Roll to Break the Rules

[Callan S.]

Could you also roll for "break the rule" to remove the rule-breaking-roll-rule? Of course that would be against the role of the players as rebels, but what if they really are so rebellious to remove their ability of being a rebel just to prove a point?

Never have I witnessed such pure hubris.

On the flip side, there's a kind of hubris in avoiding thinking along these lines and considering actually doing them. A hubris as in the presumed certainty that one just doesn't do these things.

[Simon C]

I'm kind of disappointed by the limited scope of your rule-changing rules.  It seems to be limiting players to only changing rules that are "safe", making sure that the core of the game, and the GM's authority, goes unchallenged.  Screw that!  The fun for this game I think is the fun of changing things, and not knowing what the results may be.  I want to see scope for crazy, ridiculous rules.  I want more backwards centaurs!

I think the best way to achieve this is with a very limited initial set of rules.  Throw out your ideas about dice rolling.  You want a barely functional stub of system.  I'm going to digress here to talk about system:

System is the method by which players agree on what enters the shared imagined space of the game.  It's how you decide what's "real" in the game. 

Digression over.  I think all your system needs is something very basic like "The GM says what's going on in the world, the players say what's going on with their characters.  When those two things come into conflict, the GM can make up a rule to say what happens.  If the players don't like this rule, they can change it by X"

You might want to look at the game Universalis, which has rules for shaping the rules of the game using in-game resources.  I think that will open your eyes to the scope of what's possible.

[JoyWriter]

As they level up? Or instead of levelling up!

Levelling up, especially in recent D&D, just shifts around the same basic encounter structure bit by bit. What if the players get to change the rules and the GM gets to use bigger monsters that are more and more out of place? It's like a desperate GM hammering his players with big fat threats, but actually as the main point of the game!