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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9102071" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Snarf explicitly said it went both ways, using the term "bi-directional":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.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.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 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.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.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 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?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.</blockquote>

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