Be a GAME-MASTER, not a DIRECTOR

[clearstream]

I agree with the second sentence. The core of RPGing, I think, is the combination of two things that were present in wargaming:

*A figure as being a single person, rather than a unit - this then permits an approach of "inhabitation" rather than mere "command"/"direction" of the figure;​

​

*The fiction mattering to resolution, as is found in some wargaming.​

Other typical (not necessary essential) elements, like continuity of protagonists and setting, seem to build on this base. And they're also not exclusive to RPGing - they're found in serial fiction.

Not being edited is a typical feature of live performances. And even the absence of rehearsals, though less typical for a live performance, is not unique to RPGing.

Peterson's Playing At the World documents the evolution of those two things into Dungeons and Dragons, and it seems right to say they're in some sense fundamental. Do you intend "the fiction mattering to resolution" to include something like "the extension of structured play into the imagination"?

That question aside, those two things can be done without a prior game text, as freeform amply illustrates. A consequence for what I've said is that I ought to be saying that it is distinctive of significant categories and elements of game texts that they are prescriptive without scripting the story precisely. (Interestingly, the meaning of that text must be felt by players* at one remove; as a series of meanings inspired by the text translated through their live performances.)

That would make the construction of game texts secondary or subsequent to play, which could be explained by a process of replicating (and modifying) and prospective play. I'm not sure that's right, but it seems like a possibility given the core of RPGing were the combination of those two things.

*Here I mean players as author-audiences, i.e. the lusory-duality.

 

[bloodtide]

Everything you say here about players is equally true of GMs. A GM can't just do things - if the GM can just do whatever and end the game, then there is no game.

Hence why I posted that,

I just don't follow your reasoning here.

Do you know any RPG that uses group votes as its method of action resolution? Off the top of my head, I don't. But there are other ways of mediating multiple inputs into a single decision - for instance, allocation of "ownership" of different bits of the fiction to different participants; using structured processes to elicit different participants' vision for how the fiction might unfold, and then using dice to determine whose vision prevails; or, slightly different from the immediately preceding, using dice to distribute obligations on one or more participants to come up with ideas for how the fiction might unfold that depart from their initial vision.

I don't know a voting game, but I'm far from a know all the games expert.

I don't really follow all your words.

I guess your talking about games like : When the players decide to enter 'the woods' they give the DM permission to roll once on the Woods Events Table. And it can be fun knowing that each time characters go into the woods, one of ten events will happen. Over and over and over again. And a lot of DMs like this sort of easy game where the 'rules' tell them what to do: "ok guys a roll a six, you encounter a fallen tree...wow". Though a lot of tables are so vague as to be useless.....when it says "combat encounter" the DM must 100% make that up from scratch. And that is right back to a DM doing anthing...

What are you changing?

I was working with a student this morning, helping her edit her draft. That involves changing words, sentences and paragraphs. But this is not being done in front of the audience - the intended readers of her paper - who will only see the final version.

What similar process do you have in mind that is taking place in the play of a RPG in respect of the shared fiction?

Well, this sort of compares apples and oranges. The word "edit" covers a lot.

I don't think any RPG fiction is ever final. There is no "report" that a DM must file with the RPG Lords. It's not like a DM writes something down and can ever, ever change it.

 

[Gorgon Zee]

Do you know any RPG that uses group votes as its method of action resolution? Off the top of my head, I don't. But there are other ways of mediating multiple inputs into a single decision - for instance, allocation of "ownership" of different bits of the fiction to different participants; using structured processes to elicit different participants' vision for how the fiction might unfold, and then using dice to determine whose vision prevails; or, slightly different from the immediately preceding, using dice to distribute obligations on one or more participants to come up with ideas for how the fiction might unfold that depart from their initial vision

I’ve both played and run Hillfolk (DramaSystem) and it uses group decisions in a number of cases. The core loop of a Hillfolk game is the setting of a dramatic scene, roleplaying the scene, and then a decision as to whether the petitioner got a significant concession. If the player doesn’t think they did, the group then decides if they really did or not. So the only way you can collect dramatic tokens (which power the game’s mechanics) is by group decision.

Procedurally scenes also do not take place if the group decides they are not necessary and they agree on an outcome. I ran one game where the main plot was building up to a battle. When we came to it, the group decided the outcome and moved on to the post-battle dramatic scene.

Two examples of groups making decisions that affect the game strongly.

 

[pemerton]

Peterson's Playing At the World documents the evolution of those two things into Dungeons and Dragons, and it seems right to say they're in some sense fundamental. Do you intend "the fiction mattering to resolution" to include something like "the extension of structured play into the imagination"?

By "the fiction matters to resolution" I mean the difference between a game whose moves refer to a shared fiction, and one that doesn't. RPGs are examples of the first; chess and other boardgames are examples of the second.

I've seen people try and construct counterexamples like blindfold chess. But blindfold chess doesn't use a shared fiction. It is - in its core process - no different from solving an arithmetic problem in one's head rather than on paper. It requires memory (perhaps aided by visual imagination) but the resolution process is still a type of deterministic logic/geometry. Resolution is not by way of imaginative extrapolation of a fictional state of affairs.

This is also why I regard comments such as you can roleplay while playing Monopoly, for instance by (in imagination) tooting your horn and waving to the passers-by as your motor car playing piece passes Go, as missing the point. Key to RPGing is not that we imaginatively say stuff but that the stuff that we imaginatively say actually matters to how the game unfolds. That is not true of Monopoly, no matter how vigorous the play-acting; whereas it is true of a Gygaxian dungeon-crawl, no matter how pawn stance the players' orientation towards their "pieces" (ie their PCs). For instance, there is no rule in classic D&D that tells us (for instance) that an axe might be used to break through a door. There is no axe piece, no door piece, and no rule connecting them - which contrasts, for instance, with the rule in the Talisman boardgame about using an axe to build a raft. The reason that an axe can be used to break through a door is because of a table consensus that that makes sense as a possibility in the shared fiction.

RPGs also have fictional position. That's an expansive notion, but at least as I understand it, it includes such elements of play as that my PC is standing at a barred door, holding an axe, which is not about the state of a token on a board (real or imagined), but rather an assertion that everyone at the table agrees with, but in a fictional rather than doxastic mode. The fictional position makes moves possible not because of geometrical or similar logical/deductive relationships (cf blindfold chess) but because we can, collectively, imagine what a person standing in front of a barred door and holding an axe might do.

That question aside, those two things can be done without a prior game text, as freeform amply illustrates.

I think two things are being run together here. There could be - and, presumably, are - texts to support freeform RPG. And a non-freeform RPG can be played without a prior text, if the rules are negotiated and agreed in the course of play by the participants.

All a rules text is is a reduction, to writing, of the procedures and/or rules of play. Those procedures and rules "exist" (I use scare quotes to sidestep the metaphysical questions about the nature of rules) even if not reduced to writing; and freeform has procedures (if not rules in the strictest sense) that could in principle be reduced to writing, even if often they're not.

it is distinctive of significant categories and elements of game texts that they are prescriptive without scripting the story precisely.

Game texts are prescriptive because they contain rules; and it is the general nature/function of rules to prescribe.

RPG rules generally prescribe ways for a group to come to agreement on the content of a shared fiction, in a play context where it is implicit and perhaps explicit that no single person has unilateral authority over the whole of the shared fiction as such.

It's no mystery that rules can set out methods for how to establish a shared fiction without stating what that fiction should be. Similarly, a book of instructions on how to build a house safely and legally will be prescriptive without telling you what sort of house you should build. When I was a kid, I had a book that told me how to program in simple BASIC without telling me what I should program (one of the things I remember programming was a simple PC generator for Moldvay Basic). Etc.

Interestingly, the meaning of that text must be felt by players* at one remove; as a series of meanings inspired by the text translated through their live performances.

<snip>

*Here I mean players as author-audiences, i.e. the lusory-duality.

I don't really follow this. When I read (for instance) the rules for building a PC in Moldvay Basic, I don't feel the meaning of the text as something inspired by the text translated through my performance. Rather, I read the rules and follow the procedure, much like following a recipe. And then, when I play, I establish fictional position, and resolve actions declared on the basis of that fictional position, by reference to the rules.

If the sorts of texts you are meaning are campaign guides, scenario outlines etc I still don't really follow. When my group uses, for instance, the Greyhawk maps to establish some bit of fictional position, or to reach consensus on the resolution of an action (eg We travel from the Wizard's Tower to the Forgotten Temple Complex - ie from a point on the southern Bluff Hills to a point nestled between the Troll Fens to the south and a spur of the Griff Mountains to the north), we look at the map, incorporate that into our shared imagining, and go on by straightforward extrapolation.

That would make the construction of game texts secondary or subsequent to play, which could be explained by a process of replicating (and modifying) and prospective play. I'm not sure that's right, but it seems like a possibility given the core of RPGing were the combination of those two things.

You've largely lost me here.

Some game texts are constructed subsequent to play - this is true of the original D&D rulebooks, and also of the GH Folio. Some may be constructed prior to play, although if they've not been tested at all we might expect them to be weak - I have certainly written house rules on the basis of imagination and prior experience alone, without testing them, and so those bits of text have been constructed prior to any play using them. Not all of those house rules have been failures, either, although some have been.

Anyway, it seems to me that you are treating as somewhat difficult or mysterious the possibilities that rules can be authored to govern the creation of fictions, without thereby dictating the content of those fictions and that fictions authored by one person can be incorporated by others, in whole or in part, into their different fictions - whereas I think both possibilities are quite straightforward. The first possibility is just a special case of the general phenomenon of an instruction manual for some activity that is not fully prescriptive as to the end product (what sort of house will I build, now that I know how to build houses? how many layers will I put on my cake, now that I know how to bake cakes and spread cream and jam between layers? etc). And the second possibility is just a special case of the general phenomena of (i) language being public and iterable, and (ii) assertions in non-doxastic modes, including fictional modes, being a thing that is pretty innate to humans.

 

[pemerton]

I’ve both played and run Hillfolk (DramaSystem) and it uses group decisions in a number of cases. The core loop of a Hillfolk game is the setting of a dramatic scene, roleplaying the scene, and then a decision as to whether the petitioner got a significant concession. If the player doesn’t think they did, the group then decides if they really did or not. So the only way you can collect dramatic tokens (which power the game’s mechanics) is by group decision.

Procedurally scenes also do not take place if the group decides they are not necessary and they agree on an outcome. I ran one game where the main plot was building up to a battle. When we came to it, the group decided the outcome and moved on to the post-battle dramatic scene.

Two examples of groups making decisions that affect the game strongly.

Is the group decision-making done by vote, or by consensus?

Torchbearer, and the Duel of Wits in Burning Wheel, relies on the group reaching consensus as to compromises. But that's not done by voting.

I don't know how fan mail works in Prime Time Adventures, so don't know if that's a type of voting.

 

[pemerton]

I just don't follow your reasoning here.

My reasoning is that the GM is not more able to establish a shared fiction on their own, than is a player. Neither has the power to unilaterally establish the content of a shared fiction. That's a direct consequence of it being shared.

I guess your talking about games like : When the players decide to enter 'the woods' they give the DM permission to roll once on the Woods Events Table. And it can be fun knowing that each time characters go into the woods, one of ten events will happen. Over and over and over again.

I don't know of any such game, and so am not talking about it.

To explain my words:

*allocation of "ownership" of different bits of the fiction to different participants - a lot of RPGs use this, by giving the players ownership over their PCs, and what their PCs hope and think, and perhaps also who their PCs have close relationships with; while giving the GM ownership over NPCs, and bits of the setting that are unconnected to or only loosely connected to the PCs. If everyone respects that ownership structure, then shared fiction can be created by integrating the contributions of multiple participants.

*using structured processes to elicit different participants' vision for how the fiction might unfold, and then using dice to determine whose vision prevails - D&D saving throws are a bit like this, where the GM declares "You fall into a pit trap!" or "As you reach into the treasure chest, you're stung by a scorpion" and then the player rolls their save and, if they win, get to replace their preferred vision of the fiction - "With my sharp reflexes, I step back from the edge at the last moment" or "With my sharp reflexes, I pull my hand away just before the scorpion strikes!"

*using dice to distribute obligations on one or more participants to come up with ideas for how the fiction might unfold that depart from their initial vision - Apocalypse World uses this a lot. Here's an illustration, which begins in media res, with the PC escaping from hostile enemies on a motorbike: the GM narrates a threat (maybe "As you're racing along on your bike, you crest a ridge only to see that there is a gorge right in front of you - you're going to tumble right into it!"), and then the player declares an action (let's say, "I gun my engine, race as fast as I can down the sloe between ridge and gorge, and jump it!), the GM calls for a move (in this case, Act Under Fire, given that the PC is trying to do something under serious pressure), and the player rolls the dice. If the player succeeds on their throw with a 10+, then they get what they wanted - their PC jumps the gorge on their bike. If the player fails on a 6-, the GM gets to bring the thread home: the PC and bike go tumbling into the gorge. If the player rolls a 7-9, though, the GM has to "offer [the player/their PC] a worse outcome, a hard bargain, or an ugly choice" (p 190). That would be an example of the dice imposing an obligation on the GM to come up with ideas for how the fiction might unfold that depart from their initial vision (which was of the PC and bike tumbling into the gorge) and from the player's initial vision (which was of the PC dramatically jumping their bike over the gorge). Maybe the GM decides on a worse outcome: "Your gun the engine, and take off over the gorge. Miraculously, you make it to the other side, but while you survive the landing your bike doesn't. The front forks are mangled, and that thing is not going anywhere. What do you do?"​

As per my post that your replied to, these are all techniques that can be used to incorporate multiple inputs into a consensus shared fiction. They show how players' inputs, as well as GM's inputs, can be part of that. The way those inputs are handled may be similar, or different, depending on the particular system.

But whatever the details, the point is that it is simply wrong to suggest that the only two ways to establish fiction in a RPG are via GM dictation or group voting.

I don't think any RPG fiction is ever final. There is no "report" that a DM must file with the RPG Lords. It's not like a DM writes something down and can ever, ever change it.

You seem to be talking about GM prep. I'm talking about the fiction that the group collectively creates, as part of playing the game.

 

[bloodtide]

My reasoning is that the GM is not more able to establish a shared fiction on their own, than is a player. Neither has the power to unilaterally establish the content of a shared fiction. That's a direct consequence of it being shared.

I don't see any sharing, even in your examples. The DM makes the world, the players then play in it. I get "share" is the popular buzz word,

To explain my words:

*allocation of "ownership" of different bits of the fiction to different participants - a lot of RPGs use this, by giving the players ownership over their PCs, and what their PCs hope and think, and perhaps also who their PCs have close relationships with; while giving the GM ownership over NPCs, and bits of the setting that are unconnected to or only loosely connected to the PCs. If everyone respects that ownership structure, then shared fiction can be created by integrating the contributions of multiple participants.​

Ok, so this is the classic 'players own their PC', and the DM 'owns everything else'. But there is no 'sharing' here.

​

*using structured processes to elicit different participants' vision for how the fiction might unfold, and then using dice to determine whose vision prevails - D&D saving throws are a bit like this, where the GM declares "You fall into a pit trap!" or "As you reach into the treasure chest, you're stung by a scorpion" and then the player rolls their save and, if they win, get to replace their preferred vision of the fiction - "With my sharp reflexes, I step back from the edge at the last moment" or "With my sharp reflexes, I pull my hand away just before the scorpion strikes!"​

I guess I'd wonder about the DM 'setting up the save', or any dice roll. And the even bigger one of the DM just doing something with no rolls.

​

*using dice to distribute obligations on one or more participants to come up with ideas for how the fiction might unfold that depart from their initial vision - Apocalypse World uses this a lot. Here's an illustration, which begins in media res, with the PC escaping from hostile enemies on a motorbike: the GM narrates a threat (maybe "As you're racing along on your bike, you crest a ridge only to see that there is a gorge right in front of you - you're going to tumble right into it!"), and then the player declares an action (let's say, "I gun my engine, race as fast as I can down the sloe between ridge and gorge, and jump it!), the GM calls for a move (in this case, Act Under Fire, given that the PC is trying to do something under serious pressure), and the player rolls the dice. If the player succeeds on their throw with a 10+, then they get what they wanted - their PC jumps the gorge on their bike. If the player fails on a 6-, the GM gets to bring the thread home: the PC and bike go tumbling into the gorge. If the player rolls a 7-9, though, the GM has to "offer [the player/their PC] a worse outcome, a hard bargain, or an ugly choice" (p 190). That would be an example of the dice imposing an obligation on the GM to come up with ideas for how the fiction might unfold that depart from their initial vision (which was of the PC and bike tumbling into the gorge) and from the player's initial vision (which was of the PC dramatically jumping their bike over the gorge). Maybe the GM decides on a worse outcome: "Your gun the engine, and take off over the gorge. Miraculously, you make it to the other side, but while you survive the landing your bike doesn't. The front forks are mangled, and that thing is not going anywhere. What do you do?"​

This one seems very game specific. A lot of RPGs don't have this 'vague action roll'. This is my example from lots of past posts in this thread: many games don't cover. This is where many games have to close the book and just role play.

As per my post that your replied to, these are all techniques that can be used to incorporate multiple inputs into a consensus shared fiction. They show how players' inputs, as well as GM's inputs, can be part of that. The way those inputs are handled may be similar, or different, depending on the particular system.

Well, the game your talking about makes sense then.

You seem to be talking about GM prep. I'm talking about the fiction that the group collectively creates, as part of playing the game.

I think the thing here is that in your type of game no one can edit. But in games other then that, a DM can edit things.

 

[pemerton]

I don't see any sharing, even in your examples. The DM makes the world, the players then play in it. I get "share" is the popular buzz word,


Ok, so this is the classic 'players own their PC', and the DM 'owns everything else'. But there is no 'sharing' here.

There is a shared fiction. An imaginary stuff that everyone is imagining together. And that no single person created. If the player say "We set out on our trek!", then the GM also has to imagine that. And if the GM says "OK, it starts to rain - it's dank and cold," then everyone has to imagine that - the PCs trudging through the rain. And then if one of the players, after reviewing their PC sheet, notice a cloak in their equipment list and says "I pull on the hood of my cloak and do the front collar up as high and tight as I can, to try and stay dry", well now everyone - even the GM - has to imagine this one PC trying to keep themself dry with their cloak as they trudge along.

If there is no shared fiction, the game can't proceed. Because the core moves, for both players and GMs, all depend upon saying stuff about that fiction.

 

[clearstream]

By "the fiction matters to resolution" I mean the difference between a game whose moves refer to a shared fiction, and one that doesn't. RPGs are examples of the first; chess and other boardgames are examples of the second.

I've seen people try and construct counterexamples like blindfold chess. But blindfold chess doesn't use a shared fiction. It is - in its core process - no different from solving an arithmetic problem in one's head rather than on paper. It requires memory (perhaps aided by visual imagination) but the resolution process is still a type of deterministic logic/geometry. Resolution is not by way of imaginative extrapolation of a fictional state of affairs.

This is also why I regard comments such as you can roleplay while playing Monopoly, for instance by (in imagination) tooting your horn and waving to the passers-by as your motor car playing piece passes Go, as missing the point. Key to RPGing is not that we imaginatively say stuff but that the stuff that we imaginatively say actually matters to how the game unfolds. That is not true of Monopoly, no matter how vigorous the play-acting; whereas it is true of a Gygaxian dungeon-crawl, no matter how pawn stance the players' orientation towards their "pieces" (ie their PCs). For instance, there is no rule in classic D&D that tells us (for instance) that an axe might be used to break through a door. There is no axe piece, no door piece, and no rule connecting them - which contrasts, for instance, with the rule in the Talisman boardgame about using an axe to build a raft. The reason that an axe can be used to break through a door is because of a table consensus that that makes sense as a possibility in the shared fiction.

RPGs also have fictional position. That's an expansive notion, but at least as I understand it, it includes such elements of play as that my PC is standing at a barred door, holding an axe, which is not about the state of a token on a board (real or imagined), but rather an assertion that everyone at the table agrees with, but in a fictional rather than doxastic mode. The fictional position makes moves possible not because of geometrical or similar logical/deductive relationships (cf blindfold chess) but because we can, collectively, imagine what a person standing in front of a barred door and holding an axe might do.

Connecting it with "resolution" seems right (versus those other examples of let's pretend.) I'd say that "Resolution" is more part of what it is to be a game, than what it is to roleplay. Being done in the particular way involving fiction makes RPGs open and formally incomplete in contrast with definitions of game like Chris Crawford's that assume closure and completeness. Openness and incompleteness succumb well to instruction and less well to specification. The table draws into their play concepts and norms (such as those about axes and wooden doors) from a practically limitless reservoir.

I think two things are being run together here. There could be - and, presumably, are - texts to support freeform RPG. And a non-freeform RPG can be played without a prior text, if the rules are negotiated and agreed in the course of play by the participants.

All a rules text is is a reduction, to writing, of the procedures and/or rules of play. Those procedures and rules "exist" (I use scare quotes to sidestep the metaphysical questions about the nature of rules) even if not reduced to writing; and freeform has procedures (if not rules in the strictest sense) that could in principle be reduced to writing, even if often they're not. Some game texts are constructed subsequent to play - this is true of the original D&D rulebooks, and also of the GH Folio.

Some may be constructed prior to play, although if they've not been tested at all we might expect them to be weak - I have certainly written house rules on the basis of imagination and prior experience alone, without testing them, and so those bits of text have been constructed prior to any play using them. Not all of those house rules have been failures, either, although some have been.

That's what I cover with "replicated" and "prospective": I'm not saying freeform is done without rules, I'm saying it's done without a prior game text. A game text then is "a reduction, to writing of the procedures and/or rules of play" among other things, designed to instruct future play. For folk whose experience of RPGing has been following the instructions of a text, it might not be immediately evident that those texts can only be constructed following the experience of play.

Game texts are prescriptive because they contain rules; and it is the general nature/function of rules to prescribe.

RPG rules generally prescribe ways for a group to come to agreement on the content of a shared fiction, in a play context where it is implicit and perhaps explicit that no single person has unilateral authority over the whole of the shared fiction as such.

It's no mystery that rules can set out methods for how to establish a shared fiction without stating what that fiction should be. Similarly, a book of instructions on how to build a house safely and legally will be prescriptive without telling you what sort of house you should build. When I was a kid, I had a book that told me how to program in simple BASIC without telling me what I should program (one of the things I remember programming was a simple PC generator for Moldvay Basic). Etc.

I don't really follow this. When I read (for instance) the rules for building a PC in Moldvay Basic, I don't feel the meaning of the text as something inspired by the text translated through my performance. Rather, I read the rules and follow the procedure, much like following a recipe. And then, when I play, I establish fictional position, and resolve actions declared on the basis of that fictional position, by reference to the rules.

Inspire may not be the right word choice, but while I like the examples of building and programming I believe the above significantly undersells it. My points of comparison are with traditional storytelling media, in which performances are secured by more exact specification. I'm trying to think what storytelling form aside from RPGing makes its core text an instruction manual? For game designers, there's the useful implication that there will be things to learn from instruction manuals from other domains. In that light, Tim Hutchings' Apollo 47 Instruction Manual becomes a representative artifact.

If the sorts of texts you are meaning are campaign guides, scenario outlines etc I still don't really follow. When my group uses, for instance, the Greyhawk maps to establish some bit of fictional position, or to reach consensus on the resolution of an action (eg We travel from the Wizard's Tower to the Forgotten Temple Complex - ie from a point on the southern Bluff Hills to a point nestled between the Troll Fens to the south and a spur of the Griff Mountains to the north), we look at the map, incorporate that into our shared imagining, and go on by straightforward extrapolation.

I'm not sure exactly where these sit, as they seem to go a bit beyond instruction and more toward specification. RPGing is a hybrid or heterogenous activity, and thus elusive to define (someone can always point to some exception.)

Anyway, it seems to me that you are treating as somewhat difficult or mysterious the possibilities that rules can be authored to govern the creation of fictions, without thereby dictating the content of those fictions and that fictions authored by one person can be incorporated by others, in whole or in part, into their different fictions - whereas I think both possibilities are quite straightforward. The first possibility is just a special case of the general phenomenon of an instruction manual for some activity that is not fully prescriptive as to the end product (what sort of house will I build, now that I know how to build houses? how many layers will I put on my cake, now that I know how to bake cakes and spread cream and jam between layers? etc). And the second possibility is just a special case of the general phenomena of (i) language being public and iterable, and (ii) assertions in non-doxastic modes, including fictional modes, being a thing that is pretty innate to humans.

It seems we look at the same facts and feel differing senses of excitement about them. Novel writers might refer to an instruction manual that explains how to go about writing their novel, but their audiences simply read it. Audiences aren't obliged to interpret instructions so as to write their own take on the setting and premises of the novel. Similarly films. And maybe the same applies to musicals and opera. If that's right, then that's unique to RPGing and it's what I'm therefore characterizing as "distinctive."

 

[Gorgon Zee]

Is the group decision-making done by vote, or by consensus?

Hillfolk does not specify how the group agrees, but I don’t see that there’s much of a distinction. Once you require a group to decide something, an existing consensus makes it easy, but if you don’t have one, you need some way to get to one, either by majority voting or some other way in which people register their opinion to decide an outcome.

Consensus is voting; where any one vote defeats the motion. I played Juror #10 in TEN ANGRY MEN a while back, and we voted, and we needed consensus.