One thing that you will hear over and over again in modern gaming is "I just want to have fun." The context is usually in response to someone wanting to ignore the rules or strategies of a game. For example, in a role playing game someone might say "yes my character should have died in that combat, but we fudged the roll to be more fun." When playing a fighting game someone might say "stop spamming fireballs. That's no fun, I just want to have fun." In a game like Team Fortress players might try to ban "unfun" classes like the sniper or spy, or might use the excuse of "I just want to have fun" to justify screwing around in a serious match.
It's one of those things that initially seems pretty innocuous. Who doesn't want to have fun when playing a game? But when you delve into the reasoning of these people, it breaks down. The biggest problem is that people already play games to have fun, and indeed they do have fun without ignoring the rules and strategies that these people do. For an extreme example, suppose that we sat down with a checkerboard and a bunch of checker pieces. I say "there's no rules, let's just have fun." What would happen next? Well, perhaps we could get some amusement by randomly slapping pieces on the board, or flicking them about. Young children will do this. But even young children will get bored quickly, or else they will get into a fight when the other "player" gets in the way. In contrast, we could put the pieces on the board in accordance with the rules of checkers and actually enjoy playing a game, as millions of people have before us. There's no need to do anything "extra" to have fun while playing checkers because checkers is fun already. It's a game. So that's the first strike against this attitude: it is unnecessary to actually have fun.
Problem number two: the suggestions made for "just having fun" often decrease the amount of fun had. A good example of this are the house rules used in Monopoly. For example, most people will not auction properties in Monopoly and will award money for landing on Free Parking. The rationale will be "increased fun." Auctions are "complicated and not fun" and "getting free money is fun." But these house rules make the game less interactive, more based on luck, and much, much longer. Monopoly is balanced around having an extremely limited money supply, so having a steady influx of cash (and often quite large amounts, compared to what the game expects) means that it is much harder for people to go bankrupt, and thus the game will not end. Now what are the common complaints that people have against Monopoly? That there is nothing to do when it's not your turn, and that the game goes on forever. Yet the house rules caused to increase fun are the main reason for these problems! By saying that we just want to have fun, we have made things more boring, which is idiotic. And the worst part is that the people who think this way will not admit their fault when it is pointed out. If you say "we can't have money on Free Parking because it will make the game go on too long" they will say "you are getting too obssessed with the rules, just have fun!"
Another big problem is that "fun" often varies from person to person. This is often the main motivation for the "just have fun" people. They like some game, but some specific aspect of it pisses them off. For example, they may love Team Fortress 2, but get enranged when they die out of nowhere from a backstab. Thus they say "this game would be much better without a spy class." But the problem is of course that many players come to the game specifically to play the spy class, especially since it is an experience that is not very much like most other shooters. In fact, dedicated spy players may suggest rule changes that benefit the spy at the expense of global balance, for example by enabling friendly fire to make "spy checking" much more difficult. Now if you get a player that thinks that spies should be given free reign to have fun, and another player who thinks that spies should be banned to have fun, and there is no ay for them to both "just have fun." However, both players probably would be satisfied in the normal Team Fortress 2 environment, especially after they are able to adjust their play styles. In fact, the "I just want to have fun" attitude often comes from a refusal to adapt or learn. You can especially see this in scrubs in fighting games. Their complaints are usually based on their personal skill level. A new player might say that special moves are cheap and should be used sparingly, if at all. He says this because he hasn't figured out the inputs for special moves yet and doesn't want to learn how to do them, so he would prefer to prevent others from using them either. But a player who knows the special moves might say that repeatedly "spamming" a basic attack is "cheap," "unfun" and should be banned. He wants to dominate using his special moves, since he is proud of learning them, and so gets mad when something else beats him. Of course in every decent fighting game there is a way to counter repeated uses of basic attacks, and in most games it is not even very hard to do so. But it requires effort to learn how to counter these techniques; it's much easier to simply say that they shouldn't be used. So "fun" becomes what allows one player to continue playing in the same way without needing to change. However, if different players have different playstyles there will be no way to universally say what is "fun." The only fair thing to do is to simply play the game (and again, playing the game usually is fun because it's a game!)
This attitude is probably the most ubiquitous in the pen and paper RPG sphere. Lots of people will use this attitude to freely reject whatever rules they like from a given game. Often they cite a "rule 0", which is supposed to mean that all rules can be ignored if the group wants. But the thing is, you don't need such a rule to ignore rules. There is definitely no "rule 0" in Monopoly (I challenge anyone who says otherwise to show me a version of the game that says this.) Yet more people play with house rules than the actual rules, and it's not like Hasbro has jailed them for it. In fact, in AD&D first edition Gary Gygax often stresses the need for a "uniformity" in Dungeons and Dragons, where things like ability scores, races, character classes, etc. mean roughly the same things across all tables. And in fact in the preface of the Dungeon Master's Guide he says the following:
The danger of a mutable system is that you or your players will go too far in some undesirable direction and end up with a short-lived campaign. Participants will always be pushing for a game which allows them to become strong and powerful far too quickly. Each will attempt to take the game out of your hands and mold it to his or her own ends. To satisfy this natural desire is to issue a death warrant to a campaign, for it will either be a one-player affair or the players will desert en masse for something more challenging and equitable.
This makes similar points to what I was saying above: if things change so that players just "have fun" then each individual player will try to push the game strongly towards his personal vision of "fun", leading to frustration from the other players and causing them to abandon the table (which isn't fun for anyone.) There are places in AD&D where Gygax talks about being loose with the rules, but is largely in terms of places where the rules are ambiguous (since they can't possibly handle all situations that could occur in an RPG). In fact, much of what he says seems a strong reaction against some of his statements in the original white box rules, where he did encourage a more "free wheeling" style of play. His attitude is that certainly you can change rules willy nilly, but doing so will lead to a worse game and one that is not really AD&D. But despite this, the majority of players played AD&D with house rules, to the point where even "historians" of the game are often unaware of basic rules from 1st edition.
All this is to say that there is no need for a "rule 0" to ignore rules; players have demonstrated that they can mess with the game wihtout permission. Of course, the natural question is should they do so? In the case of AD&D teh results would suggest no, since the fallout is much like Gygax says. That is, if you go to a modern RPG community board or discord or whatever, you will find people making the same basic complaints:
Like the earlier free parking example in Monopoly, it is clear that Gygax designed the game to try to avoid these sort of problems. And when people ignore the rules, they run into these problems. But they will not even consider whether going back to the original rules would be a solution, it is an axiom for them that the original rules are "unfun."
This is where the attitude really gets absurd. People who advocate for ignoring the rules almost never stop at saying that every play group can do what it wants (which again, they would do without authorization anyway.) They always maintain that the "standard" rules are worse than their freeform style. If someone says that he plays only by the rulebook, except where rulings are absolutely necessary, this will be considered a defective mode of play. Often people will exagerrate, saying that the rules are incomprehensible and contradictory, despite never having even tried to use them.
There is another angle from which this is absurd. It is possible to play an RPG with very little rules. Completely freeform roleplaying games, where players say what they are doing and a moderator says what happens based on his own judgement, are possible and I have had sessions like that. These often break down due to players hating how the moderator has complete control over their success or failure, but this can be rectified by adding a bit of random chance. For example, my play group had what we called the "d20" system (not to be confused with Wizards's system.) This simply meant that whenever an action was in question, you rolled a d20 and used that to determine how successful the action was, with higher numbers being better. If two players are opposing each other you can both roll a d20 and see who gets the higher number, and you can add bonuses or penalties when appropriate. This is a very simple system, but you'd be surprised by how much how can do with it. I would guess that most "story based" role playing games could be done very similarly with this sort of system. There's much less bookkeeping, but if you're going to fudge HP numbers, supply amounts, etc. why does that matter?
So if we believed that rules stifle fun, and that we should have as few as possible, then something like this "d20" system would be the optimum RPG. But note that the people who say that they "just want to have fun" in RPGs tend to have many rulebooks. Not just the "core books" (like the classic Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, Monster Manual combo) but also many sourcebooks containing variant rules, campaign settings, etc. But if rule 0 is so paaramount and rules get in the way of fun, why waste your money on that stuff? The real reason is of course that they aren't ignoring all the rules, but are arbitrarily ignoring a subset. It is like the fighting game scrub who suddenly says "you can't spam that attack!" but otherwise wants to play the game normally. Yet we run into the same problems, in that if we can arbitrarily declare things "unfun" then the game will be pushed very much towards indivdual player interests, losing the uniformity and predictability that Gygax advised. This is the cause for many of the problems that I noted in this essay. Specifically, the need to let "an individual player shine" comes the fact that now "fun" is paramount, meaning individual interest. But as noted in that essay, such "fun" is hollow since it ultimately comes down to DM fiat. You like playing thieves, so the DM allows you to unlock a safe. But the only reason for the existence of that safe is so that you can open it, so there is no danger of you not being able to open it, so there is no thrill. And worse, if the DM doesn't put in any opportunities for you to use your thief abilities, then it must be because he hates you in particular and doesn't want you to have fun. In a more "game-y" D&D or one more aimed at simulating a world, then you would find a safe when it was logical for a safe to be there, and you would be more or less likely to open it depending on the quality of the safe and your character's abilities. So if you did not encounter a safe, or were not able to open one that you did find, it would not be anything personal. But when the DM designs his campaigns so that each individual player "has a chance to shine" it necessarily means that when you aren't doing anything, it is because the DM is neglecting you. No wonder there are so many arguments about campaign direction.
There is also the question of how much someone has actually experienced a game, if the rules have always been ignored. If you've never played Monopoly with auctions, have you really played monopoly? If you haven't even bothered reading most of the DMG, have you really played Dungeons and Dragons? It reminds me of people I have seen, who get a video game and then immediately download a bunch of mods. Now there is nothing wrong with mods per se, but they definitely screw with your ability to understand the game. I've had a lot of fun with the Wake of Gods mod for Heroes of Might and Magic 3, but if I had installed it right of the gate I would not really know what HOMM3 is, and I would not be able to tell which optional modifications in WoG were balanced or not. This means that my ability to have fun would be severely limited, since I would often be frustrated with balance issues, or with a lack of understanding of core game mechanics. Better to play the actual game, and only when it grows stale to consider something else. Similarly, the best way to have fun with any game is to play it as is at first, learning new skills and adapting as necessary. To do otherwise will only make you frustrated and bored, even as you pursue "fun".
May 24, 2023