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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6312644" data-attributes="member: 42582">Lewis Pulsipher was a prominent contributor to White Dwarf in its early days. The following quotes are from his article in an early number of White Dwarf (my copy is in Best of White Dwarf vol 1, 1980):D&D players can be divided into two groups, those who want to play the game as a game and those who want to play it as a fantasy novel . . . The escapists can be divided into those who prefer to be told a story by the referee, in effect, with themselves as protagonists, and those who like a silly, totally unbelievable game. . . In California, for example, this leads to referees who make up more than half of what happens, what is encountered and so on, as the game progresses rather than doing it beforehand. . . . [T]he player is a passive receptor, with little control over what happens. . . Gary Gygax has made it clear that D&D is a wargame, though the majority of players do not use it as such. . . The referee [in a skill campaign] must think of himself as a friendly computer with discretion. Referee interference in the game must be reduced as much as possible . . . Effectively, this means that the referee should not make up anything important after an adventure has begun.  He should only operate monsters encountered according to logic and, where necessary, dice rolls. . . . Occasionally an adventure will be dull, because players take the wrong turns or check the wrong rooms, while others may be 'milk runs' because the players are lucky. Referees must resist the temptation to manipulate the players by changing the situation. Every time the referee manipulates the game on the basis of his omniscience, he reduces the element of skill. . . The referee who, for example, schemes to take a magic item away from a player is incompetent. If the player doesn't deserve the item he shouldn't have obtained it in the first place. Don't lie to the players when speaking as referee. If players can't believe what the referee tells them they are case adrift without hope. . . .I tried to implement this advice in my early GMing (around 1984). I was not very good at it - I'm not a particular effective "computer with discretion", and my players didn't (and don't) like the occasional dull adventure. But I do like the advice about not manipulating the players. It was around 1986, with original Oriental Adventures, that I started to discover a way of GMing in which the GM would make stuff up on the spot, while still allowing players the scope to make choices which are genuine in their consequences, thereby avoiding the railroading that Pulsipher warns against. (More than 15 years later I discovered that this approach to GMing had been refined and theorised by Ron Edwards and others at The Forge.)Does any one else have memories of reading Pulsipher's advice, or playing Pulsipherian D&D? Thoughts? Experiences?</blockquote>

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