Now for the dark side of middle school gaming.
There used to be this bit in every White Wolf book. Or most of them. Remember our golden rule, it said. Take what you like, leave what you hate, and if the dice don’t give you a result that makes sense, forget them. Serve the story, not the rules.
Sometimes it was addressed to the Storyteller, the benevolent father-dom-god who rules over the characters’ lives like the Tick Tock Man. Sometimes, it was just there.
Innocent enough, yes? By the authority of the designer — and since the days of TSR, wasn’t that the highest authority? By that authority, you could change anything. Tell the Internet that something’s terribly wrong, that you don’t want your Ravnos gone in a week of nightmares… and that’s what they’ll tell you. Golden Rule.
Who does the golden rule serve, though? From there derives the authority of the Dungeon Master, yes… but was it ever intended for the hands of the Dungeon Submissive? Can the golden rule be a safe word, can it say “no, you cannot break my character for your story because I need him intact for mine?”
There’s another response, of course, also familiar. “Don’t play with groups you don’t get along with.” But that’s just a straw man, or, when the flames come, a wicker one. Because we all disagree sometimes. I can point you to the best, most cooperative, most creatively coherent group I’ve ever seen… and they still disagreed. Came to words, even, looked in rulebooks. But the book’s no defense, is it, not in the face of the golden rule.
The Dungeon Master does more work… supposedly. Does that entitle him alone to apply the golden rule? And if so, isn’t that a different golden rule: that he who owns the books, rules?
The golden rule is a storyteller rule to keep what works and discard what doesn’t. Players empower the storyteller with the golden rule and maintain for themselves only the power to suggest, not the authority to enforce.
Players sit down at a table because they think the storyteller is going to provide them an experience. By sitting down at the table, players entrust the storyteller with their characters and agree to abide by the storyteller’s decisions. In exchange, the storyteller has to provide them a wonderful experience, even at the cost of their own planned narrative. As the storyteller is the only one with knowledge of where the story is going and knowledge of how the players feel, it’s up to the storyteller to use the golden rule to keep their group moving and make the important calls.
Meh.
I don’t see this as a down-side, just an endorsement of a particular relationship between GM, players and rules– one that entrusts the GM with responsibility to act for the good of the group and empowers him correspondingly. That’s kind of at the core of the middle-school gaming experience, and it requires some elements of trust and maturity to do properly. Skill + Stat = Whatever the GM says.
(Digression: please, please find a better name than middle-school, because the games I played when I was in middle school were much more old school)
Some of my worst experiences with roleplaying gaming are directly connected to the golden rule.
It is fine as a thought, but if it leads to a group climate where there is no ‘legal security’, where you do not know if what you did one evening and it worked might work the next, then it is evil in its purest form.
I also noticed a trend: GMs who like to bolster their selfesteem by being vindictive little pricks while gaming LOVE the golden Rule, while any mature gaming group does not need it, because they find some kind of rules equilibrium anyway because they are able to discuss things without calling names or wasting time.
SOME of the apologias one sees for the Golden Rule and GM autocracy resemble the sorts of things abusive parents and spouses say:
“I do all the prep, so I make all the decisions.” “I work my fingers to the bone for this family so what I say goes!”
“I’m the only one without a selfish, limited perspective on the game.” “I have to do what’s best for the whole family because you only think of yourselves.”
“I didn’t kill your character. Your own stupidity did.” “Why are you hitting yourself??”
Players sit down at a table because they think the storyteller is going to provide them an experience. By sitting down at the table, players entrust the storyteller with their characters and agree to abide by the storyteller’s decisions. In exchange, the storyteller has to provide them a wonderful experience, even at the cost of their own planned narrative. As the storyteller is the only one with knowledge of where the story is going and knowledge of how the players feel, it’s up to the storyteller to use the golden rule to keep their group moving and make the important calls.
I think I deny every premise contained herein.
1. I’m not there as a player for a GM to provide me with an experience. I’m not there as a GM to provide one.
2. By sitting down at the table, I agree we’ll all bend our creative energies toward something wonderful.
3. The storyteller can’t be the only one “with knowledge of where the story is going,” because where the story is going is in the directions that player-character choices take it, and those choices will surprise GM and other players alike.
4. The one most certain thing in all of roleplaying is that the GM does not reliably know “how the players feel.”
Friedrich,
You say:
Some of my worst experiences with roleplaying gaming are directly connected to the golden rule.
But this:
It is fine as a thought, but if it leads to a group climate where there is no ‘legal security’, where you do not know if what you did one evening and it worked might work the next, then it is evil in its purest form.
. . . is about your relationship with other players and the GM.
This:
I also noticed a trend: GMs who like to bolster their selfesteem by being vindictive little pricks while gaming LOVE the golden Rule, while any mature gaming group does not need it, because they find some kind of rules equilibrium anyway because they are able to discuss things without calling names or wasting time.
. . . is also about your relationships.
The difference between the Golden Rule and not having the Golden Rule is the degree of self-deception on the part of a group. RPG rules adherence is highly spotty; when I took time to view D&D3e games in a semi-systematic way as a third party I discovered that the majority feature multiple critical errors — that means mistakes that would have probably changed outcomes. Most of them went unmentioned when they occurred, too.
Basically, your GM is almost certainly fucking up all the time and making shit up all the time. The Golden Rule allows the GM to take command of a state of affairs that is virtually inevitable.
When I bring this up people inevitably look for refuge in rules-light systems as being more error free, but in these situations the context and effects of systems is usually so flexible as to be more goalpost-switching for people making shit up without regard to any particular rules set.
The conclusion is basically that you liking or disliking human moderation really doesn’t matter much when it comes to whether it will happen. The Golden Rule allows you to stop pretending it is not happening.
Honestly, I cannot think of a situation more horrible than one where I felt the need for “legal security” as a precondition of an activity with my friends. When that is the relationship mode in real life that means you’re being divorced, sued or arrested. Even board games do not use rules in this fashion. Monopoly’s rules do not exist to prevent the other players from trapping you in jail.
Where the Golden Rule is problematic is that the conventional formulation does not attend to the reality of the game as a framework for mutual generosity, working with the consent and appreciation of all involved. 20 years ago, books characterized RPG players as shitheels, and figured the GM needs to be King Shitheel to create a semblance of order. 10 years ago, the big innovation is that all the shitheels at the table need to have prison gang style power sharing arrangements under the watchful eye of a textual prison.
The Golden Rule *should* be formulated as something like “The GM is authorized to make play more worthwhile for all participants by any means necessary.”
@Malcolm:
In the end ALL gaming with a group is about relationships.
But provisions the systems make (and i don’t talk whether or not they have byzantine attacks of oppurtunity or grappling rules) by supplying a underlying philosophy shapes the consensus.
Players who play Warhammer FRPG will be okay with fast-paced, unforgiving combat and generally trend towards getting a really bad deal. I don’T actually know what D&D sets as a philosophy but to storyteller it is: ‘Do what you want, that be your only law’ or ‘All that matters is a good gaming experience for everyone’.
I do not see the golden rule as an excuse for rules violations that happen anyway. That is solved depending on whether somebody is bothered by it or not and whether he decides to do something about it or not (and no amount of gold will keep a gamer from that once he has made up his mind (or thats how it should be)).
The golden Rule is the RPG equivalent of L’etat, c’est moi. The GM is no longer bound by the rules that bind the whole group, but is free to do as he pleases by word of God.
Granted that is a worst case scenario, but that is the only type of scenario where you get to see all flaws of something.
To a stable group with a stable ‘group contract’ the golden rule posses no problem and offers no help. To groups who lack this it is a catastrophe waiting to happen since in its purest from it only states that the GM can change rules as he sees fit. Not that those rules will than again apply to everybody, not that there needs to be consistency, not that fucking up your players is not included. I know that it is assumed unnecessary to state that that is bad manners, but the kind of GM who will need the golden rule in order to be able to break and bend rules… well, those types were not much good to begin with.
[c]Players sit down at a table because they think the storyteller is going to provide them an experience. By sitting down at the table, players entrust the storyteller with their characters and agree to abide by the storyteller’s decisions[/c]
I think this might be the reason for my most vitrolic hatred for players and my worst moments of dickishness as a GM.
If players come to the table waiting to be entertained while still routinely sinking every plot you put together and ignoring any sidequests or cool NPCs you start to be disappointed. Disappointment grows into disgust and disgust forments to hatred. And once somebody secretly hates his players and is deeply disappointed with his role as GM… it only goes downhill from there.
There might be those who can ‘sacrifice’ themselves for the group and still be positive and non.dickish about it, but i never met somebody like that. The closest i came was some guy who saw it as a kind of self-improvment on his way to becoming the perfect GM but that is a completly differnet story.
@Friecrich,
But provisions the systems make (and i don’t talk whether or not they have byzantine attacks of oppurtunity or grappling rules) by supplying a underlying philosophy shapes the consensus.
Players who play Warhammer FRPG will be okay with fast-paced, unforgiving combat and generally trend towards getting a really bad deal. I don’T actually know what D&D sets as a philosophy but to storyteller it is: ‘Do what you want, that be your only law’ or ‘All that matters is a good gaming experience for everyone’.
No, they do not. A text is incapable of “supplying” a structured set of beliefs by itself. It needs to be mediated by your opinions and influences, and the experience is as much a product of those as anything else. It sure makes some game designers feel important to think they supply with with the experience, but they don’t. They are influences, but
I think a lot of game designers agree with you about the Golden Rule just because they like they idea of being in charge of the play experience in a way they could not readily claim to be when there were more tabletop gamers around and more of a sense of power springing from the group, instead of books and forums and bullshit. There are also some transforming values that make this attitude attractive for players (and would-be players) but that’s a complicated topic.
As for the rest, you’re talking about experiences that an adult should not be sharing with other adults at a table. It’s like saying a book made punch somebody in the face. It can’t do that. The Golden Rule is about owning up to your own moral and creative agency instead of praising or blaming some text by itself. I cannot think of a shittier trend for games than to concentrate on depriving players of their power on the assumption of mutual hostility.
I disagree.
You should also note that most reloplayers don’t get to RPGs in full-formed state but during their formative years were they are quite a bit more impressable.