Jargon is necessary to have deeper conversations from an academic perspective. In order to build upon ideas, we develop a shorthand to refer to foundational concepts. I don’t want to assume that any readers of this blog are already familiar with pre-existing jargon, so I’m going to explain foundational concepts as they come up.
rules elide
“Rules Elide” and Its Consequences was an article written by Jared Sinclair. The blog post itself and the entire blog were taken down sometime during spring of 2024, but you can still read it through wayback machine.
If I were to drill into the most atomic particle of tabletop roleplaying games, I would say that the rule is the most fundamental component. Rules support rulings and beget practices and rituals and processes. Rules are the thing inside the physical book that are either followed or ignored at the table, creating the game as it is played. Rules are the seed of magic.
The word “elide” means “to suppress or alter”, “to strike out”, or “omit”. The philosophy of “rules elide” suggests that rather than defining a game by what it is, rules define a game by what it is not. In other words, definition through omission. In Jared’s words,
Rules do not themselves create or conjure or elicit or inspire or invoke or incite — they only negate.
This concept is easier to understand through seeing it in practice. Imagine a standard party of fantasy adventurers making their way through an underground dungeon. They enter a new room for the first time, coming from the south. The DM gives a brief description, noting one door to the east.
| Party 1: The wizard’s player announces they are investigating the western wall. The fighter’s player announces they are investigating the northern wall. The cleric’s player announces they are investigating the eastern wall. The rogue’s player announces they are checking the floor for traps. The DM consults with their notes and announces what the players find in sequence. The rogue discovers a pitfall trap underneath a rug. The DM does not warn them of an approaching monster because none of them declared they were listening at the door. Similarly, because none of them declared they were looking at the ceiling, they fail to see the giant spider overhead. Party 2: As the party enters the room, the DM checks the passive perception of each member and informs the Cleric that there is a pitfall trap in the center. The DM then requests an active perception check from the party to see what further information is available to them. The players roll and report the number back, and the DM describes objects of interest and the sound of footsteps approaching the eastern door. |
In the first example, the game functions almost as a pure simulation, with players specifying exacting inputs for their characters to complete, and the DM responding with the results. Arguably a more realistic simulation would represent players giving attention to multiple angles at the same time, but this is an intentional comparison between old school -style play with a modern 5E-style approach. In the second example, rules for rolled perception checks and a passive perception statistic are added. This has the effect of making the play feel more game-like, and removes the process of players describing how they methodically search the room.
Both examples include “exploration” in the game. The second example uses a rule to omit or elide parts of the process of exploration that are undesirable. Neither approach is “more valid” than the other, but the addition of a rule helps us understand what’s important to the design of the game. The second game is much more interested in the consequences of exploration and accepts semi-random results in place of a precise, granular approach.
In conclusion, “rules elide” allows us to see what a game cares about by looking at what the rules serve to omit. The fictional playspace is an infinite block of marble, and rules define the negative space necessary to craft a sculpture. As Jared says:
We use rules to remove some of the trees, so we might better see the forest. We argue through negation.
I encourage those interested in this topic to read Jared’s original blog post for a deeper understanding of the philosophy.
responses
As a game designer, I do not consider “rules elide” to be a complete philosophy of games in the same way that I do not believe any given analytical method provides total understanding of an art. “Rules elide” is one of many lenses through which I examine games: each contributes to a different side of the picture.
Sean Murphy (of smurphy-games) wrote a response on their blog with several key insights:
- In addition to removing the uninteresting parts of play, elision also allows the characters to do things the players don’t know how to do.
- Rules create standards that all players agree to: they remove an amount of “arbitrariness” from play that would otherwise position the DM as the final authority.
- By removing arbitration from the DM, rules place agency in the hands of the players to make decisions with predictable consequences.
In other words, rules do more than simply elide, and the process of elision does more than omit things the game is uninterested in.
Brennan Lee Mulligan paraphrases the concept of “rules elide” in a behind-the-scenes episode of his actual-play podcast Worlds Beyond Number. The relevant section can be read in this 2024 polygon article, which transcribes his belief that Dungeons & Dragons is not a combat-oriented game. In his opinion, D&D has rules for combat because it is unintuitive, whereas the emotions, relationships and character progression are easily supplied by the players.
I think this is an incredibly silly interpretation, and examining the presence of combat rules in D&D tells us more about the purpose of rules in games. First: the absence of rules does not imply that a game expects you to intuit a process for a given topic. Despite the fact that there are no rules for farming in D&D, players are not expected to be experts on agriculture. Second: the presence of rules implies that the game is interested in those topics. By requiring all characters to have a class capable of combat and devoting a full chapter to combat, the game communicates that it expects gameplay to regularly involve combat.
“Rules elide” is one tool among many that I use to examine games. By itself, it does not give me a complete picture, but it is extremely helpful when attempting to determine which things a game wants to skip over.