EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
Honestly, this is both blowing my mind and making me even more frustrated by the conversations I've had over the years. If people talked about literally anything like this, I would have had few to no complaints. This is great stuff! As you say, it is very similar in spirit to the Principles and Agendas of PbtA games.Well it's notoriously hard to pin down what the OSR 'is'. But at least for Into the Odd--a hugely influential game in one sector of the OSR--not following the referee advice is akin to not playing by the rules. But I would say this kind of advice is now pretty common among the most cited sources. For example, a couple of selections from the Principia Apocrypha:
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Instead I have seen literally nothing but statements that GMs have--and should use--absolute authority. That the "trust" the GM should have is that they trust their players won't balk at their dictates. And the things shown, there and elsewhere, are either explicitly or implicitly completely rejected.
That's fair. I know that the QP is not the most beloved thing. That said, its history can't really be ignored; it was an early demonstration of the unfair-comparisons thing, which has remained a problem since.I was trying to avoid going there because I didn’t think it would be constructive to the thread. Personally, I prefer Apocrypha Prinicipa to A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming. Sometimes it’s useful to contrast two different styles of play, so I’m not going to fault the latter for that per se, but the style of play it advocates is not really my thing. I want something different out of my “neutral referee”, which is why I deploy constraints the way I do in my homebrew system.