What do reasons have to do with rules? (Original) FK emerged because the rulebooks were getting in the way of realistic/good/sensible action resolution.
System matters and free kriegsspiel
What do reasons have to do with rules? (Original) FK emerged because the rulebooks were getting in the way of realistic/good/sensible action resolution.
Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
There's a whole thread here, with links.
Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
No, that's not why at all. FK arose because no one wanted to learn the complicated rules and master them enough to be an umpire, which was a regulated position in the Prussian army, not because the rules weren't working.
overgeeked
B/X Known World
No, the folks here who haven't read or played FKR games are mostly just attacking something they don't understand and wildly misrepresenting it. Or reading it badly.
The FKR is trying to do much the same as the FK back in the day. Take the massively overly complicated rules and bin them in favor of some other benchmark instead. In FK it's the Referee being a trained, experienced military officer and drawing on their experience to adjudicate the probabilities or outcomes. In FKR the Referee defaults to either a) a table-shared sense of genre tropes or realism, or b) the Referee's greater knowledge of genre tropes. Much like Wesley's Braunsteins and Arneson's character getting into a duel.
I've read the thread. Other people like Pemerton seem to be describing actual FK (more or less sympathetically), while you are describing something that appears to be nothing like FK. Hence my confusion.
OK, thanks. So my descriptions of FK play wouldn't be completely alien to an FKR GM? I had the impression Ovinomancer maybe didn't understand what he was talking about, but not knowing 'FKR' myself (beyond this thread) it's hard to tell.
Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
No, I'm talking about the people in the thread that are proposing FKR, not examining it. You seem to have missed have the conversation -- including all the bits I'm referring to that you're confused about. I'm not making it up, I'm going with the arguments made by other posters in favor of FKR and following with the links they provided in this thread. As I didn't say anything funny above, I assume your laugh was mocking?
Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
No, you should read that more carefully -- it allows for exactly what I've said. This is the issue under examination -- what does FKR mean? The posters championing will not be specific and want to have both consensus seeking and GM knowing best. @overgeeked has posted that the players need protection from themselves because having rules known mean that those rules will be gamed to the detriment of the players' own fun and they are unable to help themselves. He's linked blogs saying the same. The solution is hidden adjudication, "invisible rulebooks", and the GM adjudicating play while hiding the adjudication from the players. There's a callout to genre logic, but then also realism, and no way to tell the difference between the two.
I didn't initially realise you were being serious. I'll delete the laugh.
I suspect this was him making the reasonable point that in FK you want the players 'playing the world' not 'playing the rules', just as they shouldn't be 'playing the man'. The problem with original Kriegsspiel as a training aid was that the comprehensive rules encouraged the trainees to get good at playing the game, when they were supposed to be getting good at fighting actual battles. And the senior staff officers running the exercises did feel annoyed that they were being reduced to just paper pushers implementing player orders. FK was an attempt to harness the trainers' expertise. There was also Semi-Free Kriegsspiel a bit later, which tried to get a 'best of both' and I'd say is the approach of OD&D.
