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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7571298" data-attributes="member: 42582">For me, these bits I've highlighted bring out the contrast of perspective between (i) what I might call the strong "GM decides" approach and (ii) my own attempt to distinguish free kriegsspiel-type GM decides from "Mother may I"-type GM decides. In particular, I feel that free kriegsspiel doesn't (fully? adequately? - an adverb is needed here and those are the ones I can think of in the right general neighbourhood) survive the transition you describe from being "disciplined" by the real world to being disciplined primarily by the GMs sense of what's reasonable and consistent.If I had to choose a word to fasten on and express the previous sentence, it would be objective: free kriegsspiel disciplined by the real world can be objective, in a way that "free kriegsspiel" disciplined only by the referee's sense of reasonableness and consistency can't be. Those latter things are, almost by definition I think, subjective. As you'll have already worked out from my earlier post, I see pit traps as falling on the "objective" side here, but most individual (as opposed to "population"-level) human behaviour as falling on the other side.This also leads me to think about the issue of trust in the GM as being different in the two cases: of course the free kriegsspiel participants have to trust the referee to be objective - but that's something like trusting an encyclopedia to give you accurate information. But in a Tanis and Kitiara-type case - ie the ones I put on the other side of my posited distinction - the trust is more like trusting the GM to present something plausible. And plausibility is a very different thing from objectively accurate.To try and convey the same point in a slightly different way, the free kriegsspiel referee is trying to articulate the single right answer to the situation. But when the threshold is plausibility only - as is the case, I am asserting, for individual-level human behaviour - then there is no single right answer. There's a range of possible answers, with the referee fastening on one. Rather than GM decides I might redescribe it as GM chooses to try and convey the way in which I think it differs from free kriegsspiel.</blockquote>

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