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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8524624" data-attributes="member: 82106">I don't know about the 'FKR', but Free Kriegspiel itself has a motive of simple applicability. Since it was an activity centered on modeling the REAL WORLD it was very important that it be possible to do so with great fidelity, and to present situations in an open-ended form. The idea was to give military officers a realistic scenario and let them improvise a response. No simply mechanistic wargame can do that, because they would inevitably have to encode all possible responses into their repertoire of moves, thus negating the whole value of the exercise. It isn't about the value of 'ad-hoc' mappings. It is about the value of open-endedness. There is a referee in these 'games' largely because situations will be encountered that have not been quantified, and thus require objective human adjudication. In FK it is likely to be considered that there is always a 'right' and 'wrong' referee response (adjudication) of a situation, and right is completely judged by its conformance with reality (though obviously judging the quality of a given referee decision may be difficult as it could represent something that has never happened in the real world).In fact, in FK, the referees were classically equipped with a rather thorough handbook of military tables and such which allowed them to determine the outcomes of fairly well-understood situations, like combat between specific units given known parameters. When human factors were involved, then the participants in the game WERE those humans! In some cases there would be 'NPCs' in effect for the ref to deal with.My point is, yes, there is decision-making by the ref in FK, but the entire model of the game is more 'D&D-like' than most story games. There was no such thing as PLAYER AGENDA in an FK! Not aside from 'win the war'. I think it is always best if there is some guidance provided by the system and the agenda/principles in terms of how to do the mappings back and forth, and THEN the GM is there to fall back on some level of judgment. Note that FKs are not generally 'freely scripted' and are definitely not 'player directed' though, not overall!But this brings us to the issue that I was pointing out, which is just how UNCLEAR it is what, fictionally, something like hit points even means! Why doesn't CLW fix a lost hand or eye but it does fix a broken bone? It isn't clear at all, and I'm not really aware of any rules or principles in any edition of D&D which really clarify this. Sure, there may be ad-hoc case-by-case decreed adjudications, but there's no framework they fit in.I would contrast this with a game like 4e where keywords can easily do exactly that (not to say that 4e's use of keywords was always carefully enough policed to 'just work', but it does go a long ways). My stock example is the Flametongue. In classical D&D its entirely ambiguous and arbitrary which monsters it gets +4 against vs +1. 1e DMG literally has a LIST hard-coded! 4e doesn't even have to mention this, as fire vulnerability handles it in a general way, describing the exact mechanical significance of the fire damage type (a type of keyword). I mean, this is a fairly trivial example, but even open-ended situations are at least moved into broad categories instead of designers and DMs needing to literally spell out lists of how everything interacts with everything else!</blockquote>

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