D&D 5E What DM flaw has caused you to actually leave a game?

Lanefan · Oct 6, 2018

Kobold Boots said:
Perhaps so. But two things immediately come to mind

1. In order to have rules about meta gaming you have to address that it exists.
2. If you take steps to counter it, you’re doing it.

Yes, but I'm knowingly doing it so the players don't, or can't.

Better to not do things that increase the level of attention to it if you don’t want to do it. I’ve gotten by with “how would your character know to do that?” It’s generally enough. I will admit though that I’ve done the things that I see suggested, because phantom rolling is in the 1st ed dmg and meta is as old as the hills.

My problem is that sometimes "how would your character know to do that" leads to an all-hands argument which I'd rather avoid.

Lan-"just do it"-efan

pemerton · Oct 6, 2018

Lanefan said:
There's no obligation to play with GMs that suck, but I think there is something of an obligation to allow a GM to mess up more than once before bailing - the captured Kobold example leaps to mind here, unless there's more to that story as well.

And if the GM is new to it that obligation extends to cutting them some slack, letting them mess up, and forgiving them when they do

Well, that GM seemed to think he was reasonably experienced and competent.

It wouldn't be the only time I encountered an experienced GM who wasn't terribly good.

Lanefan said:
The sense I got, and maybe misread, was that the frustration example you were referring to was where the patron heel-turned once you'd done his mission. A deception like that is frustrating, for sure, but is - as I noted earlier - a common enough storytelling trope in all genres that hitting it in a game scenario shouldn't be any big deal.

It's very common in modules that I've read - and on the whole I think it makes them bad modules.

As a player, if the only reason I'm doing XYZ in the game is because it's some sort of fetch/McGuffin quest set by the patron, and then it turns out it was all pointless because the patron was a traitor all along, why did I bother with that stuff?

In my view, there is a significant difference here between (i) a player choosing to have a PC who has fallen out with a patron, or has had the scales fall from his/her eyes, (ii) a player suffering an adverse consequence (like betrayal) as a consequence of failure in action resolution, and (iii) the GM just deciding, by fiat, that the PCs lose. I'm not interested in spending multiple sessions playing a chump or patsy for the amusement of the GM.

Lanefan said:
You're also completely dismissing the notion that a GM "reading from his notes" could in fact provide very engaging fiction for you and the other players to interact with, shape, change, and move forward.

I was in the games I posted about; you were not. I can tell you they were not interesting as storytelling events.

More generally, I don't play RPGs to tell stories or be told them. I play RPGs to create a shared fiction with my friends.

Lanefan said:
I don't think you mean to come across this way - or at least sincerely hope that you don't - but when you post things like this it more often than not sounds like you're saying that as a player you're more interested in playing your own story than that of the GM, who has (in a typical situation) very likely put far more effort into it than any of her players.

I'm not the least bit interested in playing the GM's story, and I hope I've made that clear. As I said, if the GM wants me to read his/her story s/he can fax it to me!

I want to play my PC, engaging situations the GM presents that are interesting and exciting and relevant, and finding out what happens. My Burning Wheel GM has only ever GMed a handful of sessions - it's his first time as GM - but so far is doing a better job than plenty of far more experienced GMs that I've played with.

Imaculata · Oct 6, 2018

pemerton said:
I'm not the least bit interested in playing the GM's story, and I hope I've made that clear. As I said, if the GM wants me to read his/her story s/he can fax it to me!

I want to play my PC, engaging situations the GM presents that are interesting and exciting and relevant, and finding out what happens. My Burning Wheel GM has only ever GMed a handful of sessions - it's his first time as GM - but so far is doing a better job than plenty of far more experienced GMs that I've played with.

Does this mean that you don't want to play in a campaign that has a plot? Or do you mean that you don't like a campaign that is too 'scripted'?

Lanefan said:
I'd be out. If it's true to what the character would do were it an NPC, AFAIC it's all just fine.

That said, if it comes out of character and becomes a player argument the DM smackdown hammer comes out quickly.

Well, part of the goal of a session 0 to me, is to get everyone at the table to agree what we are going to play, and how we are going to play it. It is basically an agreement between friends, that we will try to work together to make the game fun for everyone, and play our characters towards that purpose. You can still have arguments and disagreements between characters, but I want my players to agree to avoid a situation where I as a DM have to stop them from killing each other. This doesn't mean that they are forced to act out of character, but it does mean that they will try to avoid things ever getting that heated in the first place. I don't think that's unreasonable.

pemerton · Oct 6, 2018

Imaculata said:
Does this mean that you don't want to play in a campaign that has a plot? Or do you mean that you don't like a campaign that is too 'scripted'?

I'm not 100% sure I'm understanding you right (not because you've been unclear, but just because words like "plot" and "story" get used in different ways by different posters); but I think my answers are "no" and "yes".

If you look at any of my actual play posts (I've got a lot, mostly on the 4e and General boards) you'll see that I generally favour protagonist-oriented, conflict-driven RPGing. The stories this generates aren't going to win me or my group any Nobel prizes, but they're fun to play in.

What I don't like is GM pre-authored story, where the main contribution of the players is either to follow along the GM's narration (if the story is overt, like in many 80s and 90s TSR modules), or to puzzle their way through a series of mysteries to work out what it is the GM (or module writer) had in mind (this is the standard structure of a CoC module, and a D&D example is the 3E module Speaker in Dreams and also some elements of the generally excellent B/X module Night's Dark Terror).

In the BW game, there was a fight with orcs (which was the GM's thing - there's nothing about my PC that makes orcs a particularly salient opponent), an encounter with a hermit ex-knight of my order (triggered by me making a successful Circles roll when my PC was hoping to meet some such person), an encounter with a dead knight of my order whose skeleton was still animated by a restless spirit (the GM coming up with an idea that spoke to my PC's concerns but in a way I hadn't expected), an old priory of my order destroyed by magical flame (ditto), the tower of Evard the Black (which was introduced into play following a successful Great Masters-wise check for Aramina the wizard PC - so not GM-driven at all in initiation, but it became the GM's job to actually bring the tower into the play in a concrete fashion), a demon in the form of Evard (or maybe Evard was really a demon all along?) who also seemed to be the source of the fire (this was the GM, and I'm not sure whether he had it in mind all along when he introuced the burned priory or whether he introduced it to link that bit into the Evard bit), and also a seeming revelation that Evard was my PC's father (which I guess means the demon was just impersonating him; the revelation took the form of letters between Evard and my mother, found in his tower, which my PC cast into a fire!); and a few other bits and pieces that I'm not recalling properly.

This is the back-and-forth of play - player and GM riffing of one another's ideas, with the GM having primary responsibility for managing all the backstory, setting coherence etc while the player has the primary responsibility for providng the drive and thematic context for the PC. Out of this we'll get a plot/story, but we won't know what it is until we play it. (Suppose that Great Masters-wise check had failed: maybe Evard is just a rumour, which would mean he could hardly be my PC's dad! Etc.)

iserith · Oct 6, 2018

Lanefan said:
What approaches do you see in my examples that would allow metagaming to be regularly used?

In a recent thread on a similar topic, we were discussing your approach and I asserted you're creating the very "metagaming" you claim you don't want in your games in this post. I make a similar comment here.

In this post, you respond with how you deal with the "metagaming" I assert you're creating via your approach. You don't deny that you are creating it. You just have a kludge to deal with it - additional rolls to obscure the roll that actually matters. As Kobold Boots points out, that is an old technique. He also points out where the players might "metagame" for advantage with your degrees of success/failure narrations. Your approach encourages it.

These are from recent discussions and I'm almost certain we've had these sorts of exchanges before. I've certainly had them with others who decry "metagaming." You all seem to be playing more or less from the same playbook: You run the game a particular way that sets the stage for and practically encourages "metagaming." Then you come up with techniques to offset it in addition to, as [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] addresses, a social contract to keep people from doing it. Why not just change the approach to avoid the "metagaming" in the first place? I mean, I don't even care about "metagaming," but my approaches don't really encourage it like yours do. In fact, I straight up tell my players in my Table Rules document that I don't care if they do it, since it's none of my business how they make decisions for their characters. I just warn them that making assumptions is risky.

Lanefan · Oct 6, 2018

pemerton said:
It's very common in modules that I've read - and on the whole I think it makes them bad modules.

As a player, if the only reason I'm doing XYZ in the game is because it's some sort of fetch/McGuffin quest set by the patron, and then it turns out it was all pointless because the patron was a traitor all along, why did I bother with that stuff?

See below...

In my view, there is a significant difference here between (i) a player choosing to have a PC who has fallen out with a patron, or has had the scales fall from his/her eyes, (ii) a player suffering an adverse consequence (like betrayal) as a consequence of failure in action resolution, and (iii) the GM just deciding, by fiat, that the PCs lose. I'm not interested in spending multiple sessions playing a chump or patsy for the amusement of the GM.

You're looking at the short game, the here-and-now frustration at being duped; and ignoring the long game.

The real purpose of the McGuffin quest was never to recover the McGuffin (though you just did, and made the patron more powerful as a result), it was to set the patron up as a long-term villain for the campaign. At least, that was the case in the two early-campaign instances I can think of where I've done pretty much just this. (one wasn't very successful, that storyline petered out in favour of other things before long; the other worked really well and gave me about a 15-adventure story arc over three years, woven between other adventures and sideshows)

I was in the games I posted about; you were not. I can tell you they were not interesting as storytelling events.

More generally, I don't play RPGs to tell stories or be told them. I play RPGs to create a shared fiction with my friends.

And that shared fiction grows into - you guessed it - a story!

I'm not the least bit interested in playing the GM's story, and I hope I've made that clear. As I said, if the GM wants me to read his/her story s/he can fax it to me!

Assuming of course that the story the GM faxes you is the same as the story that got played out.

It occurs to me that'd be an interesting experiment sometime: as GM, write out in point form the story you've got in mind for the campaign and seal it in an envelope. Then play the campaign as usual, without undue railroading, and see where it goes. Afterwards, open up the envelope and compare the results. You might be pleasantly surprised.

side note: a few weeks ago I stumbled over my original storyboard for my current campaign, written about 11 years ago; and other than a few specific adventures and modules it sure doesn't bear much resemblance to what's actually been played out!

I want to play my PC, engaging situations the GM presents that are interesting and exciting and relevant, and finding out what happens. My Burning Wheel GM has only ever GMed a handful of sessions - it's his first time as GM - but so far is doing a better job than plenty of far more experienced GMs that I've played with.

I want to play my PC too; but I also want to be able to look ahead and around beyond the here-and-now, see how things are developing in the setting, and make plans for what I and-or the party can do to influence these developments either now or in the future.

For example, were I a player in that McGuffin-for-the-patron game I'd probably be thinking (in character!) while playing that adventure about things like "what will I do with my share of the loot and reward if this goes well?", "wonder if this patron has other jobs for us?", etc., and also "what will I or we do if the patron heel-turns on us or doesn't pay us?" and "what's our next move if we don't find the McGuffin or - more likely - find it and then break it?".

Long-range planning. Useful pastime.

Lan-"of course any long-range planning assumes survival of the current adventure, but hey..."-efan

pemerton · Oct 7, 2018

Lanefan said:
I want to play my PC too; but I also want to be able to look ahead and around beyond the here-and-now, see how things are developing in the setting, and make plans for what I and-or the party can do to influence these developments either now or in the future.

For example, were I a player in that McGuffin-for-the-patron game I'd probably be thinking (in character!) while playing that adventure about things like "what will I do with my share of the loot and reward if this goes well?", "wonder if this patron has other jobs for us?", etc., and also "what will I or we do if the patron heel-turns on us or doesn't pay us?" and "what's our next move if we don't find the McGuffin or - more likely - find it and then break it?".

I can do all those things without the GM railroading and disregard of player protagonism.

Lanefan said:
The real purpose of the McGuffin quest was never to recover the McGuffin (though you just did, and made the patron more powerful as a result), it was to set the patron up as a long-term villain for the campaign.

The idea that I would play for 10 to 20 hours just so a GM can set up a long-term villain is (in my view) ludicrous in itself.

Setting up a long-term villain in my 4e game took no play time in two cases (three PCs start as Raven Queen devotees and so Orcus is a long term villain; one PC is a drow who is a member of the Order of the Bat, a secret society dedicated to undoing the sundering of the elves, and so Lolth is a long term villain) and in two other cases has been an emergent result of play rather than a GM fiat (Vecna has taken on the status of long term villain, and also ally; and the Raven Queen has taken on a similar ambiguous status at least in the eyes of some of the PCs).

Your posts are explaining why you enjoy GM-driven RPGing. They're not giving reasons why I, who do not, made some mistake in relation to the three GMing experiences I mentioned.

Gavin O. · Oct 7, 2018

I had a DM who tried to invent the game balance themselves. They said we all started with 100 HP (regardless of our Con) because "it's like an MMO", and the enemy's HP was similarly buffed. However we did the same amount of damage as usual, so combat took FOREVER. And then our DM handed a magic sword to one player and explained that the sword did 3d10+10 damage (this was level 1) and I decided to quit.

Aldarc · Oct 8, 2018

Maxperson said:
I think something people forget when talking about those of us who dislike the metagame, is that we play with players that have the same goals and desires. We don't have to "kludge" anything in an attempt to mitigate the metagame. There's no encouragement, because those we play with don't want to do it. We have the rules and the players simply abide by them, because of common interest.

Maybe for your table, but I don't think that's true, however, in this context or in all. Often when I have discussed my own GMing techniques and preferences with Lanefan in the past - including whether to utilize phantoms rolls or not - it was not uncommon for him to remark that (and I paraphrase), "If I did that, then I know that my players would metagame." Those statements imply that the values of the player are not naturally concerned about not metagaming, and that they would "break the system" if given the opportunity. If players have the same goals to refrain from metagaming for the sake of RP then phantom rolls should not matter. Players would want to make in-character decisions regardless of player knowledge.

Maxperson · Oct 8, 2018

Aldarc said:
Maybe for your table, but I don't think that's true, however, in this context or in all. Often when I have discussed my own GMing techniques and preferences with Lanefan in the past - including whether to utilize phantoms rolls or not - it was not uncommon for him to remark that (and I paraphrase), "If I did that, then I know that my players would metagame." Those statements imply that the values of the player are not naturally concerned about not metagaming, and that they would "break the system" if given the opportunity. If players have the same goals to refrain from metagaming for the sake of RP then phantom rolls should not matter. Players would want to make in-character decisions regardless of player knowledge.

I don't engage in phantom rolls. What I do on occasion, is ask for a roll at time before the roll is necessary. Not because I'm afraid the players will metagame. They won't. But because it makes the scene where the roll would be out of place flow more organically if I don't ask for a roll during a time when it would be a disruption.