I’m back on this and you can’t stop me. Join me as I continue to wade through the refuse of my own thinking.

I spoke with Jason Tocci on Twitter about fuck-you writing (because fuck-you isn’t a design concept). Jason raised the following question:

And here was my reply:

(“Frugal” is a term I’m considering as a more palatable alternative to the current one.)

By “drawing on play culture”, I meant to refer to the way a lot of OSR and OSR-adjacent writing often skims over ideas and concepts that are widely accepted in its own cultural milieu. As Jason notes above, there is no universal culture or universal writing, so anything you make will be constrained to some degree by its context. However…

That repellence isn’t just an emotional thing either - it repels in the sense of erecting a barrier.

Another reason people have taken umbrage with the “fuck-you” phrasing is they see it as a value judgement. It is! But it’s a value judgment on the text, not the author. I think the text makes itself unnecessarily obscure to the detriment of readers and potential players. I don’t like that! I wish texts didn’t do that and will criticize them for it.

The comparison to board games is one I’d like to explore further. In some ways, the thing “fuck-you” theorizing takes aim at is a habit of not sharing our assumptions. Board games don’t do that either, but the fact that they are relatively closed systems means they don’t need to in order for people to understand the flow of play.

In a recent Discord conversation, Matt Diaz of Hex Culture brought up Brian Upton’s book Situational Game Design:

[Upton] says that there’s three parallel games, basically.

  1. Game as designed
  2. Game as understood
  3. Overlapping with both but not totally encapsulating either, Game As Experienced

If there’s a misalignment (the Game As Understood is very different from As Designed) then the As Experienced version can be really frustrating, like losing for seemingly no reason in video games or not knowing procedurally what to do next in a board game.

I will posit that RPGs require a greater degree of player investment in aligning these different version specifically because of the high degree of ambiguity in they involve by their nature.

Meanwhile, back in April Jason Tocci wrote about his three layers of rules. Here, he identifies a social layer of rules that “make clear where social rules supersede common mechanisms from other RPGs you may be more used to. There’s no formal turn order; the GM’s primary goal in managing ‘spotlight’ is to make sure everybody feels included.”

I would suggest that, especially in the OSR, our encounters with rules texts are deeply informed by a play culture and set of values that has been extensively theorized outside those texts. We leave things out because we think they’re obvious and no one wants to hear them again. This is especially true when it comes to our cultural norms, which are rarely broken down in game texts. I think this is partly because we are used to thinking of culture as something outside the game. But as Jason points out, RPGs engage us socially at the level of our relationships and interactions at the table, and we miss out by not recognizing their importance.

I think when a lot of us first discovered RPGs, we experienced a kind of awe at just how open they were. You mean I can do something just by saying it? The prospect is both wondrously straightforward and deeply complex. If you don’t want a game of complete nonsense, you need to start setting limits and making distinctions about what can be said, when, and how. Things get even messier when you need multiple people to observe those specifications. Thus: Game design. RPG rules codify and externalize these decisions.

Panel from *Calvin and Hobbes*. Calvin, a young boy, and his friend Hobbes, an anthropomorphic tiger, are jumping around wearing domino masks. Calvin: "The only permanent rule in Calvinball is that you can't play it the same way twice!" Hobbes: "The score is still Q to 12!"

Pictured: A game of complete nonsense, albeit a good one.

I’d go as far as to suggest a fourth layer of rules, which you might call a cultural or normative or philosophical layer, that indicates the principles and values that govern the other three. This isn’t what some might deride as teaching adults how to play nice, but rather clarifying what those adults might want to consider as they work out how to align the game as experienced, understood, and designed – because that’s hard work, and the way to do it isn’t always obvious.

What I like about Jason’s above example about managing the spotlight is he indicates not only the social rule (share the spotlight) but the norm it upholds (everyone should feel included). This makes it possible not only for the GM to think about how they should manage the spotlight, but also for players to understand what the GM is doing and have a common point of reference for talking about it. “Talk it over with your group” can mean a lot of different things, and becomes much more useful when you have an idea of what kind of outcome that conversation ought to have.

So what’s the solution? Is it verbosity? I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a believer in minimalism for minimalism’s sake, but I think this is a question we can approach without taking up the minimalism/maximalism scale. In fact, I’d shout out Electric Bastionland and the new edition of Into the Odd as some of the best in the business at avoiding fuck-you’s with relatively little text. They do this by being explicit about the high-level ideas informing their worldbuilding, rules, and mechanics, as well as doing an excellent job of leading by example. I have more thoughts on what this kind of fulsome writing looks like, but this post is too long already. Another time.