The role of the GM

[Cybren]

On another forum someone made a thread conjecturing that unclear rules are 'unfair' to players and empower 'tyrannical' DMs to abuse their players. You can probably tell by my use of quotations that I don't share that persons opinion, but I'm curious what other people think of the idea of GMs as neutral interpreters of a 'complete' rules system rather than arbiters of rules in their own right. Something the person said to me (before getting increasingly hostile that I don't share his opinion) stuck out as just flat out wrong:

The DM's primary job is not to be a rules arbiter, but to design or manage the campaign, control the NPCs, and keep everything moving. The rules should stand on their own. Any situation that the rules don't cover is a hole in the rules. There will be some of these in any edition, since players can take infinite actions. But when literally everything anyone tries is subject to DM approval or interpretation, that's a big freaking problem.

emphasis theirs.

[ericthered]

some facts:

• The GM's job is to do everything that absolutely requires a neutral third party on site. Everything else is ideally handed off to someone else.
• The world is not ideal and the GM may end up doing more than that. This is not a terrible problem if you have a good GM.
• Good GM's are precious and requires someone who enjoys the process of facilitating play.

[Stormcrow]

What a GM does has changed over the years in subtle ways. With the initial release of D&D the game had almost no rules on purpose, because the GM was expected to use the principle of Free Kriegsspiel: he rules everything by deciding what should happen, dispassionately and according to his expert knowledge of the realities of the game world (which he made up).

As time went on and more and more rules got added to games, the GM started to become a mere rules-engine, applying published rules with little of his own judgment in use. Oh, these rule books told the GM to change rules they didn't like, but it was implicit that once changed, the GM would follow those rules.

A game like GURPS favors the GM-as-game-engine mode. It's got rules for everything, and the players have access to all the rules. The GM need merely apply them. You CAN insert GM judgment in what happens, but you typically have to remove pieces of the rules to do it. GURPS is very forgiving of this; there are few rules that can't be replaced with GM rulings. Some other games make this more difficult.

[Cybren]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

A game like GURPS favors the GM-as-game-engine mode. It's got rules for everything, and the players have access to all the rules. The GM need merely apply them. You CAN insert GM judgment in what happens, but you typically have to remove pieces of the rules to do it. GURPS is very forgiving of this; there are few rules that can't be replaced with GM rulings. Some other games make this more difficult.

I would argue that GURPS doesn't relegate the GM to being a simple "game engine" due to the number of abilities that are explicitly dependent on the GM's judgement, or at the very least, GM-player negotiation.

[robkelk]

It looks to me that the person who was quoted in the original post wants a set of rules applied exactly and consistently, as if a computer was running the game. To that, I'll offer a misquote: Any GM that can be replaced by a machine, should be!

The GM isn't there only to apply the rules. She's also there to referee, to keep the plot moving, to present challenges that test the PCs without being insurmountable, and - most importantly, IMHO - to make sure that everybody (including the GM) is having fun. Sometimes that means adhering strictly to the rules, sometimes that means chucking the rules out the window and winging it. The trick is knowing which of those applies at any given time, and a computer can't do that (yet).

[Brandy]

You could probably just search for banned forum poster Peter Kneutson (um...spelling?). That was his mantra and you can read a lot of countervailing opinions. He was pretty much the only person who was so absolutist about it - so much so that I wonder if your mystery poster is him.

[Cybren]

Originally Posted by Bookman

You could probably just search for banned forum poster Peter Kneutson (um...spelling?). That was his mantra and you can read a lot of countervailing opinions. He was pretty much the only person who was so absolutist about it - so much so that I wonder if your mystery poster is him.

I do recall Peter Knuetson (and his oft-referenced RPG Sagatfl, I think it was?), but I don't quite believe these are the same people... could be, but who knows

[cptbutton]

Originally Posted by Bookman

You could probably just search for banned forum poster Peter Kneutson (um...spelling?). That was his mantra and you can read a lot of countervailing opinions. He was pretty much the only person who was so absolutist about it - so much so that I wonder if your mystery poster is him.

Peter Knutsen

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by Cybren

I would argue that GURPS doesn't relegate the GM to being a simple "game engine" due to the number of abilities that are explicitly dependent on the GM's judgement, or at the very least, GM-player negotiation.

That's not really what I mean. Let's take a specific example. In a game, a character wants to leap across a 12-foot chasm with a running start. In (original) D&D, the referee looks at the character's Strength and Dexterity, maybe rolls a die to look busy, and decides either yes, the character makes the leap, or no, he falls in. In GURPS, the player can point to his character's Basic Move of 5 and page 352 of the Basic Set and tell the GM, "Unless there's something going on that I don't know about, I can make that jump." The GM can either agree and apply the rule mechanically, or he can disagree and arbitrary change the rules just to be a jerk. Assuming he hadn't led the players to believe beforehand that the jumping rules weren't going to be followed. In other words, he's just plugging in rules and reporting outcomes.

I'm not saying all GURPS GMs do this. I'm just saying that the more rules being used in a game, the less a GM gets to decide for himself. The earliest RPGs expected the GM to just make up reasonable stuff; later RPGs tend to bake that stuff into the rules, making the GM more of a rules-implementer than a judge.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Cybren

On another forum someone made a thread conjecturing that unclear rules are 'unfair' to players and empower 'tyrannical' DMs to abuse their players. You can probably tell by my use of quotations that I don't share that persons opinion, but I'm curious what other people think of the idea of GMs as neutral interpreters of a 'complete' rules system rather than arbiters of rules in their own right. Something the person said to me (before getting increasingly hostile that I don't share his opinion) stuck out as just flat out wrong:



emphasis theirs.

This argument strikes me as less one about the role of the GM and more about the role of rules. That is, if you have to step in and fix the rules, are they any good? My answer is: No, they aren't... depending on what you're talking about.

As a principle, you should try to write your rulesets in a complete manner. You shouldn't say "Here's some theory, now go do the hard work!" For example, GURPS High Tech does all the hard work of figuring out the exact stats of guns for you, and giving you the rules necessary to cover weird situations. We think that's good. GURPS Spaceships doesn't cover how to deal with ships that are between SMs very well; we call that bad, because we have to step in and "cover that hole."

However, I believe that rules are tools. At the end of they day, they do not create gameplay, they facilitate the GM and the players in creating gameplay. Your job as a writer is to help them. That does mean trying to be as complete as possible: if you open a ruleset and it outlines everything for you and practically runs the game on its own, that's much easier than a ruleset that requires a ton of homework. On the other hand, it tends to be very constrained. Compare and contrast GURPS with D&D 4e. GURPS will not "run your game for you" and takes far more work than D&D 4e, but you can do a ton more with GURPS than D&D 4e. Does that mean D&D 4e is a better game than GURPS? I think most people on this forum would vociferously disagree, because GURPS does a better job of helping them create the gameplay that they want than D&D 4e does.

So sometimes, your job is to point a GM in a direction, offer some inspiration and some theory and then let him go. This is often the case in NPC design, for example, where you don't want to hardcode all of the possible NPCs into the ruleset ("What?! A princess who can also fight! Inconceivable!" is not what a ruleset should be saying). But sometimes you want to be pretty explicit in what you're trying to do and cover as much material as possible (When researching a topic and presenting it in a supplement ala GURPS High Tech or Low-Tech), or when creating a gameplay framework (like GURPS Dungeon Fantasy; you need to have a really good idea of what spells are available and which aren't, and what point level starting characters will be, etc).

To say that a ruleset "must be as complete as possible" is too narrow a view, likely focused completely on that "create a gameplay framework" element. For example, in your very quote, he even says that it's up to the GM to create the NPCs. He's right, but if a ruleset was "as complete as possible" it would do that for you too, and we don't actually want that. He might snort and say that he means "Within reason" and to "apply common sense," but sometimes "the obvious" needs to be said, because it's not always obvious to everyone, or it reveals underlying principles that people take for granted without understanding.