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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7334602" data-attributes="member: 82106">It is much more ancient and fundamental than that. In the true Gygaxian model of play the DM is NEUTRAL ARBITER when it comes to actually adjudicating the action. He's also author of the environment, but it is actually DIRTY POOL in Gygaxian terms to construct elements of the dungeon which favor or disfavor a specific character (its OK if specific skills that character has prove useful, that's different). It becomes favoritism. I think in the end you can trace most of the preferences of people in [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION]'s camp back to elements of the roles associated with player challenge exploration/puzzle play. AD&D (2e specifically) advocated moving away from that mode of play, but it left in place most of the mechanical structure, so the roles and associated concepts culture persisted and took on new meaning in the context of more open-ended story focused play. In Gygax's formulation the DM was referee and the world was a game board, or even in a sense a battlefield. Much like the referee role in Chainmail, and especially in extended wargaming campaigns, one of the referee's main jobs was to maintain the 'fog of war'. So, in a 2e context the DM's role persisted but changed, so that he became the author of a story, a fiction that was inherent in the structure of the adventure and which was played out by the players moving their characters through it. The player's role basically didn't change from OD&D, they were supposed to use cleverness and expert play to get through the tough parts of the adventure, the climaxes and such. So, you ended up with the hidden information adventure story kind of setup. Problematically 2e lacks any sort of rules for the players to assert any real control in this story. In the puzzle dungeon their simple agency as their character alter-egos was enough. They decided to push ahead, go back, check for traps, hire a sage to decipher the map, etc. In the story (basically the same as the APs that are popular today) that agency is not always sufficient. The story can really only play out as variations on success or failure to move along the set plot (it may have a small number of branches, but logistically many complex branches are hard to do in a pre-authored story).2e is, and I think [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] has stated this before and I agree with it, an incoherent game. It espouses a type of play and a set of goals which its mechanics are incapable of delivering.</blockquote>

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