How Visible To players Should The Rules Be?

[bloodtide]

I don’t think immersion and rules knowledge need be at odds. I certainly wouldn’t feel immersed in a game where I didn’t have some actual sense of odds other than pat descriptions like those of the wall. How good am I at climbing? How difficult is the wall likely to be? These are things the character can gage in some manner that goes beyond mere description from the GM.

It's bad for a lot of players that won't role play at all. They roboticaly just Make Moves vs the GMs DC Objects. "I get a 17 and by pass Object 11". It's like playing a board game.

Worse so many players won't even play the game...that is do anything in the game...unless they know they will succeed. If there is a chance they will fail they just won't do it...or anything. They come to a locked door with a high DC...one they won't just auto open...and they just top playing...."Well, can't get past the GMs Impossible Door!"

And the worst immersion breaker is when the players just metagame...."oh we ignore X as it only does Y ". And often they just go for the Exploit : "Oh..um...we randomly attack the troll with fire for no reason".

But toss something at them they don't know....something not in the core rule books....and they freak out.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Oh, another example of the distinction between secret information and secret rules: the stress and fallout mechanics of Spire. In this system, when you take an action you will often take stress. Stress is assigned to one of five tracks. By itself, stress does nothing; a character with 10 stress is equally likely to succeed at an action as a character with no stress, other things equal. However, every time you take stress the GM rolls a die. If it's less than your total stress (across all tracks) you take fallout, reducing your stress by a certain amount but taking mechanical penalties as well, up to and including death. The rules for stress are not secret; there are player-facing mechanics like class abilities that directly interact with stress tracks, and you can't really decide what abilities to take unless you know how stress works. However, once you are playing, all the rolls relating to stress are made by the GM and the numeric results are secret. The GM is expected to narrate the effects of increasing stress, and the players need to evaluate how bad things are likely to be based on that narration. This is great and works very well in play, in my experience, and it's a clear example of a setup where secret information makes the game more fun, but where the underlying rules are public information.

Spire is one of my favorite games. Absolutely love it.

I think the suggestion that the GM track all stress and rely solely on description to communicate how much stress a character has is the one significant design mistake they made. Everything else is so player facing in that game, it really is surprising that they’d go that route.

My group didn’t like it at all, so we just changed it so that they were aware of it all. I don’t think we lost anything for that change. If anything, the game improved.

 

[hawkeyefan]

It's bad for a lot of players that won't role play at all. They roboticaly just Make Moves vs the GMs DC Objects. "I get a 17 and by pass Object 11". It's like playing a board game.

Worse so many players won't even play the game...that is do anything in the game...unless they know they will succeed. If there is a chance they will fail they just won't do it...or anything. They come to a locked door with a high DC...one they won't just auto open...and they just top playing...."Well, can't get past the GMs Impossible Door!"

And the worst immersion breaker is when the players just metagame...."oh we ignore X as it only does Y ". And often they just go for the Exploit : "Oh..um...we randomly attack the troll with fire for no reason".

But toss something at them they don't know....something not in the core rule books....and they freak out.

I don’t know about any of that. It sounds like it’s at leastas much on the GM. I mean, if the obstacles are just DCs, then yeah, the players are gonna just roll and spout numbers. Knowing the rules or the math involved doesn’t mean that’s all the game should be.

And attacking trolls with fire… this is entirely the GM’s fault. Everyone knows that trolls are vulnerable to fire. If you’re the kind of GM who doesn’t want players to act on that knowledge, then don’t use trolls. Problem solved, simple as that.

I expect that few players find pretending to not know about fire until some arbitrary trigger is introduced to the fiction that makes it okay to be very fun. That’s really crappy encounter design, and really poor awareness on the GM’s part.

 

[Bagpuss]

Could have sworn the OP said something about everyone being right. That being the case, not sure what all the disputes are about. It's just preference, and there's no reason to try to change anyone's mind here.

Okay the first response to the OP that seemed to get a lot of love, and was about players not knowing the rules leading to better games, my mistake.

Not sure it is a dispute, I think in my earliest response in this thread I said I've certainly had enjoyable games where the players were unaware of the rules. I just don't think that is the norm or even generally desirable/sustainable long term, for either the player or the GM.

 

[Corinnguard]

I'm not necessarily arguing against that generally, but constantly reference to the character sheet is definitely immersion breaking.

That's because the DC for remembering what's on your own character sheet is pretty high. Who here has a Memory score of 20?

 

[Reynard]

It's bad for a lot of players that won't role play at all. They roboticaly just Make Moves vs the GMs DC Objects. "I get a 17 and by pass Object 11". It's like playing a board game.

Worse so many players won't even play the game...that is do anything in the game...unless they know they will succeed. If there is a chance they will fail they just won't do it...or anything. They come to a locked door with a high DC...one they won't just auto open...and they just top playing...."Well, can't get past the GMs Impossible Door!"

And the worst immersion breaker is when the players just metagame...."oh we ignore X as it only does Y ". And often they just go for the Exploit : "Oh..um...we randomly attack the troll with fire for no reason".

But toss something at them they don't know....something not in the core rule books....and they freak out.

You play with some strange people.

 

[Corinnguard]

Know thyself and know thy character, and you will always role-play well.

 

[payn]

It's bad for a lot of players that won't role play at all. They roboticaly just Make Moves vs the GMs DC Objects. "I get a 17 and by pass Object 11". It's like playing a board game.

Worse so many players won't even play the game...that is do anything in the game...unless they know they will succeed. If there is a chance they will fail they just won't do it...or anything. They come to a locked door with a high DC...one they won't just auto open...and they just top playing...."Well, can't get past the GMs Impossible Door!"

And the worst immersion breaker is when the players just metagame...."oh we ignore X as it only does Y ". And often they just go for the Exploit : "Oh..um...we randomly attack the troll with fire for no reason".

But toss something at them they don't know....something not in the core rule books....and they freak out.

A door in which it must be passed to continue the adventure is just bad GMing.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Okay. We are starting from the assumption that the character has been defined through a knowledge of a specific genre. let's say that the character is a heroic adventurer in a fantasy milieu. Let's also assume, since this is the supposition, that the GM knows the rules and isn't just making up everything by fiat.

The PC outside a secure manor and wants to scale a wall to get inside. The GM describes the difficulty of scaling in the fiction. "The wall is well constructed to prevent infiltration, with a smooth surface and few handholds" or "The wall is old and much of the palster has crumbled, as well as ivy growing up it that might provide handholds." In either case, the player has a in fiction piece of information that they con combine with their foundational information about their competence, and can thus make an informed decision about whether to attempt the climb in the fiction.

But how do they have that foundational information? What tells them that in a way that relates to the situation at hand, and actually tells them anything without knowing they and the GM are on the same page? If the answer doesn't come do to numbers, my experience doesn't tell me it means anything. Because what does "heroic adventurer" mean in terms of climbing capability? I promise you, there's vast differences here.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I don’t think immersion and rules knowledge need be at odds. I certainly wouldn’t feel immersed in a game where I didn’t have some actual sense of odds other than pat descriptions like those of the wall. How good am I at climbing? How difficult is the wall likely to be? These are things the character can gage in some manner that goes beyond mere description from the GM.

I would not feel very immersed at all in such a game.

Its complicated. Some people find it disruptive, but some also find being out of sync with their setting disruptive, and that's far more severe than keeping track of how some numbers relate. In a perfect world, understanding the GM and setting on a deep enough level that doesn't require that would be ideal, but I have little sense that's true in anything but a tiny fraction of cases, if that.

(To be clear, I have an immersive streak, and in many ways I found that it was fed very strongly when I played on MUXes years ago--but only when I had other players who were strongly working with it and had good give-and-take, and even then it had pretty strong time overhead.)