Rules Lawyers Ruin Everything

"I always understood ruling not rules to mean a simpler rule set that didn't attempt to cover every single situation."

- ruprecht

This reader got me thinking that I needed a definition of "rulings not rules," so I went looking for one.  Stack exchange is usually a good source for things like that, but it failed me.  Reddit was all over the map.  The Alexandrian tackled this in 2009 and, as usual, failed to show any clarity, while making about two dozen assumptions that break his own argument.

But a very popular link on my google was John Wick Presents, for reasons unknown.  But the link was broken.  Thankfully, the page was cached and that sent me to this post by Tim Kask.  Obviously, getting closer to the source.

In the post, Kask waffles about for awhile before getting to his first key observation, about the halcyon days of good old 1974:

"We played 6 or 7 times a month for at least six months before any of the dozen or so players felt like buying a [rule] set of their own.  It was two months before anyone else bought dice.  The point?  You do not need a bookbag full of books to play Old School."

I know that sounds like a definitive argument for a lot of people, particularly coming from Kask.  But you don't need a glove or a bat or even a ball to play baseball. You can play it with your bare hands and a rock, if you so desire.  I'm sure people have in some parts of the world and have been just as happy.  Doesn't mean baseball should be played that way.

After saying this, Kask goes off on a considerable Vision Quest for a great many paragraphs, really milking his early days and dropping names like a hammer used by two-fingered man building a fence.  He chats vaguely about attempts to rope in D&D by the supplements, regurgitates a host of old saws (this was written in 2016, but Kask still hasn't gotten over things) and finally swings around the barn with this:

"TSR came to the conclusion that it was time to actually codify D&D; thus was Advanced Dungeons & Dragonsborn, and the death knell of the loosey-goosey, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants OS style of play. There were so many things we did not see coming, the most reprehensible of which is the rules-lawyer."

Kask is perfectly clear.  THIS never happened before the launch of AD&D.

At this point I could easily write a post about the irrational dread of rules lawyers, who are incredibly easy to manage by plainly quoting the rules, and playing by them, but I won't.  We'll go on dragging our ass through Kask's post.

"AD&D was a tarted-up, codified version of OD&D that would now compel everyone to play the same. Worse, it was now a whole hell of a lot less engaging to the imagination; everything could be found on a chart or table. OS, or OD&D if you will, is more mentally engaging and more challenging than all the subsequent editions, not less. It is also tons simpler to play."

There's simply no way to get around this argument.  Because it isn't an argument.  It is the prejudice of an old man bitching that he did not like being the "mid-wife" to AD&D, because it was not his game.  For the next series of paragraphs, Kask begins making the same arguments we've all heard dozens of times for why Old School (which is definitely before AD&D) is better than any sort of New School that has existed since 1979, for what amounts to sweeping statements without any sort of clarification beyond "because."  For a lot of people, reading this rant, I suppose it strikes home ... but mostly in the way that most political speeches do, where the politician doesn't actually say anything but it is easy to interpret your way, especially if you already consider yourself a member of the politician's party.

If you like Old School, however you define it, then I'm sure you do believe that other versions can't possibly have imagination, or that too many tables preclude "fun," or that your version was either simpler or more difficult [Kask calls O.S. both], or more nuanced or tons simpler [Kask calls O.S. both], or that other versions killed off O.S. or whatever.  Amazing that this man who was around in 1974, who is now writing this 42 years later, can still describe later versions of D&D "killing" O.S. gaming.  I don't think that word means what he thinks it means.

Sadly and unfortunately, Kask never actually gets around to his subject heading that D&D was about rulings, not rules.  I suppose we're supposed to see the truth through the text, like one of those puzzles where you look hard at the image until a whale pops out.  I was somewhat disheartened when I had to go back to the defunct John Wick website to discover out of what well he drew a sense of "rulings, not rules" from this piece.

Wick says,

"In summation, the author—a kindly gentleman named Tim Kask—talks about the earliest days of Dungeons & Dragons, and how the rulebook wasn’t a rulebook at all, but a list of example rulings. The difference, he argued, was that rulings gave the Dungeon Master freedom to improvise creatively while rules limited the DM’s ability to run the game. He lamented that later editions went to the side of rules vs rulings and the game has suffered ever since."

That is pretty generous.  Kask makes a lot of arguments about rules and boundaries, but I didn't find anything nearly as clear as the above statement.  Wick is the Kask whisperer.

Still, this is a pretty solid definition for what most people seem to think about rulings over rules.  We still don't have an argument, but we do have some profound hypotheses, that people seem to take on faith without any need to question.  And if we follow Wick's discussion further in the post (there's not much meat here but there's some), we can find the condemnation I made earlier this afternoon being touted as the most important feature of rulings ~ at least, the only one that Wick actually exposits.  Rulings are fast.  They save time.  They're fair, and they save time.  And that's all you'll ever need if you want to improvise and have fun ... followed by the usual yada yada.

Well, I beat on this earlier today so I'll forego it.  Let's talk about the two points Wick hypothesizes but doesn't feel inclined to support.

1.  Rulings give the DM freedom to improvise.

2.  Rules limit the DM's ability to run the game.

I see these all the time.  I've yet to see a single argument that attempts to prove either are true.  I do see the sort of waffling that Kask does on his post, which we're expected to accept as it comes from "on high," but I'm the sort of guy who would have argued vehemently with Einstein about that God playing dice with the universe crack, something which Einstein himself discredited before he died.  Authority cuts no ice with me ... which is a very good reason why I should never, ever, find myself in a room with the Queen of England.

Anyway, with the first point, I agree.  Rulings give the DM freedom to improvise.  But improvise what, exactly?  Sounds like it's an excellent opportunity to improvise bullshit out of a DM's ass.

A ruling is an authoritative decision or pronouncement.  The word originates specifically from a "determination by a judge or court on a point arising in the course of a trial or hearing."  It is not, as Kask says, "a loosey goosey thing," which is how he describes the era of D&D before the invocation of the 1st Edition.  Rulings are fixed impositions of rules, which is supposed to mean that once the judge has made a ruling, that ruling is now law.  It is the substance of precedent, in which once a ruling is made, the situation then becomes a case that may be taken as a rule in other cases.

If we take the above #1 statement literally, then the more rulings the DM makes, the less freedom the DM has to improvise as the campaign moves on.  I think that is how it should be.  When something new comes up, the DM should make a ruling.  And then, that rule should be recorded, by player and DM, as a standard by which all things that progress along that same line should be maintained.  And if another ruling is called for, that relates to an earlier ruling, then the earlier ruling should absolutely apply to the later ruling.  All rulings should function that way ~ and in everything other than D&D, they do.

But D&D is a special case, because in this case the word "ruling" does not mean what the English language says it means.  In fact, the word "ruling" in D&D means, "Whatever the fuck I think I want to do right now."  We do have a word in English for this.  We have quite a few words, actually: arbitrary, capricious, random, erratic, unpredictable, haphazard, unreasoned, unsupported, illogical, irrational, unjustifiable, wanton, descretionary, despotic, tyrannical, peremptory, autocratic, draconian and oppressive, just to name a few.

So let's quote #1 again, and this time let's use the right word.

1. Unrestrained power gives the DM freedom to improvise.

Excellent.  I'm glad we've cleared that up.

Looking at #2, I must admit that I agree with this one also.  Rules do limit the DM's ability to run the game.  But, which game?

Judging from a correct interpretation of #1, I would say that #2 definitely limits the DM's unrestrained power.  This is the purpose of rules.

A rule is a set of explicit or understood regulations or principles governing conduct within a particular activity or sphere.  The word originates from c. 1200, meant to describe a "principle or maxim governing conduct," a "formula to which conduct must be conformed."  Within such things as D&D, since the 1690s the word has come to mean a "regulation governing play of a game, etc."

Shamelessly stolen from TV Tropes.

Now, I realize that good old kindly gentleman Tim Kask fondly remembers a time when a dozen people would spew the game like so much shit in a pile, but unfortunately the real world rather interfeared when TSR decided to be a business, which required reorganizing all that manure into a rational system that people who weren't Kask's personal friends could get behind.  I was one of those non-personal friends of Kask, who notwithstanding the kindly gentleman's attitude towards the game I loved, found it extraordinarily Fantastic that the game included tons of tables, teaching me how to invent and improvise new tables, and tons of Wonderful details, enabling me to invent and improvise new details, etcetera, etcetera, as opposed to sitting around with my thumb up my ass for 42 years and still complaining that they changed my game and now I hate it.

But before I forget, let me stipulate again that these rules surrounding the tables and details I make up restrain my conduct as a DM.  Every regulation I invent further governs my play of the game, so that I don't do ridiculously autocratic, unreasoned, illogical, unjustifiable and arbitrary things while I play my game.  Because I think those things are Bad.  Call me silly, but ...

When I find myself playing any sort of a game with people who disparage the rules, whatever their role happens to be in that game, I get, well, uncomfortable.  Uncomfortable in a way that rings alarm bells in my head.  And where D&D is concerned, I begin to wonder just what is meant by running the game, if we're talking about running it without rules.

I don't think we're talking about the DM's ability to "run the game."  Run is a term meaning "manage," which in turn has an extended sense of "control or direct by administrative ability."  As such, managing anything without rules, or controlling or directing things without rules, is not really running a "game" in any sense that I want to take part in.

I think we mean something other than "run" the game.  I think we're really talking about guiding, steering, commanding, dominating, calling the tune, pulling the strings ~ or to put it in words my thesaurus won't, bending the players over the table and fucking them hard with a broom handle.

When someone talks about getting rid of the rules, they only ever mean one thing.  "I don't want to play by the rules.  I want to be the rules."  With that understanding, let's rewrite #2 in the way that people who argue this game style really mean it.

2.  Rules get in the way of MY ability to freely jack the players.

Ah, good.  Now we know what we stand for.

Of course, none of this seems to be the case when we use the nice, friendly language that Wick uses, or that most people use when they talk about this subject.  Nice, friendly language is harmless, isn't it?  I mean, if we describe raping and pillaging the country by calling it a "tax cut" for the "middle class," that's certainly harmless.  We especially want to use the word "separating" when we describe families at the border, not "imprisoning illegally," or "incarcerating innocent people," do we?  NO.  We want to use nice, friendly language.  We want to call things, "solutions."  Solutions are good things.  Everyone likes a solution.  We need to have more solutions.  Right?

So if we casually say that "rules" are bad, and "rulings" are perfectly fine, despite the fact that both are from the same root word and that neither mean in the sentence what the user actually intends, everyone is just fine with that.  Because we want to "improvise," right?  Improvise is a good, non-specific, non-defined word that sounds like we really need it and that wow, we sure want to do whatever lets us do more of that, right?  And at the same time, we all hate "rules," don't we?  My, yes.  Rules suck.  Just so long as we're talking about meaningless, unimportant game rules that get in the way of fun, because fun is a really great word.

Yes, by golly gee whiz, fun is the best.  And rules suck.  All that having to do stuff just because it's a game and stuff.  Fuck, fun and games doesn't need rules, does it?  Jeez, if all those rules lawyers would just stop complaining about the DM acting autocratically and abusively while participating in a social pastime, everyone would sure have a lot more fun, wouldn't they?

Those stupid rules lawyers, always expecting people to act fairly.  They ruin everything.