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<blockquote data-quote="jmucchiello" data-source="post: 5375531" data-attributes="member: 813">Ask a five-year old what the rules are to playing &quot;let's pretend&quot;. Groups of children play role-playing games (&quot;Okay, I'm Superman&quot; &quot;And I'm Batman&quot;...) all the time without ever consulting a rulebook. If they got into an argument and an adult they both trust adjudicates the argument they will continue playing with the ad hoc ruling in play. It is the nature of humankind to be able to play in this manner. Older children (and that includes all of us) might prefer a written framework for gaming but it is entirely possible to play without rules. In my first post, I said this was the dirty secret of the RPG industry. This is what I meant. Look at a game like RISUS. It is 6 pages long. The rules don't say it explicitly but just about everything in RISUS could be GM fiat. And yet people play that game all the time and have fun. It's just a roll-over mechanic. Nothing more.In the old days, only the DM might own all the books and certainly most people at the table did not know all the rules. And they had fun.There are groups of people who buy one rulebook once in their lifetime and never buy another. They play with an insular group of friends. None of them log on to ENWorld or wizards.com or rpg.net or the forge or rpgg or DDI. Yet every week they get together and play. The industry is already dead from their point of view because they don't need it. If they've been together long enough I'm sure their game is also so house ruled that they don't even use that one book they bought long ago.I'm not talking about the fringe of the hobby. That case is probably the core of the hobby. The real fringe of the hobby is people like us who post on message boards and fret about the state of the industry. The industry exists for the fanatics of the hobby.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="jmucchiello, post: 5375531, member: 813"] Ask a five-year old what the rules are to playing "let's pretend". Groups of children play role-playing games ("Okay, I'm Superman" "And I'm Batman"...) all the time without ever consulting a rulebook. If they got into an argument and an adult they both trust adjudicates the argument they will continue playing with the ad hoc ruling in play. It is the nature of humankind to be able to play in this manner. Older children (and that includes all of us) might prefer a written framework for gaming but it is entirely possible to play without rules. In my first post, I said this was the dirty secret of the RPG industry. This is what I meant. Look at a game like RISUS. It is 6 pages long. The rules don't say it explicitly but just about everything in RISUS could be GM fiat. And yet people play that game all the time and have fun. It's just a roll-over mechanic. Nothing more. In the old days, only the DM might own all the books and certainly most people at the table did not know all the rules. And they had fun. There are groups of people who buy one rulebook once in their lifetime and never buy another. They play with an insular group of friends. None of them log on to ENWorld or wizards.com or rpg.net or the forge or rpgg or DDI. Yet every week they get together and play. The industry is already dead from their point of view because they don't need it. If they've been together long enough I'm sure their game is also so house ruled that they don't even use that one book they bought long ago. I'm not talking about the fringe of the hobby. That case is probably the core of the hobby. The real fringe of the hobby is people like us who post on message boards and fret about the state of the industry. The industry exists for the fanatics of the hobby. [/QUOTE]

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