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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9614506" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I know I'm a bit late to the party on this one, but this pretty well encapsulates exactly my problem with a lot of OSR.I don't think DMs are or can be sufficiently impartial to make this negotiation sustainable. (Note: sustainable, meaning, keeping it up forever without failure of impartiality.) I don't think most players want to be having to constantly re-litigate everything they've already attempted the next time they attempt it. And, most importantly, I don't think "EVERYTHING is negotiation" is actually a form of gameplay at all.Don't get me wrong. I love Dungeon World, and it describes itself as a conversation. But that conversation has a specific component that most conversations don't: the moments when mechanics resolve things. Because the conversation occasionally produces a conflict or a contest or a risk or whatever else, where we don't know what the consequence should be. Those places are precisely what the mechanics are for. Treating this as an icky awful thing to be avoided at all costs weakens the process, because now there never is an actual resolution, there's just a "we'll leave it there for now".A DM that is actually impartial and who treats similar situations in similar ways IS, functionally, writing rules. They're just writing rules the players aren't allowed to see, so they're constantly bumping into things.* And if the DM in question decides "okay, we know and agree on how X works, so we'll just write that down so that we don't have to re-litigate it every time", they literally are doing the thing you explicitly reject here as unacceptable in OSR play. They are saying that the negotiation is done, it doesn't have to be repeated, we know what's going to happen.Now, the converse side--where there are only rules, zero improv, zero discussion, zero wiggle-room--is just as bad. Board games get away with it because their play-space is severely limited. TTRPGs embrace far too large a spectrum to do that. But that doesn't mean that well-defined rules are a bad thing. It means that those well-defined rules need to be well-crafted and fit for purpose, so that the participants elect to negotiate when the defined rules fail them, rather than having to eternally reopen the discussion and re-argue the points and figure out for the umpteenth time whether X counts or doesn't count etc.*There is a game that works this way. It's called Mao, and is...not for everyone for that exact reason.</blockquote>

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