DMing philosophy, from Lewis Pulsipher

Libramarian said:

The DM doesn't need to fudge to get the players out of difficult situations if the players can retreat or activate an "ejection seat" type ability to escape at a cost. Obviously it's best for these to take the form of in-game abilities but if necessary fate/luck points serve the same purpose.

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Could you give some examples of in-game "ejection seat" options?

pemerton said:

Could you give some examples of in-game "ejection seat" options?

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I can't give his examples, but I'm familiar with the general concept - group teleports, especially ones which also pull dead/dying people with them are an in-game-type ability along those lines - especially if they have some kind of consequential cost. You can get away but it costs you. The problem with these is that many games, including D&D, tend to limit abilities like this to spellcasters, and to the higher levels, when the situations most likely to require them actually occur in the mid-levels (in my experience).

Shadowrun 5E has a very clear one - you can burn a point of permanent Karma (which is stat, raised like any other, in 5E), to guarantee to survive any one otherwise-fatal event (like falling out of an aeroplane) - the way it's described really seems like it's intended that the GM let you "get away", too, not just avoid death for a single round or whatever.

My memory is failing me, but I'm pretty sure there are other games out there which allow you to burn permanent resources/gain in order to survive something.

Of course what may also be meant is the less-literal aspect of "ejector seat" mechanics - but one which prevents the need to fudge even more - that you can use Fate/Luck points to negate "OH SHEEZ!" bad rolls that would really have suggested DM fudging back in the day. In fact, this is particularly good because it also encapsulates the "Well, if you screw up enough times..." model of DM fudging, where eventually the DM stops fudging because the PCs keep screwing up - because Fate/Luck/Karma points are limited, eventually they will have to face the music if they don't get their act together.

I'd never really thought that through before - but that's why I find I never or almost never have to fudge in games which include such points, because they've taken the fudging away (and the judgement of when fudging has gone too far!) and effectively given it to the players.

Ruin Explorer said:

Shadowrun 5E has a very clear one - you can burn a point of permanent Karma (which is stat, raised like any other, in 5E), to guarantee to survive any one otherwise-fatal event (like falling out of an aeroplane) - the way it's described really seems like it's intended that the GM let you "get away", too, not just avoid death for a single round or whatever.

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FATE has one as well - conceding a conflict. If the player realizes they are on the losing side of a confrontation, rather than continue and lose, the player may concede. They take a "Consequence" (and in-game issue that will persist for a while), but they survive, and get to choose what their consequence will be. Basically, in FATE, the player can lose on their own terms, rather than the enemy's.

Henry said:

That's perfectly fair, but I suppose in my mind it's like the difference between playing a bit of Liar's Dice, and playing Candyland. In Candyland, you're just going down the path with random chance injected, and with Liar's dice, you're mixing chance with a bit of tactics and challenge from your fellow players. Some Gygaxian puzzles were too much, I admit (Tomb of Horrors would teach me that, there are some parts that are like being chased through a minefield by a wild tiger who knows where the mines are).

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Sadly I have never played Liar's Dice, nor Candyland, and even reading about them this comparison is somewhat lost on me. I take it Candyland is not similar to say, The Game of Life (because you have actual decisions in the latter), but is more akin to Snakes & Ladders or something, where it's pure chance?

The big problem I had with Gygaxian dungeons is that a lot of them seemed to just encourage ultra-cautious. ultra-methodical play, which felt absolutely nothing like the tales of fantasy and derring-do I'd been raised on. I came to D&D to play a brave knight (completely seriously, this is what made 10-year-old-me's eyes open so wide when D&D was described), but when I played with people running "Gygaxian" stuff (mostly not written by Gygax, but of that style), it seemed like brave knights and their ilk had no place - rather it was a game of methodical, potentially-backstabbing and heartless professionals, willing to sacrificing henchmen without blinking, who took their 10' poles, their torchbearers and so on, and carefully, slowly, and sadly, somewhat tediously crept through a dungeon.

Often these fellows would have alignments like LG, but in no way did they seem to act the part, unless required to by the DM or their character class (even with the latter, it was typically begrudging).

I think it's one thing to encourage people to plan before battle where possible (but it shouldn't always be possible), and act like smart people who want to live, but it's quite another to traumatize players until they're living in what some have described as "Fantasy F**king Vietnam". All too often "Gygaxian" is code for either that, or terrible puzzles that make no sense in context.

I mean, ignoring the "FFV" aspect, personally, as someone who always loved archaeology and history, a lot of so-called "Gygaxian" stuff drove me nuts because it didn't make any sense - who built this? Why did they build it? Why is it still operational? If I couldn't at least answer those questions for myself, it wasn't going in my adventures, and I didn't like it much when others put it there (this design problem is still a common one - 4E's H1 and H3 had huge problems with "Even in this bizarre context, this makes no sense and even contradicts the lore of the dungeon!" - H3 was explicitly designed as Gygaxian, too)

Henry said:

As for where I've come across these players, it's been various groups over the past 20 years, some young, some same age as me. It's not just "kids these days", it's "kids my days" too.

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Fair enough!

Henry said:

The why isn't "we must DO something," it's more "I'd love to see it happen." I have noticed for times I've gamed with former or current armed forces members, I tend to see a little more care for planning from players (for obvious reasons, I suppose) - maybe I just need to hunt around for more former military to game with.

Last night in my Pathfinder game I saw a little of this -- our group was accosted in a narrow hallway by giant spiders who attacked not only at floor level, but climbing on walls too, and our group was somewhat paralyzed by the "stand and deliver" mentality, not thinking to retreat to either more cramped quarters and buffing our most heavily defended warrior, or to retreat to more open territory where area effects and ranged attacks could come into play. Taking my own advice, I took a few risky moves to both open up the corridor and to get into flanking position, but our first instinct was "stand and swing away where we were attacked" without coordination. This is a group of thirty, forty, and fifty-somethings, and we still almost fell prey to it.

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I don't think it has much to do with either armed forces or 1E/Gygaxian experience, though, Henry. It's more to do with the mindsets of the specific players. I have a main group (all in their 30s) who are a lawyer, a very senior doctor, a day-trader, a journalist, and a systems analyst/IT manager, and occasionally a diplomat/entrepreneur. All of these people lead very organised lives and have to think very hard about what they are doing, plan ahead and so on, in their work. None of them have any armed forces experience. Yet in game, those who plan most, those who scheme most and so on does not correlate well with their work or lives. I could go into details but we'd be here all day - suffice to say, some people enjoy planning/scheming, some people enjoy tactics, some enjoy both, some neither. What they all share is a love of RPGs.

Ruin Explorer said:

Sadly I have never played Liar's Dice, nor Candyland, and even reading about them this comparison is somewhat lost on me. I take it Candyland is not similar to say, The Game of Life (because you have actual decisions in the latter), but is more akin to Snakes & Ladders or something, where it's pure chance?

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Candyland is pure chance. A deck of cards is shuffled at the beginning of the game, and on a player's turn, they draw the top card and move to the space indicated. (Generally forward due to the colour of the card). When someone passes the finish line, they win.

Liar's Dice is a game of bluffing. Each player begins with five dice. Each player rolls their secretly, then in turn each player chooses either to make a guess about the current state of the game or accuse the previous guess of being incorrect. When an accusation is made, the round ends and the dice are compared - if the guess was correct, the accuser loses one die, otherwise the liar loses one die. The game ends when only one player has dice remaining.

Each guess says that there are a certain number of a certain side currently in the game. So, "Four of the dice show fives" or "Two sixes". A new guess must be higher than the old - either in the number of dice used or the face showing. So "Four fives" could be improved by "Five threes" or "Four Sixes" but not "Four threes". Obviously, at some point the statement as to what's left will become impossible.

What makes it such an interesting game is that the bids let you know something about what dice everyone has, unless, of course, they were deceiving you.

Cheers!

pemerton said:

Could you give some examples of in-game "ejection seat" options?

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I'm thinking of consumable magic items, like potions of climbing, flying, gaseous form, invisibility or invulnerability. I sometimes call items like this that function offensively rather than simply letting the PCs escape "grenades". That would be more like a potion of heroism or rods/staves/wands with very powerful (relative to current PC level) effects and a limited number of charges.

I love these because they don't affect the power level of the PCs most of the time, because the players don't want to use them unless they absolutely need to. The effect they have is they give the players a better chance to survive encounters that turn out to be surprisingly difficult, reducing the pressure on me as DM to balance encounters or fudge things to get them out of a jam.

Ruin Explorer said:

The big problem I had with Gygaxian dungeons is that a lot of them seemed to just encourage ultra-cautious. ultra-methodical play, which felt absolutely nothing like the tales of fantasy and derring-do I'd been raised on. I came to D&D to play a brave knight (completely seriously, this is what made 10-year-old-me's eyes open so wide when D&D was described), but when I played with people running "Gygaxian" stuff (mostly not written by Gygax, but of that style), it seemed like brave knights and their ilk had no place - rather it was a game of methodical, potentially-backstabbing and heartless professionals, willing to sacrificing henchmen without blinking, who took their 10' poles, their torchbearers and so on, and carefully, slowly, and sadly, somewhat tediously crept through a dungeon.

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This is a bit exaggerated but not entirely unfair. I think it's important that planning helps but never totally eliminates risk. Or else planning incurs its own risk (e.g. more wandering monster rolls for taking too long). It's a bit of a tricky balance because it depends on the players and their attitudes towards risk. Good DM-player chemistry makes for a much faster moving game. Not every old style dungeon is like the Tomb of Horrors. I actually think that PCs are supposed to be pretty confident in pure combat situations. In my games I'm moving towards more of a hack and slash style to combat encounters. As [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] has pointed out AD&D monsters are actually pretty weak in general. This makes it hard to put together good "solos" but it works well for lair battles where the last room has two dozen orcs to carve through.

Libramarian said:

I'm thinking of consumable magic items, like potions of climbing, flying, gaseous form, invisibility or invulnerability.

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I love these because they don't affect the power level of the PCs most of the time, because the players don't want to use them unless they absolutely need to. The effect they have is they give the players a better chance to survive encounters that turn out to be surprisingly difficult, reducing the pressure on me as DM to balance encounters or fudge things to get them out of a jam.

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The last of these sorts of things I remember from my 4e game was a Ring of Wishing (single wish). The PCs brought it out when they were in a difficult fight against a powerful NPC wizard (mechanically, a solo a level or two above theirs, at the end of a reasonably long series of encounters without an extended rest). The wizard had a range of powerful blinding effects, which were hurting the PCs badly. So they wished that no one in the great hall (where the fight was taking place) could be blinded for the next hour. The resultant immunity to the NPC's debuff helped them win the fight.

Libramarian said:

This is a bit exaggerated but not entirely unfair. I think it's important that planning helps but never totally eliminates risk. Or else planning incurs its own risk (e.g. more wandering monster rolls for taking too long). It's a bit of a tricky balance because it depends on the players and their attitudes towards risk. Good DM-player chemistry makes for a much faster moving game. Not every old style dungeon is like the Tomb of Horrors. I actually think that PCs are supposed to be pretty confident in pure combat situations. In my games I'm moving towards more of a hack and slash style to combat encounters. As [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] has pointed out AD&D monsters are actually pretty weak in general. This makes it hard to put together good "solos" but it works well for lair battles where the last room has two dozen orcs to carve through.

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I don't disagree.

If it seems a bit exaggerated, I suspect that's the groups I played with back then - some were mostly hardened 1E players, and gosh did they make everything into grim trudge, out of a combination of fear of getting killed/ambushed (more by traps and save-or-die monsters than normal combat encounters - in fact they were somewhat devil-may-care about those unless they involved save-or-die or save-or-suck monsters, not that we called them that back then), and fear/greed of missing some sort of hidden-but-fantastic reward. I feel like there was a bit of a culture that continued on well into the '90s that self-reinforced and normalized this behaviour, too, to the point where people who'd never played 1E or been in a Gygaxian dungeon would sometimes emulate it because they thought that was "how it was".

IMX, "that's how it was" because meta-gaming was verboten & DMs tended to try to "win" by defeating the Players with traps, SOS & SODs.

The only way to survive that combo, for my group (when I was still a player), was to pixel-bitch - to go over every square inch of dungeon with an 11ft pole.

It wasn't until much later that I realized that's a crappy and boring way for me to play. Now, as DM, I don't mind meta-gaming and I'm not out to defeat players or win. My objectives are to deliver a fun game session and engage the players emotionally. My players (many of whom are reformed pixel-bitchers) have embraced this enthusiastically.

So I'll do a dungeon crawl, but instead of "gotcha" traps and ambushes, I openly frame the challenges so the players can make intelligent decisions on what to do about it. This means SODs & SOS are in, but instead of requiring meticulous play to avoid missteps and make sure you don't stumble into anything, I take that burden to let you know what the hazard is, what shape it will take, and when it becomes an imminent peril - then it's up to you to deal with it. No gotchas. Better trust. Fun sessions.