An oft-repeated mantra about roleplaying games is that, “Rules are a necessary evil.” The idea seems to be that, when you are imagining some fantastic world complete with characters and exciting situations, you don’t want to be distracted by rules. Mechanisms get in the way, we are told.

Of course, few roleplayers play totally free-form with no rules because there are some moments where uncertainty over the ability of a character to succeed arise and it’s fairest to resolve that situation with some rules. Of course, those rules are a necessary evil so you are advised to keep them “lite” and refer to them sparingly lest they get in the way.

But I don’t enjoy “rules lite” play. Once upon a time I thought I did but, it turns out, I really don’t. Neither do I particularly crave the opposite – very detailed rules with lots of options tend to bog me down too. I seek a Goldilocks system of RPG rules: something that is consistent and creates a firm grounded experience for whatever passes for realism.

Rules are not evil. They’re not even, really, necessary if you just want to tell a collaborative story. I mean, I played collaborative story-telling games from the youngest age and when disputes arose, well, we just resolved them in conversation. Or we went with what Daniel said because he was the one we trusted most to be fair.

It was Daniel who introduced us to roleplaying games, of course. He was our first GM and we trusted him to teach us how to play. Sometimes Daniel decided how it was going to be when a question arose – today we might call this GM Fiat – and sometimes he asked us to roll some dice.

We didn’t really know the rules, at least not at first. We simply trusted Daniel to use them fairly. We were enjoying the description of the universe we flew our starship around in and getting into playing the roles of our characters. This was Traveller, in case you haven’t read or heard me talk about my earliest games before.

After a while, Daniel found some different science-fiction rules that he preferred because they had a little more detail and helped him run a better game. He introduced us to Star Frontiers and we enjoyed the very different universe that he presented, starting when we crashed on a planet called Volturnus.

After we’d played Rolemaster for a while – for our fantasy gaming – we were delighted to discover there was a science-fiction version too. Space Master was even more detailed than the other two but we trusted our friends at the table. By this time, Daniel wasn’t always the GM and others took on the same role of trusted guide.

The rules simply underpinned the play experience. They were, at least for me, always necessary because they defined the reality of the game world and grounded the action in concrete processes that provided consistency. When you have a consistent world, underpinned by consistent rules, then you can make meaningful decisions in-role.

Too flimsy a rules set always feels arbitrary in my experience. Too much GM Fiat takes away from my agency as a player. If things don’t work in a consistent manner, I feel shafted when the sands once again shift under my feet and my character suffers when they wouldn’t have done in previous similar situations.

Yes, sometimes there’s something strange or unexpected in the world that takes you by surprise. That’s always difficult but also exciting… as long as you trust that the GM is using the rules fairly and that (given some effort) you can figure out what’s going on. Mystery is cool. Arbitrary decisions aren’t.

Rules ground the play. Not too many so that you don’t end up overly slowing the action but not too few that your GM has to constantly make decisions on-the-fly. I seek a Goldilocks system of RPG rules: something that is consistent and creates a firm grounded experience for whatever passes for realism.

Game on!