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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 8501887" data-attributes="member: 71699">I wonder if the Lumpley Principle and my suggested complement can shed light on your questions? The Lumpley Principle gets at a general question about rules, which is rule following behaviour.Formalists say all instances and actions that fall outside the rules of the game, do not count as legitimate instances or actions of a game. Not following the rules invalidates participation.Non-formalists say that in addition to the formal rules of a game, there is a socially-determined interpretation of the rules, an ethos. Participants may grasp and uphold the rules in different ways, and still be playing the same game.Formalism leans into understanding rules as constitutive rather than regulative: when you are not following the rules of D&D you aren't playing D&D. Non-formalists can more easily let in regulatory rules. That is a big deal for RPG.Regulatory rules presuppose an activity is going on in any case, and they regulate that activity. We would be RPing in any case - rules or no rules - and G doesn't necessarily constitute that RP: it regulates it. Nevertheless, D&D play contains a great number of highly specific activities that wouldn't plausibly be done without the D&D (or similar) rules to constitute them.For RPG we are forced to prefer the non-formalist view because we have ample evidence that - what are the rules? - is a live question: answered differently in each social bubble.Lumpley (LP)- "System (including but not limited to 'the rules') is defined as the means by which the group agrees to imagined events during play."The complement that I propose (CP) - "RPG systems enable player fiction to progress in the designed direction."The LP can be satisfied by purely regulatory rules. So long as those rules mean the group agrees to imagined events. It may be intended to include constitutive rules, but it does not necessitate them. That's not a defect.The CP is intended to demand constitutive rules. (If it doesn't seem to, I need to wordsmith it!) That is because there is little worth in the G in RP if it's not constitutive. We would need only one set of rules - whichever best gets players to cooperate - and they wouldn't matter beyond that. The coin-flipping rules [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] cited could even be enough! Rules could be judged solely on regulating agreement, not on the specific and different-feeling play-acts they produced. I think what we see and enjoy is a diversity of games, producing diverse play-acts.Constitutive rules are so important to games that they cannot be left unsaid, or said elsewhere. A principle should exist that lays that out!You and I have supposed players might agree to play the way you describe (LP upheld?) You additionally drew attention to TIBFs and Inspiration (satisfying CP?)[USER=16814]@Ovinomancer[/USER] to my reading has said that the rules need to ensure players get something for giving up agency. It can be supposed that they won't agree if they don't get anything out if it (LP not upheld.) You answer that what they get out of it can be scaled up by DM guiding play more into cases where TIBFs and Inspiration will matter. I really like your concept yet I feel the constitutive rules for that are too threadbare (failing CP).There may be an interaction between LP and CP so that what you suggest might be achieved in D&D, requiring extra rules to enable gains that players will care about. Or one could say that the only gains that could possibly satisfy players are paradigmatically unobtainable in D&D. How would anyone prove that true, though?</blockquote>

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