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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8637258" data-attributes="member: 6790260">As someone who had to deal with a friend who had been rampantly cheating in purely casual games for many years, only to finally admit to doing so: yeah, I absolutely hold with the "it shatters the circle of play" position. (This was probably the final nail in the coffin of our friendship, which had been waning for several years.) That it goes unnoticed does not mean the circle is not so shattered; it just means the participants are not aware yet. I mean, for goodness' sake, that's literally identical to saying, "It's only illegal if you don't get caught." I sincerely hope we agree that that statement is both ethically and rationally bankrupt! As for griefing, I don't generally see the former (the only thing that that might apply to is something like social conventions, which again I see as rather distinct from rules proper). The latter absolutely, but exploiting a rule for benefit (or, I suppose, for another's detriment) is orthogonal to whether or not the rules are supposed to be binding.With cheating, it looks like the player is not accepting the goal of the game, not in fact ACTUALLY "stepping into the magic circle," but rather giving the appearance that they have done so. This allows them to manipulate the contents of the circle, while being unbound by that circle--they have, in effect, broken the border, the circle is no longer closed. As you say, "not a sincere participant."I mean, I don't actually see the second rule as being anything at all, because "agree with clearstream" already has agreement in it. Either the norm is binding, in which case you have agreed that it is a rule, or the norm is not binding, in which case it is (at most) a suggestion.If we actually had to have structures like what you're talking about here (and what you've said before), literally all rules ever would be an infinite chain: "Rule 3. Agree to rule 2. Rule 4. Agree to rule 3. Rule 5...." etc. That is pretty clearly absurd.Then my argument there is close kin to my "I don't really buy that people are that consistent" one: people in general struggle with abstract reasoning. Remember how people read the 3e Monk and thought "holy CRAP, this class is LOADED with features, it's so broken!!!" And then a few years later, after we'd built up that expertise, the actual understanding came out: "holy crap, this class is loaded with useless and contradictory features...it's so broken..."Or, to use the example of a DM horror story I once heard: there was a group that had a DM skeptical about 4e, but willing to run it. However, he refused to run it vanilla to start with. He immediately tinkered with a whole bunch of the rules. He eliminated Healing Surges, for example, and let all healing powers that depended on them be used indefinitely, because surges were obviously dumb. (This was but one major change, I just don't remember the rest.) The end result? Incredibly grindy, pointless combats because no HP costs ever mattered and characters were always full health without any real attrition or cost. This DM thus wrote off 4e entirely as a busted, pointless system solely centered on getting incredibly powerful immediately and never ever facing loss or hardship.At some point, somebody had to willingly accept the binding of the rules to find out whether they were worth playing. Outsourcing that effort to someone else doesn't mean it doesn't happen. It just means you took advantage of their efforts, assuming you trust their judgment. Someone had to get the expertise first.You still bound yourself to a rule. It just turned out the rule you bound yourself to was not the rule you were "supposed" to. Either way, you bound yourself to rules. It doesn't matter to me whether they're the "official" rules or not.Doesn't being "exogenous" make them not rules? Ethos, principle, best practice...these are all suggestions. They may be very carefully-crafted suggestions. It may be that the design was built specifically around assuming them. None of that makes them rules.</blockquote>

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