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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 9285951" data-attributes="member: 70468">It’s the way my homebrew system structures play to address the conflict of interest between GM-as-referee and GM-as-opposition. It’s <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/whats-your-sweet-spot-for-a-skill-system.696411/page-10#post-9194935" target="_blank">something</a> <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/rpging-and-imagination-a-fundamental-point.701162/page-6#post-9198549" target="_blank">I’ve</a> <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/a-neotrad-ttrpg-design-manifesto.701957/page-17#post-9237265" target="_blank">discussed</a> <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/your-ttrpg-design-principles.702218/page-2#post-9248793" target="_blank">here</a> before, but it turns out that it’s not a new idea. Jon Peterson mentions in chapter 1 of The Elusive Shift how people saw it from the very beginning of the hobby (from The Elusive Shift chapter 1, “The Legacy of Wargaming”): This necessarily brought the neutrality of the referee into doubt. In 1976, Kevin Slimak reaffirmed Phillies’s tenet that, “really, D&D is a game between the dungeonmasters and the players; they are the two sides. The dungeon designer sets the problems for his adventurers and they try to solve them.” But Slimak further recognized that this creates a peculiar conflict of interest for the referee: “Remember this when you run your game. You are playing with/against the adventurers, true, but you have ALL the advantages. If you use all these advantages, you’ll get those players, for SURE, but in the long run, you lose. Doing this will kill off your game for sure” (AW 3 (7)). This power imbalance would persuade many that D&D could not be played as a wargame and that it was instead the foundational entry in a new game category.Random events along with conflict resolution are one (but not the only) way for me to mediate between those two roles. One could say that my attempt at <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/illusionism-where-do-you-stand.699021/post-9081368" target="_blank">campaign as science experiment</a> is actually reaching back to the hobby’s roots and trying to run it as a wargame, but I think that neglects the role that emergent story plays. The players are not just engaging in a freeform scenario. Their PCs are driving play, and the GM’s role is to support that (with conflict, dynamic events, etc).Wanting them to find clues is what the three clue rule is about. I don’t actually want or care whether they discover the bandits, so I think we agree on that point. That’s the distinction I keep trying to make. If the system says, “tell the players about some danger nearby,” and that’s bandits, then I’m going to say something about nearby bandits. That’s different from the technique Justin is describing. He has a specific kind of play he wants to create that’s qualitatively different in his opinion.In a thread about what Justin wrote, it’s difficult to have a conversation about it if we can’t even agree on the point he’s making. <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="😕" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f615.png" title="Confused face    :confused:" data-shortname=":confused:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" />Yes. He describes one thing, but the substance of the technique is doing something else. I think understanding that is important to understand how it is useful.</blockquote>

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