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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Snarf Zagyg" data-source="post: 8395867" data-attributes="member: 7023840">It's only "skirting" to the extent that your unspoken premise is accepted.Given the actual conversation you were responding to ... that's not accurate (IMO).  That right there is sort of the crux; when someone states something like, "Hey, imagine this game without rules*" and your immediate feedback is, "You can't denigrate the game designers who design rules and how important playtesting is on rules quality," then you're having a failure to communicate. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I think that [USER=10531]@see[/USER] gets it- but the point isn't limited to just computers. I do think that Gygax's shift (which is well-documented) from the mid-70s as noted in Alarums and Dragon to his absolutist stance re: standardization in AD&D was driven by money, but the cycles of "simple -> complex -> overcomplicated -> simple (rinse, repeat)" seems to re-occur in most fields. Music, art, you name it.*A brief aside on definitional issues; one thing that is always fun (for values of fun=0) are silly semantic debates. One of the ones I dsilike intensely is the one over "what is a rule." Let me explain why- there are people who delight in the semantic confusion that the use of the word causes.For example, many people would use "rule" to mean a specific written rule in a game, something that would differentiate it from a "ruling" or a an "ad hoc decision." In other words, there is a colorable difference between the following:A. If you roll a 15 or higher, you hit. If you roll a 14 or lower, you miss. (Rule)B. I want to do this thing that hasn't been tried before. What is the difficulty of that task? (Ruling) C. I announce what I do, and Frank tells me what happens (ad hoc).Of course, the semantic game is that any of these are also rules, as in rules of decision. If a game was just two words, "Ask Frank," then that is a rule of decision or adjudication (with the implied, "Frank will tell you what happens"), but most people wouldn't consider that a "rule" in the standard sense. Further, if a game is played in a manner in which there are implied methods of adjudication that are arrived at consensually (think of many children's games, such as Cops & Robbers or other play variants) then it would be accurate to say that there are shifting social rules that govern the interactions and adjudications, but relatively purposeless to discuss rules in the standard sense of TTRPG game design.TLDR; definitional debates usually are pointless, because it's never about understanding, it's about "winning," often through overlapping semantic meanings of words.</blockquote>

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