Reverse Engineering world from game mechanics

[simon_hibbs]

This comment got me thinking about something I've considered before and discussed with my gaming friends, but not discussed here. This is a seperate issue to the topic te quote is taken from.

While art that is made, but then systematically evaluated by a rules system (so as to have a solid system effect), will reward the artist to skew his art toward what that system wants. The artist will start to become scientific in their method, because thats what the rules reward, because of the ways rules would evalutate it. The system rewards a behaviour that isn't art...and 'system does matter' is perhaps so simple one might miss it.

Theoreticaly player characters in game worlds should be able to deduce many of the game mechanics that we as roleplayers use to model their activities. A good example is spell ranges. In RuneQuest many spells had very specific ranges and areas of effect, typicaly a range of 100m, or an area of effect of 10m radius. In theory, the player characters could experiment to determine these parameters very precisely, perhaps even deducing the metric system used in RQ as fundamental physical constants in the game world in a way that they aren't even in our world.

Suppose I run a agme in the same game world, but decide to use GURPS. All of a sudden the physical laws of the universe have changed. GURPS uses imperial measures, so now the same spell has a range of 300ft instead of 100m. Surely the player characters will eventualy notice?

Silly? Well I think so, but I've heard sensible people take the view that the game system realy does define reality for the characters in a game world in this way. my possition is that the game mechanics are merely a convenient model that we use for gaming, but that the moment you start analysing it in this way, you have to chuck the model and say that the reality for the characters is that these ranges and measures aren't as clear cut - we only assume they are clearly definable for our own gaming convenience.

So, what's your possition? Do game mecanics realy define the physical reality of your game world? Or rather, are they a convenient simplification that we use in gaming, but that are not meaningfuly deducible by the characters in the game world?

Do you approach this question diffeently in fantasy games set in imaginary worlds, form how you would cope with this question for games ostensibly set in the real world?

Best regards,


Simon Hibbs

[xiombarg]

I will note, in passing, that in Time of Thin Blood, a supplement for Vampire: the Masquerade, one of the NPCs, Doctor Netchurch, manages to scientifically deduce the existence of what in the rules are called Blood Points. Netchurch does a lot of this stuff -- one of his "research assistants" is featured in Ghouls: Fatal Addiction, which answers alot of "stupid PC questions" about ghouling (i.e. "What happens when you ghoul a pregnant woman?") in an in-character document.

So, it seems that some of the people at White Wolf feel that characters can figure out such underlying "rules of reality", as it were.

Also worth mentioning is the "Self Referantial" plot in Over the Edge, where the PCs can figure out that they're characters in a roleplaying game, and this can posisbly grant them special powers.

[Loki]

These are two extremely interesting questions: can player characters deduce system mechanics? and if I switch to another system, can the player characters deduce that change?

In my opinion, running a game where the player characters are concerned with deducing the underlying mechanics of their reality (ie the system) is something so weirdly self-referential that prior to xiombarg's post I'd never even heard of it actually happening in a game. It seems to me that if that were the point of the game, then such a deduction would be the Point of the Game--in other words, the game is designed around the pcs determining the rules of the game. This could manifest itself as some kind of "pcs are physicists" or "pcs finding god" game... or it could manifest itself as the kind of game where the pcs become aware that they are characters in our fiction--perhaps they begin a dialogue with the players themselves.

Let me throw this back at you then... if player characters can deduce the system mechanics, how would that change your game?

Certainly my players often run their d20 player characters as though they know all their capabilities to a tee, and are nearly omniscient when it comes to estimating their chances for success within the rules. If the player characters were to discuss ranges of spells IC, it really wouldn't change much as they already behave as though they have conducted many experiements to determine the exact ranges of their magical abilities. Meanwhile, d20 is an extremely tactical game, so perhaps in another system this would be different.

[iambenlehman]

I actually heard this exact justification used in a simulationist-stemming argument for gamism (!)

The argument was this -- in a game system where, say, using all the same "type" of weapon (a big axe for hacking, a little axe for throwing backup) is better than using multiple "types" (a big axe for hacking and a dagger for throwing/backup) that experienced warriors will quickly noticed that people who use all the same "type" of weapon tend to survive, and it will survive in military culture as a "legend."

I thought this was cute.

I think it depends on the type of system -- if the rules are overwhelmingly Authority rules (this happens in the gameworld) then yes, it makes some sense that the rules are, in fact, more-or-less physics.  To me, at least.  If the rules are mainly credibility rules (rules that tell you who gets to talk about the system) then, well, that doesn't make a lot of sense.  For instance, it makes no sense for an Over The Bar character to realize that he only succeeds in doing things when some non-existant entity downs a glass...  But measuring spell effects in RuneQuest does make a lot of sense, to me, at least.

It, ultimately, depends on the CA.  If we're talking Sim/Actor stance, this is feasible, if a little strange.  If we are talking any other combination, it does not matter in the slightest.

yrs--
--Ben

P.S.  A friend of mine made a MSH character once whose only power was that he actually had a copy of his character sheet.  He didn't dare to change it (he'd have to erase first, and was worried about the implications) but he had an exact sense of his capabilities at any given time.  It was amusing.

[ethan_greer]

It's amusing to contemplate the subjective reality of fictional entities. I like the concept from a theoretical standpoint, but I agree with Ben that it's only relevant in-game when certain styles of play are employed.

[xiombarg]

It's amusing to contemplate the subjective reality of fictional entities. I like the concept from a theoretical standpoint, but I agree with Ben that it's only relevant in-game when certain styles of play are employed.

Yeah, I tend to agree as well. The thing is, in some of the examples Ben cites, it wouldn't be possible for the character to figure it out. From the perspective of the character, the Over the Bar system would look random, and there's no way for the the characters to figure out otherwise.

It's notable that despite its rhetoric, that Vampire is High Concept Simulationism, which is why Netchurch can do what he did, and that characters in Over the Edge figure out their "I am a RPG character" status not by experimenting with the "physics" of the game world, but because a plot allows them to get a copy of the Over the Edge rulebook and allows them to meet their creators, i.e. more or less by fiat.

[beingfrank]

So, what's your possition? Do game mecanics realy define the physical reality of your game world? Or rather, are they a convenient simplification that we use in gaming, but that are not meaningfuly deducible by the characters in the game world?

Do you approach this question diffeently in fantasy games set in imaginary worlds, form how you would cope with this question for games ostensibly set in the real world?

Well, I think there's a couple of ways of looking at it, even once System Typing and stance are taken into consideration.  One is that the mechanics define the physical reality of the game world.  Another is that the mechanics describe the physical reality of the game world.

The former could be really whacky, and I can see me in a silly mood running away with the idea of playing a character who discovered that the fundamental rules of reality broke down to Just Because much faster than we would expect, or bringing in ideas from Permutation City and trying to talk the GM into changing the definitions of the physical reality if the PC was able to come up with a more elegant and sensible theory than the game mechanics.  But that's mostly me being silly and messing with a GM.  I'll do that after too much caffeine or sugar.

Otherwise the answer is always 'as is convenient and suits my/our aims.'  Though I argue this with people I play with who feel that the rules should always be deducible and I still haven't convinced them to my way of thinking.

[HMT]

...Theoreticaly player characters in game worlds should be able to deduce many of the game mechanics that we as roleplayers use to model their activities. A good example is spell ranges. In RuneQuest many spells had very specific ranges and areas of effect, typicaly a range of 100m, or an area of effect of 10m radius. In theory, the player characters could experiment to determine these parameters very precisely, perhaps even deducing the metric system used in RQ as fundamental physical constants in the game world in a way that they aren't even in our world.

Suppose I run a agme in the same game world, but decide to use GURPS. All of a sudden the physical laws of the universe have changed. GURPS uses imperial measures, so now the same spell has a range of 300ft instead of 100m. Surely the player characters will eventualy notice?...

If I may be overly literal for a moment, many cultures do not have this notion of the scientific method. Absent a somewhat refined scientific technique, it might be difficult to tell the difference between a range of 300ft and a range of 100m.  However, surely the characters would know the spell could not reach someone 200m away. As a child, I had a sense of how far I could throw a rock. If spells are as reliable as that sort of physical task, spellcasters will have a good sense of their limits.

[Doctor Xero]

Well, one game-mastering technique I've used to give players a feel for the "uniqueness" of magic or superpowers has been to use one game mechanics system for the characters' ordinary lives and a rather different game mechanics system for magic or for superpowers.

For example, in one game I ran, the game mechanics for regular skills was one of those "1d10 + skill + relevant attribute to surpass the task difficulty number" systems ; however, the game mechanics for superpowers was one of those "roll relevant attribute or less on 1d20" systems.  This even applied to senses -- players found they wanted to roll a high number when using normal sight to look for something yet wanted to roll a low number when using super-senses.  It gave a marvelous sense of the difference between the human world and the superhuman world in that game.

Another time,  I ran a game in which activities in the Astral Realm worked off different ruling attributes than did activities in the ordinary world (in a system wherein one could temporarily "increase" an attribute if one knew which attribute to increase).  Characters made a concerted effort to discover which attribute ruled which effort, such as realizing that concentration mattered more than muscle memory in combat (an in-game way of realizing that Brawling now worked off Willpower not Strength).

Doctor Xero

[Callan S.]

As the owner of the quote, I can positively say rules as physics has nothing to do with that quote.

I was refering to player behavior. For example, if the rule is that I get to hit Jim the player with a stick every time his PC goes near a cave of riches, his PC wont go there (lets say being hit is enough to stop Jim).

Notice that his PC has absolutely no game world disensentive to go to the cave. Indeed, it is one of ritches and he should be drawn there.

In a gamist CA, its the same deal...the player engages the system or misses out on a reward.

I'll argue its even the same in sim...the player engages the art evaluation system when making the art, or he misses out on exploration of what that system would otherwise provide. He does get to explore not exploring (which is valid), but I think the former is more rewarding and that in the end will tilt the balance.

On the actual topic of rules and game world physics being discovered, I'd like to discuss it. But I think it'd get incoherant to do so in this thread.

[simon_hibbs]

As the owner of the quote, I can positively say rules as physics has nothing to do with that quote.

Oh quite, I hope I made that clear. The idea of characters altrering their behaviour based on the rules structure, which lets face it happens a lot in RPG, got me thinking about the wider issues.

On the general point, my feeling is that game rules are simply a model of the game world we use for convenience. In  tabletop battles game we are not personaly realy personaly taking the role of a specific character, even a general. In Monopoly we aren't relay playign the part of a capitalist, the disconnection is there because the game is so clearly about trading cards and moving metal shoes. The theme of property trading is just a theme.

Roleplaying games are different in my mind because we are trying to actualy play a (fictional) person. They are a step beyond other kinds of games in this respect due to the personal identification between ourselves and the character we play. I'm not saying we become the character, but we identify with the character in a way that we geenraly don't in other kinds of games.

For example, only in roleplayign games is it possible to transfer a character from one game system to another in any meaningful way. For example I've translated characters from Traveller into GURPS because the referee switched game systems in mid campaign. For that to be possible, we must consider that the character exists independently of the game system, therefore the game system cannot be truly definitive of the character or the game world.


Simon Hibbs

[lumpley]

Simon, can I ask you to consider this:

Game rules coordinate three things: 1) the shared imaginary stuff, the imagined and described in-game; 2) the input of the real-world players; and 3) "representations" like numbers and words on a character sheet, dice, maps, life stones, whatever.

A game's rules draw on and manipulate the representations, whatever they are, to constrain the players' input into the imagined in-game.  Neither the rules nor the representations can touch the in-game directly - how could they?  Instead, they act on the real-world players.  They contribute to the players' communicated imagination of what happens in the game.

So of course a particular character is portable from one game to another!  The game rules don't have anything to do with the character.  They don't determine what a character can do or how effectively a'tall - they determine how the players interact.  Which then in turn determines what the characters do and what comes of it.

The players follow the rules, not the characters or the game world.

...So when I port my character from Ars Magica to the short-lived ill-advised godawful Pendragon hack I wrote, does she notice the changes in her capabilities?  The question's nonsensical.  Do I notice the changes in her capabilities?  That question's nonsensical too: she's imaginary, she doesn't have capabilities.  What I notice is: I'm allowed by my friends to say things about what she does that I didn't used to could say.

Do I pretend that she notices the difference?  Well that's up to me, isn't it?

-Vincent

[Callan S.]

Ah, now I know where I am.

Okay, Vincents dead on...characters aren't independant of rules, its the players who are. As said, rules are like a guide on how to imagine something/a world...rather exact guidelines.

That said though, most characters are imagined with some amount of curiosity. They investigate stuff, which includes the effects of game mechanics.

This means a bizarre loop, where the player, though following his own guidelines on what his character does (in this case, investigation of stuff), can end up investigating the effects of the rule system/shared method of imagining.

An extreme example might be a character who ends up falling off a 100 foot cliff and actually surviving okay, when the systems guide to shared imagining suggests such a thing is fatal.

Now, on to Vincents point. Does the player ignore this? Now, remember, although the character is imaginary, it does have some substance to it. Just like a program on your computer isn't an physical object, but it is a configuration and has the substance of such, so is a character in a human mind a configuration and has some substance.

Once you've established that it has some substance, you'll realise to get around the cliff problem, you'll have to abandon part of that substance. The part that would, as per its guideline on how the PC thinks, think about it. Your going to have to skip using those.

The problem with this is that it can be like removing cards from the middle of a house of cards. Other parts of the guideline to playing this character depend on them.

So the options are:
* Abandon and rewrite the guidelines somehow to avoid this (how?)
* Simplify the characters guideline so they gloss over such things, then find the PC is more shallow to play.
* Abandon the problem parts of the guideline and have the rest of the guideline slowly collapse as the interdependant other parts of the guideline show up.
* Make no changes, operate from the guidelines and find the character notices system effects and acts on them as per the guidelines.

Note: A clarification on what I mean by guideline is whatever the player decided for the character while making it. Usually its some personality details and then the bulk of the guide is extrapolation using common sense. The common sense part giving you more than you bargained for.

[Doctor Xero]

All right, after all this, I simply have to bring up three cross-overs that I think epitomize the wonder that can come from exploiting these differences.

In the recent JLA/Avengers cross-over, the authors had a great deal of fun having the Marvel Universe heroes end up in the DC Universe and puzzle over social and physical differences between universes, with the DC Universe heroes doing the same.  Quicksilver was astonished by the Flash Museum and the fact that in the DC Universe, superheroes are celebrities (while Captain America, his mind addled by outside forces, wondered if this were enforced worship), while Superman discovered that, in the Marvel Universe, the area which would be Metropolis was only overgrown woodlands.  The Scarlet Witch found her magical abilities going out of control because magic is so much more common in the DC Universe, while The Flash found his powers ebbing away in the Marvel Universe because it lacks the Speed Force which is the source of his superspeed.  Et cetera.

In a wonderfully odd cross-over, Archie Meets the Punisher, the Punisher was astonished by the isolated innocence of Riverdale and vowed to protect it from the nastiness of the rest of the world, even deciding not to use firearms because it just didn't feel right to use gunfire in the world of Archie, while Archie and the gang were confused by the ill-fitting hoodlum who entered their idyllic polder (a place somehow protected from real world corruption, like Pleasantville or Themiscyra).

The oddest cross-over which included some level of recognition of variant laws of reality took place in a two-parter between the old Happy Days t.v. series and Laverne and Shirley.  The first half involved Richie in the Happy Days series reality, with its wry verbal humor; in the second half, Richie ended up in the Laverne and Shirley series reality, and suddenly found himself continually the victim of slapstick of the sort which never occurs to him in his home series.  What made this amusing as a cross-over is that Richie himself noticed that these sorts of things never happened to him except when he was around those two : "You live in a violent world, girls! "

I once ran a summer-long mega-cross-over celebrating my then-gaming group's anniversary, and one of the things we played off were the differing laws of reality between the many different campaigns.

(P.S. Don't forget Alan Moore's occasional cross-overs involving Supreme and Tom Strong, such as the funny animal universe in which Tom Strong discovered the Laws of Comedy trumped the Laws of Physics.)

Doctor Xero

[simon_hibbs]

So of course a particular character is portable from one game to another!  The game rules don't have anything to do with the character.  They don't determine what a character can do or how effectively a'tall - they determine how the players interact.  Which then in turn determines what the characters do and what comes of it.

We disagree on some points of semantics, but I think we basicaly agree that we as players follow the rules, not the characters.

This is why I say that the characters exist independently of the rules - it's in the same way that Frodo exists independently of the English language. My wife has read the chinese verson of LotR and if all the english editions were burned, Frodo would still exist as a character in a book. The game rules are simply the language we use to describe our game world and it's characters.


Simon Hibbs