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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8396717" data-attributes="member: 16814">This is perhaps my baggage with the OP, who has, aggressively, attacked others in threads about other approaches and then starts his own threads where he can try to control the direction and tone and where he, again, attacks those that disagree.  To me, arguments that start from there are about cementing your viewpoint first and discussion of gameplay maybe.That's a good segment, but I think that the top left (EDITED) guy (I don't know who these people are) quite nicely showed how the idea of a Bob says approach has problems.  Rules that establish clear themes, and that execute the necessary parts of that theme, but then don't go too far so as to strangle it are great.  Personally I find PbtA to be pretty good at this, overall, with some absolute standouts and some not great hacks.  I recently started playing in an Aliens game, and have read those rules thoroughly, and I'm seeing some places where I'm concerned.  First, the game has some rules that are absolutely amazing -- they hit the tone and impact of the themes out of the park!  But, then, I also see points where I think, maybe, the rules are going to get in the way.  For example, the combat system seems a bit, well, heavy for the concept space, with details about weapons types used, positioning, being prone, etc.  All of this going into the combat rolls, which finally engage the really good concept space of the panic dice!  However, I think that combat looks like it's getting bogged down in the minutia of tactics and such while the main concept and indeed the main mechanic are about the drama (and the horror).  I'm excited to see it in play and find out if my concerns are valid.Simply put, Free Kriegsspiel as an ideal is often badly misunderstood and then badly applied to the RPG space.  It works in it's original context because a Polish Army officer tried to put all of his understanding about warfare into a set of rules for other officers, and it got in the way of the point -- to learn how to conduct war before the shells fly.  So, it turned out that in the context of a wargame about real war, using the playbook of current military tactics and understanding, that having an Umpire make the calls that the rules were trying to worked out a bit better -- mostly because of how complex the rules had to be to model the game.  Instead of using the rules to find out if your artillery barrage set the target village on fire along with the other effects by using cumbersome rules, you had an Umpire who would just arbitrarily say so.  Instead of having to look up in the rules to find out if the mud in the fields slowed your foot's advance, you had an Umpire who remembered a dreadful slog under fire and said what happened.  This worked in the context of the wargame for officers of the Polish Army who were trying to get better at the task of commanding forces successfully in the face of adversity.  What it doesn't do is provide any actually useful input into whether or not a fantasy RPG should be run primarily or solely by GM fiat, or Bob says.  These are different contexts, different goals, and different things.The answer to that question is up to a table.  Maybe it is the right way to play for a given table -- I can't say.  However, I can address the arguments made that suggest that this is a preferable state of affairs that try to leverage Free Kriegsspiel as top cover when they don't really apply, and I can address the arguments that suggest that Bob Says has better results that another given approach.  It has different results.Also, I find the entire argument that undergrids the high trust arguments to be essentially attempts to shame people so that they don't disagree, because the counter almost universally applied is to be sorry that the respondent doesn't trust their GM.</blockquote>

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