Credibility of the rules as written

[matthijs]

what made those texts act as independent social---even moral---authorities?

Here's one possible factor.

The AD&D books were big and full of rules. They seemed intimidating to most people, and were a challenge to learn.

When there's something exciting and new you want to learn, and you think it's just a little bit harder than what you're capable of learning, you get the effect that you try really, really hard. You want to know everything about it, and spend heaps of time getting to understand all the details.

When you've invested so much time in a subject, you get very rigid about it. You've just learned a set of complex rules. You don't want anybody to change those rules right now. If they try, you'll defend the rules with all you've got.

Your sense of personal achievement is tied up with the credibility of the rules. When you play with friends, you give those rules a lot of authority; that way, what you've learned becomes meaningful. If you don't give them authority, all that time spent poring over books is a waste.

[clehrich]

[Edit: this is in reply to Vincent's post]

Well, I guess by your terminology, I'm saying that (granted Ron's valuable cultural caveats) it's worth remembering that AD&D achieved the #2 here, "more than mere unity of vision."  And I'm saying that actually a surprising number of games achieve this: apparently WoD games do, for a lot of people (not me, but a lot).  Which suggests that there's something we're missing, because by most theoretical formulations around these here parts, those games should not achieve this, certainly not with such a wide audience.  And I think that the most established and least analyzed way to achieve #2 (I'm loving the double-entendre) is through textual authority.

Is that any clearer?

[Callan S.]

So the question is: what weight do the rules as written have, in general?

None. However, there is something you might like to call the traffic light factor. At traffic lights, people follow the rules there. You feel they must, otherwise there will be a pile up.

This makes it feel like there are rules that must be followed, rather than a bunch of people making decisions. It makes it feel as if the traffic light rules have weight all by themselves.

I think it's a kind of projection. You don't actually know the other people are going to follow the traffic light rules, but you project this idea in your mind that these rules exist independently for all to see and have weight...weight that will force others to abide by these rules.

It's sort of an assist to an act of faith...the act being to trust other humans. But no, the rules wont force them.

The funny thing is, you can take advantage of peoples belief in rules having weight, to remind them that if it should force others to abide, they should abide by them now. The percieved weight of the rules does more to force the perciever, than it does to anyone else (which they don't force at all).

So you might like to think of them as carrying weight in terms of being a back door to each person, should you press the buttons of their faith in the rule. The prob is, most roleplayers have seen years of cooked up rules and don't put faith in them willy nilly any more, and see them as as weightless as they actually are.

[Vaxalon]

If you're at a traffic light, and all the lights are red... what happens?  Within a few minutes, SOMEONE decides that the rules have to go, or otherwise a pathological condition will persist.

The same is true of game rules.

No matter how much authority we ascribe to the rules, they never attain a state where their authority is intrinsic.

[clehrich]

If you're at a traffic light, and all the lights are red... what happens?  Within a few minutes, SOMEONE decides that the rules have to go, or otherwise a pathological condition will persist.

The same is true of game rules.

No matter how much authority we ascribe to the rules, they never attain a state where their authority is intrinsic.

But this seems to me in a sense so obviously true that it's hardly worth saying.  Dr. Xero already mentioned language, of which the same points can be made.  Sure, you can disobey the language rules.  Sure, the authority of language is never, by that measure, "intrinsic."  Does that make it not an authority?  Does that make you discard the language rules as soon as you have attained a certain mastery of the language?

If we're talking about cultural rather than natural phenomena, as we are every time humans make choices, then of course the authority is not "intrinsic."  By this measure, "intrinsic" authority isn't really even authority: I wouldn't say that gravity has great authority to ensure that things fall; that's just natural law.  Conformity and obedience to culturally-constituted authority can be analyzed; obedience to natural law is genuinely factual in a pure sense, and all that can be analyzed is what the law is and where it arises from.

The question is in what ways we do and do not submit to the authority of gaming texts, and how we constitute that authority.  Comparisons to natural law, "intrinsic" in the things themselves, are spurious.

[Bill Cook]

what weight do the rules as written have, in general? I mean, we write them with some expectation that people will follow them during play, right? So if, as some contend, a group will simply patch any rules to fit their play style, why do we have rules at all?

They provide a common point of reference to design intent, which is a vision for play. The mod's can be viewed as a layer of group tradition or GM prerogative. These may reflect tradition or production aesthetic.

********

What matthijs said about investment I find telling. I remember finishing the BW core rules, which about wore me out. It closes with a one-page note from the author that says not to use the game text during play. I was more than a little pissed off.

[Callan S.]

If you're at a traffic light, and all the lights are red... what happens?  Within a few minutes, SOMEONE decides that the rules have to go, or otherwise a pathological condition will persist.

The same is true of game rules.

No matter how much authority we ascribe to the rules, they never attain a state where their authority is intrinsic.

Yes, said that. What I'm talking about is an unconcious habbit of ascribing them intrisic authority because it's convenient. If your driving across the intersection, you look left and right, but you don't do so with intense focus...because you assume the other people will follow the rules. Why will they follow the rules? Well there is no reason, but so you don't have to live your life in paranoia your encouraged to ascribe the rules some sort of intrinsic authority.

[ffilz]

I think one point to make is that the traffic light rules have authorty because the drivers have accepted a social contract that says "follow the rules of the road (unless something is really broken)." We are so conditioned by these rules that traffic moves slower through an intersection with dead stop lights than a 4-way stop intersection because each person who arrives has to convince themself that the light really is dead, and therefore they should follow the 4-way stop rule.

I agree that we assign the rules implicit authority, but that's really just a shortcut to establishing a social contract.

Ultimately the only real authority is fear that the other guy will pound you to a pulp (or someone who cares about him will pound you to a pulp).

All that being said, I think it is useful to talk in terms of rules having authority, but recognizing that they only have the authority granted by the players, and that the real authority comes from the players. But it is useful to be able to short cut things and say "Let's follow the rules in this book."

Frank

[Marco]

A lot of these Forge discussions involve taking a common word or words, not defining them for purposes of the dissertation, and using them in a specific and often non-intuitive way. I'm not sure why that is--but it's done very often and it's problematic.

The term "authority" has many meanings If I say:

"Printed Rules have authority [in a manner similar that of a case-law precident.]" You can:

a) argue that I am using my terms wrong and I should say "credibility" or else I am abusing the English language.
b) argue that printed rules are nothing at all like established case-law precidents--but accept that if they were I would be correct to say that.

The problem with these discussions (and John's "contributes" thread) is there's a whole lot of (a) and not so much (b). And people are clinging to (a) really strongly--as though some realization depended on it.

The problem is: (a)'s wrong.

The terms we are using are being used correctly in the sentences we are using them. I can certainly claim that a rule book "is an authority" on how a game is to be played (in the sense of ' An accepted source of expert information or advice'). I can cite rules and claim authority from them (in the sense of case-law precident).

If you go look up "authority" then you'll discover that those are all valid uses of the term and, in fact, those sentences are ones in which people do commonly use them.

By doing (a) people are assuming that only one meaning is the true one (in the 'authority' case I think something like "authority means the ability to enforce a law") and that since rules cannot literally jump off the page and smack you, they lack authority.

Well, that's true (they can't jump up off the page) but trying to build an arugment that says rules have no authority based on assuming that there's only one way that word can be meant is, indeed, speaking crazy-moon-language.

And that doesn't get us anywhere.

-Marco

[clehrich]

To follow up Marco's point, the use of the term "authority" in academic circles discussing human culture is very much in line with the use to refer to things like game rules.  If anything, they would usually be considered a particularly obvious form of authority.  I for this reason see no purpose in debating whether this is authority, or whether it's the right word.  The question is how it works, and to what extent.

[Callan S.]

There seems to be a mix up between "This text has authority that I grant it" and "This text has (intrinsic) authority that it then grants to me"

The latter is incorrect. But rewind me to 10 years ago and I wouldn't have said that. Instead as I reflexively said they had intrinsic authority, as much as I had no control over that reflex, I granted them authority. Since I reflexively gave it and didn't instead pause, think and then consent to grant it, in a way they had authority whether I liked it/consented or not. The personal reflex made it intrinsic, in the same way as you could say a reaction hammer has the intrinsic ability to make your leg kick. Except it doesn't, it hits a nerve of yours and your leg kicks without your consent. But hey, if you can't control it and the hammer does...who has control here?

But eventually you leave the matrix, so to speak.

[John Kim]

There seems to be a mix up between "This text has authority that I grant it" and "This text has (intrinsic) authority that it then grants to me"

The latter is incorrect. But rewind me to 10 years ago and I wouldn't have said that. Instead as I reflexively said they had intrinsic authority, as much as I had no control over that reflex, I granted them authority. Since I reflexively gave it and didn't instead pause, think and then consent to grant it, in a way they had authority whether I liked it/consented or not.

Wow.  In my experience, that's peculiar.  Virtually everyone I have known in gaming had house rules and/or fudging.  As far as I know, this has been true since the start of the hobby.  For example, Gary Gygax was near-universally mocked for his "play by the book" rants.  I believe that you unquestioningly played exactly as written -- it's just that it is very different from what I have seen of gaming.  

Regardless, I don't see substantial disagreement on this thread.  No one here thinks that the rules stand up and enforce themselves.  Following them is just a convention of behavior.  Some people may prefer to play by the letter of the rules, while some people will modify them.

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

I'm not certain how central this point is to the thread as a whole, but it's addressed to Chris (clehrich) - why would WoD (specifically Vampire) and AD&D have so much "grab"?

I've written about my own answer to this question multiple times - because I think both games happened upon an existing contemporary teen trend. The AD&D one was probably more based on luck; the WoD one was almost certainly more prescient.

In other words, for a brief time, the game-stuff (books, etc) became gear. And yeah, a bunch of unfamiliar faces showed up in the stores and bought armloads of books, staving off yet another Chapter 11 for a bunch of game stores that year. But in each case, it didn't last long.

Since then, as the three-tier system settled into place during the early 1980s, distribution drove the market rather than the customers. Distribution dogma said, "D&D sells," and so it was. (It's a very odd version of supply-side marketing, which probably has a name.) Same thing happened in the early 1990s - any sale of a WoD book reinforces the prevailing dogma that "White Wolf sells," and the guy re-orders every damn available text.

So don't fall into the trap of thinking that a wall of White Wolf or TSR means "oh my, look at all that customer demand." You're looking at an artifact of a small, closed, and extremely non-reflective distribution system, whose members are certain they "know" what sells, regardless of empty slots where cool games once sat, and a proliferation of books collecting dust on their shelves.

In other words, not much "grab" after all. Not no grab, certainly, but not much.

Best,
Ron

[clehrich]

I'm with Ron on thinking we may be drifting, but I defer to Jay.

I don't entirely agree with you, Ron, about WW and TSR.  Everything you say factually seems right to me, certainly; I'm not denying that.  And I do think it fits very nicely with my rather brief experiences with WoD games.  But it strikes me that there is a disjuncture when it comes to AD&D.

You say that this happened by luck, and perhaps it did, but I do not think that this means we must ascribe the successes primarily to exterior factors.  I rather suspect that the texts themselves, and their manner of composition and presentation, had a significant role in their success.  After all, there were other games in the mid-70s, and some of them were quite successful, but none dominated the way D&D did.  I mean, even now a vast audience of people who do not play games and never did do, when asked about RPGs, immediately jump to "oh, Dungeons and Dragons, right?"

I have no conclusions to offer at the moment.  One of these days I plan to sit down and pore over those texts very, very closely.  I'm hoping that others with a deeper knowledge of those specific texts might offer suggestions for how they did it.  Because there really is something in the books that clicked.  I'm damn sure of it, even though I cannot at the moment prove it.

[M. J. Young]

There seems to be a mix up between "This text has authority that I grant it" and "This text has (intrinsic) authority that it then grants to me"

The latter is incorrect.

I think you miss a point here. Sure, you're absolutely correct that the text has authority because the players grant it; but the players grant that authority the moment they say, "We want to play D&D." To play D&D, you check the authorities on how D&D is played, and those authorities are the rule books.

It's not any different in that regard from playing Monopoly. You get out the board and you read the rules, and you recognize that the rules are the authority on how to play Monopoly. Maybe you invoke that common house rule about free parking getting the money in the pot--but if you do, you acknowledge that this is not a rule garnered from the authority of the rules, but one agreed upon as part of play here.

In exactly the same way, when you say you want to play Multiverser, you're saying you want to play the kind of game that is derived from following the Multiverser rules, and thus in doing so you give those rules authority--they define what it means to play Multiverser. You recognize that to the degree that you follow those rules, you're playing that game, and to the degree that you're not following those rules, you're varying from the game.

That is all that is meant by saying the rules have authority: they define what it means to play the game as written. To the degree that you intend to play the game as written, the rules are the authority that tells you how to do that. If you want to make Nestle Toll House Cookies, you follow the recipe on the package; if you don't, you can make good chocolate chip cookies, but they're not Toll House Cookies, because the authority that defines what Toll House Cookies are is that recipe. The authority that defines what D&D play is is that rule book.

That's all.

--M. J. Young