GM fiat - an illustration

[Crimson Longinus]

I don't understand this, when you play a FITD game you generally know what you're getting into; and if you dont the player's best practices tell you. You should want to face cool obstacles that make sense in the fiction and push at your character's abilities and priorities! THat's like, the entire point - going into danger and seeing what happens. The game also tells players to advocate for what they want to see in the game, both writ large ("I'd like to see us engage with the tension around labor and strikebreaking") and small ("Im so very looking forward to having demons show up"). Your choice of playbook + abilities are also this.

But you also generally want the characters to succeed and not to die. Or maybe you don't, but this goes back to earlier discussion about goals in narrativist games.

And yes, the game tells you to advocate for such things, hence the writers' room.

Why bother with any rules then? Why not just roll a d20 and fiat everything?

That is indeed a super viable way to play. Even the die is optional.

The reason PBTA et al have these awesome rules is to align the overarching play of the game to the designer's artistic vision. Then you can clearly say "this is ag game about doing X" and expect that for 95% of people the game will be about doing X. There's always a small number who will ignore everything and do what they want, but as Baker says - you design for the people under your curve who follow what you write.

So I have nothing against that per se. I am not saying that rules are bad or anything like that. But to me it seems that to some people they become the thing itself, instead of just an aid, and they lose the focus of what RPGs are fundamentally about.

 

[Pedantic]

I don't understand this, when you play a FITD game you generally know what you're getting into; and if you dont the player's best practices tell you. You should want to face cool obstacles that make sense in the fiction and push at your character's abilities and priorities! THat's like, the entire point - going into danger and seeing what happens. The game also tells players to advocate for what they want to see in the game, both writ large ("I'd like to see us engage with the tension around labor and strikebreaking") and small ("Im so very looking forward to having demons show up"). Your choice of playbook + abilities are also this.

This feels like confusion around the word "face" somehow, and drives at that doublethink around play objectives I was talking about earlier. The player wants to make good decisions, constrained by systems that present adversity...if there is a method within that system to lower adversity, it is a good decision to employee it. "Facing cool obstacles" is using mechanics to make problems go away and get the outcomes you want.

In a game about steering boats around rocks, the bit where the player decided to be faced with rocks was when they started playing; after that point, they're going to bend all of their resources to not engaging with the rocks. On the one hand, it is obviously a design flaw if they never have to dodge a rock at that point, but on the other hand, it is not at that point the player's job to steer toward the rocks, and it is perfectly reasonable for a player to be upset if the game doesn't offer them a steering wheel.

Going back to the initial alarm spells comparison; those don't do the same thing in gameplay. If the nature of a given threat is fixed somehow (setting aside the question of whether a GM can or should do so), the alarm spell will either do nothing, completely counter it or mitigate it in knowable ways. The Aetherial Premonition ability instead skews the percentages on a chance roll for the tamber of event that happens next. Those aren't the same gameplay decision! You can't neatly move the logic you would use to pick one strategy or the other between them, and they don't confer the same kind of agency on what happens next.

 

[zakael19]

How do you constrain GM “arbitrary” fiat without clear guidance or rules?

How do you make productive intentional play fostered without systems to enhance them?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

How do you constrain GM “arbitrary” fiat without clear guidance or rules?

Why do you need to constrain it? A good GM will however have principles they follow to run the game fairly and consistently.

How do you make productive intentional play fostered without systems to enhance them?

By creating situations with meaningful decision points.

 

[Bedrockgames]

How do you constrain GM “arbitrary” fiat without clear guidance or rules?

Do GM's need to be constrained? I think part of this is just a different philosophy when it comes to fostering GMing. My experience is most GMs are not arbitrary. They often have different reasons from one another for making the decisions they do, because they are different people with different interests and each has their own style of campaign. But this is a good thing, not a bad thing.

How do you make productive intentional play fostered without systems to enhance them?

What do you mean by intentional here?

 

[zakael19]

Do GM's need to be constrained? I think part of this is just a different philosophy when it comes to fostering GMing. My experience is most GMs are not arbitrary. They often have different reasons from one another for making the decisions they do, because they are different people with different interests and each has their own style of campaign. But this is a good thing, not a bad thing.




What do you mean by intentional here?

Yes, they absolutely do. I think if D&D was clear with constraints about how DM's should act and run games, you wouldn't see an internet nearly as filled with plaintive cries for help; endless guides about how to be "good at DMing;" and horror story after horror story about DMs crapping all over their player's and their ideas. I think our hobby would be massively better off if stuff like the Principia Apocrypha was baked into the rulebooks. Heck, 4e kinda did a bit of this at least; and the 2024 DMG/PHB has started to wiggle its way towards it.

I've personally experienced and seen (and honestly, exercised) arbitrary GM fiat to guide things towards "the plot" or "the way the module says" or you know all the bad GM play that's out there.

 

[nevin]

Yes, they absolutely do. I think if D&D was clear with constraints about how DM's should act and run games, you wouldn't see an internet nearly as filled with plaintive cries for help; endless guides about how to be "good at DMing;" and horror story after horror story about DMs crapping all over their player's and their ideas. I think our hobby would be massively better off if stuff like the Principia Apocrypha was baked into the rulebooks. Heck, 4e kinda did a bit of this at least; and the 2024 DMG/PHB has started to wiggle its way towards it.

I've personally experienced and seen (and honestly, exercised) arbitrary GM fiat to guide things towards "the plot" or "the way the module says" or you know all the bad GM play that's out there.

And as long as people have different views,opinions, life experience and varying levels of experience in telling stories and different levels of communication skills and keep entering the position of DM that will continue. Even if you had a perfect training course to fix all that "you" see wrong it would continue just as it does now because you'll never have a common group think on what or how it should be. That's a table decision.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Yes, they absolutely do. I think if D&D was clear with constraints about how DM's should act and run games, you wouldn't see an internet nearly as filled with plaintive cries for help; endless guides about how to be "good at DMing;" and horror story after horror story about DMs crapping all over their player's and their ideas. I think our hobby would be massively better off if stuff like the Principia Apocrypha was baked into the rulebooks. Heck, 4e kinda did a bit of this at least; and the 2024 DMG/PHB has started to wiggle its way towards it.

The internet is filled with all kinds of complaints though. I haven't really encountered any of these issues since high school. And I think the reason is two-fold: people get better and more mature at GMing as they get older, players grow more mature and less disruptive as they get older. I am not saying there aren't bad GMs out there, I am not saying people don't sometimes have misaligned interests at the table. But I do think the isn't the issue people make it out to be ether (and I think one of the things D&D does well is allow for many different styles of play but not leaning on any specific set of GM constraints)

 

[nevin]

The internet is filled with all kinds of complaints though. I haven't really encountered any of these issues since high school. And I think the reason is two-fold: people get better and more mature at GMing as they get older, players grow more mature and less disruptive as they get older. I am not saying there aren't bad GMs out there, I am not saying people don't sometimes have misaligned interests at the table. But I do think the isn't the issue people make it out to be ether (and I think one of the things D&D does well is allow for many different styles of play but not leaning on any specific set of GM constraints)

and honestly most tables don't last long with the "bad" DM's some are talking about. They either learn and get better or lose thier tables.

 

[zakael19]

And as long as people have different views,opinions, life experience and varying levels of experience in telling stories and different levels of communication skills and keep entering the position of DM that will continue. Even if you had a perfect training course to fix all that "you" see wrong it would continue just as it does now because you'll never have a common group think on what or how it should be. That's a table decision.

Imagine if you had a core book that was clear about what the system and culture has established and baked it into a set of, at the very least, best practices. Perhaps with strong examples of different styles of play that tables might fall into, and gave ideas of what it looks like to execute that well for both players and DMs? I mean, it might put The Alexandrian et al out of business I guess.

Again, the OSR community did this; to the point where some of the newer games are very explicit about "how to run and play this game well." They're very concerned with avoiding "GM fiat" through use of extensive prep; random tables; open information; etc.