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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Morrow" data-source="post: 2403539" data-attributes="member: 27012">I think the difference can only be understood looking at how decisions are made.  First, if the GM puts a 20 foot chasm in the setting for the purpose of providing a specific level of challenge (as opposed to putting it there for setting-based or incidental reasons), then there won't be much of a difference between the GM putting the element into the setting and the GM deciding the difficulty because they are really the same decision.  Not every GM puts elements into the game that way. Second, the GM will inevitably include incidental elements in the setting and if the players decide to use them, objective rules allow them to make certain assumptions about incidental elements.  As a totally hypothetical example, if my PC visits an NPC crime kingpin in his 3rd floor office with a large glass picture window behind his desk.  The NPC's lackey pulls a gun so I decide that my PC will hurl himself at the window and take the chance that he'll survive the glass and the fall.  If the game has rules for breaking through a window and falling, no GM interpretation is really necessary because the scene has already been set, even if the GM didn't anticipate that move.  Now it's entirely possible that the GM could have already decided that the window is bullet-proof or could decide that on the spot, causing the action to fail, but it makes a difference (that some players can and do detect) whether the GM makes that call for world-based reasons (a crime kingpin wouldn't sit with his back to a big windowunless it was bullet-proof) instead of story-based reasons (the GM wants the PC to be captured by the kingpins thugs for some plot purpose -- perhaps to put the PC in a giant Frosty-Freeze or something).Fair enough.  I don't play with socially disfunctional groups or players (as illustrated in the thread about throwing people out of games) so I tend to assume at least some basis ability to communicate between the participants.In convention games, I've seen the rules provide a common AOR despite the players not knowing each other and doing a minimum of talking.  I'll agree that this might not be idea, but I do think it can make the difference between a group being able to role-play together or not.I'm not talking about guarantees.  I'm talking about improving the odds of success.  I think that when people don't know what to do or can't find common ground, rules and structure can at least create a functional situation.  Software development methodologies don't guarantee that a software project will succeed but they can often help a bunch of software developers who can't just work together do production work.  Yeah, those methodologies also all have a cost and all have their problems but they can tell people what to do to move ahead when they can't figure out how to move ahead on their own.  That's what rules are for.  They tell you what to do when you can't work it out on your own.Agreed.Well, I disagree.  Part of Ryan Dancey's point was that every role-player spends some percentage of their role-playing frustrated by something not going smoothly in the game.  And I think the quantitative percentage of time that a player is frustrated can have a very real qualitative effect on how much the players enjoy the game, especially if the shift is from 40% (most decisions not frustrating) to 90% (the vast majority frustrating).  Sure, 40% is a lot worse than 10% or even 0% but it's a lot better than 90% and not everyone has the opportunity to find a perfect group or game.The possibility that you are skipping is that you might be happy with the 40% of the decisions that the GM is trusted with in a rule-heavy game but might be unhappy with that extra 50% that will likely involve different aspects of the game.  Again, not all decisions are the same, though some styles of play make the differences more important than others.The ideal level of rules for a particular group would leave those decisions up to the GM that the group is happy leaving up to the GM and would provide procedures to handle those situations that are either handled better by the rules or badly by the GM.  And that level, of course, will differ from group to group with no one right answer.</blockquote>

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