NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 8153489" data-attributes="member: 87792">I think the key missing piece of the puzzle here is that in the past 20 years or so (with the first published games in the movement being 2003's Fate and My Life with Master) there has been a lot of development into (a) what a GM is and (b) the interaction between the players, the GM, and how the ruleset mediates this in terms of what they bring out of everything at the table. The rules aren't there to be a physics model - they are there to train the GM to run this game well and the players to play this game well. And this means that although I run RC D&D, GURPS, and the Storyteller system fairly similarly (because I'm the same DM and the rules do roughly the same thing) but I run Apocalypse World in a very different way because I'm following D. Vincent Baker's guidelines for running that game, which are much much more like GMing a freeform game than DMing D&D.There are definite precursors to these games (for example The Great Pendragon Campaign fits the original technical definition of a Storygame - and the oD&D XP for GP rule was brilliant at incentivising an intended playstyle) but the rules in most of them are there for the DMs to show them how to DM that game as well as for the players.These rules are, for me, freeing for the game I want to play. I can do things as the result of the PCs actions in Apocalypse World that would make me an absolute naughty word in D&D. But I can do that in part because I'm a lot more bound; the PCs created much more of the world, and I never get to pick up a dice or even give a modifier. On the flipside they know if they fail a roll I get to cackle evilly and do something far worse than a failed roll would be normally. It's not for everyone - but that is why there are other games.So I absolutely want rules even for the GM. They make the game more interesting and me more versatile. "Rulings, not rules" to me absolutely cuts off all these games that shape the GM.And I've (as I've said in other threads) played with multiple groups and seen far far GM entitlement than I have seen player entitlement - and it's far more toxic to the game. I've yet to see the game where the players have the sense of superiority over the DM - but I've seen DMs effectively lobotomise PCs through house rules that nerfed things that were part of the character's fundamental design and pull stunts with rulings that meant that the PCs lost track of how the world was meant to work and were unable to engage with it effectively. And DMs who had their pet NPCs do everything while we just trailed round after them.</blockquote>

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