But you said that MTP is a sign of poor design, and now you're saying that MTP is just going to happen regardless? I don't know what you're trying to get at here. MTP is outright required. It's not bad design. A perfectly designed game is going to have MTP simply because of something you've admitted: a game cannot have rules for everything.K wrote:You don't need rules for reality.... that's batshit crazy talk.Verisimilitudinous wrote: Also I love the idea that MTP is just bad design and GOOD design just has rules for everything that ever might come up. Because that is the silliest thing I have ever heard about game design.
MTP is unavoidable in every RPG ever because the alternative is trying to make rules for reality. Which is not only impossible but a bad goal to boot. The DM's entire point is to regulate MTP; if you want rules for every interaction possible you want a video game, not a TTRPG.
You need rules for the scope of your game, and no rules for everything else. You don't make rules for colonizing alien worlds in your 1970's spy game and you don't make rules for crafting pots in your fantasy adventure game.
You only make rules for the things within the scope of your game. Your fantasy adventure game needs rules for swordfighting because that's the thing that people signed up for when they agreed to play a fantasy adventure game. Even if one PC really wants to start a pottery shop and sell his pots to nobles between adventures, the designer does not write big complicated rules for running a business or attracting clients because this is a fantasy adventure RPG and those things are not in the scope.
The big strawman argument for people who want good rules is always, "well, why don't you play a video game!" as if the extremely limited ruleset of a video game is the end result of having rules and a game. This ignores the fact that lots of games use abstractions instead of simply poorly representing aspects of reality with limited rules, and they are much more fun for it. For example, not being able to climb small walls is not the inevitable result of having rules, and MTP is not the only solution. You can just redesign rules when you find a flaw such as fixing your issue with small walls by abstracting movement such that small walls aren't even a consideration.
It also ignores the fact that lots of people RP in video games. RP is clearly independent of MTP.
What if I used the opposite strawman for the MTPers, the old, "If you don't like rules, then you shouldn't RPG. Just write a novel. Then you can be as creative you want and nothing can contain your imagination"?
Hell, magical tea party is the best part of the hobby. How many times have you heard, "Oh man and then I started reading the grapple rules to figure out if I could do anything and it was SO COOL," or, "Holy crap I moved five feet and rolled a D20 five times and it was AWESOME," or, "And then I read the spell description and cast it OH MAN THAT WAS GREAT," compared to the countless recountings all of us have heard about the DM allowing some batshit manuever that's outside of the rules and it being insanely fun?