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.

Noon wrote: 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

ethan_greer wrote: 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.

simon_hibbs wrote: 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?

simon_hibbs wrote: ...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?...

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

lumpley wrote: 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.

simon_hibbs wrote: I think we basicaly agree that we as players follow the rules, not the characters.

Doctor Xero wrote: That's why I suggest that player-characters would notice differences if placed in a different rules system only if the differences between rules systems were intended to replicate differences between the Laws of Reality of two different universes.

Simon, I'm with you all the way, except: there's no real reason why your game rules have to be a simulation of the game world, "good enough" or a'tall. We've come to expect simulations because that's what we've mostly got, but that's sort of an accident of history, not essential to roleplaying.

Put another way: the problems you're identifying are problems only with games that purport to simulate the game world. Games that regulate the players' input more directly - take my Nighttime Animals game for instance - don't have any such potential mismatches.

-Vincent

lumpley wrote: Simon, I'm with you all the way, except: there's no real reason why your game rules have to be a simulation of the game world, "good enough" or a'tall. We've come to expect simulations because that's what we've mostly got, but that's sort of an accident of history, not essential to roleplaying.

Doctor Xero wrote: That's why I suggest that player-characters would notice differences if placed in a different rules system only if the differences between rules systems were intended to replicate differences between the Laws of Reality of two different universes. And even then, only the scientifically-inclined would notice unless the differences were radical (e.g. if a player-character in the Champions/Hero System universe suddenly discovered how far more lethal a fall from a great height is when she has plane-walked into the A-D-&-D universe or suddenly discovered that her maximum running speed had suddenly shiftered radically downward when she plane-walked into the Call of Cthulhu universe).

simon_hibbs wrote:
Note I never actualy used the phrase 'simulations of the game world' because that's not always what we're simulating.

M. J. Young wrote: Player characters do notice changes between universes in Multiverser, largely because the bias rules can make a significant impact not merely on the difficulty of doing certain things but on what is possible. Technological devices can go from easy to use to unreliable or even non-functional; magic similarly can be stronger, weaker, impossible. Although it's rare, even the ease with which characters walk can be impaired by very low bias in the body area.

So if you'll allow that significant changes in the difficulty of doing various tasks constitutes a difference in the laws of reality between two universes, I'd agree.

I personally view system rules as an abstraction for what the game world reality is like. It is not game reality, but a model or representation of it. If it is not seen this way, then there really shouldn't be a need for having a GM. While I dislike rules-lite systems and like more detailed and complex rules, I also realize that rules should only be there to help the GM arbitrate things or to make thigns more consistent. But the final word is the GM's and not the system-rules.

If you think about it, we as real living breathing people in this world do the same thing. We try to find our limits and chances of success at things. So really, we are trying to deduce the nature and essence of the reality that we live in here in the real world. So I don't see it as a problem that characters would want to do the same in a game.

The problem is two-fold however. The first is that our real reality is vastly complex. There are so many unknown variables and so many hidden variables that we'll never know that it is impossible (probably) for us to ever figure out certain things with precise certainty. And this is where games don't have that benefit. Because game rules are simplified models it is easy to extrapolate from game events the precise system mechanics involved. And it's far easier to do this than to come up with Physics or Calculus to explain things in the here and now. There's no easy way to solve this problem, because no matter how complex we make the game rules, it will be orders of magnitude more simple than the rules of the real world we live in.

The 2nd problem is that because we are playing a game, everything is quantified. Because everything is quantified (numerically speaking) there is no mystery. A player knows exactly what his character's stats are, and he knows that Spell A can go exactly X amount of meters. The random element of games usually dictate success or failure, and not the limits of the system itself. For example, let's say I have a Strength of 10. Most games define this as being able to lift a certain amount of weight before being encumbered and doing a certain range or bonus to hand to hand damage. Few games see the number 10 not as static value, but rather an average probablity. So for example, on some days the character may feel stronger and lift more weight, and on other days he may be weaker and have less force behind his punch. The randomness is seen in rolling for damage, but not in the attribute itself.

Moreover, we in the realworld often only have vague ideas about how good we are at things. Strength is a bad example here, because it is easily quantified. In general most physical tasks can be figured out fairly well (we generally speaking now whether we have a lot of endurance compared to other people, or are more dextrous or agile....but we probably won't know...."yeah, "I'm in the 90th percentile of the most agile people in the world"). What about charisma, or attractiveness, or intelligence? These are all things which in the real world are dangerous for us to try to quantify. And yet in our games we know exactly how good we are compared to other people. And this makes it very easy for the players to deduce things about the world around them.

So a solution to this problem is to make many of the game attributes transparent and unknown to the player other than through qualitative modifiers. Through trial and error a player may figure things out, and realize that he gets better with time (through experience). But then again a character may not. It's entirely possible that a character has very high stats, but unfortunately manages to fail more often than he succeeds through bad luck. As a consequence, he'll become less confident in his abilities despite having in reality, good attributes.

When you hide the variables from the players, it becomes much harder for them to deduce how the game world works. But some system mechanics must be revealed to the players. For example, I use a Pool points in Focus and Drive that players can use to increase their chances. However, they don't know their limits necessarily. They may only have 2 points to spend and will say they want to spend 4. They will get all the bad stuff for spending 4 points, but will only get the positive benefits for spending 2. This in conjunction with not knowing the exact levels of their attributes or even their skills means that you don't run into that dreaded, "let's see, I have a Bow skill of 7, with an Dexterity of 10, and by spending 2 points of concentration and 10 Action Counts of aiming, I should be able to hit that man-sized target at 80m as long as I roll a -1 or better!".

By hiding the variables (or at the least obfuscating them) then it's like trying to fit a jigsaw puzzle together without a picture to help you. The underlying pieces are there, but you won't have any help. Another way to help avoid the absolute deduction problem is to varying variables or varying system mechanics. For example, my probability function changes according to the type of task. There are low variance tasks, average variance tasks, and high variance tasks. Some tasks are more dependent on luck and chance than on skill, and others are more reliant on skill and ability than on chance. If the player doesn't know which task type he's performing, then he can't readily calculate his odds of success (though trial and error will help).