D&D General What is the worst piece of DM advice people give that you see commonly spread?

[EzekielRaiden]

I'm surprised no one brought up the Matt Mercer effect yet. Tons of people seek to copy him yet won't account for the things that make his style work.

They have.

"You should run your D&D game just like Matt Mercer, otherwise you're not doing it right"

Not quite the focus you went for, but it was brought up.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Verisimilitude is a far better word than realism. Does the setting hold together reasonably well given what’s true about the setting? That’s verisimilitude. Do the characters behave in a reasonable and consistent manner given the setting they occupy. That’s verisimilitude. More often than not when people say “realism” they really mean verisimilitude.

Heh... unfortunately it's that bolded word that cause the most issues from some players when it comes to verisimilitude. Determining what is 'reasonable' is the stumbling block. One person's 'reasonable' is another person's 'This destroys everything!'

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Heh... unfortunately it's that bolded word that cause the most issues from some players when it comes to verisimilitude. Determining what is 'reasonable' is the stumbling block. One person's 'reasonable' is another person's 'This destroys everything!'

Which is why I don't even use "verisimilitude" anymore. Because the issue is, people don't actually care that much if things resemble what is true or real (the meaning of "verisimilitude.") What they care about is that the perception of naturalistic reasoning is present--that you feel like you could, if you asked the right questions at the right times, use nothing more than your intuition and logic and some empirical observation to figure out how things work or what the true state of affairs is. A huge range of utterly impossible things can be rationalized under this standard, so long as they've been properly explained so that that intuitive, naturalistic reasoning feels like it can be applied--even if in practice that doesn't work well, as long as it feels like it works, it's good.

It's not verisimilitude that folks care about. It's groundedness. A work that feels grounded will give such folks exactly what they want, even though it may be wildly unrealistic and actively defy how things really work IRL. A work that feels un-grounded will be alien and "wrong" to such folks, even if it is otherwise highly realistic and attempts to stick very close to real-world physics principles.

And what one person considers grounded may not have any relationship to what another person considers grounded. Which is one of the key problems of any fantastical thing built around being grounded--you must take pains to ensure that the maximum number of people agree that it is grounded. This is much easier said than done, despite what some might argue about this kind of experience. (Using this phrase because it applies outside of TTRPGs--board games, video games, even written or cinematic works all touch on this.)

 

[Kariotis]

What they care about is that the perception of naturalistic reasoning is present--that you feel like you could, if you asked the right questions at the right times, use nothing more than your intuition and logic and some empirical observation to figure out how things work or what the true state of affairs is.

Just to clarify: that would be your definition of groundedness for the sake of your post, correct?

 

[Lanefan]

Which is why I don't even use "verisimilitude" anymore. Because the issue is, people don't actually care that much if things resemble what is true or real (the meaning of "verisimilitude.") What they care about is that the perception of naturalistic reasoning is present--that you feel like you could, if you asked the right questions at the right times, use nothing more than your intuition and logic and some empirical observation to figure out how things work or what the true state of affairs is. A huge range of utterly impossible things can be rationalized under this standard, so long as they've been properly explained so that that intuitive, naturalistic reasoning feels like it can be applied--even if in practice that doesn't work well, as long as it feels like it works, it's good.

It's not verisimilitude that folks care about. It's groundedness. A work that feels grounded will give such folks exactly what they want, even though it may be wildly unrealistic and actively defy how things really work IRL.

Call me an oinky-pig if you like, but I want both groundedness (which you define really well in the bolded, I like it!) and verimisilitude/realism.

A work that feels un-grounded will be alien and "wrong" to such folks, even if it is otherwise highly realistic and attempts to stick very close to real-world physics principles.

IMO the way to (try to) achieve both is to (behind the scenes) expand real-world physics principles into the fantastic such that the setting physics can usefully underpin everything. IME once that's done, keeping one's explanations and narrations consistent becomes much easier.

 

[jasper]

Nobody actually says this.

Hey burnside, "You should run your D&D game just like Matt Mercer, otherwise you're not doing it right"

 

[jasper]

I know DMs who say you should show rather than tell and they are all cowards.

But I did show. Cindy told her mom and I now having to go to counseling. Evin grin

 

[jasper]

Okay to be abrupt so advice which popped back up in 2016. The DM needs to allow anything. AKA the DM is my B(BeeP)h.

The DM needs to allow any player to game with them or they are not inclusive.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Call me an oinky-pig if you like, but I want both groundedness (which you define really well in the bolded, I like it!) and verimisilitude/realism.

But you include magic in your games. There is no "veri" to have "similitude" when it comes to magic. There is no "realism," because magic is not real.

IMO the way to (try to) achieve both is to (behind the scenes) expand real-world physics principles into the fantastic such that the setting physics can usefully underpin everything. IME once that's done, keeping one's explanations and narrations consistent becomes much easier.

But that is the very process of groundedness--not realism. You are not forcing magic to conform to the laws of Earth physics; you are laying out new, fictional laws of physics which replace them. You are creating the new ground upon which a foundation may be built, with the intent of allowing naturalistic reasoning to hold sway. If ever realism--conformity to the way our extant physical world works--actually conflicted with these new, established laws of fiction-physics, I'm pretty sure you would not simply chuck out those established laws without a care!

I mean, for example, instantaneous travel and/or communication necessarily results in time travel in a reality where physics works like it does IRL. (In layman's terms, because of how information propagates through space, being able to instantly move from one place to another allows effects to happen "before" they were caused, from at least some points of view.) And these things are not some distant phenomenon no one can observe. The color of gold is what it is because of general relativity: the outer electron orbitals of the gold nucleus are so large, they start suffering measurable time-dilation effects, which distorts their emission spectrum into being (very slightly greenish-)yellow rather than the typical silvery color of metals. Silver is also big enough to experience some relativistic effects, but human eyes can't detect them; if we could see more short-wavelength light (as some tetrachromats can), silver would appear to have color, effectively "anti-ultraviolet" (since it absorbs ultraviolet radiation while reflecting essentially all visible light.)

But I'm sure this doesn't prevent you from including time stop and misty step in your games. Instead, you most likely wave off relativity, because that's weird esoterica for physics nerds (I can say that, physics is my field!), and being able to use classic magic like plane shift and teleport is more important than perfect fidelity to Earthly physics.

Or, to put rather more fine a point on it: If you had a player tell you, point-blank, with citations and everything, that something in the game clearly violated the laws of IRL physics, which would you choose: to modify the game world to remove the violation of IRL physics, or to dismiss the IRL physics and say "well, that's just not how this world works"?

If I were a betting man, I'd put money on you picking the latter in the (significant) majority of cases. It would take an utterly egregious violation of really basic, intuitive physics* to swing things the other way. Because what matters most is the coherence of the system to itself and the ability to use intuitive naturalistic reasoning, not the coherence of the system to our physical world. Only a really serious breach could muck up that intuitive naturalistic reasoning--and the correction would be undertaken to restore that ability. That it would happen to cohere better to our understanding of the physical world is at best a happy accident.

*Note, "intuitive physics"--sometimes AKA "Aristotelian" physics 'cause he wrote it down and his writings survived--is usually quite bad. Like, actively wrong in lots of ways. But repeated tests of physics students show that Aristotelian physics is how humans intuitively think reality works, even after they've been taught actual physics, if you just give it 6-12 months and then test them.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Okay to be abrupt so advice which popped back up in 2016. The DM needs to allow anything. AKA the DM is my B(BeeP)h.

The DM needs to allow any player to game with them or they are not inclusive.

To be abrupt: Ban anything and everything that doesn't directly appeal to you personally, no matter what your players think or feel.

'Cause that's how most folks approach this sort of stuff now. And yes, I have seen--on this very board--people explicitly recommend doing things as crappy as literally ignoring players who play stuff they think is cool but the DM don't care for in all RP contexts. Adding that "It's never been a 'problem', not for long anyway. " (This is a verbatim quote.)

It never ceases to amaze me how common it is for people to argue that the DM is some poor, beleaguered soul, just trying to live and breathe free with their absolute power and then these horrible, horrible players come along who have the TEMERITY, the thrice-damned AUDACITY, the unmitigated GALL to do something as HEINOUS as having different opinions about what is cool! How DARE they ask to play a core book race in MY game!!!