Blog book club #19: Rules vs Rulings?

Collaboration
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Welcome to this week’s blog club. This week we are looking at “Rules vs. Rulings?” from 2009 by Justin Alexander (The Alexandrian).

Next week we’ll take a look at “Don’t Prep Plots” by the same author.

You can see a list of previous blog club posts here.

I have opinions about this one - let’s see if I can get them written up before my son comes calling. School holidays!

I agree with Justin (and the linked post by Ben Robbins from earlier in our club) that we want consistency in rules. But I don’t agree that “ruling not rules” means less consistency. Here’s what I mean by that maxim:

Rules are not highly complex and tightly balanced, and they only aim to cover the principal activities of play, not corner cases. This frees the group to easily make new rules of the fly for new situations without breaking the “machinery” of the system.

If every rule in a system is highly complex and tightly balanced you cannot making a ruling for a new case without very careful consideration of ramifications throughout the system. By contrast, old school play’s relatively simple rules (and here I’m thinking B/X at most, not AD&D) allows the group to improvise new rules without “breaking” the game.

If the game already has rules for corner cases (e.g. underwater combat, smelting metals) then there is more for the group to learn up front which will probably not be used, and it’s again harder to improvise rulings that “feel right” without contradicting some existing aspect of the system.

From there, the group establishes ad-hoc rulings, which becomes the basis of a “common law” of rules: the same situation absolutely uses the same ruling, and a similar situation will lead to a similar ruling. When a few of these situations have cropped up the group may establish a more general rule to cover all situations of that type.

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The issue here is a conflict between the game rules (which by necessity are generic) and the logic of the world. Do you strictly adhere to the game rules or do you make exceptions when the logic of the world overrides? The prime example for me is whether a dagger to a sleeping human does damage as normal or just kills them outright. Personally, I’m in the latter camp. But you do need the game rules to scaffold the rest of the experience.

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I’ve pointed at this post before when talking to people about my issues with the rulings vs rules divide. It’s not perfect, but I think Justin makes most of my core points better than I would.

The one thing it doesn’t address, I feel, is why rules are needed some places and not others. (The comments on the post do get into this a bit, but not in much depth.) My feeling on this is that rules need to be heavier where player intuition about the world is worse.

As an example, this is why I dislike flying ancestries for PCs. Players don’t understand flight.

If I describe a slope as 45 degrees of loose gravel, players know that they can’t just sprint up it. No need for rules, rulings are fine.

If I have a tight corridor with a ten foot gap, players think their winged aarakocra can just fly across. There’s no human instinct for wingspans and air currents and launch speeds and whatever else. Flight needs rules in a way that walking and running do not.

There is the side-effect that many players will run and jump with anime or action-movie logic, but I think of that more as a tone concern than a rules concern. If you want your table to play anime-reality, good on you, have fun.