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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8416611" data-attributes="member: 42582">Maybe because I don't want to play a game which is mostly finding out what the GM thinks about Peaky Blinders?You're presenting the question as if it's an obviously rhetorical one, but why should it be? I mean, even the earliest OSR-ish versions of D&D have combat mechanics. They don't just start and end with the GM deciding whether or not the Orcs beat the PCs when they meet one another in the dungeon.I'm not saying that there's anything inherently wrong with GM decides as a resolution method. But I think there are obvious reasons why people adopt other methods too. It's not that "GM decides" has never occurred to them!I think this is an oversimplification, and in oversimplifying it obscures.For instance: what happens, in an OSR game, if a player has his/her PC pray for divine intervention? If the GM just decides whether or not the gods listen, we are in the same general territory as "rocks fall" - it's just GM storytelling. Which is fine, but doesn't seem all that OSR-ish. (And if the GM says that you can't just get help by praying, then "tactical infinity" is gone. Or to put it another way: it's all very well to tell players to play the fiction, but if only the GM truly knows the fiction, and is free to make it up in the moment of adjudication, then what are the players really playing. [USER=99817]@chaochou[/USER] and [USER=16814]@Ovinomancer[/USER] have both pushed this point.)If the GM calls for a check, what should it be? How should it compare to the abilities of the cleric PCs?Similar questions arise in other domains: should a MU with 18 STR have the same chance to plough through the phalanx with a charge as the fighter with 18 STR? Or does the fighter get to have their fighting ability matter?These are the sorts of practical questions that have been at the forefront of D&D adjudication since 1974. Gygax made up answers, wrote some of them down, and published some of that in his AD&D rulebooks. His suite of answers perhaps wasn't the best - in particular the needless proliferation of baroque subsystems - but the reasons behind them are easy enough to see.I've played Cthulhu Dark. I have an active Classic Traveller campaign. These both seem to get mentioned as FKR games or FKR-adjacent games but neither of them uses "GM decides" as the main form of resolution.</blockquote>

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