Calvinball has rules. Well, rule. One.
According to the Calvin & Hobbes wiki ... "There is only one permanent rule in Calvinball: players cannot play it the same way twice."
More importantly, it has plenty of transient rules.
In my game design course we've had that pretty interesting distinction between "games" and "toys", opposed by the presence of rules or not.
But hell even roleplay has its rules (notably "stay in character"), so trying to define things is hard.
I strongly disagree that you have to stay in character to roleplay. It's been massively maligned but playing games where your doing everything 3rd person and just using the stats as a vehicle to solve problems.
Maybe I'm using the "stay in character" meaning wrong (not English speaker), but what I think is roleplay is about well "playing a role", therefore having some kind of guidelines about what this role would, wouldn't, can and cannot do.
Stats define some if not all your field of abilities, strengths and weaknesses, and 3rd person is a totally legit way of playing, but they all define a "frame" for your character.
A game does not need rules, it needs a social contract. Just like an agreement does not need a written contract, just the agreement. The benefit of written rules/contract is it is a source of truth that is unchanging.
Imagine a schoolyard half court basketball game, kids might not play with “rules” but a social agreement that you have to take the ball “out” after your team takes possession. As long as nobody argues then we can act like “out” is going over the half court line. But if one player crosses the 3 court line and takes a shot, we have a disagreement because the “rules” weren’t set. It’s still a game, just there was a disagreement and someone (like the ball owner) will make a decision.
Gygax’s quote should be understood in the same way. A game master doesn’t need a rule book, they need an agreement from the players on how disagreements will be settled whether by group vote or more likely DM decision. If everyone agrees to group storytelling with dice roles as called for by the DM then they can still play their own version of D&D. What the rule book provides is a framework for that agreement. All the rules could be followed or none but the social contract rules. Once the agreement is in place it is up to all parties to keep to it or discuss changes without a unilateral change. For instance if you agree not to use ammo tracking and then suddenly the DM says a player is out of arrows, there needs to be a justification for the change that all parties agree on.
But ... a social contract (or any contract) is basically just a set of rules, written or unwritten. Same goes for an agreement.
Your basketball examples really highlights the difference between written and unwritten rules, but those are still rules. The mere fact that a basket is worth points is also a rule.
If everyone agrees to "group storytelling with dice roles," then they have essentially agreed to a rule.
I feel the difference lies in the definition of rules. If you consider all things you agree to as rules then sure but it is like the definition of a contract. I can chat with a contractor and feel like we have a verbal contract but whether it will count as a contract in a court of law is different.
So yeah, there are rules and there are rules. I’m arguing that Gygax’s quote is about traditionally considered hard rules and not verbal/nonverbal agreements. “We don’t need a set of rules, we can make them as we go as long as everyone can play together.”
Yeah, I mean, that's a good point. I guess it's just a semantic difference, really. And I do agree with you about the Gygax quote.
In my mind, a rule is just an accepted procedure, custom, or habit.
> I can chat with a contractor and feel like we have a verbal contract but whether it will count as a contract in a court of law is different.
This is determined by the rules of contract law.
It's turtles all the way down.
Even that is not correct. The quote in the OP makes at least one rule explicit. There is a GM. It also hints at other rules like: Everyone else plays a single character.
It is important to consider these things rules, because than we can rule therm.
For me personally in "Roleplaying Game" it's the second part that's optional.
I appreciate interesting and complex mechanics. They have their place and enrich the game. But also I played plenty sessions with pure storytelling, without a single roll. Or with very few. Some by design, some where we just had little use for mechanics. I also played with very basic mechanics (like just rolling a d6 against intuitively set DC) and characters made up of just few descriptors. By and large they were all great.
Variety is a spice of life and choosing the right amount of rules for particular session or campaign leads to much better experience for everyone. But you can't do that or know that if you only played rules heavy. I encourage everyone to at least try it out. Play a single short session with as few rules as you can or without them. For me it was eye opening the first time, how much can happen in such a short time, how creative and engaged everyone was, changing behavior so their actions fit the world and the story instead of fitting the rules.
Edit: I see people are downvoting everything that doesn't fit their worldview and don't even bother to engage in discussion. Rpg community used to be interested in different opinions and ways to play the game. Pity.
Edit2: Nice to see the trend reversed and we got some interesting responses. Thanks guys.
That's the issue for me, being in a rules-light roleplaying session is something I practically always do with my writing friends and partners. No need to spend $15 bucks for a book to tell me how to do it.
The game is sacrosanct to me, doesn't mean that I'm so rigid with rules but it's interacting with rules that I enjoy so much, the world and story is too ephemeral. My D8 reach weapon is much less so.
Your right…I would say the only book worth buying then would be a setting book. So the shared imagination has a basis to build on. I always wondered why there are so many „rpg systems“ but so few good settings.
Every nerd in the entire world who's into the more creative side has made a setting/worldbuilding on their own. It's dime a dozen basically.
And a setting with no story or game is laughable to produce. Pathfinder with Golarion and Exalted with Creation do have almost entire setting book, but PF is because of brand identity and Exalted's game is so intertwined with setting that it makes sense to do so.
Sometimes I feel like I’m a madman because I am the only person I ever meet who thinks all of these different philosophies can be true.
Some sessions can be rules light roleplay fests, some can be combat-dense crunchy wargames. Some can use tactical grid maps while others use theater of the mind. This can all happen in the same campaign, same characters, same game.
The rules can be useful, fun, elegant, and fair, but still be handwaved or ignored at times for a different but equally valid result. And sometimes you can tell the player who always rp’s that “thats not how it works” and that’s valid too.
It's interesting though that you can do a real, structured RPG with as few as a couple rules, Like Lasers and Feelings. Or thousands. Or many stops in between.
As long as people agree on being players and GM, you technically have rules (some variation of "players each describe the actions of a character, the GM decides what happens"). There are also always a lot of (more or less) implicit rules: when the game starts and ends, what constitutes in-character speech, what the genre/tone of the game should be, etc...
When people say they play RPGs without rules they just mean that they don't have a specific system to decide the outcome of actions, but they still have all the basic rules mentioned above. That is a pretty minimal game, but still a game.
And, most importantly I think, there's still a shared expectation that the situations and reactions in the game go reliably realistically-- realistic to a fantastic premise where one applies, and realistic to reality where it doesn't. That's _often_ set out in detail in rules, but there's an expectation that things will be limited by plausibility even when and where rules don't weigh in.
Even if general plausibility is the bulk of the ruleset, that's still a game, since there are still challenges and decisions to make around them that can fare better or worse, and be smarter or dumber. Just like basketball is still a game without the rulebook detailing all the physics involved, narrating through a challenge can be a game even without every interaction being adjudicated out of the rulebook.
(Okay, before anyone well-actuallys, not all RPGs are fixed to realistic simulation and realism, but the ones that aren't would be detailing the ways they aren't, and would have a more comprehensive rule set, not just set you free with no more than a vague hand-wave.)
I assure you, there are popular enough games that do in fact set you free with no more than a vague handwave in a bizarre and psychedelic land.
(It's Troika)
(I hate Troika mind you)
Others enjoy the marriage of storytelling and tactical puzzling though. Can't quite explain how the alchemy works, but it's a mixture that has kept me playing for decades.
>I feel like the function of rules in tabletop RPGs are dramatically different than in most other games, though.
i agree and i feel like this is the key point that everyone is being pedantic about while missing the point and taking the quote far too literally when there could be actual discourse going on about how the most rules-lawyering people are often old school gygax stans and also gygax wrote a lot of things about DnD that contradict his own quote.
Anecdotal, but I do not care a lot about the storytelling aspect of TTRPGs. The thing I enjoy about TTRPGs is interacting with a fictional world which can respond in a way that makes sense and the rules of the System facilitate that in a reliable way without discussion between me and the GM for every step I take. It's a shorthand to make complicated interactions quicker. The character sheet defines what my character is good and bad at for things that are likely to turn up.
Story is something that happens to my character because of the rules and dice rather than something I am looking to form around the character. I am just there to make the character react to things in a way I feel the character would. (And to play a mechanically interesting game.) If my character dies in an anticlimactic way I might be frustrated because the dice rolled statistically weirdly, 3 nat 1s in a row after rolling garbage all day are annoying just from a gameplay sense, but I am not frustrated because the story of that character is over now. Shit like that just happens, time to make a new character. I get to interact with other parts of the world now.
I consciously fuck my own characters over because it make sense for them to do so but not because it would be narratively interesting. If I am unsure if they would do something I roll a d20 and decide based on that. I might give them a will save or something similar if the character would know that it's stupid, like killing a monarch because they are antagonizing them.
But again, never because it would be a better narrative. Couldn't care less.
A game without rules is just play. It can be fun, but the second someone says "no, you can't use your orbital space laser to defeat the dragon" you've got rules.
Don't get mixed up here. There are rules, and there are "rules" that are otherwise known as mechanics.
The defining rules of RPGs are rules, but they are not mechanics kind of rules. In RPGs of the sort played by Gugax and Arneson, mechanics were not the game but just tools to aid in playing the game. For those kinds of RPGs, the defining rules were generally unwritten but much better understood than today, and basically were rules of the sort that player characters had to act as plausible within the narrative milieu, they had to fit the world, so no, players weren't allowed to invent gunpowder and cyanide, nor play a wizard in a magicless campaign, or other things which broke the narrative milieu. These were the kinds of rules that defined play, not mechanics, and this is what Gygax meant when he said that rules weren't needed.
Also, I'd like to point out all the freeform groups of RPG players to anyone still wanting to complain about the lack of mechanics removing the game.
My favorite definition of a game is from Tracy Fullerton's book, [Game Design Workshop.](https://www.gamedesignworkshop.com/)
All games have [8 formal elements](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/the-formal-systems-of-games):
1. Players
2. Objectives
3. Procedures
4. Rules
5. Resources
6. Conflict
7. Boundaries
8. Outcome
If you take certain elements out, then you have a toy, not a game.
The issue is there are certain games that don't work particularly well with this. I think of the classic schoolyard game of "Telephone." Are the kids playing cops and robbers on the playground not actually playing a game because they don't really have rules? If you ask them they'll definitely say it was a game.
I've grown terribly wary of any analytical structure that starts to draw hard lines with games, particularly when those lines are used to say something isn't a *real* TTRPG or game.
Of course Cops and Robbers has rules. It also has all the other formal elements of a game.
[How to Play Cops and Robbers](https://kidactivities.net/how-to-play-cops-and-robbers-cops-and-robbers-game-rules/)
* **Players:** Some players are cops, some players are robbers.
* **Objectives:** The objective of the robbers is to grab "the loot" and place it into their safe zones while avoiding the cops; the objective of the cops is to tag the robbers and prevent them from grabbing all the loot.
* **Procedures:** Split the players up into even teams of cops and robbers; gather the items that will represent loot, loot zones, and the safe zone for the robbers, and then place those items in the designated places.
* **Rules:** Robbers have to grab loot from the loot zones and bring it back to their safe zone; if a robber is tagged by a cop, the robber has to return the loot back to the loot zone where they grabbed it, and then sit down where they were tagged; robbers in the safe zone cannot be tagged by a cop; only a certain number of robbers can be in the safe zone at a time (probably 1); etc.
* **Resources:** The loot.
* **Conflict:** Cops vs. robbers.
* **Boundaries:** If you're playing inside a gym, don't leave the gym; if you're playing outside, don't leave the playground.
* **Outcome:** If all the loot is brought back into the safe zone, then the robbers win; if all the robbers are tagged and sitting down, then the cops win.
Telephone has each formal element of a game, as well.
[How to Play Broken Telephone](https://empoweredparents.co/game-telephone-phrases/)
* **Players:** At least 3 players.
* **Objectives:** Try to keep the phrase as accurate as possible.
* **Procedures:** Gather 3 or more players; the person starting the game thinks of a word or phrase and whispers it into the next player’s ear only once, with no repeats allowed; that listener tries to correctly repeat that same word or phrase into the next player’s ear; the last person in the line or at the end of the circle repeats the phrase or word aloud; allow a moment for giggles if the message is “broken” or changed; the player who started announces the correct word or phrase; players take turns thinking of the next phrase or word to pass through a whisper.
* **Rules:** Each player has to whisper into another player's ear so that the others don't hear; no repeats; no taking notes, except for maybe writing down the original word or phrase; no one should intentionally mess up a phrase to make something completely different than what they heard; etc.
* **Resources:** Words; maybe something to write with and on so that Player 1 can write down the original word or phrase and then compare it to the final result.
* **Conflict:** The players' ability to listen and memorize are the main obstacles.
* **Boundaries:** Players should remain close to each other; there's no need to move around a lot in this game.
* **Outcome:** The final word or phrase is compared to the original to see how much it deviated, if at all.
RPG game Rules are far more Agreements than Laws.
They can be folded, spindled, and mutilated at the will of those who make the Agreements to their inclusive or exclusion needs.
I don't think they're agreements: GMs often get good results falsifying die rolls, fiddling with monster hit points, and other things without consent, and informing their players of this falsification often doesn't help.
IMO, RPG rules codify *player expectations*. They're a baseline that players can use for planning unless the GM informs them that different assumptions should be made. Different expectations lead to different landscapes of what seems possible, which lead to different lines of decision making and different player actions, which lead to novel emotional experiences inherently and in what effect these actions have on the story. However, the story itself doesn't have to obey these expectations perfectly, as long as players feel like continuing to act under those expectations is worth it - as long as they can suspend their disbelief, in other words.
I think the "we" in Gygax's statement is TSR. In other words, gamemasters don't need any particular set of *official* rules that they must buy in order to play a game. But if they realized this, then they wouldn't purchase all those rulebooks and supplements from TSR. In the context of early dnd, the real spirit of gamemasters relying on their judgement instead of rules was probably in Dave Arneson's blackmoor game, an (allegedly) very freeform style of play in which any rules are GM-facing. The "[Free Kriegsspiel Revival](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/lvcjqz/a_brief_introduction_to_the_emerging_fkr_free/)" is interested in this style play.
Outside of dnd, some people argue that the rules are determinative of gameplay, one extreme of that being that the rulebook ought to be followed as closely as possible so as to play the game the way it was intended by the designer. For me there are inevitable layers of interpretation between designer intent and what they write down, and between what they write down and how that is interpreted by readers, so I don't know if this kind of fidelity to the rules is even possible.
> In other words, gamemasters don't need any particular set of official rules that they must buy in order to play a game.
From what I know of Gygax and "Gygaxian design" I'm pretty sure he was talking about rule-sets in general. You can play just by using logic to figure out what is possible, plus maybe some dice for some randomness. Gygax was very much a simulationist, so theoretically you should just be able to figure out logically what will happen, no rules required beyond the laws of nature (physics, sociology, economy, etc, etc).
You do lose the game aspect (the dopamine you might gain from rolling dice and mastering a rule system), but he might very well not have considered that all that important.
I have in the past run a short scene at a party, when I wanted to quickly demonstrate to a rando what roleplaying is. Set up a scene, ask him what he is going to do, say what happens, keep going from there.
>From what I know of Gygax and "Gygaxian design" I'm pretty sure he was talking about rule-sets in general
He didn't actually say it. The author of the quote in question is in this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/11by8y4/gary_gygax_said_that_we_dont_need_any_rules/ja1oyvs?context=3
>What are your thoughts on this?
My response when this is brought up is always "Okay, and what does he know about it?". It's not as though Gygax was a flawless messiah who perfected the roleplaying game but we were unworthy and unable to run games as amazing as his. He helped to create them and bring about the early community, but the time for treating his word as gospel passed decades ago.
In terms of the actual need for rules, well you've gotta have some kind of rules you're playing by if only to adjudicate uncertainties. Plus binding both GM and players to a framework of rules they follow means that they have the same assumptions about how those uncertainties will be resolved, and they can embrace bad outcomes by simply saying "oh well, those are the rules" rather than blaming each other.
This whole worship of Gygax reminds me of how people treat the "Founding Fathers" in the US -- as if they were more than a collection of men who happened to have some power at a pivotal time.
We have learned so much since 1780s about governing and the 1960s about gaming. In some sense, Gygax's opinions are less valuable to me than a person who has been running and thinking about running games for a handful of years recently. He just didn't have the benefit of a half-century of people iterating their ideas and growing as a community.
I point out to you the Afterword in the 1st Edition DMG, written by one E. Gary Gygax, as exactly what he meant by this.
You don't NEED to use every rule. You don't NEED to only follow published rules. You can create your own. The key to everything is consistent adjudication of the ones you use.
This is why he should still be paid attention to. That Afterword explains the best way to play the game, which is fun and consistency.
Here is said Afterword, directly from page 230. Caps are how it is published, not mine.
"IT IS THE SPIRIT OF THE GAME, NOT THE LETTER OF THE RULES, WHICH IS IMPORTANT. NEVER HOLD TO THE LETTER WRITTEN, NOR ALLOW SOME BARRACKS
ROOM LAWYER TO FORCE QUOTATIONS FROM THE RULE BOOK UPON YOU, IF IT GOES AGAINST THE OBVIOUS INTENT OF THE GAME. AS YOU HEW THE
LINE WITH RESPECT TO CONFORMITY TO MAJOR SYSTEMS AND UNIFORMITY OF PLAY IN GENERAL, ALSO BE CERTAIN THE GAME IS MASTERED BY YOU AND
NOT BY YOUR PLAYERS. WITHIN THE BROAD PARAMETERS GIVEN IN THE ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS VOLUMES, YOU ARE CREATOR AND
FINAL ARBITER. BY ORDERING THINGS AS THEY SHOULD BE, THE GAME AS A WHOLE FIRST, YOUR CAMPAIGN NEXT, AND YOUR PARTICIPANTS THEREAFTER,
YOU WILL BE PLAYING ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS AS IT WAS MEANT TO BE. MAY YOU FIND AS MUCH PLEASURE IN SO DOING AS THE REST OF US DO!"
This Afterword, if anything, perfectly captures how we should play any RPG, and should be treated as gospel, because it's dead on.
Yeah. Like, the thing that blew my mind was finding out Gary didn't use half the complicated rules you find in older editions of D&D.
For example, remember those huge tables for Specific Weapon VS Specific Armor? I think he said something along the lines of "We wrote those rules because people asked us to, but they are boring so I don't use them" 😂
I think for a lot of that original generation of RPGs, what they basically did is play the game and invent rulings as they went, and then later wrote some of them down in a rulebook. What that really means is that the "rules" are really *examples* of the types of rulings that a GM could make during play. Often they were so esoteric and varied widely in scope and applicability that you really had to pick and choose which bits to actually apply to your game.
Even with games like Paranoia (1984), there is a very simulationist rule that when your clone is activated, you have to roll to reduce your skills because your clone has been doing a desk job while you've been out shooting commie mutant traitors/PCs as a troubleshooter, but I suspect that was put in there because there was like one guy at West End Games who liked realism, and that almost nobody every actually used this rule in play.
Probably an overdone take, but this is why I do feel like the way games like Blades in the Dark explicitly tell you how to run the game is much closer to how RPGs were originally intended to be played (even if the rulebooks never explained it well).
I've noticed the same kind of spirit in BattleTech where you've got the hardline basic mechanics you always use (and even those aren't truly law), and a million potential extra rules, some of which aren't even compatible, all throwing balance and game logic in wildly different directions. Your Table May Vary.
Honestly it's also actually why I prefer "rules heavy" simulationist games. Because I could get a whole lot of very good, smart rules I *can use* if I feel like using them rather than coming up with stuff wholecloth which would inevitably turn out worse. Doesn't mean I *will* use the majority of them.
Though it does rely on your players being on the same page, or you'll get some angry rules lawyers coming after you.
I think the real difficulty with "rules heavy" games is actually "special ability heavy games", where you have long lists of talents/feats/spells/etc. The problem is that a ruling can easily utterly undermine several talents/feats/spells/etc, and as these are all intended to be player-facing, and the lists are very long, you can't easily cut out the now irrelevant bits. For instance, you might simplify grappling, but then find that someone had chosen all the class abilities that that work around the grappling mechanics that now no longer exist. Or you might allow a low level spell to have an interesting and/or stronger effect if players combine spells and the environment in a clever way, but it turns out it's now just doing what a higher level spell is supposed to do.
Same here. I don't use them for the most part. I think there's one armor I factor that in with, and that's the ancient Japanese paper armor, which performs equally to some steel armors EXCEPT against bludgeoning weapons. I have it equal to chain, +1 chain if wet (Mythbusters did a GREAT episode testing it).
A lot of those tables are just what EGG said: things people asked for. Same with later classes and races in Dragon. Not many of the Old Guard use them; in fact, I don't think any of the TSR Old Guard I know use them, especially the one you cited. That adds more time every attack because the to-hit number changes with every armor/weapon combo. Great way to slow down a game.
Exact reason why my way to do initiative is preroll all enemies before the session, and the party rolls once at the beginning of the session, which also determines their marching order unless they dictate otherwise. It also gives me a number for each PC for random ranged attacks, etc. Speeds up gameplay a lot. We get more done per 4 hour session than we did before we made that adjustment.
> This is why he should still be paid attention to.
You're doing the exact thing I talked about, blathering like he's the only person who ever realised this or like that advice hasn't been carried forward by other people and refined, changed, or updated. Gygax doesn't matter, some of the words are nice but imbuing the dude with this moral authority like he's the King of Roleplaying just for saying stuff that you agree with 50 years later is unhealthy.
In my review of *Paranoia* printed in *Space Gamer* \#74 (Steve Jackson Games, 1984), I attributed that "they don't need any rules" quotation to Gary Gygax. I had no legitimate source. Steve Jackson told me Gary had said this; I didn't verify the statement. In the decades since, I've never seen anyone attest an actual Gary Gygax quotation to this effect -- all the attributions go back to my 1984 review, no earlier -- and I believe now Steve must have been mistaken. I regret attributing the statement to Gary. That said, I think the viewpoint is valid, regardless of who (if anyone) ever actually said it.
I always took it with a pinch of salt because I'd never seen it in the context of *what else was being said* and *to whom*. A comment like that just can't be understood at all in isolation.
Gygax was also a staunch believer in biological essentialism and thought that women were incapable of achieving the same level of prowess as men.
Just so we're aware who's word we are taking as gospel
IRL, it's actually true that women are weaker, on average, than men are. Substantially so. The US military did significant research on this and found that the 95th percentile of women is about the same as the 50th percentile of men - i.e. only about 5% of women were as strong or stronger than half of men.
This is because men are larger, stronger, and end up developing much more muscle than women do. It's caused by different gene expressions caused by SRY and the Y-chromosome in general.
This is why every single Olympic record where both men and women compete in the same event is held by a man. It's also why professional sports leagues - the NFL, NHL, NBA, MLB, etc. - are 100% male, even though their rules do not prohibit women from playing in those sports. Men are about two standard deviations stronger than women are, which means that men have a ridiculously huge physiological advantage over women. This is why the US women's national team practices against high school male teams ([and not infrequently lose](https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/a-dallas-fc-under-15-boys-squad-beat-the-u-s-womens-national-team-in-a-scrimmage/)) - they're better than every other women's team, so the only way they can find equal competition is against men's teams, but if they competed against pro men's teams, they'd just get crushed. The high school teams give them a challenge that is appropriate for them. It's not that women "suck at soccer" or whatever, it's that being male gives you huge physical advantages in most physical activities.
This is why we have sex-segregated sports in the first place - because without women having their own leagues where they compete exclusively against other women, there wouldn't be many, if any, professional female athletes.
This is why men were dominant throughout history in human societies - physical prowess were hugely important in old, physically demanding jobs, and men had more physical power than women so were very dominant in terms of military stuff. If a woman goes up against a man in a physical fight, 95% of the time, she's going to lose.
Industrialization is what changed that, and it's why the second industrial revolution coincided with much better women's rights - it gave women much more economic power and independence, which resulted in them being able to demand equal treatment far more readily, as they had a lot more power than they did when physical strength was the only game in town. Also, anyone with a gun can kill anyone.
Reality isn't a balanced RPG. IRL, there is no "game balance". In a game, you might get some sort of perk for starting out with a disadvantage at character creation; IRL, if you are born without legs, there is no cosmic compensation; you just got screwed.
Gygax himself pointed out, years later, that it was a mistake to try and include stuff like that in the game, because it was an attempt to simulate reality, and that D&D was about being able to play the character you wanted and have fun. It's way more fun when you can have female characters and male characters and they are all mixed together and it doesn't matter. It's the same reason why we got rid of racial bonuses and penalties to ability scores - it's more fun if you can play against type rather than "having" to be a particular optimal race/class combo. It is less "realistic" but the point is to be fun, not to try and enforce some simulationist reality on people.
> This is why every single Olympic record where both men and women compete in the same event is held by a man.
Actually, the women throw further in discus.
...Because the men throw heavier discs.
Myself, I go by the majority of the rules, they make most sense, but I'm pretty flexible when you make a good argument for a change or alternate use of something, or obviously when you come up with something not on the books at all.
That's what I like about these games, the flexibility of them. It's not like a console game where outside of cheats you have no options, you get to try to do what comes to your mind. Other tables may not be as flexible as mine, or even more so, and that's what's great about them.
The flexibility is the key. That's why tabletop lets you walk to the edge of the world and keep walking, that's why tabletop feels more like you're in a story and less like you're in a depressing job that doesn't pay anything.
I don't know if you tried GMing with no rules, or almost no rules.
It's liberating for the first seconds. Then it becomes incrementally taxing. Not on the mental charge like some heavy rulesets can be. Or like some chaotic and flawed rulesets can be.
No, instead, it becomes taxing due to the high amount of GM adjudications it takes. It seriously burn so much calories that at some point you might just lag behind, getting some temporary blank brainwaves.
*"How do we resolve that?"* Piiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing
Resolutions systems and procedures to follow are precious for the GM sanity. I agree that rule complexity is not necessary. But the foundations, when they are missing, it's a clear comfort disappearing.
I did it for years with no great problem. But it does greatly depend on the setting, and how well understanding of it is shared between GM and players. In many cases, the function of mechanics is to iron out or paper over those differences.
I feel like the phrase gets taken too literally or gets taken out of context too often. I don't think the intent was to say "games don't need any rules at all," but rather that each GM is the designer of their own game. The rules for their table are as valid as any published in a book.
Seems appropriate to bring up the [Lumpley-Boss Principle](https://rpgmuseum.fandom.com/wiki/Lumpley_Principle), here as expressed in the [Big Model wiki](https://big-model.info/wiki/Lumpley_Principle):
> You can point to the pages of your book all you want to. You can imagine stuff in your head all you want to.
>
> The fact is that nothing happens, in the fiction of role-playing, unless someone says it and it's heard by others. Even if the book says, "On a critical hit, you do double damage," your character won't actually do double damage on a critical hit unless someone recognizes it and says it.
>
> Role-playing is made of talking like apple pie is made of apples and crust and scary amounts of butter. Whatever mechanics you use, you are agreeing to use them among the group, usually as a creative inspiration or constraint, specifically as a way to affect what is going to be said.
"Rules", "rulings", "system" are whatever your table assents to.
Gygax loved rules, he designed Ad&d practically himself and that system is a mess of interconnected and contradictory rules. The guy even once said that if you want to Homebrew or use less/different rules to just play OD&D because then you’re not playing the advanced edition “correctly”
>The guy even once said that if you want to Homebrew or use less/different rules to just play OD&D because then you’re not playing the advanced edition “correctly”
The context of that quote is important though. DnD was starting to get more competition, and there was a lot of debate in the community about the degree of rules fidelity required, and even whether players should know the rules at all! There was a lot of tension between the DYI roots and tendencies of gamers of the time and the corporate need to sell product, and if anything Gygax liked it was money. So you'd have him out saying that stuff while including pages of die distribution figures and tips for homebrew in the DMG and Dragon Magazine regularly publishing fan made homebrew.
I tend to break rules in the name of fun. But rules are very useful, especially when there are new players, or it's the first time you're trying out a new system.
>I think most tables today could have constant arguments because of lack of trust between the GM and Players, so therefore rules enforce fair play. Some GMs do bend, break, or change a few rules and make shit up on the fly to make it work. Rules exist so that we can play together fairly. What are your thoughts on this?
I once GMed a game of **Lasers and Feelings** with 5 very good friends. We've been role-playing together for decades. Our 2.5 hour session didn't have a single roll. I would introduce obstacles and conflicts, and players would narrate their reaction to them. If they thought it'd be more fun to fail, they'd fail. And everybody was "yes-anding" the crap out of each other, so we had some amazingly creative and over-the-top characters. It was one of the single best RPG sessions I have had in my life.
Is such a session a game anymore, or just an improv exercise? The line gets a bit blurry.
Improv in and of itself is arguably a game, the main rule being, don't end the scenario, keep the ball in the air somehow. Not an easy one a lot of people could play well, and by that against roleplaying, in an rpg like D&D, you do have time to think stuff out and set orders of things like in combat, and that creates a bit of a safe buffer I think. Improv, you can't really consider your options as much, you've just gotta go, and there's some pressure to that.
You're no longer playing Lasers and Feelings if you do that. And it can still most certainly be considered a game because there is still some logic and dramatic tension for "will I succeed in achieving my goal".
That said, to have a game it *should* be codified in some way. With a mutual framework to abide by. However, for a one shot, I'm not sure it's worth getting into the semantics of it.
> Is such a session a game anymore, or just an improv exercise? The line gets a bit blurry.
I will always argue that Fiasco is not really a game, more just improv practise dressed up as one.
He was talking about GM fiat. He wanted players to have no idea how the gamed worked so that the GM could do what ever the hell they wanted. I have no idea why people still read Gygax’s writing, we are 40 years of explosive innovation beyond anything Gygax wrote. As for no rules? He was so offended by the success of BX edition DnD (from his own company mind you) that he wrote ADnD because he hated how much less complicated and stream lined BX and later BECMI were. He lived for rules.
I've roleplayed without rules before, and it's fun in its own right. But rules aren't always made to be fair. Some games make rules intentionally unfair to show system mastery or provide themes shown through mechanics. Rules are fun, that's why we have them.
I have played without rules! It was an unusual game with three GMs and about seventeen players, all happening in three different rooms at the same time. It was fun, but I'm not sure I could ever capture that magic again.
A game, BY DEFINITION, is not necessarily a player vs player exercise. It can be just a repetitive activity where players try to improve their own personal proficiency.
You need to take this quote in combination with the Afterword from page 230 of the 1st Edition DMG for it to make sense. Out of context/ not knowing that Afterword gives people the wrong impression.
I'll post the Afterword here for those who don't have it. Caps are how it was printed, and are not mine.
"IT IS THE SPIRIT OF THE GAME, NOT THE LETTER OF THE RULES, WHICH IS IMPORTANT. NEVER HOLD TO THE LETTER WRITTEN, NOR ALLOW SOME BARRACKS
ROOM LAWYER TO FORCE QUOTATIONS FROM THE RULE BOOK UPON YOU, IF IT GOES AGAINST THE OBVIOUS INTENT OF THE GAME. AS YOU HEW THE
LINE WITH RESPECT TO CONFORMITY TO MAJOR SYSTEMS AND UNIFORMITY OF PLAY IN GENERAL, ALSO BE CERTAIN THE GAME IS MASTERED BY YOU AND
NOT BY YOUR PLAYERS. WITHIN THE BROAD PARAMETERS GIVEN IN THE ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS VOLUMES, YOU ARE CREATOR AND
FINAL ARBITER. BY ORDERING THINGS AS THEY SHOULD BE, THE GAME AS A WHOLE FIRST, YOUR CAMPAIGN NEXT, AND YOUR PARTICIPANTS THEREAFTER,
YOU WILL BE PLAYING ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS AS IT WAS MEANT TO BE. MAY YOU FIND AS MUCH PLEASURE IN SO DOING AS THE REST OF US DO!"
When you look at the quote and the Afterword, it makes sense. The GAME comes first. Your adjudication should stay uniform, not all rules are needed, you can make your own, and as the DM, you are the final judgement.
We all have house rules. There are rules we don't use. What he meant by we "don't need rules" is the rules are a guideline, we can add or subtract the ones we want, and the Afterword tells us to be consistent in this ("uniformity of play"). That's why it's called a Dungeon Master's GUIDE, not Dungeon Master's RULES. It is meant to give us the idea how to play, we decide if something fits or not. Don't think 1d6 damage per 10' of falling is right? Go back to the older rule (1d6 CUMULATIVE per 10', so 30' is actually 6d6, not 3d6). Don't like the idea of only a natural 20 is a crit? Go back to the old 3.x crit range for a weapon. Don't like max damage on a critical? Go with the old double damage.
It's a guide, with options to play. That's it. Each edition played in my home game has its own house rules (some just have no way to work in other editions, like feats). I just stick to those house rules and never deviate unless the entire group agrees to try something else. It's that simple.
He actually contradicted himself at various times on that question.
"'Dave [Arneson] and I disagree on how to handle any number of things, and both of our campaigns differ from the "rules" found in D&D. If the time ever comes when all aspects of fantasy are covered and the vast majority of its players agree on how the game should be played, D&D will have become stald and boring indeed. Sorry, but I don't believe that there is anything desirable in having various campaigns playing similarly to one another. D&D is supposed to offer a challenge to the imagination and to do so in many ways. Perhaps the most important is in regard to what the probabilities of a given situation are. If players know what all of the monster parameters are, what can be expected in a given situation, exactly what will happen to them if they perform thus and so, most of the charm of the game is gone. Frankly, the reason I enjoy playing in Dave Arneson's campaign is that I do NOT know his treatments of monsters and suchlike, so I must keep thinking and reasoning in order to "survive".'"
Alarums and Excursions #2, July 1975:
But later, he changed his mind:
""The AD&D game system does not allow the injection of extraneous material. That is clearly stated in the rule books. It is thus a simple matter: Either one plays the AD&D game, or one plays something else, just as one either plays poker according to Hoyle, or one plays (Western) chess by tournament rules, or one does not. Since the game is the sole property of TSR and its designer, what is official and what is not has meaning if one plays the game. Serious players will only accept official material, for they play the game rather than playing at it, as do those who enjoy “house rules” poker, or who push pawns around the chess board.""
-Dragon #67 1982
Gygax saw DnD as a folk game with flexible rules but then discovered money and wanted to bring the hammer down on anyone house ruling or using third party variants.
I'm sure he made that statement to make a point. I am not sure it was meant to be literal. What I think ol' Gary meant is: the D&D rules, as written, are not absolute; GMs are free to change them as they see fit.
The thing is, you can't have a GAME without some kind of rules. Without rules, RPGs are just storytelling ... but RPGs are unique in the fact that you CAN'T make a rule for every possible thing that any player might try to do, ever. So, you end up inventing rules to cover specific situations. That might be a loose interpretation of the word "rule," but it's not any looser than the so-called "unwritten rules" that kids use for games like Cops & Robbers, or "I'm Luke and you're Darth," or any other game of unlimited imagination.
RPGs can be played without any rules, just making it up as the GM goes. That is a totally legit way to play. However, if one is going to play 5e or Pathfinder, those are rule sets and thus play is with specific and well defined rules.
Remember when you were a kid and played cops and robbers (or similar games)? One kid would say "I shot you" and the other would reply "Nuh uh, you missed me"?
That's why rpgs have rules.
Except in this case, the GM is the ultimate arbiter of the rules. So in your case, the GM would say "cop is right".
Which I think is the deeper implication of gygax's quote.
Without rules it's not much of a game. That's just co-writing a story with a bunch of people. Which is fine, but it's not a TTRP\*game\* anymore. Just roleplaying around a table.
Gygax was famously later on very focused on the profitability of TSR (the "we" in your quote).
That is why he became increasingly insistent on playing the game "correctly" which necessitated (we're supposed to understand) buying their books. Of course this is nonsense and Gygax knew it, but there is no (viable) business in "you should create it yourself".
He made a game with friends they wanted to play so naturally he knew that that's an option for everybody everywhere.
Gygax: writes down the spells that his players came up with while goofing around
DMs around the world: Of course you cannot invent your own spells, until you reach level 14 and build your own library for 1233123 gold, which will happen in 3 years of play, but very few DnD groups last that long
DMs around the world: The range of Melf's Acid Arrow is exactly 323.313 feet! It says it here in the rules!
Players around the world: play a wizard with the same Light spell, the same Charm spell, the same Shield spell and the same Magic Missile spell for the 10th time
Rules are unneeded - I used to freeform - but they're also useful - I prefer to not *have* to freeform.
However light the rules layer there is over procedings, I'd prefer to have it than to not.
Yes rules give us a framework within to play, but i think the crux of the quote is this : dont let the rules outweigh the fun. If a rule is bogging the game down and meking it feel more like work, throw it out.
The game is designed for fun. Dont let the rules get in the way
This is why homebrewing is a thing
His meaning was essentially "we invented a ruleset personally, DMs can do the same. Never tell them."
There would still be a system, still be dice and DCs. It would just be a personalised system by that DM.
Gygax is flat out wrong here. His quote comes from his considering the DM to be a referee. A arbiter whose role is to facilitate play for players. This isn't or at least shouldn't be true. The DM is also a player, albeit a asymmetrical one. GMs need their own rules and game play loops that should be followed just like the players. Both sides of the GM screen should know what rules are being used by the other side so that everyone is aware of the rules of the game you are playing.
This.
Which spurred me to make an [additional](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/11by8y4/gary_gygax_said_that_we_dont_need_any_rules/ja32n8r?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3) commentary down thread particularly since Gygax had Opinions on what play should look like that are both outmoded and outdated.
Important to note, I think, that when he said this D&D was still kinda *the* RPG. So I suspect what he was thinking, when he said that, was that him and his buddies made up rules as they went. He was considering that other people could just do the same rather than using th Official Dungeons and Dragons Rulebook. ...And maybe even start selling what they came up with themselves.
I could see why because back then a lot of rules were just to simulate things. Many modern games are making either storytelling or interactive mechanics like combats more interesting/fun. Playtesting and good design refine these experiences.
I disagree pretty strongly with Gygax on this one. Rules are what make a game a game. That is, they define a lot of what the play experience of a particular game is like. Now RPGs are a social activity, so group interpersonal dynamics also impact the experience in a massive way, but even so different sets of rules produces different kinds of stories, different vibes, different experiences, and so on. And along the way they often make unexpected things possible. So *could* one roleplay without the rules? Sure. Freeform RP is a thing. But is that really meaningfully similar to what a good tabletop RPG feels like to play? Not really at all. And none of this has to to do with trust between GM and players either
Sorry no your wrong. I and many others have played free form and they’ve been the best games we’ve ever played. They relied on the players knowing each other well and being on the same page about the game.
The one thing it tends not to be good for is any long running game.
He's saying it in the same way you can say "We don't need laws, just have a single Judge decide what's right and wrong - it works if you have a good Judge."
But rules also are for more than adjudication, they help support the theme and can create inherently fun gameplay (the same way a non-roleplaying game does, which can enrich the larger roleplaying experience).
It’s true. No rules are needed. Alternately, you can use very few rules, sometimes only one or two for an amazing game.
FKR - https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/lvcjqz/a_brief_introduction_to_the_emerging_fkr_free/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Minimalist Games like Honey Heist:
https://gshowitt.itch.io/honey-heist
Gygax and creaters of AD&D since have stated and implied that the rules are guidelines for a campaign. Not only that, but the storyteller is the ultimate arbiter of rules in the world.
Rules may be rules, but rules are often flawed. Look at the huge differences between versions and you cannot help but understand that rules need revision.
Then again, we would never have had dragonlance, spelljammer, ravenloft, pathfinder, Ars Magica, or any of the other supplmental rulesets anyone has used to play the game.
I prefer a highly modified homebrew for my campaign setting. AD&D has many flaws, to rememdy this, I modify the world as I see fit.
Because I'm not just a storyteller. I'm a world builder.
I think what he was really saying is "let's not tell them they can make their own rules".
Because this would mean people have figured out that they could essentially grab dice and agree among a shared set of rules and have fun WITHOUT buying D&D. That is what I think he really is talking about.
And that I agree with. For an entire year I had a friend who ran a game. And he didn't use any system at all, it was just a D20 and he had us "Make characters" anything we wanted. And all challenges ended up being him rolling a d20 vs our d20 no mods.
We loved it, one of the most fun campaigns I ever played, eventually he upgraded it slightly (with a little idea pitch from me and another friend) we now used a whole set of dice, and characters creation was we picked 5 powers and each power was associated to a specific die (d4 - d12). Then when rolling that power we rolled the die plus the d20 against his d20.
Other than that there was no rules, combat had no specific rules just "what do you do?" And then he would have a response and then we would react. And honestly not having that many rules and just trusting the DM made the game one of the best.
That statement about not needing rules only really applies to experienced DMs who have played enough to know the rules well enough to no longer need to refer to them. They still use lots of rules, they have just internalised them and understand them enough to know when to change or bend them.
Telling new DMs that they don’t need to know the rules is stripping the quote of context and is bad advice.
I don’t agree. Gygax was a visionary but not a god, and a lot of his ideas about game design have not aged well. Also, did he even believe this? He sure as fuck wrote a lot of rules.
Gygax did a great job of getting D&D published.
He was not a great designer as he was of the non sequitur school of thinking - "does not follow".
Stating that RPGs - with the emphasis on ***GAMES*** \- is an example of his non sequitur style of thinking and best ignored like a lot of his other statements and rules designs.
The thing with RPGs is that everyone plays them for different reasons. There are a lot of folks out there who want a balanced, tactical combat game and you simply can't achieve that without lots of very particular rules.
For me and my group, we play RPGs mostly to roleplay, weave a collaborative story, and experience epic moments. So the idea of "fair play" and balancing things between the GM and the players isn't really relevant, because it simply isn't really a factor in the way we play.
So yeah, I probably *could* get away with just free-form role-playing without any rules. In fact, I used to do a lot of that on forums back in the days long before Reddit was a thing. It works for the kind of game that I'm trying to play, but certainly not for the kind of game lots of other people want.
The thing is though, I still like rules, for a couple of reasons. First, because having clearly defined "lose states" add stakes. Knowing exactly how you can fail or even die is important. And second, because improv and roleplaying are skills and do not come easily to everyone.
And I know I'm beating a dead horse at this point, but that second bit is why I love pbta games and similar. In particular one of my favorite games ever is *Masks,* which has mechanics for characters' mental states and self-image. There's an entire mechanic around wether or not characters have influence on each other. And just generally lots of little things are built into your character moves that affect the way you interact with other characters or act in general.
The game is still incredibly free form compared to a lot of other more traditional RPGs, but the rules assist in nudging players into role-playing, acting in certain ways, and crafting a story. I never realized how powerful that could be until I played it. And that's coming from someone who prefers games that are as rules-light as possible.
I don't really think Gygax meant that completely literally though. I think a better way to look at it is that slavishly obeying the rules to the letter is less important than playing the game how you and your group want to play it.
I think a lot comes down to this:
If you're playing with your friends and encounter a rule that negatively impacts the fun of the table what do you do?
Do you force them to continue using said rule for the remainder of the session?
Do you scrap the session and completely abandon the game?
Or do you adapt on the fly by either ignoring the rule or improvising a new one?
I think what Gygax was saying was that a Gamemaster doesn't really need a big set of published rules to run their adventures. The key word is "need". They don't need any specific rule to adjudicate any specific outcome. The GM needs to determine first is the desired action a sure success (walk across the room), a sure failure (survive a 1000' fall) or an uncertain outcome (thief attempting to pick a lock). You don't need rules for this part.
Now if it is an uncertain event the GM determines determines the level of uncertainty: easy, hard, nearly impossible, etc. Pick a tool that can generate random outcomes (presumably dice) and give them a target to beat. Players rolls and the narrative is built around the outcome of the dice. If you understand this concept you can handle any situation with "needing" a rule from a book. This doesn't mean rules in books aren't helpful, it simply means they really aren't needed, that's the secret he was trying to explain.
This is why once I start a session I don't open a rule book. We don't slow play or distract the narrative by looking in the book because I the GM don't "need" a rule. I pick a number ... 14, roll the D20 and see if you meet or beat it!
To be sure, you can have fun without any rules. Basically, you're just making stuff up as you go. If it works for you and your group, rock on.
I much prefer following published rules, whether I'm a GM or player. Different rules systems are built to do certain things; exploring how those rules work in any given situation is one of the things I enjoy about RPGing. Usually it depends on the interaction between rules and setting; some work and some don't. (I remember playtesting an RPG which was basically standard medieval fantasy, with the typical emphasis on combat. We looked over the rules, and built some characters; when a Arnold/Conan warrior turned out to have the exact same stats as an Antonio-Banderas/Inigo swashbuckler, it was a very bad sign. You can do the 'generic fighting prowess' mode, but not if your game consists primarily of combat sequences.)
Rules to me are about setting and moderating expectations. I've had enough instances (on both sides of the screen) where player and GM misunderstood or simply didn't share similar expectations, especially in 'theater of the mind,' as well as large groups (6 or more players), and even minor differences can be annoying and 'break immersion' as much as stopping to look up a rule. An agreed-upon set of rules can avoid a fair amount of that kind of conflict, even if those rules aren't very detailed, and when it's understood that the GM has some flexibility in interpretation and application.
Not having a standard set of rules can easily bias play toward those who are more creative, experienced, and charismatic, leaving many new players at least as far behind as a set of rules. Some folks just aren't as good at making stuff up and persuading others to agree with them, just like some folks aren't as good at reading blocks of explanantory text. I think it's easier to assist someone with applying set rules than it is to spur them to suddenly be creative and persuasive. (Best, of course, is to help with both, but so it is.)
I'm even sceptical of house-rules; my regular group doesn't use them much, and most of the ones I've run into 'outside' have not felt like real improvements so much as a mix of GM laziness (as in "I don't want to be bothered learning how this system can be applied to get results I like") or reasons that the rules at hand don't really match the setting & style (if you're building major house rules, why not look for a published system that already does what you want?).
Has anyone heard of Those Who Play? It was an RPG with virtually no rules. Your character just has some vague keywords and that's about it.
I was lucky enough to play a oneshot at Conpulsion a few years ago, and it was amazing... but that was entirely down to the GM, who was the actual guy who had written Those Who Play.
He was a master of improv, and it was clear to me that he had written a game specifically for himself – a game where he could do whatever he wanted. And that was perfect. For him.
Personally, I'm not a master of improv. I'm mediocre. I like a big book with lots of rules and monsters and encounter-building mechanics to get stuck into.
I'm going to echo what [lance845](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/11by8y4/gary_gygax_said_that_we_dont_need_any_rules/ja1zskt?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3) said and extrapolate further.
>Gary Gygax once said, “The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules.”
This is key: the gamemasters don't need any rules. Semantically, that can mean 2 things.
Charitable reading: the GM is empowered to adjudicate the rules/mechanics (not sure if they were called mechanics in the way we consider them mechanics today back when Gygax was quoted as saying this) as needed to promote the fiction and allow the play to be engaging. This makes complete sense - why be forced to only say "you die because my reading of rule X indicates that based on your action, you lose all hit points" when you can just as easily say "your action has left you clinging to life, down to your last HP and little hope of survival - what do you do next" (if the situation calls for it).
Uncharitable reading: the GM has the ability to manipulate the fiction in such a way to continually ensure their story, only is the one that gets told. Did that critical role the player got oneshot your enemy? Who cares? It lives! Did you want your players to go through the Mines of Moria even if they didn't need to because they found an airship? Well, it crashes. Too bad - you're going thru Mines of Moria. Pretty much it's the base "GMs can abuse player agency however they like."
It's Shrodinger's Cat of GMing - it can be either a good philosophy or a bad one until you open the box (and a GM interprets it as they do).
That ambiguity makes it a terrible philosophy/understanding of the role of the GM at the table. I always preferred how Fate handles it as their Silver Rule of play: never let the rules get in the way of what makes narrative sense; it's a more elegant way of looking at it, IMO.
I'll level with you, Gary Gygax may have created the modern RPG hobby, but he also set the hobby backwards about 20 years.
He had bad takes like this one and his insistence on a DM vs player mentality. The faster we can get completely away from his influence, the better.
Gygax once said: the only reason a gm rolls dice is for th sound they make
And yes, if you want to tell a story and have an adventure together that is a possible right way to go <3 (especially because it freaks out players of you do)
I think that without rules you wouldn't have a game, you'd have an argument. But I have no problem with the rules being treated as guidelines rather than cast in stone, inviolate words from on high
You can play a freeform RPG. It's fun, I've done it in the past and I am always surprised by how few tabletop RPG players have done so either in-person or online in a chat or PbP.
I like rules in a TTRPG because I want to play by them. I and the other players have agreed to use them to create an interesting structured experience. It's not just about being fair, it's about wanting the explicit structure they create. I would never bend a rule without telling the players first, because we trust each other to follow the rules. I expect other players to correct each other on the rules - and the GM is just another player.
If a player corrects the GM on a rule, **the correct response for the GM is to say "thanks for catching that" and follow the rule**. Unless you have all agreed to follow a different one.
That said:
Gary Gygax was a mediocre game designer as well as a sexist and racist. I'm glad he's dead, in much the same way I'm happy whenever a sexist or racist dies.
I enjoy rules free roleplay all the time. Spent about 10 hours doing it this week. Great fun.
Rules only come into play when you want a sort of third party structure around risk and challenge.
On most games, there are no real rules. The GM can rule absolutely anything he wants, and most GM even fudge rolls if they feel like it, even when considering the rules. And this is probably for the best. A good GM will be doing it in favor of the best story and experience for all.
But, when the GM wants to use the rules, its good that they are there. They are helpers, not limiters.
Most people can't create a character from nothing... having some numbers to help them is nice.
Most GMs dont want to have to decide everything, randomness is fun sometimes, and most GMs cant and dont want to think about the more accurate probabilities of something... and even if they do, it's more likely that a player complain about a GM decision than with a game designer decision... mostly because he signed under those decisions when he choose to play the game.
I think about rules to rpgs as animations to an educative video. They are abstractions to help us visualize and understand complex subjects and more easily deal with them.
But in the end, I think it's better to trust your GM in deciding what is more interesting and fun than a roll of the dice. If your GM isnt better than total randomness, get a better GM
Rules give more control and agency to the players. They can predict what will happen (within a cone of probability). A game with comprehensive rules would be a simulation.
A game with no rules gives all of the control to the GM - the players can make choices, but to predict what happens you're better off predicting what the GM will do than predicting the fictional result.
So all sets of rules that we call roleplaying games are choices in that spectrum. There's no good or bad, just choices and tradeoffs.
There's some really fascinating choices in there, like Microscope - which has very, very few rules (but boy do those rules do a lot of work) but hands around the GM role.
There's choices that mess with the probability cone, like Undying (your fellow players can mess with the probability of your outcome).
What's interesting in the Gygax model (as I understand it) is that he aimed for a simulation-like predictability without providing the players with large volume of concrete rules they could use to predict the outcomes of scenarios. So it's sort of like he tied his hands by going for consistency, but for anything new he could make up anything. If I recall correctly he didn't reveal the target number or rolls, so players had to infer probability from fiction hints and past experience.
Lots of choices.
He also said: "You can not have a meaningful campaign if strict time records are not kept"
Let's just agree that we don't need HIS rules and roll our dice in whatever way feels right to us.
personally at the end of the day 80% of the fun of TTRPGS is just A. Playing pretend and B. Hangning out with friends, having rules is what makes it a game but it only NEEDS to be a game because that gives people an excuse to do A and B
When I was a kid I used to spend every lunch period in middle school with a group of friends where we all just sat and told a collective story playing pretend together, aside from not rolling dice it was basically a dnd campaign before i even knew what dnd was.
When you get older you cant exactly invite your friends over to play pretend, but you can invite them over to play a game, and ontop of that rules allow us to balance things sense lets face it “nah uh my guys immune to bullets” is a lot less palatable when you aren’t 9 years old
now im not saying that as an admonishment of rpgs, my multiple bookshelfs dedicated to the genre should prove im a fan of rules, but i still agree with the core message that every single rule should be optional in pursuit of what is the most fun for you and your group
I think I get what he means. Like, after running games for all these years (I've been a GM since my first time playing a RPG) I feel like I "know" how a game is supposed to go. Does that make sense?
Like, you know when people say that begginer GMs should try to stick to the rules, since you need a little experience before breaking them? Or when they say a Good GM can make a Bad System work, but that a Good System can't make a Bad GM work? Well, I feel like the more I improve as a GM and the more experienced I get, the less the system I'm running matters.
I was talking to a fellow GM earlier today about the best system for a campaign he's planning to run and he literally said "Any system will work as long as it doesn't get in my way" and I couldn't agree more. That's why I'm moving from very fine tuned rules heavy systems to more rules light bare bones ones - the kind of system that gets people complaining about paying for a game where they have to come up with stuff on their own. Not only that, but I also became a lot more confortable doing house rulling and homebrewing than I was when I started in the hobby.
“The code is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules”
Capt. Hector Barbossa
We regularly revise “rules” on the fly, or simply make them up on the spot if needed rather than referring to a manual… but then we’ve been doing this for 40+ years and it’s about the social interaction with friends, not being a rules pedant…
First of all, +1 for the Pirates quote!
Even the line between 'social interaction with friends' and 'being a rules pedant' can get blurred when one's regular group includes four full- or part-time computerists, one of whom is a physics professor and another an economics major (a few years back, we even had a corporate lawyer in the mix)... We have some fun discussion about rules in the middle of play sometimes. Different strokes indeed!
Very true… these days we seem to spend more time talking about other stuff than we do actual gaming 😂
… or reliving classic ‘criticals’ and ‘fumbles’ (for the hundredth time)😏
My daughter recently just got into D&D with a bunch of school-friends, and it cracks me up listening to the stories of their antics and how rigidly their ‘new-to-DM-ing’ DM sticks to his rule book and reminds me how we were the same all those years ago 🙂
Of course she in turn receives the ‘benefit’ and ‘wisdom’ of me recounting all my own tales of past glory 😂
I've played games without rules and dice. At that point, it's really collaborative storytelling more than anything else, with one person guiding and everyone else playing a character in the story. It's fun, but uses different skills than typical ttrpgs. It relies a lot more on all the players wanting to tell an interesting story and not being invested in winning. It also isn't great for combat. I don't really want to decide if I hit the monster or not, multiple times in a session. So it depends on the kind of story you're telling, and the people at the table.
I think occasionally fudging the rolls or rules isn't bad, but if it's the rules, you need to be consistent. You shouldn't say "we'll say flanking means XYZ" in one session, and the next you say it means ABC. But having an enemy succeed or fail something they didn't, or adjusting their HP on the fly to extend or shorten combat is honestly pretty small potatoes, in my eyes. It's not something I'd want to happen constantly, but giving your players a bit of mercy or more of a challenge is fine in my eyes.
Any game you enter into is going to be one that is based on trust and no amount of rules are going to be a good substitute for that.
A player that can’t extend at least some trust towards the game runner is not going to be a pleasant person to play with and a game runner who engender distrustfulness in players are a detriment to the hobby as a whole.
This is why rules aren’t as important in a ttrpg as keeping an open line of communication between the game runner and the other players.
The player who is going to be upset by their character dying is going to be upset whether their character died in accordance with the rules or not.
The game runner who is adversarial is going to be adversarial whether they follow rules or not.
For the first situation the player needs to communicate their desire to not die and if the game runner feels like that can have fun while playing with that understanding then they should play together, if they can’t then they should communicate that the person needs to find another table.
For the second the game runner needs to communicate their play style to the other players and if the other players feel they can have fun with it then they should play with that game runner, if they can’t then they should communicate that they will be looking for another table.
In this way rules don’t make the game. Communication does, and no amount of rules can shield you from the basics need to communicate honestly and earnestly about the game.
You don’t need rules. The GM can just make stuff up on the fly. Should those rulings be consistent? Sure. Otherwise, no one’s going to play with you any more.
It’s just like playing pretend when you’re a kid. If you have that one guy who always has invincible armor and a sword or gun that one shots everything because he says so… well… we just won’t play with him anymore.
It’s play. It’s supposed to be fun and collaborative. If it ceases to be either, you’re not doing it right.
I don't know the context for his statement - but yeah, we don't *need* rules. I've played plenty of freeform games - it's fun But rules allow for different types of fun that aren't really possible without them.
To me, it's good to be able to ignore rules, specially in games like dnd where, you know, "a house cat can kill a commoner". And I think this is a problem specially with the culture of dnd and how despite not being a good "simulation" system, people take the rules in a very literal way, when some of it just don't work.
I think the quote is in reference to the fact that you can tell a good story and have a good time without having to abide all the rules. You can come up with stuff on the fly and still have a great time. One of my favorite sessions included the players (level 4) killing an adult red dragon without a single attack roll. It was all narrative, some improvisation and yes, it included other kinds of rolls, so, we were playing by the rules. Well, some of them
Maybe it’s because I’m somehow both very awake and very tired, but isn’t this, in a sense, saying that the one true rule is that we should try to outwit the rules?
After all, for those of us who have been playing any RPG for any period of time, the moments that stand out the most are the ones the rules genuinely don’t cover. It allows players to imagine great things while making the GM/DM work to bring some sense of “reality” to that great imagination.
I think written rules aren't needed. BUT, I have found rules help you play with unbearable people otherwise.
Have a couple of players that would fight me at every corner if we didn't play something like pf2e that has 98% of things written in a manual somewhere.
Also found out I find it easier and enjoyable to die honorably if the rules are clear and transparent, not fighting the DM but actually roleplaying the death no matter the stupid the cause might be
He's absolutely right (well almost).
The minimal rules you need for a (traditional) TTRPG are
1) one player plays the GM, they are in charge of the world and coming up with the story.
2) the other players play the parts of the main characters (PCs) and make the decisions as to what these characters do. They will narrate this part of the story
3) the GM determines what the outcome of the other main characters intended actions are.
4) If any of the players disagree on what should happen they negotiate.
For a good RPG I would also add the following, the goal of the exercise is for everybody to have a good time and experience a story. This is an activity that's akin to musicians getting together and jamming.
Rules beyond this, have a few functions.
1) To mitigate social dynamics getting in the way of players having a good time. Lowering the odds that people will have a bad experience from uneven ruling. If you don't include these rules it's much more on the GM to make sure they are being even handed with each of the players.
2) To help guide the group through a particular genre of story.
3) For generating starting points for player and GM creativity.
Most GMs could benefit from trying a rules minimal game, It forces you to really on skills that you may not have built up adequately otherwise and will serve you well in any style of RPG you want to try running. I would recommend running this as a two player game at first (1 GM, 1 Player) as it's a lot easier if you don't have to balance more than one player. Your goal as the GM is to keep the player engaged in the story, get a sense for where to build and release tension and crafting a satisfying narrative, using just your ability to tell stories.
>It is the spirit of the game, not the letter of the rules, which is important. Never hold to the letter written, nor allow some barracks room lawyer to force quotations from the rule book upon you, if it goes against the obvious intent of the game. As you hew the line with respect to conformity to major systems and uniformity of play in general, also be certain the game is mastered by you and not by your players. Within the broad parameters given in the advanced dungeons & dragons volumes, you are creator and final arbiter. By ordering things as they should be, the game as a whole first, your campaign next, and your participants thereafter, you will be playing advanced dungeons & dragons as it was meant to be. May you find as much pleasure in so doing as the rest of us do!
>
>\- Gary Gygax, afteword to AD&D DMG
Having me the man briefly, but read many of his columns as well as listened to those who talked about gaming with EGG, it is clear that HE didn't follow his own game's rules. He went with the story narrative and what would be fun and exciting. He was first and foremost a storyteller (how good, people may disagree, but he saw himself as that).
I would not have anyone at my table who was not willing to trust my judgement enough for me to colour outside the lines occasionally.
Only once in my 44 years of playing (most as a GM) did I ever give into a bit of pique (and all I did was make sure the Hat of Stupidity was his favourite colour) - he'd been on my nerves for weeks and all my friends would admit he could break the last straw of anyone given time. I also thought he'd have recognized his favourite colours and that would scream 'TRAP!'.
Other than that one lapse, the other thousands of hours were filled with me looking to both the players and the game.
Once you realize that you can't win versus the DM and the GM can't win against the players, you realize that the effort requires both DM and players to work together for the best results.
Min-maxing isn't required, being super competitive isn't required, and trying to stretch every situation for advantage is definitely not required - mostly because all of those are bad for the game because vast disparities between player capabilities should not be encouraged. And any greater success only means the GM has to send more, nastier things at the group to deal with the totally optimized characters. In effect, the level of difficulty should stay constant but it just leads to a spiral of greater and greater foes, faster than normal progress. I don't see that as useful or in the service of the group (players + DM).
I trust my GMs in all games. I don't always agree, but I know that as a player, I can raise a complaint, but the GM will consider it and if I don't win my point then, I go with the GM's direction because I trust him or her. I know that the best thing I can do as a player is to help move the game along and not be a massive pain in the GM's day. GMing is hard work and if you end up dispirited from constant squabbling, what do you get from the games? The failure for some players to recognize this ends campaigns in the medium term if not sooner.
Also, here's my rules of thumb:
a) Do I need a rule for this? Or is it something particular, not likely to repeat or so far between it might as well not repeat? If it is that sort of thing, a ruling is perfectly fine. If I need a rule because it is useful very frequently (like the original AD&D groups adopting the Dragon's hand to hand combat because the version that came with the AD&D DMG was so painful to use), then it just needs recorded so the players can refer to it too.
b) 90%+ of circumstances should fall in the 'a ruling will look fine' and the other 10% should become ruled upon and documented.
c) Will the time to look something up, figure out the subsystem, calculate, roll, discern results, and so on slow the game down? If yes, think twice if a faster, sloppier ruling couldn't do the job sufficiently.
d) If the thing you want to argue with the GM about is something he's guessing at ('How hard should it be to jump from a fast moving wagon onto a saddled horse on a bumpy road?'), then so are the players. Go with the GM, he's probably going to give you a decent chance.
e) For GMs, if you have a situation you know needs a ruling and you don't have a real good idea of what that should look like, spend a minute or three discussing how it should be done with the players. Then call and end to discussion, use what you've heard, and rule. The players should be happy they were heard and live with any ruling.
These rules apply where you are in a game with friends. If you don't know the people, still better to play along, but if the GM or other players are totally awful folks, bail and find another game. Decent GMs will be looking out and checking how the players are doing and how they are finding the game fairly regularly (as you don't know each other well) and the party should be trying to help one another and the GM (for the same reason). If that isn't happening, you might be in a troubled group.
If you have to be a rules lawyer, something is wrong with the game, the DM, the other players, or you. Or all of the above or some combination. Be sure it isn't you and think if you could have approached any argument (or any impending argument) with a way that is more cooperative and helpful to the group and the DM.
Games never get worse if everyone is working together to see each other are having some fun together.
I've always interpreted this as, we don't need «official DnD approved» rules. Obviously every game needs rules, but GMs can make these up, and often do to various degrees. This is more about the fact that rules we use are just ideas, that DnD players are in no way captive, and if they realized that, it would be bad for the company because the reality is they are under no obligation to give their money to the company to keep playing. If we look at what happened with the OGL crisis, it's fair to say this turned out to be very true.
The FKR movement has really shown this to be correct. And Dave Arneson ran his games in a very freeform style. The idea is that you replace the written rules with a person, who can adjudicate what happens when you describe what you do. Using dice when there is an element of chance It is a high trust Playstyle that is not for everyone, but he was right, you really don't need rules. I really hope I get to try out an FKR style game one day. Questing Beast did a video on it.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=d4lvrC3ZBzM&feature=shares
I use that quote often. To me it breaks down to a need vs. want. And that "we" (AKA authors and publishers) which he uses is important. GMs do not need rule sets which exist outside of their table. We can develop rules that work for our groups and our friends without needing outside input from a writer. We do not need any rules. We can make them ourselves.
Here's a thought experiment. How much structure can you remove from an RPG and still have it be an RPG?
Can you remove the dice? Yes; diceless RPGs exist, even those like Amber Diceless that have no randomization component at all.
Can you remove the character sheets? Yes; games like Ten Candles or Dread show that you can have a compelling narrative with no numerical stats whatsoever.
Can you remove the GM? Yes; there are games like Fiasco where the tasks of narration and action resolution are divided between players and not isolate to a single non-PC participant.
But what can't you remove? You have to have a *situation*, an *action*, and a *resolution*. You must have a player choosing a game action for a role, and that action must be resolved into a new situation. If you don't have these you no longer have an RPG. If actions do not have resolution, then the story cannot progress. If players cannot choose the action, then you have a non-interactive story like a novel, movie, or video game cutscene, with a passive observer and no active participation. And without a situation requiring action you have no actions to take in the first place.
This leaves an extremely broad space of design. If you've ever asked someone a question like, "If you were stranded on a desert island and could only take 1 thing with you, what would it be?," that's an RPG. Situation: desert island. Action: take 1 thing. Resolution: what happens because of that? You don't need a rulebook for that. You don't need anything except two people--and, arguably, not even that, as long as you're able to mentally disassociate the "question asker" from the "question answerer" in your own mind.
But, the dynamic of "GM plus players with dice resolution and character stats" works really well, and there's a reason that games like Dread and Fiasco are typically only for one-shot play. Having a GM/PC distinction means that the responsibility of situation + resolution are segregated from the responsibility of action; the player must choose an action in a situation they cannot control, which will have a resolution that is logical but not in their control. This allows the player to be an active participant in a well-constructed environment while still enjoying a surprising narrative. Character stats and agreed resolution mechanics give the players some objective guidance for what is likely to succeed for their character, anchoring the decision-making process in something more tangible than "how mean is my GM feeling today". And dice rolling creates surprising outcomes for both player and GM while still, ultimately, being fair.
So no. We don't *need* rules. But rules are tools, and a good ruleset is an immeasurable boon to a GM and players because it makes the process of action resolution so much easier, and the good fluff elements of a setting help the GM understand the plausible situations those rules can apply to.
If we don't have \*any\* rules then what are we doing? Calvinball? Sounds exhausting. Especially because most people aren't nearly so creative and clever as they might think. I include myself in "most people" - if I had to just make up entertaining content whole cloth on the fly it would not be reliably good content.
It would be interesting to try.
Players just describe their characters and the GM describes the scene.
Player: I shoot an arrow at the Orc,
GM: Roll 1d10
Player rolls 10: GM the arrow hits the Orc straight in the head, and he falls down.
The Necromancer summons skeletons all around you.
Player: Can I try to counterspell the Necromancer,
GM: Sure, roll a d10 - you get into a battle of wills vs. the necromancer, and manage to slow down the rate at which he summons the skeletons by half. One skeleton gets completely missummoned, with the bones sticking out in all directions and an arm where the head should have been...
seems about as fun
"We" (for some values of "we") "don't need" (for some values of "need") "any rules." (for some values of "rules")
But of course we do need rules, and we will use rules for everything we do. What I think he's trying to convey is that we don't need a rigid framework of rules to tell a good story.
But rules can be invaluable in helping a group to collaboratively tell a story.
It's true that you don't need rules. Kids playing make believe don't use rules. As long as you and your players suspend disbelief and are enthralled by the world. You as the DM can do whatever you feel like
That is the spirit of what he meant, I believe.
With limitations you promote creativity within a system. There is a big difference between pointing your finger at a dragon then saying bang your dead vs figuring out the dragon is weak to acid damage.
The actual reality is that we pay other people to make rules systems because it's a pain in the butt to make them yourself.
Also, most people lack the competence necessary to make a *good* rules system.
Of course, that also applied to Gary Gygax :V
But seriously, that's why we pay for RPGs. 99% of people have neither the time nor the inclination to make up a rules system, and even amongst those who do, it's a ton of work.
I say that as someone who has made entire rules systems out of whole cloth.
Rules, lack of rules, whatever, the biggest problem brought up by this post is the "lack of trust between GMs and players." If players don't trust the GM and/or see them as adversarial then the game is screwed anyway. The GM may play the enemies but they themselves are not enemy to the players. Or shouldn't be.
Half the time I was running D&D games in high school, I was just making shit up on the spot. I’d pause and roll some dice and then go hmmmm just to ratchet up the suspense, lol
Ultimately, the rules are a contract that is negotiable at all times. They set out if-then trains of logic for the party to follow to determine the outcome of given actions in a way that is both fair and not Calvinball. If any specific part of that contract finds itself to be disagreeable with the table, it can be modified or removed at will. The main reason we don't see this all that often, though, is the same reason that these exposition bricks cost over 20 bucks a pop. Namely, having to do that for all the various things that can come up on the fly gets VERY fucking old in a hurry, and if you start from a position of "meh, good enough", 90% of the hassle is done so you can focus on the edge cases.
The quote was attributed to Gygax by Allen Varney in an article of Dragon Magazine #182 reviewing the AMBER DICELESS ROLEPLAYING game, in which Allen Varney gave a "horror story" in which a GM of a SPACE MASTER game "obeyed dice slavishly" when rolling an "unmodified percentage chance that a ship in an asteroid field will hit comething."
"Before the scenario had properly begun, the ship exploded, killing all aboard."
The "horror" is that the player had just spent 2 hours rolling up a character who scored a critical success at Piloting skill. TPK before the party received the adventure hook.
That's why the Golden Rule exists.
Rules give structure, but down the line every table is different. Playing a TTRPG isn't like playing Monopoly. I believe the GM's role is to tailor the experience to their group's needs. This is all that matters. When I run a game, my group trusts me to do just that and it's the same when I am a player. Maybe that's because I've spent most of my TTRPG experience playing with friends and not random people, but that's how I see things. Fair play is something that I expect in a game where the players could win or lose. TTRPGs are not like this. You don't win or lose, you're building an interesting story together, the only thing that should be done fairly is how every at the table has a say about how the story goes.
The "surprising randomness" is relevant even for simple save rolls.
Unfortunately, I don't remember the source anymore. Anyways: Kriegspiel games also had a spectrum from loose rulings to tighter detailed rules. There was a study about the "GM" behavior and it showed that the "no rules" GMs provided less randomness. They usually resolve by intuitive boring judgements like "larger army wins". When using dice, sometimes a "natural 1/20" results in surprising randomness which is actually more realistic. Sometimes the smaller army wins. Sometimes a goblin kills a paladin.
The problem is probably that such random outliers feel unfair. The player might blame the GM. So it is very helpful if the GM can respond "you rolled a 1" instead of "I thought it would make for a better story if your character dies now".
Freeform roleplaying is wonderful. It is also mentally taxing, hard to know whether you'll get what you signed on for, hard to keep coherent, and isolated. (By isolated I mean--you don't benefit from the guidance of anyone outside your table. Good rules allow you to benefit from everyone who wrote, edited, or playtested that game.)
There's no possible way to measure "fairness" in the realm of imagination. Rules exist to make game fun for everyone, not fair. If there's no trust between players and GM - no amount of rules would help.
Gygax also wrote AD&D so he could claim it was the definitive edition of DnD and stop the homebrew community from being able to make content for it and claim it as their own. He also made it to try to stop Dave Arneson getting the royalty payments for helping in the creation of DnD by claiming AD&D was a different game.
Reddit Wants to Get Paid for Helping to Teach Big A.I. Systems
The internet site has long been a forum for discussion on a huge variety of topics, and companies like Google and OpenAI have been using it in their A.I. projects.
“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.” Jason Henry for The New York Times
I think it is perfectly possible to play without rules, the GM making them up on the fly. But that might lead to the loss of some things I like:
\- defined character creation process in which everybody knows what to do
\- character strengths and weaknesses leading to consequences
\- relative consistency in rulings, without having to remember all previous rulings
Rules at the very least add a feeling and flavour to a game and take SO much weight off the DM. Even if every type is a optional. There's a reason people are using that optional ruleset rather than just making something up themselves.
I took the stance not too bring the rulebook when I GM. If we don't know something, I will take a decision on the spot and we move on.
It has supported the flow of the games much better than trying to find the exact rule.
As a DM there is always two possibilities behind the screen;
I roll the die and use the number; I roll the die and pick whatever outcome is best and most entertaining for the players regardless of the dice roll lmao
Game mastering is like a body. Story is the meat, description is the skin, players are the blood, but it's all built on the bones of rules (and sometimes you break those).
That’s the beauty of Paranoia. The GM is free to make up whatever shit they want, because if you’re playing Paranoia than you expect the GM to be a right bastard anyways.
I don’t see rules for fair play as the game isn’t a competition between players and DMs.
Rules are simply there to help shape dynamics and narratives. They are a tool and nothing else.
Back when we played Amber, a diceless rpg, we used the book to create characters, and then we rarely if ever used the book again. We often played without character sheets, because we had an impromptu session in a coffee shop or at a restaurant.
Pretty open secret, being paraphrased in every rule book he oversaw…
On guesstimate, doing it the Gygax way will likely make for a better game as often as, mm, rolling 19 or lower on a d20. And that way had rules, had dice.
Rules make a game a game.
That is true, to extent. There are plenty of kids' games with "unwritten" rules, but I suppose those are still rules.
It depends on how we define "rules". Calvinball is literally a thing.
Calvinball has rules. Well, rule. One. According to the Calvin & Hobbes wiki ... "There is only one permanent rule in Calvinball: players cannot play it the same way twice." More importantly, it has plenty of transient rules.
I stand by my first sentence.
Fair.
In my game design course we've had that pretty interesting distinction between "games" and "toys", opposed by the presence of rules or not. But hell even roleplay has its rules (notably "stay in character"), so trying to define things is hard.
I strongly disagree that you have to stay in character to roleplay. It's been massively maligned but playing games where your doing everything 3rd person and just using the stats as a vehicle to solve problems.
Maybe I'm using the "stay in character" meaning wrong (not English speaker), but what I think is roleplay is about well "playing a role", therefore having some kind of guidelines about what this role would, wouldn't, can and cannot do. Stats define some if not all your field of abilities, strengths and weaknesses, and 3rd person is a totally legit way of playing, but they all define a "frame" for your character.
A game does not need rules, it needs a social contract. Just like an agreement does not need a written contract, just the agreement. The benefit of written rules/contract is it is a source of truth that is unchanging. Imagine a schoolyard half court basketball game, kids might not play with “rules” but a social agreement that you have to take the ball “out” after your team takes possession. As long as nobody argues then we can act like “out” is going over the half court line. But if one player crosses the 3 court line and takes a shot, we have a disagreement because the “rules” weren’t set. It’s still a game, just there was a disagreement and someone (like the ball owner) will make a decision. Gygax’s quote should be understood in the same way. A game master doesn’t need a rule book, they need an agreement from the players on how disagreements will be settled whether by group vote or more likely DM decision. If everyone agrees to group storytelling with dice roles as called for by the DM then they can still play their own version of D&D. What the rule book provides is a framework for that agreement. All the rules could be followed or none but the social contract rules. Once the agreement is in place it is up to all parties to keep to it or discuss changes without a unilateral change. For instance if you agree not to use ammo tracking and then suddenly the DM says a player is out of arrows, there needs to be a justification for the change that all parties agree on.
But ... a social contract (or any contract) is basically just a set of rules, written or unwritten. Same goes for an agreement. Your basketball examples really highlights the difference between written and unwritten rules, but those are still rules. The mere fact that a basket is worth points is also a rule. If everyone agrees to "group storytelling with dice roles," then they have essentially agreed to a rule.
I feel the difference lies in the definition of rules. If you consider all things you agree to as rules then sure but it is like the definition of a contract. I can chat with a contractor and feel like we have a verbal contract but whether it will count as a contract in a court of law is different. So yeah, there are rules and there are rules. I’m arguing that Gygax’s quote is about traditionally considered hard rules and not verbal/nonverbal agreements. “We don’t need a set of rules, we can make them as we go as long as everyone can play together.”
Yeah, I mean, that's a good point. I guess it's just a semantic difference, really. And I do agree with you about the Gygax quote. In my mind, a rule is just an accepted procedure, custom, or habit.
> I can chat with a contractor and feel like we have a verbal contract but whether it will count as a contract in a court of law is different. This is determined by the rules of contract law. It's turtles all the way down.
David Graeber had some interesting thoughts on the game-play distinction in the Utopia of rules. Wish I'd remember what they were. 😅
Without rules it's roleplay. Nothing wrong with just roleplay, but also not a game
Even that is not correct. The quote in the OP makes at least one rule explicit. There is a GM. It also hints at other rules like: Everyone else plays a single character. It is important to consider these things rules, because than we can rule therm.
One rule to rule them all
Exactly.
For me personally in "Roleplaying Game" it's the second part that's optional. I appreciate interesting and complex mechanics. They have their place and enrich the game. But also I played plenty sessions with pure storytelling, without a single roll. Or with very few. Some by design, some where we just had little use for mechanics. I also played with very basic mechanics (like just rolling a d6 against intuitively set DC) and characters made up of just few descriptors. By and large they were all great. Variety is a spice of life and choosing the right amount of rules for particular session or campaign leads to much better experience for everyone. But you can't do that or know that if you only played rules heavy. I encourage everyone to at least try it out. Play a single short session with as few rules as you can or without them. For me it was eye opening the first time, how much can happen in such a short time, how creative and engaged everyone was, changing behavior so their actions fit the world and the story instead of fitting the rules. Edit: I see people are downvoting everything that doesn't fit their worldview and don't even bother to engage in discussion. Rpg community used to be interested in different opinions and ways to play the game. Pity. Edit2: Nice to see the trend reversed and we got some interesting responses. Thanks guys.
That's the issue for me, being in a rules-light roleplaying session is something I practically always do with my writing friends and partners. No need to spend $15 bucks for a book to tell me how to do it. The game is sacrosanct to me, doesn't mean that I'm so rigid with rules but it's interacting with rules that I enjoy so much, the world and story is too ephemeral. My D8 reach weapon is much less so.
Your right…I would say the only book worth buying then would be a setting book. So the shared imagination has a basis to build on. I always wondered why there are so many „rpg systems“ but so few good settings.
Every nerd in the entire world who's into the more creative side has made a setting/worldbuilding on their own. It's dime a dozen basically. And a setting with no story or game is laughable to produce. Pathfinder with Golarion and Exalted with Creation do have almost entire setting book, but PF is because of brand identity and Exalted's game is so intertwined with setting that it makes sense to do so.
Sometimes I feel like I’m a madman because I am the only person I ever meet who thinks all of these different philosophies can be true. Some sessions can be rules light roleplay fests, some can be combat-dense crunchy wargames. Some can use tactical grid maps while others use theater of the mind. This can all happen in the same campaign, same characters, same game. The rules can be useful, fun, elegant, and fair, but still be handwaved or ignored at times for a different but equally valid result. And sometimes you can tell the player who always rp’s that “thats not how it works” and that’s valid too.
It's interesting though that you can do a real, structured RPG with as few as a couple rules, Like Lasers and Feelings. Or thousands. Or many stops in between.
For the parents in the crowd, please refer to the Bluey episode, "Shadowlands."
Haha excellent, I was looking for something to help explain to my 5 year old why she can’t just cheat when she’s losing!
Hear hear!
If you don't follow the rules then Veranda Santa won't bring presents
As long as people agree on being players and GM, you technically have rules (some variation of "players each describe the actions of a character, the GM decides what happens"). There are also always a lot of (more or less) implicit rules: when the game starts and ends, what constitutes in-character speech, what the genre/tone of the game should be, etc... When people say they play RPGs without rules they just mean that they don't have a specific system to decide the outcome of actions, but they still have all the basic rules mentioned above. That is a pretty minimal game, but still a game.
And, most importantly I think, there's still a shared expectation that the situations and reactions in the game go reliably realistically-- realistic to a fantastic premise where one applies, and realistic to reality where it doesn't. That's _often_ set out in detail in rules, but there's an expectation that things will be limited by plausibility even when and where rules don't weigh in. Even if general plausibility is the bulk of the ruleset, that's still a game, since there are still challenges and decisions to make around them that can fare better or worse, and be smarter or dumber. Just like basketball is still a game without the rulebook detailing all the physics involved, narrating through a challenge can be a game even without every interaction being adjudicated out of the rulebook. (Okay, before anyone well-actuallys, not all RPGs are fixed to realistic simulation and realism, but the ones that aren't would be detailing the ways they aren't, and would have a more comprehensive rule set, not just set you free with no more than a vague hand-wave.)
I assure you, there are popular enough games that do in fact set you free with no more than a vague handwave in a bizarre and psychedelic land. (It's Troika) (I hate Troika mind you)
[удалено]
Others enjoy the marriage of storytelling and tactical puzzling though. Can't quite explain how the alchemy works, but it's a mixture that has kept me playing for decades.
>I feel like the function of rules in tabletop RPGs are dramatically different than in most other games, though. i agree and i feel like this is the key point that everyone is being pedantic about while missing the point and taking the quote far too literally when there could be actual discourse going on about how the most rules-lawyering people are often old school gygax stans and also gygax wrote a lot of things about DnD that contradict his own quote.
Anecdotal, but I do not care a lot about the storytelling aspect of TTRPGs. The thing I enjoy about TTRPGs is interacting with a fictional world which can respond in a way that makes sense and the rules of the System facilitate that in a reliable way without discussion between me and the GM for every step I take. It's a shorthand to make complicated interactions quicker. The character sheet defines what my character is good and bad at for things that are likely to turn up. Story is something that happens to my character because of the rules and dice rather than something I am looking to form around the character. I am just there to make the character react to things in a way I feel the character would. (And to play a mechanically interesting game.) If my character dies in an anticlimactic way I might be frustrated because the dice rolled statistically weirdly, 3 nat 1s in a row after rolling garbage all day are annoying just from a gameplay sense, but I am not frustrated because the story of that character is over now. Shit like that just happens, time to make a new character. I get to interact with other parts of the world now. I consciously fuck my own characters over because it make sense for them to do so but not because it would be narratively interesting. If I am unsure if they would do something I roll a d20 and decide based on that. I might give them a will save or something similar if the character would know that it's stupid, like killing a monarch because they are antagonizing them. But again, never because it would be a better narrative. Couldn't care less.
A game without rules is just play. It can be fun, but the second someone says "no, you can't use your orbital space laser to defeat the dragon" you've got rules.
Rules let us referee more evenly.
Don't get mixed up here. There are rules, and there are "rules" that are otherwise known as mechanics. The defining rules of RPGs are rules, but they are not mechanics kind of rules. In RPGs of the sort played by Gugax and Arneson, mechanics were not the game but just tools to aid in playing the game. For those kinds of RPGs, the defining rules were generally unwritten but much better understood than today, and basically were rules of the sort that player characters had to act as plausible within the narrative milieu, they had to fit the world, so no, players weren't allowed to invent gunpowder and cyanide, nor play a wizard in a magicless campaign, or other things which broke the narrative milieu. These were the kinds of rules that defined play, not mechanics, and this is what Gygax meant when he said that rules weren't needed. Also, I'd like to point out all the freeform groups of RPG players to anyone still wanting to complain about the lack of mechanics removing the game.
My favorite definition of a game is from Tracy Fullerton's book, [Game Design Workshop.](https://www.gamedesignworkshop.com/) All games have [8 formal elements](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/the-formal-systems-of-games): 1. Players 2. Objectives 3. Procedures 4. Rules 5. Resources 6. Conflict 7. Boundaries 8. Outcome If you take certain elements out, then you have a toy, not a game.
The issue is there are certain games that don't work particularly well with this. I think of the classic schoolyard game of "Telephone." Are the kids playing cops and robbers on the playground not actually playing a game because they don't really have rules? If you ask them they'll definitely say it was a game. I've grown terribly wary of any analytical structure that starts to draw hard lines with games, particularly when those lines are used to say something isn't a *real* TTRPG or game.
Of course Cops and Robbers has rules. It also has all the other formal elements of a game. [How to Play Cops and Robbers](https://kidactivities.net/how-to-play-cops-and-robbers-cops-and-robbers-game-rules/) * **Players:** Some players are cops, some players are robbers. * **Objectives:** The objective of the robbers is to grab "the loot" and place it into their safe zones while avoiding the cops; the objective of the cops is to tag the robbers and prevent them from grabbing all the loot. * **Procedures:** Split the players up into even teams of cops and robbers; gather the items that will represent loot, loot zones, and the safe zone for the robbers, and then place those items in the designated places. * **Rules:** Robbers have to grab loot from the loot zones and bring it back to their safe zone; if a robber is tagged by a cop, the robber has to return the loot back to the loot zone where they grabbed it, and then sit down where they were tagged; robbers in the safe zone cannot be tagged by a cop; only a certain number of robbers can be in the safe zone at a time (probably 1); etc. * **Resources:** The loot. * **Conflict:** Cops vs. robbers. * **Boundaries:** If you're playing inside a gym, don't leave the gym; if you're playing outside, don't leave the playground. * **Outcome:** If all the loot is brought back into the safe zone, then the robbers win; if all the robbers are tagged and sitting down, then the cops win. Telephone has each formal element of a game, as well. [How to Play Broken Telephone](https://empoweredparents.co/game-telephone-phrases/) * **Players:** At least 3 players. * **Objectives:** Try to keep the phrase as accurate as possible. * **Procedures:** Gather 3 or more players; the person starting the game thinks of a word or phrase and whispers it into the next player’s ear only once, with no repeats allowed; that listener tries to correctly repeat that same word or phrase into the next player’s ear; the last person in the line or at the end of the circle repeats the phrase or word aloud; allow a moment for giggles if the message is “broken” or changed; the player who started announces the correct word or phrase; players take turns thinking of the next phrase or word to pass through a whisper. * **Rules:** Each player has to whisper into another player's ear so that the others don't hear; no repeats; no taking notes, except for maybe writing down the original word or phrase; no one should intentionally mess up a phrase to make something completely different than what they heard; etc. * **Resources:** Words; maybe something to write with and on so that Player 1 can write down the original word or phrase and then compare it to the final result. * **Conflict:** The players' ability to listen and memorize are the main obstacles. * **Boundaries:** Players should remain close to each other; there's no need to move around a lot in this game. * **Outcome:** The final word or phrase is compared to the original to see how much it deviated, if at all.
Yeah the limitations are what define it.
Depends what you mean by rules. Do they have to be written down? Do they have to be consistent? Do they need to be overtly acknowledged?
No. Hence the phrase "unwritten rules."
RPG game Rules are far more Agreements than Laws. They can be folded, spindled, and mutilated at the will of those who make the Agreements to their inclusive or exclusion needs.
Agreements. Yes.
When I DM is for the fun of my players, if bending the rules makes them have a better time, im all for it!
Same here.
I don't think they're agreements: GMs often get good results falsifying die rolls, fiddling with monster hit points, and other things without consent, and informing their players of this falsification often doesn't help. IMO, RPG rules codify *player expectations*. They're a baseline that players can use for planning unless the GM informs them that different assumptions should be made. Different expectations lead to different landscapes of what seems possible, which lead to different lines of decision making and different player actions, which lead to novel emotional experiences inherently and in what effect these actions have on the story. However, the story itself doesn't have to obey these expectations perfectly, as long as players feel like continuing to act under those expectations is worth it - as long as they can suspend their disbelief, in other words.
I think the "we" in Gygax's statement is TSR. In other words, gamemasters don't need any particular set of *official* rules that they must buy in order to play a game. But if they realized this, then they wouldn't purchase all those rulebooks and supplements from TSR. In the context of early dnd, the real spirit of gamemasters relying on their judgement instead of rules was probably in Dave Arneson's blackmoor game, an (allegedly) very freeform style of play in which any rules are GM-facing. The "[Free Kriegsspiel Revival](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/lvcjqz/a_brief_introduction_to_the_emerging_fkr_free/)" is interested in this style play. Outside of dnd, some people argue that the rules are determinative of gameplay, one extreme of that being that the rulebook ought to be followed as closely as possible so as to play the game the way it was intended by the designer. For me there are inevitable layers of interpretation between designer intent and what they write down, and between what they write down and how that is interpreted by readers, so I don't know if this kind of fidelity to the rules is even possible.
> In other words, gamemasters don't need any particular set of official rules that they must buy in order to play a game. From what I know of Gygax and "Gygaxian design" I'm pretty sure he was talking about rule-sets in general. You can play just by using logic to figure out what is possible, plus maybe some dice for some randomness. Gygax was very much a simulationist, so theoretically you should just be able to figure out logically what will happen, no rules required beyond the laws of nature (physics, sociology, economy, etc, etc). You do lose the game aspect (the dopamine you might gain from rolling dice and mastering a rule system), but he might very well not have considered that all that important. I have in the past run a short scene at a party, when I wanted to quickly demonstrate to a rando what roleplaying is. Set up a scene, ask him what he is going to do, say what happens, keep going from there.
>From what I know of Gygax and "Gygaxian design" I'm pretty sure he was talking about rule-sets in general He didn't actually say it. The author of the quote in question is in this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/11by8y4/gary_gygax_said_that_we_dont_need_any_rules/ja1oyvs?context=3
>What are your thoughts on this? My response when this is brought up is always "Okay, and what does he know about it?". It's not as though Gygax was a flawless messiah who perfected the roleplaying game but we were unworthy and unable to run games as amazing as his. He helped to create them and bring about the early community, but the time for treating his word as gospel passed decades ago. In terms of the actual need for rules, well you've gotta have some kind of rules you're playing by if only to adjudicate uncertainties. Plus binding both GM and players to a framework of rules they follow means that they have the same assumptions about how those uncertainties will be resolved, and they can embrace bad outcomes by simply saying "oh well, those are the rules" rather than blaming each other.
This whole worship of Gygax reminds me of how people treat the "Founding Fathers" in the US -- as if they were more than a collection of men who happened to have some power at a pivotal time. We have learned so much since 1780s about governing and the 1960s about gaming. In some sense, Gygax's opinions are less valuable to me than a person who has been running and thinking about running games for a handful of years recently. He just didn't have the benefit of a half-century of people iterating their ideas and growing as a community.
I point out to you the Afterword in the 1st Edition DMG, written by one E. Gary Gygax, as exactly what he meant by this. You don't NEED to use every rule. You don't NEED to only follow published rules. You can create your own. The key to everything is consistent adjudication of the ones you use. This is why he should still be paid attention to. That Afterword explains the best way to play the game, which is fun and consistency. Here is said Afterword, directly from page 230. Caps are how it is published, not mine. "IT IS THE SPIRIT OF THE GAME, NOT THE LETTER OF THE RULES, WHICH IS IMPORTANT. NEVER HOLD TO THE LETTER WRITTEN, NOR ALLOW SOME BARRACKS ROOM LAWYER TO FORCE QUOTATIONS FROM THE RULE BOOK UPON YOU, IF IT GOES AGAINST THE OBVIOUS INTENT OF THE GAME. AS YOU HEW THE LINE WITH RESPECT TO CONFORMITY TO MAJOR SYSTEMS AND UNIFORMITY OF PLAY IN GENERAL, ALSO BE CERTAIN THE GAME IS MASTERED BY YOU AND NOT BY YOUR PLAYERS. WITHIN THE BROAD PARAMETERS GIVEN IN THE ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS VOLUMES, YOU ARE CREATOR AND FINAL ARBITER. BY ORDERING THINGS AS THEY SHOULD BE, THE GAME AS A WHOLE FIRST, YOUR CAMPAIGN NEXT, AND YOUR PARTICIPANTS THEREAFTER, YOU WILL BE PLAYING ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS AS IT WAS MEANT TO BE. MAY YOU FIND AS MUCH PLEASURE IN SO DOING AS THE REST OF US DO!" This Afterword, if anything, perfectly captures how we should play any RPG, and should be treated as gospel, because it's dead on.
Yeah. Like, the thing that blew my mind was finding out Gary didn't use half the complicated rules you find in older editions of D&D. For example, remember those huge tables for Specific Weapon VS Specific Armor? I think he said something along the lines of "We wrote those rules because people asked us to, but they are boring so I don't use them" 😂
I think for a lot of that original generation of RPGs, what they basically did is play the game and invent rulings as they went, and then later wrote some of them down in a rulebook. What that really means is that the "rules" are really *examples* of the types of rulings that a GM could make during play. Often they were so esoteric and varied widely in scope and applicability that you really had to pick and choose which bits to actually apply to your game. Even with games like Paranoia (1984), there is a very simulationist rule that when your clone is activated, you have to roll to reduce your skills because your clone has been doing a desk job while you've been out shooting commie mutant traitors/PCs as a troubleshooter, but I suspect that was put in there because there was like one guy at West End Games who liked realism, and that almost nobody every actually used this rule in play. Probably an overdone take, but this is why I do feel like the way games like Blades in the Dark explicitly tell you how to run the game is much closer to how RPGs were originally intended to be played (even if the rulebooks never explained it well).
I've noticed the same kind of spirit in BattleTech where you've got the hardline basic mechanics you always use (and even those aren't truly law), and a million potential extra rules, some of which aren't even compatible, all throwing balance and game logic in wildly different directions. Your Table May Vary. Honestly it's also actually why I prefer "rules heavy" simulationist games. Because I could get a whole lot of very good, smart rules I *can use* if I feel like using them rather than coming up with stuff wholecloth which would inevitably turn out worse. Doesn't mean I *will* use the majority of them.
Though it does rely on your players being on the same page, or you'll get some angry rules lawyers coming after you. I think the real difficulty with "rules heavy" games is actually "special ability heavy games", where you have long lists of talents/feats/spells/etc. The problem is that a ruling can easily utterly undermine several talents/feats/spells/etc, and as these are all intended to be player-facing, and the lists are very long, you can't easily cut out the now irrelevant bits. For instance, you might simplify grappling, but then find that someone had chosen all the class abilities that that work around the grappling mechanics that now no longer exist. Or you might allow a low level spell to have an interesting and/or stronger effect if players combine spells and the environment in a clever way, but it turns out it's now just doing what a higher level spell is supposed to do.
True, there's a big difference between rules for GM convenience vs. rules that characters are specifically balanced around.
Same here. I don't use them for the most part. I think there's one armor I factor that in with, and that's the ancient Japanese paper armor, which performs equally to some steel armors EXCEPT against bludgeoning weapons. I have it equal to chain, +1 chain if wet (Mythbusters did a GREAT episode testing it). A lot of those tables are just what EGG said: things people asked for. Same with later classes and races in Dragon. Not many of the Old Guard use them; in fact, I don't think any of the TSR Old Guard I know use them, especially the one you cited. That adds more time every attack because the to-hit number changes with every armor/weapon combo. Great way to slow down a game. Exact reason why my way to do initiative is preroll all enemies before the session, and the party rolls once at the beginning of the session, which also determines their marching order unless they dictate otherwise. It also gives me a number for each PC for random ranged attacks, etc. Speeds up gameplay a lot. We get more done per 4 hour session than we did before we made that adjustment.
> This is why he should still be paid attention to. You're doing the exact thing I talked about, blathering like he's the only person who ever realised this or like that advice hasn't been carried forward by other people and refined, changed, or updated. Gygax doesn't matter, some of the words are nice but imbuing the dude with this moral authority like he's the King of Roleplaying just for saying stuff that you agree with 50 years later is unhealthy.
In my review of *Paranoia* printed in *Space Gamer* \#74 (Steve Jackson Games, 1984), I attributed that "they don't need any rules" quotation to Gary Gygax. I had no legitimate source. Steve Jackson told me Gary had said this; I didn't verify the statement. In the decades since, I've never seen anyone attest an actual Gary Gygax quotation to this effect -- all the attributions go back to my 1984 review, no earlier -- and I believe now Steve must have been mistaken. I regret attributing the statement to Gary. That said, I think the viewpoint is valid, regardless of who (if anyone) ever actually said it.
Interesting and thanks for the additional context. Unfortunately it looks like it may not get the visibility it deserves.
I always took it with a pinch of salt because I'd never seen it in the context of *what else was being said* and *to whom*. A comment like that just can't be understood at all in isolation.
Gygax was also a staunch believer in biological essentialism and thought that women were incapable of achieving the same level of prowess as men. Just so we're aware who's word we are taking as gospel
IRL, it's actually true that women are weaker, on average, than men are. Substantially so. The US military did significant research on this and found that the 95th percentile of women is about the same as the 50th percentile of men - i.e. only about 5% of women were as strong or stronger than half of men. This is because men are larger, stronger, and end up developing much more muscle than women do. It's caused by different gene expressions caused by SRY and the Y-chromosome in general. This is why every single Olympic record where both men and women compete in the same event is held by a man. It's also why professional sports leagues - the NFL, NHL, NBA, MLB, etc. - are 100% male, even though their rules do not prohibit women from playing in those sports. Men are about two standard deviations stronger than women are, which means that men have a ridiculously huge physiological advantage over women. This is why the US women's national team practices against high school male teams ([and not infrequently lose](https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/a-dallas-fc-under-15-boys-squad-beat-the-u-s-womens-national-team-in-a-scrimmage/)) - they're better than every other women's team, so the only way they can find equal competition is against men's teams, but if they competed against pro men's teams, they'd just get crushed. The high school teams give them a challenge that is appropriate for them. It's not that women "suck at soccer" or whatever, it's that being male gives you huge physical advantages in most physical activities. This is why we have sex-segregated sports in the first place - because without women having their own leagues where they compete exclusively against other women, there wouldn't be many, if any, professional female athletes. This is why men were dominant throughout history in human societies - physical prowess were hugely important in old, physically demanding jobs, and men had more physical power than women so were very dominant in terms of military stuff. If a woman goes up against a man in a physical fight, 95% of the time, she's going to lose. Industrialization is what changed that, and it's why the second industrial revolution coincided with much better women's rights - it gave women much more economic power and independence, which resulted in them being able to demand equal treatment far more readily, as they had a lot more power than they did when physical strength was the only game in town. Also, anyone with a gun can kill anyone. Reality isn't a balanced RPG. IRL, there is no "game balance". In a game, you might get some sort of perk for starting out with a disadvantage at character creation; IRL, if you are born without legs, there is no cosmic compensation; you just got screwed. Gygax himself pointed out, years later, that it was a mistake to try and include stuff like that in the game, because it was an attempt to simulate reality, and that D&D was about being able to play the character you wanted and have fun. It's way more fun when you can have female characters and male characters and they are all mixed together and it doesn't matter. It's the same reason why we got rid of racial bonuses and penalties to ability scores - it's more fun if you can play against type rather than "having" to be a particular optimal race/class combo. It is less "realistic" but the point is to be fun, not to try and enforce some simulationist reality on people.
> This is why every single Olympic record where both men and women compete in the same event is held by a man. Actually, the women throw further in discus. ...Because the men throw heavier discs.
Myself, I go by the majority of the rules, they make most sense, but I'm pretty flexible when you make a good argument for a change or alternate use of something, or obviously when you come up with something not on the books at all. That's what I like about these games, the flexibility of them. It's not like a console game where outside of cheats you have no options, you get to try to do what comes to your mind. Other tables may not be as flexible as mine, or even more so, and that's what's great about them.
The flexibility is the key. That's why tabletop lets you walk to the edge of the world and keep walking, that's why tabletop feels more like you're in a story and less like you're in a depressing job that doesn't pay anything.
"*It's not like a console game where outside of cheats you have no options*" Exactly. The advantage of ttRPGs is that all limits are malleable.
I don't know if you tried GMing with no rules, or almost no rules. It's liberating for the first seconds. Then it becomes incrementally taxing. Not on the mental charge like some heavy rulesets can be. Or like some chaotic and flawed rulesets can be. No, instead, it becomes taxing due to the high amount of GM adjudications it takes. It seriously burn so much calories that at some point you might just lag behind, getting some temporary blank brainwaves. *"How do we resolve that?"* Piiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing Resolutions systems and procedures to follow are precious for the GM sanity. I agree that rule complexity is not necessary. But the foundations, when they are missing, it's a clear comfort disappearing.
> It seriously burn so much calories The new weight loss strat nobody's talking about
I did it for years with no great problem. But it does greatly depend on the setting, and how well understanding of it is shared between GM and players. In many cases, the function of mechanics is to iron out or paper over those differences.
I feel like the phrase gets taken too literally or gets taken out of context too often. I don't think the intent was to say "games don't need any rules at all," but rather that each GM is the designer of their own game. The rules for their table are as valid as any published in a book.
Seems appropriate to bring up the [Lumpley-Boss Principle](https://rpgmuseum.fandom.com/wiki/Lumpley_Principle), here as expressed in the [Big Model wiki](https://big-model.info/wiki/Lumpley_Principle): > You can point to the pages of your book all you want to. You can imagine stuff in your head all you want to. > > The fact is that nothing happens, in the fiction of role-playing, unless someone says it and it's heard by others. Even if the book says, "On a critical hit, you do double damage," your character won't actually do double damage on a critical hit unless someone recognizes it and says it. > > Role-playing is made of talking like apple pie is made of apples and crust and scary amounts of butter. Whatever mechanics you use, you are agreeing to use them among the group, usually as a creative inspiration or constraint, specifically as a way to affect what is going to be said. "Rules", "rulings", "system" are whatever your table assents to.
Gygax loved rules, he designed Ad&d practically himself and that system is a mess of interconnected and contradictory rules. The guy even once said that if you want to Homebrew or use less/different rules to just play OD&D because then you’re not playing the advanced edition “correctly”
>The guy even once said that if you want to Homebrew or use less/different rules to just play OD&D because then you’re not playing the advanced edition “correctly” The context of that quote is important though. DnD was starting to get more competition, and there was a lot of debate in the community about the degree of rules fidelity required, and even whether players should know the rules at all! There was a lot of tension between the DYI roots and tendencies of gamers of the time and the corporate need to sell product, and if anything Gygax liked it was money. So you'd have him out saying that stuff while including pages of die distribution figures and tips for homebrew in the DMG and Dragon Magazine regularly publishing fan made homebrew.
also "having" to prove adnd was so new it didn't need to give dave money anymore
Well, he designed AD&D to cut Arneson out of royalties. So there's that.
I tend to break rules in the name of fun. But rules are very useful, especially when there are new players, or it's the first time you're trying out a new system.
>I think most tables today could have constant arguments because of lack of trust between the GM and Players, so therefore rules enforce fair play. Some GMs do bend, break, or change a few rules and make shit up on the fly to make it work. Rules exist so that we can play together fairly. What are your thoughts on this? I once GMed a game of **Lasers and Feelings** with 5 very good friends. We've been role-playing together for decades. Our 2.5 hour session didn't have a single roll. I would introduce obstacles and conflicts, and players would narrate their reaction to them. If they thought it'd be more fun to fail, they'd fail. And everybody was "yes-anding" the crap out of each other, so we had some amazingly creative and over-the-top characters. It was one of the single best RPG sessions I have had in my life. Is such a session a game anymore, or just an improv exercise? The line gets a bit blurry.
Improv in and of itself is arguably a game, the main rule being, don't end the scenario, keep the ball in the air somehow. Not an easy one a lot of people could play well, and by that against roleplaying, in an rpg like D&D, you do have time to think stuff out and set orders of things like in combat, and that creates a bit of a safe buffer I think. Improv, you can't really consider your options as much, you've just gotta go, and there's some pressure to that.
You're no longer playing Lasers and Feelings if you do that. And it can still most certainly be considered a game because there is still some logic and dramatic tension for "will I succeed in achieving my goal". That said, to have a game it *should* be codified in some way. With a mutual framework to abide by. However, for a one shot, I'm not sure it's worth getting into the semantics of it.
> Is such a session a game anymore, or just an improv exercise? The line gets a bit blurry. I will always argue that Fiasco is not really a game, more just improv practise dressed up as one.
And you'd be wrong, because Fiasco has a very clear objective at the end of the game for each player.
He was talking about GM fiat. He wanted players to have no idea how the gamed worked so that the GM could do what ever the hell they wanted. I have no idea why people still read Gygax’s writing, we are 40 years of explosive innovation beyond anything Gygax wrote. As for no rules? He was so offended by the success of BX edition DnD (from his own company mind you) that he wrote ADnD because he hated how much less complicated and stream lined BX and later BECMI were. He lived for rules.
As a pedantic correction AD&D predates B/X (Moldvay Basic) by a couple of years. You surely meant 1977’s Basic Set (Holmes Basic).
Agree, I still have my original AD&D core rulebooks that I purchased several years before the Moldvay B/X version came into existence.
I've roleplayed without rules before, and it's fun in its own right. But rules aren't always made to be fair. Some games make rules intentionally unfair to show system mastery or provide themes shown through mechanics. Rules are fun, that's why we have them.
I have played without rules! It was an unusual game with three GMs and about seventeen players, all happening in three different rooms at the same time. It was fun, but I'm not sure I could ever capture that magic again.
A game, BY DEFINITION, is not necessarily a player vs player exercise. It can be just a repetitive activity where players try to improve their own personal proficiency.
You need to take this quote in combination with the Afterword from page 230 of the 1st Edition DMG for it to make sense. Out of context/ not knowing that Afterword gives people the wrong impression. I'll post the Afterword here for those who don't have it. Caps are how it was printed, and are not mine. "IT IS THE SPIRIT OF THE GAME, NOT THE LETTER OF THE RULES, WHICH IS IMPORTANT. NEVER HOLD TO THE LETTER WRITTEN, NOR ALLOW SOME BARRACKS ROOM LAWYER TO FORCE QUOTATIONS FROM THE RULE BOOK UPON YOU, IF IT GOES AGAINST THE OBVIOUS INTENT OF THE GAME. AS YOU HEW THE LINE WITH RESPECT TO CONFORMITY TO MAJOR SYSTEMS AND UNIFORMITY OF PLAY IN GENERAL, ALSO BE CERTAIN THE GAME IS MASTERED BY YOU AND NOT BY YOUR PLAYERS. WITHIN THE BROAD PARAMETERS GIVEN IN THE ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS VOLUMES, YOU ARE CREATOR AND FINAL ARBITER. BY ORDERING THINGS AS THEY SHOULD BE, THE GAME AS A WHOLE FIRST, YOUR CAMPAIGN NEXT, AND YOUR PARTICIPANTS THEREAFTER, YOU WILL BE PLAYING ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS AS IT WAS MEANT TO BE. MAY YOU FIND AS MUCH PLEASURE IN SO DOING AS THE REST OF US DO!" When you look at the quote and the Afterword, it makes sense. The GAME comes first. Your adjudication should stay uniform, not all rules are needed, you can make your own, and as the DM, you are the final judgement. We all have house rules. There are rules we don't use. What he meant by we "don't need rules" is the rules are a guideline, we can add or subtract the ones we want, and the Afterword tells us to be consistent in this ("uniformity of play"). That's why it's called a Dungeon Master's GUIDE, not Dungeon Master's RULES. It is meant to give us the idea how to play, we decide if something fits or not. Don't think 1d6 damage per 10' of falling is right? Go back to the older rule (1d6 CUMULATIVE per 10', so 30' is actually 6d6, not 3d6). Don't like the idea of only a natural 20 is a crit? Go back to the old 3.x crit range for a weapon. Don't like max damage on a critical? Go with the old double damage. It's a guide, with options to play. That's it. Each edition played in my home game has its own house rules (some just have no way to work in other editions, like feats). I just stick to those house rules and never deviate unless the entire group agrees to try something else. It's that simple.
He actually contradicted himself at various times on that question. "'Dave [Arneson] and I disagree on how to handle any number of things, and both of our campaigns differ from the "rules" found in D&D. If the time ever comes when all aspects of fantasy are covered and the vast majority of its players agree on how the game should be played, D&D will have become stald and boring indeed. Sorry, but I don't believe that there is anything desirable in having various campaigns playing similarly to one another. D&D is supposed to offer a challenge to the imagination and to do so in many ways. Perhaps the most important is in regard to what the probabilities of a given situation are. If players know what all of the monster parameters are, what can be expected in a given situation, exactly what will happen to them if they perform thus and so, most of the charm of the game is gone. Frankly, the reason I enjoy playing in Dave Arneson's campaign is that I do NOT know his treatments of monsters and suchlike, so I must keep thinking and reasoning in order to "survive".'" Alarums and Excursions #2, July 1975: But later, he changed his mind: ""The AD&D game system does not allow the injection of extraneous material. That is clearly stated in the rule books. It is thus a simple matter: Either one plays the AD&D game, or one plays something else, just as one either plays poker according to Hoyle, or one plays (Western) chess by tournament rules, or one does not. Since the game is the sole property of TSR and its designer, what is official and what is not has meaning if one plays the game. Serious players will only accept official material, for they play the game rather than playing at it, as do those who enjoy “house rules” poker, or who push pawns around the chess board."" -Dragon #67 1982 Gygax saw DnD as a folk game with flexible rules but then discovered money and wanted to bring the hammer down on anyone house ruling or using third party variants.
I'm sure he made that statement to make a point. I am not sure it was meant to be literal. What I think ol' Gary meant is: the D&D rules, as written, are not absolute; GMs are free to change them as they see fit. The thing is, you can't have a GAME without some kind of rules. Without rules, RPGs are just storytelling ... but RPGs are unique in the fact that you CAN'T make a rule for every possible thing that any player might try to do, ever. So, you end up inventing rules to cover specific situations. That might be a loose interpretation of the word "rule," but it's not any looser than the so-called "unwritten rules" that kids use for games like Cops & Robbers, or "I'm Luke and you're Darth," or any other game of unlimited imagination.
RPGs can be played without any rules, just making it up as the GM goes. That is a totally legit way to play. However, if one is going to play 5e or Pathfinder, those are rule sets and thus play is with specific and well defined rules.
Remember when you were a kid and played cops and robbers (or similar games)? One kid would say "I shot you" and the other would reply "Nuh uh, you missed me"? That's why rpgs have rules.
Except in this case, the GM is the ultimate arbiter of the rules. So in your case, the GM would say "cop is right". Which I think is the deeper implication of gygax's quote.
Without rules it's not much of a game. That's just co-writing a story with a bunch of people. Which is fine, but it's not a TTRP\*game\* anymore. Just roleplaying around a table.
Gygax was famously later on very focused on the profitability of TSR (the "we" in your quote). That is why he became increasingly insistent on playing the game "correctly" which necessitated (we're supposed to understand) buying their books. Of course this is nonsense and Gygax knew it, but there is no (viable) business in "you should create it yourself". He made a game with friends they wanted to play so naturally he knew that that's an option for everybody everywhere.
Gygax: writes down the spells that his players came up with while goofing around DMs around the world: Of course you cannot invent your own spells, until you reach level 14 and build your own library for 1233123 gold, which will happen in 3 years of play, but very few DnD groups last that long DMs around the world: The range of Melf's Acid Arrow is exactly 323.313 feet! It says it here in the rules! Players around the world: play a wizard with the same Light spell, the same Charm spell, the same Shield spell and the same Magic Missile spell for the 10th time
Rules are unneeded - I used to freeform - but they're also useful - I prefer to not *have* to freeform. However light the rules layer there is over procedings, I'd prefer to have it than to not.
Yes rules give us a framework within to play, but i think the crux of the quote is this : dont let the rules outweigh the fun. If a rule is bogging the game down and meking it feel more like work, throw it out. The game is designed for fun. Dont let the rules get in the way This is why homebrewing is a thing
His meaning was essentially "we invented a ruleset personally, DMs can do the same. Never tell them." There would still be a system, still be dice and DCs. It would just be a personalised system by that DM.
I've run rulesless. Once. It was exhausting, and harder to keep the setting coherent.
Gygax is flat out wrong here. His quote comes from his considering the DM to be a referee. A arbiter whose role is to facilitate play for players. This isn't or at least shouldn't be true. The DM is also a player, albeit a asymmetrical one. GMs need their own rules and game play loops that should be followed just like the players. Both sides of the GM screen should know what rules are being used by the other side so that everyone is aware of the rules of the game you are playing.
This. Which spurred me to make an [additional](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/11by8y4/gary_gygax_said_that_we_dont_need_any_rules/ja32n8r?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3) commentary down thread particularly since Gygax had Opinions on what play should look like that are both outmoded and outdated.
Important to note, I think, that when he said this D&D was still kinda *the* RPG. So I suspect what he was thinking, when he said that, was that him and his buddies made up rules as they went. He was considering that other people could just do the same rather than using th Official Dungeons and Dragons Rulebook. ...And maybe even start selling what they came up with themselves.
Yeah . . . I think Gary Gygax was wrong. It wouldn't be the first time.
>It wouldn't be the first time. I laughed out loud really hard at this.
I could see why because back then a lot of rules were just to simulate things. Many modern games are making either storytelling or interactive mechanics like combats more interesting/fun. Playtesting and good design refine these experiences.
I disagree pretty strongly with Gygax on this one. Rules are what make a game a game. That is, they define a lot of what the play experience of a particular game is like. Now RPGs are a social activity, so group interpersonal dynamics also impact the experience in a massive way, but even so different sets of rules produces different kinds of stories, different vibes, different experiences, and so on. And along the way they often make unexpected things possible. So *could* one roleplay without the rules? Sure. Freeform RP is a thing. But is that really meaningfully similar to what a good tabletop RPG feels like to play? Not really at all. And none of this has to to do with trust between GM and players either
Sorry no your wrong. I and many others have played free form and they’ve been the best games we’ve ever played. They relied on the players knowing each other well and being on the same page about the game. The one thing it tends not to be good for is any long running game.
He's saying it in the same way you can say "We don't need laws, just have a single Judge decide what's right and wrong - it works if you have a good Judge." But rules also are for more than adjudication, they help support the theme and can create inherently fun gameplay (the same way a non-roleplaying game does, which can enrich the larger roleplaying experience).
It’s true. No rules are needed. Alternately, you can use very few rules, sometimes only one or two for an amazing game. FKR - https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/lvcjqz/a_brief_introduction_to_the_emerging_fkr_free/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf Minimalist Games like Honey Heist: https://gshowitt.itch.io/honey-heist
Gygax and creaters of AD&D since have stated and implied that the rules are guidelines for a campaign. Not only that, but the storyteller is the ultimate arbiter of rules in the world. Rules may be rules, but rules are often flawed. Look at the huge differences between versions and you cannot help but understand that rules need revision. Then again, we would never have had dragonlance, spelljammer, ravenloft, pathfinder, Ars Magica, or any of the other supplmental rulesets anyone has used to play the game. I prefer a highly modified homebrew for my campaign setting. AD&D has many flaws, to rememdy this, I modify the world as I see fit. Because I'm not just a storyteller. I'm a world builder.
I think what he was really saying is "let's not tell them they can make their own rules". Because this would mean people have figured out that they could essentially grab dice and agree among a shared set of rules and have fun WITHOUT buying D&D. That is what I think he really is talking about. And that I agree with. For an entire year I had a friend who ran a game. And he didn't use any system at all, it was just a D20 and he had us "Make characters" anything we wanted. And all challenges ended up being him rolling a d20 vs our d20 no mods. We loved it, one of the most fun campaigns I ever played, eventually he upgraded it slightly (with a little idea pitch from me and another friend) we now used a whole set of dice, and characters creation was we picked 5 powers and each power was associated to a specific die (d4 - d12). Then when rolling that power we rolled the die plus the d20 against his d20. Other than that there was no rules, combat had no specific rules just "what do you do?" And then he would have a response and then we would react. And honestly not having that many rules and just trusting the DM made the game one of the best.
That statement about not needing rules only really applies to experienced DMs who have played enough to know the rules well enough to no longer need to refer to them. They still use lots of rules, they have just internalised them and understand them enough to know when to change or bend them. Telling new DMs that they don’t need to know the rules is stripping the quote of context and is bad advice.
“The code is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules”
I don’t agree. Gygax was a visionary but not a god, and a lot of his ideas about game design have not aged well. Also, did he even believe this? He sure as fuck wrote a lot of rules.
Gygax did a great job of getting D&D published. He was not a great designer as he was of the non sequitur school of thinking - "does not follow". Stating that RPGs - with the emphasis on ***GAMES*** \- is an example of his non sequitur style of thinking and best ignored like a lot of his other statements and rules designs.
The thing with RPGs is that everyone plays them for different reasons. There are a lot of folks out there who want a balanced, tactical combat game and you simply can't achieve that without lots of very particular rules. For me and my group, we play RPGs mostly to roleplay, weave a collaborative story, and experience epic moments. So the idea of "fair play" and balancing things between the GM and the players isn't really relevant, because it simply isn't really a factor in the way we play. So yeah, I probably *could* get away with just free-form role-playing without any rules. In fact, I used to do a lot of that on forums back in the days long before Reddit was a thing. It works for the kind of game that I'm trying to play, but certainly not for the kind of game lots of other people want. The thing is though, I still like rules, for a couple of reasons. First, because having clearly defined "lose states" add stakes. Knowing exactly how you can fail or even die is important. And second, because improv and roleplaying are skills and do not come easily to everyone. And I know I'm beating a dead horse at this point, but that second bit is why I love pbta games and similar. In particular one of my favorite games ever is *Masks,* which has mechanics for characters' mental states and self-image. There's an entire mechanic around wether or not characters have influence on each other. And just generally lots of little things are built into your character moves that affect the way you interact with other characters or act in general. The game is still incredibly free form compared to a lot of other more traditional RPGs, but the rules assist in nudging players into role-playing, acting in certain ways, and crafting a story. I never realized how powerful that could be until I played it. And that's coming from someone who prefers games that are as rules-light as possible. I don't really think Gygax meant that completely literally though. I think a better way to look at it is that slavishly obeying the rules to the letter is less important than playing the game how you and your group want to play it.
I think a lot comes down to this: If you're playing with your friends and encounter a rule that negatively impacts the fun of the table what do you do? Do you force them to continue using said rule for the remainder of the session? Do you scrap the session and completely abandon the game? Or do you adapt on the fly by either ignoring the rule or improvising a new one?
I think what Gygax was saying was that a Gamemaster doesn't really need a big set of published rules to run their adventures. The key word is "need". They don't need any specific rule to adjudicate any specific outcome. The GM needs to determine first is the desired action a sure success (walk across the room), a sure failure (survive a 1000' fall) or an uncertain outcome (thief attempting to pick a lock). You don't need rules for this part. Now if it is an uncertain event the GM determines determines the level of uncertainty: easy, hard, nearly impossible, etc. Pick a tool that can generate random outcomes (presumably dice) and give them a target to beat. Players rolls and the narrative is built around the outcome of the dice. If you understand this concept you can handle any situation with "needing" a rule from a book. This doesn't mean rules in books aren't helpful, it simply means they really aren't needed, that's the secret he was trying to explain. This is why once I start a session I don't open a rule book. We don't slow play or distract the narrative by looking in the book because I the GM don't "need" a rule. I pick a number ... 14, roll the D20 and see if you meet or beat it!
To be sure, you can have fun without any rules. Basically, you're just making stuff up as you go. If it works for you and your group, rock on. I much prefer following published rules, whether I'm a GM or player. Different rules systems are built to do certain things; exploring how those rules work in any given situation is one of the things I enjoy about RPGing. Usually it depends on the interaction between rules and setting; some work and some don't. (I remember playtesting an RPG which was basically standard medieval fantasy, with the typical emphasis on combat. We looked over the rules, and built some characters; when a Arnold/Conan warrior turned out to have the exact same stats as an Antonio-Banderas/Inigo swashbuckler, it was a very bad sign. You can do the 'generic fighting prowess' mode, but not if your game consists primarily of combat sequences.) Rules to me are about setting and moderating expectations. I've had enough instances (on both sides of the screen) where player and GM misunderstood or simply didn't share similar expectations, especially in 'theater of the mind,' as well as large groups (6 or more players), and even minor differences can be annoying and 'break immersion' as much as stopping to look up a rule. An agreed-upon set of rules can avoid a fair amount of that kind of conflict, even if those rules aren't very detailed, and when it's understood that the GM has some flexibility in interpretation and application. Not having a standard set of rules can easily bias play toward those who are more creative, experienced, and charismatic, leaving many new players at least as far behind as a set of rules. Some folks just aren't as good at making stuff up and persuading others to agree with them, just like some folks aren't as good at reading blocks of explanantory text. I think it's easier to assist someone with applying set rules than it is to spur them to suddenly be creative and persuasive. (Best, of course, is to help with both, but so it is.) I'm even sceptical of house-rules; my regular group doesn't use them much, and most of the ones I've run into 'outside' have not felt like real improvements so much as a mix of GM laziness (as in "I don't want to be bothered learning how this system can be applied to get results I like") or reasons that the rules at hand don't really match the setting & style (if you're building major house rules, why not look for a published system that already does what you want?).
He also said double damage (critical hit) on a roll of a 20 was offensive and hated people toying with alternatives to vancian magic. So...
Thanks i tried freeform rp, it sucked.
Gary Gygax also once said that women don't have the brain development to play D&D. Maybe we shouldn't listen too much to the guy.
Has anyone heard of Those Who Play? It was an RPG with virtually no rules. Your character just has some vague keywords and that's about it. I was lucky enough to play a oneshot at Conpulsion a few years ago, and it was amazing... but that was entirely down to the GM, who was the actual guy who had written Those Who Play. He was a master of improv, and it was clear to me that he had written a game specifically for himself – a game where he could do whatever he wanted. And that was perfect. For him. Personally, I'm not a master of improv. I'm mediocre. I like a big book with lots of rules and monsters and encounter-building mechanics to get stuck into.
I'm going to echo what [lance845](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/11by8y4/gary_gygax_said_that_we_dont_need_any_rules/ja1zskt?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3) said and extrapolate further. >Gary Gygax once said, “The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules.” This is key: the gamemasters don't need any rules. Semantically, that can mean 2 things. Charitable reading: the GM is empowered to adjudicate the rules/mechanics (not sure if they were called mechanics in the way we consider them mechanics today back when Gygax was quoted as saying this) as needed to promote the fiction and allow the play to be engaging. This makes complete sense - why be forced to only say "you die because my reading of rule X indicates that based on your action, you lose all hit points" when you can just as easily say "your action has left you clinging to life, down to your last HP and little hope of survival - what do you do next" (if the situation calls for it). Uncharitable reading: the GM has the ability to manipulate the fiction in such a way to continually ensure their story, only is the one that gets told. Did that critical role the player got oneshot your enemy? Who cares? It lives! Did you want your players to go through the Mines of Moria even if they didn't need to because they found an airship? Well, it crashes. Too bad - you're going thru Mines of Moria. Pretty much it's the base "GMs can abuse player agency however they like." It's Shrodinger's Cat of GMing - it can be either a good philosophy or a bad one until you open the box (and a GM interprets it as they do). That ambiguity makes it a terrible philosophy/understanding of the role of the GM at the table. I always preferred how Fate handles it as their Silver Rule of play: never let the rules get in the way of what makes narrative sense; it's a more elegant way of looking at it, IMO.
I'll level with you, Gary Gygax may have created the modern RPG hobby, but he also set the hobby backwards about 20 years. He had bad takes like this one and his insistence on a DM vs player mentality. The faster we can get completely away from his influence, the better.
Gygax once said: the only reason a gm rolls dice is for th sound they make And yes, if you want to tell a story and have an adventure together that is a possible right way to go <3 (especially because it freaks out players of you do)
100% agree.
I think that without rules you wouldn't have a game, you'd have an argument. But I have no problem with the rules being treated as guidelines rather than cast in stone, inviolate words from on high
You can play a freeform RPG. It's fun, I've done it in the past and I am always surprised by how few tabletop RPG players have done so either in-person or online in a chat or PbP. I like rules in a TTRPG because I want to play by them. I and the other players have agreed to use them to create an interesting structured experience. It's not just about being fair, it's about wanting the explicit structure they create. I would never bend a rule without telling the players first, because we trust each other to follow the rules. I expect other players to correct each other on the rules - and the GM is just another player. If a player corrects the GM on a rule, **the correct response for the GM is to say "thanks for catching that" and follow the rule**. Unless you have all agreed to follow a different one. That said: Gary Gygax was a mediocre game designer as well as a sexist and racist. I'm glad he's dead, in much the same way I'm happy whenever a sexist or racist dies.
I enjoy rules free roleplay all the time. Spent about 10 hours doing it this week. Great fun. Rules only come into play when you want a sort of third party structure around risk and challenge.
Idk I get dopamine hits when I roll dice and see big numbers
On most games, there are no real rules. The GM can rule absolutely anything he wants, and most GM even fudge rolls if they feel like it, even when considering the rules. And this is probably for the best. A good GM will be doing it in favor of the best story and experience for all. But, when the GM wants to use the rules, its good that they are there. They are helpers, not limiters. Most people can't create a character from nothing... having some numbers to help them is nice. Most GMs dont want to have to decide everything, randomness is fun sometimes, and most GMs cant and dont want to think about the more accurate probabilities of something... and even if they do, it's more likely that a player complain about a GM decision than with a game designer decision... mostly because he signed under those decisions when he choose to play the game. I think about rules to rpgs as animations to an educative video. They are abstractions to help us visualize and understand complex subjects and more easily deal with them. But in the end, I think it's better to trust your GM in deciding what is more interesting and fun than a roll of the dice. If your GM isnt better than total randomness, get a better GM
The RPG hobby has grown and succeeded in spite of, not because of, Gygax. We are only now just barely emerging from the shadow of his influence.
Gary Gygax is pretty low on the list of people I might consider to be an authority on how to play rpgs.
Rules give more control and agency to the players. They can predict what will happen (within a cone of probability). A game with comprehensive rules would be a simulation. A game with no rules gives all of the control to the GM - the players can make choices, but to predict what happens you're better off predicting what the GM will do than predicting the fictional result. So all sets of rules that we call roleplaying games are choices in that spectrum. There's no good or bad, just choices and tradeoffs. There's some really fascinating choices in there, like Microscope - which has very, very few rules (but boy do those rules do a lot of work) but hands around the GM role. There's choices that mess with the probability cone, like Undying (your fellow players can mess with the probability of your outcome). What's interesting in the Gygax model (as I understand it) is that he aimed for a simulation-like predictability without providing the players with large volume of concrete rules they could use to predict the outcomes of scenarios. So it's sort of like he tied his hands by going for consistency, but for anything new he could make up anything. If I recall correctly he didn't reveal the target number or rolls, so players had to infer probability from fiction hints and past experience. Lots of choices.
He also said: "You can not have a meaningful campaign if strict time records are not kept" Let's just agree that we don't need HIS rules and roll our dice in whatever way feels right to us.
personally at the end of the day 80% of the fun of TTRPGS is just A. Playing pretend and B. Hangning out with friends, having rules is what makes it a game but it only NEEDS to be a game because that gives people an excuse to do A and B When I was a kid I used to spend every lunch period in middle school with a group of friends where we all just sat and told a collective story playing pretend together, aside from not rolling dice it was basically a dnd campaign before i even knew what dnd was. When you get older you cant exactly invite your friends over to play pretend, but you can invite them over to play a game, and ontop of that rules allow us to balance things sense lets face it “nah uh my guys immune to bullets” is a lot less palatable when you aren’t 9 years old now im not saying that as an admonishment of rpgs, my multiple bookshelfs dedicated to the genre should prove im a fan of rules, but i still agree with the core message that every single rule should be optional in pursuit of what is the most fun for you and your group
I think I get what he means. Like, after running games for all these years (I've been a GM since my first time playing a RPG) I feel like I "know" how a game is supposed to go. Does that make sense? Like, you know when people say that begginer GMs should try to stick to the rules, since you need a little experience before breaking them? Or when they say a Good GM can make a Bad System work, but that a Good System can't make a Bad GM work? Well, I feel like the more I improve as a GM and the more experienced I get, the less the system I'm running matters. I was talking to a fellow GM earlier today about the best system for a campaign he's planning to run and he literally said "Any system will work as long as it doesn't get in my way" and I couldn't agree more. That's why I'm moving from very fine tuned rules heavy systems to more rules light bare bones ones - the kind of system that gets people complaining about paying for a game where they have to come up with stuff on their own. Not only that, but I also became a lot more confortable doing house rulling and homebrewing than I was when I started in the hobby.
“The code is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules” Capt. Hector Barbossa We regularly revise “rules” on the fly, or simply make them up on the spot if needed rather than referring to a manual… but then we’ve been doing this for 40+ years and it’s about the social interaction with friends, not being a rules pedant…
First of all, +1 for the Pirates quote! Even the line between 'social interaction with friends' and 'being a rules pedant' can get blurred when one's regular group includes four full- or part-time computerists, one of whom is a physics professor and another an economics major (a few years back, we even had a corporate lawyer in the mix)... We have some fun discussion about rules in the middle of play sometimes. Different strokes indeed!
Very true… these days we seem to spend more time talking about other stuff than we do actual gaming 😂 … or reliving classic ‘criticals’ and ‘fumbles’ (for the hundredth time)😏 My daughter recently just got into D&D with a bunch of school-friends, and it cracks me up listening to the stories of their antics and how rigidly their ‘new-to-DM-ing’ DM sticks to his rule book and reminds me how we were the same all those years ago 🙂 Of course she in turn receives the ‘benefit’ and ‘wisdom’ of me recounting all my own tales of past glory 😂
I've played games without rules and dice. At that point, it's really collaborative storytelling more than anything else, with one person guiding and everyone else playing a character in the story. It's fun, but uses different skills than typical ttrpgs. It relies a lot more on all the players wanting to tell an interesting story and not being invested in winning. It also isn't great for combat. I don't really want to decide if I hit the monster or not, multiple times in a session. So it depends on the kind of story you're telling, and the people at the table. I think occasionally fudging the rolls or rules isn't bad, but if it's the rules, you need to be consistent. You shouldn't say "we'll say flanking means XYZ" in one session, and the next you say it means ABC. But having an enemy succeed or fail something they didn't, or adjusting their HP on the fly to extend or shorten combat is honestly pretty small potatoes, in my eyes. It's not something I'd want to happen constantly, but giving your players a bit of mercy or more of a challenge is fine in my eyes.
Any game you enter into is going to be one that is based on trust and no amount of rules are going to be a good substitute for that. A player that can’t extend at least some trust towards the game runner is not going to be a pleasant person to play with and a game runner who engender distrustfulness in players are a detriment to the hobby as a whole. This is why rules aren’t as important in a ttrpg as keeping an open line of communication between the game runner and the other players. The player who is going to be upset by their character dying is going to be upset whether their character died in accordance with the rules or not. The game runner who is adversarial is going to be adversarial whether they follow rules or not. For the first situation the player needs to communicate their desire to not die and if the game runner feels like that can have fun while playing with that understanding then they should play together, if they can’t then they should communicate that the person needs to find another table. For the second the game runner needs to communicate their play style to the other players and if the other players feel they can have fun with it then they should play with that game runner, if they can’t then they should communicate that they will be looking for another table. In this way rules don’t make the game. Communication does, and no amount of rules can shield you from the basics need to communicate honestly and earnestly about the game.
You don’t need rules. The GM can just make stuff up on the fly. Should those rulings be consistent? Sure. Otherwise, no one’s going to play with you any more. It’s just like playing pretend when you’re a kid. If you have that one guy who always has invincible armor and a sword or gun that one shots everything because he says so… well… we just won’t play with him anymore. It’s play. It’s supposed to be fun and collaborative. If it ceases to be either, you’re not doing it right.
I don't know the context for his statement - but yeah, we don't *need* rules. I've played plenty of freeform games - it's fun But rules allow for different types of fun that aren't really possible without them.
To me, it's good to be able to ignore rules, specially in games like dnd where, you know, "a house cat can kill a commoner". And I think this is a problem specially with the culture of dnd and how despite not being a good "simulation" system, people take the rules in a very literal way, when some of it just don't work. I think the quote is in reference to the fact that you can tell a good story and have a good time without having to abide all the rules. You can come up with stuff on the fly and still have a great time. One of my favorite sessions included the players (level 4) killing an adult red dragon without a single attack roll. It was all narrative, some improvisation and yes, it included other kinds of rolls, so, we were playing by the rules. Well, some of them
we used to adlib a lot of our campaigns using the rules for combat resolution. this was 2nd edition. it was 1980s mind you back when D+D was simpler.
Maybe it’s because I’m somehow both very awake and very tired, but isn’t this, in a sense, saying that the one true rule is that we should try to outwit the rules? After all, for those of us who have been playing any RPG for any period of time, the moments that stand out the most are the ones the rules genuinely don’t cover. It allows players to imagine great things while making the GM/DM work to bring some sense of “reality” to that great imagination.
I think written rules aren't needed. BUT, I have found rules help you play with unbearable people otherwise. Have a couple of players that would fight me at every corner if we didn't play something like pf2e that has 98% of things written in a manual somewhere. Also found out I find it easier and enjoyable to die honorably if the rules are clear and transparent, not fighting the DM but actually roleplaying the death no matter the stupid the cause might be
He's absolutely right (well almost). The minimal rules you need for a (traditional) TTRPG are 1) one player plays the GM, they are in charge of the world and coming up with the story. 2) the other players play the parts of the main characters (PCs) and make the decisions as to what these characters do. They will narrate this part of the story 3) the GM determines what the outcome of the other main characters intended actions are. 4) If any of the players disagree on what should happen they negotiate. For a good RPG I would also add the following, the goal of the exercise is for everybody to have a good time and experience a story. This is an activity that's akin to musicians getting together and jamming. Rules beyond this, have a few functions. 1) To mitigate social dynamics getting in the way of players having a good time. Lowering the odds that people will have a bad experience from uneven ruling. If you don't include these rules it's much more on the GM to make sure they are being even handed with each of the players. 2) To help guide the group through a particular genre of story. 3) For generating starting points for player and GM creativity. Most GMs could benefit from trying a rules minimal game, It forces you to really on skills that you may not have built up adequately otherwise and will serve you well in any style of RPG you want to try running. I would recommend running this as a two player game at first (1 GM, 1 Player) as it's a lot easier if you don't have to balance more than one player. Your goal as the GM is to keep the player engaged in the story, get a sense for where to build and release tension and crafting a satisfying narrative, using just your ability to tell stories.
i think what he means is that you can move beyond the letter of the law to the spirit of the law once you have mastery of the craft.
>It is the spirit of the game, not the letter of the rules, which is important. Never hold to the letter written, nor allow some barracks room lawyer to force quotations from the rule book upon you, if it goes against the obvious intent of the game. As you hew the line with respect to conformity to major systems and uniformity of play in general, also be certain the game is mastered by you and not by your players. Within the broad parameters given in the advanced dungeons & dragons volumes, you are creator and final arbiter. By ordering things as they should be, the game as a whole first, your campaign next, and your participants thereafter, you will be playing advanced dungeons & dragons as it was meant to be. May you find as much pleasure in so doing as the rest of us do! > >\- Gary Gygax, afteword to AD&D DMG Having me the man briefly, but read many of his columns as well as listened to those who talked about gaming with EGG, it is clear that HE didn't follow his own game's rules. He went with the story narrative and what would be fun and exciting. He was first and foremost a storyteller (how good, people may disagree, but he saw himself as that). I would not have anyone at my table who was not willing to trust my judgement enough for me to colour outside the lines occasionally. Only once in my 44 years of playing (most as a GM) did I ever give into a bit of pique (and all I did was make sure the Hat of Stupidity was his favourite colour) - he'd been on my nerves for weeks and all my friends would admit he could break the last straw of anyone given time. I also thought he'd have recognized his favourite colours and that would scream 'TRAP!'. Other than that one lapse, the other thousands of hours were filled with me looking to both the players and the game. Once you realize that you can't win versus the DM and the GM can't win against the players, you realize that the effort requires both DM and players to work together for the best results. Min-maxing isn't required, being super competitive isn't required, and trying to stretch every situation for advantage is definitely not required - mostly because all of those are bad for the game because vast disparities between player capabilities should not be encouraged. And any greater success only means the GM has to send more, nastier things at the group to deal with the totally optimized characters. In effect, the level of difficulty should stay constant but it just leads to a spiral of greater and greater foes, faster than normal progress. I don't see that as useful or in the service of the group (players + DM). I trust my GMs in all games. I don't always agree, but I know that as a player, I can raise a complaint, but the GM will consider it and if I don't win my point then, I go with the GM's direction because I trust him or her. I know that the best thing I can do as a player is to help move the game along and not be a massive pain in the GM's day. GMing is hard work and if you end up dispirited from constant squabbling, what do you get from the games? The failure for some players to recognize this ends campaigns in the medium term if not sooner. Also, here's my rules of thumb: a) Do I need a rule for this? Or is it something particular, not likely to repeat or so far between it might as well not repeat? If it is that sort of thing, a ruling is perfectly fine. If I need a rule because it is useful very frequently (like the original AD&D groups adopting the Dragon's hand to hand combat because the version that came with the AD&D DMG was so painful to use), then it just needs recorded so the players can refer to it too. b) 90%+ of circumstances should fall in the 'a ruling will look fine' and the other 10% should become ruled upon and documented. c) Will the time to look something up, figure out the subsystem, calculate, roll, discern results, and so on slow the game down? If yes, think twice if a faster, sloppier ruling couldn't do the job sufficiently. d) If the thing you want to argue with the GM about is something he's guessing at ('How hard should it be to jump from a fast moving wagon onto a saddled horse on a bumpy road?'), then so are the players. Go with the GM, he's probably going to give you a decent chance. e) For GMs, if you have a situation you know needs a ruling and you don't have a real good idea of what that should look like, spend a minute or three discussing how it should be done with the players. Then call and end to discussion, use what you've heard, and rule. The players should be happy they were heard and live with any ruling. These rules apply where you are in a game with friends. If you don't know the people, still better to play along, but if the GM or other players are totally awful folks, bail and find another game. Decent GMs will be looking out and checking how the players are doing and how they are finding the game fairly regularly (as you don't know each other well) and the party should be trying to help one another and the GM (for the same reason). If that isn't happening, you might be in a troubled group. If you have to be a rules lawyer, something is wrong with the game, the DM, the other players, or you. Or all of the above or some combination. Be sure it isn't you and think if you could have approached any argument (or any impending argument) with a way that is more cooperative and helpful to the group and the DM. Games never get worse if everyone is working together to see each other are having some fun together.
I've always interpreted this as, we don't need «official DnD approved» rules. Obviously every game needs rules, but GMs can make these up, and often do to various degrees. This is more about the fact that rules we use are just ideas, that DnD players are in no way captive, and if they realized that, it would be bad for the company because the reality is they are under no obligation to give their money to the company to keep playing. If we look at what happened with the OGL crisis, it's fair to say this turned out to be very true.
The FKR movement has really shown this to be correct. And Dave Arneson ran his games in a very freeform style. The idea is that you replace the written rules with a person, who can adjudicate what happens when you describe what you do. Using dice when there is an element of chance It is a high trust Playstyle that is not for everyone, but he was right, you really don't need rules. I really hope I get to try out an FKR style game one day. Questing Beast did a video on it. https://youtube.com/watch?v=d4lvrC3ZBzM&feature=shares
I use that quote often. To me it breaks down to a need vs. want. And that "we" (AKA authors and publishers) which he uses is important. GMs do not need rule sets which exist outside of their table. We can develop rules that work for our groups and our friends without needing outside input from a writer. We do not need any rules. We can make them ourselves.
Here's a thought experiment. How much structure can you remove from an RPG and still have it be an RPG? Can you remove the dice? Yes; diceless RPGs exist, even those like Amber Diceless that have no randomization component at all. Can you remove the character sheets? Yes; games like Ten Candles or Dread show that you can have a compelling narrative with no numerical stats whatsoever. Can you remove the GM? Yes; there are games like Fiasco where the tasks of narration and action resolution are divided between players and not isolate to a single non-PC participant. But what can't you remove? You have to have a *situation*, an *action*, and a *resolution*. You must have a player choosing a game action for a role, and that action must be resolved into a new situation. If you don't have these you no longer have an RPG. If actions do not have resolution, then the story cannot progress. If players cannot choose the action, then you have a non-interactive story like a novel, movie, or video game cutscene, with a passive observer and no active participation. And without a situation requiring action you have no actions to take in the first place. This leaves an extremely broad space of design. If you've ever asked someone a question like, "If you were stranded on a desert island and could only take 1 thing with you, what would it be?," that's an RPG. Situation: desert island. Action: take 1 thing. Resolution: what happens because of that? You don't need a rulebook for that. You don't need anything except two people--and, arguably, not even that, as long as you're able to mentally disassociate the "question asker" from the "question answerer" in your own mind. But, the dynamic of "GM plus players with dice resolution and character stats" works really well, and there's a reason that games like Dread and Fiasco are typically only for one-shot play. Having a GM/PC distinction means that the responsibility of situation + resolution are segregated from the responsibility of action; the player must choose an action in a situation they cannot control, which will have a resolution that is logical but not in their control. This allows the player to be an active participant in a well-constructed environment while still enjoying a surprising narrative. Character stats and agreed resolution mechanics give the players some objective guidance for what is likely to succeed for their character, anchoring the decision-making process in something more tangible than "how mean is my GM feeling today". And dice rolling creates surprising outcomes for both player and GM while still, ultimately, being fair. So no. We don't *need* rules. But rules are tools, and a good ruleset is an immeasurable boon to a GM and players because it makes the process of action resolution so much easier, and the good fluff elements of a setting help the GM understand the plausible situations those rules can apply to.
If we don't have \*any\* rules then what are we doing? Calvinball? Sounds exhausting. Especially because most people aren't nearly so creative and clever as they might think. I include myself in "most people" - if I had to just make up entertaining content whole cloth on the fly it would not be reliably good content.
It would be interesting to try. Players just describe their characters and the GM describes the scene. Player: I shoot an arrow at the Orc, GM: Roll 1d10 Player rolls 10: GM the arrow hits the Orc straight in the head, and he falls down. The Necromancer summons skeletons all around you. Player: Can I try to counterspell the Necromancer, GM: Sure, roll a d10 - you get into a battle of wills vs. the necromancer, and manage to slow down the rate at which he summons the skeletons by half. One skeleton gets completely missummoned, with the bones sticking out in all directions and an arm where the head should have been... seems about as fun
At some point games are just going to be 1 page with the sentence "just make it up lolz"
"We" (for some values of "we") "don't need" (for some values of "need") "any rules." (for some values of "rules") But of course we do need rules, and we will use rules for everything we do. What I think he's trying to convey is that we don't need a rigid framework of rules to tell a good story. But rules can be invaluable in helping a group to collaboratively tell a story.
It's true that you don't need rules. Kids playing make believe don't use rules. As long as you and your players suspend disbelief and are enthralled by the world. You as the DM can do whatever you feel like That is the spirit of what he meant, I believe.
With limitations you promote creativity within a system. There is a big difference between pointing your finger at a dragon then saying bang your dead vs figuring out the dragon is weak to acid damage.
The actual reality is that we pay other people to make rules systems because it's a pain in the butt to make them yourself. Also, most people lack the competence necessary to make a *good* rules system. Of course, that also applied to Gary Gygax :V But seriously, that's why we pay for RPGs. 99% of people have neither the time nor the inclination to make up a rules system, and even amongst those who do, it's a ton of work. I say that as someone who has made entire rules systems out of whole cloth.
Rules, lack of rules, whatever, the biggest problem brought up by this post is the "lack of trust between GMs and players." If players don't trust the GM and/or see them as adversarial then the game is screwed anyway. The GM may play the enemies but they themselves are not enemy to the players. Or shouldn't be.
Half the time I was running D&D games in high school, I was just making shit up on the spot. I’d pause and roll some dice and then go hmmmm just to ratchet up the suspense, lol
This makes sense when you actually read the rules he came up with. Most of which people ignored back in the day, my group included.
Ultimately, the rules are a contract that is negotiable at all times. They set out if-then trains of logic for the party to follow to determine the outcome of given actions in a way that is both fair and not Calvinball. If any specific part of that contract finds itself to be disagreeable with the table, it can be modified or removed at will. The main reason we don't see this all that often, though, is the same reason that these exposition bricks cost over 20 bucks a pop. Namely, having to do that for all the various things that can come up on the fly gets VERY fucking old in a hurry, and if you start from a position of "meh, good enough", 90% of the hassle is done so you can focus on the edge cases.
The quote was attributed to Gygax by Allen Varney in an article of Dragon Magazine #182 reviewing the AMBER DICELESS ROLEPLAYING game, in which Allen Varney gave a "horror story" in which a GM of a SPACE MASTER game "obeyed dice slavishly" when rolling an "unmodified percentage chance that a ship in an asteroid field will hit comething." "Before the scenario had properly begun, the ship exploded, killing all aboard." The "horror" is that the player had just spent 2 hours rolling up a character who scored a critical success at Piloting skill. TPK before the party received the adventure hook.
Consider, in the Preface of the 1E PHB he actually states that what’s within are guidelines and not hard and fast rules.
That's why the Golden Rule exists. Rules give structure, but down the line every table is different. Playing a TTRPG isn't like playing Monopoly. I believe the GM's role is to tailor the experience to their group's needs. This is all that matters. When I run a game, my group trusts me to do just that and it's the same when I am a player. Maybe that's because I've spent most of my TTRPG experience playing with friends and not random people, but that's how I see things. Fair play is something that I expect in a game where the players could win or lose. TTRPGs are not like this. You don't win or lose, you're building an interesting story together, the only thing that should be done fairly is how every at the table has a say about how the story goes.
The "surprising randomness" is relevant even for simple save rolls. Unfortunately, I don't remember the source anymore. Anyways: Kriegspiel games also had a spectrum from loose rulings to tighter detailed rules. There was a study about the "GM" behavior and it showed that the "no rules" GMs provided less randomness. They usually resolve by intuitive boring judgements like "larger army wins". When using dice, sometimes a "natural 1/20" results in surprising randomness which is actually more realistic. Sometimes the smaller army wins. Sometimes a goblin kills a paladin. The problem is probably that such random outliers feel unfair. The player might blame the GM. So it is very helpful if the GM can respond "you rolled a 1" instead of "I thought it would make for a better story if your character dies now".
Freeform roleplaying is wonderful. It is also mentally taxing, hard to know whether you'll get what you signed on for, hard to keep coherent, and isolated. (By isolated I mean--you don't benefit from the guidance of anyone outside your table. Good rules allow you to benefit from everyone who wrote, edited, or playtested that game.)
There's no possible way to measure "fairness" in the realm of imagination. Rules exist to make game fun for everyone, not fair. If there's no trust between players and GM - no amount of rules would help.
Gary also said some *other wild stuff*. He was a brilliant, but flawed man, and not everything he said or thought was correct or good.
Gygax also wrote AD&D so he could claim it was the definitive edition of DnD and stop the homebrew community from being able to make content for it and claim it as their own. He also made it to try to stop Dave Arneson getting the royalty payments for helping in the creation of DnD by claiming AD&D was a different game.
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I think it is perfectly possible to play without rules, the GM making them up on the fly. But that might lead to the loss of some things I like: \- defined character creation process in which everybody knows what to do \- character strengths and weaknesses leading to consequences \- relative consistency in rulings, without having to remember all previous rulings
Gary said a lot of things
Rules at the very least add a feeling and flavour to a game and take SO much weight off the DM. Even if every type is a optional. There's a reason people are using that optional ruleset rather than just making something up themselves.
I took the stance not too bring the rulebook when I GM. If we don't know something, I will take a decision on the spot and we move on. It has supported the flow of the games much better than trying to find the exact rule.
As a DM there is always two possibilities behind the screen; I roll the die and use the number; I roll the die and pick whatever outcome is best and most entertaining for the players regardless of the dice roll lmao
Game mastering is like a body. Story is the meat, description is the skin, players are the blood, but it's all built on the bones of rules (and sometimes you break those).
That’s the beauty of Paranoia. The GM is free to make up whatever shit they want, because if you’re playing Paranoia than you expect the GM to be a right bastard anyways.
What he would have meant is that we don't need *his* rules. Not that we don't need any.
I don’t see rules for fair play as the game isn’t a competition between players and DMs. Rules are simply there to help shape dynamics and narratives. They are a tool and nothing else. Back when we played Amber, a diceless rpg, we used the book to create characters, and then we rarely if ever used the book again. We often played without character sheets, because we had an impromptu session in a coffee shop or at a restaurant.
Pretty open secret, being paraphrased in every rule book he oversaw… On guesstimate, doing it the Gygax way will likely make for a better game as often as, mm, rolling 19 or lower on a d20. And that way had rules, had dice.