"Rules as written" and the current state of RPG design

[Suzerain]

Why is RAW not the default state of rules discussion, instead of requiring clarification that, yes, we're talking about what the rules say and not what they don't say? I can't find a source on where the phrase "rules as written" was first coined, but the fact that it needed to be coined at all is telling.

Further on that, is the fact that RAW is not the default responsible for the current stagnant design climate? After all, if your player base is so disconnected from the actual rules material you're producing that they aren't even really talking about it until they specify they are, why even put effort into making sure what you're producing even makes sense on a basic level? I mean, apart from a sense of professionalism and pride

[Whatever]

Here's the Healer feat from 5e (I don't mean to divert this into a 5e discussion, it's just a concise example):

You are an able physician, allowing you to mend wounds quickly and get your allies back in the fight. You gain the following benefits:

* When you use a healer's kit to stabilize a dying creature, that creature also regains 1 hit point.
* As an action, you can spend one use of a healer's kit to tend to a creature and restore 1d6 + 4 hit points to it, plus additional hit points equal to the creature's maximum number of Hit Dice. The creature can't regain hit points from this feat again until it finishes a short or long rest.

As written, using the second ability to heal someone and later stabilizing them (before they rest) precludes them from gaining 1 hp from the first ability.

That's RAW, but I'd be very surprised if even a small fraction of D&D players parse the feat that way on a casual reading. And I'd be even more surprised if they ran the feat that way at their table.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Everyone house-rules. And a lot of people have trouble distinguishing the RAW from their house-rules off the top of their head. Most people actually play in very specific (and often weird) social contract spaces, and the RAW are simply a common component of those spaces. 'Clean' rule spaces are the exception.

The current design climate is mostly the result of the biggest companies going all-in on marketing over math. That in turn is probably caused by nepotistic hiring resulting in most of the designers for those companies being unable to do the requisite math, and so resorting to blowing smoke up asses to compensate.

[Dogbert]

Why is RAW not the default state of rules discussion, instead of requiring clarification that, yes, we're talking about what the rules say and not what they don't say?

Because you can't discuss Rules As Written if your system has no rules?

"Rules" no longer belong in the hobby's current phase. Rules are the devil, now it's all storygaming and Magic Tea Party and emulating Critical Role's scripted shows.

*sings* We had a good run, but now it's done,
It seems all the stu-pid peo-ple won,
And all those who couldn't get a-long,
Will lose anyway...

Most Denizens here still know the meaning of RAW and work on that assumption when actually discussing rules (at least those that don't argue in bad faith), focus on those, as well as those players out there who are still worth your time. The rest of the world, though? They're a lost cause. Hell, at least 8 out of 10 players out there can't tell the difference between "the way things are" and "the way YOU do things at YOUR table" (and in some players' case, they literally -can't- assimilate the difference, no matter how many times you explain them with puppets).

[Trill]

The reason why RAW and RAI are there is because writing rules is an artistic endeavour
And just like with art or music what you produce may not be what you wanted to produce
So sometimes you want your rules to do XYZ. But either due to small errors, incompetence or lack of perspective you instead produce XYC.
the latter is RAW: the actual product
the former is RAI: What we suppose the writer wanted to write.

Let's take an example: A very lethal damage system in a game with long chargen. RAI would usually be that it's not supposed to be that lethal.
Sometimes you ask the writer and it turns out that RAW and RAI are the same: they managed what they wanted to do (they intended for the lethality to be high)
sometimes RAW =/= RAI, but your RAI isn't their intent. (they didn't want that level of lethality, they wanted it to be even more lethal)

The only thing we can talk about objectively is RAW. How to interpret it is something everyone has to decide for themselves

---

Or take another example: In SR 5e microtransmitter are undetectable.

Micro-transceiver: This classic short-range com-
municator has been favored by professional operatives
since the 2050s. It doesn’t do anything special, it just
lets you communicate by voice with other micro-trans-
ceivers and commlinks that you (and the other person)
choose, within a kilometer. The micro-transceiver con-
sists of an ear bud and an adhesive subvocal micro-
phone (p. 439), both of which are commonly available
in hard-to-spot designs.
Wireless: The micro-transceiver’s range becomes
worldwide.

With wireless off it can still communicate within one kilometer, without you being able to detect it at all.
You can't jam it because Noise only affects things connected to the matrix.
And there's no known way to block it because there's no specific way to block all waves.

RAW it is the best way to create IEDs. Just pack it somewhere and send a short tone if you want it to blow. And since you can be 1 km away they have no idea where you are.
RAI you'd likely assume that enough noise to remove wireless functionality would make it not work.

[shinimasu]

Because even written games have bugs in them sometimes that render RAW either unplayable, broken, or unplayably broken.

Say there's some class feature that allows you to make a move action whenever you miss with an attack. And then there's a feat added in a later splat that allows you to make a free attack after a move action. Clearly the intention of these two rules wasn't to make a combo where you can just keep attacking forever until you hit, but that's what the RAW says.

Now you might argue this is the fun kind of bug, and if the game designers were dumb enough to code it in like that then you're well within your rights to exploit it for all its worth. And that's fine. But it's also fine for a table to decide "No that's dumb" and patch it by adding the "Once per turn" addendum to one of both of those abilities.

[Suzerain]

Because even written games have bugs in them sometimes that render RAW either unplayable, broken, or unplayably broken.

Say there's some class feature that allows you to make a move action whenever you miss with an attack. And then there's a feat added in a later splat that allows you to make a free attack after a move action. Clearly the intention of these two rules wasn't to make a combo where you can just keep attacking forever until you hit, but that's what the RAW says.

Now you might argue this is the fun kind of bug, and if the game designers were dumb enough to code it in like that then you're well within your rights to exploit it for all its worth. And that's fine. But it's also fine for a table to decide "No that's dumb" and patch it by adding the "Once per turn" addendum to one of both of those abilities.

That's not the issue I have. The issue I have is that people will claim that since there's a patch, obvious or not, that can fix whatever it is they don't like, that means it doesn't matter that we wound up in this situation in the first place. There's still a burden on the writers of rules to do better, but they won't as long as people are happy to patch over whatever cracks they create, no matter how big, because of this attitude that RAW doesn't matter.

[OgreBattle]

those youtube actors that play dnd5e, do they do a lot of fudging of the rules or are they actually pretty knowledgable and play it as is?

[DrPraetor]

"The DM will hotfix it" is an excuse for lazy writing and design in general, but it isn't a cause.

RPG development has stalled because it is hard. To take the most prominent example on the Den, for a game to be a categorical improvement on D&D 3rd edition even at the lower levels, you'd want good rules for stealth, social interaction and wilderness survival. There are many threads devoted to these questions on the den, and a general commitment to fuzzy rules-light games is categorically not the problem.

"The DM will hotfix it" is, while not the cause, a persistent excuse for bad design. It is persistent because it has an element of truth to it: a good gaming group, and a good GM in particular, will have a better game with bad rules than a bad group will have with good rules.

Therefore, yes, people defending bad or lazy design trot this out almost reflexively. But, that isn't why they're bad and lazy.

[Suzerain]

those youtube actors that play dnd5e, do they do a lot of fudging of the rules or are they actually pretty knowledgable and play it as is?

By necessity they fudge most anything out of combat or else they wouldn't have a full ruleset.

[Stubbazubba]

those youtube actors that play dnd5e, do they do a lot of fudging of the rules or are they actually pretty knowledgable and play it as is?

Talking just about CR, there is a spectrum. Some of the players do not know how their class features/spells work until the DM walks through it with them on the stream. Others know as much as your average regular player. As a group, they are tactically inept, but that doesn't matter because they usually only have 1-2 set piece encounters per day and have plenty of resources to spare.

Yes, obviously outside of combat it's unclear what rules are being applied, but that's because 5e's RAW are just unclear to begin with. I'd say CR has done more to give form to 5e play than 5e's rules have.

[maglag]

The reason why RAW and RAI are there is because writing rules is an artistic endeavour
And just like with art or music what you produce may not be what you wanted to produce
So sometimes you want your rules to do XYZ. But either due to small errors, incompetence or lack of perspective you instead produce XYC.
the latter is RAW: the actual product
the former is RAI: What we suppose the writer wanted to write.

Let's take an example: A very lethal damage system in a game with long chargen. RAI would usually be that it's not supposed to be that lethal.
Sometimes you ask the writer and it turns out that RAW and RAI are the same: they managed what they wanted to do (they intended for the lethality to be high)
sometimes RAW =/= RAI, but your RAI isn't their intent. (they didn't want that level of lethality, they wanted it to be even more lethal)

The only thing we can talk about objectively is RAW. How to interpret it is something everyone has to decide for themselves

Sometimes yes, but other times it's clear the devs just messed up and the solution is simple. Like by RAW D&D 3rd edition monks aren't proficient with unarmed strikes (they're simple weapons, but monks don't have simple weapon proficiency). However I think everybody would agree that monks by RAI should be proficient with unarmed strikes.

[Mord]

Lately I've been playing far more board games, particularly Descent 2e, than any RPG. Even within the much more constrained scope of action available to a hero in Descent as compared to an RPG character, the rules still leave plenty of room for interpretation and confusion. The unofficial faq is 60 pages long, compared to a base rulebook of 20 pages. That's a board game that offers strictly combat-only gameplay, with no support for improvisation, social play, stealth, etc.

RPG rules require exegesis and Rabbinical commentary because rulebooks of such scope and complexity are intensely difficult to write. The most fully fleshed-out and ambitious rule set of all time, D&D 3e, was the product of three full-time professionals working heads-down for three years with the support of a major corporation, from an existing base of decades of experimentation and progressive refinement to the 2e ruleset, with the support of many other developers, writers, and testers. Even after that level of work, various failure modes and undetected train wrecks in the 3e rules made it out of development.

Can you really be surprised that other rule sets are both less ambitious in their scope and less successful in realizing that limited scope?

[Trill]

other times it's clear the devs just messed up and the solution is simple.

which falls under incompetence
or if RAW is the intended rules: malice

[shinimasu]

Because even written games have bugs in them sometimes that render RAW either unplayable, broken, or unplayably broken.

Say there's some class feature that allows you to make a move action whenever you miss with an attack. And then there's a feat added in a later splat that allows you to make a free attack after a move action. Clearly the intention of these two rules wasn't to make a combo where you can just keep attacking forever until you hit, but that's what the RAW says.

Now you might argue this is the fun kind of bug, and if the game designers were dumb enough to code it in like that then you're well within your rights to exploit it for all its worth. And that's fine. But it's also fine for a table to decide "No that's dumb" and patch it by adding the "Once per turn" addendum to one of both of those abilities.

That's not the issue I have. The issue I have is that people will claim that since there's a patch, obvious or not, that can fix whatever it is they don't like, that means it doesn't matter that we wound up in this situation in the first place. There's still a burden on the writers of rules to do better, but they won't as long as people are happy to patch over whatever cracks they create, no matter how big, because of this attitude that RAW doesn't matter.

This is a weird argument. RAW doesn't cause lazy writing, lazy writers cause lazy writing.
Sure you could argue that as long as players are willing to buy and patch shoddily produced products we'll keep getting them, but that's like saying "as long as people keep eating mcdonalds no other restaurant will bother making good burgers."

The rpg market is niche, not a lot of people produce for it, and not a lot of people expect to make money off of it. Designers don't skimp on playtesting and editing because they know fans will put up with a half assed product, they skimp on those things because they're expensive and they'll probably already be selling on a razor thin profit margin.

[jt]

I think RAW is a useful tool, but focusing purely on RAW/RAI is missing a lot. A more comprehensive approach would be, "The distribution of games that people play as a result of reading this rulebook." RAW is a convenient shortcut because those games tend to fall in a cluster that centers around RAW with a wider spread where the rules are sloppy. But if everyone who reads the book has the same mindcaulk, that's more important than the exact legalistic reading of the rules. And if the game sloppily points in the vague direction of some mechanic, but everything remotely near there is still fun, then that's a better result than a precise procedure detailing how not to have any fun.

(I'd like to point out here that the usual state of discussion - "This isn't a problem with the system because my DM houseruled it," is still meaningless, and not the same as "This isn't a problem with the system because everyone houserules it using one of these two rulings, both of which are fine.")

As a thought experiment to highlight the difference between RAW and "Games played as a result of reading this rulebook," imagine two games. One is pure Magical Tea Party. The other has a class and level system that grants people specific abilities, but stops at "You can cast Fireball once per day" or "You can pick any lock" and has no actual resolution mechanics besides Magical Tea Party. Both have the same rules - none - but in the first game Aragorn is making up bullshit abilities to keep up with his party member who's an actual dragon, while the second game people successfully get into a dungeon crawl before arguing about whether a fireball can melt iron bars. They're predictably different experiences, despite having the same RAW.

[Suzerain]

This is a weird argument. RAW doesn't cause lazy writing, lazy writers cause lazy writing.
Sure you could argue that as long as players are willing to buy and patch shoddily produced products we'll keep getting them, but that's like saying "as long as people keep eating mcdonalds no other restaurant will bother making good burgers."

Terrible analogy. McDonalds burgers are actually edible out of the box. Most current RPG rules would either be burgers that are 50% inedible, 10% poisonous, with only 40% actual burger; or just plain being sold a bun and told to imagine the other ingredients.

The rpg market is niche, not a lot of people produce for it, and not a lot of people expect to make money off of it. Designers don't skimp on playtesting and editing because they know fans will put up with a half assed product, they skimp on those things because they're expensive and they'll probably already be selling on a razor thin profit margin.

Bullshit. They absolutely do know fans will put up with a half-assed product because a half-assed product is the market leader. And like most any business, they'll do the minimum because that's what the market wants.

(I'd like to point out here that the usual state of discussion - "This isn't a problem with the system because my DM houseruled it," is still meaningless, and not the same as "This isn't a problem with the system because everyone houserules it using one of these two rulings, both of which are fine.")

Something being universally houseruled does not make it a non-problem. To be hyperbolic, if someone shits on your desk, it's not made okay because you can wipe it off. The desk shouldn't have been shit on, and people should stop being so accepting of people shitting on desks.

The current climate of "well the rules in the book don't really matter" is why the hobby is stagnant, because the rules are the only thing that differentiate a TTRPG from improv theatre. And until we move back into a place where people are actually prepared to discuss the rules as they're written, not the rules as they'd like them to be written or the rules as they think the designers wanted them to read them, we aren't going to get anywhere. People are just going to keep writing bullshit go nowhere rulesets because why put in any more effort when it's anathema to even say "hey what they wrote makes no fucking sense if you look even a little bit hard at it" in most RPG communities?

[Orca]

If there's one reason RPG designers skimp on playtesting or even having another set of eyes run over their product it's ego. The chances of having their baby denigrated, of having people miss the (to them) obvious point of some feature, or just of getting into a slanging match are pretty strong negatives to a lot of likely introverted writers.

No, TGD is not normal.

[shinimasu]

This is a weird argument. RAW doesn't cause lazy writing, lazy writers cause lazy writing.
Sure you could argue that as long as players are willing to buy and patch shoddily produced products we'll keep getting them, but that's like saying "as long as people keep eating mcdonalds no other restaurant will bother making good burgers."

Terrible analogy. McDonalds burgers are actually edible out of the box. Most current RPG rules would either be burgers that are 50% inedible, 10% poisonous, with only 40% actual burger; or just plain being sold a bun and told to imagine the other ingredients.

The rpg market is niche, not a lot of people produce for it, and not a lot of people expect to make money off of it. Designers don't skimp on playtesting and editing because they know fans will put up with a half assed product, they skimp on those things because they're expensive and they'll probably already be selling on a razor thin profit margin.

Bullshit. They absolutely do know fans will put up with a half-assed product because a half-assed product is the market leader. And like most any business, they'll do the minimum because that's what the market wants.

I mean if you want to be mad at the people who play elf games in their spare time for fun instead of the designers then go off I guess, but it's still being mad at the wrong people.

Saying the mcdonalds analogy is wrong because their burgers don't poison people is A) hyperbolic in the extreme and B) a profound misunderstanding of just how terrible that chain is for your health. They also make billions of dollars so you could certainly also call them the market leader in shitty burgers.

[brized]

For the portion of the TTRPG audience that cares about good rules, a significant chunk moved onto alternatives: MMORPGs and cooperative board games like Descent, Gloomhaven, Kingdom Death, etc. Those games offer players some or most of the fun of a TTRPG with less hassle.

In MMORPGs, computers handle the rules seamlessly. In cooperative combat board games, the scope of the game is tight enough that the rules can be picked up quickly and playtested into better quality than a TTRPG. Descent and Mansions of Madness now have official mobile apps that run an AI for the enemies and game structure, so it's even more clear.

The people still playing TTRPGs today love the experiences that only TTRPGs can offer. Rules lite games are dominant now because they reduce the hassle of learning the game and running it. How? They lean into the game requiring a human to referee. Mindcaulk is a feature, not a bug. I suspect the next successful TTRPG that has clear rules is going to be built with an integrated mobile app from the ground up, so the app can handle game rules/structure and the GM can focus on what they find fun.

[shinimasu]

I don't know if I'd say kingdom death is "less hassle" than something like shadowrun. The base game comes in a 22lb 400 dollar box full of fiddly plastic assembly, cards, tokens, and dice. Expansions run from 60 to 150 extra.

I'd say kingdom death and its contemporaries are more like a boutique gaming experience, you're paying out the ass for them but they come with more art and more tactile bits. A higher end kit than "the quarters are orcs, the pennies are goblins, and this eraser here is the dragon" that we defaulted to in 4e.

[Iduno]

I don't know if I'd say kingdom death is "less hassle" than something like shadowrun. The base game comes in a 22lb 400 dollar box full of fiddly plastic assembly, cards, tokens, and dice. Expansions run from 60 to 150 extra.

I think the point Brized was making was you can teach a board game a lot faster than a TTRPG. The longest board game rules explanation I have heard was an hour long. It probably takes an hour to take new players through the pre-generated Shadowrun characters to explain what the numbers mean and where they come from, let alone teaching them all of the rules.

I'm with you on the expensive game parts.

[Foxwarrior]

Given that there are so many better tactical battles games out there (character optimization interferes with that even being possible, not that D&D combat is primarily limited in depth by mathematical limits to how good a thing can be), why is it that these modern, lightly designed RPGs put so much of their limited design work into making mediocre combat when they could be putting that effort into describing what sorts of steel beams your fireballs can melt, what sort of messages you can put into peoples' heads, and other things that are too broad for a focused board or computer game to deal with?

[Omegonthesane]

One, because the most contentious part of an RPG, the bit where you are going to want the text to be the final judge to avoid any appearance of bias, is when two players want different things to happen. If the MC has one vision and each player has another, a framework is necessary to decide which one. The most obvious example of this is conflict.

Two, because most RPGs still don't want to admit that they're improv theater prompts with a dispute resolution mechanic, and meat grinder combat is an easy and familiar challenge to justify throwing in.

[shinimasu]

I don't know if I'd say kingdom death is "less hassle" than something like shadowrun. The base game comes in a 22lb 400 dollar box full of fiddly plastic assembly, cards, tokens, and dice. Expansions run from 60 to 150 extra.

I think the point Brized was making was you can teach a board game a lot faster than a TTRPG. The longest board game rules explanation I have heard was an hour long. It probably takes an hour to take new players through the pre-generated Shadowrun characters to explain what the numbers mean and where they come from, let alone teaching them all of the rules.

I'm with you on the expensive game parts.

Right, my poorly made counter argument was that hassle in the rules is traded for hassle in the setup. I've played both KD:M and Gloomhaven and while the rules were easier to learn my god were there a lot of moving parts.
Setting up the game and putting it away again can be a thirty minute endeavor especially in later lantern years in KD:M where your settlement has grown massive and your list of innovations and settlement locations is threatening to go off the end of your table.

And this is each time you play the damn thing. Wheras explaining the rules ideally only needs to happen once, and can be stretched out through the game to be done only when it becomes relevant (example: you don't need to learn the drowning rules for 3.5 if your characters never encounter a situation where they might drown)