It depends on your perspective. Are you looking at "trust" from a player's perspective or a GM's perspective? Or from Snarf's take, from the employee's or manager's perspective?
Seen from the GM/manager's perspective, the trust means "I trust my players/employees". The way you are seeing it is from the player's point of view. The trust means "I trust my GM/manager".
Snarf explicitly said it went both ways, using the term "bi-directional":
This concept of bi-directional trust animated the OSR, and the later FKR, movements.
The claim is that it is supposed to go both ways. The player trusts the GM
AND the GM trusts the player. That has not been how people describe it to me, nor has it reflected any of the commentary I've seen on the subject up to now.
I actually have never heard the term before this post, so I can't speak from which perspective I have seen it used more.
This is an important point. I've rued "rules-lite" systems for a long time. I find it ironic that so many "rules-lite" systems come with 300+ page core rulebooks, and often get the impression that the authors really would have preferred to have written novels or screenplays, but getting into the RPG biz is easier.
In the good ole days, you could have what would be considered rules/crunch heavy games in 128 pages or less. Though admittedly, that was usually 128 pages of rules and not rules intermixed with setting fiction or 3 paragraphs of exposition how some supposedly simple rule works.
I've felt like now that electronic media is so common, there should be two formats for rules. One is the rules, and just the rules. This is useful for "just the facts ma'am". The other is sample game play explaining how the rules work and a kind of "Game Master's Guide" which gives advice on how to best run that particular system. I've heard of gaming groups that try to switch from D&D to some other game system, but still expect it to play like 5e (or some other edition).
Sounds reasonable to me. 4e did something more or less like this, later on in its run. The "Rules Cyclopedia" book was your one-stop shop for basic rules questions, with fairly minimal descriptive text, and all errata up to that point included. I'm given to understand it was a very handy reference book, though (as you say) not necessarily good for
teaching.
That was my take on this idea too. While I think that characterizing such a style of play as "mother may I" – with regard to the players basically letting the GM dictate what can be done, and the expectation being that their word is final and unquestionable – is the sort of pejorative that invites pushback rather than discussion, the characterization that such a shorthand provides with regard to the aspects of "high trust" play that I find distasteful/undesirable is apt.
Yeah. It's not a nice way to say it, but it is a pithy way to say it.
Every presentation of the so-called "high-trust" form that I have seen, prior to this thread, has not mentioned bi-directionality of trust. If bi-directionality is so important, it seems to have been
horrifically neglected!
I agree to one extent or another with most of what you said in this post, but I want to comment about this.
There are absolutely low engagement players, and there are players who aren't all the time but are some of the time.
I'm not the former, but I am the latter. There are parts of the games that engage me, and parts that don't. But the latter engage other people, so its not all about me. And sometimes I'm just not altogether with it (partly because I have the chronic GM disease of getting bored easily).
But I still get things out of the game as a whole, even if I'm not constantly engaged, and probably can't constantly be engaged.
And the people who are borderline engaged are still getting things out of the game, but they don't really want a higher level of engagement, at least in many cases.
I think people in the hobby who don't get that are going to constantly not understand some players and why certain things are useful to some GMs. That doesn't mean anyone has to want to deal with low or intermittent engagement players, but they're very much real and very much a thing some GMs are dealing with.
(To make it clear, that's not an excuse for the generic infantalization of players by some GMs, but there's some middle ground here).
I see a difference between "I am engaged with some things and not others"--something which many games now address, thanks to the influence of Robin's Laws--and "I am engaged with the game
at all." The former is business as usual. The latter is an absolute requirement for participation in the first place.
Part (or in some cases much) of a DM's role is that of referee; and the role of a referee in any game or sport is to assume the players are going to try to break the rules and to stop them from doing so using whatever enforcement mechanisms that sport or game provides.
The players of that game or sport have to trust that the referee will be fair and impartial, and the referee has to trust that the players will abide by his/her rulings.
That's
not bi-directional trust. At all. That's one person expecting trust, and everyone else getting diddly in return. It is quite clearly mono-directional. "Trusting that players will abide by their rulings" is not showing trust--it is demanding obedience.
As monsters, opponents, and things that frighten people, yes. But not as characters to actually play.
Why? "Monsters and Treasure" specifically singles out the "Golden" dragon as uniquely Lawful amongst the six types of dragon extant at the time. Bahamut--though at the time known only as the "Platinum Dragon" or "King of (Lawful) Dragons"--has existed since Greyhawk. The idea that dragons can be leaders, advisors, or supporters is literally as old as the hobby itself. And good dragons in fiction date back even further:. There are good dragons in some of the original
Earthsea books, '68-'72, and
Dragonriders of Pern came out in '67. Heck,
The Reluctant Dragon goes all the way back to 1898! And
Earthsea certainly includes references to people of mixed dragon-human ancestry.
This idea that no one could even
conceive of dragons as anything but monsters to slay is simply false. They've been both monstrous and marvelous, benevolent and belligerent, for as long as we've had anything like a distinct "fantasy" genre.
I understand that this is a caricature of high trust games, but in these games there are good GMs and not so good GMs, and the good ones distinguish themselves by creating scenarios for player agency and earning the trust of their players. It's similar to how pbta games rely on GM principles to suture the mechanics to the overall place experience; in fact, modern OSR games are more explicit in borrowing that technique (i.e. including GM principles) to describe
how the game should be run. For example, from Into the Odd Remastered:
View attachment 292910
The difference is that you'll find "be fair," to be a principle in the OSR, more than "be a fan of the PCs." Meanwhile, the notion--boogeyman really-- of the authoritarian GM seems a bit exaggerated with respect to the reality of GM burnout even in 5e, where people commonly complain that PC power levels and player social expectations leave GMs without good ways to create meaningful stakes. I'd be more interested in reasons for why a particular balance in authority is interesting more than as just a reaction to a caricature of a 90s style trad GM
I mean, my point here is, and has been, that
nobody talks about this. Nobody has brought it up before now. This whole "trust absolutely must be
bi-directional" thing--which Snarf has alleged is at the root, the very heart of OSR--has
literally never been mentioned to me. If it's so critically important, why does nobody talk about it?
Like, looking at the selection you just provided, I have had people thoroughly and repeatedly reject everything after the first sentence in "Give Information," totally repudiate the entirety of "Present Choices," and act like the instructions in "Show Impact" are absolute anathema to the concept of challenge and difficulty (because that section is just another way of saying Fail Forward). If these things are supposed to be representative of OSR--if they're supposed to reflect a deep, abiding commitment to truly bi-directional trust, why do so many not just fail to mention it, but actively
reject it?
Right. The issue is with those who get stuck in that way of thinking.
That’s kind of an example of what I mean. A charitable ruling by the GM is being contrasted with an uncharitable rules-based approach. Where this can get problematic is when that alternative is taken as the only alternative (in my experience, it’s not).
I mean, this has been with us for ages. The "Quick Primer for Old School Gaming" goes out of its way to show modern gaming as the worst, most painful gaming experience one could have short of literally causing pain. For those of us skeptical of OSR, this sort of treatment is the norm, not a strange exception.
