D&D General D&D's Evolution: Rulings, Rules, and "System Matters"

[Ovinomancer]

Uncle Ben, is that you?


While reading this and a few other posts, such as Ovinomancer's post in response to yours, a thought occurred to me in regards to storygames. In some regards this whole rulings and rules as well as this whole FKR vs. Story Game traditions feels a bit like of an odd dichotomy or point of contrast.

Apocalypse World, for example, came out of D. Vincent Baker designing (and then co-designing) a system with his wife Megan's preference for freeform RP in mind. Furthermore, it was designed, in part, in response to a common practice in the 3e era when people were engaging skill rolls first (e.g., "I roll for Perception!") rather than engaging the fiction first.

The rules for GMs in Apocalypse World are largely about when and how to make "rulings": making judgment calls about when player actions in the fiction "trigger" moves or deciding what is an appropriate soft or hard move for player rolls. (There are also "soft rules" in the game in the form of game guidelines and principles, which are meant to assist in rulings and facilitating play.)


PbtA constrains the GM/MC, but at the same time, the game feels lighter and quicker than D&D: e.g., "to do it, do it." The rules are robust, but at the same time there are far less rules in the way when compared to most editions of D&D. Should we be praising PbtA games for being closer adherents of FKR with an Umpire and a light system than D&D is?

Honestly, dare I say it, but could the "fiction first" principle that is nearly ubiquitous and highly emphasized in "story games" (e.g., PbtA, FitD, Fate, Cortex, etc.) may be more in spirit with FKR than D&D is?


Not to discredit the fine people at Magpie and their grasp of games, but watching this video when it released, I remember wishing that Ben MIlton had brought in some of the "storygame" heavy weights (e.g., Vincent Baker, John Harper, Luke Crane, etc.) for this discussion. I would have been more interested in their thoughts, especially since several of them also have a solid grasp of OSR as well with games like Luke Crane's Torchbearer or John Harper's World of Dungeons.


The accusation you mention here is sometimes veiled and sometimes not, but it does crop up quite often in these discussions. I do think that it's telling that some of the people who shame/gaslight people with the accusation of not trusting their GM then seem to explicitly showcase a lack of trust in their players. I'm skeptical if that's pure coincidence.

I will say that my own preferences formed not necessarily as a result of "bad GMs" in high trust games, but, rather, from seeing "good GMs" operate in games with alternative GM/player structures. They consequently formed as someone who game mastered "high trust games," and then found myself enjoying running as a GM these very same alternate GM/player structured games.

I overall agree with a lot of this, but the point I'm going to make and exception is where you're suggesting that storygames, like PbtA, have a better claim to Free Kriegsspiel. I understand the thrust of this argument, but it fails for much the same reason the Bob Says claim fails -- it's idealizing Free Kriegsspiel and then comparing to the idealized version.

Free Kriegsspiel as an ideal is often badly used -- it's an example of the evolution of a specific type of game in a specific context and for a specific purpose. The ways it did what it did cannot be disentangled from these. Straight up in front is that the Umpires generated the same set of outcomes that using the rules did -- young officers learned the art of war before the shells started flying. The outcome wasn't very sensitive to the resolution method because the intent of both methods was to recreate war accurately and serve as a training tool. This is NOT the point of the arguments being made claiming Free Kriegsspiel as a spiritual guide -- these outcomes are going to be very different because they are so sensitive to resolution methods. Here the methods aren't chosen for such a specific and measurable goal as Free Kriegsspiel, but instead to achieve completely different results.

 

[chaochou]

Free Kriegsspiel as an ideal is often badly used -- it's an example of the evolution of a specific type of game in a specific context and for a specific purpose. The ways it did what it did cannot be disentangled from these. Straight up in front is that the Umpires generated the same set of outcomes that using the rules did -- young officers learned the art of war before the shells started flying.

I agree with this.

Kriegspiel (free or not) has a number of critical difference with RPGs:

• the neutral umpire isn't playing one of the sides
• the neutral umpire isn't there to generate story, tension, drama or pacing
• the neutral umpire isn't invested in the set-up or concept of the game
• the range of adjudications required of the umpire is contained to known military practicalities - deployment times, movement rates, written order interpretation, combat effectiveness - done so through the lens of lived experience
• the purpose of military wargames is to to test reasoning and decision-making, not to pretend the game outcomes are simulative

Neutral 'umpire' style GM-ing in RPGs is compromised by all of these pretty much out of the gate. Banale repetition to 'trust' the GM doesn't make it any less the case.

In short, the 'Free' in the title of Free Kriegspiel makes it absolutely nothing like the adjudication process in games which give the GM complete freedom, any more than the 'advanced' in Advanced Squad Leader makes umpiring a game of that the same as running 'Advanced' Dungeons and Dragons.

 

[Campbell]

@Snarf Zagyg

Can you provide some examples of games you feel are aiming for a Free Kriegspiel like experience that you feel are binding the referee? Because from where I'm standing I am not seeing any game that foots the bill of attempting to start from a war gaming culture and failing to live up to it. I see lots of games that have a GM role that is explicitly not a referee, just a different sort of player. I also see a ton of OSR games like Worlds Without Number that provide GM tools, but don't bind the GM in any meaningful way other than calling on them to be referees.

Here's an example :

Apocalypse World does not have a referee. It has a Master of Ceremonies. The role of the Master of Ceremonies is not to arbitrate rules, make judgements over what should happen, or passively determine what an NPC would do based on a bespoke scenario. It is not failing to live up to FK ethos because it does not care to try. It has no referee. Needs no referee.

I'm not trying to be difficult here. I just need something more specific to go off of in order to discuss. Not seeing the meat here.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Honestly, dare I say it, but could the "fiction first" principle that is nearly ubiquitous and highly emphasized in "story games" (e.g., PbtA, FitD, Fate, Cortex, etc.) may be more in spirit with FKR than D&D is?

I think that what you're citing here points to that venn area of narrative story games and the OSR, that both are responses to certain elements of mainstream games. They’re each trying to address the same perceived flaws, but then go about that in different ways.

But I think you then see a lot of similarities when comparing them.

The accusation you mention here is sometimes veiled and sometimes not, but it does crop up quite often in these discussions. I do think that it's telling that some of the people who shame/gaslight people with the accusation of not trusting their GM then seem to explicitly showcase a lack of trust in their players. I'm skeptical if that's pure coincidence.

The lack of trust in a GM can be present in any game. I don’t think that constraints on GM authority or action are about addressing lack of trust. Not unless we view the need for any and every rule as a lack of trust in participants.

Constrained GM authority is something I’ve seen described as “GMing with training wheels” and it’s a description I really don’t like. Especially because playing with constraints is often seen as skilled play. Oh, you managed to do X despite Y! Impressive.

I find the principles and guidelines in games like Apocalypse World and Blades in the Dark to be more about enabling rulings. Keep them in mind when making decisions about the outcome of play.

I think they jibe quite well with the general idea of a GM playing the world. The only area where I’m not so sure about is the idea of “neutral referee”. But then I think the importance of that idea is vastly overstated; I tend to think most GMs are invested in the outcome of play.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

@Snarf Zagyg

Can you provide some examples of games you feel are aiming for a Free Kriegspiel like experience that you feel are binding the referee? Because from where I'm standing I am not seeing any game that foots the bill of attempting to start from a war gaming culture and failing to live up to it. I see lots of games that have a GM role that is explicitly not a referee, just a different sort of player. I also see a ton of OSR games like Worlds Without Number that provide GM tools, but don't bind the GM in any meaningful way other than calling on them to be referees.

Here's an example :

Apocalypse World does not have a referee. It has a Master of Ceremonies. The role of the Master of Ceremonies is not to arbitrate rules, make judgements over what should happen, or passively determine what an NPC would do based on a bespoke scenario. It is not failing to live up to FK ethos because it does not care to try. It has no referee. Needs no referee.

I'm not trying to be difficult here. I just need something more specific to go off of in order to discuss. Not seeing the meat here.

I think that the idea of tying this (FKR) explicitly to a wargaming culture, as opposed being inspired by it, is not helpful. It is more useful for me to think of conceptual approaches; for example, in wargaming there was a long push-pull between rules-heavy (or rigid) systems and rules-lite (or free) systems.

This same push-pull can be seen as reflected in TTRPGs as well.

I would add that in my opinion, creating rules and systems that make the referee a Master of Ceremonies, or "just a player with different responsibilities in the narrative," is, to me, no different than creating rules and systems that "bind" or "limit" the referee.

In addition, giving the referee active goals that depart from neutrality (or placing rules upon the referee that force decision making in certain directions) is certainly an interesting distinction.


So you are correct- I don't think that AW (for example) "fails to live up to FK ethos". You're right- it's not trying to. What I would say is that AW (and similar games!) are, in fact, very similar in their overall goals to many FKR games, but achieving it from a different design process; they both seek to privilege story and fast play, but do so from a very different a priori belief in the design.

Weirdly, in practice, I honestly don't think it matters that much.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Uncle Ben, is that you?


While reading this and a few other posts, such as Ovinomancer's post in response to yours, a thought occurred to me in regards to storygames. In some regards this whole rulings and rules as well as this whole FKR vs. Story Game traditions feels a bit like of an odd dichotomy or point of contrast.

Apocalypse World, for example, came out of D. Vincent Baker designing (and then co-designing) a system with his wife Megan's preference for freeform RP in mind. Furthermore, it was designed, in part, in response to a common practice in the 3e era when people were engaging skill rolls first (e.g., "I roll for Perception!") rather than engaging the fiction first.

The rules for GMs in Apocalypse World are largely about when and how to make "rulings": making judgment calls about when player actions in the fiction "trigger" moves or deciding what is an appropriate soft or hard move for player rolls. (There are also "soft rules" in the game in the form of game guidelines and principles, which are meant to assist in rulings and facilitating play.)


PbtA constrains the GM/MC, but at the same time, the game feels lighter and quicker than D&D: e.g., "to do it, do it." The rules are robust, but at the same time there are far less rules in the way when compared to most editions of D&D. Should we be praising PbtA games for being closer adherents of FKR with an Umpire and a light system than D&D is?

Honestly, dare I say it, but could the "fiction first" principle that is nearly ubiquitous and highly emphasized in "story games" (e.g., PbtA, FitD, Fate, Cortex, etc.) may be more in spirit with FKR than D&D is?


Not to discredit the fine people at Magpie and their grasp of games, but watching this video when it released, I remember wishing that Ben MIlton had brought in some of the "storygame" heavy weights (e.g., Vincent Baker, John Harper, Luke Crane, etc.) for this discussion. I would have been more interested in their thoughts, especially since several of them also have a solid grasp of OSR as well with games like Luke Crane's Torchbearer or John Harper's World of Dungeons.


The accusation you mention here is sometimes veiled and sometimes not, but it does crop up quite often in these discussions. I do think that it's telling that some of the people who shame/gaslight people with the accusation of not trusting their GM then seem to explicitly showcase a lack of trust in their players. I'm skeptical if that's pure coincidence.

I will say that my own preferences formed not necessarily as a result of "bad GMs" in high trust games, but, rather, from seeing "good GMs" operate in games with alternative GM/player structures. They consequently formed as someone who game mastered "high trust games," and then found myself enjoying running as a GM these very same alternate GM/player structured games.

I suspect that while AW was based on Baker's wife preference, Baker's own frame of reference colored how he percieved and addressed that need. My observation has been that the way 'play to find out what happens' is understood as a result of procedural narrative generation and interpretation, conflicts heavily with the authorial spirit freeform traditionally employs (where the 'what happens' you're discovering comes from the other players, and mechanics exist, if at all, to resolve uncertainty and conflict not drive the story- thats on the players.)

 

[clearstream]

I suspect that while AW was based on Baker's wife preference, Baker's own frame of reference colored how he percieved and addressed that need. My observation has been that the way 'play to find out what happens' is understood as a result of procedural narrative generation and interpretation, conflicts heavily with the authorial spirit freeform traditionally employs (where the 'what happens' you're discovering comes from the other players, and mechanics exist, if at all, to resolve uncertainty and conflict not drive the story- thats on the players.)

Freeform is a useful word. And now that you draw attention to it I agree with the distinction you make between play-to-find-out games and freeform. It's very evident in DW that the mechanics pull the narrative forward (a quibble, but I prefer "pull" over drive, because in principle you do it because you do it, so it is the outcome of the mechanic that pulls the narrative forward). While freeform doesn't uniformly invest mechanics in driving the narrative.

As to mechanics, while resolving uncertainty is definitely one thing they deal with, every freeform game I can think of has something else going on mechanically. CD's insanity die. I had elemental compass directions (luck, death, time, chaos). A friend's had differing perceptions of time. There's usually a hook - something special that the creator felt it was worth investing mechanics in.

One counterpoint. Think about the moment insanity is reached in a CoC-genre freeform. That's likely going to happen as a mechanic driving that piece of narrative. As I touched on elsewhere, freeform games will resist definition: they're a patchwork.

 

[clearstream]

Can you provide some examples of games you feel are aiming for a Free Kriegspiel like experience that you feel are binding the referee? Because from where I'm standing I am not seeing any game that foots the bill of attempting to start from a war gaming culture and failing to live up to it.

As I said up thread, I find FK an unhelpful misnomer of - let's call them 'freeform' or 'ultralight' RPGs. I can understand that it is tempting to see freeform games as related in some way to FK - especially due to what some have labelled them! - but pursuing a connection is unproductive. Their intents diverge on fundamentals.

Of course we can say that both are part of a tradition of wargaming that lead to roleplaying games. FK is somewhere in the ancestry. I simply don't believe that matters. The designers of freeform RPGs that I know - myself included - aren't foremost motivated by reducing RAW. That is really secondary to other objectives. One game I know of was designed around the idea of being able to be played in an airport. Others were inspired by a specific thematic.

Rather than say that an important goal of freeform is to reduce the rules count, what I might most say is that rules are really secondary to the goals of freeform. The starting point isn't say to approach 5th edition with a scalpel, it is to feel inspired by some idea, and not feel that a lot of rules are wanted to convey that idea. To get right down to the nub of it.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Freeform is a useful word. And now that you draw attention to it I agree with the distinction you make between play-to-find-out games and freeform. It's very evident in DW that the mechanics pull the narrative forward (a quibble, but I prefer "pull" over drive, because in principle you do it because you do it, so it is the outcome of the mechanic that pulls the narrative forward). While freeform doesn't uniformly invest mechanics in driving the narrative.

As to mechanics, while resolving uncertainty is definitely one thing they deal with, every freeform game I can think of has something else going on mechanically. CD's insanity die. I had elemental compass directions (luck, death, time, chaos). A friend's had differing perceptions of time. There's usually a hook - something special that the creator felt it was worth investing mechanics in.

One counterpoint. Think about the moment insanity is reached in a CoC-genre freeform. That's likely going to happen as a mechanic driving that piece of narrative. As I touched on elsewhere, freeform games will resist definition: they're a patchwork.

A COC-genre Freeform? If you mean, like a freeform RP based on the same milieu as Call of Cthulu, my experience would expect that to simply be the player pacing a portrayal of their character falling into insanity, with the other players prodding them if they don't seem to be effected by things they should be. Introducing a mechanic to decide when could be a good addition (and I think, that's when you're starting into get into something like Fizzy Bubbles, which is such a delightful case because it demonstrates a completely different lineage for what is essentially the convergent evolution of a TTRPG style system, unless people had way more TTRPG experience than they let on) but it would have been unusual back in the day. But to be clear, I'm talking of forum play-by-post fandom roleplaying, which is likely a bit different than what you're thinking of.

Interestingly though, this style of game matches the origin story for 'OC' or 'Neotrad' from the six cultures of play blog we've been talking about so much, so to my mind, understanding where the narrative drive comes from, and what mechanics are for from that line of thinking is actually a super interesting demonstration of how it really is its own animal and we're seeing that mentality play out in terms of the new players of 5e and their expectations for how the game should work. In my eyes, modular systems are the way to go, where the players of the game ARE playing freeform in the abstract, but are pulling in things that are useful to the kind of game they're playing as necessary, kinda like your COC mechanic lycnhpinning an otherwise freeform game.

To understand what I mean, the way we played 4e, was actually very roleplay heavy, because we (I, from my forum roleplaying days, and I could teach others) only needed the system for its combat simulator for the extensive combat scenes from the media we wanted to emulate and the tactical experience of that, simple action resolution to handle uncertainty if it comes up, and freeformed the narrative drama between encounters, giving our characters applications of powers the game system implied they have from what they took, but doesn't actually give us-- e.g. my swordmage could teleport every round of combat, but it required a marked target to attack someone other than me to do in am echanical context... but it made sense that in the fiction, my character could do a short range teleport every six seconds, and that made its way into my casual roleplaying, and into my animations for other powers, and so forth.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

A COC-genre Freeform?

The Cthulhu Dark pdf is available here:

http://catchyourhare.com/files/Cthulhu%20Dark.pdf

You might find it interesting.

*I should note that this is the lite and free version of the full game.