Rules in Practice, part 1
Introduction
play System, Style, and Culture in Tabletop Role-Playing
TTRPGs don’t just differ in rules—they differ in how they expect those rules to be used. Without understanding how system and playstyle interact, players can end up frustrated, even while they think they’re playing by the book.
This article explores how system and style interlock, diverge, and co-create what we think of as “the game,” and why understanding that distinction matters.
Thinking seriously about games often feels like a perverse pastime, the intellectual equivalent of vivisecting your own fun, and yet the habit turns out to be useful when a campaign stalls, or a design draft jams, or when you’re simply wired — as I am — to enjoy the dissection for its own sake.
Every tabletop RPG begins with a rulebook whose procedures, probabilities, and narrative scaffolds promise a unified structure and a unified gaming experience, and every real game of that RPG lives somewhere inside the human limits of time, memory, and attention at the table where it’s actually played. Rules at the table become a negotiation shaped by interpretation, group dynamics, and silent cultural shorthand. Because that filter is unavoidable, even the most elegant mechanics bend to individual judgment and collective style, and when the process stays invisible to the people doing it, mismatched assumptions slip in and can derail sessions for players who thought they were playing by the rules.
Designers build systems with certain experiences in mind, and those systems only come to life through player interpretation and adaptation. Every group cultivates its own style within the broader influences of whatever playing culture it’s drawing on — highlighting the rules that align with its preferences, downplaying the ones it finds less relevant or enjoyable, and quietly omitting whatever it considers unnecessary or disruptive.
In my experience, no two RPG groups have ever played the same system in precisely the same manner, and while my experience isn’t all-inclusive, it does span about three decades. Listening to and watching actual plays has only strengthened that sense. Sometimes one even wonders if we’re all playing the same game.
This tends to show up more in the way the rules interact with the narrative — or the narrative with the rules — than in the literal mechanics of the systems themselves.
System never stands alone. It comes to life through style of play, the particular way a group chooses to read, bend, or outright ignore the written rules. What gets foregrounded, what fades into the background, what stays on the page, and what leaps into actual practice are all products of that style. Style governs who holds narrative authority, how risk and reward get negotiated, and whether the mechanics frame the fiction or merely nudge it along.
These largely unspoken decisions are what determine whether the rules end up functioning as scaffolding, hard limits, or mere suggestions. That interpretive layer — far more than the swing of the dice — is what explains why two tables can play the same game and produce wildly different outcomes.
Style also shows up in how much a group leans on improvisation rather than preparation, and in how faithfully it sticks to or strays from the written rules, all against the backdrop of its broader play culture. Style underwrites the experience of play. It grows out of player preferences, GM habits, the social dynamics of the specific group, genre expectations, spur-of-the-moment rulings, and even referential media or rulebook art that end up framing what the table can imagine happening.
That outside media matters more than it’s often credited for. Many gamers enter a shared fiction not through the system itself but by pointing to a streaming show, a comic, or a novel, and those shared reference points become a crucial part of establishing what can and can’t happen in the world — a set of constraints the system is only partially responsible for establishing and maintaining.
The takeaway is clear enough: style remains distinct from system even while leaning on it. Every rule, no matter how precise, ends up filtered through a table’s collective assumptions about tone, priority, and procedure. Claiming to play “by the book” simply stakes one interpretive position among many, and others are free to contest it.
Because RPGs fuse formal procedure with collaborative daydreaming, they resist universal formalization. Picture a spectrum with the interpretation of a tarot reading at one end and chess at the other, and most tabletop games sit far closer to the tarot side — though it’s worth noting that the tarot is itself grounded in a system, or rather systems, often written post hoc to explain the relationships between various symbols. That puts it in a different category from practices derived from the purely random, like reading tea leaves, which isn’t to say that one is more scientific than the other. Both RPGs and tarot use systematized randomness to generate narrative prompts.
Expecting a TTRPG to operate more like chess invites frustration, and it arguably overlooks the internal tension that makes the hobby compelling in the first place. This tension isn’t an inevitable problem that has to be solved. When it’s recognized and embraced, it can make for more enjoyable games, and it’s a significant part of what makes tabletop RPGs uniquely compelling as a hybrid medium — structured mechanics interpreted within the spontaneous, creative context of collaborative storytelling.
By which I mean that even the systems themselves are adaptive to some extent, and that creates an inherent tension between the theoretical purity of a system as presented in the rulebook and the messier, interpretive reality of actual gameplay. The tension becomes a hurdle within communities or movements that treat either system or style as a rigid absolute, and hobbyists are nothing if not opinionated, which may be case in point here as well.
My argument is not that systems in TTRPGs are irrelevant or superficial — far from it. It’s that systems can’t be engaged with as if they were fixed and immutable in the manner of a Platonic form or a mathematical axiom.
Across different cultures of play, the acceptability of modifying rules varies widely. Many groups modify the rules to better suit their style, and there are cultures of play where such modification is more or less expected, while in others it’s strictly verboten. Throughout the hobby’s history, various cultures of play have emerged — distinct schools of thought and communities with their own values and norms. Culture of play is a broader category than style of play, closer to the difference between a given group at the table and a “movement.” Movements like the OSR, the Traditional and Neo-Traditional approaches, and the Story Games indie scene have all engaged deeply with the question of how rules influence gameplay and how gameplay, in turn, shapes rules. Iconic games like Dungeons & Dragons (in its many editions), frameworks like Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA), Fate, GURPS, and so on, each embody diverse philosophies about the relationship between rules and play experience.
The Old School Renaissance (OSR) is a useful example of how confused this conversation can get. It attracts considerable debate, and participants offer a range of contradictory definitions depending on who you ask. OSR fundamentally operates more as a play style than as a strictly defined set of rules, even though the style typically favors principles like “rules light,” “rulings, not rules,” and a Game Master–centric, improvisational approach ostensibly oriented toward player agency. Some people take from all of this that rules are essentially arbitrary and meaningless, which is not what any of it actually says.
These are clearly matters of practice and philosophy rather than codified rules, and they demonstrate a broader principle that isn’t unique to OSR: the intricate, fluid relationship between style and system is present everywhere in the RPG landscape.
Meanwhile, every attempt to create a generic and universal resolution system that works well for all occasions only introduces yet another option into the mix, which is reminiscent of an old xkcd comic about “universal” standards. Other systems are ostensibly designed to support only one type of story, setting, or style of play.
Every time.
My contention is that it’s the interaction of system and style within a particular culture of play that defines what we really mean when we say “the game.” That isn’t a unique position — I hope I can bring a new angle to it, but the view itself has been around.
Consequently, debates over the “correct” way to interpret or apply a system, or about the right approach to RPGs in general, ultimately hinge far less on the rules themselves than on deeply ingrained preferences about play style and the broader cultures in which those styles evolve.
Over the next few months I’ll be releasing articles in this series on the Modern Mythology blog. Not quite a manifesto — more an attempt to organize thoughts on one of the primary conversations that has run through many of our podcast episodes. In open discussion I tend to talk around things, or get distracted by one facet and never return to the original point. Hopefully the articles will correct for that, for anyone who would like a somewhat more in-depth look under the hood.
The rest of the series will look at how system (rules as written) and style (the lived practice of gameplay) mutually inform and shape one another. There’s no way to encapsulate a fifty-year history in a single article, so I’ll try to ground the discussion in game design theory and RPG history without pretending to be comprehensive. Much of this information exists in hundreds of other places, online and in books, and I’ve tried to synopsize the history as succinctly as I can while adding what I hope are some novel points along the way.
The goal is to clearly articulate how no rule system is ever implemented without a corresponding style, and how style is always in dialogue with the underlying system, continuously shaping our shared experiences at the table.
What counts as success? Who decides the fiction? How much risk is fun?
My contention is that the system isn’t for answering those questions. It’s for helping us get there once the objective is already clear and agreed upon.
Further Reading, Part 1:
Additional Resources
Gary Alan Fine — Shared Fantasy: Role-Playing Games as Social Worlds (1983): A seminal sociological study of RPG groups in the early 1980s, looking at how players collectively negotiate rules and reality.
Matt Finch — A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming (2008): A free pamphlet articulating the ethos of “old-school” RPG play — “Rulings, not Rules,” player skill over character stats.
Ron Edwards — “System Does Matter” (1999): An essay from the indie RPG design community arguing that game mechanics directly shape the play experience, and that designers should tailor systems to achieve specific play goals.
Jon Peterson — The Elusive Shift: How Role-Playing Games Forged Their Identity (2020): A detailed history of the early RPG hobby’s debates (1970s–1980s) over whether RPGs are about storytelling, simulation, or game challenges.
Shannon Appelcline — Designers & Dragons series (2011–2014): A four-volume history of the RPG industry that also tracks the evolution of design philosophies and play cultures over the decades.
