More than one type of fun

There's more than one type of fun.

Essentially the benefit of rules is that they stop certain types of fun from happening - so as to enable another type of fun to happen! Maybe not everyone likes that kind of fun (Eg, I'm not a big fan of monopoly, but lots of people have fun with it). But if they stop other types of fun to enable fun type X to happen...and you don't like fun type X at all...then you should probably stop playing that RPG (and look for another RPG that more suits you).

Just giving up on rules arbitrarily (instead of adhering to all/some consistantly) means the book neither delivers it's type of fun, but at the same time you are all putting in effort to follow its rules - for no real reason since it wont deliver it's fun. That's why a lot of people start looking for rules lite games - because they ignored so many rules they find rules useless to follow, so they think the solution is to play an RPG with less of them.

Granted, sometimes the designer just designed the rules badly - the designer maybe had fun X playing, but following his rules doesn't lead to the fun he had because he designed them badly. But again, this is really a sign to move on from the game (though hell, I GM Rifts - and I haven't moved on from it's hodgepodge of thrown together rules, so can I talk about moving on?).

Anyway, essentially the benefit of rules is that they are a buzz kill - of a certain type of buzz. And that enables other buzzes to be experienced instead.

First posted by me, here