My Favorite Rule

[Filip Luszczyk]

In Carcassonne the rule is: when you draw a tile that you can't legally place, you return it and draw again.

I played Carcassonne maybe about 150 times. Exactly 123 times since we started recording our scores in 2008. That's more sessions than in any single tabletop game that I played and especially any single rpg.

The first time we had to apply this rule, it was around #50 or maybe #75. It was after a few dozen games anyway. Since then, we applied it perhaps about five times. It comes up in less than 5% of our games.

The rule could not be there. The designer could not bother. The guy could decide we should extrapolate, handwave, freewheel or otherwise adapt the game to the way our group prefers to play it. He could even call that a luxury. And maybe, just maybe, upon drawing the tile with no legal placement we would somehow figure out what to do on our own.

But the rule is there.

It's my favorite rule.

It makes the ruleset complete.

[Callan S.]

Complete procedure. No hole in procedure that play could flow out of the rules and drip into social contract (or worse things).

Except roleplayers seem to see procedural holes as the only way for prior spoken fictions to affect gameplay. Try and fill in the gaps and they'll go 'What? This isn't a boardgame, you know! We can use our imaginations!' said with rising glee at the end, making holes holy.

Except that everyones imaginations don't work the same way, so they are in no way a replacement for making sure everyones actually doing the same activity. Indeed that aught to be the feature of roleplay - to come into contact with imaginations unlike your own. Except people do the exact opposite and try and act as if they can use an imagined scenes contents like rules or currency in itself - and when someone imagines it another way, they think they can call them a cheat, as much as if they snuck an opposing chess piece off the board or stole from the bank in monopoly. They even seem to get off on the idea their imagination is objective.

It's kind of rediculous to go on about it though - bang, full procedure and you don't have to think about any of this stuff. It's that simple. Board games got that thing right, where we as a social group actually do the same activity without really putting much effort into doing the same thing (no long talks about SC, no long talks about agendas and shit...fuck, you can just play! WTF!?), long, long ago. And indeed I bet there have been board games that have left some currency transfer up to someones reflection on spoken fiction, been made at various points in distant history and we just don't know about them.

I noticed the holes in procedure part about ten literal minutes into my first roleplay session. Then I had this fantasy that I would fill in the gaps in procedure, make it whole, and my friends and others would declare me da man for what I had designed! Huzzah! So I went looking for what, at a procedural level, makes a good game. At first I just searched, then in latter years I probed - I found there is actual resistance to quantifying gameplay into a complete procedure. You ask someone what they like, as in getting down to the very steps and procedure of what they like, and they will dance around the subject, with handwavey, vague talk that'd make a politician proud. As far as I can tell, there is no reaching these people through design/complete procedures, barring how big your real life scooby gang is.

[contracycle]

Except roleplayers seem to see procedural holes as the only way for prior spoken fictions to affect gameplay. Try and fill in the gaps and they'll go 'What? This isn't a boardgame, you know! We can use our imaginations!' said with rising glee at the end, making holes holy.

What does an RPG with no imaginary space look and play like?  If you reduce it to a boardgame, then isn't it a boardgame?

Except that everyones imaginations don't work the same way, so they are in no way a replacement for making sure everyones actually doing the same activity. Indeed that aught to be the feature of roleplay - to come into contact with imaginations unlike your own. Except people do the exact opposite and try and act as if they can use an imagined scenes contents like rules or currency in itself - and when someone imagines it another way, they think they can call them a cheat, as much as if they snuck an opposing chess piece off the board or stole from the bank in monopoly. They even seem to get off on the idea their imagination is objective.

For which there is social contract and distribution of authority.  It doesn;t have to go sdour and contentious, and indeed I think that it is a failure when it does.

You know, I did jury duty some time ago, and quite an interesting experience it was.  One element was that we couldn't ask questions, so even though there was quite some appetitre to investigate further, we couldn't do any of that.  And at the end we came decision, and implicitly in this process we had in effect to imagine what had happened.  We had no time machine viewing portal to see what had actually happened, we had to make a judgement.  So these appeals to9 imagination are a fact of life, and always will be barring universal omniscience.

[Caldis]

I kind of pity you for having played that much Carcassonne, there are so many better games.

As for how it relates to RPG's the rule that completed the ruleset during my formative years in roleplay was that if there's any question the GM decides.  For many reasons it's a crap rule but it was still there.  Like one time in 1st edition D&D a player throws oil on an invisible assasin and sets him on fire.  There were no rules for whether the invisibility would make the flame/light and smoke produced by the fire invisible or if it would remove any penalties they players had to hit so as DM I made the decision.  Complete loop of proceedure, it might not be a great and there were arguements about specific rulings but there was a complete proceedure.

[Callan S.]

Gareth,

What does an RPG with no imaginary space look and play like?  If you reduce it to a boardgame, then isn't it a boardgame?

This is one of those questions which actually asserts something as a fact in it's asking. It's asserting that if you plug all the holes, there will be no imaginary space thingie/element involved with play, to any degree. I don't agree with that base assertion, depending on how you plug all those holes in procedure. Can we toss around the idea between us that there are mechanical ways of plugging the holes, yet still having points where we reference our subjective take on the prior spoken fiction in our mechanics use?


Caldis,
That adds another tricky subject to what I talked about, because it's like a leap of imagination that insists on adding rules. It's like if my guy can shoot lightening from his hands, and he shoots it into a pool the badguys are standing in - don't I zap them all!? Water conductivity, man! Well, lets say the ruleset has nothing on that. If I aimed at the pool, I just missed them. And if the invisible guys on fire, he's on fire, as in taking damage, but there's nothing else in the rules. I know, I know, you'll probably rush me and say that imagination should have authority over rules, including which new rules are made up, rather than rules structure determine that a certain imagined thing just doesn't happen. I bet your thinking that sounds short sighted and imaginatively restricted, but it's actually the complete opposite. If, for example, you always add the conductivity rule to every RPG you ever play - well, your always stuck with conductivity. Always. When the person who follows the rules is actually more free - he can try a world without conductivity. He is actually more free for following rules than the person who puts imagination ahead of rules (PS: I love this quote : "Since implicit rules are generally invisible, the tendency is to always think that the guy who follows explicit rules is the one constrained"). But anyway, as said, this sort of leads on to another related, yet lengthy subject of it's own. I'm just trying to briefly touch on it here.