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Message: <blockquote data-quote="LostSoul" data-source="post: 5861044" data-attributes="member: 386">I am reminded of this blog post:  <a href="http://www.lumpley.com/comment.php?entry=360" target="_blank">anyway: Rules vs Vigorous Creative Agreement</a>2008-04-09 : Rules vs Vigorous Creative Agreement I really dig the term vigorous creative agreement and I really dig Jim Henley's post about it. He sets me up (by association, not by name, and I don't hold it against him a bit, these are the circles I run in) to think that natural, emergent agreement is a poor substitute for functional formal rules. In fact I think the opposite. Here's what I'd say: if all your formal rules do is structure your group's ongoing agreement about what happens in the game, they are a) interchangeable with any other rpg rules out there, and b) probably a waste of your attention. Live negotiation and honest collaboration are almost certainly better. (This goes along with my answer to Mo here about the Wicked Age's owe list, and maybe see also reward the winner, punish the loser.) As far as I'm concerned, the purpose of an rpg's rules is to create the unwelcome and the unwanted in the game's fiction. The reason to play by rules is because you want the unwelcome and the unwanted - you want things that no vigorous creative agreement would ever create. And it's not that you want one person's wanted, welcome vision to win out over another's - that's weak sauce. (*) No, what you want are outcomes that upset every single person at the table. You want things that if you hadn't agreed to abide by the rules' results, you would reject. If you don't want that - and I believe you when you say you don't! (**) - then live negotiation and honest collaboration are a) just as good as, and b) a lot more flexible and robust than, whatever formal rules you'd use otherwise. The challenge facing rpg designers is to create outcomes that every single person at the table would reject, yet are compelling enough that nobody actually does so. (***) If your game isn't doing that, like I say it's interchangeable with the most rudimentary functional game design, and probably not as fun as good freeform.</blockquote>

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