Still a permissive ruleset?

[Quixus]

I cannot find any statement in the 7th edition rulebook that Warhammer 40K uses a permissive ruleset. Is this principle really gone?

[Kristoff]

What do you mean by permissive ruleset?

 

If you mean any actions available are rigidly defined, that is mostly true.

 

But this is also meant to be a fun sandbox game where you and your opponent (or club) can make adjustments you both feel can make the game more enjoyable for you both.

[Acebaur]

I cannot find any statement in the 7th edition rulebook that Warhammer 40K uses a permissive ruleset. Is this principle really gone?

 

 

All rule sets for every game in existence is a permissive rule set.  This is simply the nature of playing a game. It would be far to difficult to tell you everything you could not do as opposed to only things you can do. So yes, 40K is, and always will be, a permissive rule set. 

[Quixus]

All rule sets for every game in existence is a permissive rule set.  This is simply the nature of playing a game. It would be far to difficult to tell you everything you could not do as opposed to only things you can do. So yes, 40K is, and always will be, a permissive rule set.

Such a generalization is simply not true. While not explicitly restrictive, most PnP RPGs come pretty close, simply due to the fact that enough situations are not mentioned in the rules.

[Kastor Krieg]

I was about to reply with that - most wargames are permissive (i.e. "if something is not explicitly PERMITTED, it's not allowed"), most PnP RPGs are restrictive (i.e. "if something is not explicitly RESTRICTED, it's allowed"). RPGs are "open", wargames are "closed" systems, to say it differently. 

As a person with 20+ years of background in RPGs, among that a decade of editing and translating them, it was really hard for me to switch to the permissive mentality in rule interpretation and I kept finding "loopholes" which just weren't there, plainly because of the underlying design premise. That premise, however, is not explicitly mentioned in the rulebook itself, it's just the defininig feature of the genre.

[Morollan]

To the best of my knowledge, no 40K rulebook has ever explicitly stated that it is a permissive ruleset.

[Quixus]

But it always has been, right? Not treating it as such would lead to a boatload of problems, I think.

[Morollan]

But it always has been, right? Not treating it as such would lead to a boatload of problems, I think.

 

Absolutely. It is, by it's very nature, a permissive ruleset. It just doesn't say that in the rulebook.

[Kristoff]

 

But it always has been, right? Not treating it as such would lead to a boatload of problems, I think.

 

Absolutely. It is, by it's very nature, a permissive ruleset. It just doesn't say that in the rulebook.

 

Correct. It just plots out how each phase is to be handled, telling you what can be done.