Quote:
Originally Posted by Lurken
But how would you interpret the two key quotes I found in the BETA? The GMs are encouraged, not told you can choose to be an adversary. And it may be a reason the adversarial GM-style has gone the way of the dodo. It is not fun and constructive for a long term campaign where all participants wants to have fun.
In v1, v2 and v3 (v2013), there are zero encouragement to be adversarial. It is all quite dry in that aspect. Only that during this and that condition, you are to roll on the encounter tables and resolve the results.
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In most games of a certain age, there's frankly zero encouragement or guidance of how to do much of
anything beyond roll dice on encounter tables. Whether this was because nobody had any idea of how to do otherwise, or that they wanted to sell more poorly conceived adventure supplements, I can't say. But, it that sure did lead to some boring and tedious gameplay when I was just getting started with RPGs in my teens. Might have been different if I had happened to know any amazing GMs, but those were much rarer then. The published materials didn't have much help to offer a rookie.
The GM shouldn't be adversarial, but they must
portray an adversary. They must be the
face of challenges. Maybe we're different, but I don't want to spend much time at all on a game that's just random encounter rolls. I want to play a game where the person doing most of the storyweaving actually has the tools to do that, where surprising things happen, and where they're tied to character moments that make them impactful. It's no surprise at all that one of the things OSR games have tended to add to their classic roots are things relating to character motives, and XP triggers beyond "you killed the baddies," and so on. These things make for interesting, surprising stories that feel collaborative. They were wholly absent from the original games.
There have been a few passages in the FL book regarding "how to run the game" that have made me shake my head a bit or think "Hm, that's not how I would do it."
(But quoting them out of context is just proving my point about the innate hostility here.) Several of those have now been edited after people such as myself pointed them out. Nonetheless I think it's far, far better for the game/hobby by far that books provide aspiring GMs with guidance and storytelling tools that are entwined with mechanics, which is what they're mostly doing these days.
Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.