Tag: trust

Low Trust “Traditional”

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?

Rule Zero & Others

The existence of Rule Zero in a role-playing game, or any of its other equivalents, does not invalidate the existence of any other rule. Rule Zero is roughly Referee Fiat – the idea that the referee has final say, and any content of the rules-text is subject for hacking, removal, addition, etc. by the table.

There exists a certain kind of role-playing snob who upon seeing anything akin to Rule Zero to proclaim “Then why am I buying this book, shouldn’t you have designed a system?” While ignoring all the tools, procedures, adventures, monsters, or any other useful material in the text that a referee may opt to use.

Like Jim P says “Rules are not bad or dumb” – they’re a tool to for the referee to help present the world and to determine what happens when rulings fail or the ref doesn’t feel like making one. Rule Zero should be an assumed default in every traditional role-playing game, and even if its not – no designer holds power over your table should you add it in.

Rule Zero is there to aid your gaming and leaves you free to utilize anything else in the rules-text to make your game run how you want it. It does not obviate anything that comes after. It just allows you to examine those rules as they come up and decide if they are really serving a purpose.

To do something that does not make fictional sense just because a rule tells you to do so is a betrayal of the medium of role-playing. The beauty of the game is the conversation – we can discuss, negotiate, and use our understanding of fiction to shape the imagined world. A slavish adherence to mechanics that produces fictionally incoherent world negates the strength of this hobby.

So Rule Zero is always on the table, and it allows you to use whatever rules you want to produce the game that’s right for your table. Just because you might change some things, make rulings on the fly, or even throw out sections does not mean what you keep and use does not have value.

Every Rule A Ruling

The medium of tabletop role-playing games is such that every single rule must go through a series of steps from declaring intent to do something, to the actual handling of the mechanical bits, to the resolution and reintegration of “what happens” in the fictional space. So for every rule that exists, the table must make a ruling over its use and effects.

I will try to avoid going into designer jargon land or reference dead theory [*], but the point I am trying to get across is that no matter how detailed or instructive a rule is in a game, the humans at the table still need to interpret the rule, acknowledge when and where it is going to be used, and decide amongst themselves how and what happens.

If a game tells you to roll a die when your character attacks, and if you get some number you do damage – who actually decides when this happens? What is a sufficient attack? Does the player get to direct where they attack or just their intent? Do they get any part in narrating the outcome? Does the result on the to-hit roll confer additional information, such as rolling extremely high might let the player put their opponent at an additional disadvantage?

Or take Apocalypse World’s Read a Sitch move – it says when examining a charged situation. What does “charged” mean? Who determines that? Can the player ad-hoc add context to make an otherwise un-charged situation charged? How much veto does the referee have?

Most games don’t actually explicitly answer many of the above questions. Of course the general assumption for traditional role-playing games is “the referee decides”, but how the referee and the table culture draws the line on these kinds of things varies quite heavily from table to table, and the exact differences may widely shift how the game is experienced between different play groups.

If two groups pick up OD&D and the first plays it like a very regimented wargame, the second more in a loosey goosey narrative fashion, neither are playing it “incorrectly.” Its also not an “accident” if someone interprets a rule differently from how another person tries to read the “design intent” of the game. The game doesn’t belong to the designer, it belongs to the players.

This is why role-playing games are so awesome. The game is yours. No designer and no judge has any right to come to your table to tell you that you’re doing it wrong. The methods you find to work for you, to portray and play your worlds are the right way. If you want to pick up new styles and techniques you converse with other gamers, you chat about things you tried, how that worked out, how people responded, and we as a culture refine our toolbox.

* edit: I am specifically talking about things like Big Model & IIEE, my pal Panic Pillow made a post examining this concept from a more philosophical stance, which is an excellent read