Jay Dragon (& Friends)
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Toys vs. Rules
🕑 Added 2025-06-11 21:34:41 +0000 UTCI've been fascinated by toys lately. I have a deck of magic cards (my Pistols At Dawn Battlebox) that I carry around with me everywhere; I call it my toy. Lately I've been thinking of "toy making" as an important part of my creative process, on par or even higher than my game design. But what is a toy? How do toys relate to games? What is it about toys that has so fully fascinated me?
Here's a definition for a toy: a toy is a physical object. The properties of a toy are dictated by its physical qualities, and that physicality grants affordances to those who interact with it. For example, a basketball is a toy. It will bounce when you dribble it, and if you poke a hole in it, it will deflate. The limits of a basketball are dictated by the limits of reality — it is very hard to dye a basketball green, and it is impossible to magically duplicate a basketball.
A rule is a culturally-imposed limit on how you engage with a toy. There may be the rule "don't poke a hole in the basketball" — it's something you physically could do, but you're choosing not to. A toy may contain or propose its own rules (like how a bop-it will tell you what to do with it, and by extension, what not to do) but these rules may also emerge from a broader cultural context, supplementary material, other players, or basically anywhere else.
A video game developer is principally a creator of toys. Super Mario Bros. is a toy. The rules that surround the game are culturally specific and localized, but the way we engage with the game is defined by its physical affordances. If you want Mario to have a gun, you must physically modify the toy (which will be difficult and require modding skill) .
A tabletop RPG designer is principally a creator of rules. These rules are restrictive, limiting how you engage with the toys available. Sometimes for a game operating in the theater of the mind, the toy is a shared imagined world. Rules limit what we do within this world, but we could break them at any time. This might feel odd, but there are many games which can be played using our shared imagination as a toy, with chess being the most classic example.
The difference between an imagined toy and a physical toy is that an imagined toy lacks physical limitations. I could mentally visualize ten million queens on a mental chessboard, but I cannot place ten million queens on a physical chessboard (yet). Therefore the chess board is dominated by a set of special rules we've invented to preserve the physical affordances of the "true" chessboard. We also preserve the social rules of Chess, even if cheating is a physically plausible action.
Tabletop RPGs move one step further in this simulacra, by creating an imagined board for a toy that has no physical referent. However, we still expect this modeled world to obey certain rules around our social expectations and physical reality. If we're playing The One Ring, and you create a Batman character, this may be a violation of the social rule of our Lord of the Rings world, but it may not be. The only way you could stop me from imagining myself as Batman is through social pressure and social rules; which of course I may disregard.
I think I like it most when TTRPGs also have physical toys.
Thanks to the Dice Exploder Discord for helping me come to these conclusions and refine my claims.
Comments
Kyle Wesley and Holly Wist
I love that "BFF!" has a box of friendship charms and chipboard characters you can move around the maps. Playing it brings me back to the days of playing make-believe with "Ninja Turtle" playsets or "Polly Pocket."
Jay Dragon (& Friends)
i absolutely agree, but also i reject the idea that games have to have an end goal or a win/lose state tbqh
Brett Rolfe
There is definitely something special and appealing about the idea of toys. Will Wright (creator of the Sims, SimCity and other video games) also talks extensively about how his games are actually ‘toys’. A lot of his perspective is about the way that people approach and interact with a toy, which is quite different from ‘playing a game’, encouraging more experimentation and creating a greater sense of empowerment for the ‘player’.
Cadence (a.k.a. GooCatBirdMaid)
i really appreciate some physicality within ttrpgs, and especially variation! most systems have kinda blurred together in using pencils, paper, and dice (see everything from dnd to world of darkness to blades in the dark) so when i see eidolon using a tarot deck, the long year using a traditional deck and explicitly including drawing in its rules, and everything else that breaks from the mold, it feels more like a new toy even if it’s technically a pdf.
Chris Sellers
I like how this interacts with the "toys vs. games" dialogue, in which "toy" is defined as something without an end goal or win/lose state (something you just play with), and a "game" as something with one or both. By these lights, a physical toy creates lots of sensory ways of interacting with it. A notional toy is almost hard to imagine, although a dungeon with no bankable treasure and no threat of character death would count. In contrast, to have an end goal or win state, a game must have rules. The worth of gold, how XP increases and why you care, how HP decreases and why you care. By these definitions, a video game is a game, because you can lose, and the game is good at making you care if you do.
Joaquim Ball-llosera Castillo
Lately I've been also playing with idea that RPG (as a concept) are toys, whereas the specific games (Mothership, Monster of the Week, Mork Borg, etc.) are indeed rules for that "toy" we call RPG (play pretent in and imaginary shared world). So, RPG being toys don't have player objectives per se, while every individual RPG can define there own player objectives.
Lydia Scribe
I think this relates to the recent explosion of setting books, which I imagine people don't even use in their games. They just riffle through the gorgeous artwork, imagining the creatures stomping through the world or the environments shimmering with potential. (This post being inspired by my friend having me read Electric Bastionland.) It's a big book of toys, and the pleasure is rotating the figures in your mind, imagining play.
Chris
Please never ever stop writing and sharing your thoughts about games (and toys). You're constantly shining light on things I hadn't considered and making me reframe what I (think I) know about games.
Nate W.
And meanwhile, I'm just trying to afford Fall of Magic's scroll period. 😂
John Willcox-Beney
Love this!! May sound a bit daft but I'd been looking for a way to describe the affordances Fall of Magic solely introduces by its use of components (e.g. while the game never explicitly tells you to flip the coin that represents your character, players will regularly decide to flip the coin to show their character changing or even flip it to decide what to do next). Making that distinction of toys vs rules really cleans that up!! I've seen it a few times but I love when RPGs introduce toys but don't tell you what to do with them (I suppose the most universal example being what you choose to do with the back of your character sheet! Or as another example the myriad ways one could use the voronoi cells on the Apocalypse World threat map)
