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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8999842" data-attributes="member: 6790260">And someone new to RPGs would know these features how, exactly? This is one of the biggest blind-spots for a lot of D&D players, counting myself for ages and ages. D&D is the biggest, mostly because it was the first and everyone else played catch-up thereafter, but "skirmish-scale fantasy combat with an action economy" is incredibly specific. Someone looking to get into the hobby will know at best two of those words ("fantasy" and "combat.") And, as we're seeing with the rise of video games like Minecraft and Portal and the plethora of visual novels, a game does not need to have any combat or action economy or anything like that in order to be fantastically successful (nor, for that matter, did prior ultra-successful games like Myst, one of the best-selling games of all time.)And yet, as has been brought up in this thread (IIRC by [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER]?) the only way you can make actual Free Kriegsspiel work is by having referees who, in effect, already are living rulebooks. The rules still matter, they are just internalized by a person; they translate the freeform-stated intent of a player into something productive. Throwing the rulebook out entirely and just making literally everything up as you go is not only not FK, it's actively against what FK was doing, which was teaching young officers. You can't teach something empty of content! (Well, I mean, you can waste time doing so, but no productive learning will come of it, and productive learning was the whole point of FK.)Which was part of my criticism, yes.Sure. Just as you can tell someone, "Because all the rules of writing are about writing better, chuck 'em! Ignore every single one, whenever you want, as often as you want. Because better writing is the point, so just write better."Except that that is, demonstrably, extremely ineffective. Which was the point. Rules, even ones with the inherent disclaimer "the purpose of this rule is to make things better, so if obeying it makes things worse, don't do that," are almost always rules for a reason. Chesterton's Fence applies quite strongly here. You're chucking the fence because you say, "Well, I don't see how this is necessary for success, therefore it must go." But that isn't a useful thing to do. It's often very counter-productive. Instead, better to ask, "In what ways does this support success? What am I giving up without it?"And the answer, a lot of the time, is...looping back to stuff we discussed earlier. Theoretical absolute latitude, whichever side of the screen, limited by an awful lot of practical issues and problems. Or, you accept some tested (and that's critical--by definition you can't test an invisible rulebook) restrictions on your theoretical latitude, and in so doing, achieve reams more practical latitude. And for those who have not so much "tested" their invisible rulebook as subconsciously tweaked it over time in response to "problem" situations (I can't think of a milder phrase, but I mean that very mildly), lo and behold, you quite often find that the ad-hoc, invisible, unstated, tacit, implicit, inaccessible rules end up being...rather shockingly similar to the formally-stated ones, except the latter can be learned and communicated, while the former are trapped within each person's thinkmeats.I'm afraid I don't get what you mean.</blockquote>

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