Fear of Making a Ruling

Many modern games instill this "fear of making a ruling" in referees, and some games I read give referees no room to even make one. D&D 4 felt like this to me. We came away from that game with the feeling that all the referee did was read the text in the highlighted box, set up the monsters, play the monsters, and lay out the map for the next room.

The referee was a "play" button on a DVD player or a streaming service movie remote.

Also, the more rules a game has, the less the referee has to do. Some games barely need a referee, and many have solo-play modes, which are the game. The more "referee advice" a game pushes, the less free a referee feels to make a ruling. There are good general guidelines, but I don't see a few hundred pages of referee advice being needed.

In the first version of D&D we played, there was barely a page or two describing who the DM was and what they did. Since then, referee advice has grown, and now we need 500 pages explaining how to do something that was supposed to be simple and straightforward. Somewhere along the way, the art of refereeing a game becomes one thing, and today, it feels more like a training manual for managers instead of enabling creativity. Please play the game however the company requires you to, or the game will be unfun, and you will disappoint your players. Thank you.

These thoughts came up when I read about the corruption and sanity systems for the new Amazing Adventures game. Many games have these systems, basically "referee tracking systems" about various aspects of the character. They are also intended to "soften the blow" of a mechanic like a "save or die" sort of "save versus insanity" monster attack. Back in the old days, monsters did all kinds of nasty things to characters, save or die, turn to stone, level drain, rust away gear, burrow their way into the brain or heart for instant death in a few turns, and so many terrible effects pulled from horror movies.

We never needed "soft" tracking systems. While I appreciate them in the game, and they support the Cthulhu-genre play, things were much more harsh and absolute back then. They are here to help the Cthulhu genre; things were much harsher and more brutal, and they relied more on referee judgment. In AA, the corruption mechanic relies on the total mental damage taken. The system feels like a slow progression over 20+ levels, more than a system intended for a faster play experience. If used as-is, I would speed this up a little and tweak it to be a little more like the ones in horror games.

In Shadows of the Demon Lord, corruption is tracked per act and bumped up by one for each committed. The effects get progressively worse and can be reversed by repentance. There is a random chance for a "corruption manifestation" to appear. This system feels better to me, and in the old days, we would just "borrow it" for our AD&D game and keep playing. If the Rolemaster "Arms Law" felt like a better combat system, we would use that for AD&D, too.

In older games, "making a ruling" included "borrowing systems from other games." In today's games, you almost feel forbidden to do anything like that. It is a good thing Amazing Adventures and Castles & Crusades are built to be "hacker games" like the ones in the old days; if you find a system you want to drop in and use or mod the rules in any way, you are free to go ahead and do it.

Soft tracking systems also sometimes break. I have had things I should have known happen, but they did not occur because the game's internal soft-tracking system prevented them. You must be brave enough to override what the game tells you to do and just say, "It happens."

If you feel it should happen, it happens.

And then you move on.

Never revisit, try to hack the soft-tracker, make the game work the way you should feel it should, or try to change the rules. You should trust yourself 100% of the time, make the ruling, and move on. This is true for every internal tracking system a game gives you for sanity, corruption, reputation, fame, renown, kingdom score, distrust, diplomatic factor, or any other numeric system the game provides to track some soft factor often hidden from the players.

There are times I feel a simple journal works better than all of these systems, and you can look back through the events of the campaign and say, "This event made the party more famous," and "That event corrupted these farmlands." You don't need soft-trackers since your journal lists things that happened, and you can make rulings on "what logically happens next" for each of them. You can also notice patterns and increase the effects of repeated actions, like a thief who always gets caught stealing from shopkeepers in an area (or a thief who never gets caught, and the shopkeepers start to take notice of things missing).

Most of the time, keeping a simple journal will beat any numeric soft-tracking system games try to introduce and produce much better (and varied) results that create a dynamic sandbox and game history.