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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7932045" data-attributes="member: 4937">There are two observations about RPGs that I've made so far that I'm proud of.  Celebrim's 1st Law of RPGs: Thou shalt not be good at everything.Celebrim's 2nd Law of RPGs: How you think about playing a system is more important than the rules system itself.Your lengthy and interesting discussion above to me is just delving into the truth of the second law. That "thinking about playing a system" is what I am talking about when I mention "processes of play". Processes of play are rarely documented by game systems. They are usually implicit. To the extent that they are documented and the game designer tells you how to play the game, they are almost always the first thing that a table will ignore. Quite often in my experience, I discover from play examples and discussion by the game designer that the game designer themselves actually regularly violates their own described process of play, and just kind of assumed that any skilled GM would do so and doesn't really think about the fact that the document that they produced telling people how to play their game doesn't correspond at all to how they themselves play the game.On the forum's, I'm found of using as an example, "The World's Simplest RPG", which I will claim for the purposes of the discussion has only one rule:"For any proposition, flip a coin. On heads, the proposition succeeds. On tails, the proposition fails."For all the times I've used that example, no one on the boards has ever challenged me on the quite true fact that in order to become an RPG, in addition to that one rule, I'd need pages and pages of description of what the game actually was. By "rule" I'm really only describing the resolution mechanism, what we normally think of as rules. But the resolution mechanism in fact doesn't describe the game, in the way we think that the rules of a game do. For example, hidden in that rule are a bunch of metarules about RPGs like that you are playing pretend, that you have a single character, that the character faces situations and then proposes actions that they undertake, and very likely that there is a secret keeper that knows the setting and is responsible for creating it who also undertakes to describe the outcome of the actions that player undertook. It's amazing to me how little attention tends to be put on the process of play at a table, and how complex that process can actually be.</blockquote>

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