In Dungeons & Dragons (the tabletop game), there are universal laws. These are published in the Player’s Guide. They set parameters for the characters, like how powerful they should be relative to monsters. The Player’s Guide outlines weapons, combat procedures, and success rates. It describes spells, what they do and how long they last. What is a reasonable amount of gold to pay for a weapon, and how much learning (XP) comes from a fight.
The Players Guide does not tell you: everything else. What happens when a player attempts to save a drowning baby using a waffle?
The Player’s Guide represents the universal laws of D&D. The rules exist because they’ve been shown (over time, this is the 5th edition) to enable games that are fun.
Yet the prime directive of D&D is: what the DM says, goes. (The DM is the dungeon master, the person telling the story in collaboration with the players.) The DM can override the rules when necessary. More often, the DM makes up rules to suit the situation. The rulebooks do not cover everything the players might choose to do, that that’s both essential and by design.
In D&D, the DM sets the stage with a situation. Then the players respond, describing how the characters they control act in this situation. The DM determines what happens as a result of their actions.
In our game today, Tyler was DM. Tyler DMs by the “Rule of Cool”: “If it’s cool, let them do it. If it’s not cool, don’t make them do it.” One character, TDK Turtle, ran out of the inn with a waffle in hand. On his next turn, he tried to use the waffle to save a drowning baby.
Could that ever work? The DM decides. How unlikely is this? More unlikely than Turtle rolled. And yet Tyler came up with a consequence: Turtle threw the waffle in the river, our dog jumped in to eat the waffle, the baby grabbed onto the dog, and thus the dog saved the baby.
Every D&D campaign (series of games with the same DM and roughly the same players) has its own contextual rules. These build up over time. Our party has a dog because yesterday we rescued this pet from a Kuo-toa tribe that was trying to worship it as a Doge. (The Kuo-toa worship gods of random construction. Where by random I mean, DM’s choice. This DM chose Doge, because it advanced the plot.)
What works for a group of players, we stick with. What doesn’t, we leave behind. If it’s cool, do it. If not, don’t. Results drive future practices.
Our teams are like this. Humans work within universal laws of needing to eat and sleep and commute. Organizations impose constraints. Within these bounds, we come up with what works for us, what makes us laugh, and what helps us advance the plot of the system we are building.
Not every baby-saving-waffle-toss is the same. Not every party has this dog. Let teams build their own process, and don’t expect it to transfer. Do look for the wider rules that facilitate a productive game, and try those more broadly.