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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9025586" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'll defer to others who know the history of FK better than me to tell me whether or not this is even a reasonable move. If it is, I would expect that the resolution is via a pre-established throw of the dice.Or else the judge might make an arbitrary call so as to test the capacity of the commander being trained/tested to handle some or other contingency.It seems to me that this sort of thing might be more likely in a Braunstein, and the more the Braunstein contains this sort of thing then the more it crosses the dividing line I'm drawing. Which was [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER]'s point about Braunstein's a little way upthread.I don't know what you are meaning by "dispassionate refereeing" in this context.There can be no "dispassionate" decision-making about (for instance) deciding what happens to the governance of and public order in a town if the ruling oligarchs are all assassinated. All that can happen is that the GM makes something up. But there is no knowledge or expertise possible here: actual human societies, in such situations, can respond in a tremendous variety of ways depending on all sort of considerations that historians and social scientists debate as part of their professional activities.Gygax's solution to more local problems of dispassionate decision-making (like, does the dragon breath again? who does the ogre attack with its brutal club) tended to be random dice rolls. This can be extended to some contexts, in order to create something slightly less static without being "living, breathing" in virtue of GM decision-making.But it will break down in any situation of even modest complexity, where the idea of expert knowledge simply fails to gain purchase.My (b) is a diagnosis of the challenges to GMing once RPG setting and scenarios go beyond the austere dungeon. I don't think the only response to those challenges is railroading GMing. But other responses require rather radical changes to widespread conceptions of what a GM's role and powers consist in (eg rule zero). Vincent Baker's great contribution to RPGin design has been to identify and operationalise various versions of such changes.Your post upthread about hard scene framing suggests an approach to play in which the GM establishes individual scenes of some degree of austerity, and then exercises scene-framing authority to "move" the PCs from scene-to-scene. I don't know if that's what you intended, but it was what I took away. This approach differes from the "tour guide" approach in that there is no aspiration to "living, breathing" naturalism in the scene-transition process, nor is there any pretence that any non-GM participant has anything but a minor role to play in scene-framing.I imagine that some 4e D&D campaigns looked like this. Maybe some 3E ones too.</blockquote>

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