Which Rules Elide?
Can rules elide what doesn’t exist?
In a word: no. But not for the reason you think.
When Jared talks about “rules eliding,” he refers to endogenous rules—that is, “game rules.” Mechanistic, computational, rulesy-rules. “Longswords deal 1d6 damage,” for example.
In 1983, Gary Alan Fine published a great book called Shared Fantasy, which among other things described what Fine calls “frame theory.” 25 years later, Markus Montola wrote an amazing paper called “The Invisible Rules of Roleplaying,” which expanded and clarified Fine’s frames.
Together, Fine and Montola describe three frames of play in TTRPGs, which players frequently and seamlessly move between:
- Primary/Exogenous frame: the real, physical, actual world, where we’re people sitting around a table together, rolling dice and eating Cheetos. Exogenous rules are things like “try to show up on time” and “don’t throw dice at each other.”
- Game/Endogenous frame: the mechanical, systemic frame, all numbers and crunch, where we’re bundles of stats. Endogenous rules are things like “roll 1d20 under ST to avoid the fireball” and “it takes 3,000XP to reach level 3.”
- Fictional/Diegetic frame: the imaginary, fictional world, where we’re adventurers slaying dragons and raiding tombs. Diegetic rules are things like “gravity” or “if you don’t eat, you’ll get hungry and eventually die,” but also “if you stand in the light of the full moon, you’ll transform into a wolf.” (And also things like “weapons are forbidden inside city walls,” but that’s for another time.)
Players shift between these frames all the time. Watch your table and you’ll see them (and yourself) do it.
Okay, so, three frames, three kinds of rules. In typical parlance, when we talk about “the rules of the game,” we usually mean the endogenous rules, the ones that determine longsword damage and chances to pick locks and so on.
It’s these rules that Jared describes as eliding. When you pick a lock without dice, where you just describe all the tumblers and pins and picks and things and see what works, you’re more or less cutting out the endogenous rules entirely*. You can play a whole session or campaign like this, actually: it’s the premise of Thriftomancer’s fascinating Null. But! When you simply roll 1d6 to pick a lock (an endogenous rule), you’re eliding the fictional world (the diegetic rule). Endogenous rules are summaries, overviews, skimmings-over of more complicated fictional rules. Most of the time, this is fine and dandy. Fiddling with tumblers is complicated and annoying—as is, say, trying to figure out exactly how many pitons fit in a backpack, or how big a laceration a battle-ax inflicts to the soft tissue of the bicep. All of these are complicated and annoying (but also pretty important to the fictional world we’re playing in) so we write some rules to breeze through them and get back to the stuff we actually care about. Each time you write an endogenous rule, you make a summarized representation of a more complex fictional world—you elide the fictional world.
So, what about stuff that doesn’t exist in our world? Axes and backpacks and lockpicks all exist in our, but what about magic? The argument goes that, because magic doesn’t exist in our world, we need to write endogenous rules about how it works, because otherwise it wouldn’t exist in the fictional world, right? Right? Wrong.
Here’s what diegetic rules for magic might look like:
Take a carnelian at least one fingernail’s width in diameter and grind it to powder in a mortar & pestle. Stand in a circle of pink chalk no more than ten paces across. Eat the cooked heart of a salamander killed before the last full moon, recite the phrase ”llaberif llaberif llaberif” in a loud voice, then blow the powdered carnelian outward. When you next inhale, the powdered carnelian explodes with fire like a tree struck by lightning. Only those inside the circle of pink chalk remain safe.
Or even more simply:
After deeply memorizing the arcane words of the spell, spend 5 seconds with your eyes closed in deep focus, murmuring the words and extending your hand, and a globe of fire shoots out of your fingertips.
Fireball! No dice, no wizard levels, no spell slots, just raw magic. This rule isn’t true in our world, obviously, but in writing this in to our imaginary fictional world, we make it part of the game. You could port this to any endogenous ruleset and it would work identically (assuming their fictional world has carnelians, chalk, fire, etc). Luke Gearing does something similar for magic in Wolves Upon the Coast, and it entirely changes how magic feels and operates compared to standard elf-games.
When game designers write an endogenous spell description for fireball (6d6 dmg., 120’, 20’ radius), they use those endogenous rules as a shorthand for saying “hey yeah so if you’re a wizard and you memorize this spell or whatever so you can create a ball of fire from your fingertips or something, anyway here’s the math.” Those endogenous fireball rules elide the complicated fictional reality of what it means to cast fireball, the magic spell. D&D’s magic system provokes so many arguments online because it’s become unmoored from its fictional reality—it used to be based on Jack Vance’s stuff, but that went out of style years ago, and now nerds online constantly argue about how best to retrofit their game worlds to fit these isolated magic rules.
Endogenous rules elide, in every case; when it looks like they aren’t, when it looks like they’re somehow creating, dig a little deeper to find what fictional complexities they’re papering over. And next time you create a setting far different from our own, ask yourself: are endogenous game rules really the best way to communicate this world?
*A note: I actually argue that Montola’s three rules of roleplaying (world, power, character) are endogenous in and of themselves; roleplaying games hinge on them as the means of providing inefficiency for the game itself (under Suitsian definitions). These rules don’t elide, unlike every other endogenous rule, because they’re non-simulative and nonrepresentational. But they also are fundamental to roleplaying and don’t-elide in equal measure across more or less every roleplaying game, thus making them largely irrelevant when examining the difference between endogenous rulesets. Some day I’ll write a paper talking more about this.