Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Korgoth" data-source="post: 4674339" data-attributes="member: 49613">That the 'rules' are in fact only guidelines is the basis of Old School play. You cannot understand or practice Old School play without an acceptance of that rule, any more than you can do modern Physics without an understanding and acceptance of gravity.As Judge, I know best about the individual situation. I'm the one responsible for delivering a good session to my players and so I make the call. If I wanted or needed the rules to make all the calls themselves, i.e. cover every possible situation with a reasonable and consistent result, the actual rules would have to be enormous and complicated.In something like Advanced Squad Leader you do have an enormous set of rules... precisely because there is no Referee and it's just two guys/teams playing against one another. So the rules have to be exhaustive, because the players all expect realism, fairness and consistency... yet there is no human whose job it is to make sure everything is realistic, fair and consistent in a game of ASL. So you have to externalize a very complicated set of instructions (almost like a program) to automatically adjudicate any of the million different things that can happen. And ASL is actually much more constrained in scope than a role playing game.The word "rule" as applied to Old School role playing is only spoken analogically... it's not univocal with the word "rule" as it appears in a competitive tournament game.Initiative rules are a great example of this principle. In a lot of games, a guy can have a loaded crossbow, and a foe can run 30 feet and attack him before he can fire. Now, you can come up with one or more rules (including individual special case rules) to deal with this. Or you can have a simple ruleset and rely on the Judge... to Judge.Now, among internet pundits there seem to be a fair number who had really lousy DMs that they for some reason never shouted at or punched in the face. Carrying these emotional scars with them decades later, they seek the "perfect set of rules", where "rules" is understood to mean something binding. To me, this is a Quixotic errand. A bad DM can and will ruin any game, no matter how good the rules are. So why not have the rules be a mere set of guidelines and tools?</blockquote>

Verification