygaxian naturalism for a minute. Here we have the ultimate predator. Intelligent, winged, breath weapons, claws and fangs. They are enormous and are going to need to hunt large quantities of prey. However, since they are too clumsy in the air to hunt on the wing like a raptor, they are going to have to do one of two things: blast everything with their breath weapon and then scavenge whatever remains; or fly somewhere, land, hunt on foot. The latter makes no sense really - whatever are the wings for then? The former is sensible but makes dragons kind of sad. Dragon attacks will involve a quick blast of death from above and then everyone hiding while it makes its turn, and then staying hidden while the dragon roots around in the ashes. Sucks to be a dragon, they are going to need to resort to stealth. I do see an opportunity for dragons ambushing and sneak attacking shepherds, adventurers, and other unfortunates, but that would be a complete reimagining of the dragon as the iconic enemy.

These rules appear to have been by people who have never seen raptors hunt. On my way to work I pass through a wide stretch of flood plain where I sometimes see hawks hunting. They really don't seem to have any trouble with these rapid banking maneuvers and dives that are deemed impossible. For what its worth, I am no ornithologist, nor even a serious bird watcher. I just have seen birds around, you know? I think the authors (of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd editions) have confused raptors and airplanes. Birds are good at flying. Shouldn't flying monsters be good at flying? If we take Gygaxian naturalism seriously at all, flying predatory monsters should fly like predatory birds. Why does being big mean they have to be clumsy? A dragon probably should have hollow bones and the wings will be governed by enormously powerful muscles. They should fly like an eagle. Wyvern's should fly like hawks.

I think a little imagination can replace all of the flight rules completely. Watch some Wild America (is that still on?) or something. Think about what kind of flyer this creature is. Rule appropriately.

Note: Pathfinder eliminates this sort of absolute thinking and replaces it (like everything else) with a skill check. Not a bad idea, since it encourages flexibility, but it has all of the difficulties that all Pathfinder skill checks have. Endless tallying of modifiers.

How I actually played second edition AD&D

Teazia's comment on my last post got me thinking about how I actually played second edition AD&D. When I started playing as a child I devoured source books, splat books, campaign settings, and optional rules with the reckless abandon of a young person. Knowing nothing else I drunk deeply from the well of second edition folly. As I grew older I began to realize that my game had lost something important. So in my late teens (the last time I played a lot of D&D until my late twenties) I began to pare down the monster of second edition until I was left with the things that had originally enthralled me.

My selected optional rules and house rules (as best as I can remember) looked something like this:

• 3d6 in order for stats.
• Secondary skills - no non-weapon proficiencies.
• No kits.
• No sub-races.
• Actually, pretty much nothing from the Complete books series.
• No specialty priests.
• No weapon proficiencies - I at first experimented with weapon groups from The Complete Fighter's Handbook (which sees final fruition in third edition) but ended up abandoning proficiencies entirely.
• A 10 second combat round.
• Nothing at all from the Player's Options books.

I might be missing something, but that gives you the gist of it. What I find fascinating is how close it is to Labyrinth Lord + Advanced Edition Companion (no half-orcs or assassins, but . . . bards?). Obviously, not everyone likes this sort of paring down. I had players who really didn't think much of it. Those players went on to become avid third edition players and I (largely) stopped playing.

Why am I playing Pathfinder? (Part 2)

More thoughts on 3e and then an explanation of why I actually am running  a Pathfinder game.

Combat - Takes forever. In some ways I love playing on a battlemat, in some ways I don't. I like the visual representation (although a white board works just fine if you need something to track things on) - especially for complex combats, but this is where all the rules monkeying tends to crop up.

I had a player (in a different game than the one I am running now) once try to leap through the air and punch a flying griffin that was about 10 feet up and 20 feet away. I said "no way" and this devolved into a big discussion of the jumping rules and the player saying my favorite line: "but this is what my character does."

I thought that all of this rules minutiae was defended on the grounds of realism?

The same goes for movement and attacks of opportunity, so yes, it is realistic that someone will try to strike you if you try to pass by or cast a spell, but they won't take one step to do so? Not realistic, (not that I care), but let's not try to pretend that these rules are based on anything closer to reality than AD&D was.

Rule completeness - Its a myth. No rule set is entirely complete or coherent. Example from last session:

Group of 3rd level characters (we picked up where a campaign I ran last summer left off) has been exploring the dungeon and generally kicking ass in true 3e manner. There is no rogue so the barbarian is hacking through doors. Each time he does this I take the opportunity to roll for a random encounter). Finally one hits and . . . swarm of bats! Well this a melee heavy group so they all say "uh oh, swarm". They have exactly one AoE spell among the five of them. Burning hands goes off . . . and doesn't kill them. So the witch cleverly pulls out a vial of acid and throws it amidst the swarming bats. Well, apparently grenade-like weapons use the touch AC of the opponent. Bats have a very high touch AC. It is very tough to touch a bat. Of course that isn't what he is doing. He is not trying to touch one and cast shocking grasp. He is merely trying to throw a glass vial onto the floor and have it splash on them. So he misses. This is a ridiculous result to the action he is attempting to take. So . . . house rule, he hits automatically! Unfortunately this doesn't kill the bats either and they have to flee . . . but at least things are making sense now.

So don't claim that the rules cover everything or always coherent. Just as much a need for adjudication as ever, just now we have to look a lot of things up first.

So why DO I play Pathfinder?

Because I have found a good group of players who like to play it and I like DMing. They know the rules well and are good sports so I don't need to memorize things. Generally they tell me the rules, we look it up if it is very important or there is disagreement, and I adjudicate. I don't mind DMing (sorry WotC, GMing) Pathfinder because I like designing adventures, dungeons, and monsters. The rules system is pretty irrelevant to all of that.

Would I rather play a different rules system? Sure. Would I be a better DM if we played something I was more familiar with? Probably. But I think that with a good group rules adjudication is the smallest part of the DM's job. Will they start seeing monsters from the Swords & Wizardry Monster Book that arrived last night? Absolutely.

Basically, rule systems are pretty irrelevant to the kind of stories we tell. That's just the details. That's why I think simple rules are good, but if my players would rather get all bogged down in that stuff I'm okay with that. They just need to understand that I think CR is a laughable concept, and that yes I am going to kill them with the cave giant waiting by the stairs.