Author: Peter Knutsen (---.tele.dk)
Date: 11-06-2003 09:24
"What are the rules for that?"
"There aren't any rules. I just decide stuff as I go."
While it is perfectly permissible, even desirable, to change the rules of a roleplaying gaming campaign, they must be changed before the game begins. And there *must* *be* rules.
Trying to play a roleplaying gaming game without rules gives the GM an insane amount of power over the events in the game world, enabling him to shove stories down the player's throats - the stories he, a single individual, feels should be told.
As the rules are made more thorough and objective, the huge power gap between the GM and the players is made smaller, and the players come on a more and more equal footing with the GM.
Of course the rules must be good, for this principle to have any worth. Being forced between no rules or bad rules is like being asked what you'd rather suffer, the black plague or cholera. Me? Neither!
One can't make rules for everything. While that is never to be taken as an argument for not having rules at all, or not caring about rules quality, when the GM does need to make improvised rulings, he should always take the relevant traits of the involved characters into account. It seems to me perfectly sensible, in a campaign where characters have superHuman Strength - either all the time, because they are superHumans, or else temporarily due to Strength-enhancing magic - to make a simple, general ruling about how much Strength you need to rip a door off its hinges.
If the GM is allowed to decide each such instance on an ad hoc basis, instead of being froced to formulate a general rule, then he has the power to, in one session, let a relatively weak character (like Strength 24), rip off a very heavy door, breaking tempered steel hinges in the process, for the sole reason that the GM wants the character to be able to be on the other side of that door. It suits the story that the GM feels should be told.
Then some sessions later, the GM ad hoccily rules that a much stronger character, like Strength 30, can't do the same trick with a ligher door, with much weaker hinges. Again because wants or does not want something to happen. In this case, he feels that the story would be "better" if the character is unable to get on the other side of the door, even though the character is stronger than in the first case, and the door is weaker.
So of course the rules of the published game aren't unchangeable. But note the last word: They can be changed, but they can not be ditched. There must be rules.
The absence of rules elevates the GM to an intolerably powerful god-like position.
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