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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 9279793" data-attributes="member: 71699">That may be true (if someone is saying that.) What I have been proposing maintains a strong distinction between principles and rules.Principles illuminate the meaning and ideal use of rules Rules reify, extend and override norms in specific ways (e.g. constitutive, regulatory, procedural, mediating) Either can be written or unwritten. Rules have greater normative force for a number of reasons (that I can list if it becomes important), but they don't have that force in the absence of principles, and differing principles will lead that force to be applied in differing ways.That gets at the related point of how we know what a rule means. While I think that rules are not principles, we will not agree on what rules mean without principles. So it would be right to say that one cannot make sense of a Stonetop basic move outside of the context of how moves work. That doesn't seem to me very controversial. Equally, however, one cannot know exactly what behaviour amounts to fulfilment of the move, without the rule. Principles imply the desirability or suitability of rules - encouraging and justifying their coalescene into the game design and how they are used in play. But only the rule tells us specifically what to do, and only that specificity allows construction of the web of rules forming a coherent game text such as Blades in the Dark.As an analogy, I cannot understand an English language edition of The Old Man and the Sea without knowing English, but knowing English doesn't mean I know the story of The Old Man and the Sea. Another analogy might be to say that Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night could not have the power it does without English words and the poetic form of the villanelle, but English words and the villanelle are not that poem and it takes nothing away from it to say that it is written in English.</blockquote>

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