I have received many messages regarding my post from yesterday, quite a lot of corroborating of the state of the discourse, as well as many individuals wondering if and what can be done to salvage online discussion around games of this type. I should first clarify that while the driving factor for me to make these posts was a “final straw” so to speak in one particular community, I have been having issues with several “FKR” communities for a while now, some less recent than others. This is very much not a one-point issue and is instead a reflection, almost every year, of what the supposed FKR communities have become, situated around when the various Discord servers kind of popped off. If you speak with anyone who has known me for more than a month you’ll probably know that I have pretty much voiced my concerns since day one.

I have also seen concerns that my post is calling for some type of purity testing – that I want only TRV3 FKR, and that I am rejecting beginners and people with alternative playstyles alike, accepting only the most Rigid of… Not Rigid Kriegsspiel 😛

This couldn’t be further from the case, and if anything – I think the current state of discourse actually prevents beginners from discovering what I think is the most compelling and table-empowering playstyle, and I think it disallows us from actually growing FKR by any stretch as if we allow the playstyle to be “just vibes”, then there are no constraints, limitations, or unique features to follow, manipulate, and then break.

The FKR is one of the few communities I have seen where a beginner will ask for advice for getting into FKR, and while there are a few voices that want to lend aid because many of the communities are concerned with the vibe and getting along more than the playstyle, they also get the complete opposite recommendation – immediately a wet blanket will be thrown on stressing that “FKR isn’t for everyone” and that one must play with training wheels and instead pick up Misspent Youth, or My Life With Master, or study the methods of setting position and risk in Blades in the Dark.

Instead of being about playing worlds, we start suggesting rules. In an almost contradictory fashion people will say “It’s not about the rules”, and then the community will go back and say things like “PbtA can have a mature statement on violence… D&D can only express capitalistic colonialism.” And my beef with that last sentence has nothing to do with the particular games expressed or the descriptors used – you could swap them out with literally any other game or adjective and I would still say it’s just as bunk. It’s saying that the play outcomes are dominated by the rules text selected.

How does one rectify this with the idea that referees are to hold rules texts lightly, utilizing them as tools to portray a world? How can we claim that one game “requires” emotional connection, and another “punishes” with zero context of how the table is addressing any of this? How are we to ascribe moral qualities to the players of a particular game without being a part of the table they are at?

FKR is about relationships – to rules, to the conversation, to other players, and to play. Certainly, some tools are better than others at certain tasks, but the practice of actually playing is so unique to the individual table instance that I think any attempt to exalt or vilify any particular ruleset in a way where you ascribe unalienable moral, ethical, or societal qualities is not only missing the point to the highest degree – it is actively toxic to what FKR can become.

I do not bemoan anyone who does not like FKR – we can like different things. I also do not bemoan those who have different perspectives on what it is (within reason) – we definitely should be bringing our unique perspectives to the table. What I bemoan is the sadness I feel when I see people who have spent a sizeable amount of time in a place that many first feel excited and ecstatic to explore a playstyle so rarely discussed these days, and they are instead dampened by naysayers and carelords, such that many feel dissuaded from contributing.

Purity tests be damned, but can we at least talk about FKR from a positive, actual play experience before we try to establish theoretical hypotheticals where we argue that the rules text conveys or holds some authority? More “play worlds, not rules” like we’ve been saying for years now?

If it hasn’t been obvious from some of my recent vague-posting, I have been pretty unhappy with the state of so-called “FKR” discourse. The term was used to describe an alternative to play where rules texts were given authority, and where the fiction was secondary to the mechanics. Where the idea that social issues, bad behavior, and aggressive game masters and players alike could be curtailed by somehow following the rules as some designer intended.

Instead, it refocused the game as being a representation of a fictional world, communicated and adjudicated by a referee to players taking control of characters in a world. The referee is free to use whatever means they see necessary to portray and resolve this world and the actions of the player, and no rules text, designer, or other set of people were seen as an “authority” over this.

This idea was first proposed by one of the original players in Gary, Dave, and Phil’s games, and it was later adopted by further bloggers who ended up creating Discord servers and the like based around the acronym. It’s worth noting that this term was originally proposed on an OD&D forum, and the later Discord creators were posting a lot about the types of games that surrounded Arneson’s group. So traditional high-trust play.

There was a split in this community, as there often is. I certainly landed on the side I supported, but so did quite a few new people who were unfamiliar with these origins or goals, and seemed more inclined to foster a new identity around a term that had a very small, but growing amount of hype and recognizability around it. The conversation became less an exploration of the growing concept of FKR, and more a forcible reframing of what FKR was – which basically amounted to whatever the specific individual was playing.

I have mentioned before that it’s fine for things to be different – not every game, practice, or culture should fit under every label. What makes specific playstyles special is their unique approach, not that they are an umbrella. But this seems to be contrary in some FKR circles as of late. Instead, they claim that the FKR should be “just vibes”, only excluding the games that fall under a particular individual’s pet peeve. Which unfortunately is usually just old D&D or “traditional” RPGs. So we have gone in a few short years from an OD&D forum creating the term to people trying to gatekeep those that use the 3LBBs to only being able to “support” certain kinds of play.

Note here the emphasis on systems – folks are claiming that if one plays OD&D, or “trad” the particular rules text they are using dictates the play experience. If you understand anything about FKR at all, you will understand how this argument reveals the particular Edwardsian chauvinist has yet to understand the culture of play. Because instead of trying to understand it, they just attempted to hijack it.

A quote from one of the recent discords is as follows:

If there is no mechanical reason to be invested in the emotional story at large; there won’t be a real reason to be emotional attached to things in the game either.

– supposed “FKR” discord user

Of course, they’ll then try to do the “I am very smart” argument of citing the Lumpley-Care principle that by “mechanic” they really mean “anything by which you resolve the situation”, but this quote comes from a diatribe against traditional play in favor of storygames, so it’s pretty clear “mechanics” is precisely what the average person would think, not the Forgehead definition.

Now, I don’t think “FKR” as a term is “dead”, or any other such pretentious nonsense, but I think we should have more care in being stewards of this community. It is sad how this term has been circling around the RPG scene for about three years now, and supposed participants of the community still feel a need to play games “as they were intended.”

Despite all of this belly-aching on my part, I want some ideas on how we could be better stewards of this community: positively push forward the actual term, promoting healthy rpg conversation and high-trust tables.

I am thinking of trying to put together a zine or something similar, something I’m initially ripping off calling “Play Worlds.” The idea would be something like GURPS’s genre books, but obviously without the GURPS, and a little less dry. So we’d put together something like “Play Fantasy Worlds” that would be articles, advice, and tools that a table of any experience level could pick up, empower a referee to portray a world (of their own, their tables’, or another’s construction), and give players the best working advice for playing as characters in such a world with high degrees of player agency and the concept of tactical infinity (anything may be attempted, but not everything is as likely to succeed).

Let me know what you think, especially of the Play Worlds idea. Thank you!