GM rulings and GM fiat rest at two ends of a single spectrum.

On one end of the spectrum you have GM decisions that are completely disconnected from the existing rules. These are examples of clear GM fiat and the same decision would be made regardless of what rule system the GM was using or even if there were no rules at all.

On the other end of the spectrum you have a very simple and straightforward ruling: The players want to do X. There is a rule for X. We will use the rule to determine X.

In between you have a broad spectrum of gray.

For example, let’s consider the case of jumping across a crevasse. At one end of the scale you have pure fiat: The GM says “yes, you can” or “no, you can’t” based on his desire for them to do so, his whim, or somesuch. At the other end of the scale you have the simple application of 3E’s jumping rule: The GM simply picks up the rule, applies it, and determines whether or not the action is a success.

In between you might have OD&D, which lacks a clear rule for jumping. So the GM says, “He has a Dex of 15. He could probably make this jump easily, so yes.” That seems to still clearly be a ruling; the GM is simply figuring out how to apply the mechanics in a situation for which a clear rule does not exist.

Heading further into the gray we have thinking like: “His character background says that he was an Olympic track athlete, so it makes sense that he should be able to make this jump.” or “Last week he wasn’t able to jump over that pit and this crevasse is even wider, so it makes sense that he won’t be able to make this jump.” Are those rulings or fiat? It’s getting a little harder to judge. (Is the latter a ruling based on a previous fiat? Or just more fiat?)

Another way you can draw the distinction is that it is very easy for rulings to become rules; it is difficult or impossible for fiat to do so.

For example, in a case of pure fiat (where I say “yes, he can jump that crevasse because I say so”) it is very difficult to then make an informed ruling based on that fiat. At the purely local level it probably means I’ll decide that the character can make that same jump again, but whether or not that will have any wider applicability will probably still depend on some arbitrary decision-making.

On the other hand, the more concrete the ruling the easier it is to begin applying it as a rule. For example, if I say “he has a Dex of 15, so he can make the jump”, then it’s relatively easy to apply that as a rule and decide that, yes, the character with a Dex of 16 can also easily make the jump.

If I go even further and base the ruling on something like “I’ll say that you can jump 2 feet for every point of Dex”, then it’s very easy to simply treat that as a rule going forward.

A third way of looking at this is through the lens of consistency: The easier it is to reapply the same decision in a consistent fashion across multiple situations (because it’s based on some sort of meaningful criteria), the more likely it is that the decision is a ruling. The more difficult it is to do so, the more likely it is that the decision is fiat.

Which is one of the reasons why I say that a properly structured rule facilitates rulings.

My next PC:

Taciturn the Dwarf.

So old that he claims the word comes from his name.

(I think he might be a little grumpy.)

Tom Bissell says that “Superman games are legendarily bad” and asks the question:

What comprises interesting gameplay for a character that is essentially immortal?

What Bissell is inadvertently touching on here is the fact that — with the exception of puzzle games and sports simulators — virtually every video game in existence is fundamentally rooted in either D&D, Space Invaders, or both. And what both D&D and Spacer Invaders have in common (and thus virtually every video game ever made has in common) is that they define success as “killing the bad guy” and they define failure as “you die”.

(Technically, it would be more accurate to say Spacewar! instead of Space Invaders, but everybody knows what Space Invaders is and almost no one knows what Spacewar! is. And, of course, there are endless variations on the “kill” and “die” conditions. But I digress…)

So, yes, as long as you intrinsically define gameplay as “either you die or the bad guy dies”, designing a Superman game that doesn’t suck is going to be pretty much impossible. And, unfortunately, Superman doesn’t seem to easily lend himself to blended puzzle or sim gameplay. (For example, the original Prince of Persia: Sands of Time largely eliminated the kill-or-die mechanics, but it did so by introducing puzzle-style gameplay.)

Another option might be making the goals of the game exterior to Superman as a character. (In other words, you can still fail at your goals even if there’s never any real chance that your avatar in the game will die.) What probably won’t work well, however, would be simply pushing the kill-or-die mechanics onto secondary characters. (An entire game of escort quests featuring Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen? Kill me now.)

I’m not going to pretend to have the magical solution. But open question: What alternative forms of gameplay could a Superman game use that would be fun to play?

From At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson:

Meanwhile, not everyone was happy with the loss of open hearths. Many people missed the drifting smoke and were convinced they had been healthier when kept “well kippered in smoke”, as one observer put it… Above all, people complained that they weren’t nearly as warm as before, which was true. Because fireplaces were so inefficient, they were constantly enlarged. Some became so enormous that they were built with benches in them, letting people sit inside the fireplace, almost the only place in the house where they could be really warm.

Not much to add here except to say that the idea of a fireplace so large that it has benches inside of it sounds like exactly the sort of thing that I would add to a fantasy campaign in order to give it a touch of the “unworldly”. (Or just flat-out gonzo-ness if I’m not feeling pretentious.)

But apparently history has beaten me to the punch.

So let’s punch it up a notch: We’ll put the same architecture into a giant’s castle, resulting in a fireplace so large that entire trees are rooted up and thrown in whole. Often the leaves are left right on the trees, creating thick smokes. But the giants don’t seem to mind, and even ascribe various medicinal or hallucinogenic qualities to the leaves of various tree-stocks. (And perhaps there’s truth for it as far as the giants are concerned.)

From At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson:

What never fails to astonish at Skara Brae is the sophistication. These were the dwellings of Neolithic people, but the houses had locking doors, a system of drainage, and even, it seems, elemental plumbing with slots in the walls to sluice away wastes. The interiors were capacious. The walls, still standing, were up to ten feet high, so they afforded plenty of headroom, and the floors were paved. Each house has built-in stone dressers, storage alcoves, boxed enclosures presumed to be beds, water tanks, and damp courses that would have kept the interiors snug and dry… Covered passageways ran between the houses and led to a paved open area — dubbed “the marketplace” by early archaeologists — where tasks could be done in a social setting.

Life appears to have been pretty good for the Skara Brae residents. They had jewelry and pottery… The one thing they lacked was wood. They burned seaweed for warmth, and seaweed makes a most reluctant fuel, but that chronic challenge for them was good news for us. Had they been able to build their houses of wood, nothing would remain of them and Skara Brae would have gone forever unimagined.

It is impossible to overstate Skara Brae’s rarity and value. Prehistoric Europe was a largely empty place. As few as two thousand people may have lived in the whole of the British Isles fifteen thousand years ago. By the time of Skara Brae, the number had risen to perhaps twenty thousand, but that is still just one person per three thousand acres, so to come across any sign of Neolithic life is always an excitement. It would have been pretty exciting even then.

What really caught my imagination in all that is that final sentence: The idea that it would have been exciting to suddenly discover this incredibly rare pocket of civilization in a world untamed.

I’m hardly the first person to suggest that the historical Skara Brae be used as inspiration for fantasy gaming (it notably appears in both The Bard’s Tale and Ultima). But what I am strongly tempted to explore right now is not so much a “points of light” setting, but a point of light setting: The elder races have drawn back into iconoclastic isolationism (the elves in mysterious, fey-drenched forests; the dwarves into citadels deep beneath the earth — the former dangerous for mortal races; the latter forgotten) and humanity is nothing more than a thin smear across the surface of the world.

And it’s not that it’s a long, long journey from Skara Brae to the next point of light: It’s that there are no other points of light. Not in the British Isles anyway. The grandparents or perhaps the great-grandparents of the PCs had this idea about settling down and it seems to be working out, but what little humanity there is (and there’s not much of it) is still almost entirely nomadic.

Monsters, on the other hand? Oh. There are a lot of those. Good luck.