Freeform or not?

My wife, Karen, and I spent some time talking about our superhero game and play in general last night.

So I've lamented the difficulty of adapting Fudge to superhero play. But a lot of where that is coming from is that I started out trying to play fairly freeform, and the further I go, the deeper I find myself in creating more rules when my intent was to not do so.

Karen's mostly convinced that there's no middle ground… either we commit completely to freeform play, or we commit to a robust set of rules. Mostly because when we have some rules, using those rules always seems to lead down the path of creating more rules to fill in the "gaps." This wasn't such a problem for me with the fantasy game, but it is with superheroes.

I'm wondering if part of that is because practically all of my superhero gaming experience was with Champions… seven years of playing Champions almost every Sunday. My mind makes a lot of "automatic" connections between "superheroes" and "tactical combat system."

One of my concerns about running supers (or any genre, really) is that the players feel like they have accomplished something when they win a fight. That immediately puts me in the position of feeling like I have to be "fair." And you see where that leads… that means "impartial," which runs me into "more rules." Heh. (The "feel like they've accomplished something" is a topic for another entry.)

So Karen's challenged me to run our next session completely ruleless and diceless. And that scares me. Which leads to my own personal problem with gamemastering… I fear failure. I over-analyze minute decisions and find myself paralyzed because I can't find criteria that calls for one choice over another. And that's just in making decisions for the antagonists' actions. Throw in making decisions about who hits and who doesn't, and whether or not that wild leap from the twentieth story window onto the helicopter skid is successful… and I feel somewhat overwhelmed by having to make so many decisions and get them "right."

Part of that is wanting to keep the players happy. The dice keep an impartial layer between the GM and player… the player blames the dice for failure. Eliminate those, or interpret them in a very freeform manner, and now they can blame the GM. But that's only part of it.

I think the other big issue there is that I fear so many decisions could be key turning points without my realizing it ahead of time. That I'm going to screw up the storyline three sessions down the road by making the wrong decision today. And, ultimately, that my players are going to think poorly of me for making mistakes. I feel like I'm "performing" when I gamemaster, and I fear being laughed at or thought stupid for making "dumb" mistakes. So I treat nearly every decision as if it were a key decision, even if it's as simple as deciding whether that blow was enough to knock the villain unconscious this round or not.

This is an entirely stupid way to think, but it just comes to me naturally. :) I'm seeing it as the largest obstacle I have to overcome in becoming a good gamemaster… I have to quit worrying that my players will think I'm stupid.

So I think I'm going to bite the bullet, talk it over with my players, and take up Karen's challenge. To run completely ruleless. Maybe not diceless, because there are times that I just don't care what the outcome is. But if I use dice, they'll be used in a very freeform manner.