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FWIW, Deset Gled, I feel that chaochou's point was reasonably clear in the context of their overall post. Your post felt like a response to only the sentence you bolded; to me it seemed clear that the post as a whole was saying something quite different from the argument you thought you were...

Side note: My own view is that games, as opposed to recreational activities, have goals with quantifiable outcomes towards which players strive, and if there's no such goal, it's not a game. The Rules of Play (Zimmerman et al.) introduced me to the idea that RPGs may not be games at all, and...

I think we have fundamentally different views of what FKing is. My understanding of free Kriegsspiel is that there's no restriction on "what is a reasonable move", nor a requirement to use pre-established dice throws. (The absence of such requirements is precisely what distinguishes "free"...

I request clarification on three points: 1.) Is it your position that rule application, and not fiction creation, is the only type of refereeing that occurs in a FK game or Braunstein? If a player in an FK has his troops do something which requires referee creativity, such as going into a...

Is it legitimate for immersionist play to begin in medias res, with a goblin attack? Play has to start somewhere.

I am not clearstream but to me it appears that the contrast you describe is exactly what is meant by "Possibly what is at odds is the direction of justification". I think you folks are on the same page here now. Note also that there are different levels of GM and player resistance to the idea...

If I've misunderstood you then I apologize. That was my honest good faith attempt to paraphrase your position. To me the two quotes seem congruent. What am I missing?

Apparently there's been a misunderstanding, because when you contrasted Braunsteins/FK with GMing an RPG ("The latter does not involve judging in the way the former does") I thought you were saying the opposite. If you don't in fact think that there's no overlap then we don't disagree.

If the GM knows the answers to these four questions, that's enough for a simulationist, but if the players don't know these answers too they won't be able to construct a narrative. I'm always looking for new techniques to relay information to the players, lately including something sort of like...

Thanks. You're right that I think in GDS terms, not Forge Narrativism. I've never really gotten my head around the meaning of Forge Narrativism or Simulationism no matter how many times I reread the threads. In this case I probably should have said "dramatism" even though I wasn't speaking...

I think there's an even more fundamental drive: a narrative approach wants a coherent narrative to be discernable after the fact. They want to know WHY the goblins terrorized the village, and how it relates to other events. "We may never know why this crime was committed" is a valid explanation...

Welcome to the world of troupe play and scenario one-shots! You're not wrong about it being cool and interesting. Best of all, it's not mutually exclusive with campaign play. If player Z can't make it to the February game session, playing a one-shot scenario with players X and Y, as cult...

Sometimes, yeah. But monsters like Oni and Nycalorths have invisibility built in. I'm not advocating specifically for PCs here, just agreeing and emphasizing that fantasy worlds make new approaches viable. I don't know if it's been mentioned in this thread, but waiting until nightfall tends to...

Not to mention invisibility spells and teleportation.

[shrug] Beats me. I'm just making the point that starting encounters at close range doesn't avoid the issue. Myself I'm pretty okay with this kind of tactic. I just try not to spend more table time on it than it deserves.

It's not just about engagement starting range. If you have an extremely long-range capability, then: 1.) Breaking contact (successful retreat) becomes a de facto victory condition in many cases: victory via Expeditious Retreat. I. e. you don't have to kill the Tarrasque right now, you just have...

Stop telling players it's not their turn to talk yet: abandon cyclic initiative. It's okay to have some kind of order to when you will RESOLVE action declarations ("archery before move-and-melee" for example) but there's nothing good that comes from telling the players they're not allowed to...

Still waiting for your answer on why you think Army wargames are free Kriegsspiel despite having very little referee discretion. (0.001% according to you.) Pemerton asserted that refereeing a scenario in a fictional world in FK and refereeing an agendaless dungeon crawl in a fantasy world in an...

This is called a Motte and Bailey fallacy. You make a ridiculous claim, then when challenged on it you claim it was a joke that doesn't need to be defended. And then you pretend like it was successfully defended and go back to relying on it.

Are you sure the Army wargames you describe are descended from free Kriegspiel and not classic Kriegsspiel? Obviously I wasn't alive in the 1800s, so I'll borrow from The Elusive Shift's characterization: In the pioneering Reiswitz system developed in the 1820s, players no longer moved pieces...