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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7585118" data-attributes="member: 4937">The relationship between "rules" and written law and "rulings" and common law is something I've thought about before.I've always been a critic of the phrase "rulings not rules" because ultimately both seemed to me to be much the same thing - regardless of whether the law is derived from a Constitution or a body of common law, it's still going to be law and fodder therefore for lawyers.I've never been a lawyer, but it seems to me that the great difficulty in being a lawyer always come from the common law, which in any legal system soon vastly outweighs the written law both in its volume and its influence over how a case is adjudicated.   I've read the written law and it's often struck me how the written law is just as badly written as RPG rules, and often much more so, so that it doesn't actually address the question or provide the answers you'd want to have in practice.I don't think it is possible to write law or rules that are so complete that no common law arises from the interpretation of them.  But I think it is possible to write law or rules to varying degrees of quality so that on the whole, the situation is more ruled by the law than fiat and almost everyone reading the rules has some close sense regarding what the laws say and how they'll work in practice.I likewise think that there is a more or less ideal state where the rules are short enough to be comprehensible and yet comprehensive enough that they seldom give rise to the need for rulings touching on things that the rules do not cover adequately.   My suspicion is that that ideal state is for a rather large body of written rules, both by practical experience (trying to apply different rules set) and theoretically in that I think that the complexity of a rules set which involves simple operations tends to grow at a less than linear rate.   That is to say, I tend to think that doubling the page count less than doubles the complexity - at least for certain types of writing (the sort I prefer).In fact, I think you can increase complexity by shortening the rules.  For example, consider the following variant:1) If the proposition is trivially easy, it always succeeds.2) If the proposition is impossible, it always fails.3) If the proposition is doubtful, then the GM decides the outcome.For most traditional RPGs, since the GM is the sole authority on resolving propositions, so this reduces to a game with only the following rule:1) The GM decides the outcome of propositions.This is in fact a game which contains only the rule frequently referred to as "Rule Zero".  Despite having the same number of rules as "The World's Simplest RPG", the complexity of "The World's Simplest RPG" defined by the number of factors that touch on the resolution is zero.  While the complexity of game based solely on "Rule Zero" has a complexity that approaches infinity.  Since the "Rule Zero" game is the only rule in a Braunstein, I see the entire history of RPG rule development as an attempt to reduce the complexity of the rules compared to that of a Braunstein.</blockquote>

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