This is a bit late, but more than that relatively incoherent. If you do manage to dig up some of the (I think) clever ideas underlying this piece, please let me know. Especially if you can articulate it better than I can.
“Freeform” is a pretty loaded term. Consider the fact that my interview with Sarah Kahn is about “freeform”, but clearly we use the same term to talk about a bunch of other things too. Today, I’m talking about one of those other uses. Specifically, when I use “freeform” in this entry, I’m talking about play that does not refer to a game text to provide authoritative structures.
Remember that all authority in roleplaying ultimately belongs to the players, so what we are actually talking about here is a ceding of authority to a rules text. The text simply has no authority on its own. Now there is nothing wrong with ceding authority to a rules text, and doing so actually has a number of benefits. But like most things in life there are trade-offs, and it is important to realize what we are giving up when we give authority to the rules.
Let us examine the upside first. One of the really great things that granting authority to the rules-text does for play is that, in a sense, it gives authority to a person who is not a member of your play group. Specifically, the the writer of the game. This, in turn, means that you get ideas put into play that you would not have come up with on your own.
Ceding authority to a game text also gives you a static authority. This means that everyone knows that they final authority is impartial. For instance, when we play Capes around here, if we are not sure about how a certain thing should be handled, we check the book. The book shows no favoritism, and it provides a certain amount of stability to the game.
Further, ceding authority to the game text makes the game somewhat universal. If I am familiar with a rules text, and I want to play with any other group that is using the same rules text as an authority, then I know pretty much what to expect. While some of the particulars may differ, I can expect the core experience to be the same in both groups because our ultimate authority is the same.
The biggest advantage that I have noticed is the first one I mentioned: giving authority to the rules-text introduces a sort of new life to your group’s play. It allows for some emergent play that just would not happen if your group was left to itself. It is important to note here that your group does not necessarily need that emergent factor. In fact, your group is full of good ideas already. Getting that emergent factor from outside your group is something of a bonus, and one that comes at a price.
One of the big things that freeform play does for you is that, since you are not ceding authority to an inflexible game text, you are able to evaluate where authority should be distributed in real time. There are a number of risks in doing this: sometimes you make worse decisions in real time than if you just stuck to the game text. That is, real-time evaluation of where to distribute authority is a skill, and sometimes it is better to be safe than sorry. (Of course, this introduces a curious paradox, as it is difficult to improve the skill if you do not pratice it.)
There are a lot of points that I would love to talk about regarding freeform in the sense I am using today, but this is already pretty long, so I will limit myself to a single major point:
When you cede authority to the rules, one of the things you do is set aside your immediate evaluation of what the group wants most. In a freeform game, when a question comes up about the rules, the evaluation criteria is “what does the group think would be best?” When you have ceded authority to the text, the evaluation criteria is “what does the text say”?
Of course you still evaluate “what does the group think would be best?” when you cede authority to the rules, but the tendency is to do it between sessions. “Should we keep playing with these rules?” is not something that tends to get asked mid-session unless something is going terribly wrong. When you play freeform, you evaluate the question of how to best achieve your goals on a moment-by-moment basis rather than a session-by-session basis.
The thing is, freeform is hard. The group must have a set of play goals that is compatible, and they must have at least an intuitive understanding of what those goals are and how best to achieve them. And there is an entire array of skills involved in evaluating what structures of play will best meet the group’s goals.
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Actually, I prefer rules-based over unruled, simply because unruled would never work with any group of gamers I’ve ever been a part of. It would degenerate into pure, highly unfun, chaos almost immediately.
That’s an important point: some groups simply operate better when there’s an absolute and (by nature) impartial authority. I mean Calvin-ball (”The only rule is you can’t play the same way twice”) is fun to talk about, but not so fun to play.
Still, I think that many groups can funcationally play without an authoritative text, it only takes a bit of collaborative spirit. However, like you said: just because a group can do something doesn’t make it more fun to do things that way.
Thomas