I was chatting with a friend the other day about how strict adherence to the rules-as-written (RAW) might be a male-socialized thing. Yes, this is typical game chat in my universe! I don’t want to speculate too deeply on that bit (yet). But it unlocked a whole other set of thoughts around the many utilities of rules, and how there are entire cultures and paradigms of play around the uses we have chosen.
So just for fun, setting aside tribal nonsense about storygames or OSR or indie or whatever else, here are some of my thoughts on the utility of rules* — that is, how we use rules, not why they exist or what their purpose “should” be. This is not a manifesto! It’s a way to think about what happens when you and I use rules for different, maybe incompatible, reasons.
* But wait, what do I mean by “rules?” I know you want to ask. Let’s say it’s any material where you might hear the phrase “rules as written” invoked. So: obviously the procedural stuff, but — for me at least — also in-fiction material that carries authoritative weight: known conflicts between factions, fictional social strata and who defers to whom, cultural or religious strictures, things like that. I suppose that could even extend to art but that feels theoretical.
Fairness
Disagreement resolution is the use that decades of trad RPGs assert, arguably the default utility. You know, the “roleplaying games are just like cops and robbers, but when one of you shoots the other and they say you missed!, that’s when the rules come into play.”
Which, sure. Generations of mediated make-believe rely on documented procedures to resolve disagreements. We can thank our wargaming roots for that.
I find that folks who use rules for disagreement resolution are looking for reasonable, bounded outcomes. Assuming you touch the system often enough to perceive patterns, the system is handing back a bell curve of outcomes, with occasional outliers. There’s a clear cap to how great your effort can be, and a clear floor to how bad failure might be. This utility says rules exist to provide a fair, level playing field.
Using the rules primarily to ensure fairness means fairness is the main pain point for you. I wouldn’t want to speculate as to why that would be! But that’s the utility most needed by these folks.
Learning
This is where we use rules* to help understand the subject matter of the game. It’s using rules to model and deconstruct: What are the key elements of a genre? How did these aspects of history affect each other? What’s the storytelling function of a common trope?
Rules can be a way to understand genre, history, setting. Lots of PbtA is designed around this: Impulse Drive deconstructs small-ship-crew sci-fi, Night Witches models the social pressures of being a Russian woman pilot in WW2, and so on. RPG rules are a legit way to understand how a genre “works,” or to explore the dynamics at play in history.
Rules that emulate authorial type decision-making invite us to model and deconstruct. So the strict scene economy of Burning Empires, for example, or the mission focus of Blades in the Dark with the deferral of “downtime” activities to a few quick rolls. These rules ask the player to engage with the subject matter as an author rather than as a participant. Authorship style rules aren’t necessary to the model-and-deconstruction utility! It’s just something I’ve seen a lot, and it’s a distinction of the RPG form.
Rather than focusing on outcomes (like resolution rules), players that want rules to model and teach focus on inputs. We look for interlocking abstract incentives: if I do X then I get Y which makes Z easier, which helps me understand why some historical event played out the way it did (for example), if we understand human behavior to be driven by incentives. But also, this explains why players are often not incentivized by the incentives a system offers them. They just don’t care about the model, they care about some other aspect of play (which may exist outside the rules altogether: see “facilitating experience” next!).
Modeling and deconstruction utility frequently look for the next step of the model, ie snowballs, moves that trigger moves, etc.It’s all about engagement that flows from system to system, each system describing an aspect of the subject matter.
Presentation, even, can help walk you through the model proposed by the designer. The campaign for Night Witches, for example, displays the clear march of events from base to base through time in the war. The game is teaching you, and it’s up to you to decide whether you want to be taught or not.
Facilitating Experience
And finally: this is where we want the rules* to facilitate an experience, to generate excitement, or an emotional state, or a creative challenge. When we use rules* to facilitate experience, we want surprising or perhaps even unwanted outcomes. To force discomfort as part of the experience. We want the game material itself to engage us and make our imaginations run wild.
I can think of quite a few experiences that rules can facilitate: emotional/internal experiences, tactical/achievement experiences, aesthetic pleasure in the form of big elaborate patterns to complete. And just a reminder: I’m talking why we engage with rules* here, not how. Rules + humans = actual play, right?
It is, in my experience, a very common point of displeasure for folks who want rules to provide bounded, reasonable outcomes when they run into rules designed to facilitate experience. See, for example, the old Murphy’s Rules comics that would pedantically make fun of rules that never intended to model reasonable outcomes. Those two uses for rules are so divergent as to be irreconcilable in a lot of cases. I’ve seen groups break down over it.
Other examples of using rules for engagement: glomming onto economic cycles that help the player empathize with decision cycles. That feeling of empathy is the experience! Related: engaging with abstract economies that model diegetic incentives, rather than incentives for non-diegetic stuff (mechanical advancement, success/failure, etc.) For example, Glory in King Arthur Pendragon: you can’t touch it in the fiction, it’s abstract, but it is the thing we’re told to pursue because it will grant us material benefits in our relationship with our Lord. In other words, not “diegetic incentives,” like money or magic items.
Another example: lists that seed your imagination. A list might also, or only, be educational. That’s gonna be in the eye of the beholder and all that. But think about the colorful random tables you see in lots of OSR stuff: zero shits are given about those results being reasonable. Unreasonable outcomes are the point.
There’s a good bit of crossover here, between experience facilitation and modeling/deconstruction. I know I drift back and forth a lot with my use of rules that do either of these things. Sometimes the model produces delight and challenge, and sometimes the model explains and teaches. Sometimes learning is itself delightful, right? So of course we do both all the time.
But sometimes the utility disagreement is more stark: players who don’t want to grind through a detailed simulation, like Book of the Manor for King Arthur Pendragon for example, because detailed manor management is just not an experience they want even while it models the complexity of the job. Or folks who are excited to move through the cards in For the Queen because answering questions is fun, but it isn’t really teaching them anything at all while other players want to slow down and chew on those answers.
A Few Takeaways
Obviously there are lots of crossovers between these approaches, both on the design side and the player-utility side. What’s the space between “model” and “deconstruction,” after all? Mostly a matter of editorial voice, I think: for the most part, I don’t gain any greater understanding of genre or history from physics-type modeling.
In my own game design efforts, I regularly screw up thinking about my rules. Reasonable outcomes might not engage and delight. Delightful experiences might not teach what I want. A cycle of play might be educational but both unreasonable and unfun. And of course my control-freak impulses are awful, since I can’t really control how any given player will engage the rules. You can drag a gamer to a lesson but you can’t make them learn.
As a practical matter, thinking about the utility of rules this way allows me to completely set aside whatever style of game I’m thinking about. There are OSR games that facilitate experiences well but do little to proceduralize disagreements. There are storygames that are smart and interesting deconstructions but don’t do much to facilitate a particular experience for me. Keepsake games, like A Field Guide to Memory? Almost entirely about producing an experience and nothing else.
Back to that chat I mentioned at the start, the thing about how playing by the rules seems male-coded? I can see the shape of that argument, viewed through this utilitarian lens, but I think it’s a sliding scale: expecting or demanding deferral to rules in a parliamentarian sense is just different than a kind of deist engagement with rules to show us how things work, or eager engagement with rules that help get us to a specific experience. Some of us want a referee making calls, some of us want a judge bound by the law, some of us want an event planner.
This also helps me, at least, drill down into why folks get so confrontational about games. Like, if you need a game to resolve disagreements, a thoughtful model of medieval life isn’t gonna help you much. But if you played Pendragon and really enjoyed how it helped you understand medieval life, playing a tactics-oriented fantasy game is gonna come up short for you. And so on.
Consider also: PbtA GMs/MCs who chafe at moves as a constraint (that is, rules that model) versus those who look to their moves for inspiration (that is, rules that delight). It doesn’t take but a small shift in perception and the whole “MC moves” thing changes from straightjacket to a fun bit of help. But if you use rules as a model — in the case of most PbtA, “how does this game model its genre?” — the list can feel like a validation gate. Am I making a move that’s in-genre? Am I playing it “right?” Honestly, no wonder folks bounce off this sometimes.
Another thought: there are tons of issues that come up when how we use rules conflicts with why rules were written that way. A gamer who’s looking forward to delight but is handed an elaborate fairness engine? Boring! A GM who’s excited to share their knowledge and has to work with a bunch of inspirational-but-goofy tables? Ugh! And so on. Pick any mismatch, you’ve probably seen it play out in the world.
What do you think? How are you using rules? How has that conflicted with others at the table?
PS: Yes, this does bear some surface similarities to Big Model/GNS talk. But trying to directly map agenda to utility (narrativism = model, etc.) is a category error for both. So try real hard not to do that, they’re different things.
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I think “Fairness” might be a poor term for the first category, since you expressly include the use of rules to provide reasonable outcomes, even though such outcomes can very quickly become unfair. As to the use of them: I find the enjoyment in RPGs as a player to be in making moment-to-moment decisions as the character and seeing the effects, and having an engine that spits out reasonable outcomes is an easy way to make those decisions informed and meaningful.
‘Eow’ for ‘End Of Week’. Links I gathered during the week. This is iteration 16. For more weekly links, head to The Seed of Worlds Shiny TTRPG link collection.
This Article was mentioned on alexschroeder.ch
Something that occurred to me just this year: having an encyclopedic knowledge of RPGs hasn’t actually made me happier. In fact it’s probably made me less happy participating in my hobby, because I don’t share the same assumptions as the players with whom I spend most of my time. It’s given me all the tools I need to understand my own unhappiness, though.
Maybe it would be different if I were playing largely online. A diffuse body of players themselves will more often cross-pollinate ideas, particularly if they’re all drawn together by the idea of cross-pollination. But that’s just not the case with the folks who show up at your home on the regular.
The same thing happens a lot when I’m running some weird indie shit at a Games on Demand-style space at a larger mainstream convention. The indie weirdos are probably down for whatever you throw on the table. But you’ve also got the not-indie folks, the trad crowd whose tickets are actually making our indie corner possible. In that case, I know the common assumptions – the traditions that comprise “trad” play – I’ll face, and build those into my pitch and explanation.
Rediscovering your own beginner’s mind is the postgraduate work of roleplaying.
Beginners are so much easier to work with. And it’s so hard to be a beginner, again and again.
Category and Rhetoric
The problem I think comes down to players either making category errors or rhetorical stands.
Rhetoric shouldn’t come as a surprise in a hobby rife with tribalism: all RPGs are D&D hacks is the umbrella claim. Stop me if you’ve already heard these bangers:
You can’t trust the GMThe GM is GodThe point of play is to make your character strongerAll games ape other mediaThrow away any rule you want
Ehh…it’s all basically folk dances, right?
More often, though, a player’s operating assumptions aren’t rhetorical. They come from a profoundly different understanding of what the activity “is.” For me, a former composition major, roleplaying is music: there’s a huge range of styles, orchestrations, methods, and structures filtered through history and venues. For others, all roleplaying is waltz music: jam that melody into a ¾ time signature whether it fits or not, play it at a dance pace no matter what, one chord per bar no matter what, and treat every single piece of music as ultimately derivative of folk dances.
The (Eight) Usual Suspects
These are the eight topics I find demand specificity at tables with experienced players, because they (experienced players) come loaded with assumptions from other games. Any one of these could be a complete essay! And maybe they will be. Just let me know if any of them sound interesting enough for another few thousand words.
Intent, conflicts, tasks and moves
Maybe the most common point of confusion I run into is what happens after players touch dice (or some other procedure-with-uncertainty). It’s especially confusing if the player is unclear why they touched the dice in the first place. What’s the cause and what’s the effect? What are the rules even for?
Some games use randomizers to determine success or failure of a specific, tangible task: that’s your straight up task resolution method. Others require players to state their intention before the roll: this is either transparency (if you’re clarifying why you’re doing a task, as you do in Burning Wheel) and/or conflict resolution (if you’re resolving an entire scene and you’ve described what you want out of it, like Dust Devils). Others use randomization to introduce surprise into the fiction, the aspirational — if not frequently unrealized — goal of PbtA style moves.
Why are we rolling again? When are we rolling? What do I stand to gain? What am I risking? Maximize my agency but don’t overwhelm me with options.
The purpose of a roll has the most room for misunderstandings and disagreements, even within genres or traditions of play. Especially within genres or traditions of play. What happens when you state your intent but a move doesn’t hit it? What if you just perform a task but don’t discuss your intent (maybe to leave yourself some wiggle room ex post facto)? What if you expect more granularity and the whole scene ends up resolving with a single roll? And so on.
There’s also the question of when you engage with a game’s procedures. PbtA moves (usually) trigger when something happens in the fiction. FitD actions (usually) trigger because the players want to achieve something. Trad games (usually) instruct the GM to tell the player which skill to roll and (usually) only when what they’re doing has a chance of failing. Lots of (usually) in there, right?
Inputs and outputs are such a fundamental bit of The Transaction and yet there are so many ways of doing both. The curse of being an experienced player is that you’ve probably developed preferences along the way.
Collaborative vs adversarial facilitation
Many games of the current era aspirationally describe themselves as “collaborative,” frequently to imply that those other games are not. But the rules may or may not support actual collaboration. Games with goals, for example, are hard to run collaboratively if the play product is supposed to feel like accomplishment. Does it still feel like winning if everyone agrees that you won? I’ll get into that one more in a future column I’m working on.
Calm down, control freaks.
There was an old Forge bugaboo about authority, broadly referred to as Mother May I. You can probably imagine what this looks like from the player perspective, constantly having to seek approval for your play choices. Lots of indie games were specifically designed to get away from traditional power structures, but it doesn’t mean the players have. Your GM might still act like a Mother, and the players might also treat the GM like a Mother! Things can get real weird when those power structures get reimposed by players because of their assumptions.
Downtime as abstract bookkeeping vs open play
Play phases are a more recent design phenomenon. You see it a lot post-Torchbearer and its Adventure/Camp/Town breakdown, and popularized by Blades in the Dark’s Downtime procedure after every Job. Rather than a constant play-the-day flow of action, the game has formal breaks where stuff happens that’s not about the adventure, or the job, or whatever.
Spend one more Coin on recovering from harm. As a treat.
Sometimes the phases are meant to be pure abstraction, or the players treat it as such: the Fellowship phase of The One Ring, for example, doesn’t really need to be played out. You take a break, jump ahead a few months, and the characters spend that downtime healing, training, and so on. And sometimes the not-adventuring phase is meant to be played out, just without the mechanical weight of the action sequences: the Investigation phase of Voidheart Symphony is my most recent exposure to this.
More often than not, the text doesn’t actually say much about how much “free roleplay” is meant to happen during these phases. Different players and facilitators will treat this in very different ways. No surprise, then, that players may be caught off-guard when they’re asked to dig into their downtime stuff. Or GMs may be caught off-guard when the players bing-bang-boom work through their checklist, eager to jump into the next procedurally dense bit of play.
Structural goals vs embodiment play
This isn’t a great description but let me unpack what I’m getting at.
Band of Blades, Fellowship, and Voidheart Symphony all have explicit goals in mind. Band of Blades’ goal is for the characters to reach Skydagger Keep while racking up the highest possible score. There’s a score! Fellowship characters will ultimately face the Overlord and defeat them. Voidheart Symphony is about facing and defeating a series of big bads who serve the Void, the universe’s visceral urge for toxic individualism. But goal-oriented games use their goals for different reasons: Beating the Game might be one, but pacing might be another.
Compare these to Urban Shadows, Mutant, or Blades in the Dark. “Get rich or die trying” in Blades is a driving motive for your crew, but it’s not really an endgame goal. Finding Eden in Mutant is a goal, but you don’t defeat Eden, you go there and see what happens. Urban Shadows has “storms,” thematically connected PbtA style fronts, that just structure what’s going on in the game’s big picture.
Cool, cool, glad you liked your 7-9.
Players looking to shoehorn goals into embodiment games are gonna have a rough time, just like embodiment players are gonna make the goal players crazy in goal-oriented games.
Vocabulary
This basically comes down to two problems: mechanical tricks that look similar but aren’t the same, and common words that mean different things (or different words for functionally identical ideas).
Why is it always clocks, anyway? Who wouldn’t want a slice of this?
Clocks, for example, got popularized in Forged in the Dark games, but the graphical presentation has shown up in other games to confusing effect. The clock in Voidheart Symphony’s Investigation phase is just counting the days since the characters became aware of the next Vassal; they can’t run the clock and achieve a goal by filling it. Those are two different applications of the same graphic design idea.
Assets are all over: sad things on index cards! But they work differently in Fate, Cortex and Dune. Easy to assume Assets all do the same thing but they definitely do not. Assets are an easy place for players to get confused and frustrated. You can invoke an Asset in Fate, for example, but you can’t assume that’s a thing outside of Fate. There are (different) economic constraints to Assets in Fate and Cortex, but not in Dune.
I ran into a problem with the word/concept of Advantage in Fellowship, where it represents an opening you can exploit against an opponent and not a third die, take the highest. Frustrating! Or Value Statements from Tales of Xadia, which look a little like Beliefs from Burning Wheel but are actually more like Fates in Tenra Bansho Zero.
(This is what I was saying at the top of the essay: encyclopedic knowledge won’t make you happy, but can explain why you’re unhappy!)
Or take skills from most any game as compared to actions in FitD games. Functionally similar, but there’s some subtle differences there worth exploiting. Actions are bigger and more thematic than skills, except in games where skills are meant to be big.
Economic incentives vs pacing
In a game with an economy of some kind – Fate Points, Plot Points, Artha, Doom Pool, Darkness Points – it can get very confusing as to what the economy is for. Sometimes economies are there to incentivize play choices, like taking a d4 instead of a better die in Cortex and getting a Plot Point in return. But sometimes economies are pacing and GM-constraint tools and don’t have any sort of incentive purpose to them, like Darkness Points in Coriolis or your scene budget in Burning Empires. I frequently need to explain what an economy is “for,” but players will explore them on their own no matter what you say.
But I don’t want all this Artha. I just want to have more than you.
Let’s also not forget that many incentive schemes do not incentivize players who don’t care about them.
Explicit responsibility and implied authority
What exactly each player is responsible for at the table used to be a pretty clear-cut thing, but lots of indie game design challenges traditional authority breakdowns in novel ways. I run into this one a lot! Players who think that, since they had a mandate to narrate their own successes in one game, that’s just how all games are going forward. Not so! Or GMs who are expected to make rulings in one game are explicitly forbidden from doing so in another.
I picked gm-less for a reason.
In some games, there’s no actual GM at all of course. But there’s almost always some version of facilitator at the table. That’s not great when other players start treating the facilitator like a GM and abdicate their responsibilities.
The mechanical weight of fiction, the fictional weight of mechanisms
Does it “matter” how you’re armed or armored, what equipment you have, what the landscape looks like? Is fiction just color or is it constraining? Does the fiction provide interesting new affordances or can you only do what the character sheet says you can do? Does the fictional positioning meaningfully change after the rules touch it, and if so, does that change what you can do within the procedure?
You think that’s air you’re breathing?
I wish more games were better at calling this out specifically. But it’s an ongoing struggle, at least in the beginning, to suss out the relationship between the fiction and the procedures in any game.
But The Rules Say…
Besides the fact the players bring their assumptions to these things, let’s not forget that plenty of game texts themselves do a poor job of clarifying their own assumptions. Designers are gamers as well, and they have their own blind spots. In other cases, they’re writing toward a specific audience with their assumptions in mind. See most everything that calls itself OSR, for example.
Treating this stuff as having any sort of meaningful shared assumptions is impractical, even with explicit textual explanation. To strain some metaphors, it’s like a baseman tackling another player as they run between bases because, hey, there’s tackling in football so why not baseball? They’re both ball games.
Closing Thoughts
It’s not a complete list of every possible unaddressed assumption, but it’s as complete as I can make it. Writing the list left me wondering, is there a lowest common denominator to this category of activity? What defines “roleplaying” and makes it stand apart from other, related activities?
Honestly, I’m not sure there’s much there, beyond “embodying and authoring a role within the constraints of an agreed-upon set of fictional criteria.” That might be it, the very minimum definition. Which, of course, means we should be thinking long and hard about fanfic and other forms that fulfill all those criteria but don’t look a thing like any RPG you might see on a shelf.
Meanwhile, I can’t help but think that it’s just so impractical to expect every player to completely discard every assumption every time and start from scratch. Going once more back to the sports metaphors, there are only so many sports you might participate in. You’d be forgiven for conflating pickleball with table tennis and regular tennis (which I did recently). But there are just so darned many RPGs, and we prize novelty in the indie space. It can be exhausting to come at every text with beginner’s eyes.
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