Oh I don't think that's true at all. It's important that board state be honest, in that you can trust you can take any legal game action and the game will proceed, but you want the board state to be interesting so that your decisions actually need to be good. The problem here is conflating resolution and scenario design in challenge*. It's actually really hard to make a game system that will in and of itself produce interesting challenges (and frankly, might actually be impossible if the nature of the game doesn't allow you to set the game end and/or victory conditions), which is where GMs generally come in.
*A DC 25 climb check is not more or less challenging or interesting than a DC 20 or a DC 10 one, but a castle patrolled by animated armor, made of superheated lava might is probably more challenging or interesting (though maybe not, depending on the PC position/level approaching it) than a bandit fort with a wooden palisade.
The implication of
rigged is that the board state isn’t honest. I would rather take a cheap win than have the GM adjust the scenario on the fly to compensate. At that point, from a gamist perspective, play has lost integrity.
For example, suppose the PCs found a clever way to leverage those lava-sentinels to bypass a planned encounter. Should the GM make adjustments to ensure it happens? Is that a “cheap win”? I would answer no and no. Figuring out those kinds of ploys is fun, and it’s not like we got nothing out of it. It’s just that it didn’t fit some other expectations (dramatic, pacing, etc).
We actually had something like that occur in my current campaign a while back. I wrote about it a while back in the five words commentary thread in
post #163. To summarize, the PCs wanted to clear their hex of monsters, but they were too scared to act because of what was out there. Deirdre (the barbarian) seized an opportunity to kill two gorgons with one bulette.
Did that deny them a cool combat? We did have one years ago
1 in Pathfinder, so maybe if they tried similar tactics. However, this accomplished their goals with minimum risk. I love it when players do stuff like that. I don’t care about combat per se (except to the extent the combat mechanics are working correctly), but I do care about being able to reason about the situation and figure out solutions (i.e., playing with an honest board state).
It's just that you need a quite strict division between their role in creating a world, their role in acting as the non-player agents in that world, and their role as an adjudicator of the rules. Perhaps it would be best to set that division as a principle, a guiding force for how the world/game should be created/adjudicated, even if it is impossible to achieve as a perfect reality.
That approach is pretty fundamental to my homebrew system. I want to run a hexcrawl without having to prep a hexcrawl, but I also want to do so with integrity (honest board state, etc). While I would describe the system as “campaign as science experiment”, the creative agenda is definitely gamism.
The way I do this is similar to how PbtA and FitD games do things. I use principals and mechanics to constrain how the referee can do things. That doesn’t mean there is a rule for everything, or that play is reductive. Once the referee gets to inject consequences and adversity, you can do
whatever makes sense for the situation in the game world. It’s just that once you do it, it’s no longer yours to decide anymore. After all, it’s not much of an experiment if you decide the outcome.
Post #223 in that commentary thread is another example of the PCs making a clever play (this time to take out a dragon without fighting it directly). There will be fallout. They’ve indicated they are interested in taking the treasure (all 1.5M+ S of it) out of the dungeon. Other people are going to be interested in it, and getting it back to town safely will be its own challenge. Fortunately, there are mechanics to handle consequences like “someone else may find the treasure while you are in town for a few weeks” in a way that maintains the honest board state.
[1]: My favorite combat ever in Pathfinder 1e was at the end of
Kingmaker. There’s a fight against a medusa that ranges across most of the dungeon floor (M3 of
Sound of a Thousand Screams). The PCs put on blindfolds and tried to locate her by sound alone. That was fun. There was a temptation to peek, though that didn’t work out so well for the wizard. At least death is just a status effect at that level (17th). That poor wizard. He died at least three or four times in that campaign.
