It wouldn't seem right to say that a referee decides play in a game of football. The players observably enjoy genuine decision-making and in collaboration have decisive impact on the game.
A referee in football doesn't play the game. They don't set the field. They don't establish the success conditions. They enforce the rules. (Sometimes this requires judgement calls. Just like LBW or dangerous bowling in cricket. Judging whether an observed phenomenon violates some standard is not a mechanical process, but it is not the same as making something up.)
In Australian Rules football, the umpire frequently has to bounce or throw the ball (eg if the ball leaves play; if a goal is scored). But this is not a move for either side. It is a neutral device for (re)commencing play.
When Vincent Baker makes his comment about task resolution - "Task resolution, in short, puts the GM in a position of priviledged authorship. Task resolution will undermine your collaboration." - he is not making a remark about football referees. Nor is he making a remark about free kriegspiel or Braunstein judges. He is making a remark about the consequences that follow from a certain player of a RPG enjoying certain sorts of permissions in respect of the shared fiction.
The judge in free kriegspiel or in a Braunstein does not enjoy permissions of that sort. Moldvay Basic has relatively strong instructions for the GM process that constrain such permissions.
Gygax's AD&D is incoherent in this respect. His PHB gives advice to players which
can only work if the GM lacks the sorts of permissions that Baker is criticising - that is, the advice can only work if the GM is bound by their prep, is not at liberty to change the dungeon in significant ways in response to player-driven incursions, and is adjudicating the situation essentially as a free kriegspiel judge would. His DMG then gives advice on how to change the dungeon in significant ways in response to player-driven incursions, which - if followed - will (i) make the PHB advice to players more-or-less useless, and (ii) create exactly the problem that Baker is diagnosing.
Of course the reason for this incoherence in the two rulebooks is not that Gygax is some sort of idiot. It's that they were written at different times, and expectations about the goals and content of RPGing were changing rapidly over that time.
I feel this is a reasonable line to take if one hopes to argue that one participant's power to change rules must disrupt (what I've called) the lusory fabric. I need to bring judge into the game as a player so as to dispose of their otherwise clearly not disruptive conduct as referee. That step can be resisted through saying any or all of
- a person is capable of operating in a plurality of modes in play, so that they can operate as both referee and player
- it is possible for a person to be expert or conferred with expertise in their version of an imagined world
- there's no need to be the most expert to be an effective referee: other qualities are more important
- possessing an agenda for refereeing is not necessarily identical to possessing an agenda for playing: the referee does not share in the prelusory goals of the players... they're more akin to a game affordance for those goals (elsewhere I described the FKR GM as a "font of unnecessary obstacles")
Generally, it seems straightforward and plausible to say that GM can indeed act as referee.
I don't know what any of this is saying. What I mean by that is that I can read the words, but I don't what actual phenomena they are intended to refer to.
Consider a free kriegspiel. The modelled battlefield contains a river. So part of the challenge for the players is coming up with sensible ways of getting their forces across the river without excessive loss.
Now imagine two different ways that might unfold:
(1) The players are told that it is spring, and are told (or its taken for granted) that the battle is taking place in Europe. It is thus reasonable to expect them to have regard to spring melt, and the effect of that on river depths and flow, in their play. Perhaps this is actually part of what the exercise is testing! When the judge reveals an unwelcome truth about the depth, speed of flow, etc of the river, the players are expected to suck that up and cope.
(2) A player is in the process of describing how their forces cross the river, and the judge suddenly tells them that a flashflood occurs, and half their forces are swept away! This may or may not be a reasonable thing for a free kriegspiel judge to do: it will undoubtedly test the ability of that player to make decisions about how to proceed in the face of unexpected disaster and loss of forces. But it clearly doesn't test the ability of the player to make decisions about crossing a river. No matter how vividly the judge is imagining the sudden and torrential upstream rain, the player cannot have been expected to have regard to the risk of a flash flood if nothing about the set up of the situation signalled it as a possibility.
Suppose, now, that instead of thinking about a free kriegspiel training exercise, we think about a competitive game (say a wargame or a Braunstein). My (1) would be a fair way to set up the scenario. My (2), on the other hand, would be an example of the "judge" deciding, more-or-less arbitrarily, to hose one of the competitors.
In (2), the "judge" has become a player, making a change to the shared fiction that dramatically affects another players' fictional position, that has no grounding in the evolution of the game state - that it to say, it is not a reasoned extrapolation from the fiction as affected by another player's move. It is a move in its own right.
Gygax in his PHB gives players advice on the best way to tackle scenarios of type (1). Gygax in his DMG gives GMs advice to do type (2) stuff. Once the GM is doing type (2) stuff, the whole dynamic of play has fundamentally changed. Abstract postulating that a given participant can be both a player and a referee won't change that conclusion.
The way I would reframe what you say here is that there are multiple RPG modes, and in some of those modes GM is intended to be a player. In those modes, it's intuitive to picture that anyone with rule-forming-and-modifying authority must adopt a lusory attitude that forestalls their waving aside all unnecessary obstacles. There are then a subset of rules, the "why" of which is just that. Those rules are not necessary in a refereed game.
I don't understand any of this.
It is impossible, in Suits' framework, to adopt a lusory attitude and at the same time to enjoy rule-forming-and-modifying authority, as to adopt a lusory attitude is to grant normative credence, for the sake of play, to some rules that are constitutive of the play that is being undertaken. So unless you are using "lusory attitude" with some other meaning, I can only take the injunction "anyone with rule-forming-and-modifying authority must adopt a lusory attitude" to be self-contradictory and thus impossible to conform to.
