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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7524987" data-attributes="member: 42582">This "descriptive vs prescriptive" thing was basically incoherent when Mearls said it, and that hasn't changed.Here's an example of a prescriptive rule: How do you work out what hapens when you declare as an action that you cover the moon in inivislbe whale scrotum? By following such-and-such a procedure. Many RPG rules look like this.Here's one sort of descriptive rule: the rule that describes universal gravitation. It's descriptive because the rule is an attempt to describe - in a highly general and highly systematic way - a fundamental physical process. But no RPG rules look like this - they aren't statements of natural law like universal gravitation.Here's a different sort of descriptive rule (with credit to HLA Hart for the example): at least c 1960, the English go to the cinema on a Friday evening. It's descriptive because the rule is an attempt to describe - in a generalising fashin - a certain widespread if not strictly universal social practice.Here's another example from Hart: again at least c 1960, English men take of their hats when they go into churches. This is descriptive - again of a widespread if not striclty universal social practice - and, unlike the cinema example, the practice is understood by those who participate in it as prescriptive. There's not such thing as "breaking" the rules of universal gravitation. There's no such thing as "breaking" the rule about going to the cinema on a Friday evening - if English people stop doing that, it just ceases to be a rule. But one can break the rule about taking off one's hat in church, and may well be censured for doing so (as rude, or sacreligious, or both).But RPG rules aren't descriptions of widespread social practice. Like other game rules, they are (partial) constituents of a specialised social activity. And they have prescriptive force, in two sense. First, like the example above, they tell you how to do things within the context of playing the game. And second, as a general rule the participants in the activity expect them to be adhered to (much like the no-hats-in-church rule). That is, they are treated as prescriptive by the participants in the activity. Indeed, because they're (partly) constitutive of the activity, these two modes of prescription come together: the expectation among participants that we are going to do this thing together rather than some other thing generates the expectation that, when a question comes up within the context of playing the game (like is this move allowed? or what happens when a player makes this move?), it will be answered by following the rule. External prescription - social expectations - reinforce internal prescription - following the procedures the game sets out.I say that rules are partial constituents of an RPG because a game as an activity has constituent elements other than its rules. (Eg in the context of D&D there is no rule that play invovle an adventuring party, but that's a pretty fundamental element of D&D play although no doubt there are outlier instances occurring in the world.)Now just as with the no-hats-in-church rule, you can get interesting questions arising when social practices change. What happens if half the churchgoing men start keeping their hats on, but the other half keep telling them off about it. What's happened to the rule? There's no uniform opinion about the answer to this question among sociologists, philosophers and legal theorists.So likewise, what happens if, among the community of D&D players, a widespread practice emerges of (say) ignoring the rules for stat allocations, and instead allowing players to pick whatever stats they want for their PCs, even up to six starting 18s? Opinions would differ here, just as they do for the more widely studied examples. One might want to say that it's silly to insist that a game has a rule X when most of the professed players of that game do something different from X.But in that sense of a rule being descriptive, RPGs are no different from chess. If every player in every chess club the world over changed their expectations about castling - so that (say) you can castle even across an attacked square - then it would make little sense to insist that they're no longer playing chess but playing some other game. Games, like other social activities, can change and evolve over time.TL;DR: there's no sense in which RPG rules are descriptive that distinguishes RPGs from other games.</blockquote>

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