The Cult of RAW

The philosophy and implications of pursuing Rules-As-Written

The question of whether and why to play Rules As Written—or RAW—is apparently as old as civilization. Ancient works which have survived the passage of millennia (indirectly) address this topic.

Here we will look at the question in a holistic manner, escaping the usual conversation-killing mental walls, digressions, and distractions that plague the topic of RAW in TTRPGs.

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The Hunt for Sincerity

To achieve lasting answers on the matter of RAW, we must have a clear notion of its meaning. Ordinarily, this would be a simple process such as looking up the term in a dictionary—or several dictionaries, comparing the collection—and using the definition as a stand-in for its meaning.

However, the concept of RAW and the nature of its pursuit are tangled in the sludge of a special linguistic mire. Currently, most discussion of deep concepts tends to slide into reliance on definitions—and most appeals to definitions are dishonest rather than sincere. Because RAW is wound up in language, intent, and implications derived from the pursuit of meaning, discussion surrounding it has been hit hard—only those who already see what is there have an understanding of it, while most everyone else looks on in understandable confusion.

We must first transport our thinking to clean, clear waters. To do so, we need to identify the dishonest methods and practices that cast doubt on our words and intentions.

Legalism vs. Law

There are numerous historical examples where societies experienced the peaks and valleys of Law and Chaos. We might be tempted to reflexively describe today’s ascendant societies as highly Lawful. There are no shortage of “scholars” ready to decry all of history—even the very recent past—as Chaos and paint the present as a beacon of Law. But the same (mistaken) view was certainly present in prominent historical societies coming off the peak of their power.

Acting as a bridge between Law and Chaos, a third manner of force—Legalism¹—reigns in near absolute supremacy in the order of things today. But what is the difference between Legalism and Law?

To oversimplify, Legalism is the letter of the law, while Law is the spirit of the law. Legalism treats rule following as the supreme indicator of correct conduct.

This should not be conflated with the observation that correct conduct is highly aligned with rule following, but the difference is subtle. Leaning more on philosophy terms, Legalism is an implicit nominalist denial of the principles that are the foundation of correct behavior.

Goodhart’s Law

The economist Charles Goodhart succinctly expressed a common danger encountered in business, financial, and legal arenas. He used very technical language², but the message is often stated: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

In this usage, a “measure” is something that we see after an action has happened; it’s an indicator of how well or poorly things went. A “target” is a goal that we establish; it’s a tangible, measurable objective to be reached.

It seems almost obvious to set a goal like “make the measure go in the right direction,” but Goodhart warns against it. Briefly, there are two reasons this strategy may not result in better outcomes.

The Cat-skinning Problem

In a complex system, we might be measuring something like “gallons of final product packaged” or “number of customer service calls completed.” Let’s imagine these are measured daily. The first indicates the performance of a soda factory, while the second is measuring a bank’s 24-hour customer service department.

If we went to the factory floor and offered bonuses for more “gallons of final product packaged,” we will quickly find the unintended wisdom of the phrase, “there’s more than one way to skin a cat.” As an example, the floor crew might devise ways to pack more volume into each container. Cans or even bottles that are overfilled are more likely to break—and the containers that don’t break represent the sale of more product (the liquid) for the same price!

Similarly, if we assume the bank’s service department has a high volume of calls, there are many things that could go wrong if we reward employees for “completing” more calls per day. They may find ways to delay, override, or otherwise “solve” the problem with half-measures that don’t address root issues. Instead of being patient and polite, they may succumb to pressure and become curt and demanding—hurting the bank’s reputation in the long run.

Subtly Inverting Causality

On a more fundamental level, Goodhart’s Law warns us against actions which confuse cause and effect. The reason the cat-skinning problem exists is that different knowledge states change the interpretation of measures.

The process is subtly changed; the measure takes on a different meaning

In terms of cause and effect, a measure is an effect—it’s what comes after. By making it a target, we can confidently predict it will improve, but that should make us suspicious! Its improvement is more likely to be a result of direct action on the measure rather than a hoped-for improvement in the process.

If someone approached us and wanted $10,000 to improve our factory output using the strategy above, we would interpret that as dishonest—or, at best, ignorant. Real improvements in a complex process aren’t so simplistic; they are often the result of numerous, additive, intangible changes.

Goodhart’s Legalism

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

Legalism, as a mindset, is a meta-linguistic violation of Goodhart’s Law. It confuses the measure—rule following—of a Lawful society by making it a target. It implicitly posits that people who act within the rules are good by virtue of acting within the rules. When put this way, we can see the inversion of causality.

An ordinary person of good character will follow rules because of a complex array of societal expectations and a desire for the world to be good. In the mind of the rule follower, both he and the rule-maker understand that (explicit) rules are a formalism that allows for the judicious punishment of bad actors.

The words on paper are a mere administrative detail to a person of good character. These words are, at best, indicative of the behavior expected of an upstanding citizen. What really matters is the underlying principle and the collective insistence on following that principle.

These crucial considerations are skipped over entirely by the Legalist mindset, which instead demands simplistic adherence to the letter of the law.

Apex Legalism

The execution, rather than mindset, of Legalism involves robotically sifting through rules and regulations to mechanically decide on the fate of a rule breaker. In the long term, this process corrupts both the adjudicator and the citizen.

From the citizen’s point of view, he must learn all the rules and regulations so he won’t commit violations. Rather than avoiding Law-aligned violations by becoming internally more Lawful, he is forced into a near-permanent state of neurotic inference over classes of minor violations.

From the adjudicator’s point of view, his role is neither to punish nor reward but to blindly follow the process as it’s laid out. If he enacts mistaken procedures or invokes superfluous considerations, he will, in turn, be punished by the very system he arbitrates.

Rather than act as a means to systematically punish bad conduct, Legalism creates a situation that trains men of potentially good character to neurotically obey increasingly precise and arbitrary demands instead of seeking the good within themselves.

The citizen is burdened by an ever-growing landscape of minor violations to avoid, while the outlaw, in his defiance, pays no such hourly cost. Both risk punishment—the outlaw through his defiance, the citizen through his mere existence.

The adjudicator can never make a real judgment because the system itself has no core other than rule following. To judge the system mistaken is to become an outlaw; there are no steps in between for reflection—no separation between the fact of the rule and the legitimacy of its authority.

This is the endgame of Legalism. While Legalism can never fully achieve this state before its internal contradictions give way to Chaos (its sincere purpose and utility), it can string along any number of would-be citizens right up until it collapses under the weight of their collective psychic distress.

RAW = Legalism?

There are a number of dishonest objections to the pursuit of RAW. These are essentially malicious and not worth addressing.

But if we want to understand why so many otherwise reasonable actors might object to pursuing RAW, we can begin by realizing that honest citizens are repelled by the scent of Legalism! Because of a lack of linguistic separation (in everyday usage) between moral concepts, RAW’s insistence on following the rules comes off exactly the same as some bureaucrat’s malign obsession with putting people through rat mazes.

RAW as Law

Many deploy TTRPGs to escape from the evils that the wider world imposes on their daily lives. A citizen weighed down by Legalism can be forgiven for mistaking RAW as yet another tendril of its tiresome influence reaching to destroy their beloved hobby. In the darkness of the present order, the benefits of RAW are obscured.

We’re left with questions. What benefits is RAW supposed to bring? How can we look at a table and decide whether Legalism is under the hood? How do we pursue RAW without our efforts descending into Legalism?

The answers we seek can be revealed by clarifying the path of Lawful RAW. The meaning of RAW can be understood fully only by seeing each star concept as belonging to a larger constellation of ideas.

TTRPGs are Games

The most important conceptual error in the TTRPG arena is thinking of TTRPGs as game-building toolkits or storytelling machines rather than as complete, functioning games. Given the nature of the TTRPG³, we do not view this as a mere philosophical difference but as an explicit, straightforward error in thinking.

Can a designer utilize a TTRPG to build a game? Yes. Can a table of players utilize a TTRPG as a storytelling machine? Yes. However, a TTRPG is a game—with all the prerequisites we require games to have.

“Playing the rules as they are written” is an incoherent idea if we don’t view TTRPGs primarily as games. This starting point leads us neatly into the other elements.

The Cycle of Mastery

Games are arenas for mastery, and the players that are excited about games want to follow the path of winning, carving out their own victories. What does that process look like for a TTRPG player?

In a TTRPG, the rules are not the game; they are the pathway to the game. The rules produce and reveal outcomes to players who use them to engage with the gameworld; this process creates the campaign canon. The character of this engagement, the experience of playing, is what participants remember and form opinions on.

But this is no more than a summary of the RGE cycle⁴. Players read the Rules in order to access the Game which provides a certain Experience. Rules → Game → Experience. Informed by this Experience, the players look at the Rules again with new eyes, gaining better insight into the Game contained therein; and the cycle continues.

Unity of Action and Purpose

One table one may focus on trade and travel while another focuses on distinguishing their characters through the gladiatorial arena. The first table is unlikely to have the same fine grasp of combat mechanics as the second, and the same asymmetry of understanding is true about travel encounters at the second table.

Yet by following the RGE cycle, both tables’ understanding of the game will converge! As the number of cycles increases and the players become better students of the Rules, the two Games they discover will rapidly approach one another—and this is as true for two tables as it is for two thousand.

But what if two groups of players insist on reading the Rules differently? By following the RGE cycle, we can see that they will not arrive at the same underlying Game—in fact, the Games they uncover are likely to diverge with each cycle.

Imagine we develop the TTRPG Killers & Kastles. We’ve designed K&K to allow for players to translate characters and events from one table to another. This encourages the growth of persistent campaigns encapsulating a vast history of action produced by a multitude of characters.

But this vision shatters the instant someone says, “we don’t play [X] that way at our table; we do [Y] instead.” The table that insists on treating the rules differently creates their own peculiar branch of the game that is incompatible with real K&K.

Small incompatibilities can be fixed by simple replacement, such as swapping “Might” with “Strength.” More difficult incompatibilities—such as converting a World of Darkness character to an AD&D character—can only be addressed by players who have mastery in both games making judgments on a case-by-case basis.

But fundamental incompatibilities cannot be addressed without something being sacrificed. Imagine one table of players used a “roll to-hit vs. AC, then roll damage” pattern described by the rules, while another table used a “roll for damage, AC reduces damage” pattern invented by their referee. Feats that would be physically impossible at the second table—such as slaying a high-AC creature with a basic sword—might be happening frequently in the first table.

Even this trivial spot-problem reveals the issue with combining the campaign histories achieved through different rulesets. From this perspective, we can see that the game rules act as an interface between tables—a common language that all tables can use to combine and share their experiences.

Only RAW provides the shared language and assumptions that allow a TTRPG club to form around a tangible instance—like a campaign or a “universe”—of a game rather than an intangible brand whose very nature is elusive⁵.

In this way, the pursuit of RAW creates a dividing line in the hobby, effectively forming two hobbies out of one. In the hobby where players pursue RAW, they are all converging and combining and joining in their understanding and ability to coordinate and participate together. But the side that rejects RAW, whether directly or passively, will gain no such benefit, becoming more and more isolated as they “master” the different version of the game they (nevertheless) insist on calling K&K.

Trust and Cohesion

If everyone at the table has agreed to pursue RAW, the conflicts of interest that result from the ebb and flow of gameplay events are mediated by an impartial, impersonal authority—the ruleset.

But in places where RAW is shunned, whether vigorously or passively, the mindset of Rule Zero comes into play. The referee’s role changes from arbitrator of the rules to an overseer.

In Rule Zero play, the players constantly monitor the referee. If the referee follows the rules in situation D but not situation E, the players form a concept of the referee’s motivation. Is his motive justified, or is it hypocritical? Because player characters find themselves in unique situations, players constantly wonder whether the referee’s treatment is preferential to one character—or player—over the others.

These odd considerations—and all of their vast breadth of implications—are difficult to imagine in a game where the referee’s motivation is never more than to arbitrate events according to the game rules. Even in a group of total strangers, commitment to RAW provides a launch pad for trust, cooperation, and confidence. Importantly, this restores the natural balance of agency by tilting it away from the referee and back to the players—it was only ever in the referee’s hands because he attempted to act as demiurge over the gameworld.

What if the game is bad?

The snide response to this objection is simply: play a better game. For RAW adherents, the rhetorical goal of insisting on playing by the rules is that their opposition will be forced to admit they are playing a bad game and potentially move on to a better one.

But this objection is getting at something important to the hobby as a whole. Why is there a persistent library of so many bad games out there? We would intuitively expect that bad games go away, but we have seen TTRPGs collectively plummet in quality and usability over time.

Art galleries are filled with toilet seats, garbage heaps, and other aesthetic atrocities that demean the whole field. The cause? To oversimplify: the message that “art can’t be held to a standard,” overtook the the art world.

TTRPG storefronts are filled with narrative dice storytellers, art projects posing as RPGs, and bargain-bin BX knockoffs that demean the field⁶. The cause is very similar: the abandonment and rejection of standards.

RAW is the only standard of judgment that can be applied to every TTRPG equally. If, as a field, TTRPG players judged games based on the quality of their rules, this problem would vanish. Imagine being bombarded with high-quality BX clones that enhance and focus the game on some particular aspect instead of feeding into the same idiomatic mistakes for decades!

Rather than being an objection to RAW, the existence of bad games is an excellent reason for serious players to not only adopt RAW but to insist publicly and fiercely on its further adoption.

Can RAW Fail?

Hypothetically, what if every existing TTRPG fails to be a complete, functioning game? Seemingly, it would be silly to argue for the pursuit of RAW.

But RAW, as hinted above, serves a purpose much like the idea of Zero-Prep Refereeing. They are both aspirational concepts.

If a game supports Zero-Prep poorly, it is still worth attempting to play it that way. Pragmatically, the referee is mastering the rule system to the edge of its capabilities and becoming more practiced at secondary skills. But more importantly, carrying the Zero-Prep torch lights up the topic in the minds of other players and designers.

A game that supports RAW poorly is still worth attempting to play RAW, but there is a deeper reason than in the case of Zero-Prep. RAW is the only pathway into the RGE cycle that will let us learn about the game’s true character and identity.

Consider a TTRPG with some contradictions in its systems or ambiguities in its procedures. If we never attempted to play it RAW, we would not even know these flaws exist! We would have no basis with which to judge the game; designers would have no strong confidence in either embracing or avoiding its designs in their own creations.

There are limits to mentally modeling the downstream effects of rules—and this creates an imperfect basis for judgment even in many of the simplistic cases where it works as intended. Only by committing to the rules and entering the RGE cycle can we form the desired basis for such judgments, if we are clever enough to master the game.

A game which can be played Zero-Prep has rules with certain rigorous support behind them, in the same way that an underwater vehicle will have dramatically more reliable pressure seals on its entry and exit points. The same is true, in a stronger and more fundamental way, with games that can be played RAW—and this is the target we should be gunning for as designers.

A House Built on Sand

How many rulebooks begin—sometimes on the first page, even—by telling us that we can ignore or throw out rules we don’t like and that we should decide for ourselves whether a rule is suitable? How often do we see referees at conventional Rule-Zero-Run tables enforce or ignore rules selectively? These problems feed into one another.

If a designer does not provide a clear, prescriptive vision for the use of the rulebook, it is implicitly up to the players. If we have 900 rules in our rulebook, we are singling the referee out and saying “decide, one by one, which rules you think are valid.” This is the antithesis of a vision or a pathway. It’s an expression of the idea that a TTRPG is a game-building toolkit rather than a game.

The referee instinctively understands that the game must have a vision, however. Thus, it is up to him to create one—and on this basis, we see tables where referees with a half-formed vision selectively enforce rules and end up designing a game on the fly according to the feeling at the table. Some referees might even recoil from a game that lays a solid foundation or insists on its internally realized vision.

The pursuit of RAW avoids these ambiguities. Even if a TTRPG rulebook fails to convey its vision, players that assume that its suggestions are definitive will hunt for (and probably find) an unambiguous center. If a designer builds a game that is playable RAW, they will avoid ambiguity and highlight their vision with a clearer voice—perhaps even warning players against straying from the path.

A RAW Vision

Instead of passively avoiding the tendrils of Legalism, we should be joyfully sinking ourselves into the depths of each game we play, without cynicism or fear. With the concept of Legalism—a central enemy of the TTRPG hobby—made readily apparent, we should evict it from our own thoughts and find serious players who are willing to do the same.

Foremost, these TTRPG players will be curious. They will want to read rulebooks closely, and they will want to scaffold their reasoning using game systems. They will prefer when games make demands of them and will relish the opportunity to express themselves in a medium with the creative constraints of the ruleset.

Sticking to RAW allows us to avoid a huge breadth and depth of pitfalls—just look at the size of this article! Whole classes of unmentioned problems—like “dice fudging” and other sorts of dishonesty—are automatically evaded, disappearing into the unseen rear arc of the RAW perspective.

As it is written, so shall it be done! Go forth and spread the cult—save the TTRPG hobby from the doom of rot and decay!

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1. “Legalism” has been used to describe a great number of things historically, from Qin dynasty philosophy to Biblical metaphysics differentiator to colloquial description of modern Western judicial processes. The term as it’s used here doesn’t precisely represent any one of these meanings but is instead a general idea at the root of all of them.

2. Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes. — Charles Goodhart, "Problems of Monetary Management: The U.K. Experience"

3. See an in-depth analysis of TTRPGs as Second-World Exercises, the logical extension of the wargame.

4. See the RGE cycle—the universal structure of mastering a game—examined in great detail.

5. The distinction between “The Game” and “The Brand” is understood and laid out best by Bradford C. Walker, who has excellent insight on his blog about the advantages of club play over the diffuse energy of “gaming community,” among many other related topics.

6. There are definitely good games coming out, but the lack of a collective standard means they are hidden in piles of refuse rather than systematically brought to our attention.