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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Snarf Zagyg" data-source="post: 8423182" data-attributes="member: 7023840">Way back when I was toying with the idea (at the point, poorly expressed) that the FKR movement in terms of outcomes was really not that different from the ideas of Vincent Baker (and/or other proponents of "system matters" or "story now" or similar ideas) ... but just very different in terms of approach. Again, a global statement like that hardly does justice to the nuances involved, but I think that there is a kernel of truth there. Because there is an obvious overlap.As a rallying cry, "Play worlds, not rules" might seem diametrically opposed to the idea that the rules matter greatly to the expression of the game. And yet, I think that they both manage to have the same concerns; that the table engage with the fiction.Which is why I keep coming back to the critiques I see; while I think that some of them are well-thought out, I also think that many of them miss the point. Take, for example, [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] and his excellent provision of  best practices in this post-[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.enworld.org/threads/system-matters-and-free-kriegsspiel.682620/post-8421149[/URL]Those are a lot better than "high trust"!  But for all of the arguments over high trust, I think that a lot of us (including me, at times) misunderstand the purpose of it. It's not really an articulable principle or best practice- it's advertising. It's an explanation.In the prior thread on this subject that I started, a great deal of the pushback wasn't from those familiar with PbtA or Story Now games- it was by D&D players, who liked having those rules. Lots of rules. When we get into insular conversations over best practices, I think that we often overlook that the target audience for this isn't someone playing a lot of games; it's someone who is probably a D&D or PF or CoC player. Because that's the majority of the market. Those are the people that have to understand what this is, and how it can work. It was ages ago, but I still remember the first time I encountered a diceless roleplaying game. And it took me nearly a year to be able to run it! I just ... couldn't grasp it. As simple as the concepts seem now, I just didn't know what to do. And I think that the issue FKR proponents have (from their perspective) is that- how do you explain to someone who is used to rolling abilities, that they don't need to? How do you explain to someone who is used to checking their skills, that they don't need to? Fundamentally, they aren't trying to persuade you- they're trying to persuade the people that find these concepts completely foreign.And that's why we see this as a relatively formless and amorphous thing. What is FKR? What are the real and salient features? The real reason I think it's hard to pin down is because it's not based in a working theory, so much as aspiration. Tracking down that 2015 post was pretty cool, but you also note the gap until 2020! And I can't help but note that while there are people that discuss a return to a neo-Arnesonian time for D&D, the majority of case-uses of it seem to be for genre-games that have nothing to do with D&D or even fantasy.So to go back to the subject of "high trust" (and/or provide fodder for disagreement) I think that the following can and should be noted:A. In the games I have run recently using this model, there is significant player authorship of narrative. I would go so far as to say that for a successful game, it's practically required. Even when the ultimate result for authority of the fiction is with the GM, you just can't run the game if the GM isn't trusting the players to author a good deal of the fiction. Otherwise, it's just a game of players asking if they can do something (which doesn't work, and isn't fun).B. Moreover, I think that the "high trust" while originally conceived as a method to explain the game to people used to rules-heavy systems, doesn't require it to be beholden to the GM. We already see that FKR games allow for the explicit rules-based division of authority, either with players controlling narrative by resisting the GM's narrative, or players in control of scenes (pausing, rewinding, etc.).In the end, I think that FKR is two things- first, a movement of people. As such, there will be those who hype it, those who over-describe it, and those who advocate for it.But more fundamentally, it's about the reduction of rules. It's about reducing the rules to the absolute minimum, and then reducing them even more. The assumption is that if you reduced it too much, you can always add a rule back in. At least, that's my take so far. But there's nothing necessarily opposed to the idea that the rules you have, should be good rules. There's nothing that requires good rules (or good allocations of authority) to be discarded.PS- I pulled and read Wuthering Heights RPG over the weekend when I had some spare time. It looks fascinating and I would love to try it out; unfortunately, I don't have a group that I would be able to play that with given the subject matter. But that's a different issue entirely.</blockquote>

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