Quote from: Touhoufriend;624167I hope you don't do this alot it both condesending and kind of childish.

Alright it's clear the "pro-system" people and "anti-system" are arguing past eachother here.

So let's say that the GM is "playing the rules not game" and the party is say fighting some Rogues. Phil decides she want's to slide down the banister swing on the chandeliers or preform any other sort of acrobatic pirouette than tend to be brougt up when people talk about actions that rules don't easily model. The GM "plays the rules not the game" and comes up with something on the spot and Phil get's to do his fun thing. This is cool and I'm sure almost everyone is on board with that.

On the other hand let flip it turnways. Say during this same encounter Sam with his deep knowledge of the rules rembers that you can't sneak attack targets that have concealment so he casts Obscuring Mist in an attempt to make the encounter easier by turning off the Rogues best class feature. Now maybe the GM dosen't a 1st level spell having such a disproportionate effect on his encounter or just dosen't like Sam's face. He "plays the game not the rules" and the Rogues still get their sneak attack. This makes Sam very unhappy and he feels like he has less agency and in the future he might be less likely do try to be creative because he can't read the GM's mind to find out which of his creative ideas he is willing to let happen.

So when people say "play the rules not the game" that means diffrent things to diffrent people. When the OSR types talk about "giving GMs more freedom" they there talking about expaning horizons leting people act outside the ruleset. The thing is that when many people hear "play the game not the rules" from their GM feel that their horizons are not being expaned. If the GM is taking liberty with the rules than people often worry about their ability to act within the ruleset being compromised.

Good post.  Also, since we are dealing a bit with the concept of RAW here, a whole lot of rulesets specifically allow for GM interpretation, so the GM coming up with a rule or interpretation is RAW.

Rules that control social behavior have no place in an RPG.  If you can't get along with the people you're playing with, just leave.

"Without having to appeal to the GM's authority" is "I want the game rules to give me protection from the GM."  Pure and simple.

Do people out there actually play with GMs they know are incompatible with their playstyle.  Is any particular convention event that fucking important that you can't just walk away?  You need protection in the rules from a GM playing dictator?

There's only one social rule that matters, don't be a dick, and it's always been handled the same way for thousands of years, foot or hand.  Don't need a book to make us all play nice.

Quote from: Votan;623985I think you may misunderstand the reason that this type of system arose.  It came about because of sponsored play (e.g. Living Greyhawk) where it was needed to make it possible to shift between tables and have the same rules apply.  It was open to anyone so the informal enforcement that I see with FlailSnails (i.e. don't misbehave) don't really work.

I don't get the comparison; or rather, I don't see why one would have to be so grossly formalized as compared to the other.  You can have sponsored play and shared worlds and campaign-hopping without "consistent rules".  What you can't have is competitive play, where one player or team "does better" than the others, because there's the expectation of consistency as being equivalent to fairness.  I have no expectations that two DM's campaigns will all use the same rules, requirements, house rules, etc, because I don't give a shit about 'player ranking' or whatever else is woven into some of those 'sponsored play' experiences you're talking about.

Point being, FLAILSNAILS is "open to anyone".  There's no membership card to buy to play in a game or start your own.  That's the RPGA you're thinking of.

Quote from: soviet;624164What you fail to understand is that a lot of the people who prefer this style of play are GMs. Seriously, do you think that these games only get used when disgruntled players stage a coup and put a gun to their GM's head?

Where are these "lot of the people who prefer this style of play are GMs" at? Because what you claim does not seem to appear very often in Real Life.

Quote from: soviet;624164However good a GM is, if they have a veto over everything that happens, what happens is going to be less surprising to them, right? When I GM I don't want to decide whether the player succeeds in his endeavours, I want to find out. I don't have a plot in mind that I need to enforce.

And this is just a strawman arguement.

Quote from: Blackhand;624178Well spoken.

For a strawman, yes.

I don't see anything wrong with Soviet's point of view. I use random tables and roll in the open for those very reasons. The difference, which is a function of the system, is a matter of degree not kind.


I think there are some crazy mental gymnastics going on in here in order to make an unpopular poster wrong.

Quote from: jeff37923;624220Where are these "lot of the people who prefer this style of play are GMs" at? Because what you claim does not seem to appear very often in Real Life.

Who do you think GMs these games when they are played?

Quote from: Benoist;624124"show us where the bad GM you".

Quote from: Benoist;624154: "Show us where the bad GM touched you."

 "Show us where the bad GM touched you".

> "Show us where the bad GM touched you."



> "Show us where the bad GM touched you."

This is nice.

Quote from: soviet;624227Who do you think GMs these games when they are played?

Mental patients from the sound of it.

All kidding aside, you are making the incorrect assumption that GMs do not and cannot have the capability of making sound judgement calls in adjucating rules or handling the unexpected actions that are not covered by rules. That they cannot improvise without it becomming a "magical tea party". Have more faith in your fellow man.

Quote from: Gib;624221I use random tables and roll in the open for those very reasons.

Definitely. Last year I ran me some AD&D 2 using DMG 1 and all those random tables definitely made things a lot more fun. So much so that I have created a couple of random NPC personality trait and monster special ability tables for my current fantasy storygame campaign and a whole bunch more for the science fiction storygame supplement I am writing. Random tables are cool.

Quote from: jeff37923;624230Mental patients from the sound of it.

All kidding aside, you are making the incorrect assumption that GMs do not and cannot have the capability of making sound judgement calls in adjucating rules or handling the unexpected actions that are not covered by rules. That they cannot improvise without it becomming a "magical tea party". Have more faith in your fellow man.

I'm not assuming any of those things. I'm saying that giving a lot of power to one person - no matter how awesome they are, no matter how judiciously they use it - has an effect on the kind of game that results. Some play experiences work better if no-one has this level of power at all. (And some play experiences work better with it, sure).

Quote from: jeff37923;624230Mental patients from the sound of it.

All kidding aside, you are making the incorrect assumption that GMs do not and cannot have the capability of making sound judgement calls in adjucating rules or handling the unexpected actions that are not covered by rules. That they cannot improvise without it becomming a "magical tea party". Have more faith in your fellow man.

.yeah, or do any research on the first decade of the hobby (sheesh)

Quote from: estar;624176You assert the that the game is less surprising for the referee if the referee has a veto over things. I disagree. The referee is adjudicator, a good referee is a fair adjudicator. This mean while the veto exist it isn't the focus. The focus is on resolving what are the players doing in a way that is accurate and fair given the rules of the genre or setting.

Adjudication can be straightforward during task resolution. Or quite fuzzy like when a character is trying to convince the council of elders and the referee has to decide their individual reactions.

The veto is a consequence of the fact the players play characters whose abilities are limited. That the players can only act as their characters. I bring this up because the only alternative is that the players can act in other ways than as their characters. In general this boils down is a formal way of "making up stuff in the middle of a session".

I say this makes the games less surprising because there is a bias to stack the deck for one's character. Don't get me wrong, for the average player itis as blatant as using a fate point to gain a +5 sword. But rather  the player is more apt to alter things to cause positive consequences or his characters rather than negative consequences. It just human nature.

A referee doesn't have a vested interest in seeing one character succeed over the other. It is more likely that the ruling will be more fair and have a more realistic mix of positive and negative consequences.

Finally I have advocated in making sandboxes that the referee create a timeline of future events as if the player never existed. I stress that this timeline, this plot, is just a plan. Very similar to the process used by generals before a battle.

And like a battleplan, once the campaign starts and the player start making their choices it will and must be altered to reflect the changed circumstances if there is to be a fun campaign. A general who fails to alter his battleplan to reflect what has happened will lose the battle. A referee who fails to alter his timeline will have a campaign that will be a railroad and likely suck.

This process of the player acting and the referee deciding fairly the consequences means that the campaign will take surprising turns. The process is out of control of player and referee alike due to the free agency both sides possess.

For me this is not theoretical.  I been running campaign like this since the late 80s. I had elements of this since when I started when I was known as the referee who lets his players trash the setting.  I have NPCs with elaborate plots, plot out a timeline of events. Yet in the end the course of the campaign always winds up surprising me.

The players seem to have a good time. Time and time again, they tell me that they feel that were in a setting that has a life of it own and that it made their own victories all the sweeter because they overcame not just the immediate opposition but the immense tides they feel around them.

Dude we're GMs on the internet, of course all of our games are fantastic and all of our players think we're awesome.

I agree with most of what you say. I just personally find that when I GM, sticking to the rules makes things more fun for me by adding suspense to dice rolls and creating more unexpected detours.  

If one person has the power to veto surprises, by definition there will be fewer surprises happening. Unless they never use that power, in which case what's the point of having it?

Quote from: soviet;624233I'm not assuming any of those things. I'm saying that giving a lot of power to one person - no matter how awesome they are, no matter how judiciously they use it - has an effect on the kind of game that results. Some play experiences work better if no-one has this level of power at all. (And some play experiences work better with it, sure).

So tell us what play experiences work better when everyone has an equal amount of power, because I bet that they are not tabletop RPGs.

Quote from: Gib;624229This is nice.

It might not be worded nice, but if you read the actual arguments that lead there, you'll see that's what the "rules as the final arbiters of the going-ons at the game table" come down to: a belief that rules can fix people, and that bad GMs ought to be cornered into not sucking by the rules themselves, and a general lack of trust for the other participants in the game which will "break the game", make "arbitrary rulings," will ipso facto "never be consistent", and the like. It's a symptom of a lack of trust in human beings to collaborate in a game of their imaginations and actually play together in a rational manner, for the benefit of all, and not just themselves, basically.

No, it is comparing bad gming to child molestation, multiple times- and then putting those words into someone else's mouth.  I would think someone of your religious background would approach such things with a bit more circumspection.

Quote from: Gib;624243No, it is comparing bad gming to child molestation, multiple times- and then putting those words into someone else's mouth.  I would think someone of your religious background would approach such things with s bit more circumspection.

Well, its a joke that made me laugh the first time I heard it, and it does reflect a commonly-encountered attitude displayed by a large portion of the gamers one might encounter online. I think you may be taking it a bit too seriously.