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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9478272" data-attributes="member: 42582">I can talk about games of Moldvay Basic played (by me, and I imagine thousands of others) in the early 1980s.The rules of the game state certain things that the GM must do: for instance, the GM must faithfully describe the dungeon to the players, consistently with the position of the PCs on the map and the light source that they are carrying. Just to give one example, the GM is not at liberty just to decide that the PCs are blind, or hallucinating, or so short-sighted that they can't see clearly to the end of a 30' tunnel. (Assuming they have adequate light.)Or suppose that the GM rolls the wandering monster die, and it indicates a wanderer, and then the GM rolls on the wandering monster table, and it indicates 3 goblins, and the GM rolls for encounter distance and then narrates the arrival of the goblins on the scene as indicated. And then suppose the players describe their characters shooting arrows at the goblins. The rulebook sets out rules for resolving this declared action: rolling for initiative, rolling to hit, rolling damage on a hit, comparing the rolled damage to the goblins' hp totals, etc. The GM is not just at liberty (for instance) to tell the players whose PCs shoot at the goblins that their arrows miss. Or if the hp roll for a goblin indicates 2 hp, and a player's roll to hit and damage indicate 3 hp of damage to that goblin, the GM is not just at liberty to tell the players that the goblin is unharmed, or is fighting on. The GM is obliged to tell the players that the goblin has been shot dead.There are many other examples that could be given, of how the rules place obligations on the GM (and the players too) as to what is said about what is happening in the shared fiction.So-called "narrative style" has nothing to do with it. One of the most recent times that I GMed a game of D&D, we were playing White Plume Mountain using AD&D. In this post, just above, I've given Moldvay Basic as an example, based on my actual play experience that resulted from reading the book and then applying what I read in play. (In the basic structure of play it's very very similar to the AD&D that we used to play WPM: the differences are mostly in the minutiae of the PC build rules, of the combat rules, and of the exploration rules like the precise probability spreads used to resolve looking for traps, listening at doors, etc.)Both Moldvay's and Gygax's rulebooks are full of statements about what the GM will do - these are not predictions, they are statements of rules for the GM to follow. They are also full of statements of procedures - for preparing a map and key, for resolving exploration, for resolving combat - that allocate tasks to the GM. Again, these are statements of rules for the GM to follow.The notion that the GM can make up whatever they like at any time - dictate results without regard to action resolution rules, without reference to their map and key, without reference to any procedures of play - is not foundation to D&D. I'm not sure when or where it first emerged. It was known of, but was far from universally accepted, in the late 1970s. It only seems to me to have become ubiquitous in the second half of the 1980s.</blockquote>

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