I recently came across a discussion debating the validity of this quote by Gary Gygax, "The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules." I'd just like to talk about my experience and opinions regarding the sentiment behind this. First off we should acknowledge that this was probably said in a business sense, meaning that if the DMs knew they didn't need rules or books published by the company, then RPG publishing wouldn't be a viable source of income.
Alexis Smolensk on the Tao of D&D blog has often explained the need for codified rules in an RPG with an emphasis on the Game aspect of Role-Playing Game. I generally tend to agree with what he has written on the subject. The more we treat RPGs as games and less as story-telling devices, the more varied and meaningful our game sessions will be.
However, some of my experience contradicts this sentiment. My best friend, Christian, invented what he called "Mind Games" before I met him or introduced him to D&D. These games were very similar in play to RPGS. He would take the role of narrator and anyone else would play a character. Before the game would start, Christian would describe the setting, and each player would describe their character. He would then describe events based on what we chose to do. There were no dice or paper or pencils or anything to keep records, except sometimes we would draw a map. Consequences of actions were decided by what is now called 'DM fiat' though we didn't know of the term at the time. In many ways it could be called a 'story-game'. Yet the game played out in a manner very similar to our D&D games run by my father at the same time. In my view at the time, it was D&D without any rules.
So, I guess the takeaway is that RPGs don't need rules if a certain style of play is wanted and if you have a good DM.
If there are no rules then it’s not a game. But the rules don’t have to be explicit. For instance, playing fetch with the dog. You can fake throw it a couple times but if you do it all the time the dog gets bored. So the rule is, throw the ball most of the time.
ReplyDeleteGames have rules.
It might not be a "game," but it is "play."
DeleteI am more interested in the aspect of what people enjoy: when we tried no game master, no rules, just narration passing from one to the next, it was cool one session and the next session it was boring and we never did it again, probably 25 years ago, haha. So now I think of rules simply as the constraints. Constraints is what turns text into poetry, it’s what turns story telling into a role-playing game. How much of it you need depends on the kind of activity you enjoy. So I agree with “don’t need rules if a certain play style is wanted” and I’d emphasize the need to figure out the play style people want.
ReplyDelete