On Mechanics/Fluff Integration

[RelentlessImp]

So, I get the feeling that lately, TTRPGs are moving away from having their mechanics inform their world - inasmuch as they ever did, like Shadowrun and Earthdawn (which is famed for it). Instead they want their games to break the rules of their world, which is touted as being 'good for the hobby' and to follow patterns like John Woo films, in which people do superhuman - but, important, not necessarily INHUMAN - stunts. What I want to know is:

WHY?

Why would you not want your mechanics to inform your world and thus work together and remove the need for willing suspension of disbelief? Why would you not want a world where everyone works on the same set of rules - for certain values of same, certainly. Not that Wizards aren't using different rules than Peasants, but Wizards have more rules than the peasants do, rather than less, and in the superficial they are most certainly using the same rules (breathing, movement, hitpoints, BAB) - it's just the Wizard also gets the rules that tell him how to cast a spell, and that works.

These "High Drama" games where people get to play out being a John Woo protagonist where doves inexplicably fly out of their ass when they do something marginally interesting are telling people that it's okay to have mechanics that completely destroy verisimilitude. They waste so much page space telling you that you can do the Awesome that they forget to include the Awesome baked into the fucking ruleset.

In these games, anyone not a PC is a fucking Nodwick. Inexplicable and there only for exposition, or to provide a comparison point/sympathy lever. These people don't have fucking lives when they leave the PC's worldview; these games suggest a solipsism so intense that, quite literally, when you're not looking at something it ceases to fucking exist.

Whether or not the rules that provide the backdrop for the world make sense or not is, unfortunately, unimportant - it would be nice if they did, but including them at all is better than not having them, so you have a frame of reference for everything fucking else. You can argue that the Big Three requirements of publishing an RPG - Core book, Monstrous Manual, and Campaign Setting - are where these things come from, but they're actually supposed to be baked into the rules. Without them the entire fucking framework comes tumbling down.

So, why are games moving away from marrying fluff and mechanics, in your opinion? Is it the difficulty of doing so? Do they just not see it as important? Are they literal mouthbreathing paint-chip-eating morons? Or are they just ignorant?

[OgreBattle]

Could you be more specific on what mechanics you find offensive? Your John Woo vs mooks example makes me think of Feng Shui, but that game is specifically designed to be...

1) basically for one-shot campaigns, the John Woo archtype actually has a class feature where they deal more damage but also take more damage in a climatic battle
2) meant to have relatively fast character generation for heavily combat oriented games where they fight mooks with stats that fit on a post-it note.

I'd like to know what specific game is rustling your jimmies though.

[RelentlessImp]

No specific game, just a general trend I'm seeing lately with the creation of games like Savage Worlds, FATE, BearWorld, et al. The "high drama narrativist" genre that wants to trade on concepts that World of Darkness did back in the fucking 90s, but wants the PCs and NPCs to be operating on different rules and in different conceptual spaces.

Even oWoD/CWOD had rules for fucking MORTALS and while they were shit, they gave you a baseline to compare Vampires, Mages, Hunters, Changelings, etc. to. They came LATE, yes, but they still wound up in the system eventually. Without putting the victims/mooks/grandmothers in the same conceptual space (IE, having a set of baseline rules for them as well as others) as the PCs (the Vampires, the Wizards, the fucking Fighters) then you have a world that is, in my opinion, broken from the word go.

[Aryxbez]

So, why are games moving away from marrying fluff and mechanics, in your opinion?

I think it has to do with a mislead mindset, where they want to get away from the clutter of Old Famous RPG's collecting gallons of rules for decades. However they feel to do so, they must reject having rules as they can, and must go Rules-lite. Despite of course, even a "rules-heavy" game done correctly, would actually have the parse and page count to rival, if not put so many rules lite game products to shame.

Correctly such as not "paying per page/wordcount", so the book can be optimized for small page count, and thusly brevity in various stat lines and rules. As well as only having rules necessary for the stories/genre the game wishes to emulate, and not including in Legacy BS, or REALIZARM (whom most people don't understand very well translating it to rules in a game)

So I'm not so sure people understand this mindset, industry pay standard encourages bloat, and lack of design capability may also lead to them writing overly wordy rules, or rules that ask more questions than it solves.

Although in the Fantasy case, would ye have problem with monsters having different rules for how they're created? Since the idea of Monster roles is a good one, and definitely something fantasy should implement going forward.

[RelentlessImp]

would ye have problem with monsters having different rules for how they're created

Only if those rules resulted in something that operates on a ruleset completely different from the PCs, at which point they've broken the world, broken WSoD and broken any trust in the MC. Otherwise, use whatever the fuck you want to generate your monsters, but they better operate on the same conceptual rulespace as the PCs, even if those rulesets are things they can't access. (Wizard v Peasant sort of divide is fine, Godschlong Solipsism PCs vs Don't-Exist-Unless-Interacted-With NPCs is not)

[tussock]

Don't-Exist-Unless-Interacted-With NPCs

What you seem to want, I've seen it termed "Gygaxian Naturalism", where there are griffins which fly and eat horses and so horses are scared of griffins, griffins have no self-control around horses, and the combat and movement stats are such that without PCs there the griffins will totally just eat the horses. Also, wild horses come in herds of several hundred and griffins appear in very small numbers and not often even then (and a herd of horses could potentially kill a griffon which landed to grab one of them, tricky).

So that's a bunch of rules and text which inform what is probably always going to be a minor point unless someone asks why so few town guards ride griffins or why getting a trained one is so crazy-expensive and also difficult.

Where other games say, fuck that, it's just a game, 1d4 griffins attack! If anyone asks, I'll just make some shit up, but they never ask anyway.

WHY?

For a lot of people, they're just playing a game, like it's monopoly or chess or whatever and the story and world or whatever is barely even a thing. The 4e D&D design team completely rejected the notion that background abilities and emergent stories are needed for even a game like D&D.

But 4e, like all of the other games which say that, are shit and do not sell. Because for most people it's not quite the same game as others and the whole "making sense" thing is actually pretty cool, even if they don't want to hear it during a game. More like talking shit between sessions and the GM can totally just point out why something worked that way on the day (not "the rules"), and then everyone's happy.

It's actually quite a problem, and the main reason Fighters can't have nice things.

[ishy]

these games suggest a solipsism so intense that, quite literally, when you're not looking at something it ceases to fucking exist.

That is how most games work? Nothing really exists out of scene.
Though the DM might describe some changes when an NPC or something is in the next scene.

Now I am not sure what topic you want to discuss, but there are many reasons why you don't want to describe the world perfectly with your rules. To list some:

• You don't care and there is no conflict
  you don't need rules that describe how people eat
• Realistic emulation is too complex
  I don't want to know exactly how weather works, I prefer rolling on a random table and get a region appropriate weather
• It detracts from the game you want to design / play
  Most games do not have a functional economic model, including one, will usually take up a lot of table time and makes people focus less on say murder-hoboing.
• PCs have a different scope
  A mindless plant monster is fine, a mindless PC that can't move is not.
  PC resurrection might be needed, while easy resurrection for everybody changes the game in major ways.
• Game balance
  Shooting someone in the face in a future tech society might always be better, but you don't want space monks to be a terrible supported option
• People hate it
  It might be realistic that black people get fucked over all the time in America, but it is probably not what people want from their game(unless that is the focus of your game).

[RelentlessImp]

When you look at a game like Shadowrun, you see that people can quite easily live in this world without being super fucked over - day jobs and lifestyle rules, not to mention the unholy act of signing on with a megacorp that the Neo-Anarchist PCs don't do and hate people who do.

In D&D 3.5, you see rules for making money using Profession (X). The rules are shit, but they give us a basis for seeing how crap daily life is in a D&D world.

Now, no game needs to make this the focus of their ruleset - it just has to be there, somewhere, so you have a baseline of comparison. That's part and parcel of putting "the Awesome" into your ruleset - having a "Life sucks then you die" portion for most of the world to be living in. You can even suggest that the PCs are part of that part of the ruleset before they become PCs.

What you can't do is say "The world works like this for everyone but because you are PCs you move on a completely different set of rules, right down to the basic crap of daily life". Because once you put the PCs on a pedestal to the point that the world itself works differently for them, and they're not even interacting with the world in any way that could make sense to the NPCs in the world, then you've got a borked setting.

[ishy]

In D&D 3.5, you see rules for making money using Profession (X). The rules are shit, but they give us a basis for seeing how crap daily life is in a D&D world.

Now, no game needs to make this the focus of their ruleset - it just has to be there, somewhere, so you have a baseline of comparison. That's part and parcel of putting "the Awesome" into your ruleset - having a "Life sucks then you die" portion for most of the world to be living in.

But you don't need rules for that.
Say something like:

Farmers work X hours a day for 5 copper a week. Hiring one costs 1 copper a day.
Blacksmiths work Y hours a day for 7 copper a week. Hiring one costs 2 copper a day.

This way you won't waste time designing and bug-checking rules, nor do players / DMs waste time on rules they don't care about. And the information you provide probably hands out more and better information than shitty profession rules. And you can create kingdom management rules instead (because that is something the players are supposed to care about).

[RelentlessImp]

Yes, but most games don't even do that. You can do that, and you can derive an infinite return on them over not having them at all because it helps to structure the world you've made.

And yet these basic considerations are tossed aside in most modern style of TTRPG.

And it's not just professions or living. It's everything that is not central to the PCs. It's sloppy and it divorces the world from the mechanics and I want to know why the fuck they do it.

[hogarth]

I don't know how "I hate games that don't bother with Profession skills or upkeep" is related to "I hate games where doves fly all over the place from nowhere".

As ishy said, all games don't cover the parts that they don't cover. That's tautologically true. I suspect this is another conversation like those where people rag on "dissociated mechanics" when they're really just complaining about fluff they don't like.

[RelentlessImp]

"I hate games where doves fly all over the place from nowhere" is the central point. Profession/Upkeep aka NPC lives outside the PC's purview is just the most visible aspect of a design that leaves out details that don't cover anything outside of the PCs. 4E design is the one that does this the worst as it only concerns itself with the combat mechanics which leaves you basically no mechanics for a world to operate off of.

[deaddmwalking]

Verisimilitude is important to me, so I prefer a point where PCs were once 'regular people', but I don't think it's always a problem when it doesn't work that way. Superhero genre, for instance, gets a pass. The PCs are just functioning in a different world and regular people are just background - or at least, they can be. Peter Parker's problems with his boss is a story you can still tell even if you can punch a galaxy eating super-villain. But I digress.

Making PCs 'special' is easier than making all the rules work for all situations. This is the 'exception based design' that 4th edition touted. It is crap. It doesn't work. But from a design perspective, it looks like it could, so people keep doing it.

But having rules that apply to more people opens up more play space. Not everyone wants to play rat-catchers, but having that option is good.

[8d8]

What you can't do is say "The world works like this for everyone but because you are PCs you move on a completely different set of rules, right down to the basic crap of daily life". Because once you put the PCs on a pedestal to the point that the world itself works differently for them, and they're not even interacting with the world in any way that could make sense to the NPCs in the world, then you've got a borked setting.

This is one of the biggest problems I've had with D&D. The "murder hobo" concept is a funny one because we know it shouldn't be so. It goes against the idea that we're heroes or people in a believable world and points out how playing the game the way the game is meant to be played turns it into less of a role-playing experience and more of a tabletop arcade game simulator.

And all those rules are thrown in there for how you advance as characters, but nothing I have ever seen says that any other people in the world are doing the same thing you are - you just don't run into a hardy band of adventurers who are also trying to kill the dragon. There are no rival bands of murder hobos telling you that this dungeon is off-limits because they got there first. Kings don't say, "Please save my daughter, and take these other heroes along because, really, there are so many of you and I don't see why I wouldn't want as many people doing it as possible." At least in superhero genre games it is patently obvious that you are set apart and different, and that is a legit role you need to play.

But Hogarth is right. It's just fluff I don't like. It's totally possible to run a D&D game with stuff added in that deals with my problems, and you don't even need rules for it.

Aside from supers or games like Exalted where you are supposed to treat normals as plot devices instead of equals, I have a hard time thinking of too many games that paint PCs as being totally different from everything else. In Savage Worlds you play as a "wildcard", but NPCs are often wildcards too, and it doesn't make the world seem unbelievable. In D&D nothing says you can't meet an NPC, befriend them, and take them along with you on adventures so they gain class levels in exactly the same way PCs do. In Mongoose's Conan RPG you are definitely on equal footing with every NPC. So besides 4e D&D, what games are doing this?

[silva]

these games suggest a solipsism so intense that, quite literally, when you're not looking at something it ceases to fucking exist.

That is how most games work? Nothing really exists out of scene.
Though the DM might describe some changes when an NPC or something is in the next scene.

Now I am not sure what topic you want to discuss, but there are many reasons why you don't want to describe the world perfectly with your rules. To list some:

• You don't care and there is no conflict
  you don't need rules that describe how people eat
• Realistic emulation is too complex
  I don't want to know exactly how weather works, I prefer rolling on a random table and get a region appropriate weather
• It detracts from the game you want to design / play
  Most games do not have a functional economic model, including one, will usually take up a lot of table time and makes people focus less on say murder-hoboing.
• PCs have a different scope
  A mindless plant monster is fine, a mindless PC that can't move is not.
  PC resurrection might be needed, while easy resurrection for everybody changes the game in major ways.
• Game balance
  Shooting someone in the face in a future tech society might always be better, but you don't want space monks to be a terrible supported option
• People hate it
  It might be realistic that black people get fucked over all the time in America, but it is probably not what people want from their game(unless that is the focus of your game).

This.

Some people like a more thorough simulation and the added complexity it entails. Other people just don't care. There is nothing wrong with either approach. Its simply a matter of taste.

[nockermensch]

WHY?

I have mixed feelings about this. For one side, I like Action or Hero Points and the view that the PCs are greater than the common folk, to the extent that probabilities will bend backwards for them sometimes. On the other side, I dislike minions with 1 hit point because they're stupid in a world where everything does at least 1 damage. But I'm pretty sure all this resolves to taste at the end of the day.

So, who said that the BEST objective for a RPG is to simulate a living world? Why couldn't a RPG simulate an action movie, for example, and why is this simulation inherently worse than a living world one?

[Ancient History]

PCs as "special" isn't necessarily a mechanics/fluff interface issue, any more than having different rules for PCs and NPCs is an annoying-but-common aspect of game design. After all, many games are power fantasies that like the PCs to be some flavor of special snowflake. The issue is whether the rules are integrated into the setting, and that's where many games fall down. In Shadowrun, it would actually make sense to say "I'm a 6th Grade Initiate in the Order of the Metallic Constellation" or in Earthdawn to say "I'm a 6th circle Warrior Adept." There are just things that in Shadowrun and Earthdawn where the game mechanics and setting line up, and the metaphysics are worked out sufficiently that you can have really good semantic arguments about them. D&D, WoD and suchlike tend not to have that, a very strict delineation between fluff and mechanics. So you can describe a character as more powerful, but not be able to really define that in any effective way that relates to their abilities or class.

In a wider sense, it's a question of abstraction vs. simulation: how well the rules of the world reflect the reality of the setting. You can't really have a workable or realistic economy with just the D&D3.+ profession rules; if you tried, the world becomes as nonsensical as a video game. Leaving some areas in the abstract is not a bad thing for RPGs; it is sometimes better to have no rules than bad ones.

[RelentlessImp]

So besides 4e D&D, what games are doing this?

Shadowrun 5th Edition's Matrix rules don't work unless you only make Matrix Perception checks for plot-relevant things, and they clearly wrote this into the rules, thus breaking many layers of verisimilitude that the Matrix (barely) had in editions before.

The Warhammer 40k RPGs do it to a lesser extent in a couple of areas per line, but it has reams and reams of novels showing you how the world works so it's less important to know why it works in the rules, just so you know it does work. Further the RPG rules were clearly developed after the setting so they were made to at least plausibly fit into the setting that was made for a wargaming system.

FATE literally has no rules for anyone that's not a PC or opposition. (At least, none I can find in my copy of Core of FATE Core.)

Savage Worlds is a pretty lackluster system (to me) but it gets around this by having what amounts to a GURPS-like system (in implementation only) and hundreds of setting books that introduce new rules, not all of which are cut from the same cloth. But base line it has no rules for people who aren't PCs or, again, opposition, which means the settings that are developed for it just don't give a fuck about fluff/mechanics integration.

So, who said that the BEST objective for a RPG is to simulate a living world? Why couldn't a RPG simulate an action movie, for example, and why is this simulation inherently worse than a living world one?

People who like their settings to make sense. An RPG that simulated, say, Lethal Weapon would still have to obey the laws of the real world because the movies do. One that simulates a John Woo film still has to obey the laws of reality because that's where they're set, doves from one's posterior or not. The difference is, these are ostensibly set in the real world so you brain fills in the short hand and the rules aren't really necessary.

But when you create a setting whose mechanics and fluff are woefully at odds - and D&D is not innocent of this, given that high level Wizards don't rule everything in most settings - you heap more requirement of suspension of disbelief onto the people reading/playing/writing in these worlds and detract from the whole of the setting.

And if you deliberately create a system whose settings do not match, then everything just goes weird for me. I think the best example of film here whose setting and "mechanics" work best for this is Wuxia; RPGs should emulate Wuxia media, in that everything has a certain explanation (even if it's just qi) but the world is set up in such a way that it's not in a vacuum. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon has wire-fu everywhere. House of Flying Daggers trades on it. Even Kung Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer, comedic parodies of the medium, still obey its world-building rules. And they're better for it. RPGs would be, too.

[TheFlatline]

These "High Drama" games where people get to play out being a John Woo protagonist where doves inexplicably fly out of their ass when they do something marginally interesting are telling people that it's okay to have mechanics that completely destroy verisimilitude. They waste so much page space telling you that you can do the Awesome that they forget to include the Awesome baked into the fucking ruleset.

For the same reason why you can play wizards to begin with. The whole point is escapist power fantasies.

I mean, you invoke D&D in your post and ignore that fucking fireballs shooting out of your fingertips is john woo doves flying away from you levels of special sauce.

[RelentlessImp]

Flatline you quoted the part that doesn't ignore it.

that they forget to include the Awesome baked into the fucking ruleset.

Being a Wizard and fireballing people is baked into the ruleset. Telling people to go John Woo in a game whose rulesets don't support it is bad game design, made worse if the setting doesn't support it, too.

[TheFlatline]

What you can't do is say "The world works like this for everyone but because you are PCs you move on a completely different set of rules, right down to the basic crap of daily life". Because once you put the PCs on a pedestal to the point that the world itself works differently for them, and they're not even interacting with the world in any way that could make sense to the NPCs in the world, then you've got a borked setting.

Dude Kim Kardashian is famous because of her ass and her husband routinely compares himself favorably to Jesus and Shakespeare because he rhymes and steals bits and bobs from other music to rhyme to. And the world totally rolls with it.

The real world has a set of "characters" that operates on a completely different set of rules than 99.9% of the rest of us operate on.

[RelentlessImp]

Truth is allowed to be stranger than fiction.

EDIT: Okay, yeah, that was facetious. Sorry.

[TheFlatline]

Flatline you quoted the part that doesn't ignore it.

that they forget to include the Awesome baked into the fucking ruleset.

Being a Wizard and fireballing people is baked into the ruleset. Telling people to go John Woo in a game whose rulesets don't support it is bad game design, made worse if the setting doesn't support it, too.

So you have problems with games that have rules that aren't part of the ruleset that allow you to be cool... or something?

I"m not sure if you're pissed off that RPGs aren't accounting simulators or if you just are hating on MTP or what.

[TheFlatline]

Truth is allowed to be stranger than fiction.

EDIT: Okay, yeah, that was facetious. Sorry.

Jesus just quit while you're behind.

[deaddmwalking]

I think there's a point there that makes sense. If people can routinely go 'John Woo' in a game, that is something that world routinely deals with. Now a film like Hard Boiled or Killer doesn't really require any major changes to the world or characters than a standard low-level setting. Bullets still kill the protagonist(s) - you just need robust 'death and dying rules' that let you crawl through churches while you leave a blood trail 3 ft. wide. For the most part, his movies are set in the 'real world' so character options don't have to impact world design.

But it is lazy setting design to ignore things that should have an impact. If decanters of endless water are ubiquitous, why do you have deserts? Heck, how do you avoid a Water World situation? These types of questions should have answers. And if you want the setting to be a certain way, when you introduce an element that would 'break' the setting, you should address it. In D&D, the whole social system doesn't reflect the rules which is a problem. How do kings get to be 18th level? If they're not high level, how do they remain in charge?

Settings that answer those questions make more sense than settings that don't. All else being equal, sensible settings are better.