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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Malmuria" data-source="post: 8397921" data-attributes="member: 7030755">I have not yet passed my RPG theory qualifying exams, so I'm not sure I follow all your points, but some notes/questions/thoughts:• Fiction, fictional positioning, narrative: these terms are more capacious than they might seem to be at first glance.  What you call fictional positioning, referring to classic dnd, is the kind of "realism" and verisimilitude, perhaps derived from the wargaming tradition, that makes it so that a player trying to determine whether a dungeon floor is sloping or a dm adjudicating whether a character can climb a sheer surface are legitimate concerns (even if they sit alongside spells and supernatural monsters).  On the other hand, "fiction-first" gaming is less concerned with the verisimilitude of the shared imagined world, and more concerned with  replicating genre.To take a practical example, let's say you are trying to do a chase scene.  This is a staple of action movies, and we can all picture how these scenes are put together, with tension building, characters negotiating obstacles, etc.  Many games have rules for chases--do any of them create chase scenes as interesting as those you see in action movies?  In trad games, part of the tension is wanting the chase scene to be realistic (skill challenges/checks, tables for random obstacles, examples of how to keep track of the various elements) on the one hand, and the fact that our idea of tense chase scenes is, in so many ways, driven by genre and not by any kind of realism.• Mechanics and RulesThe end of the that <a href="https://d66kobolds.blogspot.com/2020/09/free-kriegsspiel-worlds-not-rules-etc.html" target="_blank">blog post</a> reads as followsThis is what I mean by you start with the world and then build mechanics organically around that, rather than starting with the rules and mechanics and then create a setting.  For example, let's say you wanted to play Brideshead Revisited roleplay.  The most important thing would be that everyone read the novel and have as much knowledge on its historical context as possible.  What character stats, resolution mechanics, and rules you use would be not that important compared to that shared knowledge of the fiction.  What the "gm decides" would be what to do when there is uncertainty about what happens next.  Do you roll a percentile dice, or 2d6, or come up with something else on the fly?  And here, "gm decides" could easily be reconfigured as "everyone at the table agrees."• Trust: in the Questing Beast video I posted, Mark Diaz Truman argued that he was not a fan of free-form rpg because it is difficult for him as a gm to "disclaim responsibility."  The example he gave was players interacting with a king, and as a gm he doesn't know how the king responds, because he wants to respect the investment of the players but also be true to the fiction.  So in that example, something like pbta-style gm moves are helpful because both gm and players can refer back to the system.  I don't know if that reference back to the system says anything pejorative about the level of trust that the players have in the gm, so in that way both FKR and pbta can be "high trust" games but still arrive at different approaches to the same problem.That same situation in fkr or osr--or, tbh, trad dnd--is typically handled by the dm playing the role of the king and no one complains too much about it.  The dm can just decide what the king says, subject at most to a charisma check that serves more as guideline or prompt than anything determinative.  So, even trad dnd places a lot of trust in the dm for those kind of situations, rpghorrorstories notwithstanding.  Where trad dnd draws the line mostly has to do with combat, because the dm cannot be trusted to fairly adjudicate a grapple without a <a href="https://www.d20srd.org/srd/combat/specialAttacks.htm#grapple" target="_blank">few paragraphs</a> of rules, for example.* I feel like this post isn't long enough.  To compensate, I quote at length from the play advice of Blades in the Dark on "fiction-first":</blockquote>

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