My Life As A Gamer: Errors In RPGs (Part Four)- Rule of Man, Not Rule of Law

(Editorial Note: Monday's post is here and Tuesday's is here, and yesterday's is here.)

This is not the law.

The Error: Overstepping The Role of the Referee

Part-and-parcel of the argument for tabletop role-playing games as a medium of narrative is that the one in charge of administering the game and adjudicating player actions must also take the active role of guaranteeing that narrative logic prevails. This, by necessity, means usurping the authority of the rules and making himself the law of the game and not the rules themselves.

Justified commonly as "Rule of Cool", and argued as "But the rules can't cover everything!" what actually happens is that the usurping Referee becomes a petty tyrant. The game is now "Guess what the tyrant is thinking" and not whatever it is that players signed on for.

Combined with our previous errors, and you have the environment for all of the many videos done by channels like Neckbeardia, CritCrab, and many others about these aberrant games run by these immature or aberrant people using this error in particular--down to aping Judge Dredd "I am the law!"--to justify doing so.

It does not help at all that so many RPG designers and publishers wholly accept this error as normal and cite to justify publishing incomplete products, incompetently designed products, or more recently to justify predatory monetiation business models (in the form of "You can just rule it differently at your table").

Lost in the noise, but heard in testimonies repeated over the decades, is that one of the most common reasons for prospects to bound off the medium and hobby is because--unlike games of other sorts--the rules in the manuals are ignored, misunderstood if used at all, or outright abused to satisfy whatever outcome the petty tyrant wants.

Like it or not--and far too many do not, as a review of the online RPG discourse reveals, much to my dismay--there is only one remedy.

This is the law.

The Correction: Insist On Play By The Rules As Written Without Exception

The Referee needs to be put back into his box. His role, as it is no different with proper RPGs than it is from the wargames it descend from, is to arbitrate, adjudicate, and administer. The game is not what he says it is; the game is what the rules say it is.

The reason for this insistence is because the rules are--and here's where you can see the pattern emerging--a disinterested neutral party. They do not care, and they never will, and thus will not play favorites because they cannot. Tyrannical usurping Referees can, and often do, pick winners and losers for one excuse or another; "Muh Narrative" is merely the most common one these days.

By fostering and supporting mastery of the game's rules by all players, this simultaneously checks against such abuse while promoting the confidence of competent Referees through assurance that they do not bear the cognitive burden of keeping the game running smoothly by themselves.

By letting the rules do the work of deciding how things go down, the Referee can relax and allow players playing characters with conflicting agendas to drive the campaign because he need not be bothered to answer every little question (because the rules do that for him) or how the results will be received (because his hands are clean of that worry, having had no part it in other than adjudication).

By sticking to the rules as written, the campaign becomes internally consistent--inputs always match outputs--so players can think, plan, and act knowing that what worked today will work tomorrow- and if something goes wrong, that's a sign of potential trouble and not metagame fuckery.

This does not constrain the Referee from exercising practical creativity as required, and he will find that players handling all of the things (like hostile parties) results in a far more dynamic and engaging play experience for everyone- especially himself. By letting go of total control he finds the joy in the hobby that he sought all along,

This means that RPG designers and publishers cannot be allowed to continue pushing products that enable--in the manner that one says of someone doing this for addicts or other abusive or aberrant people--this error any further. Insist that RPGs be whole and complete products on release. Reduce the demand on the Referee to go outside the rules as much as is practical for an analog medium and a tabletop gameplay hobby- this is not a videogame-in-waiting (looking at you, Rolemaster) and make-your-own-game products are for designers and publishers, not end-users (looking at you, GURPS/HERO/et. al.).

We once called them "Referees". We should again.

On Friday I will not show how the errors synergize to create all the horrible gaming norms. There's decades of online postings all about all variations of those things. What we need is a vision about how the remedies synergize together, so come back for a vision of how things should be- and will be once we make this paradigm shift.