A bit of a preamble for anyone not familiar with the acronym – there’s a movement or set of movements known as the FKR, standing for Free Kriegsspiel Revolution, a (mostly) joke term intended to contrast with the OSR to focus purely on a relationship to rules in gaming – namely that the referee is the interface between the fictional world and the player characters.
These movements tend to primarily focus on very small rulesets – often stuff like “d6 roll for low” or contested 2d6 rolls, just because these kinds of rulesets allow the referee to really focus in on rulings. I think there’s also a bit of fondness for how Bob Meyer runs Blackmoor.
So from the outside lots of people are starting to assume the FKR means nearly no-rules roleplaying games. But if you look at Kriegsspiel itself, or even the kind of rulesets Arneson seemed fond of writing – sometimes there are a lot of rules. And this to me is an important thing to note. It’s not the amount of rules.
FKR to me is purely a relationship to rules. If your table is composed of a referee who portrays the world opting to use rules as a tool whenever they wish, and players portraying characters responding with what they would do if they were in whatever fictional situation the ref is describing – that to me is FKR. It doesn’t matter if the ref is using a single coin flip, or if they decide to sometimes opt into Mythras, or their own hack of ASL, or anything else. The amount of crunch doesn’t impact the FKRishness, its if the table is focusing more on the fiction over the mechanics. This is obviously easier with light systems, but if the ref feels using something heftier “behind the screen”, that’s a perfectly valid approach.
That’s just me though.
Aha! I haven’t been keeping up with FKR and I do a bit more than “d6 roll high” or opposed 2d6 at the table, but the focus on narrative versus rules is really right on. FKR to me has been about trust at the table that the DM (me) will create appropriate rules behind the screen that get called out when necessary. The players… they get to try fantastical things with their characters. No rule mastery necessary.
Thanks for writing this out!
https://therpggazette.wordpress.com/2025/03/14/why-the-system-is-so-important
Contrary to Dubbelman, if one takes the FKR playstyle perspective, one might say that rules, systems, and mechanics do not drive the form of the narrative experience for players because the players are insulated from the rules. The rulebook (and the related web of consistent rulings) is invisible.
However, just as the real world rules and mechanics of physics, biology, psychology, sociology, or economics are not visible (unless studied academically or except where pieced together in conversations about life) but constantly manifest via outcomes and feedback, game systems are revealed via play and then shape player choices and the narrative possibilities.
Also contrary to the inclinations of FKR, the sharing of a “player’s handbook” in RPGs meets an important need. It positions the players in a world and set of manifest rules and mechanics that any character they would create would understand (however incompletely) via a lifetime of experiential learning and dialogue with other characters and in-game learning resources (e.g., books).
This could be omitted if the game world is wholly mundane (same rules), familiar (same lore), and intuitive (players are playing characters with abilities that are very close to their own). However, none of these three qualities tend to apply to roleplaying games which, de facto, if not by definition, vary at least one and typically all three.
An advocate of FKR might respond that, in FKR, one trusts the players to imagine, or discover in play, the “rules of the road”. The assumption is that real world experience modified or overridden by genre experience (werewolves work like this…, magic works like this…) provides all the players need to play. This assumption is unrealistic.
Players need to have a sense of the current capabilities of their characters without having to discover that in game. Real world and genre awareness does not adequately specify the capabilities of a particular character.
This would be true if any game produced a rigid, defined output within the fiction for any mechanism, but as I’ve said in Every Rule a Ruling – this is not the case.
Rule texts are not in any way a description of the physics of a setting, but they are instead abstractions of the various bits within the fiction that we wish to elide and abstract, be it for brevity, clarity, or even fun.
The notion that “Players need to have a sense of the current capabilities of their characters without having to discover that in game” ignores a pretty glaring fact that a majority of players do not, in fact, read the rules of the games they are playing. This has been a thing predating the hobby from a published standpoint, and some of the most fully featured campaigns are ran this way. But even then, knowing the rules doesn’t completely clarify what one can do – what is a charged situation in one instance of play may be nothing than par for the course at another table.
A player can discover their capabilities way more easily by discussing with their fellow players regarding the conventions of the world.