I don’t know why I have been seeing a recent uptick in discussion on the “blorb” principles method of refereeing, but it seems like it has made its way back around Discord and the various microblog scenes as of late. This is not a style I would normally comment on – I see it very outside of what I like to play, especially when the author gave a very bad-faith hot-take on FKR.
But people have been making assertions about it that seem puzzling to me – they’re recommending it as an OSR prep style, for one, where I cannot fathom how it gets associated with the very emergent, high-trust style refereeing we strive for in various OSR communities.
blorb is extremely low trust – it’s a style that proposes a rigid hierarchy for the referee to follow, going so far as to hypothetically allow players to audit prep or a module to make sure that the referee didn’t supersede prep with emergent tools or fiat. It’s effectively the same sort of justification you see in communities that will allow for toxic play to flourish under the banner of “designer intent”, only the designer, in this case, is your prep.
The whole point of the referee in traditional roleplaying and adventure games is to utilize a source of higher fidelity rulings to step in when the mechanics or situation may produce fictionally inauthentic results. Or when they could use their experience, creativity, subject knowledge, and tools to arrive at a ruling quicker than mechanization could, often with a higher degree of specificity in that they as a human could take into context more elements than any rules text could.
Take for instance this example:
You have prepped a dungeon where a maniacal gnome has created a death trap dungeon. You placed a secret door to a treasure room off of some room – you have some reason why you selected this particular room and secret door setup.
Now let’s say in play that you realize your prior location is not suitable – maybe its in a place that would be generally inaccessible or dangerous for the gnome or its minions to reach. Maybe it does not line up with other emergent properties set forth by tools. Perhaps it doesn’t make structural sense once you examine the dungeon in play.
Now, you see a room that makes perfect sense for this. No sweat – the players have yet to find any hint of this secret door. They’re still at the entrance or fiddling with other elements – you can take a break and just shift the whole thing over to a place that will be more fictionally consistent with the dungeon, as well as the established elements of the gnome – such as it being an architectural genius.
By using your in-flight creativity and expertise around the fictional world you have course corrected a fictionally-inconsistent element into one that fits the setting and established lore. If you used blorb’s rigid adherence to prep you would be introducing fictional inconsistencies.
Having had this discussion with a few of the principles’ adherents, the argument I have received around this is pretty demeaning. It leverages the above as a critical mistake that the referee must work to improve (later… in other forms of prep, but never during the game). It plays into some impossible notion that one will never prep inconsistencies, or run a module that has mistakes in it.
All of this is hogwash, of course. What is better – to assume “perfection” (which I think is a demeaning way to phrase it and one that sorely misassumes the role of the referee), admonish “mistakes”, and force people to play a game that makes less sense in lip service to some arbitrary manifesto. Or is it better to allow for flexibility, trusting a referee to use whatever tools they have at their disposal, and to trust the players to converse, negotiate, and question elements to clarify the understanding of the world – to recognize that not everything is going to be perfect in prep or play, and to allow for the referee to follow their intended role and run the best game possible?
My impression of blorb (based entire on reading the manifesto, not on interactions with its adherents) is that it is a GM-focused doctrine, something that GMs are expected to enforce upon themselves. In that light, it doesn’t make much sense to me to assign a trust level to blorb as a whole (unless we’re talking about the GM’s trust of themselves, maybe?). Eero Tuovinen’s _Muster_ presents similarly strict (but much more nuanced) doctrinal statements about how the game is to be run. Eero is concerned with concepts like “procedural hygiene”, which aims to structure play in a way that minimizes the possibility of even unconscious bias in referee rulings, and “procedural oversight”, whereunder the GM makes rulings and operates rules in the open so that the players can confirm that the everything is being done correctly. This might seem very low-trust, but in play it tends to be the opposite. We _could_ interrogate him over every ruling he makes, but we don’t feel the need to. I tend to do so more often than other players, but that’s mainly because I’m relatively new at the table and wasn’t there when the precedents were set. (And, crucially, I’m doing it because I want to understand how the GM is doing things, not because I suspect him of cheating.)
Although not doctrinally forbidden under Eero’s principles the way it is under Sandra’s, changing the layout of a dungeon in the middle of a session would be considered an unhygienic practice because it introduces the possibility of unconscious bias—not necessarily the end of the world, but still something to be avoided. Even if you _think_ you’re doing it to enhance the consistency of the scenario, you’re still doing while the players are walking around the dungeon, with incudental knowledge of where they’ve been and where they seem to be headed. This means you have to make a judgment call: hygiene and fictional consistency are both important, so, _in this case,_ is the fictional consistency you gain by correcting the perceived error worth the hygiene you lose by changing the dungeon while it’s live? Whatever you choose to do, you still have to make the call one way or the other.
“Trust” as in the trust of the role of a Referee, rather than favoring trust as an adventure-writer, who may be asked to turn the adventure and prep over to the Players just to “prove” the call of a situation.