Rules in Practice, part 2
Read more of the Rules in Practice series
Rulebooks and Roleplay, the Origins of TTRPGs
Much of this intro will seem obvious to those of you who have been playing roleplaying games for years, but for the sake of making sure we’re on the same page, bear with me a moment.
The game system for a tabletop RPG is typically discovered through its rulebook texts: the mechanics, numbers, and procedures that players and Game Masters (GMs) are instructed to use. It’s what’s contained in books like Dungeons & Dragons’ Player’s Handbook or the Fate Core rulebook.
The system dictates how to create characters, how combat works, how conflicts are resolved, how advancement happens, and so on. In theory, if you follow the rules, the system defines what happens when players declare actions.
A game’s written rules may encourage or be better suited to a certain approach, but every gaming table inevitably has its own interpretation regardless of how true to the source we’re trying to be.
Arbitrating this interpretation — and deciding whose interpretation (or what type of interpretation) should take priority — is a critical part of play style. One group might spend a great deal of energy trying to ensure every action is by-the-book “correct” vis-à-vis the rules, whereas another makes a quick ruling and moves on.
So far as this goes, it’s the same reason that any single “correct” interpretation of a text tends to spawn a counter-faction. Games are a fairly low-stakes instance of this compared to, say, the offshoots and factional schisms that result from religious texts, but the principle is the same. Interpretation is inherent and unavoidable if you actually engage with a text. The process of reading is partly a creative exercise, whatever the topic.
More typically, it’s been observed that a single ruleset like D&D 5th Edition can be — and demonstrably is — played in modes more aligned with traditional dungeon crawling, or Old School Revival (OSR) principles, or Traditional story-driven campaigns, or even indie Story game sensibilities, all depending on the group’s approach. There’s plenty to debate over how well one game system can serve all these styles, but it certainly can be done.
The rulebook provides the potential game, but the real game happens in the interaction between the rules and the people.
Even from the earliest days of the hobby players understood that the rulebook is only a way to open the door. House rules (alterations or additions to the written rules) and the famous “Rule Zero” (the principle that the GM can adjust or override rules as needed) have always been common counterbalances to the quasi-legalism of putting the intricacies of the system above all else. Indeed, official texts have long acknowledged this.
Rule Zero is foundational. The 1981 D&D Basic set famously noted that in a sense “the D&D game has no rules, only rule suggestions. No rule is inviolate, particularly if a new or altered rule will encourage creativity and imagination.” A decade later, AD&D 2nd Edition lead designer David “Zeb” Cook reiterated in the DMG foreword: “The rules are only guidelines.” And so on for every single subsequent edition.
All of these are somewhat paradoxical caveats in books filled with fairly specific rules for ranges, areas of effect, quasi-legalistic language and so on, nevermind a culture that also looks for sage advice and ‘official rulings’. This would be doubly true when the Advanced system was first released with an explicitly anti-Rule Zero stance.
Be that as it may, from 1974 onward, the idea that “the spirit of the game, not the letter of the rules, is what’s important” has been a recurring mantra. Little wonder that he mused that if everything could be strictly codified, one might as well “play some game like chess” instead — a telling comparison of RPGs to a game with fixed rules.
As we will see in part 3, this internal tension would pose certain problems for TSR in subsequent years in terms of trying to keep up with predominant cultures of play, as they were about to expand and proliferate wildly, although this tension is also at the heart of what makes roleplaying games a simultaneously fascinating and frustrating edge-case in games studies. Games are hard enough to define universally, but the internal tensions in TTRPGs makes it practically impossible as “pure” ludology.
In practice, most gaming groups take Rule Zero to heart to at least some extent—for instance, surveys have shown a majority (80%) of groups follow some set of house rules, customizing the system to fit their preferences. There is no single ur-text of D&D or any other RPG that all players adhere to in the same way.
System never stands alone. It comes to life through style of play. As discussed in part 1 of this series, this is the particular way each group chooses to adhere, bend, or outright ignore the written rules. Style governs who holds narrative authority, how risk and reward are negotiated, and whether mechanics frame the fiction, call to action or nudge it along. What can be somewhat confusing is that at other times, these things are also dictated partly or wholly by the system(s) at play.
Though some editions tried for a certain degree of simulation, by and large D&D developed on fairly gamist roots, even if the combination of systems and sub-systems may be internally inconsistent in various ways.
It is worth mentioning here that it’s probably untrue that any RPG play style or system is purely “gamist” or etc. This is a commonly cited issue with being too prescriptive using models like GNS. These modes rank priorities rather than giving a binary statement “this or that”.
With a few notable exceptions, nearly every RPG game includes some degree of Gamism, Narrativism, and Simulation. Likely other things as well, as a model attempts to describe something, it cannot prescribe what it is.
Even in RPGs where “simulation” is almost entirely backgrounded, what role does a narrative play if it is not attempting to interpret what the system is telling us? In the process of translating “I rolled a 7” to narrating an outcome, we’re literally performing a type of mental simulation based on one’s sense of how that world and the characters in it work.
The sense of simulation exists between the system and the narrative, hinged on believability. The question is again how these parts interact and which has priority in what way, whereas GNS tacitly prioritizes narrative and depreciates simulation.
Within the hobby it is frequently argued that if the intended experience a game is designed to create does not suit the system, it is better to adopt a system with the intended experience in mind. This is a fair point, although in practice it is often not quite so simple, for reasons that will become more clear as this series continues.
To summarize how this tension would come to develop:
On one end, we have the adage “System Matters,” a rallying cry from the indie RPG movement that would arise in the early 2000s, asserting that the mechanics directly shape the resulting fiction and experience – so a well-designed game should enforce the desired style of play.
On the other, we have the recognition that no system can account for every scenario, so ultimately “Rulings Not Rules” (to quote the OSR maxim) will prevail when needed.
In practice, every game attempts to find its own balance between the various factors that make a roleplaying “game.” The key is that rules and how we use them are inseparable. The text of a game and the culture of play around it exist in a feedback loop.
To see this clearly, we’re going to be exploring how this interplay unfolded across RPG history — from the dawn of D&D, through the rise of narrative-focused play, to the indie revolution and the modern resurgence of old-school ideals. The next few articles will be abridged versions for the sake of discussing these ideas, rather than a truly comprehensive history.
Early RPGs and the Emergence of Culture of Play
When the first “true” TTRPG, original Dungeons & Dragons (OD&D), was published in 1974, its creators (Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson) provided only a loose framework of rules. OD&D was, in many ways, an experiment grafted onto a medieval wargame chassis, and the rulebooks were short and sometimes ambiguous. Gygax and Arneson assumed players would “know how to fill in any blanks” in the rules, so many specifics were left unsaid or open to interpretation.
Gameplay in the mid-1970s often looked like this: the referee (then usually called the Dungeon Master or simply referee) would present a scenario — say, a dungeon corridor with strange markings on the walls. The players would then poke, prod, and experiment, coming up with creative actions to investigate. The referee in turn would adjudicate outcomes on the fly, perhaps calling for a roll when appropriate or simply making a ruling based on logic and the limited guidelines available. Improvisation and on-the-spot rulings weren’t seen as breaking the rules – they were a necessity.
With so many situations “uncovered by explicit rules” in OD&D, the referee’s job was to keep the game moving by interpreting what should happen. In effect, style — the referee’s personal approach and the group’s collective problem-solving — overtly filled in the gaps left by system.
This early play style was characterized by a focus on challenge, exploration, and player ingenuity. Since the rules didn’t provide exhaustive procedures for every possible action, success often depended more on the players’ wits than on their characters’ stat blocks. “Player skill over character abilities” became a defining feature of this era, which contradicts various facets of the cultures of play that followed.
For example, players learned to ask lots of questions, use creative strategies, manage resources like torches and rations carefully, and avoid fair fights unless they had a clear advantage. The mechanics were sparse and character mortality was high (OD&D characters were quite fragile), which meant the answer to a problem was usually not found on your character sheet.
Getting through obstacles was more of a hands-on puzzle than a matter of triggering a predefined ability. Victory arose from out-of-the-box thinking and teamwork more than from having the highest bonuses. The narratives that emerged from these sessions were largely unplanned — any “story” was an organic byproduct of the interplay of player choices and random dice outcomes, rather than a predetermined plot.
It’s important to recognize that this early style wasn’t just the quirks of a few popular tables (though it wasn’t universal either), but it was broadly understood as “how RPGs are played” in that era. In the early days there were already signs of ongoing stories developing, Greyhawk and so on, but the expected play-style was at once open-ended and procedural rather than narrative-driven.
Even as new RPGs appeared in the late 1970s beyond fantasy, for a time the general expectation remained that the GM was a referee and facilitator, not the auteur of a scripted story. This move was one of diversification away from the dungeon-crawl-centric, class-and-level model of early D&D. A key trend was the rise of skill-based systems that offered more granular and sometimes often fairly simulationist character creation. Chaosium’s RuneQuest (1978), set in the richly detailed world of Glorantha, was a standard-bearer for this approach. Its percentile-based system allowed characters to improve organically in the skills they actually used, fostering a deeper connection between gameplay and character development. This design philosophy directly influenced a generation of games and is a clear antecedent to modern systems like Call of Cthulhu (1981) and Basic Role-Playing (1980).
Science fiction also proved to be a fertile ground for innovation, offering experiences far removed from dragon-slaying. Game Designers’ Workshop’s Traveller (1977) was a landmark title that prioritized world-building and a “lived-in” future. Its famous “lifepath” character creation system, where players could gain skills, contacts, and even die before the game began, generated characters with rich backstories and tangible connections to the setting. The typical Traveller campaign was not about epic quests but about survival, trade, and navigating the complex social and political tapestry of its “Third Imperium,” a style of play that favored problem-solving and roleplaying over combat.
The play culture was open-ended and sandboxy: players could declare virtually any action, and the world would respond via GM rulings and simple mechanics. This forms what we in hindsight call the classic style of play: rules were relatively light, and style was ruling-heavy, challenge-oriented, and emergent.
Many years later, in the mid-2000s, this style would be deliberately revived and celebrated by the Old School Renaissance (OSR) movement. OSR designers and bloggers looked back at the 1970s games and said: there’s something valuable there that newer games lost.
They explicitly embraced those early principles. We’ll discuss the OSR in greater depth in a later article, but it’s worth noting here that the OSR’s philosophy was not merely nostalgia — it was a reaction to the feeling that heavy rules and pre-planned storylines had taken the soul out of RPGs. It was another reaction to that internal conceptual tension within the “roleplaying / game.”
By returning to a rules-light, rulings-heavy mode of play, OSR groups intentionally shifted the system, through a balance back toward the style side of things. For example, empowering GM judgment and on-the-spot creativity, rather than relying on rigid mechanics or scripted narrative beats. The OSR’s core tenets are intended to be read like a love letter to OD&D: flexibility and creative problem-solving over exhaustive rules, real risk and consequences over overly balanced or “safe” encounters, and the GM as a neutral arbiter rather than a Plot Author with a capital “P.”
These ideas were often explicitly framed as a reaction against later trends. Against the intricate character-building and rules density of D&D 3rd Edition and the tightly-balanced, tactical combat-centric design of 4th Edition; against the GM-as-storyteller approach of the traditional style that became popular in the 1980s–90s; and against the heavy narrative meta-mechanics of the indie story games of the 2000s.
In effect, the OSR message was: the system should get out of the way of the style of play we want—which is a gritty, immersive, player-driven challenge. Before jumping ahead to those later movements, however, all that’s important to understand for now is how the hobby swung from the free-form early days to the point where OSR felt like a rebellion.
Meanwhile, during this same five-year window the tabletop field exploded beyond swords-and-sorcery into an ever-expanding list of genres. TSR’s Boot Hill (1975) framed the American frontier as a lethal duel simulator that rewarded quick initiative and accurate gunplay rather than treasure counts. Fantasy Games Unlimited’s Bunnies & Burrows (1976) reversed expectations by casting players as cooperative rabbits, shifting the design emphasis to stealth, ecology, and community survival. By 1981 Hero Games’ Champions introduced a transparent point-buy engine that let groups build anything from street-level vigilantes to cosmic paragons, demonstrating that flexible maths could fuel boundless character concepts.
Simultaneously, role-playing was escaping the kitchen table. In 1978 Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle’s MUD1, running on a DEC PDP-10 at the University of Essex, unveiled a persistent multi-user text world that evolved even when players logged off. The design fused exploration puzzles with real-time social negotiation and essentially became the proof-of-concept for every later MMORPG, teaching early adopters to perform character entirely through prose and then becoming increasingly defined by game mechanics.
The idea of a virtual dungeon had earlier roots on the PLATO education network. pedit5, dnd, and Moria (all 1975) automated dice maths, line-of-sight, and loot tables inside wire-frame mazes. Though single-player, they showed how computers could shoulder the arithmetic load and generate limitless procedural content—efficiencies that would later inspire rules-light tabletop design.
Home computers broadened the audience still further. Richard Garriott’s Ultima I (1981) offered an open-world quest across four continents, while Sir-Tech’s Wizardry (1981) distilled adventure into a brutally efficient party-based dungeon crawl. Both titles sold tens of thousands of copies and codified levelling curves, over-world exploration, and inventory economies in digital form.
Their success cemented CRPGs as a parallel, mutually influential lineage. Lifepath generators, point-buy maths, and hit-point economies soon flowed back and forth between silicon and paper. These two streams, though distinct in some respects, would increasingly borrow from and influence one another, so even a discussion purely of tabletop must to some extent include a discussion of computer RPGs.
The next big development would be the rise of what’s now called the “Traditional” style of RPG play — a style that, interestingly, swung the pendulum in the opposite direction from OD&D by the 1980s, emphasizing story and consistent settings, changing the demands placed upon the systems intended to support them. We’ll explore that shift in the next installment.
Further Reading, Part 2:
Gary Alan Fine – Shared Fantasy: Role-Playing Games as Social Worlds (1983): A seminal sociological study of RPG groups in the early 1980s, examining how players collectively negotiate game rules and reality.
Matt Finch – A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming (2008): A free pamphlet articulating the ethos of “old-school” RPG play (e.g. “Rulings, not Rules” and 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.
