The old rules emulation debate

[rancke]

WIll has also his share of right, as no comparison could be made with a unexisting OTU underlying reality, at least until OTU was described.

Obviously a game universe has to be described before it can apply. Once it has been described, though, it generally trumphs any rules, as long as the description is reasonable.

For example, as I mentioned above, according to the CT combat rules, it's impossible to kill an average human with one shot from a handgun. Nevertheless, if I run an adventure that featured a strong, agile, healthy NPC being hit in the heart by a single shot and killed outright (just before he can tell the PCs the crucial plot details ), any player who attempted to use the rules to convince me that such an event was impossible would have a thin time of it. Is that reasonable, do you think? If it is, it's because the rules alone don't define reality.

On the other hand, if I told my players that the NPC had been hit by a handgun and disintegrated with all his clothes and possessions so there's no body to search for clues, I think my players would be fully entitled to give me the raspberry. And not just because the rules says a handgun doesn't disintegrate what it hits, but also because the players' knowledge of the underlying reality makes it perfectly possible that someone could be killed outright by a single shot but utterly impossible that he could be disintegrated.


Hans

 

[Carlobrand]

Having read this:

The thing is, it's practically axiomatic that game rules are at the very least simplified, often distorted, representations of the underlying +reality, simply for the sake of playability, whereas setting details, at least in the authorial voice, are supposed to be true and accurate. So when the rules don't match the setting details, the rules must be presumed to be wrong until and unless the contrary is proved...

and then this:

Obviously a game universe has to be described before it can apply. Once it has been described, though, it generally trumphs any rules, as long as the description is reasonable.

For example, as I mentioned above, according to the CT combat rules, it's impossible to kill an average human with one shot from a handgun. Nevertheless, if I run an adventure that featured a strong, agile, healthy NPC being hit in the heart by a single shot and killed outright (just before he can tell the PCs the crucial plot details ), any player who attempted to use the rules to convince me that such an event was impossible would have a thin time of it. Is that reasonable, do you think? If it is, it's because the rules alone don't define reality.

On the other hand, if I told my players that the NPC had been hit by a handgun and disintegrated with all his clothes and possessions so there's no body to search for clues, I think my players would be fully entitled to give me the raspberry. And not just because the rules says a handgun doesn't disintegrate what it hits, but also because the players' knowledge of the underlying reality makes it perfectly possible that someone could be killed outright by a single shot but utterly impossible that he could be disintegrated...

I think it's a case of both being true, so far as Traveller is concerned.

Traveller runs into an issue I haven't really seen in most other games: it's rewritten its rules to create not just one but several sometimes conflicting and very distinct "environments" of play.

D&D survived its changing rules systems with little more than some grumbling about this or that spell or class being favored or "nuked", but the system itself never contradicted the various milieus they created for it. No matter how spells worked, no matter how many hit points a fighter had, the forces of good and evil clashed in pretty much the same way irrespective of the rules, the only exception being specific rules for specific alternate planes or realities.

Traveller, on the other hand, presented us with a milieu of Imperial dreadnoughts battling in space against Zhodani, Vargr, and Sword Worlds battlefleets, then offered a rules system that made dreadnoughts obsolescent at around TL 13 and made it all but impossible for the Sword Worlds to build a dreadnought, much less score a hit against an Imperial one. The fact that it was rather hard to die from a rifle wound in one rules system (CT) unless you're the sickly sort, but a distinct possibility for even the healthiest without adequate armor in another (Striker) can be written off as design philosophy. The fact that Imperial dreadnoughts were prey for a well-designed squadron of light cruisers or that the Sword Worlders couldn't hope to do what the campaign setting said they were doing without some very artful rationalizations by the gamemaster - that's a good deal harder to write off.

 

[aramis]

I need to apologize for my tone. It's a been more than a bit harsh. Sorry, Hans.

However, I disagree that there is any underlying reality emulated, including our own, in pre 1981 CT. Sometimes an RPG is just a game, and CT 1.0, D&D OE, T&T all eds, and quite a few others simply do not go past the "just a game" stage. And taken as "Just a game" - it's prescriptive, not descriptive nor proscriptive. CT core doesn't really develop one until maybe Bk4 and sup 3....

Likewise, due to the retcons from hell between editions, I really can't see the "underlying reality" of the CT supplements and Bks 5+ as the same as the MT ones, nor the TNE one, nor the T4 one, nor the T20 and GT ones.

It's much like with "New Trek" vs TOS... same physical layout of the universe, but things do work and look quite differently. They're related but parallel universes. Anything prior to the Narada arriving is supposedly the same... but works differently, so it really isn't the same.

And any GM's game is yet another parallel universe.

 

[Darkwing]

I've always felt that the rules of any RPG were meant to emulate an augmented reality - whether D&D magic or Trek's phasers and warp drive, the gamemaster has to fill in holes in the rules with their own logic and real world experience in order for it to be believable to the players. The designers may not have intended it, but the concept did. Otherwise, we'd never have jumped from wargaming medieval warfare into playing individual characters. It was a way to make the fantasy wargame more realistic, IMO. YMMV.
But only munchkins ever argued with me when I overruled the book on the number of attacks high level PCs got on zero-level NPCs. Everyone else agreed that the "underlying reality" meant the book rule was not reasonable. And the munchkins never argued that I was wrong about the realism; they argued that the book rule gave them more power, and that meant I should let them slay hordes of peasants in one round, not make them work for it.
In the end, though, we each have to decide what works in our own games.