You Can't Elide What Doesn't Exist

Jared Sinclair says, "rules elide." In general, I agree.

For those not yet familiar and who don't want to read the whole post, I'll summarize briefly with one of Jared's own exercises. Think about picking a lock in an RPG. If you wanted, and everyone at the table knew enough about how lockpicking works in real life, you could resolve that entire process just by describing it in detail: the ref could decide what type of lock it is and how the mechanism works, the player could describe exactly how they use their tools to examine and work with it, what motions they make, and the ref could describe how each motion moves each pin or whatever other part of the mechanism. If you know enough, you don't even need to roll any dice (maybe--I have my suspicions about that, but that's a subject for another post) or rely on any set mechanics beyond what you all know about how to pick a lock.

Of course most of us don't know nearly enough about how lockpicking works to do that (I sure as fuck don't). Luckily, we don't have to, because instead of going through that whole process of describing every detail, we can just say, "roll 1d6, add your lockpicking skill bonus, if you get a 5 or higher you do it."

This rule elides the true process of picking the lock. It takes away the full detailed complexity of picking the lock and replaces it with something simpler, quicker, and easier for most of us to understand. Depending on the desires of your group and your game, this might or might not be a good thing. In OSR gaming, we place a lot of value on player skill over character skill; by using rules to elide what happens in the fiction, we take some of that load off the players to know how things work in the fictional world and apply that knowledge, and put more of that load onto the characters. Every game and group will have its own ideal balance of what to elide and what to play out in full.

Jared's argument, in the strong form, is that this is all rules can do. They cannot create or inspire or evoke, only elide. Broadly speaking, I agree. Every rule we set for our game simplifies some part of the fiction.

However, I believe Jared makes an important oversight. The strong form of Rules Elide presumes that everything in the game fiction has a real-world referend. Picking a lock is something that can happen both in the fiction of our game and in real life. We can assume, unless told otherwise, that it works the same in the fiction as it does in real life. When we then apply a rule to the fiction for lockpicking, we elide that process. It is implicitly the real-world process of picking a lock that our rules are eliding, not the fictional one.

But our fiction doesn't always have to refer to real life. The fiction can create new things wholly from imagination.

Rules Can't Elide Magic

Magic doesn't have a referend in reality. When we say, "My wizard casts Magic Missile," they aren't doing something a person can do in real life. The interaction cannot happen if there isn't a rule to say, "A wizard can cast Magic Missile."

Now, technically we can assume there's some elision of the fiction happening. We probably imagine that in the fiction, there's a whole lot going on when we say our wizard casts Magic Missile that we aren't bothering to describe in detail. We might have an idea of what some of those details look like, or we really might not care at all. But I argue that when we talk about rules eliding, that elision of the fiction isn't what really matters to us. It's the elision of the real-world referend.

The reason we care about rules eliding is because when they do, they're shifting that balance of skill and knowledge away from the players and toward the characters. We want to be careful and thoughtful about what we elide because we want to make sure we leave the things in the hands of the players that we want to be there. If we want to run a game that challenges the players' skill at creative logistics, we don't want a rule that says, "roll 1d6 to figure out how you get the wagonload of treasure down the mountain to town." We want them to figure that shit out and explain it.

But when it comes to magic, to interactions that exist only in the fiction, the players can't know anything about them until they hear them explained. We can't make a game that tests the player's skill at magic without reference to game rules, because magic isn't a thing the players can be skilled at. (I'll leave aside discussion of real occult practices as not really related to how magic is used in most games.)

Now, you can argue, "But when you establish magic in your fiction, it's not necessarily rules creating that magic. It's the fiction, they're not the same thing." In this case, they are--unless you really are establishing how magic works in your fiction down to the last detail, which is impossible, and then creating simpler rules to elide that complexity. However you establish it, your explanations are always leaving something out. So, yes, maybe in that sense, your rules are eliding the truth of magic in your fiction. But at that point, who cares? How is it useful to talk about rules eliding something that can't exist without the rules to begin with?

(This ties into another thing I've been wanting to talk about: when you play at the world, your setting is your system. Hoping to have another post for that ready sometime soon.)

I think Rules Elide remains a useful lens for thinking about modeling real-world interactions through game rules. But when it comes to interactions that are wholly fictional, things characters can't do at all unless something in the fiction establishes them as possible, I think the argument breaks down. You can't elide something that doesn't exist--not in any way that matters.