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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9010332" data-attributes="member: 42582">[USER=7036985]@andreszarta[/USER] I think it is worth considering the relationship between GM authority (&quot;keeper of the fiction&quot;) and moment-to-moment assent even in more OSR-ish play.There are a host of &quot;folk&quot; terms for criticising certain events/decisions in RPGing - &quot;gotcha&quot; GMing, &quot;viking hat&quot; GMing, etc. And there are ideas that sit in the same analytical space: &quot;is this a fair trap?&quot;, &quot;did I make the right ruling?&quot;, etc.As I've already mentioned in this thread, I think it's no coincidence that we find these ways of thinking about RPGing emerging in GM-as-keeper-of-the-fiction play. These ways of thinking are precisely ways of trying to point to, and describe, situations where there has been no violation of the authority distribution, and yet moment-to-moment assent has been put under pressure.To me, reflecting on the above - as much as reflecting on other experiences, like the VtM one you mention - is a good reason to agree with Baker that rules should do more than clearly assign authority (though that can often be helpful too). Or to put it another way: where the function of rules is to mediate negotiation, I don't think mere content-neutral authority allocations are the best way to go about the task.And we can see implicit recognition of this in some classic texts. Moldvay, for instance, does not encourage purely content neutral GM authority in his Basic rules. He uses notions like &quot;There's always a chance&quot;. By contemporary standards some of his &quot;chances&quot; are pretty brutal (eg PC death on anything but 99-00 on d%) but there is at least a hint there of a soft move/hard move structure.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 9010332, member: 42582"] [USER=7036985]@andreszarta[/USER] I think it is worth considering the relationship between GM authority ("keeper of the fiction") and moment-to-moment assent even in more OSR-ish play. There are a host of "folk" terms for criticising certain events/decisions in RPGing - "gotcha" GMing, "viking hat" GMing, etc. And there are ideas that sit in the same analytical space: "is this a fair trap?", "did I make the right ruling?", etc. As I've already mentioned in this thread, I think it's no coincidence that we find these ways of thinking about RPGing emerging in GM-as-keeper-of-the-fiction play. These ways of thinking are precisely ways of trying to point to, and describe, situations where there has been no violation of the authority distribution, [I]and yet[/I] moment-to-moment assent has been put under pressure. To me, reflecting on the above - as much as reflecting on other experiences, like the VtM one you mention - is a good reason to agree with Baker that rules should do more than clearly assign authority (though that can often be helpful too). Or to put it another way: where the function of rules is to mediate negotiation, I don't think mere content-neutral authority allocations are the best way to go about the task. And we can see implicit recognition of this in some classic texts. Moldvay, for instance, does not encourage purely content neutral GM authority in his Basic rules. He uses notions like "There's always a chance". By contemporary standards some of his "chances" are pretty brutal (eg PC death on anything but 99-00 on d%) but there is at least a hint there of a soft move/hard move structure. [/QUOTE]

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