Xanathars guide

[John Brebeuf]

If you’d read the whole post, I talked about strain, and then wrapped up challenging the notion that there is any appreciable difference between two things.

I did read the entire post, and you didn't talk about strain at all except your own experience of "burnout," which is irrelevant to the post you were responding to with your question and the question itself.

As to what's an "appreciable difference," a DM is called "Master" for a reason: he has to have at least as much mastery of how a class works as any of his players, and that requires more than a mere glance at a few pages. He has to think about how it would interact with the elements already incorporated in his campaign and make a considered judgment as to whether it would benefit or hinder the course of gameplay. That involves, to say the very least, an increase in cognitive load.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

You...think that reading the parts of the book a player wants to use will be a strain? Like...for anyone with average cognitive capabilities and lacking any reading issues, reading a subclass and a feat isn’t going to be any noticeable strain whatsoever.

Do you think that this DM has the entire PHB memorized? Because that’s the only way I can imagine it would be more cognitive load to read a couple options from a new book than to read them from another book.

I did read the entire post, and you didn't talk about strain at all except your own experience of "burnout," which is irrelevant to the post you were responding to with your question and the question itself.

As to what's an "appreciable difference," a DM is called "Master" for a reason: he has to have at least as much mastery of how a class works as any of his players, and that requires more than a mere glance at a few pages. He has to think about how it would interact with the elements already incorporated in his campaign and make a considered judgment as to whether it would benefit or hinder the course of gameplay. That involves, to say the very least, an increase in cognitive load.

Bolded the instances wherein I literally even used the word. Also, note the complete lack of any mention of burnout. Did you confuse the post you had quoted with another one?

The DM doesn’t need to have the same “mastery” of PC classes as the players. That’s silly.

Even if he did, he almost certainly doesn’t have the entire phb “mastered”. If he does, he has enough system mastery to easily determine the balance and impact of a 5e subclass and a feat or two.

If, like 99% of people, he hasn’t memorized every general rule, condition, class feature, race feature, spell, feat, how they combine in each class, how they interact with eachother, and who gets what at which levels, he will be reading up on some of those for any new character. Which book one part is in won’t matter.

 

[John Brebeuf]

Bolded the instances wherein I literally even used the word. Also, note the complete lack of any mention of burnout. Did you confuse the post you had quoted with another one?

The DM doesn’t need to have the same “mastery” of PC classes as the players. That’s silly.

Even if he did, he almost certainly doesn’t have the entire phb “mastered”. If he does, he has enough system mastery to easily determine the balance and impact of a 5e subclass and a feat or two.

If, like 99% of people, he hasn’t memorized every general rule, condition, class feature, race feature, spell, feat, how they combine in each class, how they interact with eachother, and who gets what at which levels, he will be reading up on some of those for any new character. Which book one part is in won’t matter.

"Complete lack of any mention of burnout"

I mean, I get burnout, but isn’t it a little extreme to just refuse to even read the book, for free, and maybe reading some player feedback or whatever, in an edition that just doesn’t have the balance traps and hidden combos of 3.5?

"The DM doesn’t need to have the same “mastery” of PC classes as the players. That’s silly."

Yes, he does. The idea that the DM should be beholden to his players for knowledge of how the game works is what's silly.

 

[Stalker0]

Even if he did, he almost certainly doesn’t have the entire phb “mastered”. If he does, he has enough system mastery to easily determine the balance and impact of a 5e subclass and a feat or two.

We don't know your DM, so we can't say what he considers a burden or not. I can tell you that once you are decently comfortable with the core rules, reviewing supplements takes a little work (from my own experience)

In your estimate, maybe its not much. At the same time, I presume you are not spending the time and energy to build the adventures. The DM has decided incorporating new books is not worth his time. He already commits a lot more time to the game than you or any other player does, so I would respect his decision.

 

[Immoralkickass]

I am thankful that my group is the opposite of this. Only my DM has Xanathar's, and he expanded our kitchen sink by allowing everything from XGTE.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

We don't know your DM, so we can't say what he considers a burden or not. I can tell you that once you are decently comfortable with the core rules, reviewing supplements takes a little work (from my own experience)

In your estimate, maybe its not much. At the same time, I presume you are not spending the time and energy to build the adventures. The DM has decided incorporating new books is not worth his time. He already commits a lot more time to the game than you or any other player does, so I would respect his decision.

I’m the DM of my group, with 7 players. And all of my adventures and most of my campaigns are entirely home made.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

"Complete lack of any mention of burnout"



"The DM doesn’t need to have the same “mastery” of PC classes as the players. That’s silly."

Yes, he does. The idea that the DM should be beholden to his players for knowledge of how the game works is what's silly.

So you were responding to a different post. Got it.

So, like I said, in that post there is no mention of burnout, but there is mention of strain. Why are you continuing a nit pick you’ve already lost? Nit picks are never useful. Just move on.

Anyway, why does the DM have any need to have full PC level mastery of the classes being played? What does it gain?

Nothing. You need to know how their main stuff works, and it can help to know enough to remind them of things. When writing adventures it’s often useful to reread some abilities to find new ways to challenge them. None of best requires memorizing everything in the damn PHB. At all. The review process when building an adventure is the same whether an option is in the phb or another book.

 

[John Brebeuf]

So you were responding to a different post. Got it.

So, like I said, in that post there is no mention of burnout, but there is mention of strain. Why are you continuing a nit pick you’ve already lost? Nit picks are never useful. Just move on.

Anyway, why does the DM have any need to have full PC level mastery of the classes being played? What does it gain?

Nothing. You need to know how their main stuff works, and it can help to know enough to remind them of things. When writing adventures it’s often useful to reread some abilities to find new ways to challenge them. None of best requires memorizing everything in the damn PHB. At all. The review process when building an adventure is the same whether an option is in the phb or another book.

And why are you continuing to pretend that mentioning "stress" in one post somehow changes the meaning of "increased cognitive load" in a subsequent post? The latter means nothing more than "more cognitive load than there was previously," and implies NOTHING about its intensity. Thus, my original reply to that post is still entirely on point: reading a new book most definitely increases one's cognitive load. The only reason we're still discussing this issue is because I allowed myself to be led astray by your initial red herring, a mistake I will most assiduously avoid henceforth.

As to why the DM must have mastery of the classes being played, I already answered that: because he's the Dungeon MASTER, not the Dungeon Facilitator. His judgments in the game are final, and so his judgments must be fully informed by the rules governing how classes function for those judgments to be "masterful" ones.

 

[Bacon Bits]

He's still fresh at being a Dm. So that's how he's progressed from where he started to now. I've noticed he's become more power hungry. Making it so that we don't get magic items because their to O.P. (his words) but yet the creatures we fight are honestly way to strong for us. We didn't have a chance against the beholder we fought. My character died. Two turned to stone. And the other was paralyzed. And he had it set up to where we couldn't get out of the 150ft cone so that we couldn't use magic ( half our party is magical users).

No magic items sucks, but the game was designed so that all the CRs account for never having any magic items. If your DM is building encounters correctly, you should still be fine.

I mean, Beholders are basically floating TPK machines, especially in their lair. They always have been. That's why there are so many weaker versions and stupid monsters that look like them like the old Gas Spore (which was built as a trap for melee characters, which is what beholders tend to suck at). One thing to keep in mind, though... the eye rays don't work in the central cone, and the beholder can't just freely blink to shut it off. It picks how the cone is oriented and if it's on or off once a round:

Antimagic Cone. [...] At the start of each of its turns, the beholder decides which way the cone faces and whether the cone is active. The area works against the beholder's own eye rays.

So, either your party was in the antimagic cone and therefore immune to eye rays, or they were subject to eye rays and therefore not affected by the antimagic cone. If your DM was allowing eye rays to work inside the antimagic cone, then he was using a much higher CR beholder than normal, inadvertently or otherwise.

Either way, if all the players think combat is too difficult, you and your players should talk to the DM about it before the game starts for the night. If several of your players are wanting a different campaign, then I suggest one of the players run a game for awhile and let the DM play. New perspectives help a lot, and DMs who never play tend to fall into old traps like adversarial thinking. I'm certain reason my group has lasted 20 years is because we rotate between DMs frequently.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

And why are you continuing to pretend that mentioning "stress" in one post somehow changes the meaning of "increased cognitive load" in a subsequent post? The latter means nothing more than "more cognitive load than there was previously," and implies NOTHING about its intensity. Thus, my original reply to that post is still entirely on point: reading a new book most definitely increases one's cognitive load. The only reason we're still discussing this issue is because I allowed myself to be led astray by your initial red herring, a mistake I will most assiduously avoid henceforth.

There was no red herring. Suggesting that there was one seems like a dishonest attempt to wiggle out of having just derailed the discussion with a nonsensical nit pick over wording.

I had typed out most of a detailed explanation of what just happened, but it got borked by a browser glitch, so I'll have to sum up.
this post seems to be the crux of the misunderstanding.

You...think that reading the parts of the book a player wants to use will be a strain? Like...for anyone with average cognitive capabilities and lacking any reading issues, reading a subclass and a feat isn’t going to be any noticeable strain whatsoever.

Do you think that this DM has the entire PHB memorized? Because that’s the only way I can imagine it would be more cognitive load to read a couple options from a new book than to read them from another book.

WHile nitpicking this post, you said something about me mentioning burnout, even though this post does not. Thus my "no mention of burnout" comment, later. I was responding directly to the post I quoted, addressing the specific thing that you said in response to that specific post, wherein you literally said that I mentioned burnout in that specific post, while also claiming that I didn't talk about strain.

The other misunderstanding here stems from you not reading two separate paragraphs in a post as two separate statements. In the first paragraph, I address what I perceived as a suggestion by you that reading a new book would be a strain on the DM. A silly notion. In the next paragraph, I go back to the issue of increased cognitive load.

Clearer, now? Two issues. Related, but separate.

As to why the DM must have mastery of the classes being played, I already answered that: because he's the Dungeon MASTER, not the Dungeon Facilitator. His judgments in the game are final, and so his judgments must be fully informed by the rules governing how classes function for those judgments to be "masterful" ones.

Your answer is that the DM's title in the game has the word master in it? Really? lol

But seriously, to address the meat of your answer, the conclusion that the DM must have mastery over every class in order to make good table judgements does not logically follow. This isn't a court, the rules are not complex, and the kind of mastery that is suggested by this discussion (ie, having essentially memorized the classes, races, feats, etc) just isn't need to run the game. At all.

If you are seriously putting in that level of effort into just understanding every aspect of the game, you are overworking yourself. That's fine if that's what you want to do, but don't act like it's a requirement of being a DM. I've watched or played with some of the best DM's out there, and maybe one of them has ever had the books memorized to where a player never had a greater understanding of their character than the DM had, and that guy was just one of those people who is absurdly good at memorization and mastering a system.

When I am a player, rather than a GM, I nearly always have greater system mastery in general, and better knowledge of each class, than anyone else at the table, including the GM. The game doesn't suffer for it.

Watch Critical Role some time. Matt is partly responsible for how big DnD has gotten, all without having what you seem to think is a requirement of doing a basic decent job of DMing.

The idea is patently absurd.