Oracles & Portals: The Role of Rules in RPGs
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People argue about rules a lot in tabletop RPGs. So let’s talk about the role of rules, our failure to delineate the possible approaches, the resulting clash between tool and intent, and the friction all this causes within the TTRPG space.
There are two big delineations I want to cover. (Certainly more exist, but these are the two I’m most familiar with, and also the two whose friction with each other seem to have the biggest impact on the TTRPG space, in my experience.) One approach treats rules as an oracle to support storytelling — I’ll call this the Oraclist approach. The other treats rules as a means of interacting with an imagined world, like a portal to transport you — thus I’ll call this the Portalist approach.
Oracles
The Oraclist approach starts with the idea that we’re here to tell a story, then adds the support of an oracle. For our purposes, an “oracle” is something to assist the telling (or more precisely, the creation) of a story. Instead of someone just making all the decisions about how a story goes, they have a tool (the oracle) they can employ to generate prompts, guidelines, or other parameters when desired.
The reason for having an oracle can vary — maybe it’s a safety net for when you’re not sure what should happen next, or maybe it’s just to spice things up a little — but the important thing is that the tool is secondary to the act of storytelling. First and foremost, you’re here to tell a story. If the storytelling is going well on its own, you don’t have to reach for the oracle. If the oracle gives you something you dislike, you can choose to discard it. The oracle is nothing more than a storyteller’s advisor.
What I call the “Oraclist” approach to TTRPGs is to treat the playing of an RPG as an act of storytelling, and the ruleset as an oracle. Thus, the people at the table are there to tell a story, and the rules only matter as a source of potential advice: to be engaged only when desired, and to be modified or discarded whenever someone has a better idea.
You’ve probably seen advice like “Don’t let the rules get in the way of a good story,” or people bragging about how they played a whole session without opening a book or picking up the dice. You may have seen people talk about not letting characters die outside of sufficiently dramatic moments, or heard tips on how to keep a narrative arc intact in spite of the dice. These are all expressions of the Oraclist mindset.
Portals
The Portalist approach to TTRPGs is fundamentally different from the Oraclist approach, starting with the idea that we’re not here to tell a story, but to inhabit an imaginary world. So instead of the rules being an oracle to support storytelling, they’re a portal to transport you to another world. The role of the tool is not to be your advisor, but to represent a separate entity outside yourself.
What I call the “Portalist” approach to TTRPGs is to use the playing of an RPG as a channel of interaction with a world, and the ruleset as the manifestation of that world’s separateness from you. The rules give the world its voice, its hands, its teeth. They give the world the ability to exist outside the scope of your own decision-making, the ability to interact instead of merely being acted upon. The rules give the world its existence, its ability to be engaged as an inhabitant rather than an outside creator.
In the Portalist approach, the rules are not generating ideas, they’re representing something — and that something is allowed to exist outside of the people at the table. In order to fulfill that purpose, the rules must be consistent and reliable, not subject to the same on-the-fly adjustments that are fair game with an oracle.
Unfortunately, this approach is largely lacking common vocabulary, since many discussion spaces skew heavily Oraclist. But if you’ve seen TTRPG folks get exasperated at someone else’s storytelling, saying something like “If we’re just making stuff up, what’s the point?” then that might be coming from a frustrated Portalist trying to express the distinction between their interests and those of an Oraclist.
Intent versus Tools
In my experience, TTRPG folks don’t do a great job of differentiating these two mindsets and how they place different demands on our toolsets. I won’t go into a full historical tangent, but we’ve arrived at a place where most of the well-known rulesets skew toward enabling Portalist approaches, while most of the meta-discussion of the field (creators, advice-givers, even the prose in the Portalist-leaning rulebooks) operates largely on Oraclist assumptions.
This can create problems. For example, a GM seeking tips and advice will typically absorb Oraclist assumptions, while players who just take the game at face value will instead skew Portalist, and then the two sides clash at the table — each without realizing the other is even a legitimate option.
Similarly, for creators, someone looking to make their own game will be surrounded by Oraclist advice but Portalist tools and examples. Regardless of what type of RPG they want to make, this mismatch can lead to confusion and frustration as they struggle to either defy common advice or unearth (or invent) more suitable tools.
As you can see, we have two (or more) fundamentally different endeavors with different practical needs, trying to share the same space and use the same tools and be identified by the same labels. Currently everything’s jammed into a junk drawer together under the “tabletop roleplaying game” label, and it makes the space difficult to navigate.
Friction In TTRPG Land
Obviously, both Oraclist and Portalist activities are perfectly valid. And although there’s a discussion to be had about the relative accuracy of calling them both “roleplaying games” (or whether we should subdivide and ditch the original term altogether), they’re both art forms, and as such I’ve tried to present them equally, with neutrality and balance.
However, the real world is not always as neutral and balanced as theory. We need to address the weird moral posturing of Oraclists.
I mentioned earlier that the Oraclist mindset is dominant in meta-discussions of TTRPGs. If you look at blogs, advice podcasts, videos, even just how creators talk shop with each other, the chatter overwhelmingly carries the Oraclist assumption that TTRPGs are fundamentally about storytelling.
It’s easy to imagine why folks would latch onto that idea. Storytelling is a familiar concept; even if you’re not an author or a theater kid or a cinema buff, you’ve at least been exposed to these other storytelling mediums, so it satisfies the human need to understand new things as twists on familiar things. Add to this the explosion of “Actual Play” streams — which, if we’re honest, are a story-driven performance art — and it’s easy to see why “storytelling” has become the default mode of describing RPGs.
However, in addition to being factually incorrect, this assumption about the nature of TTRPGs has moved beyond the realm of “preference” or “approach” and is crystallizing into dogma. Engagement with “story” is often treated not as a choice of activity but as a level of understanding: if you’re not treating TTRPG as storytelling, it’s because you just don’t get it yet (or you’re being intentionally disruptive).
Sometimes it’s a subtle assumption of universality. I mentioned earlier the common advice of “Don’t let the rules get in the way of the story,” which is predicated on the idea that the Oraclist approach is “correct” and applies universally to the whole TTRPG field. Similarly assumptive axioms are everywhere.
Sometimes it’s a less-subtle sense of superiority. I’ve seen people say that if you’re not discarding the rules multiple times per session, you’re “missing the point” of TTRPGs. Defenses of using rules consistently (as a Portalist would) are frequently painted as “reducing” TTRPGs to a medium seen as “lesser,” usually something like video games or war games — with zero effort to understand why someone would want consistently-applied rules, opting instead to ascribe motives (usually negative ones) or belittle their intelligence or character.
Once you understand that the Oraclist approach is not all there is, you start to notice how entrenched and dominant it’s become. You watch general discussion and see it’s the casually-assumed default. You challenge it and you see religion-esque defenses and mental gymnastics. You watch the general attitude toward rules, and anything non-Oraclist is seen as a wholesale rejection of imagination.
I don’t know what a more developed and thoughtful TTRPG landscape needs to look like — as I said earlier, these two aren’t even the only approaches to the medium. But I do know that we need to be far more mindful of leaving room for differing voices and ideas in the space, without trying to brush them aside to the kiddie table to preserve our own feelings of enlightenment.
