Burning Questions: What's the Worst Thing a DM Can Do?

iserith said:

Yes, it's a passive check which is used to determine surprise per the rules.

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Hussar said:

Heh. I tried to say this in another thread and got dogpiled for it.

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Benji said:

I guess so, but I'm trying to think about how 'who gets to roll dice' translates to a feeling of agency.

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Benji said:

Also, the probability of the group spotting in the second example is not only reliant on the GM rolling well, but the players in opposition to that roll. So if the GM rolls badl but the highest player also rolls bdly, maybe it's the poor guy with the low perception that flukely saves the group - that's a cool story dictated by the dice.

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Benji said:

You see, I'm still not sure that in Iserith's example that this would grant an active check. Or weather this counts as 'Keeping Watch' and therefore, in Iserith's mind, is still passive.

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Benji said:

As for the example 'with context', take the example in isolation for a moment. There's a few contextual factors that might change the needle here but I they also change the purity of the example, I guess. Whatframing do you think underides the mechanics as set out?

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pemerton said:

For clarity's sake - if the GM describes the columned room, and a player says "I hope there's nothing lurking behind the columns - I'm looking closely!", would you call for a WIS/Perception check at that point, or still rely on the passive check?

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Rya.Reisender said:

Of course they are comparable. Why would it be okay to change the rules in one game and not in another game?

The only reason D&D 5e isn't for me as a player is that there aren't any other DMs that want to play by the rules.

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iserith said:

I would say this depends on how the scene was framed and when the drow tries to ambush the PCs. If the drow is, say, within short range with a hand crossbow when the PCs enter the area, the DM might describe the attack from the lurking drow and ask "What do you do?" Then we're probably determining surprise using the passive Perception scores of the PCs who opted to remain alert for danger and then rolling initiative. If instead the drow is outside of hand crossbow range when the PCs enter the area, then the DM might have the drow wait in the darkness as they draw near. A player who at some point in the ensuing exploration challenge describes the character as looking closely at the columns for lurking threats might make a Wisdom (Perception) check to spot the hiding drow if there's an uncertain outcome and a meaningful consequence of failure. In this specific context, I think this would not be unlike a Search action in combat. The characters that are engaging in other tasks while the other PC is searching may not be alert to danger and, of course, the drow may do his or her thing while the PCs do theirs which might complicate matters.

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Hussar said:

But rolling this back around to the original question of the thread, IMO, ((barring the more extreme/illegal actions a person might do)) the worst thing a DM can do as a DM (and not just as a human being), is allow his or her ego to dominate. Pretty much every DM/Player issue that's the DM's fault can be traced back to the DM not checking his or her ego at the door.

People who forget that the DM is just another player at the table and is no more or less important than anyone else at the table make very, very poor DM's.

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pemerton said:

To me, these seem to go together.

If one player's PC's motivation is (say) defeat Lolth and redeem the Drow, then action declarations on their own aren't enough. If all the action is framed as piratical derring-do on the high seas, the "story" of how this PC set out to defeat Lolth and redeem the Drow is unlikely to be told. (Picking challenges itself depends upon the GM providing the framing - unless you're using some sort of "kicker" technique.)

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pemerton said:

Book 3 (Worlds and Adventures), p 19 of the 1977 edition (in what I think is a 1978 printing):

Non-player characters are frequently encountered by travellers in the course of their adventures. Such persons are manipulated or controlled by the referee; their actions and deeds influence and direct the activities of the actual player characters in the game. . . .

Adventurers, as they travel about on planets, have random encounters . . .

Some random encounters are mandated by the referee. For example, a band may encounter a guard patrol at a building whil in the course of visiting (or burglarizing) it. The referee is always free to impose encounters to further the cause of the adventure being played; in many cases, he actually has a responsibility to do so.​

There's a bit of contradiction there (mandated and imposed "random" encounters), but I think that can be forgiven. And obviously the advice is not as rich as found eg in Luke Crane's Adventure Burner for Burning Wheel. But the "responsibilities" of the referee in running the game include framing encounters that will "further the cause of" the adventure - that's clearly something about being engaging, or exciting, or creating some sort of pressure with an eye to where it will drive the play of the game.

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To me, these seem to go together.

If one player's PC's motivation is (say) defeat Lolth and redeem the Drow, then action declarations on their own aren't enough. If all the action is framed as piratical derring-do on the high seas, the "story" of how this PC set out to defeat Lolth and redeem the Drow is unlikely to be told. (Picking challenges itself depends upon the GM providing the framing - unless you're using some sort of "kicker" technique.)

Which also feeds into the issue of what is the "best signal" - I don't look just for action declarations, but for backgrounds, Beliefs and the like in systems that have them, informal signals of thematic/narrative concern, etc. (Think even of Classic Travell Book 1, and the example merchant Jamieson's resentment at being let go by the service at the height of his career.)

Part of the challenge of being a GM is then weaving these things together across multiple players, multiple PCs, multiple sessions, the details of the system, etc. I rely on a mixture of advice (eg about pacing), system and techniques (eg does the system require party play, like D&D; or allow actions of one PC to affect the situation for a geographically and even temporally separated PC; etc), and the social dynamics at the table.

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pemerton said:

To me, this drives home the bigger issue of the context of framing in the example. What I mean is that the drow isn't really anywhere, so that (except in the tightest version of classic dungeoncrawling, in which the precise location of everything on all the dungeon squares is known at all time) the issue of where the PCs are, in relation to what they can see in the room, in relation to where the drow is and what s/he can see of them, is all up to the GM's narration.

So when is it fair for a GM to say (DW "hard move" style) "Suckers, what's your AC?" and when is it fair for a GM to say (DW "soft move" style) "You see a many-columned room with pooling shadows" and follow up with "What do you do?"

For clarity's sake, I don't think there's any single answer to that question probably even for a single table, given how varied the context, momentum, mood, etc of play can get; let alone a single answer that would work for all DW GMs or all 5e GMs.

At the risk of being controversial, I feel that some approaches to using a WIS/Perception check as a type of "save vs ambush" and some approaches to using a WIS/Perception check as a type of "Am I going to tell you about the missing gauntlets or not?" can seem like the GM not wanting to take responsibility for framing and its consequences. I say "some cases" because I think that a pretty classic dungeoncrawl might be a different case, with it's highly procedural play in a maze that gets re-run many times (a bit video-gamey, that!) and with players having player-side options to try and manage those throws (recruit a ranger or an elf; listen at doors; etc) while GMs are governed by conventions about not having all the "placed" monsters just gang up on and slaughter the PCs.

But in games that depart even a modest amount from that paradigm, I'm less sure about what this random determination of content (I mean, sure, in the GM's imagination the gauntlets are missing even if s/he never tells the players, but that's unilateral content that's not part of actual play) and random determination of stakes (who gets the drop - us or the drow?) is for.

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