Rules Don't (Necessarily) Elide

19 Jul, 2026

I find the ubiquity of the sentiment that "rules elide" genuinely puzzling for a couple of reasons. This argument comes from a blogpost by Jared Sinclair, but similar sentiments are echoed by other designers, especially in the OSR sphere.¹

I find it very strange that this deprecatory view of game mechanics is constantly being proposed by game designers, the people one would most expect to be interested in the development of mechanics that lead to interesting narratives. Instead, Sinclair proposes that "rules do not themselves create or conjure or elicit or inspire or invoke or incite." With all due respect to Sinclair, whose work on The Vanilla Game I deeply admire, I find this argument fallacious.

In Sinclair's example of how rules elide, he proposes that in order for a traditional dungeon game to be "about" lockpicking, it would have to involve the player accurately describing, in graphic detail, how their character picks a lock. Even in this hypothetical, this process leads to the mutual frustration of the GM and the player, suggesting that no game "about" lockpicking would be interesting or fun except perhaps to locksmiths. To me, it is obvious that the reason dungeon games tend to mechanize lockpicking is not because we don't want the game to be about lockpicking, but because lockpicking is unintuitive to most people, and so we need a mechanic for it to be a comprehensible subject of play.

This kind of resembles something Luke Gearing said, writing: "Mechanisms abstract the thing they describe or simulate. This can be done to speed up play, or to make something complex more easily grasped." But I take issue with the idea that "mechanisms abstract" because, given that TTRPG play already takes place in an imagined world, there is nothing concrete to abstract.²

Certainly, there are multiple ways to resolve ambiguity in TTRPGs, as discussed in To Be Resolved's Object-Oriented Conversations. What I personally find most valuable in this article is the idea that TTRPG play exists on a spectrum from totally conversation-based, something akin to completely freeform improv, to totally object-based, something akin to traditional board or card games. Different TTRPGs, and even different subsystems within the same TTRPG, can occupy different points along the spectrum. But most (all?) tabletop roleplaying games are simultaneously conversation-based and object-based to some extent, which is to say that they have mechanics, but that those mechanics are ultimately mediated through the conversation between participants.

I think Gearing and Sinclair are gesturing at the idea that the conversation which occurs during TTRPG play is somehow more "real" than the interaction of game mechanics, which I disagree with. The conversation between participants in a game does not reflect some underlying "reality" of the imagined world, merely the desires and expectations of those participants. This means that the conversation can be useful in instances where all participants have a similar understanding of the imagined world. If you come to a 20' ledge and have a 20' ladder, it seems reasonable that you could use the ladder to climb the ledge; and in many games, you would not have to engage with any explicit mechanical procedure to do so.

However, play which is entirely based on meeting the desires and expectations of the players has the risk of becoming predictable and uninteresting, as elucidated in Jay Dragon's Rules Are A Cage (and I'm a Puppygirl). The reason we play games at all instead of just saying "I win" is because the overcoming of self-imposed obstacles is satisfying to us for some reason. Mechanics in games frustrate our desires and expectations in ways that can be enjoyable or unenjoyable, depending on the mechanic and the kind of experience we are hoping to achieve from the game. "Rules elide" suggests that there is a correct answer to the question "What happens when I lean a ladder up against a ledge?" and of course, the intuitive answer is, "You can use the ladder to climb the ledge," but since it is a speculative ladder and a speculative ledge, anything is possible. As unwieldy as a "Ladder Malfunction" mechanic might be in play, it would generate interesting possibilities (was the person climbing injured? did the party get separated with some above and some below the ledge? how will they find their way back to each other?)

I find the "rules elide" line particularly odd coming from OSR folks, when to me one of the most salient features of OSR games is the way that narratives emerge from intricate mechanics regarding things like travel and inventory management. I always remember this Reddit post about Gearing's Wolves Upon the Coast, which notes that the rules about wind completely changed the trajectory of a session, turning a story of a triumphant siege into a Pyrrhic victory as the players had to wait and hope their hired mercenaries didn't mutiny while they waited for weather conditions to improve. By including rules about wind, something the vast majority of TTRPGs don't even think to remark on, Gearing's game becomes a game, to some extent, about what happens when the weather stymies your endeavors.

Mechanics with the same level of "elision" can also produce different incentives, leading to different experiences of play. Take a game where you heal back up to full health after combat vs. one where you have to rest in town for a week. Both of these games, according to Sinclair's argument, elide the process of telling the GM how you set your broken bones and what herbal poultices you apply to your abrasions, but the characters in the former game will feel more "heroic" getting into fight after fight while those in the latter will feel more "scrappy" as they crawl back to town fleeing from threats.

Ultimately, a game is about whatever the players do during the game, and what stands out in their memories afterward.³ Mechanics can diminish the importance of a certain subject in play, but this is not their sole or crucial purpose. Instead, I would say that the mechanics of a TTRPG structure and define the participants' relationship to the conversation which mediates play.

I hope that this short essay didn't come off too confrontational or standoffish. I genuinely just wanted to talk about an argument I disagree with, and I'm always eager to hear feedback. It's entirely possible there's a dimension of the "rules elide" argument I don't understand. Thanks to everyone whose work inspired this post and who let me talk about TTRPGs with them.

Footnotes

#theoryslop