All published role-playing games include some form of rules system and most 'home brewed' games also involve one. The person in charge of running the game (normally known as the Games Master or GM) referees these rules during the game and explains them when a player does not understand. For this reason almost all GMs will own a copy of the game they are running and be familiar with the content. However, it is a rare occasion when every member of the player party is also in possession of their own copy.
In most cases this does not matter. A player can get by simply rolling dice when the GM tells them to and picking the rules up as they play. However, experienced players find that learning the rules of new systems gets easier as they become more familiar with other games. This is because all games are built on the same basic principles and once you 'speak the language' the imposing rules tomes become far more intelligible.
For the next section of my series on RPGs, I'm going to try and explain the underlying ideas behind the many differing rules systems in print today. I was originally going to cover the entire subject at once, but halfway through I found it was becoming a little long. I'm therefore going to stick to the general principles in this post and explain the nuts and bolts in my next article.
The rules provide a fair form of uncertainty – Stories can be exciting. The ones that excite us always share two essential characteristics – they make us care about the characters and they make us uncertain that things will work out well for them.
RPGs are perfectly set up to do the first of these things. The majority of the 'audience' have invented one of the characters themselves, with the process of play requiring them to attempt to identify with the character as much as possible. Even if a player initially regards a character as disposable, most grow attached to them over the months or years of weekly play that a successful game can entail.
The second part is trickier. Without an external story-teller to dictate the character's fate, how can their be any doubt what the ending will be? In truth, the GM is in ultimate control of each character's survival chances – he dictates whether dangerous actions succeed or fail and controls the hostile external forces that they are subjected to. Unfortunately this makes their fate arbitrary rather than exciting. If the GM just dictates that you win, you were never going to lose. If he dictates you fail, there was never a chance. This also robs the players of any practical control over the outcome of the collaborative story.
Rules allow the GM to relinquish control of the action to a set of random dice rolls. This makes the action genuinely exciting for all concerned, since even he doesn't know if the heroes are going to make it out alive this time. It also absolves him of blame if a character dies, making an unlucky player feel less 'picked on' than they otherwise would.
Of course, if the rules are going to dictate the outcome of an action, the odds have to be 'realistic'. Ensuring that the adjudication is fair gives rise to the complexity of most RPG systems.
No rules set is complete – In a conventional competitive game, the rules cover all possible moves available to a player. In chess, for example, the legal moves open to each piece on the board represent the only choices that a player can make.
RPGs are different. The games is first and foremost a story-telling experience, where characters might end up doing anything the GM deems reasonable in any situation they can imagine. For this reason, no game can cover every specific situation that might occur in play. RPGs are therefore built upon a set of general adjudication rules, with more detailed specific rules for frequently anticipated challenges.
The more specific situations that a game caters for, the more sensitive and 'realistic' it will seem when applied to the game and the less improvisation is needed from the GM. It might therefore seem that complicated is good.
However, players are only human. The more rules a game has, the more impromptu mathematics are needed and the more page-turning in search of half-remembered rules occurs in play. Since rules typically go into most detail regarding the action at the heart of the game, this can result in play slowing to a crawl precisely when the story reaches a peak.
Some games so relentlessly embrace the principle of complexity that they are considered to be literally unplayable in their pure form by most of the role-playing community. Others rebel against this by refusing to complicate the basic resolution mechanics in any circumstance. Most strike a sensible balance between the two extremes.
The rules don't apply to everyone – All of the normal players are bound by the game rules unless the GM decrees otherwise, but the GM is not. As the director of the story a GM can ignore, modify or add to the rules at any time. This includes refusing to accept the result of his own dice rolls and either re-rolling or declaring a different result.
In the early days GMs used a cardboard screen to conceal their rolls. The decline of Dungeon-based gaming (more on that in future) caused these to go out of fashion, but many GMs still conceal the rolls they make to hide this 'fudging' when it occurs. Some GMs even roll on behalf of the players (especially in situations where the character would not know the results of their efforts). I personally think that this is bad practice – although it makes no actual difference who chucks the dice, players will feel as if control of their character is being taken away from them.
A good GM uses their ability to override the rules as little as possible – doing so frequently removes the tension and sense of fairness that they exist to provide. Players accustomed to conventional gaming can find this power hard to accept, but a GM is actually more likely to use this ability to benefit the players than to rob them of an earned success. A highly improbable set of damage rolls from nameless goons can suddenly kill a character, which is unfair if the GM contrived for the fight to happen as a routine action scene. Of course, if all punches are pulled the tension is removed from what should be risky combat.
'Realistic' rules are not always related to the real world – Given their nature, it is tempting to regard RPG rules as attempts to create a mathematical model of reality. It truth the model is not of reality, but of reality as seen by a particular fictional genre. The story should work out the way that the source material suggests things work out, which may be very different from the real world experience of actual people. If something always works out well in an action film, it should usually work out well in games based upon those films.
The best games embrace the conventions of the genre that they represent. Game design is a real art form when it is done properly, elegantly expressing the hidden assumptions and ideas behind the stories in rules form. Certainly, entire rules systems are not interchangeable from one genre to another – which is why so many exist.
One consistent result of this principle stems from the fact that heroes in many genres achieve things 'against the odds'. When rolling dice, things usually go the way statistics suggest that they should. Game rules often give PCs better odds than even the world that they inhabit would credit them with – if the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field actually were 3720 to 1, Star Wars games would be pretty short.
NPCs use the rules too, of course. If they also benefit from easy odds the achievements of the heroes start to look less impressive. A typical system is laced with subtle advantages for the protagonists, enabling them to survive long enough to complete their adventures. Conversely, both
horror and slapstick games are sometimes designed to bring about improbable misfortune as soon as possible.
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