Whenever I criticize a game system for not having various options or for how those options work I tend to get certain responses and chief among them is "Well, when I asked to do this at my table, my GM just made a ruling and we rolled it."
That's fine, and arguably one of the most important jobs of GM as rules arbitrator, but it's not a solution and I'm tired of people treating it as such.
Recent tabletop design has pivoted towards offloading as much of these "rulings" onto the GM at the table instead of rules written by the designer. It is even touted as an advantage, that you can make this game yours!
This "design principle" leads to many problems. But I'm going to focus on one specific one, a particular bugbear that I think almost every TTRPG participant can agree with.
When you decide to grapple the magic wand out of the evil wizard’s hand, hack someone's cyber eyes to sneak past them, or use magic to bypass this wall, and you discover any existing rule does not cover it, you look at the GM and say "GM may I?"
Now the GM is in a bind, the rules don't say it can't happen, but they also don't say how to make it happen. You might have built this entire session around this combat and your answer could trivialize it, but you want everyone to have fun and can see how the player is going to be heartbroken if you say no. The clock is ticking and you don't know which call to make!?
The Players are honestly hurt by playing “GM May I.” too if it succeeds and does trivialize the 'main challenge' of the session it can feel very unsatisfying, if the question is asked during combat it can drag out an already long portion of the game that you might not be interested in, and if you are the asking player it can feel defeating to be told no. Plus, there is a distinct possibility that a GM’s ruling can trivialize your character, if you built a character focused on identifying magic items just to discover the GM replaced all those rules with a ruling on a skill, you now have to (hopefully) retool your whole character and gimmick around this.
The other unintended consequence is that this creates an ugly gap between various playgroups and even various GMs in a playgroup. If GM A, said that grappling works this way, and then you build your next character for GM B on the assumption that grappling works that way only to discover it doesn’t you are going to be upset, and no one is really at fault.
If you're a frequent reader, you might be surprised to hear me scoffing at this, here at Split/Party we have a section about playing the game wrong. There is a huge difference between playing a game and coming to a conclusion that these rules are the hard ones to remember or ones that don’t work and making a conscious choice to talk about changing it with your group, and deciding that grappling is taking too long so you make a call.
Now, I am not naming specific systems because this “GM May I?” issue pops up in lots of places, from the most gritty and granular combat sim to the loosiest goosiest narrative game, you can run into the issue of “This system doesn’t have an answer for me, or I don’t like the answer it does have.”
Are there solutions to avoid this problem? Think about what you want your game to be about, maybe don’t run your barehanded martial arts game in a system without rules for axe kicks, maybe don’t run your political drama in a war game. If you are a player, make sure you are familiar with the rules, because what you are asking to do could have mechanics. If you are making a major call, write it down.
If you are a designer, I am not saying for you to try to build a system that can do anything, but I am saying, to make sure to cover the basic things you expect players to be able to do, and maybe as a whole, we can get away from “Mother May I?”