Art vs. Craft in Play & the Role of Hard/Soft Rules

[kenjib]

In looking at this journal on situation over at Vincent Baker's blog, Chris points out a distinction between soft advice and hard mechanics.  I thought that this was an interesting area to explore and haven't been able to find anything about this by searching the Forge.  If there is some past history on this topic maybe someone could help to point me in the right direction.  In terms of terminology, I think that calling one "soft advice" and "hard mechanics" is a bit redundant, creating the effect of making "soft advice" seem not very important to a ruleset.  Either calling them advice vs. mechanics or calling them soft rules vs. hard rules seems sufficient to me.

The Forge seems to focus primarily on the hard rules of a game - the creation of an objective structure to a game system to engineer a desired social dynamic.  However, soft rules have such a long history in RPGs that I think they deserve more attention, and perhaps a more accepted and understood place in the design of games.

My first thoughts on what role soft rules have in an RPG concern the distinction between art and craft in playing an RPG.  While any discussion of art versus craft in any field is by nature a murky matter, I think it is fair to say that both elements are existant and important to any roleplaying game activity.  On the far craft end of the spectrum would be the administrative tasks, attending to the demands of the hard rules of the game in such a way that the infrastructure of the game runs smoothly and quickly.  On the far art end would be the creative tasks such as creation of interesting new elements in the game, the fostering of motifs, acting ability, creating appealing antagonism that is not predictable, and similar activities.

Hard rules provide a fixed structure to formalize play, whereas soft rules promote a behavior less effectively but leave a large amount of room for improvisation and creativity.  I think again with hard versus soft rules there is a continuum, with the hard end containing rules for which there is little or no free interpretation of rulings allowed (such as combat in D&D with a GM following the 3.5E monster tactics in the Monster Manual), to a soft end containing those "GM Advice" types of rules that have no mechanical backing, relying instead entirely on the subjective interpretation of players for implementation (such as D&D is all about going into dungeons, kicking monsters in the junk, and taking their wallets or how relationship maps unfold throughout play in Sorcerer).  In the middle might be something like fortune-in-the-middle, which provides a strong foundation for results but still leaves a fair amount of room for subjective interpretation.

Without claiming any absolute correlation, I would suggest that harder rules are better oriented toward the craft of playing, while softer rules are better oriented toward the art of playing.  As an example, I will use The Riddle of Steel and it's lack of hard rules on how to time and frame cutovers between multiple, simultaneous, fights and the variable duration of each exchange.

Consider two conflicts.  In one a player character becomes severely injured and will be killed in the next exchange.  In the other a player character will dispatch his foe.  The timing of these two can have several very different dramatic consequences:

1.  The first conflict is resolved to the end first, and the second player then goes through his conflict already knowing that his companion will die and there is nothing he can do about it.

2.  The first conflict is halted when it is clear that the player character will soon be killed.  The second player is allowed to complete his conflict and then is given the opportunity to intervene and save his friend afterward.

3.  The first conflict is halted when it is clear that the player character will soon be killed.  The Seneschal informs the second player that he has 4 exchanges to save his friend.  the second player is now given greater urgency and is more likely to take risks in dispatching his own foe so that he can be free to take on the second foe.

4.  The first conflict is halted when it is clear that the player character will soon be killed.  The Seneschal, midway through the second player's battle and right after his opponent spent all of his dice while he has one remaining, informs the second player that now and only now does he have a chance to intervene to save his friend.  He is now faced with a decision.  If he dispatches his own foe, the can face the second one alone.  If he helps his friend, he will suddenly be faced with the unpleasant situation of two foes simultaneously, which may result in his own death.

Which is more interesting?  This depends both on the creative agenda of the group as well as the specific context of all of the issues surrounding the fight in question.  Most games will assume the former, but the latter is very hard to pin down mechanically.

Leaving this clearly in the realm of soft rules allows the Seneschal to guide the flow of combat and crisis in an artistic manner.  Now, whether his artistic RPG ability is good or not is certainly something to be concerned with, and it is a beneficial quality of hard rules that they help to avoid any artistic shortcomings in a player, but offering this freedom of interpretation can in the right context be a good quality to rules.  If each exchange were a second long, and multiple simultaneous exchanges in combat occurred in round-robin fashion, these four options would not be present, as the hard rules of the system would have already made only one of them viable.

Another potential role of soft rules, is to guide in the understanding of how hard rules are supposed to work and, more specifically for narrative games, to strip people of their old skool assumptions about how RPGs are "supposed to work".  To use Riddle of Steel as an example again, there seems to be a long history of negative reaction toward this game because of a lack of clear soft rules explaining how central Spiritual Attributes are to the game, and how they are intended to be used as the primary source of situation in the game.  As a result people are playing the game the "wrong way" - such as a GM-driven plot sim style of play - and it doesn't work out for them.

[Bankuei]

Hi,

I think what is even more interesting to look at is how soft rules work with or against hard rules.  Consider many traditional games that the rules ultimately boil down to, "What the GM says" and what a powerful impact soft rules have when run through that filter.  Consider many other games that softly promote one thing, but the hard rules promote another...

I think that things work best when both types work together to promote what the game is about, including listing options of different styles if that is also a feature of play.  The Marvel Universe Rpg and octaNe both are good examples of this in a text.

Chris