The title is something that I keep seeing again and again in advice for DMs/GMs in RPGs: "You're in charge, so if you don't like it, change it!" It all comes back to "rule 0", i.e. that the DM has final say on everything. In this essay I'd like to explore why this idea is so damaging.
Let's start with an object example. A guy was trying to figure out how to randomly distribute treasure in dungeons. He wasn't sure if a certain option that said "1-3 items" meant:
Now what interests me for this discussion are the answers he got. A few people said that one method or the other was correct, but by far most people said something like "who cares? You're the DM, so you can change everything anyway. So just do what you feel like!" Now here is the trouble: the same thing could be said about any part of the random treasure or random dungeon generating system. Why bother following any table, since you are the DM after all. In fact, why bother using the book in the first place? You're the DM, so you can make up a whole system from scratch, in theory at least.
Now obviously no one wants to do that because it would take too much time and effort. So people use an established system. In that case, why shouldn't we expect the established system to do what it claims and actually provide a working game? Obviously the DM can change the rules if he wants, just as it is possible to change the rules of something like Monopoly (even though nothing in those rules gives you "permission" to change them.) But this is really only the change of a rule if the rules existed in the first place.
The real problem hits when games start being designed by people who have this attitude. In Dungeons and Dragons, that's happened since Second Edition. Then the idea that "if you don't like it, you can change it" becomes a safety valve. Say you didn't actually test some rules, like the rules for training. Then it's likely that they are going to be broken in some way, such as by unfairly favoring a class, having excessive (or meaninglessly low) costs associated with them, being incompatible with your preferred "just skip ahead in time whenever you feel like it" system, etc. You put in the rules, but you never tested them and they don't actually work. Normally this would be considered selling a defective product. However, with the attitude of RPG players you can just say "every part of the game is optional, so if you don't like how those rules are working, just change them or ignore them!" You've offloaded the design element on the people who bought your product for its supposedly complete design, and convinced them that this is a feature because it increases "player/DM freedom."
Of course, when everyone has this attitude, no feature of the game is safe. This is how we got to the point where people seriously argue about whether all deaths should be fudged away, removing all chance for failure (and hence most of what makes RPGs a "game" in the first place.) Since no feature of the game really "counts" anymore, there is no game anymore, but on the delusion that a game still exists because it did at one point in the past.
There is an even worse effect of all of this. Not having a game is not actually the worst case scenario, since it is possible to run an RPG on practically nothing. You can have fun in a game where you simply roll a d20 for any uncertain action and have the referee make up a result based on how high the number is. Such a thing isn't D&D, or any other published RPG for that matter, but let's face it: D&D lost all trace of being D&D in 3rd edition anyway. The real problem is that if everything is up to DM fiat, then there are no standards, which means that no one can improve.
Let's go back to question that inspired this essay: a guy was generating treasure randomly and wasn't sure how to do go about it. He was told that he should just do whatever he wanted. How does this help him out? Of course he could do what he wanted, he had to have known that as much as what anyone else did. What he wanted to know was what the best way to interpret the rule was. Even if the standard is just "make sure your players have fun!" there will still be an answer that is better than the other. The responses did not help when it came to answering that question; most couldn't even admit that there could be a better answer. Thus this attitude not only leads to crappy RPG products that use "just do whatever you want" to avoid giving actual rules, but also an RPG community that uses "just do whatever you want" to avoid giving anyone advice.
Something that is particularly insufferable about this is the combination of how worthless this advice is with how eager people are to give it. To give another example, I saw this advice being given in response to the question "How long should enemies remain broken after failing morale checks?" Someone responded by saying that the rules are all just guidelines, so that you should do whatever you want to resolve the situation. This is worse than useless. First of all, the question was about if rules for this situation even exist in the first place. The response didn't even say if there were or not, it just said to reflexively ignore them just in case they do exist. In that case, why bother reading any of the rules to begin with? Secondly, how does this help? You could say that in response to anything. If the advice had said something like "here's what I do at my table and here's what works nicely about it. Of course, you are free to do what you want at your table." then that would be one thing. At least it would give a concrete plan of action. But saying that you should do what you want gives no help. It's like saying "I don't know, but make sure that you don't forget to breathe while playing." Yet the people who give this advice always act like they are being helpful.
Things get particularly troublesome when combined with the attitude that the DM is the most important guy at the table. In the modern folk RPG culture the DM is expected to make a complete world without player input, but also provide "spotlights" on each player in such a way that the game is fun for everyone. This is an immensesly difficult task. The DM is literally doing more work than an entire playgroup should be doing. And he has to do all this wihtout even being able to get good advice. He's the one responsible for making sure everyone has fun, but when he asks other DMs "how do I make sure people have fun?" the only response he gets is "just do whatever you like, it's your game and people have fun in different ways!" There's no way for the DM to ever improve, so his games end up being mediocre when they need to be extraordinary to work in this model. No wonder that campaigns usually last such a short time with such bitter fallouts.
We have a situation where things obviously do not work (since campaigns fail and players are unsatisfied) but we've also thrown out all mechanisms for improvement or even to really evaluate why we have run into this problem. You might contrast this with giving advice in sports, like baseball. If a batter is never making it to first, you can give him advice about how to read pitches, how to improve his swing, etc. Now imagine that instead of playing baseball, you've decided that you're just using baseball equipment and can change the game however you like. Who says that getting to first base should depend on hitting the ball and running to first without having the ball be caught or having the base tagged? Who says that you should be out after three strikes, or that foul balls shouldn't allow you to get on base? If we use the attitudes of the RPG community, we could easily change any of those rules if they are upsetting the players. Once we have done that, how can you give advice about how to swing anymore? If you are allowed as many swings as you want, advice about how to read pitches and reliably hit the ball is meaningless. If you are allowed to treat fouls as fair balls, then there is no need to improve your control. If you allow all these things and the result is a miserable, unfullfilling experience, being told "just do whatever you want to have fun" isn't helpful. It's not advice that you can apply in any meaningful fashion. What you should be told is: "go back to actually following the rules of baseball and get good." That doesn't mean that we can't have variations on the rules. For example, we might not allow bunts or modify the infield fly rule, and we certainly don't have to follow the "ghost runner" rule that the MLB has instituted for extra innings. But we need to start from an actual set of rules that everyone is familiar with before we can decide if it is good to modify them. Then we can start by simply improving our play, with real goals for what "improved play" looks like (i.e. not just "people should have more fun.") In the same way, an actual RPG needs to have explicit standards for things like combat, character development, rewards, travel, faction play, etc.
All of this raises the question of why the RPG community is like this. If you have a non-system where advice can't even be given, and people complain about the same issues over and over and over again, why would you keep it that way? I think there's a few different causes:
All of that being said, what can people in the RPG community do to improve and move past this attitude? It's very simple: play the actual game, giving it an honest shot even if you don't understand the motivation behind the rules. Resist the urge the theorycraft. Many times rules will have hdiden interactions that aren't immediately apparent. This is especially true when we are talking about RPGs. These games have a lot of probability in them, and they are player guided experiences where the players are motivated by the rules. For exmaple, if you actually use gold for XP rules as written in early editions of D&D you'll find that now players are motivated to go out and get gold... not necessarily to kill monsters. And they now have lots of gold, meaning that doing things like hireing mercenaries or building keeps is on the table. If you theory craft you may say "if we allow gold for XP, then my players won't have any motivation to do anything but kill monsters to get their stuff" but the actual gameplay will likely be different, since the players will make their plans based off their own ideas and the implications of the rules, not your initial intepretation of the rules.
Now it may very well be that the rules really don't work. There's tons of RPGs throughout the history of the hobby that have had dumb or even outright non-functional rules. This will become apparent in actual play. If you see this happen, first reread the rules. You might have missed something. It's very easy to misread things, especially if you bring in assumptions from other games. (For example scrolls in B/X are not used for learning spells, despite this being one of their big uses in mainline D&D. Ironclaw is very heavily based on getting ranks in skills, but even being able to buy ranks in skills at all is only a variant rule in the spinoff Urban Jungle. There are reasons for these changes, but if you view things in the lens of the old game you may not even realize that you are not playing correctly.)
If you confirm that the rules are fundamentally busted, or that at the very least everyone hates them, sure you can throw them out and replace them with a house rule. But now you have a specific aim. The actual rules caused some very specific problems that you saw play out in reality. What sorts of rules would prevent the same problems? In contrast if you just throw the rules out without testing them, you will probably institute rules that have hidden side effects that you did not anticipate. For example, suppose you hated the idea of giving gold for defeating monsters or getting treasure (though you didn't realize that these rules didn't require killing monsters and didn't automatically give XP the second PCs picked up gold.) Since leveling is still required in a game like D&D you replace them with story rewards. Now your players are forced into following your plotlines, or they cannot gain experience. The game is necessarily a railroad. This may or may not have been your intention, but either you probably didn't realize that this would happen. The orignal rules allowed player freedom, your new ones did not. If you instead found real problems with the system in play, you could design a more refined system of rewards. (For example, perhaps instead of giving XP for rescuing a specific princess in a specific plotline, you could give XP for various heroic deeds regardless of where they occurred; the old Werewolf the Apocalypse system essentially had something like this.)
But the key thing to realize is that to get the results you want, you must improve at your game. And you can only do that if you have a standard to view things as "better" or "worse." In turn you can only do that if you have a set of actual rules that you follow, not just a bunch of "do whatever you want" Calvinball proclamations.
December 14, 2023