Editing One Simple Thing (section)

=== The Rules ===

Original post and 47 pages of discussion, [http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=239022 here].

:The Rules: Most people play RPGs in groups of two or more. Any time you get people together, they are going to be thinking and wanting different things. To help them know how what they are thinking fits with what others are thinking, any group, doing anything, anywhere, ever, will have rules. Some of these rules are stated ("Thou shalt not kill") and some of them aren't ("Jerry's rich, so he pays for the pizza"). Get a group together with no rules at all and they will start making some. It is a human instinct.

:RPG groups have rules. Some of them come from a rule-book ("The GM has authority to speak for NPCs"). Some of them don't ("We are trying to tell a heroic story about good people"). Some of them are spoken and some of them are not. If you abide by those rules, you will expect other people to abide by them too. After all, they owe you. But here's the thing: the rules that aren't spoken? You don't know whether everyone has agreed to those rules. And those are usually the most important ones.

:Let's take a common situation: You think there is a rule ("Don't kill another guy's character") and you abide by that rule faithfully ("Oooh, I could get the Gem of Amotto ... but I'd have to break the rule, so I won't.") It turns out that other people at the table do not know anything about that rule, and would not agree to it if asked. That becomes clear when your friend violates the rule, without even thinking about it. You may feel betrayed and cheated. You may feel that your friend knew full well that you were playing by those rules, took advantage of it when it was to his benefit, then screwed you when he felt like it. You may feel that this person is not a good person, not a good friend.

:But, of course, you would be mistaken. Your friend has not betrayed you. They do not owe you anything for having obeyed the rule. They never agreed to the rule. They can not be blamed for not knowing what nobody ever said. Human beings do not come equipped with ESP. We come equipped with vocal cords instead. Talking about these things, early, is more fun than sulking about them later. But nobody wants to spend eight hours talking about all sorts of stuff that they do agree on, just to find the one thing that (surprise!) they don't. That is why it is so essential what the rules in the rule-book are. That's a huge packet of rules that everyone can agree to, all at once. If you count on that, and count on nothing else, you won't think you were betrayed when you were really just confused.

Nobody seemed to disagree with the general advice:  Talk to each other.  It was the details everyone got stuck up on.  Many people fought for their right to be judgmental:  to come into a situation with the belief that they were right and the other guy was wrong, and that was '''important''', and all that.  Specifically:

:* There was a sizable camp of people who said that competitive, PvP play was wrong, wrong, wrong ... a violation of what they believed to be a moral imperative to play RPGs in a cooperative way, just as it's been since the early days of D&D.  Heh.

:* There was a more moderate camp of folks who conceded that competitive play was a legitimate style, but argued that it wasn't '''as legitimate''' as cooperative play, because more people play cooperative.  So they argued that cooperation was the default, and anyone who wanted to play competitive was obligated to raise the issue, or else play cooperative without being asked.

:* And then there were the folks who felt that almost any combination of things could be perfectly legitimate, but once two people '''had a problem''' then somebody obviously had to be wrong so that the other guy could be right.  So whenever I said 'breaking an unwritten rule isn't wrong' they heard me as saying 'the guys who '''relied''' upon the unwritten rule must be in the wrong.'  No matter how often I said 'Nobody is in the wrong in this situation' it didn't seem to stick.

Anyway, fun, fun discussion.  For what it's worth, the thing I had most fun contributing to the thread was a fictitious [http://forum.rpg.net/showpost.php?p=5168376&postcount=307 conversation] between two people who both had the best of intentions, but who gradually came to assume the worst of each other because they wouldn't grasp the idea that the other guy '''also''' had the best of intentions.  Ironic, that.