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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aldarc" data-source="post: 8396891" data-attributes="member: 5142">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.</blockquote>

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