Third times the charm. If your game has a GM as part of the game, where GM/DM/Storyteller has some kind of narrative control over the game at all, GM fiat HAS to be part of the game. There is almost nothing else for the GM to do. As long as the GM is making a decision for ANYTHING then GM fiat cannot die.

The reason why you HAVE to eject GM fiat when talking about designing something is that GM fiat is not something you can design around because GM fiat differs wildly from table to table. You literally cannot account for what everyone or even a room full of people will do. What you CAN do though is attempt to make a game that works by itself, for the most part, if no one changes the rules. From there, if someone wants to change the rules, then that is their prerogative.

Quote from: MGuy;565526Third times the charm. If your game has a GM as part of the game, where GM/DM/Storyteller has some kind of narrative control over the game at all, GM fiat HAS to be part of the game. There is almost nothing else for the GM to do. As long as the GM is making a decision for ANYTHING then GM fiat cannot die.

Yeah. You need someone at the table to adjudicate the rules, in the absence of the designer... and the GM is usually going to be the best person for that job.

Designers can certainly help them in that task, through strong and widely-applicable core mechanics (Remember, a core mechanic can be as simple as "roll high"), but designing the GM out of the game tends to not work; someone always has to interpret.

Quote from: MGuy;565526Third times the charm. If your game has a GM as part of the game, where GM/DM/Storyteller has some kind of narrative control over the game at all, GM fiat HAS to be part of the game. There is almost nothing else for the GM to do. As long as the GM is making a decision for ANYTHING then GM fiat cannot die.

"Narrative control". Riiight.

Quote from: MGuy;565526The reason why you HAVE to eject GM fiat when talking about designing something is that GM fiat is not something you can design around because GM fiat differs wildly from table to table. You literally cannot account for what everyone or even a room full of people will do. What you CAN do though is attempt to make a game that works by itself, for the most part, if no one changes the rules. From there, if someone wants to change the rules, then that is their prerogative.

You are advocating the ejection of any consideration of the human factor in designing games that are played by human beings around a table as a social gathering, for their own private enjoyment. Stop the bullshit machine and think about it for a moment.

This is a completely moronic idea.

I think that only accredited chefs should write recipe books, and loudly announce the end of home cook fiat. Enforcement will follow when logistics allows.

Quote from: Benoist;565564"Narrative control". Riiight.

...
This is a completely moronic idea.

Narrative Control is clearly the DM 'domain'.  If the DM is in charge for 'building' the sandbox, they effectively have 'narrative control'.

Quote from: MGuy;565526The reason why you HAVE to eject GM fiat when talking about designing something is that GM fiat is not something you can design around because GM fiat differs wildly from table to table. You literally cannot account for what everyone or even a room full of people will do. What you CAN do though is attempt to make a game that works by itself, for the most part, if no one changes the rules. From there, if someone wants to change the rules, then that is their prerogative.

sure you can. One can easily design a game and at certain points in the mechanics say "the gm makes a judgment call here and decides what happens". Obviously different will make different decisions, but some gamers would prefer a system where human judgement takes over fom dice in places. This may not be the game you want to play, but people can make such a game and there are plenty of people who regard it as good design.

Quote from: Ladybird;565533Yeah. You need someone at the table to adjudicate the rules, in the absence of the designer... and the GM is usually going to be the best person for that job.

Designers can certainly help them in that task, through strong and widely-applicable core mechanics (Remember, a core mechanic can be as simple as "roll high"), but designing the GM out of the game tends to not work; someone always has to interpret.

Very well put. I understand MGuys theory; it's an old and venerable one that deserves to be discredited. It's led to a large number of over-complicated rpgs, and contributed to the decline of the hobby. The evidence from the last 40 years is that the original solution is best: empower one player to make judgement calls on things not covered by the rules. It's simple, and it works.

Quote from: MGuy;565526The reason why you HAVE to eject GM fiat when talking about designing something is that GM fiat is not something you can design around because GM fiat differs wildly from table to table.  You literally cannot account for what everyone or even a room full of people will do.

So what? Why would I need it to be the same around every table?  Here's an example of how I design GM fiat into a game: the Microlite74 Extended Skills rules.

First, I tell players there are no skills in the modern D&D sense of the term, that they are expected to simply describe what their character is doing and the GM will decide if it works.

Second, I tell the GM to decide if it works, does not work, or it might work (needs some type of random roll to decide) based on the player's description of what the character is doing -- taking into account the situation, the character's class,  and the character's background. And that a roll should only be made if the GM isn't fairly sure what the result should be. If the GM decides a roll is needed, he can ask for whatever type of roll he wants -- or he can use the simple system I provide (and I give it -- it still requires the GM to decide what category of "skill roll" is needed based on the character's class and background, die roll modifiers based on how hard what the players wants the character to do is, and the like.  Note: M74 Basic and Standard are even simpler as characters only have class abilities for the GM to consider.

I've just built GM fiat into the rules. The primary method for deciding whether a player's "skill-like" action succeeds is "the GM decides" based on what the player says is being tried and what the character's class and background say about the character's abilities.

QuoteWhat you CAN do though is attempt to make a game that works by itself, for the most part, if no one changes the rules. From there, if someone wants to change the rules, then that is their prerogative.

IMHO, there is more to GM fiat than the GM changing the rules.

I agree wholeheartedly with the 'deck building' problem being a likely source for this change of opinion.  (And I'm grateful for that word-handle because I've never seen anyone frame it that way before.)

One of the major tussles over at the Paizo forums always used to be the purpose of Charisma as a dump stat, an attractiveness stat, a social interaction stat, etc.  This, in my view, is deck building fighting against the RAW looking for better places to spend feats, etc.

Imagine you're prowling a castle and get caught by a guard of the opposite sex.  The different approaches handle this differently:

A) There's no fiat allowed.  You pick a sheet feature and roll.

B) There's no mechanics allowed.  No need to roll, she sounds the alarm.

C) You can try it, but it's based on your sheet, roll and we'll see.

D) As 'C' but heavily modified for circumstance (and let's not forget you're fuck-ugly because you have a CHA of 7).

E) If you as a person can sell it, it flies...


My personal choice is 'D'.  I want sheet choices to matter, and will actually go out of my way to try and make this the case.  I also try to get each class choice a chance to shine, along that same like.

I've never liked anything that won't consider the situation, and for me this is 'A' and 'E' both.  While challenging the character may be silly, making character creation choices matter isn't.

Quote from: danskmacabre;564160To my mind if you generate a character with low social skills, (Low CHA, low diplomacy skills whatever), then it should be Roleplayed as such.
It IS a ROLEplaying game after all.

If you're the sort of player that knows you only want to roleplay in a way that is  highly diplomatic or UNdiplomatic, then you should generate a character as such.

Why is that so difficult?

Because they want to have their cake and eat it too. There's also laziness.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;565588sure you can. One can easily design a game and at certain points in the mechanics say "the gm makes a judgment call here and decides what happens". Obviously different will make different decisions, but some gamers would prefer a system where human judgement takes over fom dice in places. This may not be the game you want to play, but people can make such a game and there are plenty of people who regard it as good design.

This goes with the first part of the statement. The GM is GOING to make a call on SOMETHING along the line even if you don't put it into the rules. In 3rd edition you get a penalty to seeing stuff in the distance and it seriously gets worse by the number of feet you are away from stuff but people automagically don't think about that when they can see stars in the night sky. Its seriously not even something you have to think about and thus something you don't have to explain in the rules (even though you can).

What you can't do is make a game that DEPENDS on the GM making a call. If your game is going to hold together you need to create it based on a number of assumptions. None of these assumptions can be dependent on the GM making the call alone. Even if you just reference rules "as a guideline" the "guideline" has to draw some kind of conclusions prior to a GM making a call.

A great example is the "Bluff" skill. The bluff skill is one of the most GM fiat dependent skills there are but has enough rules where you don't have to consider it all MTP. The bluff skill goes thus: You tell a lie of some sort. Now you have to roll your check vs the target's sense motive. If you win the lie is believed if you lose it isn't. That's pretty straight forward and solid. From there GM fiat is all over the place. The GM decides how believable the lie is, a GM decides how long the lie takes to tell, and the GM can even decide what constitutes as "proof" to help the lie. The book then gives your GM modifiers he can apply to it from there on. Hell before you even attempt the bluff the GM can just decide that the NPC already knows the truth or hates the PCs personally (and there are no rules to stop him from doing so).

Now despite how elaborate bluffing someone can be and how steeped in fiat it is there are still enough rules where the players can gauge whether or not to make the attempt. First, as a rule, proof can be provided to help the lie. It seems like an obvious thing but knowing the numbers that you can achieve based on how "solid" the proof is helps empower players. Also knowing the numbers on how far their bonuses will take them with truly elaborate or harder to believe bluffs will help them gauge whether or not they should even try in the first place. What's more the many variables that can go into the bluff DC encourages players to do research so they can find out what modifiers might be involved and gauge how unbelievable their lie might be. All of this because there are actual rules for modifiers to the Bluff skill.

What you can't do though is make a bluff check with no modifiers and just have the GM ass pull a TN with nothing to go off of. Well no, in a rules lite game that is exactly what you do but if you want some more solid mechanics you want to at least frame how bluffing will work so players have some idea about how the TN they are going to need to hit will be produced so that they can make solid decisions about whether or not to take the risk of lying. That brings up another good point. The consequences for failing the lie are also GM fiat. You literally CANNOT play a game where the GM is a feature and not have GM fiat.

On the flip side you cannot design a game that depends wholly or even significantly on GM fiat just to function. The best example of this is Illusions (Polymorphing is a better example but involves other issues that are beyond just this discussion). Doesn't matter what game system you're using you WANT hard limits on what illusions can do. If the rules are unclear about something as open ended as illusion magic it becomes a game breaking tool. Silent Image's usefulness is directly proportionate to how much you can get away with it. Relying on GMs to decide what one can plausibly do with Silent Image will likely result in one of 3 things happening.

1) You get a creative player who uses silent image to be a way to bypass challenges he regularly wouldn't and shouldn't be able to bypass.

2) You have to create on the spot rules to introduce new limits to the spell to keep it under control and hope that the limits you place don't make the spell useless (because then you short changed the player who might not have picked up the spell if he knew you were gonna gimp it) or you make rules that don't actually fix the problem or that are inconsistent and thus lead to arguments further down the line.

3) You just ban the spell.

Doing 1 is punishing player creativeness. Doing 2 means that you have to change the rules in order to make the game function and that's a sign of failure on the designer's end. If you do 3 its still a failure on the designer's end and you are losing a thematic and cool ability to boot. All three of these issues can be avoided if the rules are, by themselves, solid enough to make it work without on GMs to spot fix the problem.

Mguy: you can and people do make such games. Clearly they are not for everyone. But personally I like much more open-ended approaches to things ike illusions and do prefer an emphasis on GM fiat here. I am not saying this is the only way to design, but its quite clear to me one can make a game with Gm fiat in mind, and whether this is problematic will entirely be a matter of taste.

Quote from: MGuy;5656991) You get a creative player who uses silent image to be a way to bypass challenges he regularly wouldn't and shouldn't be able to bypass.

Why is regularly bypassing challenges through creativity a problem if everyone in the group enjoys it? Personally I am not phased as a GM if the players overcome a hard challenge through creative use of a spell. I know plenty of players that are fine with it as well.

Quote from: MGuy;565699What you can't do is make a game that DEPENDS on the GM making a call.

Yes you can. Here's a quote from the 1e DMG:

Quote"There will be times in which the rules do not cover a specific action that a player will attempt. In such situations, instead of being forced to make a decision, take the option to allow the dice to control the situation. This can be done by assigning a reasonable probability to an event and then letting the player dice to see if he or she can make the percentage. You can weigh the dice in any way so as to give the advantage to either the player or the non-player character, whichever seems more correct and logical to you while being fair to both sides."

This is a perfectly workable and clear-cut rule. It is not broken – if you don't like it in application, either because you don't trust GMs to make such a decision, or because you want to know in advance the exact probability of the outcome of every action, that's an aesthetic choice.

Quote from: Glazer;565720Yes you can. Here’s a quote from the 1e DMG:



This is a perfectly workable and clear-cut rule. It is not broken – if you don’t like it in application, either because you don’t trust GMs to make such a decision, or because you want to know in advance the exact probability of the outcome of every action, that’s an aesthetic choice.

The thing is the system doesn't depend on this part to work. It's a "If we don't cover this thing make something up" clause.