Why do RPGs have rules?

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think part of the divide in these conversations is how much faith people put in rule zero. And the problem is for one portion of the hobby, it is the thing that defines what makes an RPG work, for another it is the thing that makes them dysfunctional.

The other part which follows on that is, when you make the transition from the first to the 2nd category (and I think at least all GMs of a certain vintage and beyond started off in category 1) you gain a perspective on category one that those who are in that category don't have.

 

[clearstream]

Right, but even beyond that... I don't even know what people mean specifically by Rule Zero. In this thread, folks who have been advocating for it seem to actually be talking at times about slightly different things.

If we asked "what is Rule Zero?" we'd get different answers.

And for anyone who isn't already familiar with the concept, it's kind of useless, right? A new player might turn to the books to find it, and in most cases, they wouldn't find it.

It's certainly very misleading. My personal view is that the issues at stake are of importance. So it's worth tackling. Unfortunately "rule zero" is applied so vaguely and inaccurately that your point is well made.

 

[Bedrockgames]

There are people who believe that Sinbad starred in a movie called Shazaam and there are people who think the former are misremembering things. That too may be a difficult gulf to bridge, but I don't think that this means that they are equally valid positions.

The difference though is no one has actually ever experienced Shazaam, but rule zero is something people have experienced and something mentioned explicitly in many RPG books. I am not saying the value I see in it, you will see. But I think we have to at least operate with an understanding that both sides are having legitimate responses to rule zero for there to be a discussion

 

[clearstream]

I know! And if you look at my posts in this thread, that's why you'll see me saying things like "AFAICT it's not possible to design an RPG that cannot deliver you to an ill-defined game state". (Paraphrased, but I'm pretty sure the "AFAICT" is in there literally.)

I've never seen one that could provide the illusion of infinite detail without the GM needing to make things up, but I agree that 5E's gaps prove nothing about the general case, and I don't believe I ever claimed they did.

I believe the lyric TTRPG We Are But Worms exemplifies your point. It has one rule (two counting the title.) It's potentially as narrow as an RPG could be, while raising an unlimited number of questions. The explicit extension of TTRPG rules into language, imagination and meaning, mandates incompleteness. TTRPGs are necessarily incomplete. If you see a game that is not, then it's not a TTRPG (this is implied by Baker's observations regarding fiction and fictional position.)

 

[Bedrockgames]

The other part which follows on that is, when you make the transition from the first to the 2nd category (and I think at least all GMs of a certain vintage and beyond started off in category 1) you gain a perspective on category one that those who are in that category don't have.

I think we have all been playing long enough to experience the dysfunction rule zero can lead to. But again the difference isn’t one side is enlightened and the other blind, but how they react to that experience

 

[Aldarc]

The difference though is no one has actually ever experienced Shazaam, but rule zero is something people have experienced and something mentioned explicitly in many RPG books. I am not saying the value I see in it, you will see. But I think we have to at least operate with an understanding that both sides are having legitimate responses to rule zero for there to be a discussion

I beg to differ. People have claimed that Rule 0 has a long, storied history in D&D from the very beginning; however, as best as I know, the first explicit mention of Rule 0 in any D&D rulebook is in the 3rd Edition D&D PHB, and it doesn't say there what people assume that it says. Moreover, it's absent in a lot of the D&D books that people assume it's present (e.g., D&D 5e)!

The ideology and thinking that informs Rule 0 may have been present from the beginning in some form or another, but Rule 0 has not been. IME, there is a heavy amount of Mandela Effect when it comes to retroactively projecting or remembering the presence of Rule 0 in the early stages of the game. Even then, the governing principle that gets referred to as "Rule 0" is inconsistent between books that have since adopted Rule 0 as a "rule."

 

[hawkeyefan]

Rather than define rule zero, I will define what makes RPGs operate the way they do for me. At the very least, it’s the first thing I observed about them: the ability trace an existing system of rules and adjust, change, ignore or modify as needed to fit what the players are trying to do. I think you can have as complex or as simple a system as you want gif RPGs, but without that flexibility to creatively apply or even ignore rules, to tend to what is the primary focus of play, I would say the experience loses the magic of TTRPGs for me

I wouldn’t disagree with you here, although I think different games handle such flexibility in different ways. I don’t know if having a catchall phrase really helps, though, because I think it muddies the different ways that games handle this.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I beg to differ. People have claimed that Rule 0 has a long, storied history in D&D from the very beginning; however, as best as I know, the first explicit mention of Rule 0 in any D&D rulebook is in the 3rd Edition D&D PHB, and it doesn't say there what people assume that it says. Moreover, it's absent in a lot of the D&D books that people assume it's present (e.g., D&D 5e)!

This is why I defined something other than rule zero in my other post. I can only speak to my experience but the first thing I noticed and liked and playing RPGs was the GM could go above and beyond the written rules do that anything we wanted to try was a possibility, like we were there. I am not saying this is a truth of play for everyone but I am saying this is what people seem to be pointing to when they talk about rule zero (and even where it hasn’t been called rule zero, it’s been present I would say)

The ideology and thinking that informs Rule 0 may have been present from the beginning in some form or another, but Rule 0 has not been. IME, there is a heavy amount of Mandela Effect when it comes to retroactively projecting or remembering the presence of Rule 0 in the early stages of the game. Even then, the governing principle that gets referred to as "Rule 0" is inconsistent between books that have since adopted Rule 0 as a "rule."

I sort of agree. Rule zero is just a new term that can’t along. But there has definitely been this aspect to play since at least when I started in 86.

 

[clearstream]

I beg to differ. People have claimed that Rule 0 has a long, storied history in D&D from the very beginning; however, as best as I know, the first explicit mention of Rule 0 in any D&D rulebook is in the 3rd Edition D&D PHB, and it doesn't say there what people assume that it says. Moreover, it's absent in a lot of the D&D books that people assume it's present (e.g., D&D 5e)!

The ideology and thinking that informs Rule 0 may have been present from the beginning in some form or another, but Rule 0 has not been. IME, there is a heavy amount of Mandela Effect when it comes to retroactively projecting or remembering the presence of Rule 0 in the early stages of the game. Even then, the governing principle that gets referred to as "Rule 0" is inconsistent between books that have since adopted Rule 0 as a "rule."

Some text you might find intriguing is from Moldvay Basic D&D

if, after playing the rules as written for a while, you or your referee (the Dungeon Master) think that something should be changed, first think about how the changes will affect the game, and then go ahead.

So "you" here (bolded by me) must be the  player.

 

[Pedantic]

This is why I defined something other than rule zero in my other post. I can only speak to my experience but the first thing I noticed and liked and playing RPGs was the GM could go above and beyond the written rules so that anything we wanted to try was a possibility, like we were there. I am not saying this is a truth of play for everyone but I am saying this is what people seem to be pointing to when they talk about rule zero (and even where it hasn’t been called rule zero, it’s been present I would say)

I'm not at all sure I'm comfortable assigning this as the explicit or implicit purpose of rule zero. That's a frequent defense, but I don't think it's clearly necessary, and I think you can design a rulesets that is comprehensive for most purposes. This is usually an argument at the edges that gets elevated as if it's the primary use result of rule zero, when I think it's actually one of the more rarely used functions.