Why are there ever RAW discussions? As an abstract, fun exercise, to see how much you can abuse the game? Or something else?

Who cares what the "rules as written" are? Unless you want to say that the writers are infallible, you know there are going to be loopholes / errors throughout. Guaranteed there's not a sentence in the English language that can't be parsed 5 ways to Sunday. "It depends on what the meaning of 'is', is".

The books are just ways to learn what the RAI are.

I see RAW as being a nice, firm foundation on which to build house rules, myself. Sure, you could go build your own foundation somewhere else, but if there's already one laying around...

And on a forum, its the only foundation that we all have in common, so assumption is that RAW is used, unless the poster states othrwise.
After all its really really hard to have rules conversations if everyone isn't on the same page

Also there are games that you have to run RAW, missions for example(well, okey missions have some official house rules, but the point remains that you cant make up your own rulings)

This. Most of us are playing variations of the same game, so it's important to have a basis for conversation.

Plus, posters like Neraph point us (with huge, flashing red arrows) to parts of the rules that are broken^^ Very useful, and entertaining too =)

I think my point is, you can't ever really run "RAW". Everyone makes up their own rulings. When you sit down at a table, collectively, that's never RAW - it's what everyone (mostly the GM, sure) thinks the RAI are.

Maybe there are a very very few clear-cut rules, but for the most part, someone can parse a sentence or even a word to death, as has been seen here many times. It comes down to common sense and what everyone who is playing agrees, and that means everyone is playing RAI, not RAW.

This comes from seeing so many people say "Well, this is RAW. Your interpretation is a house rule.". No - everything is a house rule.

Think I've found my signature block for this account now...

Not really, RAW is really clear on multiple topics.
You just dont see those hashed out in the forums as there's nothink to talk about, unless someone is planning to house rule that particular part of the rules and even then mostly the talk is about the planned/proposed house rule.

RAW is also important as a baseline for discussion. If everyone is coming in with their own houserules and RAI ideas, then it takes awhile for people to figure out what the hell other people are talking about. Because not everything is a house rule. Are you running damage as written? then its not houserule is raw, likewise character creation or karma awards or whatever.

Yeah, I disagree with your interpretation, phlap. Part of it is like Mäx said, you don't see arguments on most of the rules because, frankly, most people don't argue about things like most skill rolls or the general casting of spells or things like that. You see arguments on things that are vague, yes, but if you add up the bulk it's less than the total RAW. Also, some of that is questions on stuff where people pop their opinions on. And then, there are people who tweak stuff on their own but not trying to override the RAW.

I run all my games on RAW. Hell, I don't even really have that many house rules, unless we come into a situation where handwaving is necessary.

Because some people want to play by RAW, or at least aim to play by RAW. And if not coming to discuss here how do they know if they understand things right ?

Sometimes correctly understanding RAW is hard, and sometimes there is several valid interpretation of RAW (wich indicate a badly written RAW and the need for an errata/rewrite).

If you dont care talking about RAW, you supposedly dont care either talking about background, setting or source. Afterall as soon as we sit down and play all that written material become obsolete.

BTW I want to indicate you,your gaming groups and all people playing character in Seattle area that all your characters are dead because my players team just fail to avoid detonation of a nuclear device and the whole area got blasted away. I will mention Catalyst too so they can pick up an update/erata for the Annual and Seattle 2072 book.

I guess there are some things that noone argues about - that doesn't make it RAW, that makes it something that everyone agrees is RAI. I think that any particular rule, there are a million ways to interpret it, if someone really really really took a mind to parse the written words apart. It's just that usually, "common sense" prevails - which is RAI.

A good example I saw on the boards, someone mentioned that per RAW, adepts can only be female. Why does everyone ignore this RAW? Because everyone pretty much agrees on the RAI. But if someone were to fight about it, say that it's by RAW only female adepts, noone can argue with the RAW interpretation.

I hear what you mean as far as "baselines" for the rules and all. I'm not saying the SR rules are worthless - I'm saying they're great guidelines, starting points, so you don't have to create a whole rule system yourself. But any specific application of the rules will be a derivation of the RAW, not the RAW itself. I think

And now your just being obtuse.

Ok... What the hell are you talking about? To begin with I want citing for your "example". Book, Page, Sentence.

Second off, I think you're off base. If you want to continue with this line of thought, then no rule system whatsoever can be taken as written. But then again your logic is flawed. How can you parse things like, say, the basic mechanics of using a skill?

He's prefering to the fact that adept entry uses a she not he, but with that logic if it was the other way around adepts could only be males.
But the fact is rpg rule books use she and he inter changeably(except those that only use one or the other) and always have done so, would you rather that they used hir or some other gender neutral word(that noone uses) made up by linguist.

Edit: Actually now that i checked the book quite nicely uses "Character" in all the quality descriptions.

SR uses feminine singular pronouns almost exclusively. That has nothing to do with the "RAW" of choosing a gender in-game, and everything to do with conscious grammatical device.

edit: looking closer, it just seems to vary from chapter to chapter. It just happens that the chapters I read the most often use the feminine. In any case, phalp, you're confused on what RAW means.

I try to use 'they' as gender neutral. That's generally how folk do it these days.

People talk about RAW like they talk about Newtonian physics.
RAW works in all but the few outlier cases. In those cases, you apply GM relativity.
Meanwhile, relativity doesn't mean that we can't predict normal shizz like the path of a bullet.

RAW works increasingly well with players who care increasingly about the whole table having fun.

Sometimes "they" just doesn't work in a sentence like she or he does.
I always find it little intresting that english doesn't have a gender neutral singular pronoun and on the other hand my native language finnish only has a gender neutral one.
It's just hilarious that when I'm using english i curse the lack of gender neutral term and when i'm writing in finnish i curse the lack of gender specific ones

At least every noun doesn't need a gender, like in the romance languages.

For the same reason that when people discuss God, they use the Bible.

There's loads of ways to interpret it. But it's the rough rulebook they all at least try to play by.

I do, 'cause I'm playing about 80% at conventions and it's plain impossible to play with (sometimes) total strangers without a common basis.

Phew, thank god my character is in New York City right now.

--



It?

Well, there's RAW and RAW.
There's RAW "Grunts don't have language skills so they can't speak", RAW "according to the running speeds, people in the Shadowrun universe run faster than in ours", RAW "there's no modifier for 'cuteness' so you don't have any modifier to shoot this happy little girl with the kitten" and RAW "You can't have more than 4IP in the meat world, 5 in the Matrix". Each one of these are different from one another.

Not really good when talking about persons.

Houserules are RAW



I have played several game systems now, and none of them have gone unmolested by me (except Rifts...but thats due to a distinct antipathy towards the system). I've written at least 2 different systems and modified one beyond the point of recognition. Any campaign i run now has something distinctly NOT RAW. Current shadowrun game is no magic. Have done a short modern day Zombie apocalypse game with shadowrun (of course no magic/matrix or any other stuff). The system and fluff is great for a backdrop and foundation. But an experienced GM should be able to take that and use it to create unique playing experiences for his/her (hir?) players.

The ugly truth is that Homer's Wonder Bat is a piece of crap.

Personally I pay attention to them because [several] someone(s) put thousands of hours of work, collectively, into smoothing out the crinkles. That makes RAW solid baseline to work from. Most people couldn't 'game design' their way out of a wet paper bag (yes, that means you, dear reader) muchless 'simply' make deep changes without screwing things up royally. At least to start with, and usually it continues downhill. I cringe every time I see people dive into changing around rules they haven't even yet played, I cringe for the unspecting people that don't know they are going to be lab rats for a mad, bumbling scientist. Reading the rules doesn't equate to understanding how they move in play.

Well, it and one are two singular gender neutral pronouns.

Long ago in a game system far, far away we used to try to make house rules to make games more realistic. At first the house rules made sense, made the game more fun for everyone, and they were good. Then came the game suppliments/expansions...

As the system expanded and more "RAW" rules were added / amended, many of the house rules became over or underpowered. As a result many of the house rules needed to be changed. Additionally some house rules required other new house rules to be functional... and the house of cards grew.

Eventually the house rules were starting to approach the number of RAW... and was deemed to no longer be good.

In the end I've found that playing with RAW tends to keep your game better prepared for future suppliments / expansions for the game. The more house rules you make the more you have to change (or discard) as future books are released. Optional rules generally should be your friend though... since at least those will be kept in the developers minds when writing the new stuff.

Personal attacks....
just say no

I care about RAW because my assumption is that the time and effort that went into making a cohesive set of rules, playtesting, editing et cetera, is a hell of a lot more time than I am going to put forth, so makes a very solid base to start from.

I agree, once the rules hit the game table, I don't have issue changing anything written (or not written) in my games to make them fun for my players and me.

But, I have had plenty of times that I have come here asking about a rule and after someone explained it, as written, it made a lot more sense and I found that I just misinterpreted or missed something.

Plenty of other times I've come here with some vague ruling and getting a group of people to share how they do it in their games (or how they would plan to do it), based on other rules, is helpful to making a ruling in my game.

I agree with… several people. RAW is the common, foundational system. It's also that we assume they tried to balance RAW, so you learn them first and give them a chance, *then* tweak.

And 'they' *is* English's gender-neutral pronoun; has been for centuries. This 'she' stuff is annoying, and 'hir/sie' doesn't bear thinking about.

'They' is gender neutral allright, but it's not singular.

MMMmmm.. but me likey Hershey chocolate!

I think you'll find that 'they' *is* singular. It's also plural. That happens sometimes.

mmmMMMmmmm, hershies.......

Yes, but it's plural.

And singular. I didn't point it out the first time because I had faith in context. Alas.

First off, I'd like to say, I'm definitely not trying to attack anyone for playing RAW. Mostly I was just curious, and trying to have a discussion (a polite argument?)

I don't have the PDF with me at the moment, I'll come back and edit in page number for the he / she adept when I can. <page number here>

But that doesn't matter (I don't think). The very fact that people look at the he/she language, and INTERPRET what the author means - that's RAI. How do you know the author didn't intend to have adepts be only female? Because you find that ludicrous? Me too - so we've interpreted the rules the same way together. Glad you're playing RAI with me instead of RAW

Yes, yes, I'm saying there is never any thing such as "RAW". What are words, anyway? Squiggly lines, bunched together on paper. Do words have intrinsic meaning, or only meaning when someone reads them and interprets them? I would hope people are willing to admit, there are a few mistakes in the books. How do you know that's not RAW too? Do you play the game even with the mistaken rules?

I'm definitely not "knocking" the devs of SR or any other devs. Game balance is a hard job, I'm sure. Sometimes they write good words, make it easy for people to understand the true spirit of the rules. Sometimes the meaning isn't so clear. Hard to interpret. Both cases, the words are getting passed through your brain-filter and coming out the other end changed to the way you see things.

Dang, I should've started this thread at the beginning of the week, I def. want to make sure to reply to everyone's point...

Eh. The he/she issue isn't even qualified as 'all adepts are female' as it's an accepted 'gender neutral' pronoun as 'he' is. Blame the political correctness movement.

Vindication!

For my part, I will post some quotes about/for/by me that I've kept because I like them so much.







Also, for the language discussion going on, what's interesting is that Japanese (to my understanding) is even worse with gender identification - women and men have completely different words that they use in conversation. As in, the two genders have completely different words that mean the exact same thing, but women use one and men use the other.

<Backs away slowly, hands in the air>Hey, that's cool. I'm not saying you're playing it wrong, or not playing SR at all. I'm saying that when people say "I'm playing RAW", they are actually playing RAI, they just don't realize it. I mean, your post - several valid interpretations of RAW - this means there is no RAW, it's all interpreted by the players, so it's RAI. I'm not saying throw away the books of SR, they're great! I'm just saying that EVERYTHING in them is RAI.



I think I'm saying that no rule system is ever free from the limitation of human language, and so everything written about a rule system is subjective, not objective. I know, some of the language games I'd have to play to show that some rules are subjective would be pretty wacky. But they don't seem any wackier than some of the other parsing that people are doing, reading the threads on "this is RAW".

Technically, no.

But only because your houserules are not "written" in the book as published.



They are definitely RAI, though.




-karma

Its been a while since I've studied my Japanese, think that is true. Japanese is very contextual and since the language is roughly limited to 100 different sounds (or is it just around 50? in comparison, English has a couple thousand, IIRC), there are a lot of homonyms. I also thought I remembered enjoying learning Japanese because, unlike Latin-based languages, there was no gender identification.

But, that was years ago, so I could not remember (and I didn't take the time to back that up with any sources).

Missions, I don't remember the discussion of RAW being as heated before Missions. Once you have an organized form of play people start expecting you to play by the book. The thing that pisses me off is Missions doesn't allow the optional rules in the book. Why even bother printing the options then?

Just for the sake of being picky, technically, the books are RAW and everything in them is RAW. Its not until you read and implement any of the RAW that they become RAI.

We can't even agree on the real meaning of "They"! This is the best argument for RAI instead of RAW that I've seen yet

This is dangerously close to claiming that there are no absolutes. When you see the stats for a weapon damage code, is that RAI? When you see a price value for a weapon, is that RAI? When there's a skill roll that needs doing, is that RAI?

There are absolutely Rules As Written with no room for interpretation. Now you can argue that if you use the RAW and it works perfectly that it's also being used as Intended, therefore also being RAI, but that's an additional logic step that is not neccessary for standard discussions.

Yeah - this is pretty much my point. Thanks deek, this is much clearer

So you can't play "RAW". There are the books, with rules in them, with RAW. Once you pick them up and play, you start interpreting those rules. Sometimes they get interpreted the same way, sometimes not. In any case, you're in RAI territory.

Except that if you interreb the rules wrong then its not RAI(Rules As Intended)

and really, there is no such thing as RAW, its all Rules As Interpreted.

I wonder if lawyers have forums like this, where they sit around talking about the latest published cases or codes of their jurisdiction?

At least they get paid to argue for and against LAW (cool, LAW is Law As Written)...