I view the "establishment of situations" as an incorrect reading of the GM's role. They establish and populate a setting as a worldbuilder and separately animate the forces/people/things inside that setting. Situation is an emergent property of the interactions between those roles, the actions of the PCs and the results output by the system (which should encode the impact of actions separately from setting and actors; the GM role that should be most deprecated is GM-as-adjudicator).
By “establish situation”, I refer to situational authority. When the players say they are going into the dungeon, it’s the GM’s job to describe what they see. When they go into a bar looking for a contact, it’s the GM’s job to describe who is there and how the contact behaves as they approach. This is sometimes referred to as “scene framing”. My point is players are responsible for their characters and what they do. They don’t frame scenes or contribute content beyond the changes effected by their characters’ actions. The GM is in charge of adjudication but also frame scenes so that play can happen. A fully systemic approach would remove that authority from the GM, but I expect that would make for play that is considerably less flexible. It seems very similar to what adventure board games like
Middara do.
Don’t get me wrong, I like
Middara. I picked it up at Origins a few years ago and backed Act 2 and 3 when they opened it up. We play it in off weeks when we don’t have a full group. It’s a lot of fun, but your agency as a player is pretty limited. You can choose how you gear and build your character, whether to do side encounters, and your tactics during an encounter. That’s pretty much it. There’s no GM, but there’s no need for one because even the monsters are automated with AI cards.
Once you move directly to situations, you necessarily conflate the GM's roles, and run into questions about agency, though you're clearly working on another angle to resolve that. I think you run into a trade-off of immersion, in exchange for hopefully getting something stronger than a GM's professional responsibility to separate actions taken while embodying different roles.
There is a conflict of interests that people have recognized since the start of the hobby (if not before). Again, another quote from
The Elusive Shift.
As many would soon point out, the simulation implied by realism transitions poorly to the realm of fantasy, but the designers of D&D nonetheless strove for a system that represented magic and monsters in a balanced way, preserving the logic of the fantasy literature that these systems emulated. But it might be said that its rules opted for playability over realism: no design could hope to encompass all of the situations that might arise in a fantasy game like D&D, especially a game that hoped to simulate people and not just wars. So the rulebook explicitly authorized the referee to alter the design, and with that D&D created an opportunity for referee bias that could not be governed by mere dice.
This necessarily brought the neutrality of the referee into doubt. In 1976, Kevin Slimak reaffirmed Phillies’s tenet that, “really, D&D is a game between the dungeonmasters and the players; they are the two sides. The dungeon designer sets the problems for his adventurers and they try to solve them.” But Slimak further recognized that this creates a peculiar conflict of interest for the referee: “Remember this when you run your game. You are playing with/against the adventurers, true, but you have ALL the advantages. If you use all these advantages, you’ll get those players, for SURE, but in the long run, you lose. Doing this will kill off your game for sure” (AW 3 (7)). This power imbalance would persuade many that D&D could not be played as a wargame and that it was instead the foundational entry in a new game category.
Excerpt From
The Elusive Shift
Jon Peterson
Arts & Entertainment · 2020
books.apple.com
This material may be protected by copyright.
A common solution to this problem is for the GM to do sufficient prep and stick to that prep. The prep may be biased, and there is a risk you may bias play towards your prep, but since it is prepared ahead of time, it can conceivably be done in a fair way. So I don’t have an issue with prep. I use it to help me have things to say, and the things in my prep are fixed. What I prep are facts. This dungeon is here, those people are there. What I don’t prep are possibilities. Who will do what is speculation not fact. Anyway, given that I want to hold lightly to my prep and want to keep it limited in certain ways (as noted above) while still providing for adversity and conflict, I need the system to help me out. It’s a complement to prep (and handles things that prep cannot such as how a given situation will resolve).
Since it’s a new page, I’ll again link my
recaps, which are actual sessions run using my homebrew system. For the most part, there’s not much about my homebrew system that’s theoretical (and when there is, I try to be transparent that something is an untested idea). I have an
MVP, which I iterate. It’s playable, though some bits (like encounter tables and some monsters) are taken from Old-School Essentials and Basic D&D. It’s really nice being able to find out right away in a session whether and how something works. Some parts are fairly stable, but I’m still working on getting skills to the right place (more issues described
here).
