System matters and free kriegsspiel

[pemerton]

@S'mon, which bit stunned you?

 

[S'mon]

@S'mon, which bit stunned you?

I am unable to take actions at present, sorry

 

[Manbearcat]

@Manbearcat
Yeah, fascinating, ah ah!

Btw I guess that was an improvised exchange in a chat, nonetheless...... yeah

That is basically how I handled combat in my Gumshoe game, to be honest. Sometimes asking the player to roll a D6, eventually spending skill points.

“Sometimes roll a d6, eventually spending skill points” is considerably more systemitized than what I read in that blog!

I mean the below sincerely.

If I was going to come up with the douchiest satire of dysfunctional FKR play, it would be much friendlier to they FKR movement than what I read there.

That feels like somebody who hates FKR trolled them with a blog.

 

[Numidius]

“Sometimes roll a d6, eventually spending skill points” is considerably more systemitized than what I read in that blog!

I mean the below sincerely.

If I was going to come up with the douchiest satire of dysfunctional FKR play, it would be much friendlier to they FKR movement than what I read there.

That feels like somebody who hates FKR trolled them with a blog.

Yeah, but the point, to me, is that if you want combat fiction-full, with diegetic, in-fiction harm and consequences, that is the way to go.
FKRers say also: develop rules as you go if you need 'em, or borrow from the tons of existing rulesets.

 

[Manbearcat]

Yeah, but the point, to me, is that if you want combat fiction-full, with diegetic, in-fiction harm and consequences, that is the way to go.
FKRers say also: develop rules as you go if you need 'em, or borrow from the tons of existing rulesets.

But where is the orienting of the players to the constituent parts of the fiction that should inform their move-space as they navigate decision-points?

I mean…typically that orienting is the synthesis of (a) conversation surrounding the shared imagined space + (b) rules.

In that example, the (a) is outright vetoed by the GM (the player asks orienting questions and gets rebuffed…these orienting questions would be the internal dialogue and automaticity that happens IRL when dealing with obstacles whether they’re people or things or places or self doubt or or emotions or some combination) and (b) doesn’t exist!

That moment of play is the opposite of “tactical infinity.” That moment of play depicted is “tactical nothingness.”

EDIT - If it’s not clear…I’m frustrated. I actually thought I was starting to get my head around conceptually what is happening in the FKR movement. I thought I had a model for play in my head. Reading that excerpt has set me back significantly.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

But that looks very different from the completely unstructured freeform without descriptor restraint and extremely limited orienting aspects that I just read.

So here's the disconnect, in my opinion.

You have a few people here (mostly @Malmuria @overgeeked @S'mon @Numidius @niklinna and myself ... I apologize if I missed anyone) articulating that we think that there are some interesting ideas in "FKR." Some of us are viewing it in terms of interesting ideas, some are running the rules-lite games that are considered FKR, some are adopting some of the principles for use in their own games (such as stripped down D&D as advocated by some FKR/OSR proponents).

None of us (AFAIK) are "leaders" or "central figures" or "speakers of the orthodoxy" of FKR. Just curious gamers trying stuff out that seems interesting.

From my P.O.V., for the most part (not completely, not totally, but for the most part) the disconnect is coming because we have a group of people trying to share the things that they find interesting and valuable. And the skepticism is coming from people that are trying to "define" it.

We end up close to the wine post!

System matters and free kriegsspiel

My joke was unproductive, but the above is cool? Well, your "joke" was mocking people you don't agree with in a sarcastic manner. Put another way, if you're engaged in a discussion (or argument) with someone, and you turn to your friend and mock the people you don't agree with, it is...

www.enworld.org

So it's an endless redux- first, there was an argument over what Free Kriegspiel (not even FKR) is. Then people were uncomfortable because some people (apparently? I'm unclear on this) who mentioned FKR elsewhere also mentioned OSR, or had other opinions that were bad. Now it's an issue that disparate examples of play, or disparate examples of the game itself, have to be justified as being the "one true way" of FKR. Which no one can do, because the term is just an umbrella term that doesn't have a single game, or even a single "style of play" to it.

To give you a few examples-
A. You have the OSR/OD&D/FKR crossover. Darkworm Colt's blog (Norbert Matusch) is an example of this. It's people that use the term to try and re-create a neo-Arnesonian approach to the game. I think it's interesting, but that's not my cup of Mad Hatter tea.
B. Then you have the playing the fiction, DM-adjucation approach. The original "play worlds, not rules" blog post linked to (d66 Classless Kobolds aka Jim Parkin).
C. Next, you have the broader swath of people using "FKR" as an umbrella term for inspiration to create rules-lite systems that are ... well, I want to say fiction-first, but I don't want to accidentally trample over a definition and cause problems. We can say that the narrative concepts matter more than numbers on a character sheet and rules abstractions.

The thing is, other than a shared interest in rules-lite systems (which I believe @pemerton would say are incomplete systems, and knowingly so!), there's little to connect a lot of them. Does an FKR game provide for little, some, or significant amount of player authorship of the narrative? Yes! Does an FKR game allow a player to override the referee? Maybe! Does an FKR game depend on actual experience, genre knowledge, or just willingness to move the narrative along? You betcha!

I get that it's frustrating trying to pin this down. In a way, it would be like someone saying that D&D in general is cool, and then the problem being that you get multiple people arguing about OD&D, 4e, 2e, 5e, 1e, 3e, and pointing to all the different ways people play them and what other people say about it. And, of course, someone will then say, "Hey, y'all BASIC!" It's not just a single thing- and people can (and do) have multiple interpretations.

To the extent you keep asking about the rules or the method of play, you are going to get frustrated. What I am taking from FKR, and the "FKR" (really, a philosophy regarding rules-lite games) is different than what others might take. And that's okay! IMO.

 

[Aldarc]

One reason why I find both Story/Narrativist and OSR games appealing is how they represent two divergent responses (if not conscientiously so) to the issue of GM-curated Force, as broadly represented by Traditional gaming. But from what I can tell - even by reading the old play stories of Ur-gaming with Arneson, M.A.R. Barker, et al. - there aren't exactly any safeguards against GM Force that are part of FKR. So how does FKR handle the issue of GM Force?

 

[pemerton]

I wrote the OP in this thread. It was not any sort of criticism of free kriegsspiel; it was an analysis.

And someone else turned this into a thread about FKR. Which is fine by me.

I think I would find it helpful if someone who thinks they "get" FKR better than me would identify some of the rules-heavy systems that are the objects of its critique. As I've said, 3E D&D seems to me to be the core of it; but are there other systems that are also being had in mind?

Not far upthread @Numidius suggested that D&D-style spells are compatible with FKR. Can RQ be played in a FKR-adjacent fashion?

Anyway, it seems time to mention Vincent Baker on cubes and clouds: a list of those blogs is here, and here's the one I know best: anyway: 3 Resolution Systems.

Obviously FKR is very hostile to cubes-to-cubes resolution (D&D hit points; WotC D&D stop-motion initiative; at least some interpretations of the action economy and PC abilities that affect it more generally; damage-on-a-miss, which tends to undercut Baker's treatment of "I hit" as a cubes-to-cloud relationship; etc). They love cloud-to-cloud.

It's the attitude towards cubes-to-cloud that I'm unclear about, because it is sometimes called for but there is a least an intermittent hostility to systematisation, though not a uniform hostility. (The AW-flavoured FKR clearly has a systematic mechanical framework, of rolling dice whose size reflects fictional likelihoods of prevailing in a given sort of contest.)

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

It's the attitude towards cubes-to-cloud that I'm unclear about, because it is sometimes called for but there is a least an intermittent hostility to systematisation, though not a uniform hostility. (The AW-flavoured FKR clearly has a systematic mechanical framework, of rolling dice whose size reflects fictional likelihoods of prevailing in a given sort of contest.)

Again, it's not just one thing.

Let's make this exceedingly easy using a system you are familiar with. Cthulhu Dark (lite). Go to the section marked UNANSWERED QUESTIONS.

Now, imagine the following based upon that:
A. "Standard model." Keeper decides everything.
B. "Shared model." There is a Keeper, but decisions are collaborative.
-There can be different, agreed-to, collaborative frameworks.
C. "Fiasco model." No Keeper.

Same game. Same ruleset. Very different approaches.

This gets even trickier when you introduce different games under the same banner.

1. GM applying "FKR" by using a genre source (Star Trek: TOS or Brideshead Revisited or whatever) with an invisible rulebook and GM decides.

2. Group playing FKR with ruleset allowing players to override GM narration.

3. Group playing FKR with ruleset allowing players to "rewind" scenes or have genre-appropriate narrative devices (flashbacks, montages).

Because FKR is not a single thing, game, or set of rules, asking about "the" method of resolution doesn't work. This is the repeated disconnect- it's not one thing, so you can't expect one answer, or have it fit into one box (or, um, one cube).

 

[hawkeyefan]

That bit where the GM says “If you ask ‘can I do it’, you can’t; but if you just do it, then you might do it” sums up the area of criticism I have about what seem to be some elements of FKR; namely, reliance on GM interpretation of the fiction combined lack of player facing rules and seemingly total GM fiat on how things go.

There are games that were linked on itch.io that I absolutely would play. There are others I’d like to try if the opportunity came up. Those don’t appear to be anything like what was described in that blog.

If I found myself playing in such a game, I’d have to politely bow out. There’s nothing appealing to me about that example of play.