Clear Rules, Clear Worlds

25 Mar, 2026

This post isn’t directly related to the excellent “Permisiveness in RPGs” and “Yes and No, but… ?”, but their talk of yessing and noing got me thinking about some of my own reservations about improv theatre parlance and received wisdom in TTRPGs. Namely, our games are peppered with rules that purposefully lead us into an interpretive gray zone. They do so in the name of narrative surprise, but end up undermining the integrity of the game world. To me, these inclusions have misguided notions of playing to an audience baked into them, they put undue burden on the referee, and they push the players into passivity.

I taught myself the basics of OSR play with solo games. If you look for solo gaming resources online, you’ll quickly come across oracles: systems that use dice rolls to inform the game’s fiction. The simplest of these is the “Yes/No” oracle: you ask a yes/no question about the game world, and roll the dice that spits out a yes/no answer.

Usually these include variations like “No, but…” (the answer is no, with a mitigating detail) or “Yes, and…” (the answer is yes, with something extra). Additionally, most oracles I’ve seen are also set up to introduce complications (say, on doubles on a 2d6) or shift the ‘scene’ (there’s that theatre-speak sneaking in).

Such oracle results turn solo gaming into a creative writing exercise. They muddied and slowed down my early solitaire D&D games.¹ The assumption baked into their design – that the solo player should halfway feel like an audience member, surprised by the fiction unfolding via the oracles – misses the point of play. Old-school D&D is already an emergent story engine. Its systems (time, resources, reactions, etc.) are perfectly capable of creating interesting game states by themselves. To task the solo player with further interpretive work, I think, misunderstands the point of the game.

No Buts

Running Mothership, one of the things that has started to grate on me is how it handles failed rolls (Warden’s Operation Manual, p.33):

A failed roll does not mean “nothing happens.” It doesn’t even have to mean that a player fails to achieve their goal. It just means that the situation gets worse in some way. Every roll moves the game forward, whether that’s by making the situation better or worse. Instead of stating “You fail” or “You miss,” tell the players how the situation changes as a result of the failure. What new situation are they in now?

The game uses a d100 system because it gives you so much room to interpret. “Barely failed” or “Barely succeeded” can mean something if you let it. This is why it’s important to set the stakes of the conflict appropriately, to show that a success can mean “making the most of a bad situation” or “trying not to screw up an easy job.

You can feel a storygame ‘partial success’ influence here. This does two things I don’t like. One, it puts the onus on the referee to come up with interesting stuff on the fly. We’re back to a performer-audience dynamic. But we don’t want to reinforce the player’s role as a passive audience member, right, here to be entertained by the referee?

Two, there’s a trap here: we can easily end up in a situation where the player won’t know the result of their failure before rolling. Without extensive and disciplined dialogue, the game world can suddenly become soft-edged and arbitrary.

“You fail” or “you miss” may not be dramaturgically interesting results for a dice roll, but they are predictable, and predictability is what allows players to make meaningful decisions.

No Ands

A lot of games, even in the OSR space, use critical successes/failures and advantage/disadvantage mechanics. I’m lumping these together as small and simple mechanics that once again shift the focus from procedure toward referee interpretation. For crits, this is fairly obvious: on an unexpected result, a lot of systems rely on the referee to adjudicate the very good or very bad thing that happens, and we’re back in the mode of referee as storyteller. Some systems solve this by explaining specifically what happens on these results, and to me that’s much more palatable. A lot of systems actually only solve it partially, explaining what a crit success does (e.g., double damage), but staying silent on the crit fail.²

Advantage, meanwhile, puts a similar burden of in-the-weeds discussion on us as Mothership rolls do. The player is asked to repeatedly make their case for advantage, and, in absence of clear guidance, the referee once again becomes the sole arbiter of the game world’s logic. Advantage, an elegant-on-paper system built on dialogue about the shared fiction, ends up weakening the clear fictional framework established by concrete procedures. The mechanical ambiguities of advantage can turn into ambiguities in the fiction, and once again damage the player’s ability to reason about the game world.³

Yeses and Nos

I think my perfect game may be somewhere in the realm of an Into the Odd, or an OD&D or B/X with less cruft. Give me a ruleset that lets me neatly assess my players’ actions, without twists or murky half-results; one where we don’t roll a lot of dice, but know what we’re rolling for when we do. I don’t want to play in a fiction whose mechanics demand relitigating (because this does a disservice to my players), and I don’t want a game’s rules to push me into the role of storyteller as the referee (because this does a disservice to me). OSR games are not creative writing, they are not improv theatre, and they are not classical storytelling.

Two classic blog posts for further reading; orthogonal to my post but in the back of my mind as I was writing:

• Advantage and Impact, Dreaming Dragonslayer
• Difficulty in Bastionland, Bastionland

#design #mothership #rant