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Message: <blockquote data-quote="billd91" data-source="post: 5325396" data-attributes="member: 3400">The goal of the games you're comparing are quite different. In sports like baseball or football, the goal of the game is to play to win, not just have fun or have a shared experience. The rules are, therefore, much more important to provide a fair game so that the win is determined by pitting skill vs skill, not skill vs superior ability to cheat the rules.The goal of a role playing game isn't to win. Aside from various tournaments, there's no competition between players that will determine "a winner". There's no need for as much strict adherence to hard rules to provide fairness unblemished by a player gaining an advantage or two.There's also the nature of the game. The nature of most sports is determined by what the rules define the sport to be. How do you tell who wins in baseball? The rules tell you exactly how you can score.In RPGs, the players take on the roles of avatars interaction with a fictional world but real from the avatar's perspective where they can do pretty much anything they want within their defined powers and free wills. They're not constrained within a certain playing area, to particular game durations or innings, to limited forms of contact with other game participants. The rules have to be treated as incomplete and open-ended. They may not be able to completely define how an avatar's action would play out, hence, the flexibility a player or GM has to determine the downstream events that unfold from a PC action, overruling written rules as necessary to do it (and the accolades they get if they do a clever job at it).</blockquote>

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