@Ovinomancer - my understanding of the Golden Rule is that it is not just [i[if you don't like a rule, change it[/i] but rather
ignore the rules, if necessary, in the interest of the story. It is an instruction/permission directed to the GM (ie the
players are't being conferred permission to ignore the rules in the interests of the story).
I agree with you that prep and force are independent. Lewis Pulsipher is (was? I'm talking about stuff he weote 40 years ago) the best advocate I know of the wargaming/"skilled play" style of D&D (Gygax is the second best I know) - in his articles in early White Dwarf Pulsipher emphasises the importance of prep, in part to
avoid force (eg if you prep, you have an impartial answer to the action declaration
I cast Detect Magic - what glows?).
From his wargaming perspective, Pulsipher is pretty unrestrained in his criticism of the "choregographed novel" approach to D&D. It's interesting to revisit his criticisms today in light of the emergence of that as a dominant mode of RPGing, and then a new and prominent wave of criticism from a different (Forge/non-wargaming) perspective.
I wouldn't characterise choosing a module as GM force, because it's not really guidance or manipulation - it doesn't interact with action declaration or resolution at all. On the other hand, a response to an action declaration
We go west of
Please don't go west, I haven't mapped that out yet probably counts as force - I guess it's a type of adjudication of the declaration - but certainly not illusionism!
Roger Musson, who was another very thoughtful contributor to early White Dwarf who engaged with some of these issues, advocated a type of "illusionism light" for such situations - don't negat the action declaration per se, but place something there (his example is a dozen ogres holding a union meeting) that will make the players revise their decision. That sort of tactic is probably going to be obvious enough in many cases that it's not really serving an illusionist purpose but rather providing a rudimentary peg on which all the participants can hang their immersion in the shared fiction.
Here is the Gygas quote from The Strategic Reviw (2.2, Apr 1976) that @lowke13 mentioned:
[A]bsolute disinterest must be exercised by the Dungeonmaster, and if a favorite player stupidly puts himself into a situation where he is about to be killed, let the dice tell the story and KILL him. This is not to say that you should never temper chance with a bit of “Divine Intervention,” but helping players should be a rare act on the referee’s part, and the action should only be taken when fate seems to have unjustly condemned an otherwise good player, and then not in every circumstance should the referee intervene.
To me this seems very similar to the following from p 110 of his DMG:
You do have every right to overrule the dice at any time if there is a particular course of events that you would like to have occur. In making such a decision you should never seriously harm the party or a non-player character with your actions. "ALWAYS GIVE A MONSTER AN EVEN BREAK!" , . .
Now and then a player will die through no fault of his own. He or she will have done everything correctly, taken every reasonable precaution, but still the freakish roll of the dice will kill the character. In the long run you should let such things pass as the players will kill more than one opponent with their own freakish rolls at some later time. Yet you do have the right to arbitrate the situation. You can rule that the player, instead of dying, is knocked unconscious, loses a limb, is blinded in one eye or invoke any reasonably severe penalty that still takes into account what the monster has done. It is very demoralizing to the players to lose a cared-for-player character when they have played well. When they have done something stupid or have not taken precautions, then let the dice fall where they may! Again, if you have available ample means of raising characters from the dead, even death is not too severe; remember, however, the constitution-based limit to resurrections. Yet one die roll that you should NEVER tamper with is the SYSTEM SHOCK ROLL to be raised from the dead. If a character fails that roll, which he or she should make him or herself, he or she is FOREVER DEAD. There MUST be some final death or immortality will take over and again the game will become boring because the player characters will have 9+ lives each!
I don't see either passage as
advocating for GM force, and nor for illusionism. The focus is on preserving the correlation between skilled play and PC survival, and even in respect of that there is an evident degree of hesitation - both expressly in the advice, and also in the surrounding admonitions to
disinterest and to
giving monsters and NPCs an even break.
Where Gygax in his DMG seems most comfortable endorsing GM interference with rolls is on this same page, in relation to "finding a particular clue, e.g. a secret door that leads to a complex of monsters and treasures that will be especially entertaining" and on p 9, where he suggests that if a party is "doing everything possible to travel quickly and quietly to their planned destination" but the GM keeps getting wandering monsters on the die check, then rather than "spoil such an otherwise enjoyable time" the GM might "omit the wandering monsters indicated by the die." He contrasts this setting aside of the wandering monster result with "allow[ing] the party to kill them [ie rolled monsters] easily or escape unnaturally" which would be "contrary to the major precepts of the game". And he also says that "If a party deserves to have these beasties inflicted upon them, that is another matter" ie the GM should not set aside the wandering monster result.
This approach to wanderming monsters can be seen as another instance of preserving the correlation between skilled play and PC success, but it is connected to
introduction of content by the GM. The secret door example is also about
introduction of content. One can see how the use of GM decision-making around introduction of content can drift into the "choreographed novel" approach, especially because wandering mosters are both content introduction but also a mode of consequence for action declaration (epsecially poor and time-wasting declared actions); but I don't think it's the same thing. In the choreographed novel, the GM is doing more than just opening up an opportunity for hijinks (as with the secret door example), and there is no longer any sort of guiding principle of trying to ensure that skilled players are not unduly penalised by poor dice rolls on their or the GM's part.
The 1977 version of Traveller contemplates the referee setting up special worlds, or running special encounters, that will be especially interesting for the players. These are flagged as express departures from the basic principles of random generation of content. But, again, I think these suggestions around content introduction have to be drifted quite a bit to get to the "choreographed novel" of the 1982 version.
