Stop Using Rules to Solve Social Problems

One of the most notable observations one can make about the history of Dungeons & Dragons as a game is that as time went on, the game accrued more and more rules. Every edition from the Little Brown Books in 1974 all the way up through the release of 4th edition in 2008 represented bigger books, with more words, and more fiddly bits now being adjudicated by those rulebooks. Even 5th edition, while not as rules heavy as prior editions published by Wizards of the Coast, is still roughly double the page count of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition rules.

There has always been a lot of discussion and debate around this aspect of the game and why having more or less rules is good or bad for a roleplaying game. Today I want to look at one particular argument in that debate; the idea that games with more rules somehow protect players from bad or disruptive GMs.

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What is the Myth Exactly?

Something I have heard brought up time and time again is that having more rules in a version of D&D is there to codeify more parts of the game; in so doing you give the players more stability and protect them from the whims of fancy of a bad or punitive Dungeon Master. I want to challenge that assumption from the beginning of this post; a bad or punitive DM is fundamentally a social issue, not a fault of the rules or the game’s design.

Why do I believe this? Let’s look at the fundamental structure of a roleplaying game first off. A tabletop RPG is played when a group of people (or an individual if you’re solo gaming) get together and agree to a few basic premises. That group has agreed to use their shared imagination to experience something that occupies the spectrum in between gaming and improvisational storytelling, they have agreed to a rules framework that allows them all to adjudicate interactions within that, and they have agreed to a setting to occupy and characters to use to occupy that setting. Which is not to say that system doesn’t matter, but fundamentally underlying the “play” of a TTRPG is actually a series of social contracts that a group of people have agreed to.

Which brings us to the hypothetical asshole DM. This person has already violated one or more social contracts. The role of your GM/DM/Referee/Storyteller is to be an impartial adjudicator of the rules and to prep the scenarios and situations the players may find themselves in. If they are already doing that in a more rules lite game, having more rules isn’t going to make them less of an asshole. The reality is that they can simply choose to ignore those rules or apply them unevenly. The solution for a player like this is not to have more pages of rules; it’s to either talk to them about their behavior, or if all else fails, stop playing with them.

The Larger Issue At Play

The real problem is this; TTRPGs are a social activity, largely enjoyed by a subculture that struggles with social interaction. The choice to just stop playing with a problematic player or GM is seemingly simple but actually quite challenging for many groups. As Michael Suileabhain-Wilson writes in his blog about the Five Geek Social Fallacies, geekdom often puts friendship above all else, and often to its own detriment.

Let me use a more personal example to illustrate how these social dynamics can impact your game. Years ago I had a rather large group of local friends, who had all played RPGs in the past, who all wanted to play a game again, but who lamented their lack of time to do so. Tired of hearing these complaints, I took the reigns and implemented a bi-weekly RPG night. We ran some polls as to what to play and landed on Ryuutama, a whimsical little Japanese tabletop RPG best described as Hayao Miyazaki’s Oregon Trail.

I GM-ed this campaign, and right away ran into some issues with a particular player who will remain nameless. He was the kind of person who always wanted to bend the rules to his interpretation and be the clever hero who “solved” the dilemma at hand without having to sacrifice anything. On an early discussion of the rules, he wanted to use a spell that allowed him to create any kind of flower to make healing herbs. Healing herbs are a pretty powerful resource in Ryuutama, and I was reluctant to allow something so powerful that clearly went against the spirit of the game.

Unfortunately I was younger and less wise back then and I eventually relented with the caveat that he couldn’t carry around unlimited healing herbs still. This was not a good solution, and this sort of nonsense would become par for the course from this player throughout the campaign until it finally ended and I was relieved from my duties as Gamemaster.

Our next campaign is when things would really devolve. One of my best friends to this day stepped in and wanted to run a Final Fantasy inspired campaign utilizing a homebrew system they had found online. This system was intensely crunchy, allowing players to make their own custom skills. It was also entirely combat focused and it was clear that my friend’s intent was to use it to make her own Final Fantasy game experience.

Well unfortunately for her, our problem player was back with a vengeance and had become much more hostile in the interim. He took great issue with the structure of both the rules system and the game itself, and made sure to let his complaints be known. During a regular survey we ran to check in on the pulse of the group, he tore into my friend, insulting her GM-ing ability and viciously listing out everything she did wrong. They also ended up having a discord voice call to work through issues that went nowhere. Eventually I had to step in and separate the group into two smaller RPG groups to try and mediate this and stop it from escalating further.

In the end, I am no longer friends with this person (and I had been friends with them for nearly 2 decades). The harsh reality I had to learn was that someone being a jerk in your weekly TTRPG session is just someone who is a jerk, and you have to decide whether it’s worth it to interact with that person going forward. Your love of TTRPGs can easily be exploited by shitty people who will hold your desire to roll dice hostage.

And none of the above situation could have been fixed by better rules. This person was and is an asshole, and no game system was going to change that. The best thing we could do for ourselves and our game enjoyment was to simply stop playing with him. We are all much happier and our game runs much smoother now that he is no longer involved.

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