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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8252587" data-attributes="member: 42582">A variation on [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER]'s recent post:Rules can be govern an activity in the absence of a referee. This can be symmetrical, by way of mutual compliance: a friendly game of chess or bridge is like this. Or it can be asymmetrical, where one participant in the activity is also put in charge of rules-enforcement. Playing Monopoly or a similar game with a banker who is also a player is like this.Although I often refer to myself as a "referee" in the context of GMing - because I learned my nomenclature from late 70s rulebooks, and only came across the term Gamemaster (modelled on Dungeon Master, I guess?) later on - I don't know of any approach to RPGing where the GM actually plays the refereeing role that is part of (eg) organised sports or serious competition in chess and other games.The GM-player relationship has just as much in common with the asymmetry among participants exemplified by the banker in Monopoly. There can be good reasons to have such a role in the game because there are a number of things in RPGing where asymmetry can help achieve the goals of play. These include, as fairly well-known candidates: scene-framing; revealing hidden background fiction; declaring actions for non-player controlled characters; adjudicating the fiction and keeping action declarations within genre constraints; narrating consequences for failed checks; etc.But none of these has anything to do with the idea that a referee is necessary to enforce the rules! That's a false claim that is also a content-independent claim (ie it is supposed to be true of all rules regardless of their content). Whereas the reasons why RPGing can benefit from having a GM are all very content-specific, having to do with particular content-dependent reasons that can arise in RPGing for having a particular participant in the game be the one who establishes what happens next in the shared fiction.Appreciating this is pretty fundamental to understanding what is possible and/or desirable in RPGing, I think.</blockquote>

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