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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 3225695" data-attributes="member: 42582">As in my earlier post, I was contrasting game rules with (your example of) scientific theories. The latter attempt to describe something real. The former don't - they are purely conventional. In this respect they are like laws (which is why I made the comparison to law as a contrast with scientific theory).Thus, whereas it is natural to say that Newton's theory of gravity attempts to describe the behaviour of (among other things) planetary bodies, it is not natural to say that the rules describe halflings. Rather, they define or stipulate halflings. Where the definition or stipulation is incomplete, there is no truth to be discovered.This conventional character has other implications besides truth-conditions. It also has implicatons for what counts as a good reason for one interpretation over another.You are assuming that, when someone asks "What is the rule for X" they are looking for the best possible deduction, drawn from an extremely close reading of the text, as to how the game should handl X. But this sort of inference is difficult, time-consuming and contentious (as these boards prove); indeed, because the rules are couched in natural language, what counts as a good proof is itself up for grabs.But given the conventional character of any rule set, it cannot be presupposed that this is the only criteria for correct determination of the rules. The rules, in this respect, are quite different from (for example) a formal system in which provability is the only sufficient condition for truth.For example, one feature of any system of conventions that can help those conventions endure and even flourish is clarity and simplicity. When someone asks "What is the rule for X", they may have in mind that this is a further constraint on a correct answer. The FAQ helps to meet this desiderata.Again, an analogy. Many people speculate about how the courts have got the interpretation of various parts of the Constitution wrong, whether in relation to gun control, free speech, civil rights, abortion or what have you. Such speculation is sometimes interesting, especially when undertaken by well-informed and clever politicians, academics or practitioners. But it does not tell us what the law actually is. Furthermore, it is crucial to law's being what it is that this be so, ie, that there be an authority vested with the power to tell us what it is, regardless of whether or not we could get to the same answer, or a different answer, by application of our own reason.No harm is done in treating the law as a purely formal system, and reasoning it out from first principles, but this will not tell you what the law is in a jurisdiction. Likewise, no harm is done in treating the rules as if they were a formal system in which truth is demonstrated by proof. But this  is not necessarily what all posters on a rules forum are doing. Some want to know what the rules are by which they are actually promising to play, should they stick up a sign advertising a D&D game. And I don't think the FAQ is irrelevant to answering such a questionThe analogy between WoTC and the hierarchy of courts is (obviously) imperfect, but not absurd. For an account of how some people actually use the FAQ in the way I have described, see the posts of Artoomis and others above (which I also quoted in my own original post).</blockquote>

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