Rulings over Rules considered harmful
OR: The OSR Primer and its consequences have been a disaster for the hobby
In A previous blogpost I talked about about using functional rulesets. One thing I mentioned is my distaste for the OSR adage "rulings over rules". In fact, going through them it seems to me that all of the adages and pithy one-liners in any of the OSR primers have been misunderstood or misconstrued to a degree where they now effectively mean the opposite of what they ought to, if they have not proved themselves to be bad advice from the very beginning. However, "Rulings over Rules" to me is the pinnacle of these. It's multiple lines of misinterpreting texts badly and not understanding the core concepts of the game coming together into one clusterfuck that ruins gaming.
Let's take a real life example to show why I don't think any of this works particularly well
Rulings over Rules taken to its extreme
In the beginning there was Kriegsspiel. Created by the son of a Prussian officer, it was the world's first recorded war game (I know of) to educate new officers. The rules are massively complex, but it was created to be a comprehensive. The rules when applied properly ought to create an accurate simulation of strategic level movement and clash of bodies of troops. It includes rules for how long orders take to arrive, large sets of tables for the effects gun fire of different kinds of weapons at different ranges under different circumstances, for cavalry charges and everything else.
One issue however: the creator was a proto-German. The rules were onerous, difficult to apply at times, and considered to constrictive. A countermovement appeared, arguing for a freer form of Kriegsspiel. With a referee that was an experienced soldier, they argued, you don't need all of these rules. His experience of war allows him to adjudicate results of actions with a much smaller set of rules.
When the TTRPG crowd found this they were inspired. Why have a 200 page rulebook if you can just make up a ruling on the fly? In theory this should be freeing. They argue, with some merit, that players are both implicitly and explicitly constrained by the rules. Explicitly because they make outright statements on what players can and cannot do. Implicitly, however, because their thoughts are funnelled down certain paths by the rules their read. It's effectively the Sapir-Whorf theory applied to TTRPG rules.
So what went wrong?
Apart from people shilling one page rulesets saying "roll a dice. High is better. Adjudicate as you wish"? Quite a bit really. I'll try to boil it down to a few major arguments. There's plenty of other minor bugbears I have with them, but let's try to keep this post to a manageable length for once.
When expectations differ
You are travelling through a dark hall, when suddenly within your torchlight you see a large rend in the floor in front of you, probably ten feet wide. Can you jump this? It's a weird question, but something you could probably arrive at a reasonable guess about. You might look at long jump records, or work back from experience and arrive at a conclusion. We have a shared view of our world which allows us to make reasonable inferences about it.
But what if we don't? You see a bestial figure standing in that hall. Squat legs, about 5 foot tall, with arms nearly touching the floor. He's dragging a club covered in hammered iron and wearing rusted mail and a helmet that comes to a beak-like point. Can you take him? You're a wizard of some power. You see a group of bandits coming up to your camp, but they haven't yet spotted you. Can you cast an illusion over the camp to make it invisible to them? You're the captain of the ship. There's four ships of the line on your tail locking on torpedoes. Can you dive down into the corona of the sun, skirting the breaking point of your shields to survive, but destroy the torpedoes before they explode your engine?
In the realms where either we move out of our own realm of direct experience, or even more pressingly, into the fantastical realms of fantasy or science fiction, it becomes harder and harder to make any sort of reasonable inference about what you can or cannot do. Furthermore: the odds of your set of expectations being the same as those of your players, and those increasing the chances that players are able to assess their abilities in a way which is in line with what you think is possible, decreases.
Rules create a common reference framework
Can you kill that bestial figure? Well, you don't know its capabilities maybe, but you know your own. The rules tell you how well you can attack, how good your armor is. Can you cast that illusion? The rules tell you what sorts of spells you can cast, and what sort of odds targets have to resist. Can you dive into the sun's corona and survive? The rules tell you what kind of beating your shields can take before failing and turning everyone in the ship into clouds of plasma. The rules in this way create a common framework that players can use to infer their odds of success without having to ask. This is powerful not just because the players don't have to "mother may I" whenever they do something. It also speeds up gameplay.
Is this important for everything? No. For things we all understand how to do, they're unnecessary. You don't need rules on how you talk, because people know how to do this. Between reaction rolls and whatever arguments players make you don't need stuff like diplomacy skills. Rules systems as a common reference framework become important when there is no real-world analogue to be used as a common reference, but also in cases of contested interests.
Example: we're playing a medieval fantasy game. I play a gruff barbarian from the frozen north. Should I expect my capabilities to be in line with Conan, with me being able to wrench the head off of a demon, and being able to kill 80 men in combat? Am I Obelix? Or am I just some Germanic savage on the borders of the Roman empire? Any and all of these could be true. Arguably there should be a discussion of tone and style, and that's true. However, even within that there's plenty of greyness in which misunderstandings can exist. And here those differences are vitally important because it may be a literal difference between life and death. This becomes even more important if players ever turn against one another.
Other examples are if you have people at the table who have done some form of fighting and those who haven't. They'll have a different view entirely of what ought to be possible. The rules provide a common ground on which to build the action, a common language everyone understands to underpin the game.
Rules guide play
A game is more than just the shared imaginations of the ref and the players. If it were just this is would be a session of guided improv. The rules of a TTRPG system, or at least: the rules of a well-constructed one, guide player behaviour down an intended avenue. Why is Exp For Gold the best experience system for any Fantasy Adventure Game? Because it rewards playing for what the game is made to do: find and explore fantastical places. Why is encumbrance so important? To place limits on how much a single character can take with them. It encourages bringing larger entourages as you explore further, which requires more people to guard these bearers, which all leads into Domain Play, as John M. McGowan discussed in his excellent book.
A common adage of the FKR crowd is "Playing worlds, not rules". This is not just insufficient, it misses the point. The world exists in the rules. It is the ultimate setting document; not just some vague set of lore, but one which tells you what happens in this world when you attempt to perform action X. This is why Gygax said in the ADnD that the Proper Order to conducting a game is "Rules first, then the campaign, and then the players". Not just because the rules are important, which they are, but the rules and the world, are in a good system, equivalent.
Without the rules, what guides play? Consensus on the subject? That's not just a pinky swear but also a heavy straightjacket. Instead of doing what's right because it comes naturally within the confines of the system you have to mentally confine yourself to do the right thing. This seems like a fragile system that won't hold up well over time. Especially when you onboard new people you might think it's easier; after all, just create a character. However, instead of explaining the rules that are written down you now have to explain the intricacies of your shared world.
Rules free up players to act
Rules move away from Mother May I gaming to one which enable players to plot their own course, as I have explained above. They allow players to be confident on adjudicating their own actions, moving away from "if I were to attempt this how would we resolve this" to "I am attempting to do this. I'm going to resolve the consequences of this actions as far as I can". This is more than just a timesaver on your part. It's psychologically massive in how it empowers players. It's effectively a variation on 'limitations breed creativity". The rules give them positive options on what they explicitly say on what they can do, and while there are negative rights (Thou Shalt Not) these also create clarity. Anything not disallowed could feasibly be done somehow.
Consistently applied rulings are rules
The clincher to me is this one. Say I rule five times that in order to do damage they have to... I don't know. Roll under someone's armor class. Why be coy about this? If I have a ruling that comes up often, and if, as I should, apply a ruling consistently, we're better of codifying it. It's already implicitly codified at our table anyway. After the fifth, or maybe tenth time, players know how I'd tell them to do something. If we write this all down in some sort of... Player Manual, we might call it, we can easily use that to onboard players. Similarly, I might write down rulings I did previously on the referee end of the table so that I can create consistency on my end. A Referee Manual, you may call it. I can order rulings by topic and quickly look up what I said before, so I can apply it. It also is a document I can hand to someone else if they like my style of refereeing, so they can emulate it, or even run a game in the same world. To drive the point home: we are reinventing rules books here, guys.
So Bos, what about that "Rulings over Rules"?
Yeah, I drifted a bit. I hope I have shown why rules are so important. There's other issues with the Rulings over Rules article. Many of them nitpicky and not all that relevant in the larger scope of the discussion. Statements "Rules are a resource for the referee, not for the players" and "most of the time in old-style gaming, you don't use a rule; you make a ruling" are trivially disproven if you ever read ODnD. I'm not going to waste more of your time going over those because they're not important. Let's call Rulings over Rules wat it is: DM Fiat.
But let's look at what ODnD does say on this subject:
There are unquestionably areas which have been glossed over. While we deeply regret the necessity, space requires that we put in the essentials only, and the trimming will oftimes have to be added by the referee and his players. We have attempted to furnish an ample framework, and building should be both easy and fun. In this light, we urge you to refrain from writing for rule interpretations or the like unless you are absolutely at a loss, for everything herein is fantastic, and the best way is to decide how you would like it to be, and then make it just that way!
And similarly in ADnD:
Naturally, everything possible cannot be included in the whole of this work. As a participant in the game, I would not care to have anyone telling me exactly what must go into a campaign and how it must be handled; if so, why not play some game like chess? As the author I also realize that there are limits to my creativity and imagination. Others will think of things I didn’t, and devise things beyond my capability.
Neither of these says "ok, these rules are just suggestions. In fact, you're better off ignoring them and chucking them away". They say "look, we do not have infinite space and time. Even if we wanted to, we cannot create and write rules for all possible scenarios". It's not a grant to change whatever you just make shit up as you go; it's an admission of what's obvious: any set of rules will have flaws, inclarities and omissions, and that your job as the referee is to rule on those as you think is best.
So I can never stray from the rules or alter them?
Of course you can, and arguably you may have to. As I said above: rules implicitly codify a world. ODnD is explicit about Clerics and the power they have. It's explicit about the Alignments and how they influence the world. Hell, Wayne Rossi created an excellent document called the Implied Setting, talking about what the world of ODnD looks like when you play by the rules. It's a great read. Give him a few clicks.
If your world has different expectations, you ought to (not should) change the rules so they are congruent with your world. But write them down. Be explicit about what you change. That way you can easily remain consistent.
But let's be clear
Rulings over rules is not an old-school thought. It's not one which frees up players (or the referee, for that matter). It's a false idol which draws more power to the referee than they ought to have for the good of the game, while, paradoxically, constrains them.
But we're 2.5K words in. Once again I have failed to stick to any sort of reasonable length of post. I might write more on this at some point in the future, but for now I'll leave it at this.
Until next time, count your torches, and keep mapping.