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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9033756" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is not a working definition for TTRPG rules.For instance, there is no normal, and no pre-existing norm, in the context of shared fiction creation, about who gets to say what happens when Derrik falls into a pit, or when Marie opens her brain to the psychic maelstrom.Your last sentence presupposes some interesting difference between a modal operator - you ought to do such-and-such - and an imperative - do such-and-such. There is an extensive literature on the semantics and pragmatics of both sorts of locution. It is very interesting, but tells us absolutely ZERO about RPGing.As for the posited contrast between "standards that are normative" and "rules" - there is no such contrast. A rule is a normative standard. (See eg Hart's extensive discussion in The Concept of Law.) And of course one standard (though contentious) analysis of the imperative speech act is that it presupposes a type of authority (ie normative) relation obtaining between speaker and addressee, such that the former is entitled (another normative notion!) to command the latter!Really? Thou shat not kill! lacks forcefulness? The rules I quoted from the Australian statute books lack forcefulness?No, this is not what he says.He says that, in a voluntary activity aimed at the collective creation, sustaining and development of a shared fiction, the only reason to introduce rules rather than simply to just proceed by way of social negotiation is because rules permit the introduction of the unwanted and unwelcome. Because anything else - ie anything that is neither unwanted nor unwelcome - can be introduced into the fiction by sheer cooperation.That is not a statement about what anyone should do with rules. It is a statement about why people have a reason to erect a system of rules in this voluntary, cooperative activity.It's telling, to me at least, that the rule you hint at, about rolling on a random weather table, does not take your mooted form. It doesn't say anything about "norms" or "extending norms" or "descriptions leading via rules to consequences."Rather, it directs a game participant how to establish some shared fiction, namely, by carrying out the mechanical procedure of rolling some dice and then correlating the result of that roll with an entry on a table. It establishes a normative standard which must be satisfied if someone's statement about what the weather is is to be accepted as part of the shared fiction.</blockquote>

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