I am once again reacting to Jay Dragon. Specifically to the sentence she wrote about below, about how rules in a TTRPG could be:
Rules in an expressionist game tell you who your character is expected to be, how society sees them, and how they ought to behave.
I once heard Brennan Lee Mulligan say the reason he likes D&D is because its ruleset does the work of simulating the physicality of the game world for him, allowing him to focus on simulating the parts he finds fun to think about. Basically, fall damage means Mulligan does not have to figure out how gravity happens, so he gets more time to come up with cool witches.
Thinking about Dragon’s line above, I think that what Mulligan has actually been doing all this time is designing expressionist-ish games (in at least this one ‘rules are society’ sense) atop the non-expressionist scaffolding of D&D. Listen, for example, to the Coven of Elders arc of Worlds Beyond Number, in which players tangle with a set of stringently-enforced social rules (don’t run from Gramore, etc.), and barely engage with D&D mechanics at all, beyond skill checks.
This ‘the book sets the physics rules, GM makes the social rules’ division of labour is (I think?) quite common in TTRPG play. What the expressionist manifesto offered to me is a reversal of this responsibility. What if the book set the social, and the GM the physical? Or rather, what if the authority of text was deployed on behalf of rules about dress codes, proper worship, or how inequality manifests, while the rulings of the GM concerned the effects of gravity?
I believe this shift would make games focused on navigating the challenge of society much easier to run. It is hard for me to be truly mean to my friends. It is particularly hard to propose that I inflict punishment for breaking unfair rules of my own design even within the game world. If those rules were sourced from the text, rather than from me, I am not accountable for them. We as a table are accountable for their presence, due to the collective decision to play the game in the first place, in knowledge of those rules. So, I can enforce them with caution not anxiety.
I also think the delegation of physics-design to the GM also opens up play. This thought is less well-developed, so I will leave you with an experience. In a recent campaign of Heart, I performed an NPC called Milt Friend, a classic “Bad American Accent” wet-mouthed corrupt cop. He first appeared in the game as the guard of a specific weapons depot, located in a specific part of the world. But then, when the players had moved to a completely different part of the world, I found I needed a border guard for them to encounter.
Now, Heart has a journey mechanic called Delves. The subtext of this rule is that journeys between locations in worlds that run on Heart take time and are dangerous. Milt Friend was a coward, and I felt that if I stayed true to Delve physics, he probably would not appear in a new location. But I wanted him to. So, I ignored the book’s physics, and instituted my own: that anywhere there was a closed door or a boundary of some kind, Milt Friend could also be there, regardless of distance or danger.
Making that decision felt like setting down an awkward weight. Maybe for Mulligan having fall damage liberates. I however find that I might like to make my own gravity.