Not Thriving: Rule Playing

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Early editions are the Ur-Example. Player Characters are generated by rolling up The Six Stats at random and then seeing which Character Class you qualify to play. Want to play a wizard? You just have to hope the dice give you a high enough Intelligence score. In practice, most groups use House Rules to be more lenient and flexible.
  • A possible drawback of the more miniatures-rule heavy editions of D&D (notably third and fourth) is that especially during combat players may focus more on moving their physical playing pieces around and choosing actions from an established standard list and less on actually playing their characters as such.
• Old editions of Traveller are infamous for having random character generation tables that can kill a character before play even starts. The current edition allows much more choice in the process and makes "killer character creation" ("Iron Man") optional.
• Rolemaster is infamous for having rules that require rolls for everything. There are even rolls for basic hygiene and walking without falling. Bad rolls on these checks can move you to the game's "beloved" and lethal critical failure charts which are designed to humiliate your characters while maiming or murdering them.
• F.A.T.A.L.: The one and only thing you can choose about your character is your gender — and, given the No Woman's Land setting, the choice is nominal at best. Everything else - from your class to the width of your anus - is determined by die rolling and modifiers (with some arcane mathematics thrown in as well).
• In early editions of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Player Character creation is completely random aside from race and sex, including their stats and the starting Career that governs their advancement. Want to play as a wizard? Better hope you don't start the game as a dung collector instead!

Non-Gaming Examples

• The Order of the Stick is an example of this enforced on a story-verse. The world works specifically according to Dungeons & Dragons rules even when it defies normal logic. The characters frequently Lampshade this even though it probably shouldn't seem weird to them. The rules are, of course, suitably interpreted for Rule of Cool, Rule of Drama, and Rule of Funny.
• Knights of the Dinner Table:
  • The rules always win and it's only on very rare occasions that a rule is widely agreed to be broken. One of those occasions was the "beggar mob" rule which stated that 10 angry beggars constituted a mob and could automatically overbear a target. Brian tried to discourage BA from using this rule when it was used against the party but, failing that, decided to turn the rule to his advantage by having the party hire their own beggar mobs to overbear targets.
  • There was also a widely agreed upon Moratorium/Treaty in Muncie banning the use of coupons, which had previously led to a coupon based arms race (since gaming is Serious Business in the Muncie community.)
• In the 3rd installment of The Intercontinental Union of Disgusting Characters, Ringman's wife accidentally lets the front door to his house close. Because 2nd Edition AD&D's rule for opening an unlocked door doesn't specify that the door has to be stuck, Ringman is forced to make a running start and slam into the door with his full strength to get it open. And it takes two attempts. If the normal-strength person who'd let the door close had tried to open it instead, it could have taken all day.