It's not something you often hear at a roleplaying table. And he'd said it with such conviction! F*ck Immersion. It's the rules that matter.
He practised what he preached. If there was a rule, it had to be followed. No matter how obscure or if we had to spend 20 minutes looking it up. Nevermind that when it was finally resolved none of us quite remembered what was going on anymore. Or cared.
That slowed the game to a crawl. Then it got worse: the game master kept rolling bad results on an events table and we couldn't advance. So I suggested it was time to fudge some dice and move things along.
You would have thought I'd said we were going to slap his mother.
He detonated. He roared. You could say he was passionate about it.
"You might as well create a system without dice then!"
When I told him I had, I momentarily feared for his wellbeing. Healthy people don't go that colour.
It was the last session I played there.
That day taught me three things.
First, some people want the game to work that way. The rules are the point. The dice are sacred. You play the system as written or you don't play at all.
Second, I don't.
Third, trying to please every type of player leaves nobody happy. So why try?
This led me to a new question: if I were to build a game for players like me, what would it look like?
It would start with immersion. Not a nice-to-have, not something you protect only when the rules happen to allow it. The point.
The best sessions I've ever played are the ones where you look up and realise it's several hours later. Everything else dropped away. The only thing that mattered was what was happening at the table.
Psychologists call this 'flow'.
It's an incredibly fragile state. Rules lookups kill it. Arguments about interpretation kill it. Anything that pulls people out of the story and into the manual kills it.
And it would put the table at the centre. Roleplaying is telling a story together. The narrator prepares, yes, but the story happens in the spaces between the preparation. It emerges. The unexpected tangent that swallows the whole session. The NPC invented on the spot and fondly remembered for years. The plan that falls apart spectacularly and produces the best evening of the year.
The table creates moments no one could have come up with alone. And those moments are what makes this medium different from everything else. Computer games have the pretty graphics. But there you're always a visitor to somebody else's world. Only ttrpgs can make you feel like you've come home.
And that makes the table your family.
So the rules have a job most rulebooks ignore. They should foster collaboration, cohesion and connection. Every game has two worlds — the one you play in and the table you sit at — and the system should make both worth inhabiting.
These realisations crystallised into a hierarchy.
The group's enjoyment comes first. The story second. The rules a distant third.
That sounds like it diminishes the rules. It doesn't. It puts them where they belong. Rules are tools: you pick one up when it helps and put it down when it gets in the way. You're not playing the rulebook. You're playing your game.
If nobody is sure what a rule says, wing it. If there's a disagreement, the narrator makes a call and you sort it out after the session. The story does not stop for the manual.
That's the game I wanted to build. Not one that tolerates this philosophy, but one built out of it — where the rules stay quiet when they're not needed, do their job fast when they are, and never once ask the table to trade the evening for a technicality.
A game where deciding if you've won is easy. You only have to ask one question.
Did you have fun?