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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9025529" data-attributes="member: 42582">In my posts, and in many previous posts, I have contrasted the GMing of the austere dungeon environment found in Moldvay/Gygax type D&D, with a non-austere-dungeon environment of the sort common in much D&D play since the early to mid 80s.My view is that dungeon play can, to some extent at least, be seen as analogous to free kriegspiel or a Braunstein: central to the game are representative devices (eg maps, miniatures; in a Braunstein, perhaps "The kitchen is London, the laundry is Paris"), which are intended to model  (imagined) reality. This is all established in advance of play. The function of the judge is to make determinations/extrapolations about the way that reality would work - based on expertise. As things change in the (imaginary) reality, the model is updated - eg tokens are moved on a board/map, the board/map is redrawn, etc.The reason I emphasise austerity is because this whole set-up only works if the extrapolations are genuinely based on expertise, such that (i) there is a standard of correctness, and (ii) the participants can have a more-or-less objective reference point for making sensible decisions and improving their play. (I accept your point that social courtesies may operate on individual occasions of play - eg a junior officer may be obliged to suck up a bad ruling from a presiding field officer - but this doesn't change my point about the normative standards and expectations that are at work.) And expertise can only operate if the situation is austere.In my view, even the Against the Giants modules push the limits of austerity, as good play requires judging how different decisions might trigger the cascading of encounters, and this will be based on intuitions about how various sorts of people might respond to their homes being attacked, and it's not really clear that this is something where expertise applies in the same way as someone can be an expert on the effect of rain and mud on cavalry operations. And to flip this point around, I think it's not a coincidence that the most classic dungeons are implausibly static, with their room occupants hanging around with their treasure "waiting" to be defeated and looted by the PCs.Once the fictional backdrop against which the PCs have to make decisions, and about which the GM is expected to make decisions, becomes remotely plausible or realistic in its "living, breathing" character, the ideas of expertise, and of knowability/learnability on the player side, in my view utterly evaporate. In terms of D&D texts, for me the dividing line on this issue lies between Gygax's PHB, which gives players advice on how to succeed in dungeon exploration that will work only for a basically static dungeon of the classic sort; and his DMG, which gives GMs advice about how to run "living, breathing" dungeons which will make his advice to players of the previous year largely useless.Given that the world is full of professors of economics, history, social psychology etc who have widely divergent views on how the world will develop in the future, and what processes caused it to become as it currently is, the idea that a GM can use expertise to extrapolate the events of a "living, breathing" world, and to judge how PC action ramify and cascade, is in my view illusory. All the GM can do is to make decisions about these things that seem more-or-less plausible. And in this context, in my view the maps, notes and so on are not models of an imagined reality, but simply records of imaginings.Even though the divide I'm drawing may be somewhat porous or at least fuzzy in reality - see the Giants modules I mentioned, or even Keep on the Borderlands with its different tribes - I think, at the conceptual/analytical level it is pretty fundamental to understanding the difference between (a) the role played by a judge in FK, at least some Braunsteins, and very classic D&D play, and (b) more-or-less mainstream, "living breathing world" RPGing of the sort that has predominated since some time in the early to mid 1980s, in which the GM is not any sort of judge or referee but rather is a creator/author of fiction.Vincent Baker's remarks about the role of mechanics, in the OP, are directed at the "GM as author of fiction" side of the divide. And my repeated insistence upthread that the GM is a player, who therefore adopts the lusory attitude and deploys (asymmetric) lusory means, is likewise directed at the "GM as author" side of the divide.My objection to the notion of GM as expert about their fictional world is that is an obscurantist way of redescribing the fact that the GM is an author, that thereby creates a purely illusory parallel between the role of the GM in the (b)-type play and the role of a genuine judge in (a)-type play.</blockquote>

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