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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DogBackward" data-source="post: 5819736" data-attributes="member: 50642">"Proper" means "by the rules as presented in the books". But you're focusing on the wrong bits here. It's a word, not a value judgement. The main point was that when you don't know how to implement or judge the rules of a given system... why are you using that system? When you don't have a firm grasp of a set of rules, the rules just get in the way of you telling your story. When you don't have rules mastery, you have three options:Run the system anyway, and stumble and stutter through trying to figure the rules out while you're playing.Run the system anyway, and attempt to handwave and shift around the rules to make the game work.Run a system for which you do possess system mastery. Then you can work with the rules to make the game run smoothly.If you don't know how the rules work, and how they interact... then you'll constantly be either fighting the rules or finding ways to work around them, or you'll be trying to figure out how the rules work mid-game, which slows things down to a crawl. It's better to find a system where you don't have to fight the rules... which is why simpler systems work better for people without a thorough grasp of the mechanics. Something like Risus is incredibly simple and easy to run, while still allowing you to tell the story you want to tell.To be honest, I'm probably being much more blunt about this than I usually would, and I apologize for that. But I've sat through far too many boring, tedious, lackluster games that could have been awesome... except that the GM's insisted on fighting against a rules system that they weren't familiar enough with.Rule zero works as a handwave, yes... but again, you're having to take extra effort to make up your own rules, contradictory to the rules of the system you're playing in. And again, using Rule zero requires system mastery to know the effects of the changes you're making, otherwise you could have a cascading series of side-effects you hadn't expected. Knowing why a rule exists, and how it's balanced against other rules, is very important when you're trying to change a rule. And if you just use Rule zero to hand-wave any problems caused by your rules changes... again, why are you playing with a set of rules that you're constantly ignoring or changing? What's the point of playing a system if you're just going to ignore the details of that system?</blockquote>

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