Rules are secretly Rulings

Or why crunchy rulebooks should focus more on how to make rulings

This is another philosophy inspired post. Continue at your own peril.

In the OSR community the saying 'Rulings over Rules' is quite popular. The idea is that rather than making rule systems that cover as many situations as possible, whoever is running the game should just make a ruling on how the current situation is best resolved. 

I have heard several arguments made against this idea:

• It offers too little guidance for new GMs
• Rules make what characters can do predictable for players before they get to the table
• Using the same character between different GMs becomes almost impossible. 

This is not an exhaustive list, it isn't meant to be. What it is meant to do is show that there is an underlying assumption about rules that applies to all of these arguments:

When well understood/read, it is clear when rules apply. 

It is this supposed clarity that is to offer guidance for new GMs, is what player predictions are based on and what allows different GMs to come to the same conclusion. After all, if a rule says: 

"At the beginning of every combat, you roll initiative by making a Dexterity check."

it seems like everyone will know exactly how to apply this rule. It says when to apply it in the rule itself, for crying out loud.

However, what most people seem to ignore is that the GM still has to make a ruling in-game before they can apply this rule. Namely, they have to determine when combat starts. The vastly overrated, incredibly racist and grossly misunderstood philosopher Immanuel Kant puts it like this:

"For although an abundance of rules borrowed from the insight of others may indeed be proffered to, and as it were grafted upon a limited understanding, the power of rightly employing [these rules] must belong to the learner itself; and in the absence of such a natural gift no rule that may be prescribed to him for this purpose can ensure against misuse.*"

Or in to put it more simply: It is a different skill entirely to correctly apply a rule and this skill cannot be supplanted by more rules, as one would have to know when those rules apply as well. 

People that have taught or tutored maths will probably be able to attest to this fact: Often students know the mathematical equations, they just don't know when you have to use one equation over another. Explaining the equation better to them is in my experience never sufficient to get them to apply it more accurately. Instead you have them train this ability of judging when the equation applies by practising maths problems. 

If you play games with lots of different GMs, or listen to a lot of different actual plays try and pay attention to when they choose to apply rules. I think you will find that there are going to be slight differences. Again, initiative to me is the best example because it seems so clearly defined: 

"At the beginning of every combat, you roll initiative by making a Dexterity check."

For lots of players and fans of D&D rolling initiative determines the beginning of combat, but for the GM the beginning of combat instead determines rolling initiative. It completely depends on the GM in question when they believe combat actually starts. Some GMs roll initiative the moment you see a particular encounter that they prepped as a 'combat encounter'. Some GMs will roll initiative not the moment they describe it, but the moment they describe the creatures preparing to attack the PCs. And other GMs will wait for the players to decide they want to engage before rolling initiative (why shouldn't the PCs get to talk down the Kobolds even as they show a willingness to fight?). Some GMs would even differ in interpreting whether a situation is combat at all.

What I want to stress here is that none of these differences come from a misunderstanding of the rule or from a difference in interpreting the rule. All these GMs would agree that you roll initiative by making a Dex roll, that you do so at the beginning of combat and that doing so determines who gets to act first. The difference lies solely in the ruling they make on when to apply this rule.

All of this causes me to come to the following conclusion:

ALL RULES IMPLY RULINGS

And this leads me to my major gripe with systems like D&D 5e and similar rules reliant systems. This is because of the assumption I mentioned above: Lots of people seem to presuppose that it is clear when rules should be applied. I remember learning the rules for 5e and feeling uncertain about what to do with them. Only after reading advice online and watching some videos did I get a feeling for how you should apply them. 

How different did I feel reading the GM advice in a lot of smaller RPGs. What a lot of these systems have in common is that they are rules light, and thus feel the need to provide some guiding principles on how to make rulings. These principles seem to be wholly missing from systems with more rules, even though, as I have hopefully showed, these do not rely any less on rulings. 

If there is anything I hope one takes away from this, it is to not underestimate the difference between knowing a rule and applying it. Examples of play or principles aren't reserved just for systems with little to no crunch, but could be a useful addition to crunchy systems as well.

Funny footnote that the asterix in the Kant quote refers to (probably not really that funny):

"* Deficiency in judgement is just what is ordinarily called stupidity, and for such a failing there is no remedy. An abtuse or narrowminded person to whom nothing is wanting save a proper degree of understanding and the concepts appropriate thereto, may indeed be trained through study, even to the extent of becoming learned. But as such people are commonly still lacking in judgment, it is not unusual to meet learned men who in the application of their scientific knowledge betray that original want, which can never be made good."

Or in laymen's terms: No matter how much education, some people are just born stupid.