This is prompted by a current thread at theRPGsite, where I took Levi to task for bringing up "Lumpley Principle"-esque definitions.

Anyway, I'm going to make my own set of definitions, not as a bid to impose them on the rest of the world, nor as an attempt to "interpret" the essential meanings of terms as used in Forge/Story-Games circles. These definitions may be influenced by earlier ones but they're completely de novo. Also, they're just a stepping stone to talking about the underlying concepts as they relate to design and play, in less jargonistic fashion.

Here goes.

System: the formal rules governing the distribution of authority in an RPG, and the transformation of participant declarations into game-world "facts". Systems are concerned with explicit rights and procedures.

Paradigm or ethos: a collection of common or mutually-complementary understandings regarding the responsibilities of the participants and the purpose of play.

Even these definitions aren't so important in their particulars as they allow us to talk about these things separately in design and play. In design, they're fully distinguishable. A rule that says, "The GM may not declare a conflict without the agreement of the players" is formally the same as "the players may veto any conflict proposed by the GM". Both are part of the system. A "rule" that says "The GM should avoid killing player-characters unless they do something stupid" isn't a part of the system, because it doesn't formally address rights or procedures: it doesn't alter the fact that, presumably, the GM has ultimate say over life & death, or at least the right to over-rule the results of other procedures in the system. But it is an attempt to impart or explain a paradigm or ethos.

As a bit of an aside, an explicit paradigm or ethos may or may not be necessary. As I've argued in the past, many games do have a paradigm that guides play even though we tend not to be aware of it. Namely: winning and losing, concepts that are seemingly meaningless outside the "game-space", but which we allow ourselves to care about. The only exceptions to this are activities such as gambling and professional sports, which do have extrinsic outputs that clearly intrude on "real life". But most of the games we play are not of this nature.

Still other games operate on sub-cultural paradigms that barely need explaining to the initiated--and, in any case, can't be fully explained any more than other cultural activities, whose "purposes" and "language" are diverse, and constantly being transformed through use. For example, "going to a club to see a show" has so many possible functions, each understood in varying degrees by different subsets of the club attendees, that one ought to resort to a meta-paradigm of sociality, the idea of a "scene", if one wants to capture the "aboutness" of the activity. (I've never played a LARP, but I'm pretty sure this idea will ring a bell to those who have.) I think it's undeniable that tabletop can have the same quality. In fact most interactions between humans have this quality, but RPGs are one of those activities that can thrive on it. Furthermore there's a wide range between "using an RPG as a general excuse to hang out with friends" and "using an RPG as the focus for a particular mode of socializing". Even if one did seek a method to group the varies "modes" into categories, that would not in itself allow us to directly impart a specific mode.

Finally, some people wish to assert that certain paradigms are "natural" and don't need to be taught. Personally I think this is more likely to be true of "playing pretend" than various varieties of "telling a story", but that's neither here or there: I'm just including this possibility for the sake of completeness. If you can believe that dogs instinctively communicate with barks, growls, and whines--even if they've been separated from "dog culture" since weaning--then maybe it's possible that significant portions of human culture, or its "substrate", are innate and do not need to be taught.

Let's return from the digression. As I said, the distinction between system and paradigm as I define them is absolutely clear when it comes to the designer's job and the rules text itself. A system may be incomplete--for example, it may describe how to resolve combat, without instructing you how to tell if combat occurs: can anyone declare that it's started, or only the GM, or is there some set of objective conditions which automatically triggers combat? But that doesn't stop it from being a system. Implicitly the holes will have to be filled by a paradigm, such as "the group decides collectively based on common sense".

However, once we move to actual play, the system may or may not survive, but the paradigm goes through a complete transformation. It is no longer text, but action, and the difficulties I alluded to with regard to transmission of paradigms now applies much more widely (to virtually all RPGs, if not to all games), regardless of whether the designer made an effort in the "rules text" to impart a paradigm.

The importance of this observation can be seen by briefly returning to the concept of "System" that I've previously dubbed "LP maximalism". Under this concept, it's commonly been noted (usually as an epiphany) that "systemless" or "freeform" RPGs have infinitely complex "Systems" (LP sense) rather than simple ones. But the nature of paradigms in actual play reveals that this is a completely banal assertion: all RPGs work by means of, through, and indeed upon the paradigm, the web of social interactions and understandings, that guide play. A "systemless" game is only "complex" if it requires a drastic shift on the part of the observer: otherwise it's easy as pie.

Conversely, no matter how much or how little system (my sense) a game has, there are very few ways to avoid the complexity of social interaction. One is to sew up as much as possible under formal procedure, or to fall back on very well-worn paradigms like "win/lose". Either way, you impinge on the quality that distinguishes an RPG from a board game. (The effect varies from group to group: if you strongly buy into the notion that "you aren't really playing the game if you never roll the dice", to the point that you're always trying to hammer on the mechanics, then you're more likely to fall into this trap than if you take a light system as an invitation to apply it only when necessary, on top of your largely-freeform style of play. Viz.) Finally, you can pretend the complexity isn't there, either by appealing to naturalism (see "Brain Damage") or by culture-formation and identification.

See also Jim Henley's recent post about the different perspectives on rules, with a dash of polemic from Malcolm Sheppard (eyebeams) in the comments.

Ah, almost forgot: the next step should be to take all this and translate it back into English.

I think the discussion has died down, and that also includes my enthusiasm for writing at length about the LP and the SIS. I was originally going to write something about how the depiction of gaming under the LP is intellectually descended from Enlightenment views on individual autonomy and natural law, but I think I'll just throw out that reference and anyone who wants to can run with it. (I do note that a couple of the comments over in Malcolm's LJ picked up on a similar theme of libertarianism in gamer-geek culture.)

The upshot of the spillover in lordsmerf's and adamdray's LJ's is that some people view the LP expansively in a way that turns System into a combination of the Social Contract and Exploration levels of the Big Model. Social context and implicit influences are part of System. I call this "LP-maximalism." Some people also view SIS as the intersection of all the beliefs held by the players about the game-world, regardless of whether those beliefs have been explicitly communicated. In other words, the term "shared" in SIS is construed as "common".

Against these views, there's the idea that the System only consists of the procedures (Techniques) evidenced in actual game play actions (Ephemera). And the formal definition of SIS is only concerned with elements of the game-world which have been "shared" in the sense of "communicated" or "transmitted" within the context of the game.

Personally, I hold the latter views, and based on the conversation in the Forge thread Shared Imagined Space, Shared Text, as well as the Glossary definitions of System, Ephemera, Techniques, and Shared Imagined Space, I think the weight of Forge authority is on my side (which came as a bit of a surprise).

This isn't to say that social context, psychology of the players, etc., aren't important areas of analysis, nor that the idea of creating a "common" imaginary world among the players is delusional. Just that it's more profitable to separate these social and aesthetic concepts from formal issues of how games are played.

An excellent example can be found in Markus Montola & Mika Loponen's article "A Semiotic View on Diegesis Construction", which can be found in PDF form in Beyond Role and Play. They build on Montola's earlier argument against the objective existence of a single diegesis, or shared ("common") imaginary space among players, in favor of multiple subjective diegeses. In "A Semiotic View on Diegesis Construction", he demonstrates how the subjective diegeses of the various players interact semiotically, often with the goal of making them equifinal, that is, "similar enough to cause indistinguishable consequences". (When I write this, I'm reminded of some of the language in La Ludisto's Interactive Model about "reconcile-and-develop".)

I would also point to works on ritual in RPGs, such as Chris Lehrich's article and posts at the Forge, as well as this thread. These may or may not touch on System, but they're really about the psycho-social and aesthetic elements of roleplaying, including how they interact with System.

eyebeams has a lively discussion going on over in his journal about the Lumpley Principle ("System (including but not limited to 'the rules') is defined as the means by which the group agrees to imagined events during play").

I'll just say this. I think that the reason the Lumpley Principle was originally embraced at the Forge is that it's the perfect rejoinder in a standard argument over whether "system matters".

I remember the old flamewars on rec.games.frp (before .advocacy) where someone (often me) would rake D&D over the coals only to be told that it was a perfectly good system because none of the rules were set in stone: they were just guidelines which could be modified or ignored in those situations where they'd produce nonsensical or dissatisfying results. And complaints about D&D fostering munchkinism or encouraging repetitive dungeon crawls would be answered by someone saying there's nothing in the game that forces you to make monster-hunting the central focus--with the right GM and players, you could play any kind of campaign.

In my view the LP answers the "guidelines" response by saying that when you introduce house rules and conventions to "fix" a game system, you're really creating a new system. "AD&D1e doesn't suck because you can always say that a crossbow bolt at short range will force a save vs. death" isn't an argument for AD&D; it's just shifting the terms of argument. For the "focus" comment, the LP answers that, at best, the lack of a clear focus means that a game is incomplete as a system. At worst, trying to focus on, say, romance and social climbing will require you to struggle against the tide of a game system whose text and procedures are oriented around fighting monsters.

Where the LP starts to get into trouble, though, is "including but not limited to 'the rules.'" I'll be following the comments over on eyebeams' journal, and if I can organize my thoughts, I'll try another post. Comments welcome here, too.

This Forge thread might be worth reading: Beyond Credibility (note the actual title is misspelled, so you might want to bookmark it for future reference).

[Edited to add] The LP also gets into trouble by talking about "agreeing to the imagined events during play". This begs the question of whether "agreement" (and "negotiation", a term often used in conjunction with the LP) is really an accurate way to characterize the way imagined events happen in roleplaying. I hope to say more on this, too.