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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Oligopsony" data-source="post: 9102613" data-attributes="member: 56314">I’m going to disagree here and say that the referee language is perfectly appropriate even in the simple case of a party that works together uniformly and a GM who enjoys seeing the characters succeed.In the traditional division, the GM has two roles that should really be distinguished: world-spirit (she controls the rest of the world in the same way other players control PCs) and referee (she adjudicates what happens when results are ambiguous; players refer to her in such circumstances.) Sometimes this involves forces that are literally antagonistic to the PCs (such as an opposing faction) or figuratively so (such as a harsh cliff face) and sometimes not at all.If a table were playing say Pandemic (a board game where everyone is unambiguously on the same side) this function would still exist even if it might be distributed; players could of course accomplish their in-game goal of winning the game by collectively declaring themselves the winner,  it this would undermine their out-of-game goal of solving an interesting challenge together, so players at a Pandemic game largely work to impartially referee themselves.Giving the world-spirit player the primary referee role has some downsides (increased cognitive load on the already most loaded player) and upsides (she already has to engage in doublethink, and the boundaries between these in practice can be very porous), and even the most trad table involves a lot of spot delegation, but IME the term doesn’t imply too close an analogy with professional team sports (though I can see why it would summon those associations for some - I’m allergic as many are to the term “Storyteller” even as I’ve enjoyed plenty a game of Vampire.)</blockquote>

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