Snow wrote a blog yesterday with the tagline “A game can be about more than its rules.” I think I was processing their words all night as I slept.
There is a recurring idea that “RPGs are about what their rules are about”. Fantasy RPGs are about combat and violence because that is the bulk of their rules. But you look at the way most groups play and it’s pretty clear that while combat is a part of what they do, it doesn’t seem to be the bit they enjoy the most and it’s not what they tell you about when you ask them what happened in their games.
When we play RPGs we are creating a shared fiction together. Mostly this means a conversation as we discuss and explain what our avatars do, say, investigate, steal or try to chat up. We have rules for some of this and I think most people intuitively know after just a few sessions where in the conversation we should defer to the rules.
And I do mean defer. When you bring in the rule, the conversation is sidelined until the rule is finished.
The conversation at the heart of any RPG, just bumbles along until we get to a rule. We stop, resolve the rule and then get back to the RP. Sometimes that all happens because we don’t want to RP two weeks of space travel. Sometimes it’s because deciding for ourselves with discussion if Jamie’s Orc can hit Martin’s Elf with a spear despite the elf’s armour and agility, is hard; let’s just roll. Sometimes we stop the conversation because the rules said so, and it’s a little disappointing because we were having fun seeing where our chat and RP were headed.
The rules of an RPG are pre-defined facts about your fiction. ‘If this, then that,’ abstractions to model the things which we know are going to happen. Even when there are dice involved, the rules have bounded the possible results. This can be good, it means we don’t have to worry about what is possible within our fictions, the rules will tell us… but it also limits the things we can explore.
Dogs in the Vineyard is a game about young faithful cowboys tasked with travelling between towns bringing justice to their people. It’s a game about finding and punishing the guilty in complex webs of needs and sins. But there are no rules for morality. It’s up to the players to decide what is right and what is wrong. What is justified in each situation. The author, Vincent Baker, called this the Fruitful Void, a space in the rules left intentionally blank for the players to fill with their discussions and decisions as they play.
Say you want to run a game about humans and dwarves, previously enemies, both driven from their homelands by dragons. Do they work together? Can the dwarves thrive above ground? Can the humans thrive below? Are there other allies in the world? Can the dragons be fought? There might be generational trauma in the humans from the war with the dwarves, The ancient dwarves might carry much more personal trauma.
This looks like fertile ground for an extended campaign. So what rules are we going to want? Travel and survival for sure. Seasons, weather, supplies will all be important. Maybe systems for building settlements and fortifications. Workers and fighters? Armies? What scales do we want to be operating in? Trading rules? Negotiation mechanisms for making allies and avoiding fights? Combat rules probably. Sounds like we might want mass battle rules. Maybe we want army vs dragon rules.
All of these are options for sure, but do we really want to systematise everything? At some point this RPG of dwarves exploring a fantasy world becomes an exercise in optimising interrelated systems. The trick is knowing where the players want to be creative and when they want to just roll for it.
For me I’m not interested in running a wargame so I’ll either have a really simple opposed roll to tell me who wins or I’ll just have battles happen in the background and decide the results which I think make the most sense. For wilderness travel and survival I want it to be significant but not too time consuming, so light rules which move us quickly from “Where do we go?” to “How are our supplies?” Combat rules I would want because I want this world to be dangerous, I don’t want combat to be common but when it happens I want it to be significant.
But then we get to the real meat of the campaign, the alliances and animosities, deals and old grudges. Who is prepared to work together and who can’t let old harms go unpunished. I wouldn’t want to predefine any of that! “Play to find out” right? I want it to be nebulous and unpredictable. I would want manners and formality to be essential in some negotiations and a detriment in others. I want some humans to be wary because of that one time you worked with that other human. All these subtleties get lost as soon as you put a dice value on the relationship.
I think you can roughly split everything in any RPG’s fiction into three categories:
1- The stuff we don’t care about. How long does it take to get served in a tavern? How good is Traveller anti-gravity? We don’t care, so no rules are provided.
2- The stuff we need for a convincing, consistent fiction. How much can you carry? Can you shoot the gangster? This stuff we write rules for.
3- The stuff that the game is actually about. If you write the rules you’ve already defined the thing and there’s nothing left to explore.
Vincent highlighted the fruitful void as a special thing that is the focus of his game. I’m thinking that the void runs all through our games and every time someone is thinking “Do I use a rule for this, or ignore it?” they should also be thinking, “Or do I leave this intentionally blank?”
Ominosity 
A very thought provoking article.
Though after processing said provoked-thought, my experience leads me to a different conclusion. The idea that we groan when encountering rules and are eager to move on past them to what actually matters in an RPG – that is an indication to me that we are playing a system that doesn’t align with the story we want to tell.
For me, dice are supposed to bring excitement, doing their best work in areas “nebulous and unpredictable”, not a sense of chores to be done before the “real” excitement. For me, picking the right system is about making sure that the rolling of the dice is aligned with the core tension of the narrative.
If I want the exciting part of my game to be the interpersonal drama between volatile characters, then I select Monsterhearts. If I want the exciting part of my game to be the exploration of dangerous, fantasy dungeons, then I pick dungeons and dragons.
[And if I want both, I make my players suffer through monstrous amalgamations of the two haha]
Thanks for your reply, I’m glad you enjoyed the article.
I’m not really arguing for minimal rules, although that is a valid choice for many games, I’m just trying to show that if you write rules for the thing you want to explore them you end up exploring those rules, not the full potential of that fiction.
5e is a good example here. You want to explore the tactics of magical heros in tactical battles, well I can tell you now, Paladin up front with Smite, Cleric for support, Rogue or fighter with a bow. The answers are set. That might be fine for a tactical game, it’s a hard thing to roleplay interestingly, but for other topics of rather we were exploring the space ourselves.
I don’t remember Monsterhearts well, but doesn’t it proved rules for lots of ways to create tension and drama between characters but leave it up to the players find ways to resolve those issues? If so that sounds like a good way to get to social drama with space to dig into it with RP.
“I’m just trying to show that if you write rules for the thing you want to explore them you end up exploring those rules, not the full potential of that fiction.”
Ok, my first instinct is to fully agree with this statement.
*processing, please wait* *processing, please wait*
Alright, my second instinct is to say that I mostly agree with this statement. I agree with the phrase “you end up exploring those rules” but I am suspicious of the phrase “[but] not the full potential of that fiction.” I actually agree that you cannot explore the full potential of the system this way. What I’m suspicious of is the implication that there is another way which does in fact explore the full potential of the fiction.
Leaving aside absolutes (like “full potential”), the key question for me becomes “which explores the narrative potential more: the spaces with all the rules or the spaces without all the rules?” Now while I don’t have a vast amount of experience with RPGs, I think I can say that between Pathfinder 2e (which tries to have rules for everything from combat to exploration to social encounters) and Wanderhome (which has few rules for anything at all), I have experienced some extreme examples.
In my very personal and highly anecdotal experience, the rules of pathfinder 2e provide an affordance for players to build narratives off of. The players can latch onto a rule (“oh, we just discovered a spell with the ‘rare’ tag”), then build the narrative off it in the space without rules (“let’s use this as a bargaining chip with the magic school so they’ll help us find the location of my PC’s sibling”), which will eventually lead to another rules latch (GM:”good job, here’s some XP to level up” or “nice! your reputation with this faction increases by one step”).
Whereas the vastly greater potentials of Wanderhome tend to be as intimidating as a blank canvas. The players/GMs have to build their own latches by checking in with everyone to make sure that things make sense to everyone. For me, it’s more draining than rewarding, and by the end of it I don’t necessarily feel like I have explored the narrative potential any more than a rules heavy system.
I don’t know if I’m making sense, but again, thanks for a great article and for replying. ❤
A impressive article. That crystallized a lot.