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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8635943" data-attributes="member: 6790260">To the best of my knowledge the specific point of the actual Free Kriegsspiel (not the FKR movement of the modern day as a philosophy of play, the original wargaming) was very specifically to not use rules. There were rules for Kriegsspiel--rather a lot of them, in fact, so many that it was too difficult to find people who knew all the rules willing to referee...and also pretty difficult to get junior officers to sit down and read through and try to understand all those rules. So they said, "Alright, we're ditching the rulebook. The only rules will be the dice-roll table for consequences. Absolutely everything else, literally everything, will be left purely to the discretion of the referee. The effects of fog of war? Referee decides. The logistical requirements of fording a river? Referee decides." Now, of course, if a ref gained a reputation of capricious or unfair decisions, people would probably stop playing with that referee. But, again as I understood it, the whole point of switching to Free Kriegsspiel was to make it so almost anyone with wartime experience could referee, and almost anyone wanting warfare experience could play, because the only limits would be "what the referee considers reasonable."This is very different from your sports analogy, where the rules might not have been "written down," but they surely existed as rules, as in, they could be enumerated by the people playing. Free Kriegsspiel was not, as I understand it, meant to work like that. It was not meant to have "actual rules, that we just by happenstance didn't write down."FKR, however, is even more than that. It's explicitly the rejection of doing things via rules in the first place. Those links I provided go into pretty significant detail about how this style of play will break down if the people playing it have "invisible rulebooks" that differ by too much. That seems to be a pretty clear admission that there aren't really any rules to begin with, just intuition and experience, which two people simply may not share.</blockquote>

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