"Laws versus Rules"

EDIT: I first misinterpreted what you meant by law. I though a law was something like "You will not have more than 3 units". And the rule was just a description of mechanics. You should invert occurences of "law" and "rules" in what's written below. sorry ! :)

Sometimes, having "laws" can simplify what one would do with a set of rules. For example, if you want to limit the number of combat units, you could devise a set of rules to allow production of food, supply to armies, etc. But if army/combat is not an important part of your game, and you want to emphacise another element, you could restrict by dictating a "law" to reduce the amount of units available.

Nevertheless, I would think defining laws should really be the last way of achieving an effect, as it is not intuitive, and that most of the time, you can use certain elements of your game to create a mechanic/situation in which players will realise themselve what's best for them.

I also think of games (such as Mare Nostrum) where there is a limited number of army/triemes/caravanes/cities tokens to place on the board. The small amount of token availables were obviously defined to force something on the game (Force player to attach each others, prevent players from conquering the whole map). I have seen players annoyed by this.

I think abstract games are good design tools to get a feel for this sort of thing. The designer has a certain "feel" in mind for the way the game should play, but only the bare mechanics are presented, so it may not be obvious by reading the rules what the experience of gameplay will be. Concepts like density of pieces before there is a reaction or a crisis are most obvious in abstracts, and, I think, illustrate the rules/principles dichotomy quite well. Usually, with an abstract, the sum is far more than the parts alone would suggest, and this can be equally true of boardgames in general.

It's basically emergent complexity all over again; letting the interactions between the various rules guide the game play, as much or more than the rules themselves.

I personally hate arbitrary rules and love laws. Some rules irritate me so much I cannot play the game.

A good example here is renju. I know the restrictions on the black player balance the game very nicely. And yet they seem so arbitrary to me, and aesthetically unpleasant. The fact that the rules cannot be explained to a new player before some game analysis is taught only adds to that feeling.

I also tend to dislike games with lots of rules you have to memorize. It's a mark of a good design when the rule set is short end elegant. But in some games you read the rules and almost see how playtesters came to the designer and said: "when the players do this and then that, they always win". But the game was already "done" and scheduled for production, so the designer simply patched it by including the rule "you are not allowed to do this and then that". Then, another situation like that came up, and another patch...

And yet, there are situations when an extra rule is a good thing. For example, it's a good thing to include a rule "don't shoot yourself in the foot".

That is, if the number of possible choices is vast, but most of them are fruitless (according to the game laws), players feel frustrated.

If one strategy is slightly better than the other, it's fine to alow both and let the players figure out the best one for themselves. But when a certain choice quickly leads to being stuck for the rest of the game and not having any fun, it's better to eliminate such choices altogether with a rule.

Players should be gently guided by the rules, and rules should limit the options to reasonable. A new player is bound to make stupid moves... if that leads to him getting stuck and frustrated, he is likely to walk away and not even play another game.

Well, just to muddy the waters some more, I think that this whole debate of "rules vs laws" is really just a subset of the "freedom of play" discussion. So far my musings on this subject have passed a reasonable posting size, and are even heading past a moderate article length (which is why I haven't contributed so far - every time I do, I realise that my thoughts belong better in the article, which will get posted somewhere. Eventually. :-)

Fundamentally though, I think it comes down to exactly how much influence the players themselves are allowed to have over the direction of the game. There is a clear axis which runs from "here's the scenario; do what you like"* all the way through to "here are the rules; do what you are allowed to do."** [I guess the other axis runs from "here is the precise thematic model we are simulating" through to "this is piece X and this is piece Y" - as a result, we can locate all our games somewhere in this space, although there are other dimensional axes that I haven't considered in this model!]
*this would be something like a social LARP, where players are given characters to play and interact with each other directly with as little outside intervention as possible.
**where this would be something like Go, where players are given some simple but very precise rules and everything is governed by those rules.

In other words, I guess I am disagreeing with the original assertion that a heavily-themed game should avoid rules in favour of laws, since there are good examples of that sort that are full of specific rules. Not tremendously helpful, but hey...

I like the phrasing. I'd even extend the word "laws" a bit to "natural laws" or "laws of nature." There's no rule in life that says if you don't eat you'll starve to death: you just do by nature of the fact that your body needs fuel and eating is how we do it. I know in my designs I certainly work for natural law restrictions over explicit rules. I had a game once with actions where the game was broken if, of the five possible actions, players performed 1 or 2 and 5. Temporarily I had a rule that said you couldn't do 5 if you did 1 or 2 (or vice versa), but eventually I massaged the game such that you really wouldn't want to do that, and even if you did nothing would be broken.

As to your idea, David, I'd love to hear more.

-- Matthew