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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aldarc" data-source="post: 7567970" data-attributes="member: 5142">That is how they are commonly written but that is not necessarily universally true. That said, tinkering has been a common feature of board games. Let us return to an earlier example! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> Parker Brothers once assumed that everyone was playing by the rules of Monopoly laid out in the game. What they discovered, only relatively recently, was how many people had their own house rules for the game. It turns out that Monopoly is a game with a longer legacy of people tinkering with rules than D&D! This was often a common source of conflict when one played the game with others, as people would bring their idiomatic assumptions about what the rules were and/or how the game played. It was only when they sought to accommodate the wider breadth of play that had emerged that Parker Brothers began also including common "house rules" as part of the game instructions. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f631.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":eek:" title="Eek!    :eek:"  data-smilie="9"data-shortname=":eek:" /> Furthermore, nothing stops you from roleplaying your "character" in Monopoly, and one could most definitely operate a character in D&D as one would a tin figure from Monopoly. And I have weirdly enough seen both performed in their respective games. However, whether these games are designed for such experiences is another matter entirely. And how many other card and board games came out of "people tinkering with the rules" from some other game? Probably far too many to count, with many more being lost in history to us. It ill behooves us to apply the all too common fallacious position of 'exceptionalism' to TTRPGs. Not quite. I am not so much talking about adhering to OneTrueWay to play a game, and more about adhering to OneTrueWay as the presumed norm for play in all games. I would say (more concretely) that one should not necessarily presume that one's experience (or preferred method) of playing 1e D&D, for example, should be the metric for analyzing the merits of other games, design principles, play priorities/values, campaigns, etc. I would further say (to the point of it being a platitude) that TTRPGs are designed to facilitate particular styles of play. The design of games may provide a greater latitude or scope for other styles than intended, and these other styles may only be discovered later through the process of play. I naturally hope that you would agree with me that it hardly seems controversial to suggest that Gygax et al. had a certain style of gameplay in mind (or range thereof) when they designed Original Dungeons & Dragons. (And I think that D&D has been subsequently written, much like Monopoly, with a contentious desire to accommodate other styles.) And it hardly seems controversial to suggest that Vincent Baker had a different style of gameplay in mind from OD&D when he designed respectively Dogs in the Vineyard and Apocalypse World. And that differences in the respective designs of these systems would result, on the aggregate, in different norms of play. This is not to suggest that these games should be played according to OneTrueWay, but, rather, simply recognizing the fact that game rules are designed to cultivate particular sorts of gameplay experiences. Rules impact the norms of play.This assumption even forms a prominent part of the OSR movement game philosophy: i.e., "The game rules of 'old school' D&D resulted in games with a different feel from the D&D of nowadays; ergo, how can we intentionally facilitate 'old school' styles of play while emulating or modernizing the rules?"  I probably could have said more if I had said less, as per [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION]'s more succinct summation: "the system matters." <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/laugh.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":lol:" title="Laughing    :lol:" data-shortname=":lol:" /></blockquote>

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