I'm splitting this off of Early Roleplaying because what I'd like to discuss seems to have more to do with theory than play. At the moment, my ideas are largely based on anecdotal evidence, but I'm hoping that people here can help elaborate on them a little.

Reading through descriptions of gaming experiences in the Early Roleplaying thread as well as in Ron's A Hard Look at Dungeons & Dragons, I'm wondering whether it would be useful to describe gamers' relationships with the text of early games in terms of the interpretive strategies that surround scripture. In both cases, individuals are faced with texts that they consider authoritative but that are also incomplete and often ambiguous. Because of the value placed on the texts, however, there develops a sense that they shouldn't be incomplete or ambiguous -- any gaps that exist must be able to be bridged through the proper interpretive tools.

While I like the Cargo Cults metaphor to describe the ways in which gamers constructed their games out of fragmentary texts, I wonder if those ways could also be described by comparing them to the processes of interpretation that eventually formed the Talmud. Rabbis worked from a set of basic guidelines for dealing with scripture: general rules could be extrapolated from specific ones, phrases could be compared across the text or contextualized in order to unpack their meaning, and so on. Gradually, an entire body of interpretations develops, and those interpretations in turn generate their own commentaries.

Looking at the "Sage Advice" column in Dragon magazine, or rules debates on gaming forums, leads me to think that the same basic strategies are still in effect. Not only that, but the cultures of some games (D&D in particular, but others as well) seem to treat conversations about interpretation as a valuable part of the entire gaming experience: "rules gurus" of different sort acquire a particular status within the community, not only because they've memorized rules, but because they can deal creatively with the incompleteness of the text without drawing attention to that incompleteness. "The answers are all there," they seem to say, "if you know how to look for them."

At the same time, there seems to be a second kind of response to texts, one that resembles a sort of theodicy in that it tries to answer the question of why the game's rules are the way they are. I haven't thought as much about this part, but at first glance, the answers appear to be dogmatic (e.g., "For game balance" or "It's a fantasy world") or elaborate (like many of the conversations here on the Forge) depending on the community.

For a concrete example of the dogmatic approach, here's an excerpt from the forums for Gygax's game, Lejendary Adventure. The poster had asked why humans and non-humans get a different number of skills, and received this reply:

Why anything, though? ... Do you ask why Tic Tac Toe uses X's and O's? Why is chess played with 16 pieces per side on an 8x8 board? Why do Elf's have pointy ears? Why do wizards wear robes? When it comes to games and when it comes to fantasy, you have to be willing to accept things without asking why.

Alan, I think that's an excellent observation. You will probably find similar parallels in any endeavor where a body of canon gets established, be it literary, poetry, theater, etc.

A big factor I think is that the development of canon also tends to lead to the development of turf (for better or worse). As you point out with game rules, a big part of becoming a master of the canon is the prestige / authority that comes from being so acknowledge. But as soon as that happens the individual then has a vested interest in protecting their position as an acknowledged subject expert (their turf)...and that's when you start heading down the road to dogma.

Alan wrote: At the same time, there seems to be a second kind of response to texts, one that resembles a sort of theodicy in that it tries to answer the question of why the game's rules are the way they are. I haven't thought as much about this part, but at first glance, the answers appear to be dogmatic (e.g., "For game balance" or "It's a fantasy world") or elaborate (like many of the conversations here on the Forge) depending on the community.

On the one hand, this is an important phenomenon. It's not an accident that 'rules lawyering' is one of your four stats in the card game Hack. The Cargo Cult phase is how the game was built, but many texts, above all the original AD&D books, pushed more and more gamers towards recondite rules interpretation as a way to 'win' a given scene. (I think some of the early hatred of 'metagaming' actually comes from the annoyance of endless rules bickering).

You can't say it wasn't there from the beginning though. "The spell description doesn't say I can't create a Wall of Stone above their heads in midair!"

On the other hand, though, I never enjoyed rules lawyering in RPGs. Give me the cargo cult and the creation-of-rules-through-bricolage-and-play any day; once it reaches the theology stage everything goes to hell and the fun gets sucked out like a whirlpool. That's totally a statement of personal preference, though, and I can even imagine a game (maybe better an open-ended boardgame than an RPG) designed specifically to make rules lawyering fun: say a metarule that says you have to invoke rules to get certain things, and then lots of weird arcane rules in a book that trump each other in various ways. It would be like Scrabble, you would cite rules and people would have to challenge you (with the rulebook closed) if they didn't want to let you do whatever you wanted.

---------

I guess in the first part of this post I was dealing with the process of forming these interpretations in play, which I call rules lawyering, and which I find to be, in general, a drag. But re-reading the original post I also see the idea of the 'body of accepted interpretations', and forming these is an interesting part of communal consensus in open-ended games. For instance: in our D&D games there was no raise dead after about 1980 (since it 'sucked all meaning out of play', we thought). Also, there were no 'magic item shops' save maybe the odd old wizard's tower where he might have a scroll or three if you paid him enough - magic was rare. Lots of stuff like this.

I think that part of what's driving C&C and the general resurgence of older D&D stuff and play (the part that's not just nostalgia) is that lots of the people playing went to lots of work to get this stuff ironed out in their own games (their local Rabbinate certified certain things as kosher within their own community) and they don't want to give up that social contract they were once part of, that took so much work to form. It was hard work, interpreting the Law, when the Law was so vague to begin with - see Kafka's Trial and Castle - and having done all that work the last thing we want to do is give it up just because some designer understands mechanics from the top down better than we did.

Darn, having a baby makes it hard to polish posts. Gotta go.

I'm going to suggest something a bit strange: Real life narrativism as design.

Normal, in game narrativism is where you imply your morality on the world. You decide, from a difficult choice, what your PC believes in. And it's very fun to do so, for a whole lot of reasons.

Chris wrote: Now the thing is, Douglas is talking about what sorts of structural principles informed (not perhaps consciously) the folks who constructed Leviticus. But when you look at later Talmudic and other commentaries, this is not at all the principle they derive. The assumption made by commentators is that there must be an ethical principle at work here, and that it must be seamless in that regard. So they completely reinterpret the text to fit that model.

clehrich wrote: Thus the text becomes canonical scripture: we don't need to add anything, because it's complete; what we have just added we claim is not an addition but merely an explication of what was already there. This is of course the rhetoric of the supplement, the idea that you add to a text to prove that you didn't need to add anything, and then conceal from yourself that you have added something.

As originally conceived, D & D was limited in scope only by the imagination and devotion of Dungeon Masters everywhere. The supplements have fulfilled the need for fresh ideas and additional stimulation. But somewhere along the line, D & D lost some of its flavor, and began to become predictable. This came about as a result of the proliferation of rule sets; while this was great for us as a company, it was tough on the DM. When all the players had all of the rules in front of them, it became next to impossible to beguile them into danger or mischief.

Everyone knows Corellon Larethian and the other nonhuman deities from the Player's Handbook. Now, however, you can introduce some new deities to your campaign...

You'll keep your players guessing with the catfolk, who first appeared in the Miniatures Handbook...

I had another thought on the narrativist design and wanted to extend it. It's in relation to the phrase "The GM's word is law!" or similar.

Apart from some of the other things it represents when some games stipulate it, I'm wondering if this isn't so much a proclamation, but a plea. It's a social contract submission that "The GM shalt suffer no force!".

I'm talking typhoid mary style force. That the GM's descision on how something works should be pretty damn sacrosanct, like a narrativist players choice. I shouldn't even say it's 'like' a narrativist choice...it is a themeatic descision. Basically the theme is 'if you were in charge, could you make a better world?'. I mean, I'm sure you could have a narrativist game about gods and their having to make difficult descisions in creating the world (the implications for their flocks making these difficult choices). If that's a valid nar game (shoot me down if it isn't), what about when the GM decides how something works in the game world? In this case it's not a concern about an imaginary flock, but actual people and how they will react (in addition to the other concern I outlined before).

It's interesting there; The players are a difficulty factor in the narrativist choice before the choice is made. But after the choice is made, their trying to influence stuff toward a better story (in relation to the choice) is typhoid mary syndrome. The GM's nar choice needs to be upheld or it just sucks for him.

I'd really like some input on this. Like with that nar god game I mentioned...how is making choices in that much different from making choice about the world as a GM and the difficulty in that question?

I am urging some caution here. The stakes for religion are most of the time existential, while the stakes in gaming are at best economical (if you want to continue to sell books).

Also, while I am much in symathy with deconstruction, I have much difficulty with the use of a decontructive gesture emplyed in these critiques of reolepaying rules text. Because today, there is no such thing as trying to construct the perfect system. Thus, todays designers are not deceiving themselves as to wether something is an addition/supplement or not. There is no perpetual deferral of of complete perfection. My Dungeaon Masters Guide clearly states that no system can encompass everything.

In my very humble opinion, the comparison of Mr. Kask's introduction to some marketing blurb on a Website seems to me not very fair. It would be better to compare introductions. This further opens the question to not confound opinions of authors, publisher marketimg blurb writers and forum
posters, who might take the texts as more authorative than they are written.

I suggest that accessories are published for different reasons that the establishment of a perfect canon. Insread most authors revel in the gaps
left by any system possible. That is why there can always be another book on the topic, and the publishing explosion for d20 supports this notion.
As to mr. kask's remark, I think he is referring more to the fact that gamist players memorized all the rules and thus would know to interpret
everything that what done by the book. Even here, I cannot see that the author thinks "Eldritch Wizardry" would solve that problem once and for all.
In addition, as log as we're talking commercial RPGs, it's "publish or perish". It is this that some marketing rhetoric is trying to conceal, not
aspirations of metaphysical perfection pursued by game designers.

After all this, I did not find your thoughts without merit, but more as a commentary to a social phenomenon engendered by the publication of certain texts than as that you found something in the texts that needed exposition for a deeper understanding.

Heh. I really like this metaphor. In particular, I like the idea that the rules seemed to suggest a sense of completeness and a lack of ambiguity, but it obviously wasn't (and possibly couldn't be) the case.

From this situation two types of GMs arose; those who sort to solve the problem of ambiguity through better design (the simulation priests) and those who sort to ride the storm of inconsistency through storytelling (the narrative wizards).

Actually, let's make it three. There were those who accepted the inconsistencies, ambiguity and imbalances and sought to manipulate them in a imaginative way (the gamist mystics). These were typically players rather than GMs however.

In a sense the third group were probably the inspiration for the first and second... I still remember when as a young GM a player showed me the power of a Multispell Disruption Matrix... good lord that was devastating...

Three cheers to imaginative gamist players!

sophist wrote: Also, while I am much in symathy with deconstruction, I have much difficulty with the use of a decontructive gesture emplyed in these critiques of reolepaying rules text. Because today, there is no such thing as trying to construct the perfect system. Thus, todays designers are not deceiving themselves as to wether something is an addition/supplement or not. There is no perpetual deferral of of complete perfection. My Dungeaon Masters Guide clearly states that no system can encompass everything.

After all this, I did not find your thoughts without merit, but more as a commentary to a social phenomenon engendered by the publication of certain texts than as that you found something in the texts that needed exposition for a deeper understanding.

Hackmaster is usefully cited as working to resolve a number of issues that have been brought up here.

The eight-volume Hacklopedia, with twenty varieties each of all familiar monsters, effectively makes it both cost- and time-prohibitive for all but the most insane players to memorize everything in those books. (3e actually accomplishes the same thing more elegantly, by letting you jack up hit dice and/or add class levels to every kind of creature. The downside of the 3e approach though is that your tenth level adventures sometimes look like your first level adventures did, except they're level 5/5/2 fighter/rogue/blackguard goblins instead of level 1 warrior goblins.)

The Hackmaster rules also contain explicit text to the effect that there are no contradictions in the rules, and that if you're seeing them it merely indicates a lack of understanding on your part. I don't know if EGG ever said anything quite like this back in the early days, but one sometimes had the sense that something like this was being claimed.

What's especially funny about this in the Hackmaster case is that there are several rules that are deliberately left incomplete and/or incorrect in the player's handbook - and, of course, if the player cites the correct rule from the GMG, he is immediately docked honor and experience for 'cheating'.

So anyway, HM at once takes advantage of the Kask point and parodizes the scripture point, but in both cases is hearkening back to what David Kenzer, Jolly Blackburn, and 'the gang at Hard 8' perceived as features of early play.

Oh yeah, here's a thought. Maybe the 'scriptural' approach to RPGs is just a straightforward response to being traumatized by poorly written, incomplete, and self-contradictory rules-texts. "But, we were having fun, a minute ago. Surely, these rules contain the solutions to these problems. Surely these seemingly intelligent men can't have missed such an obvious problem..."

If I were a less charitable man, I might draw an analogy to religious texts, and suggest that the scriptural approach to them is also a straightforward response to being traumatized by poorly written, incomplete, and self-contradictory rules-texts, except there the stakes are higher, because it's not perceived as 'just a game'. And then I might go on to talk about Kafka some more. But being a charitable sort, I'll pass on the opportunity.

Damn, though, I wish Hackmaster was not such a nightmare in terms of handling time, because I'd play it some more if it was functional.

Sean wrote: Damn, though, I wish Hackmaster was not such a nightmare in terms of handling time, because I'd play it some more if it was functional.

sophist wrote: I am urging some caution here. The stakes for religion are most of the time existential, while the stakes in gaming are at best economical (if you want to continue to sell books).

(T)oday, there is no such thing as trying to construct the perfect system. Thus, todays designers are not deceiving themselves as to wether something is an addition/supplement or not.

Alan -

I was actually part of the Necromancer Games design team for the new Judges Guild stuff. I didn't really wind up doing that much except put on my old fogey hat, tell the youngsters what the feel was like, though I did get credited in the Wilderlands boxed set and on the Caverns of Thracia module retread.

One bit of actual design I did was the fixed-location encounters for Map 2 (Barbarian Altanis), though, and I did sometimes have this feeling like it was all going wrong. I mean, I think some of my ideas were cool-for-D&D - I wrote a wererat bard with illusion spells setting up the party with hallucinatory terrain, and goblins on worgs, and a weird techno-artifact, and vampire berserkers, and some other stuff - but the whole thing that was cool about the ORIGINAL wilderlands is that everyone got to fill quirky tidbits and tactics and connections for themselves from these weird little sentences of terse description. Now it's just going to be a Wilderness supplement - a pretty big and cool one, maybe, but it's all going to be 'done' for the people reading it in a way that it wasn't quite for us. I mean, it's a big world, and there's still a lot of chance for improvisation ("what if these guys over here know that dragon over there...") - it's not like a damn Dragonlance adventure or anything. It's still a setting for you to do what you want with. But still. Not just endless lines of text to riff off.

Of course, riffing is time-prohibitive in 3e anyway, which is why I stopped playing it a while back. So I'm not really sure an old-style supplement would be functional for a game where it actually matters how many ranks of Spot a Dire Flumph has. And I will say that the Necromancer people and the design team had a keen appreciation of the old-school issues, and that we did the best we could to try to convey the old feel with the kind of detail necessary to sell a product to current 3.x players. But ultimately I just think the two things are really different.

Anyway, returning you to scriptural interpretation discussion...

the clarifications in your posts make your theory more likely to me than before.
recstricting it to a rhetoric of certain texts, especially older ones, reminded me
of some examples, too.

But a thought came up right then: what if this rhetric structure was demanded by what
the text tries to do? if it does not *promise* from the outset that you can use the
rules without constant amendment, why use them in the first place? One could see here
a structural similarity to scripture, which needs to promise that it can be a complete
guide for your life.

I am not suggesting here that a text is person or something like that, but about basic
performative properties in language that influence the rhetirc it needs to employ.
Because we want to stick on topic here, I cannot delve further into that, but I think
I can deduce from your posts that you know what I am getting at here.

I call it the rhetoric of promise here (rather than deferral) because I want to interpret
this rhetoric in a more positive way then in the framework of eschatology. It might be
that very promise that allows us to interpret a whole fictional world with a limited system.

At the same time, a basic premise of roleplaying - that you can do anything within the
bounds of verisimilitude -, must subvert that very promise. That is why (if you follow
lev's terminology) simulationists will always need yet another supplement. This subversion
led to the profilation of genre basesd systems etc.etc.
cOmpare this to the needed supplementary interpretaions of the e.g. the bible on cloning.

So in my mind there is both - a scriptural aspect in rpg rules text and its subversion,
and this subersion is reflected my *MOST* authors today. I would even suppose that this

Sean wrote:
The Hackmaster rules also contain explicit text to the effect that there are no contradictions in the rules, and that if you're seeing them it merely indicates a lack of understanding on your part.

I like the term "rhetoric of promise" and have a proposition for how it comes about from the requirements of the text.

In early RPG design, the idea was self-consciously new, and had to be explained to the reader. So the author must necessarily adopt the stance of an expert explaining to a novice, and this places demands on the phraseology employed. In most cases of RPG rules the language is didactic, and often structured to go from simple concepts to complex ones.

IMO this remains a feature of most modern text, in large part becuase of the subtle nature of RPG. It's hard to read the rules until you "get" the form of play, a fact echoed by the dictum to conceptualising the mode of actual play before setting out on mechanical design. Board games by contrast are able to assume that the mode of play is largely known, and often assume you already have the components out in front of you or have inspected them already. By contrast RPG tends to need to explain the Why of every strructure. And so modern texts still often begin with a "what is RPG" section because it is necessary to be sure that the reader understands enough to comprehend the remainder of the text.

Combine that with the cargo cult, and the prestige of the published author, and I think its easy to see that in the absence of God, Gygax had to do.

On a side note about board games: I recently played a game called cranium. The guy who ran it (decided to run it, rather than players possing questions to each other as per the rules), had us roll the dice before our turn and if we got the question right we rolled again, and kept doing so till we got it wrong.

On reading the rules I tried to note to him 'I don't think you keep getting turns', to which I got a quick 'Well, whats the point of correctly answering then?' without any pause for further negotation.

I'd decided to play because I wanted some more board game experience to broaden myself. I was not dissapointed...the social structure and rules interpretation was highly reminicent of early roleplaying sessions. (on a side note, your supposed to roll after your turn in that game and you do so when you get a question right...ie, that's your reward).

So in regards to contra's board game note...actually, I think some people just like to make it up. It's perhaps not all that hard to 'get' the form of play the book suggests...instead it's easier for people who like doing this to just do their own thing with it. To bend it their way. They'll do it with a board game and hell, RPG's are far more ripe for this sort of thing.

This is just a short update to let people who are interested know that I'm still dealing with the issues raised in this thread. I've been browsing through older gaming material and, in order to narrow down the topic, focusing on what Gygax has had to say in the past about rules and their interpretation.

My, he has a lot to say. There's next to nothing in the original D&D books themselves, so I'm working my way through his columns in old Dragon magazines, as well as looking at his advice on rules from later works -- Dangerous Journeys, his two books of advice on roleplaying (Role-playing Mastery and Master of the Game), Lejendary Adventure, and a few articles from Lejends magazine. While it's clear that his attitudes change over time, there does seem to be a certain consistency to them.

This passage from Role-playing Mastery seems to sum up his views on how to approach rules quite well, and is also, I believe, appropriate for a conversation about rules as scripture:

If the reader is forced to begin with inadequate material, he must spend time and effort understanding the bases for the structure and devising logical corollaries. Where voluminous rules exist, then the reader must absorb them. Both cases require patience and understanding, and the understanding extends not only to the written rules but to what lies between the lines as well. This is the spirit of the game. Spirit is evident in every RPG. To identify the spirit of the game, you must know what the game rules say, be able to absorb this information, and then interpret what the rules imply or state about the spirit that underlies them.... The spirit of an RPG pervades all the statistics, mechanics, and descriptions that make up the actual rules; it is everywhere and nowhere in particular at the same time. (p. 26)

I find this thread both highly satisfying and personally amusing, in that it was Gaming that led me to study Rabbinical Hermeneutics (by providing conceptual metaphors that allowed me to by-pass the highly intellectual Marxian agnosticism I was raised with), and Rabbinical Hermeneutics and comparative religion that led me to back Game Design (by developing mental habituation to the practice of analytic rational, non-rational and trans-rational approaches related to comparing, deconstructing, and synthesising superficially contradictory zeitgeist and weltanshaung reductio et coaguli).

phew. lemme take a breath after that stream of BS.

OK, let me pile it a bit deeper: (wade through it, it gets good fast)

Briefly and much over-simplified : Rabbinical Hermeneutics is broadly divided into four streams of textual analytic strategy summarized in the mnemonic acronym 'PaRDeS'. This stands for "P'shat" , "Remez", "Drosh", and "S'od".

"P'SHaT" refers to the plain & simple, straight-forward and unexpansive interpretation of a given text (what an uneducated person would be assumed to understand at a preliminary reading/recitation). Thus: _It is roughly equivalent to Gamism in the GNS model_. "What Must We Do?"

'ReMeZ' is related to intertextual cross analysis, or "rules lawyering" (in a non-perjorative sense of course). "Why Must We Do It?"

"DRoSH" refers to an expansive cross-correlation of a text with a _real-world_ example, usually in homiletic form "How Should We Do It?"

(The collected P'ShaT and ReMez interpretations make up the Mishnah, and the collected DRoSH interpretations make up the Midrash. Mishnah + Midrash= the Talmud.)


and "S'oD"...ah, yes. S'od.

S'od is the Way of Understanding: " ...but...WHY?"

Thus: PaRDeS is the equivalent of Practical MetaGame Design, Analysis and Ecstatic Play.

I should also mention all four of these methodologies have systematic sub-methodologies, and that _none_ of them are given pre-eminence (...except perhaps S'oD... among the ChaSiDiM ;P)
but rather are viewed as simultaneously valid _even if they appear to be contradictory_

sophist wrote: I am urging some caution here. The stakes for religion are most of the time existential, while the stakes in gaming are at best economical (if you want to continue to sell books).

Alan McVey wrote: I should make my own biases clear here: I'm an academic, and my field is religious studies. That means that I tend, like Chris, to look at texts through a particular set of lenses, and to use comparisons from the material and methods with which I am most familiar.

Alan McVey wrote: (T)oday, there is no such thing as trying to construct the perfect system. Thus, todays designers are not deceiving themselves as to whether something is an addition/supplement or not.

Alan McVey wrote: Once the text is out there, it's up to the readers to decide how they're going to interpret it; there may be an implied reader discernable from the text, but there will also be readers who resist the imposition of certain interpretations.

Alan McVey wrote: what I'm interested in is why and how certain strategies of reading rules developed, and what effect they might have had on the ways of playing games and of creating them between the mid-'70s and now.

Alan McVey wrote: I tend to agree with you that game-designers today tend not to present their work as complete (or even absolutely authoritative), but I wonder if that itself isn't a reaction against an earlier tendency to present games in just that way..

Alan McVey wrote:
Lev -- I've been wondering about whether you could make divisions in a way similar to what you've done with respect to other responses to gaps in the rules. "It's realistic," "it's part of the genre," and "it's for game balance" seem to match up fairly well with your priests, wizards, and mystics.

wrote: uote>Alan McVey wrote: ... focusing on what Gygax has had to say in the past about rules and their interpretation. My, he has a lot to say.... While it's clear that his attitudes change over time, there does seem to be a certain consistency to them...This passage from Role-playing Mastery seems to sum up his views...
Might I suggest that if Gycax was Moses (and thus Arneson was Aaron) that would make Steve Jackson a candidate for Jeremiah. I have been reviewing his articles in the 'Space Gamer' after the release of 'The Fantasy Trip' , and his accounts of the dialogue of cross-pollinizating Idea exchange with other 2nd gen designers such as Paul Chadwick & Greg Stafford led to a foment of ferment of RPG exegesis. The reason SJ gets the nod is that he _wrote it all down_.

Alan McVey wrote:

If the reader is forced to begin with inadequate material, he must spend time and effort understanding the bases for the structure and devising logical corollaries. Where voluminous rules exist, then the reader must absorb them. Both cases require patience and understanding, and the understanding extends not only to the written rules but to what lies between the lines as well. This is the spirit of the game. Spirit is evident in every RPG. To identify the spirit of the game, you must know what the game rules say, be able to absorb this information, and then interpret what the rules imply or state about the spirit that underlies them.... The spirit of an RPG pervades all the statistics, mechanics, and descriptions that make up the actual rules; it is everywhere and nowhere in particular at the same time. (p. 26)

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quot;Alan McVey"St. Paul would be proud.

Not to mention the Maimonides, Machmonides, and the Lubavitcher Rebbe!!

In fact: if you substitute [ religious text {X} ] in the statement for the term [ RPG ] you have as good an explanation as has ever been promulgated by Any Romantic Organicist or Mystic from Lao Tzu to Ram Das!!

We're having too much fun with this :P