Kings and Constitutions 1/18/10 vision

The United States of America was born as a protest over the arbritrariness of Kings. Instead our Forefathers chose a Constitution, in which the rules are clearly laid out and any commoner can argue his case with respect to the rules instead of beg for mercy from a politician who acts as judge and jury.

This tendency is part of me. I am a proud American and one reason I am is because of this choice of Constitution over King.

This tendency has led me into science, where the rules are "set in stone" - unchanging, reliable. Something I learned about science fifteen years ago may have been explained wrong at the time but the facts are still scientific facts, and still reliable. I always hated people telling me what to do - what to eat or not eat "because it's good for you"; following arbritrary parental orders "because I said so"; etc.

I've always like video and computer games for a similar reason; the rules of the setting are set in stone; no King is going to step in and decide the game runs differently now at some random moment.

I've also found that, despite my great attraction to them, I am generally frustrated and bored by tabletop roleplaying. When I try to get into it I am called a "rules lawyer", or I lose my ability to pay attention as the GM rambles on about Obama or how medieval swordsmen REALLY fought.

I'm a rules lawyer for the same reason I'm a scientist and a patriot. I don't like authority figures deciding things on whim (e.g. arbritrarily deciding when the group is "in game/character" and when we're just buddies shooting the breeze, something which in my experience at tabletop games typically happens frequently and without any sort of clear signal, leading me to miss "in game" details of great importance).

Perhaps similarly, I get annoyed at computer games in which the setting doesn't make sense. For example, in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, there are some characters who cannot die, but always get knocked unconcious, and others who always die, and never get knocked unconcious. Then some NPC tells a story about how he asked someone to choose to knock the target out but instead that person killed the target. It's a little thing; but it just doesn't make sense.

How does knocking someone out work in this world? I can't choose to knock someone out vs kill them. It doesn't make sense. I feel a setting should meld seamlessly with the rules in a game, so that events make logical sense as consequences of the laws of nature (aka the game rules).

Another, possibly similar example is the acronym WINR (Wesnoth Is Not Reality). The game Battle For Wesnoth has troops with strange characteristics; for example, Pikemen are nearly immune to arrows, but have no defense against slingers or people who hurl axes. The reason for this is that they have a high resistance to piercing weapons and no resistance to slashing and blunt weapons. It's kind of silly, and was done entirely for "balance reasons" so their team could handle charging lancers better. The idea is that "it's a game, and having fun is what matters, not historical accuracy" - but for a guy like me, the fun of the game in large part depends on how sensible the setting is and how well the rules agree with the setting and vice versa.

If my pikemen were getting destroyed by lancers, I'd either disband them, use them in combination with some other unit which could repel cavalry if it existed as pikes were used in the Tercio, or give them longer, sharper, stronger pikes and armor and train them more. This translates into, perhaps, more damage, and more general resistance to weapons, and perhaps more mobility. I'd also start using more lancers myself!

If this is overpowered so be it. In real life it WAS overpowered which is why formations of spearmen, both on foot and on horse, dominated so much of history from ancient Greece through medieval Switzerland into the early modern era. In fact they STILL use a sort of spear as the primary melee weapon in the modern military; the rifle mounted bayonet. Constantly interfering in the rules of the game to suppress particularly powerful troops in nonintuitive ways for "balance reasons" bothers the hell out of me.

I prefer a more organic method of determining balance, more like reality. If some technique is found to be overpowered and make other methods of doing the same (combat, typically) obsolete, then the old ways will disappear and the new ways will be adapted to, and a dynamic equilibrium between various powers will eventually come to be.

In my opinion, the setting should determine the numbers, and the numbers should shape the setting. In too many games the numbers and the setting are way out of whack and I find it very annoying.

As I said before; I'm an American, and I have the American desire for a set of written rules that I can learn and understand. I very much dislike having to deal with Godlike authority figures - and that include the Abrahamic God, if he exists. The only reason I'd take such a being seriously is if he tortured me or the world was asolutely without pain.

Instead of arbritrary Gods, I like Scientific Laws. Instead of drive-by shootings and posses, I prefer lawyers and police. Instead of Kings I like Constitutions. Instead of GMs making reality in a tabletop RPG game at whim I prefer computer games like Starcraft, or board games like Axis and Allies or even Heroquest in which there is a GM with clear capabilities and limitations - games in which one's knowledge of the rules is rarely or never made obsolete. Even when games are patched the new rules can be relied on for quite a while, and it's made explicitly clear what has changed.

For another example of this issue, see my "Obama Troll vs Maori Troll" entry. I got banned from a forum because the admins chose to be arbritrary rather than state what rule I had broken, which should have been posted with the consequences of breaking it on the FAQ. The admin's dominance was more important to that website's admins than having a coherent disciplinary system - even when the admin in question was personally invested in that particular conversation and therefore prejudiced against me for personal reasons (not rules breakage).