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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5172894" data-attributes="member: 42582">Trust and rules designI think there might be at least one factor which pehaps makes D&D and Rift more prone to trust issues than (for example) Call of Cthulhu.D&D or Rifts play is more likely (not always, but often) to focus on the players - using their PCs as their vehicles - overcoming obstacles which have been set by the GM, and which the GM then has to referee. There are, therefore, a lot of points at which things can come unstuck: unfair obstacles, biased refereeing, inadvertant errors or differences of opinion (eg the GM and the players have very different pictures of where things are and how they are interacting in the imaginary space).Call of Cthulhu is typically focused on the PC's descent into (near-)madness as they narrowly thwart some event that would shatter the sanity of the rest of humanity. The challenge element is much less, and the exploration of the mythos and each character's inner psychic workings is much higher. The GM still has a heavy workload in terms of writing and running a compelling adventure, and the game will suck if the GM can't do this well - in fact, personally I would probably rather play D&D than CoC with a GM whose imaginative and story-spinning skills are only mediocre.But CoC doesn't really have the refereeing element to the same extent as D&D or Rifts. And I think it is the refereeing element that is more relevant to player trust.Can a game be designed to make refereeing easier? I think the answer is yes. I don't have a lot of sophisticated examples to point to, but in D&D terms one that I would point to is alignment. In AD&D, and even 3E judging from the continuation of paladin debates into the 21st century, alignment is a big issue for a lot of games. In my view, this results from (i) making controversial moral descriptions inherent to the action resolution and character build mechanics, and (ii) requiring GMs to make real-time refereeing decisions that involve making moral judgements and applying them via those mechanical systems. In my opinion, this is a recipe for disaster in any group whose players share a diversity of moral opinions. One way to strengthen trust is to eliminate the need for this sort of refereeing, which is almost guaranteed to threaten trust time after time after time.One obvious feature of 4e relative to 3E, and of 3E relative to AD&D, is the reduction in those aspects of the game where the GM is expected to make a call on the physical difficulty of a task (opening a door, jumping a pit, whatever). Basic D&D, for example, sugggests assigning percentage difficulties. 3E sets skill DCs. 4e not only sets skill DCs, but codifies them by level. Is their a rationale for this in terms of trust? Well, in Basic D&D the players will be hosed if they try things that they think are easy, but the GM thinks are hard (eg how hard is it to jump a 10' wide pit while wearing full plate for a moderatley strong person? I don't have an obvious percentage difficulty ready to hand) - especially if the GM only tells them the percentage chance once they already commit their PC to the attempt. Later rules designs reduce this potential element of contention (and in a game like CoC, where life-threatening physical challenges loom much less large, these sorts of things are less likely to come up).Of course there is a potential cost to giving up alignment, or locking in level-relative DCs via the mechanics - as this thread indicates, it makes a certain style of play (Gygaxian "skillful play") much harder to achieve.But I think it is a mistake to think that such changes aren't relevant to the issue of trust.</blockquote>

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