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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8308064" data-attributes="member: 82106">No, but there is another type of failure mode here. You can dictate in your game rules that the GM shall decide if the character hit his enemy by observing whether or not the next pig which flies by the game table is going north or south. This rule plainly cannot be implemented. This is obviously a reductio as an example, but the idea of an impartial referee in B/X is, IMHO, something like this. You simply cannot run a game without making considerations in favor of the players and the PCs in order to create a viable overall game process. I mean, you certainly CAN be fairly impartial in a given moment, but in terms of the greater context of play of B/X that won't lead ultimately to a viable experience. GMs who are actually successful at running campaigns under this rule set pretty soon run into the issues. They are rather well-known at this point too!Furthermore, many posters on this forum have advocated for a sort of play in which the fiction produced by the referee is in some sense deemed by them to itself be 'impartial'. This is often expressed in terms of "I run a sandbox." I can recall a discussion I had once with a poster (one that I have not seen posting in a number of years) in which that poster literally stated outright that his houseruled D&D was ALL ENCOMPASSING and that it lead to perfect neutral arbitration, could resolve ANY situation 'realistically', etc. lol. I only bring this up as a sort of anecdote about where people sometimes go in their thought processes on this sort of thing. IMHO that person was 'out to lunch'. They had so sublimated the necessary partiality of the GM which drives the story in classic D&D that they literally could not see that it even existed or even COULD exist in their game!</blockquote>

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