Robert Bohl To my mind, RPG play relies so heavily on the contributions of the participants that I don’t think of RPGs as ‘complete games’ in anything like the way code or boardgames can be.

IMO this is easy to underestimate because it comes ‘for free’, and takes no page space in the rules, despite dwarfing the rules in terms of complexity and sophistication.

I’ve been asked several times over the years to build software that had an implied, “Oh, and this bit is artificially intelligent” for this reason–the client was taking human cognition as a free starting point.

So whether or not the game has explicit ‘hack me’ labels, or whether the group is trying to play RAW, I think of the rules less like a description of what’s supposed to happen and more like a vector to depart along (with everyone’s starting point being materially different).

Most RPGs leave so many fundamental things unspecified, such as the manner whereby player utterances become accepted as actual (if fictional) events.