EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
This seems to serve my claimed distinction, that the emphasis placed on Rule Zero is kind of a misnomer. That is, Rule Zero is claimed to give GMs flexibility, because it enables them to cover situations not covered by the other rules. But the whole process of applying Rule Zero requires following several social rules, and is actually much more limited than the absolute, unbounded possibilities cited, and almost always requires either having and mostly sticking to the written rules already present, or doing the same with unwritten but verbally/tacitly agreed-upon restrictions which are ultimately themselves rules.
And that whole thing doesn't even touch Pedantic's two key criticisms.
I don't specifically recall the origin point for the flexibility discussion either. IIRC, someone claimed D&D was uniquely flexible among TTRPGs, others (including me) pushed back pretty hard on that, and Rule Zero was cited as why it is so. Hence why there's the response of, "How is this in any way unique?"
Whereas I have specifically been thinking of it in terms of what you can do at the table, and it has seemed pretty clear that that is what people have meant, especially with the Rule Zero stuff. Hence why I gave examples of the existing rules in DW and how they can be used for lots of situations players will encounter.
I don't understand what "flexibility of designability" even means. Are designers not at liberty to write down whatever they want whenever they want? The concept seems to be empty.
Yes. I'm not sure why one would care about any other form of flexibility when actually recommending a system, and certainly not why someone would claim D&D was uniquely flexible in terms of "designability" when it is infamously baroque in many ways and players get terribly touchy about altering its "traditions" (even if those "traditions" are hardly traditional at all.)
Because they claim the label. If you claim a label such as this, you're clearly trying to say there's a deep and fundamental connection. To then blithely say the label has no bearing at all is ridiculous—if it had no bearing, it wouldn't be claimed in the first place!
More importantly, I was highlighting the clear and very circular problem here. FKR approaches emphasize an invisible rulebook. An invisible rulebook cannot be communicated. That means you cannot, even in principle, teach anyone how to play FKR-style. It is literally, actually impossible, because in absence of communication, teaching is always impossible. The "invisible" rulebook becomes the inaccessible rulebook. The rules, whatever they may be, are still there, and will absolutely still constrain you, but you cannot give them voice, nor can you subject them to evaluation in any intentional way. You just slowly accrete intuitions and hope coincidences and accidents don't (or haven't) lead you to develop poor ones. This is where I normally then bring up extremely common flawed DM intuitions, like a failure to understand iterative probability (aka the "make the rogue roll to sneak every round indefinitely" problem) or problems humans have with consistency, but that's a separate conversation. Point being: the invisible rulebook is actually very hard to "edit," and impossible to communicate, which severely limits practical flexibility at the table.
Let us consider an abstract example. We have two systems, one using primarily "invisible" rules and the other using primarily "visible" ones (recognizing almost all games have both to some degree: written rules and social contracts, at the very least.) There are three possible states: the rules for each system say a lot about a topic, but none of it is useful for the current situation; the rules say something about the topic, but are not conclusive; the rules say nothing about the situation.
If the invisible rules already have a lot to say on a subject, deviating from them is much more difficult than if the rules were written out, because you have to navigate a maze with walls you can't see. Rule Zero is thus not adding any flexibility at the table, and may be costing a lot in fact! If neither says anything, the two are precisely equivalent, so Rule Zero neither adds nor removes anything. The only one of these situations where Rule Zero may favor the invisible rulebook is when the system says a little but not a lot, and I frankly don't see it adding all that much: if the system really does have a meaningful hole, either way, you'll need to discuss a way to fill it, and you'll almost certainly need the consent of the players to make that repaving work.
There sure as heck are two teaching objectives. One: teach GMs how to GM. Two: teach players how to play. Invisible rules make the first impossible (you simply have to stumble through it solo, good luck buddy), and the latter nearly so.
At which point, one has conceded my core point: having visible rulebooks is in fact extremely useful, useful enough that even efforts to go full FKR rarely stay that way. The visible parts specifically bring communication, testability, and teachability to the system.
But, again, TTRPGs are an effort to capture the breadth of human imagination in game form, mental lightning in a bottle. They are not like hopscotch and most other playground games, nor indeed like any sport. They are much closer to playground "Let's Pretend," hence why players make reference to that. However, they usually do so in a disparaging way, because of the common faults playground games devolve into, e.g. "oh yeah well my infinity-plus-one shield blocks your infinity sword!" Play becomes better when we are not able to act like this. We give up the freedom to declare truly absolutely anything, because many of the things we are giving up are not actually good to declare even if they are the game-theory rational choice, in order to restrict gameplay to a (still infinite!) set of declarations that are productive, playable, interesting, etc. That is why flexibility is utterly vital to play in TTRPG rules: the rules, visible or invisible, must constrain those things that are harmful to play while preserving, as much as possible, the vast field of things that are beneficial to play.
Games that eschew a pointed emphasis on Rule Zero recognize that this swings both ways: that there are things GMs with absolute latitude could do, but should not do, because they are as harmful to play as "I have my infinity-plus-one shield" is. A sacrifice of truly absolutely infinite flexibility (the flexibility to be harmful to the game) in order to strengthen practical flexibility (reliably producing good, useful results in the largest possible set of non-harmful contexts.)
Couldn't agree with Mr. Baker more. Assignment of authority as the endpoint of game design is...honestly kind of sad. And avoiding constant renegotiation of the rules is a third benefit of visible rulebooks over invisible ones, a benefit I often see overlooked or even (albeit unsurprisingly) cast as a flaw, as though it were a good thing that every time a common situation comes up the game has to stop and figure out how to resolve it yet again.
