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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5716893" data-attributes="member: 54877">OK, I get where you are going with this now. Maybe some of my recent real-life experiences are coloring this too much, but I see this as a case of examples turning into rules--sometimes without the intent of the example writer. I've run into a lot of situations lately where I had information or a process to teach to a person, and expressed it with some examples, in the hopes of explaining why the 1, 2, or 3 choices I saw as viable were the best choices. The intent is to give the person enough information to make their own, good decisions--including anything that arises later or that I wasn't aware of. What they hear, however, is, "Do it like this, or that, or this third thing. Those are your choices. Pick one. You don't have to think about it."  Now I'm a pretty confident, blunt guy when the subject is something I know. But I'm not totally clueless when it comes to this dynamic, and I have made explicit efforts to get the intent in sync with the results--such as leading off and closing with, "You should do it your way. Here is how I see it. Take this and adapt it to your situation. Think about it. Do it your way." And often people still come away with, "Pick one of the choices I was given."  Yet, if you don't give examples, and keep it neutral, then people often don't understand what you intended, either. Now I procede to prove the problem by using an example that someone will misunderstand, either due to their perception or my inablility to convey it well, or both. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> Say you have a rule in the game that is, "Do something wacky at the right time, get bonus experience." That's the whole rule; everthing else we write on it is commentary.  We can stop there. Let people be the judge of what is wacky, how much is enough to qualify, when the time is right, how much experience they get for each incident, etc. If we do a pretty good job of providing indirect examples via setting material, background, color, etc.--or maybe leverage off of a well-known and distinctive style (e.g. Warner Bros. cartoons), then maybe that is enough. They'll play the game more or less the way we intended, and thus provided rules for, or they'll adapt it to their own style easily enough. Or we can provide explicit commentary and examples right after the rule. If we do, the worst thing (in my opinion) that we can do is provide exactly one example. People will invariably read more into the example than is intended, and elevate it to the same status as a rule. Two examples is almost as bad. By the time we get to three or more, we've nullified a lot of that problem. But now people start reading it as the defacto limits of what can be done. They won't say it that way, because it is more attitude than thought--and certainly not literal. But the examples will be taking as limits on the actions expressed in the examples. More examples will accrete. People will argue about how those examples fit in with the other examples. And pretty soon we have a thin hardback pick collecting all of the examples as "canon". <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f631.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":eek:" title="Eek!    :eek:"  data-smilie="9"data-shortname=":eek:" /> So one of my answers to that dilemma is that you need at least 3 examples, but not a ton, and that at least two of the examples have to be mutually exclusive enough that each raises doubts about the other. That is, you can't read those examples without being forcibly reminded that they are mere examples. Running around the room screaming, "Oklahoma, Oklahoma, Oklahoma," when in the game it is entirely socially unacceptable might be one example. Then making a deadpan remark, quietly, at just the right moment, becomes another. In one campaign, the former got 10 XP, and the latter got 5 XP. In another game, the former got nothing and the latter got 7 XP. There is no rule in the commentary. I'd say that the way out of this is to label commentary and examples explicitly as such, but unfortunately, my experiences says that it isn't adequate.</blockquote>

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