"Rulings not Rules" and Insufficient Design

Or: Pitfalls when designing for the OSR. (reupload)

So I've been considering many aspects of design as I delve back into the OSR (where I cut my teeth as a kid playing ttrpgs, but where I have not been for over a decade and a half), and I've been met with many catchy lingo phrases touted religiously by long-time players. I want to address one of them today: "Rulings not Rules.".

The phrase, at least according to cursory research, originates from Matthew J. Finch's excellent work, "A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming", where he describes it as the first "Zen Moment" that can make OSR-style TTRPG click for players. The thesis he sets forth is that the rulesets of old games were intentionally left sparse so as to exclusively be a resource for the GM, an incomplete collection from which to create your own rulings in the moment using some combination of "common sense" and die rolls.

Further, he (and many others) elaborate that in this lack, player engagement with the world is deepened; without a skill to roll for "Disarm Trap", everyone is encouraged to interact with and "solve" the trap as they would were they really there. See Brooks Dailey's "The Danger of Skills" for an excellent breakdown of this design outcome separate from Finch's work- I'm perpetually left considering and reconsidering the phrase "Before the addition of the Thief, everyone was the thief." from that blog post.

But I digress- I've discovered, over the years, that this thesis is immensely successful and informative, foundational really to an entire, rewarding style of play. But I do also find, to my taste as someone re-entering this older style of play, that many games seem to take its words too literally, or misunderstand the core message it's trying to impart.

If the fundamental idea is that a rule restricts the players, I have found some to take this message to mean that as few rules should exist as possible. That rules are a detriment to a game, and only the barest essentials should be provided. And I find, increasingly, frustration with this attitude. Rules are not a nuisance to be excised from the hobby, they are a tool to be carefully considered and wielded, a fine-honed blade that can sculpt the experiental clay of the player experience before the kiln firing of publication.

Let's take some unnamed examples, because I feel as certain that this post will be receieved extremely poorly by some as I do that my conclusion is an important one to some others:

1. Falling is codified in the rules. If you fall X amount of distance, you take some calculable, consistent amount of damage.
2. Being prone is codified in the rules. If you are tripped or otherwise fall over, you suffer some number of penalties and others gain some number of advantages.
3. Your ability to disarm traps is codified in the rules. It's a talent that can be practiced, perfected, and invoked, and it has a consistent outcome, whether chance-based or otherwise.
4. Your ability to carry things as an adventurer is codified in the rules. You can hold only so many things at once, and you cannot hold any more than that.

Now, one of these should stand out to those with a savvy eye for design. Examples 1, 2, and 4 are all foundational aspects of the game system, things that shape how the world responds to being interacted with. Example 3, on the other hand, is a rule creating interaction with the world, it decides how a player can interact with traps. If you can't disarm traps, you can't disarm traps. But a fall is always a fall.

In Beau Rancourt's "On Pathfinder (and most TTRPG) Combat Being A Separate Game" (and sorry for the long quote), they state of rules-heavy (sub-)systems "This allows players to reason about the game and make future plans without the sense that they're playing Calvinball. It allows the GM to be fair and consistent when the PCs' lives are on the line. It encourages and rewards system mastery for the folks who seek that (since now there's a coherent system to master).".
I would extend this out into interactions with the world- the standard methods through which the world responds to players (the occasional necessities (and unrepresentable through player reasoning) of swimming, climbing, picking locks, falling, and especially combat should be heavily codified and reliable.

Not in such a way that creative engagement is espoused, or that overcodification becomes a problem (as per Arnold Kemp's ""Rulings not Rules" is Insufficient", where they say "[If I've written] two pages of rules on how to attack tiny animals in your stomach, I've codified the acceptable options and excluded more esoteric solutions."; it takes a delicate hand, yes, but I'd argue a not-too-subjective line of where is "too much" or "too little" to make that decision, and I think I can offer a few considerations and a few pointers to internalise when designing your systems.

1. If the thing is a result of the world's response to players, it should be a rule. Falling damage should be a consistent rule (though how individual players attempt, or don't, to mitigate such damage may not be).
2. If the thing is reliable in how it can be handled, it should be a rule. How swimming does or doesn't impede the movement or survival of characters, dependent or not on their gear varying by your level of simulationism, should be a consistent rule.
3. If the thing cannot reasonably be expected of a player, it should be a rule. Lockpicking is perhaps the most obvious example of this because short of pulling out a real lock and picks and asking the player to solve it, there is no way to reason your way through it. Instead, we either set time, roll dice, or require certain tools.
4. Finally, if the thing is a risk the players can consistently encounter, it should be a rule. This is best exemplified in combat, and re-referencing Rancourt's words above, how ensuring this engagement is consistent creates a game that is fair.
How individual players may attempt to interact with, subvert, or succumb to catastrophe within these rules remains a viable avenue of expression, but giving a foundation off which to build pitches the onus onto the players and takes an immense load off of the GM. Rather than someone falling into the waves and the GM having to come up on the spot with some variation on "slower movement", "ditch some things or drown", "you just drown", or "test [attribute] to see what happens", a decision that may end up needing revision or reminding down the road, the decisionmaking is immediately in the players' court; they know the risks at stake, and must imagine a way out of them.

There are pitfalls to this as well though, and while I won't itemise them I will detail my favoured solution as of now: While a rule should create a reliable response from the world, it should also allow for the player to engage in many different avenues. In this way, skills themselves become detestable, but attributes remain important tools, alongside some "other method" of specialisation (without some way to differentiate yourself from your companions, you end up gaming exclusively as players, not characters. perhaps your will to impede or differentiate from yourself through roleplay is stronger than mine, but i prefer when the system can support that all its own).
Joshua McCrowell's His Majesty the Worm, I think, exemplifies the virtues I've been espousing quite succinctly. Each character has four Attibutes, which are the simple, physiologically-bound modifiers that are added to many "tests" (the game's term for checks). Each character then also has three Motifs, which are two-word descriptors of your character or their past experiences (say Zen Wizard, Naughty Acrobat, and Fanatical Scribe). These Motifs provide an additional bonus on tests to represent your experiences and specialties.
In this way, the virtues of skills (the ability to express specialisation, the shaping of a character with history or talents, nudging towards certain handlings of tasks) survive, with their pitfalls rotting off into the void.

In short, I find that games that provide a reliable route through which the GM can adjudicate as little as possible on the standard things, saving their mind and energy for the inventive and the clever, for the players' imaginative solutions, rather than their mundane actions, have far more virtue on both sides of the screen than those that expect for every table to imagine their own guidelines for swimming, for falling, and for picking locks. I hope to see more games, going into the future of this hobby, embrace what does work with the new and wield it to the betterment of our collective fantasy.

Thanks everyone. All of the cited reading is listed below for your convenience.

Referenced and Additional Reading:
Matthew J. Finch - "A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming"
Brooks Dailey - "The Danger of Skills"
Beau Rancourt - "On Pathfinder (and most TTRPG) Combat Being A Separate Game"
Arnold Kemp - ""Rulings not Rules" is Insufficient"