How Did RPGA Handle Ambiguous Rules?

[The Shining Fool]

It seems to me that a lot of discussions that insist on absolute granularity use PFS as the reason. DMs in PFS aren't allowed to just make judgement calls. They have to use RAW.

(I don't know if those statements are true. I don't really do PFS. It's just what I've gathered hanging out on the boards.)

But earlier versions of the game were a lot more ambiguous than PF, and they still had organized play. How on earth did the RPGA handle things like 2nd Ed.'s "Hide in Shadows?" How were shadows defined?

Did the GMs just have more leeway?

[Vincent Takeda]

Yes. If you look at a lot of the games of that time period most of them were founded on the principal of rule zero... Anything that wasnt clearly defined or had some leeway in interpretation was left to the gm to interpret...

The onus on the gm to make fair and fun judgements in those scenarios lives on today: if your players think you're rulings are unfair or unfun, they won't soon let you run another game.

The dearth of people willing to 'run a game' instead of 'play the game' coupled with the vast array of people who were happy to be players if they couldn't run things with an iron fist regardless of player approval meant that there were a ton of players and very few gms, while most of those gms still got to run things with an iron fist...

which they did...

so players got very used to having evil crazy killer gms with napoleon and/or inferiority complexes... players demanded systems that were less dependant on the fiat of gm's they disagreed with, and unfortunately the newer, much more specific and nuanced rules put to page have in equal measure a vast array of nuances and incongruities equal to those that would have been solved by fair or unfair gm fiat... The modern systems do not appear to, at the end of the day, promise to deliver on the request for rules that are any more hard or fast or fiat-based than the older rules... Sometimes they are unintentionally uncomprehensive or abusable or vague... Other times the language is intentionally vague.

Only now gms feel like the language gives them something to lean on supporting their beliefs while players ALSO feel like the language gives them somet5hing to lean on supporting their conflicting beliefs. This gives birth to an active and dynamic forum culture where hundreds or thousands of players who still adamantly care about the game and the system rage about minutiae and wait with bated breath for the publisher to play what was once the role of the gm. The 'Final Arbiter'... 'Final word'... 'Published intent'... etc....

TLDR: Yes. GM's used to make the call. It did not always go well... It still does not always go well... The voices of dissent are now simply able to reach a wider audience through the forums than they used to simply arguing amongst the few gaming groups they knew 'back in the day'. The new systems and rules mostly do not make any better or worse the specifics of the rules that folks might expect to have been ironed out. The new rules are not written to solve arguments or make specific the intent of the publishers any more than they ever used to be, and in fact often create new nuances and conflicts by giving each side a niblet of linguistics to ardently latch onto in their own defense, clarifying nothing. Fiat is still king. Always know your dealer.

Only society play is an example of a publisher putting its foot down in defense of a unified set of judgements, but still then they do not profess that the rules they've adopted for unified society play are necessarily the publishers intended stance on the rules they themselves printed...

[Jiggy]

The Shining Fool wrote:

(I don't know if those statements are true. I don't really do PFS. It's just what I've gathered hanging out on the boards.)

And then you said it, so the next person who can't be bothered to fact-check is that much more likely to gather the same idea from the boards.

But you could have looked at the free PDF of the Guide to Organized Play and how it says that GMs are expected to exercise common sense in their interpretations of the rules.

Or you could go to the PFS sections of the boards where actual PFS participants discuss PFS topics, and see that almost every GM ever has a policy of "Unless this is life or death, either let it go, or very briefly make your case and then accept my ruling until we either take a break or finish the game, then we can verify without holding up the game."

From there, you could then draw the conclusion that maybe PFS GMs are allowed to make judgment calls when appropriate, and then your question disappears.

Alternatively, you could just accept a smattering of comments on the internet from people who may not even have ever played PFS at all as being probably true, not bother to verify, and then wonder how a campaign could function like that.

[thejeff]

Jiggy wrote:

The Shining Fool wrote:

(I don't know if those statements are true. I don't really do PFS. It's just what I've gathered hanging out on the boards.)

And then you said it, so the next person who can't be bothered to fact-check is that much more likely to gather the same idea from the boards.

But you could have looked at the free PDF of the Guide to Organized Play and how it says that GMs are expected to exercise common sense in their interpretations of the rules.

Or you could go to the PFS sections of the boards where actual PFS participants discuss PFS topics, and see that almost every GM ever has a policy of "Unless this is life or death, either let it go, or very briefly make your case and then accept my ruling until we either take a break or finish the game, then we can verify without holding up the game."

From there, you could then draw the conclusion that maybe PFS GMs are allowed to make judgment calls when appropriate, and then your question disappears.

Alternatively, you could just accept a smattering of comments on the internet from people who may not even have ever played PFS at all as being probably true, not bother to verify, and then wonder how a campaign could function like that.

That's all very true and important, but it doesn't really change the thrust of the question: AD&D was much less rigidly defined and had a lot more gray areas than PF does. And PFS has even more of an emphasis on strict RAW (even though the GM will have to make judgement calls on occasion) than the rest of the PF game does.

How did the earlier organized play campaigns handle the larger and more common judgement calls that must have existed?
I don't know. I only played in home games back then. I'd love to hear from anyone with actual experience, particularly running, but also playing, back in the RPGA days. Or even earlier in the "tournament modules" of the early days.

[LazarX]

thejeff wrote:

That's all very true and important, but it doesn't really change the thrust of the question: AD&D was much less rigidly defined and had a lot more gray areas than PF does. And PFS has even more of an emphasis on strict RAW (even though the GM will have to make judgement calls on occasion) than the rest of the PF game does.

How did the earlier organized play campaigns handle the larger and more common judgement calls that must have existed?
I don't know. I only played in home games back then. I'd love to hear from anyone with actual experience, particularly running, but also playing, back in the RPGA days. Or even earlier in the "tournament modules" of the early days.

I will try to answer the best that I can from my experience in GMing Living City, Living Greyhawk, Living Arcanis, Legends of the Shining Jewel, and Living Death.

AD+D was actually more rigidly designed than the later incarnations, the important difference was simply there really wasn't the ton of builder options that 3.0 and later introduced. You built a fighter, or one of the other based classes or you ran a demi-human with it's equally rigid choices of multi-class. You didn't have feats, traits, archetypes, and a whole bunch of other things to monkey with class wise, as pretty much the only variation was in how ability points were arranged and some skill point allocation in the later iterations of pre 3.0. Even with 3.X, the living campaigns were generally much slower to adopt rules expansions than the PFS campaign.

Even more important, it was the Pre-Internet age where every decision made at a gaming table wasn't brought up to a messageboard for fact-checking or the soapbox of public appeal and rant. If anything the Internet above all else, is the determinant factor of why things are so different now. The explosion of builder options is a close second. Pathfinder arguably has considerably more builder options than 3.5 did, and more options can be applied to a single character.

The Judges of those days were expected to run their tables with a reasonable amount of discretion. For ambiguous judgements they made a call and if there was a dispute it would be resolved with the convention or game day coordinator. Despite what this messageboard's general level of hysteria may imply, it isn't really that much different experience for me in running PFS tables. If there is an issue, I'll usually call on Santana or any other PFS Venture officer I can grab ahold of and that usually ends it. (I've never had to take it further than that to date.)