Rule of cooll/funny are sinful thinking and as such a thought crime.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;501055Things you've declared to be "part of the scenario":

- Simulationist elements
- Rule of Cool
- Rule of Funny

And things you've declared to be "beyond the scenario":

- Ruining the prepared scenario

I suspect the problem at this point is that there doesn't seem to be any clear definition of what "beyond the scenario" means to you.

A definition by analogy: A judge makes a ruling on a case. If the facts of the case justify the ruling, it's not fiat. If the judge makes a ruling from his own authority, rather than the facts of the case, it's fiat. (generally not allowed in most legal systems)

Things that might be pertinent to a case: The facts of what happened. The written law. Precedent. Testimony.

Things that might affect a ruling that aren't pertinent to the case: The judge's desire to get this case out of the way quickly. The judge's personal distaste for a party involved. The judge's preference for an outcome based on his political or religious leanings. The judge's desire for an exciting case. The judge's desire to be re-elected or re-appointed. The judge's desire to avoid extra paperwork.

In the case of an RPG, the judge is the DM and the scenario is the case he's ruling on.

I think it'd be easier to just say that "GM fiat" doesn't parse well under some RPG systems and some roleplaying paradigms.

In practice where I've seen it used, as opposed to theoretical nitpicking, it's either been:

1. Talking about the lack of a resolution system for significant outcomes, so that the ultimate determination is based on pure GM judgment--especially if there aren't any satisfactory guidelines for making the judgment. E.g. way back in 1990 I was bitching about the style of GMing where PCs couldn't die except if, in the GM's opinion, they did something stupid. Otherwise the mechanics and everything else could be overruled and fudged to keep PCs from dying.

The complaint implicit in the term "GM fiat" makes sense in a paradigm where tactical decision making and weighing of relative risks is part of the game. Possibly not in other paradigms.

2. More recently, I've mostly seen the term coming from Forge/story-game quarters (and even then, a few years ago) where the closest I could parse it was that the entire discussion was based on experience with heavily-plotted/storified scenario construction and GMing, and little experience with anything else. As a result the term was mainly a complaint/critique of the fact that players never really had much influence on their characters' destiny or the outcome of the scenarios. It was assumed that the rules, PC actions, "facts" (both known and hidden) of the scenario, would always be overruled by GM rulings as much as was needed to keep the scenario on track. Or at least to preserve a certain dramatic structure, even if the details changed. (For example, if the villain was accidentally killed in "act one", the GM would change things around so that he was really only a henchman of the real bad guy.)

If a game is played from a simulationist perspective, both (1) and (2) are still operative concepts. But if the game is played from a collaborative story perspective, "GM fiat" breaks down as a concept--especially if the game doesn't allow anyone to make a final declaration of fact without challenge. For example in Polaris, even if we overlook the fact that the GM function is diffused among the players and rotates, anything the GM-of-the-moment ("the Mistaken") says can ultimately be submitted to a die roll. Basically the same applies to any "stakes-setting" game. Furthermore, it's taken for granted that people are saying stuff just to screw with the PC, or because it sounds cool. Under this paradigm, you don't really have (1) or (2). At most you have a crappy spaz of a GM, just as players can also be horrible. Even if the GM has a traditional function under the formal rules of a game, once everyone buys into the idea that it's the GM's responsibility & prerogative to make cool things happen, as pretty much the GM's only purpose, with "cool" understood in terms of the group, then a bad GM is just a bad GM just like a bad player is someone who messes up the group vibe. The issue of power imbalance implicit in "GM fiat" falls away.

Harrumph. I dislike leaving important terms under erasure. I think I can define 'fiat' sufficiently. Combining it with GM means it depends on what, exactly, the GM does - and that function changes from game to game, group to group. I can describe what a GM does in my playstyle, or in idealized playstyles, but that's not super useful when the rubber meets the road.

Quote from: Settembrini;501061Rule of cooll/funny are sinful thinking and as such a thought crime.

I normally stay away from rule of cool, but that's all the people I'm running for are about. One of them is playing an antipaladin of Aries who travelled the world to learn it's fighting arts. He fights with paired nunchucks, paired hand crossbows, and a whip... But he still has hoplite armor on. His weapons are fixed on his waist like a utility belt.