20141015.0724

I do not think I have made any secret of my participation with the Legend of the Five Rings Role-playing Game, having only last Friday written about its most recent supplement and before that having discussed it a few times. And my engagement with the game has not been limited to that; I am even now on the GM staff for the official online play-offering, the Winter Court, having played twice in it before and having participated in the even nerdier activity of live-action role-playing at GenCon over a decade ago. I have invested a fair bit of time and money into the game, and a fair bit of thought.

In discussions, one of the tensions of the genre of game has come up repeatedly. As a game, the RPG has rules that should be followed to ease and optimize play, to help things be a fair and presumably fun experience for all involved. But an RPG is not really supposed to be competitive, Steve Jackson parodies notwithstanding; it is supposed to be a collaborative endeavor in which a group of people come together to tell a story for which they are themselves the audience. (Here, I follow Daniel Mackay's assertions in The Fantasy Role-playing Game: A New Performing Art.) The tension that arises is between adherence to the rules and adherence to story, between the letter of the law and the spirit in which the letter was written. And it provokes many rancorous arguments.

If part of the goal of the RPG is to simulate reality, to offer a secondary sub-creation (and here I channel Tolkien) into which audiences can enter easily and maintain their Coleridgean willing suspension of disbelief because that sub-creation corresponds in many or most points to the observable reality of the audience, then the fact of its provoking such arguments is a mark in its favor. For it is very much the case that the divergence of what is written and what is true animates much discussion, often vituperative, in the world in which we live--and not only in the games we play. (Sports also see it happen, I might note, so that it is not "just some nerd thing" that the minutiae get argued.) Various readings of the US Constitution, for example, or of whichever Scripture happens to be valued in a given place all see it happen, and people die because of the results. Or kill. (I might add that it makes learning how to read things well more important--but I teach reading for a living, so I would say such things.)

I come down on the side of story over rules, as those who know me know. I have abused the rules, at times, and I still look for advantage at times. But I believe that it is far better to be concerned with the narrative than with the mechanics (and, really, any world where magic works has to allow for rules to be broken). We do not remember the formal techniques Achilles used or Lancelot, but rather that they fought and why they thought, after all...