The rulebook made me do it

how different kinds of readers relate to RPG texts

This is not a peer-reviewed academic article.

This is the end-term essay for the Algorithms and Activities seminar, a module within the broader Bachelor in Digital Media Studies.

Written by Alessandro Piroddi.

Submitted on the 9th of August 2021.

Re-edited and published on Patreon on the 21st of March 2022.

Enjoy...

Abstract

In this paper I want to attempt a preliminary observation of the quirks and vagaries surrounding the relationship between the people using a text to learn and perform a complex activity, and the text that is (supposedly) employed to do so. Specifically, I am going to look into the varied, contradictory and quite baffling world of tabletop roleplaying games (ttRPG) texts and the people using them. Such endeavour can’t, at the moment, have any semblance of scientific value as the main source of data for it will be my personal experiences, as accumulated through the course of years of play and participation in the ttRPG culture. In this sense it could be seen as an ethnographic project focused on the observer’s a posteriori reflections, rather than the detailed chronicle of the whole observation experience. That said, I will at least try to lay down a foundation of concepts rooted in research and documented critique.

I’ll do this by establishing a chain of fundamental concepts that, hopefully, will lay a bit of structure and stability to my claims about ttRPGs: we’ll briefly touch on how people communicate through words and language; then how this communication changes when it happens in textual form; then how people relate to texts that are not just meant to communicate, but to teach; and finally we’ll apply all of this to ttRPGs.

Lost in translation

Without calling into question Aristotle and his whole Language Myth, let’s accept the idea that language, be it written or spoken, works as a way for people to communicate with each other in a rational and meaningful way (Harris 2009). What I am more interested in at the moment, is to look at language’s general patterns and behaviours. To this end I find great clarity in the model presented by Ian Danskin in his video essay “The Artist is Absent: Davey Wreden and The Beginner's Guide” (Danskin 2016). Framed this way, an idea present in one person’s mind is functionally isolated and inaccessible by anyone else. Communication is thus only possible through language: the idea is broken down into constituent elements that, through words, are then conveyed in the form of descriptions. These descriptions represent specific meanings for the speaker that, hopefully, will also match similar meanings in the listener’s own experience. Putting those meanings together, the listener recreates in their own head the idea the speaker was communicating. But there is a fundamental disconnect between the descriptions used to convey a meaning, and the subjective version of that meaning that each person might have experienced. Language is like a blueprint for the building of ideas where each person uses their own unique set of construction materials. This act of translation is optimally represented in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1

Here the idea of “a tree” is conveyed as a sum of qualities: it is as high as a telephone pole, its trunk is so big a child could not hug it completely, its surface has a rough texture like that of a car pneumatic, etc. These simple elements are expressed through words, and these are then received by the listener that (assuming they are able to understand the speaker’s language) connects them to their own version of the same concepts. The final result is at best an approximation, but hopefully functional enough. This is the reason why an author’s message will never be completely and flawlessly communicated. A “translation” is inevitable and, with it, transmission artefacts and loss of information are to be expected.

The voice inside my head

When this process happens in person it is supported and complemented by a multitude of additional information, both verbal and non-verbal, including the option of asking the speaker for further details and clarifications. But in written form, this is not possible. It is true that the paratext can greatly enrich the communicative load of its related text (Genette 1997), and that the same applies to the additional paragame elements of a ttRPG (Sedda 2017), but a static content such as a written text or a recorded audio/video will always lack the cybernetic qualities of a live and interactive communication. For simplicity’s sake one could, with a loss of nuance and depth, read “cybernetic” as “adaptive” in that the listener reacts to the speaker in real time and vice versa, allowing both subjects to adjust their understanding and communication to each other. Also, it should be clear that the concept of para-content describes all the elements that are present in addition to the content within a certain medium: a text is its words, while the paratext includes the font, the physical book or electronic support, the illustrations accompanying the text, etc. Likewise, paragame elements include the above, plus dice, miniatures, game-sheets, the other participants to the game and even the environment in which the play activity occurs.

In this regard, a text can only ever mean what the reader manages to understand by putting together the symbols provided with their own personal experiences and hope that this is what the author wanted to convey. This shows how the previous metaphor (following blueprints while using unique building materials) is actually too simple and optimistic, as the process of putting together symbols to create meaning that might match the author's intentions is quite more complex. A more fitting parallel could then be that of an investigation: the reader collects clues and uses them to figure out how they could fit together in the hopes of unveiling what was meant by the person who left them.

While, during a live conversation, the speaker and all their personal attributes are manifest to the listener and can be interacted with in a cybernetic way, during a textual communication the reader will have to, conscious or not, build in their head an imaginary portrait of the author... the voice of the text. This voice, like everything else in the communication process, is assembled in the reader’s mind according to the data they have about the author and from the influence the text itself exerts on their opinion of the author: a text written with frivolous or informal vocabulary and tone will conjure a very different idea of author than a text written in a stiff and formal way. But there is more.

This process continues by making the reader define an imaginary listener as a counterpart to the imaginary speaker/author. Is the reader imagining themselves as a listener enraptured by the speaker’s voice and language? Or as a distracted passer by that doesn’t really want to be there? Or as a humble student in awe of the teacher? Or a fellow scholar evaluating a peer? Again, a good image (Fig. 2) offers a clear summary of this seemingly complicated mirror play.

Fig. 2

This process and its various passages can highly impact the way people approach a text not just as a means for communication, but as a learning tool. The characteristics of the imagined author within the reader’s mind, often referred to as the voice or persona of a text, have a great impact on the learning experience. As a reader, the way one relates to the text’s persona can facilitate or hinder the acceptance of the communicated information. A persona that “speaks” in colloquial terms, with a mostly informal vocabulary and tone, using life-experiences as examples and anchoring points, can ease the learning process of readers that are unfamiliar with the subject matter or that are not used to rigidly structured academic contexts. The reader might find this persona less threatening, more inviting, even charming and relatable, and as a result be eased into feeling “trust” for the text, investing extra time and effort when the teachings seem difficult or unclear, and more easily remembering and adopting the imparted knowledge as it rings true and dependable. But to a different reader the same textual persona might instead be an obstacle to learning, an alienating factor. Readers that are looking for a more institutional approach might find the aforementioned persona irritatingly condescending, or hold it in contempt as too basic, believing it unable or unworthy to impart them any useful/meaningful/new knowledge. They could “mistrust” the text, disregarding its contents as unimportant or flawed. The reverse effect can also be true, of course, with some readers antagonising and rejecting a text perceived as too institutional, while others can more easily grok with such a dry, no-nonsense and authoritative voice (Darville 2009).

There is obviously much more to the universe of textual personas than just the life-experience / institutional categorisation, both on the author’s side and the reader’s one (Becker 2008). Many details can contribute to shaping the imagined author’s persona in the reader’s head, and then different readers will react in a variety of ways to such an imagined interaction. The key point to keep in mind here is that the activity of learning from a text is much more active than what common tropes suggest: the idea of a book being an amount of raw content being poured into the empty receptacle of the reader’s head, a passive vessel being filled with knowledge, is partial and miopic, to say the least.

Learning how to play games

Of all the possible kinds of teaching texts that exist, I am specifically interested in the bizarre culture that has developed around tabletop role-playing games, hereafter referred to ttRPGs or just RPGs. But before tackling this subject I feel the need to offer a bit of context, and a term of comparison, by first looking at another category of games: boardgames.

The term “boardgame” technically encompasses a cosmos of sub-genres that include pretty much any game that is mainly played around a table: from Chess to Poker to Risk to Charades to, in fact, RPGs. Going into their taxonomy is beyond the scope of this paper, so I’ll just consider them all as part of a big family of activities (and of texts explaining how to perform them) that, for the most part, behave in a recognizably similar way. With the exception of RPGs.

At their core, most games exist as a set of rules. Many physical accessories can be involved in the play activity, but what truly defines the identity of a game are the rules expressing the methods and procedures the participants have to follow in order to use the aforementioned accessories in a meaningful way. Someone using shells and stones and pebbles in a way fitting the rules of Chess would be identified as playing the game of Chess, albeit with pieces of unorthodox shape. In the same way, using standard Chess pieces with a different set of rules, like those of Checkers for example, will qualify the activity as playing the game of Checkers. So while specific components might be iconic and culturally recognizable, with their presence being critical in facilitating the play activity, what defines the identity of a game is the activity, which is itself defined by a set of rules. In boardgames these rules are almost universally expressed as textual instructions that at least one of the participants to the game has to read and understand before play can happen.

There are obviously other ways to learn how to play a game. The most common is surely being taught by a person that already knows the rules and is willing to impart them on others. Another common learning tool, at least in the past decade, are instructional videos, be they tutorials where a teacher goes over the rules and components of the game, or “actual plays” where a partial or complete instance of the play activity is recorded. Another option that has been common for decades now is to consult online sources of counsel and clarification, usually by asking about other people’s subjective understanding of the rules. But in all these cases the relationship between players and rules is clear: any doubt on what to do or how to do it (aka: how to play) is resolved by looking at the textual instructions. The instructions manual is the source of truth for the activity. This is reflected in the fact that most of the aforementioned options, especially the videos and online questions, are largely seen as an aid to the comprehension of the original text, not as a substitute for it. Only the presence of a live teacher is consistently adopted as a substitute, with the text becoming a reference tool to be consulted in case of doubt and disagreement.

Role-Playing Games

Do RPG players behave differently than players of other boardgames? Yes, and they do so in a way that has spawned a multifaceted and quite contradictory culture full of paradoxes and tribalisms focused around the role and value, for the play activity, of the rules as written. By simply comparing the average boardgame rulebook with the average RPG rulebook a few differences immediately appear obvious.

The first difference is length. Boardgame rulebooks tend to be very short and compact. One page rulebooks are common, with the vast majority counting between 5 and 20 pages, with only a few “mammoth” rulebooks ever requiring more than that. Moreover, these pages tend to house relatively little text, putting emphasis on direct commands and instructions supplemented by succinct examples, both in the form of text and images, and by functional layout; in a word, the pages have a relatively low word density.

On the other hand RPG rulebooks are... books. The “typical” rulebook (an editorial product within the mainstream RPG market) traditionally sits between 200 and 300 pages, with some games sporting even higher page counts or, more commonly, splitting their core rules (thus not considering accessory, optional and expansion materials) into multiple volumes. Das Scharze Auge is a 416 pages long book. Pathfinder 2nd edition tops at 640 pages. The 5th edition of D&D requires the Player’s Handbook (320 pages) and the Dungeon Master’s Guide (320 pages) and to a lesser degree the Monster Manual (350 pages) for a grand total of 990 pages. Exceptions always existed but they have been few and far between until, after the 2000s, the “indie” scene and its modern and experimental designs popularised the creation of smaller games that could offer a complete set of rules in just about 100 pages or even less, with 1 page “nano-games” constituting a specific sub-niche. And almost universally, these pages are filled with text: from verbose descriptions and explanations, to narrative segments, the word density is unequivocally high, even accounting for the presence of illustrations and layout.

The second difference is the type of instructions provided by the rules. Boardgame rules instruct players to perform simple tasks (move a pawn, spend a resource, pick one option) within a procedural frame (turns, rounds, phases) towards a clear and finite goal (win conditions are X, loss conditions are Y, the game ends when Z) where player agency lies mostly in exercising some skill the game is built to test (short term tactical choices, long term strategic planning, bluffing, hand-eye coordination, mathematical/logical reasoning, team communication, etc).

RPGs, on the contrary, instruct players to perform complex tasks (participate in the creation of a shared narration, play the role of a fictional character) within an improvisational frame (rules are applied if/when players deem appropriate) towards relative and open ended goals (no win condition, no loss condition, subjective diegetic goals) where player agency lies in making creative choices while engaging with the narration and the subsystems underpinning it (will your character choose honor or glory? will they stand for the village or abandon it? what are the rituals of the Ubäru tribe?). And, to make things more complex, RPGs integrate a slew of boardgame-like elements as subsystems within the general scope of the overall game: for example it is common to resolve the outcome of a fictional conflict with “combat mechanics'' that amount to a sort of mini-game within the broader system. Here we find more procedural instructions, simpler tasks with discrete options, clearer and measurable goals, etc. Games like D&D 5e are a classic example of this approach, but more modern designs also leverage similar structures when it serves their purposes, like in the case of Anima Prime.

Already from these elements it should be easy to see why boardgamers have cultivated a play culture where rulebooks are unequivocally important: readers have an easier time piecing together the intended meaning of the author and then are able to test their assumptions in simple and direct ways, through practical play activity. Either the procedures have been understood and applied correctly, and the game works as intended, or they have not, and the game breaks down or returns an unsatisfactory result. Problems and misunderstandings can then be clearly identified, making it easier to find supplemental/external help. Playing a game correctly is not only a concept that exists, but is assumed to be the way to play any boardgame; unintentional alterations to the rules are undesirable errors and mistakes, while intentional alterations (house-rules) constitute play variants that, whilst being accepted as a valid way to play, are also seen as exceptions to the established norm.

On the RPG side, things look different. For the sake of brevity I’m going to oversimplify the nuances of a phenomenon 50 years in the making (Appelcline 2014) by ignoring the historical development of RPGs and their play culture; instead I will limit my analysis to what can be observed today, as a phenomenon occurring at present. This approach allows me to reduce a sprawling and complex reality to three main “reader cultures” that ascribe different values to the game rules and the text that conveys them. I refer to them as “cultures” because it’s not simply a matter of how a reader approaches a text, but how this approach has effectively defined a sort of identity for communities of readers, producing specific behaviours, traditions, common knowledge and memes that are shared by the whole culture.

Before delving into the description and analysis of these cultures I feel the need to provide a disclaimer. In many ways the relation that readers have with RPG texts deeply shapes and influences the way they play, thus the kind of games they choose to play, thus what the market establishes as successful, thus how authors develop and evolve their designs in response to what the market tells them the users want. But it is also important to separate these levels. Play-culture and Design-culture are adjacent to Reader-culture, with many interconnecting and mutually influencing elements, but are not the same thing. Members of a certain culture share, on average, a common way of approaching a game-text, but the relation of such approach to how they play and which games they choose to play and how these games are designed and written ... all of these elements should not be flattened, nor should they be assumed to be in a direct 1-to-1 relationship.

Text = Good

Let’s start with the simplest of the three reader cultures. Being the youngest and least widespread of all, this culture shares many traits with the broader Boardgaming one. The fundamental assumption is that the rulebook will be the primary learning tool and subsequently a source of truth. This approach is typical of readers that prominently favor RPGs created with a more modern/indie design philosophy, as such rulebooks tend to fall within the smaller side of the page-count spectrum and their rules tend to be clearer and more procedural in nature, striving to achieve boardgame-like levels of directedness and transparency. The rulebook is a tool to convey the rules, where play activity is supposed to match them as closely as possible. For this reason many such texts make the author’s intentions explicit in plain terms, not only describing the game procedures, but also sharing snippets of the game design reasoning behind them, and descriptions how the final play activity could/should look like, and how to get to that result. Evocative text and illustrations can be present, but are often of secondary importance in comparison to the text relaying the procedures of play.

Text = Bad

The second reader culture is, by far, the most widespread of all three. It is also the most complicated one, as its members ascribe to game rulebooks contradictory values. In the following paragraphs I’m going to unpack the elements that make up this culture’s core, presenting them one at a time in order to build a comprehensive picture.

Contempt

On the one hand, the game text has no value and is held in contempt: overall play activity is seen as ineffable, vague, instinctual, subjective, something that can only be learned through the direct practice of trial and error, and by following in the footsteps of more experienced players. It’s not an activity to be learned in a few attempts, it is a craft to be mastered in the course of years. Due to this attitude, texts that try to explicitly regulate play activity and teach “how to play” are often perceived as pedantic, paternalistic, unpleasantly dry and ultimately lacking or even flawed. On the contrary, texts that offer relatively vague guidelines, inspirational material and optional content are received much better by this kind of readers, as the specifics of “how to play” are unexpressed and largely left in the reader’s hands. External experience and personal talent will then guide the concrete choices governing how to play this game with these participants in today’s event.

This has spawned the myth that play is possible (and preferable) in absence of rules (meaning the rules presented by the text), with veteran players even boasting how they own the books but have never read them, and how they are able to play thanks to years of what can only be described as “apprenticeship” at their friends’ tables. This mistrust in the text goes so far as to actively impede the process of learning through reading: player communities are filled with anecdotes and stories about grossly misread and misunderstood texts that were then judged as “bad games” because, unsurprisingly, the resulting activity was not satisfactory. These are nothing short of real life occurrences of the famous article “We tried baseball and it didn’t work” (Jeffries 2006), which usually happen when a Text=Bad reader approaches the kind of game that a Text=Good reader would appreciate, often with the intention of “proving it wrong” or demonstrating that “they know better”. It is important to recognise that this kind of gross learning failure can also happen when genuine curiosity and honest intentions are present: in this case the main problem is constituted by ingrained habits that literally blind the reader to what the text tries to communicate, requiring a much greater investment of effort than what would be needed by, for example, a reader with no previous experience with RPG texts and practices.

Illusion

So, on the one hand, texts are bad and the rules they convey are unnecessary, if not an outright obstacle, to the act of playing. Thus, playing without rules is preferable; the highest form of play practiced by talented experts.

But critical observation easily reveals how play activity is always governed by rules, although they are implicit and social ones rather than explicit and written in the text. How do you play correctly? There is a clear answer, but it is different for every (tribal) group, and it has to be discovered and “felt” through social cues. At the same time, this dynamic is invisible to its participants, fueling the belief that there is no correct way to play, and that the rules in the text are thus devoid of value. Most games that stem from this culture even go as far as including within their text some sort of Golden Rule or Rule Zero which expresses the concept that “these rules are meant to be broken, you as players know better, do as you like”.

What is the value of a rule stating that rules have no value?

Fetishism

This paradox is the crux of the contradiction at the heart of the Text=Bad culture, as the rulebook becomes a fetish representing the ultimate source of authority, rather than knowledge. Since play procedures have shifted from the explicit-textual level to the implicit-social level, then the default way to know “how to play” at any given time is to listen to what the “person in charge” has to say. But in such a complex and openly creative activity there are often times when the opinion of the person in charge gets challenged: how to solve such conflict? The usual tools are  personal stocks of authority and charisma, but both are limited and unreliable resources. The game text then becomes a receptacle of social power that can lend credibility and weight to a person’s opinion about how to play. This in turn shifts the discussion away from the practice of play and focuses it on to the minute interpretation of the rules as written, turning the text from reviled to sacred.

Truth to power

In a play environment shaped by the implicit leadership of talented veterans, the existence of power that can potentially be wielded by anyone is naturally disruptive. So while its use can’t be easily prevented, it can be discouraged by defining it as socially negative and unpalatable: players that fully know and apply the rules of the game-text are called, as a form of derogatory slur, Power Players. Likewise, players that are vocal in quoting the game-text to call out behaviours that infringe on the agreed upon rules are negatively addressed as Rules Lawyers. Everyone has then to walk a fine line: too little adherence to the game-text means we are not even playing the game whose book sits on the table, but too much adherence to the rules can become a sign of power abuse, as it upsets the status quo that this kind of game relies upon. The famous adage “Role-play is not Roll-play” encapsulates this (false) dichotomy perfectly, with the act of rolling dice being a stand-in for using the rules. As normal play relies on social capital and the adherence to a certain hierarchy (the talented veterans know how to play) the continual or brazen use of game-text to trump the arbitrary experience-based decisions of individual players is disruptive: having one’s authority successfully challenged on a constant basis, or having to spend one’s social capital to silence a rules-based argument, rapidly erodes the stability of this kind of social structure.

Curiously, but not surprisingly, game mechanics that change this traditional structure to be less vertical and more horizontal are described as “democratising play”. Mechanics that completely remove the figure of the Game Master (GM), or that multiply it, or that break it down into tasks that are then split and passed around procedurally, are all examples of such mechanics. Same goes for the so-called “safety mechanics” which define special tools capable of superseding most other game elements. Here we are obviously looking at games that fall in the Text=Good category where, among other things, the Roll-vs-Role dichotomy is absent, players that know and use and enforce the game-text are seen as a boon to the whole group, and “social power play” is frowned upon instead of being the baseline of play.

Text = Meh

The third reader culture is the oldest, even though it’s still a small minority if compared to the mainstream Text=Bad one. I left it for last because it can more easily be understood as a hybrid of the other two. Here game-text is treated as the source of truth, but the text itself is heavily focused on content, be it pre-packaged or procedurally generated. The behaviours of “how to play” are instead left as vague outlines and/or completely in the hands of the traditional authority role (the GM) and/or simply overlooked and left undefined. This is in large part achieved by focusing on simple rules expressed by short texts (relatively speaking) that quickly veer towards showcasing usable content: locations, characters, items, adventure seeds, spells, pet names, etc. This culture holds the game text in high esteem and makes a point of playing games in a “pure” way by “mercilessly” adhering to the letter of the rules, but this largely happens because the texts themselves are purposefully crafted to offer little cause for attrition between whatever tribal set of unwritten rules a group might be using and the explicit procedures presented by the rulebook.

This has promoted the self-production of homebrew rules and contents: the text is truth, but its authority is softened by its proud hobbyist/do-it-yourself roots (even commercial products often adopt graphic stiles that strongly remind of amateur products) and by shying away from making too overt statements on how to play.

Miscommunication

Interactions between members of these three reader cultures have always been quite problematic, spawning endless “flame wars” and adversarial interactions that have somewhat subsided only in the past few years. In a way, these cultures and their interactions with the game-text remind me of the dynamic between the mexican midwives of Yucatan and the teachers from the Traditional Birth Attendants training programs observed by Brigitte Jordan in her ethnographic research (Jordan 1989). Text=Bad readers fit the role of the local midwives: they rely on apprenticeship as their source of knowledge and, because of that, struggle to profit from being exposed to the TBA trainers’ lessons, as their structured and theoretical approach appears to them uninteresting, unrelatable, pedantic and detached from the realities of daily life practice. Likewise, Text=Good readers, when interacting with other reading cultures, often behave like the TBA trainers, assuming that sheer exposure to their brand of knowledge would somehow rub off onto the midwives, without really understanding how to connect with them in their own language (meaning “how they learn” rather than “how they speak”) and how to relate to their practical needs and problems. Even the adoption of medical tools as fetishes that obviously hold value and power but have no concrete use in traditional midwife practices maps nicely to how Text=Bad readers use rulebooks as a fetish imbued with social power but with little practical bearing for routine play activity.

Conclusions

After observing how people tend to read and relate to RPG texts it would be worth delving deeper into a host of different future research questions. Using the present essay as a starting point, future research could integrate the historical data that I have so far ignored in order to discern why and how the three cultures I have outlined have come to be. This could in turn prompt a deeper exploration of how readers and texts have mutually influenced each other: for instance, how a Text=Good culture promotes the creation of more boardgame-like RPGs, while at the same time the existence of boardgame-like RPG is the key factor that enables such an approach to the text. The same dynamic could, and should, be researched in the other two cultures as it would be difficult, if not impossible, to follow one evolutionary thread without including the others in the analysis.

Another angle of inquiry might consider the other side of the coin: if on one hand we have a reader imagining a fictional writer, there is also a writer imagining a fictional reader. Failing to be aware of this process and account for it can lead to the “midwife crisis” mentioned before.

Reference List

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Danskin, Ian (2016). “The Artist is Absent: Davey Wreden and The Beginner's Guide”. Innuendo Studios. Published 26.07.2016, last accessed 26.07.2021.

Darville, Richard (2009). “Literacy as Practices, Teaching as Alignment: A Message in a Bottle.” Literacies 10. 14–18.

Genette, Gérard (1997). Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: University Press.

Harris, Roy (2009). Rationality and the Literate Mind. New York: Routledge.

Jeffries, Ron (2006). We Tried Baseball and It Didn't Work. Published 02.05.2006, last accessed 03.08.2021.

https://ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/jatbaseball/

Jordan, Brigitte (1989). “Cosmopolitical obstetrics: Some insights from the training of traditional midwives.” Social science & medicine, 28(9), 925-937.

Sedda, Francesco R. (2017). The Presence of the Designer in Two-player Role-playing Games. Master Thesis. IT University of Copenhagen.