System and Theory
This is a rerun. It was originally posted on March 20, 2006.
What about the rules? Do rules make it a game? Rules exist, in my mind, to serve three purposes: to resolve conflicts, to introduce random factors, and to support the flavor of the setting.
The first is most important. Without a conflict resolution system, we’d be playing cowboys and indians yelling “Bang! You’re dead!” “No I’m not! You missed!” “I didn’t miss! I never miss! Fall down!” Success, failure and, where applicable, degree of success. That is all.
Random factors serve to inspire the imagination and keep things moving along. I have built entire campaigns (a wargaming holdover term; I prefer “series”, as in a television series, a series of novels, or a series of connected game sessions) from the shambles of plots where die rolls have gone horribly, horribly awry and having to incorporate the outcome of those events, especially players’ reactions, into the big picture. Were I just sitting at the laptop writing the story, it would have gone much, much differently.
As for flavor, there are whole schools of thought devoted to the connection between rules and setting. All rules influence setting. Pick a movie or TV show. Use it as a game setting using five different sets of rules, and you’ll have five different experiences. Why? Everything from skill lists to special abilities available to how task resolution works to what type of damage weapons do will influence the world. Rules are the physics of the world. You can use any generic system to run any setting, it’s absolutely true, but you will need to tweak, and some rules are better suited to particular settings than others.
Rules are only rules if you follow them. Even most core rules published in the past 20 years have some verbiage in them encouraging you to chuck out anything that doesn’t work for you, demoting them to mere suggestions. The proliferation of house rules and D20 flavors supports this idea. Nothing is inflexible; use rules that support the story you’re trying to tell. Like a writer writing a story, if you need something to happen, it does; if something doesn’t fit, call a do-over or ignore it.
So what do you call a roleplaying game, Uncle Bear, if it’s not a game?
You just call it roleplaying, silly. You might need to utter an extra sentance to clarify to non-roleplayers that you’re not talking about a therapeutic technique or a method of teaching critical thinking and problem solving, but it shouldn’t be so hard.
So what are all these books sitting on my shelf, professing to be games?
Some of them are systems: a way or method of doing things. Here are the laundry lists of things your character can potentially do. Here is the method of task resolution. Some of them are theories: this is how we, the authors, feel roleplaying should work, or at least how it should work in this genre or setting. When you’re roleplaying using that system, you’re testing, validating, and building upon that set of assumptions and, ultimately, accepting them, adding to them, or scrapping them in favor of a more workable theory.
To the first squirt that says I’m making this way more complicated than it needs to be, I ask: have you picked up a D20 core rulebook lately?
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