D&D 5E Are DMs the Swing Vote?

[Jester David]

In a Legend & Lore column a few weeks back Mike Mearls made the claim of players:
You aren't edition warriors. You want the game to support a variety play styles in equal measure. You're not attached to any specific ways of doing things as long as the game works.

Now, this doesn't match the forums, but it does suggest we're a curious minority here. But I still believe the statement is accurate. I'm a pretty strong 3e fan and was a bit of a anti-4e troll at the start of the edition. But i still ran a 4e game for two years, and played in two games (plus some Encounters). Because that's what people were playing.

But how do we reconcile the idea that players - as a collective whole - are not edition warriors and will play what works with the reality that many groups never upgraded from earlier editons or left 4e for Pathfinder?
I believe there must be a swing vote. In a group full of indiferent people who don't care what they play so long as they play, there must be one or two players with a firm opinion that drive the choice.
This would most likely be the one also providing the books, the participant most invested in the hobby. More often than not, this is the DM.

It's an interesting idea. DMs drive the hobby despite being outnumbered 4:1. But they're the ones that have to actually run the games, so if they're not having fun or don't enjoy the edition then it is going to be very hard for everyone else to enjoy themselves.
This actually explains some of the blowback from 4th Edition.

The lore changes hurt DMs the most, by altering worlds. Any DM who had an established campaign world - either homebrew or published - suddenly had to revise everything to account for the new races, classes, planes, monsters, and the like.

The bulk of the mechanics and content were also aimed at PCs, with no use for DMs. Unlike 3e, where DMs could at least use feats and classes with monsters, there was no reason to buy any of the ____ Power books.
4th Edition, like 3e, was a player's game with the power in the hands of the characters. The game was so designed to avoid bad DMs that good DMs lost a little authority. Everything was codified.

Curiously, 4e was touted as being easier to DM. So how does this theory mesh with that claim?
I often found 4e's claimed easier DMing not to be the case. Building encounters was trickier as I couldn't just pull a single monster from a book but had to pull 4-8 and see if their powers synergized and also think of the terrain in the encounter area and provide a map for the encounter and each fight had to be a big setpiece fight. You couldn't just have a quick filler encounter to act as a break between long stretches of roleplaying, or small mood building encounter.
Monster building was somewhat easier. Kinda. While there was far, far less math involved making a 4e monster also involved writing two to five unique powers. The math was annoying and slow, but brainstorming unique snowflake power could be even slower. Having designed quite a few monsters, eventually your brain just starts to shut down.
Often DMing was easier, often it was not. So at best I'd call this a tie.

I wonder if this is the potential appeal of D&D Next. More power and focus on the DM. A DM's game, because they're the swing vote that will drive up sales.

This ended up much longer than planned. I might expand it into a blog...

Thoughts? Comments? Am I dead on, full of poop, or somewhere in the middle?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

In a Legend & Lore column a few weeks back Mike Mearls made the claim of players:
You aren't edition warriors. You want the game to support a variety play styles in equal measure. You're not attached to any specific ways of doing things as long as the game works.

Mearls is just wrong: from personal experience, I'd say players can be just as much edition warriors as any DM.

I game in a large group, and the only reason we had a 4Ed campaign at all is that the guy running the main 3.5Ed game wanted a break, and the newest member of the group wanted to run a campaign using 4Ed. And he did, for almost 2 years. But about 50% of our players objected to 4Ed's method of doing things so much that they never even made a PC, or stopped playing after just a few sessions. We'd only see them on nights when our group- for a variety of reasons- played poker or other non-4Ed games.

What killed the 4Ed campaign, have no doubt, was the guys who refused to play.

Personally, I knew I never wanted to run 4Ed from day one, and even after being in the campaign and having a good time, that position hasn't changed. Even though I did find myself liking the game enough to play as a player, I still have much the same objections to the way 4Ed worked as when i first picked it up, only more refined. So I have no grudges against those who didn't play because I can't say they were wrong.

 

[Blackbrrd]

I think you are right about the DM's is the ones that choose the game system. It's how the group I have played in has always done it. Typically the DM has an idea for an adventure or a premade adventure he wants to run, chooses a system and gets the players involved.

I think 4e did an ok job at making things easier for the DM. Creating an interesting tactical encounter was a lot easier in 4e than in 3e. Mostly because the big range of power levels among classes and monsters when comparing character level / challenge rating. In 4e you can basically just use your xp budget and it will be balanced the way you want. In 3e you really need a lot of experience to create interesting encounters that weren't really easy or really hard.

The 4e way of creating monsters where you basically look at a table and select attack/damage/defenses according to choice is a lot easier than the 3e create stats, level up, calculate, add feats, weapons, armor and so on. For instance in 3e you could give Trolls a chain shirt (+4 AC), but it's the same challenge rating, even though it's a much tougher monster. 4e tells you what attack/damage/defenses are apporpriate for a certain level (or CR in 3e).

What I disliked in 4e was the constant item grind. It's basically built into the system and without the items the math doesn't add up. It was like that in 3e as well, but due to the spells greater magic weapon/armor, you were much less reliant on what the DM gave you of magical items. In 4e you basically have to constantly upgrade the PC's weapon, armor and amulet every 4 levels or they will start to lagg. For 6-7 players this just gets to be a chore. Nothing magical about it.

4e did later on "fix" the reliance on magical items with the inherent bonus system as an optional rule, which I think is a great fix. Using it you can create settings where magic is much more scarce and special without ruining the basic math.

What 4e did pretty badly in my opinion was adventure support and lack of "compatability" with earlier d&d systems. If you want to run a 3e module you probably have to change the layout of the dungeons and all the fights. This compared to the previous editions where it was a lot more likely you could just use the maps and tweak the monsters/use updated stats.

tl;dr I agree with your post in general terms. DM's chooses the game system and making a game popular with the DM's will give you good sales.

 

[Blackbrrd]

...Even though I did find myself liking the game enough to play as a player, I still have much the same objections to the way 4Ed worked as when i first picked it up, only more refined. So I have no grudges against those who didn't play because I can't say they were wrong.

I am curious to the reasons you have for not wanting to DM 4e when you like playing it as a player. Care to elaborate a little?

 

[Savage Wombat]

Interesting, and I think you're right - I've never played in a game where the players told the GM what to run. (I've had a couple that asked - what would you like to play? - but never told outright.) The business strategy of catering to GMs might be valid.

The other question implicit in the post - did 4e cater more / too much to players, and is 5e a reaction to that? I'd really like to hear people with more 4e experience than I discuss that, but I'm afraid it would become edition warring in a heartbeat.

 

[Trickster Spirit]

Mearls is just wrong: from personal experience, I'd say players can be just as much edition warriors as any DM.

I'm not sure I agree. I mean, players absolutely can be just as much edition warriors as any DM; but the emphasis is definitely on can. Realistically, the vast majority of D&D players out there are casual players. They don't have the same commitment to the hobby that us forumites have - they probably don't have much if any experience with any tabletop game other than D&D, and might not even be aware of the differences between editions if they haven't undergone a transition between them under their DM. They might have preferences for one edition or another if they have played multiple editions, and sure, some might feel strongly enough about it that they won't play a particular edition, but the average player? The average player shows up to hang out, drink and eat table snacks while make-believing that they're dragon-slaying elves with friends, and will likely acquiesce to their DM when it comes to such unimportant things as the rules of the game.

Now, you can argue that it's not the average player who's participating in the playtest, that it's those of us who do care about stuff like the rules... but honestly, at this point, I think if you're still participating in the playtest after everything we've seen so far, it's because you're onboard with - or want to be onboard with - the central conceit of Next, which is that this is the Unity Edition. This is the compromise edition that'll reunite 4E and Pathfinder and OSR players with heaps and heaps of new casual players who joined the hobby after seeing the Basic Boxed Set next to Monopoly in the toy aisle while they were at Walmart or Target. Pipe dream? Probably. But that's what I think most playtesters want, and combined with the apathy of the silent majority casual player base, this whole "edition war" thing probably really is relegated to a few hardcore forumites who probably take their make-pretend game hobby a little too seriously.

I think more DMs fall on that side of the line than players. I agree with Jester here - Next will rise or fall on the grounds of how many DMs it will convince to transition their groups. As the DM goes, so go the casual players.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I'm a 4e supporter and mainly a DM. As you pointed out, the DM really is the swing vote. If someone likes another edition but isn't willing to run, they're not getting that game. I doubt my group will ever go back to 3.x/Pathfinder, not because we have a huge hate on for it, but because no one wants to run it anymore.

The lore changes hurt DMs the most, by altering worlds. Any DM who had an established campaign world - either homebrew or published - suddenly had to revise everything to account for the new races, classes, planes, monsters, and the like.

That doesn't bother me at all. I'm just finishing up a 4e Dark Sun campaign, and while they ran back the clock to eliminate some of the terrible late 2e changes, they then introduced some nonsense (tieflings?) that I just ignore.

The bulk of the mechanics and content were also aimed at PCs, with no use for DMs.

Other than a lack of adventures, I never felt there was a lack of 4e DMing options. There's templates, there's themes, there's reskinning, and if that's not enough, making NPCs is easy. Right now I've created 1st, 5th, 10th, and 15th-level versions of each class I'm interested in as NPCs (using the monster rules rather than DMG1/2 rules, as those are kind of lame). In any urban encounter, if I need to follow Chandler's Law and throws "ninjas" at the PCs, I can do so. I've only seen one such collection on the internet, but it was a pre-MM3 document based on the DMG1/2 rules, so it wasn't useful to me.

Unlike 3e, where DMs could at least use feats and classes with monsters, there was no reason to buy any of the ____ Power books.

Save me from 3e monsters. Balancing a 3.x monster is far harder than in 4e. Far too often they end up with some weak saving throw or some overly powerful grapple check, while you're wrestling with overpowered spellcasters. I don't want ogre kensei, I'd rather have the tools to create a monster the way I want.

Also, I can steal PC stuff. I've blatantly made NPC copies of my PCs. I've taken player-only feats and given them (as traits) to NPCs. I have a diviner NPC wizard (working for the police) with the Divination Mastery "feat", as a trait, whose primary purpose is to use the Inquisitive's Eyes ritual (the one that lets you see 1 hour/level into the past) as a crime solver. No witnesses? No problem! (He's only 4th-level, but can perform divination rituals as if he's 8th-level.) One of my Dark Sun PCs has a somewhat overpowered feat called "Unfailing Resources" that lets him automatically save at the cost of spending 10 hit points. Many boss monsters have simply blatantly stolen that ability. Or the time I stole the grappling fighter stuff and put it on 1st-level "fighter" NPCs... I'm using those on jail guards. (That's relevant for my new campaign, which involves jail guards.)

4th Edition, like 3e, was a player's game with the power in the hands of the characters. The game was so designed to avoid bad DMs that good DMs lost a little authority. Everything was codified.

There was only one area where I found players got a power-up compared to 3.x, and that was the Character Builder. That takes away DM authority. It's much harder to say "core-only" when the players don't even know core is anymore. Or I say "no stuff from Divine Power" but some of the players don't even look at sources and I'm dealing with some poorly playtested nonsense.

However, that's not really an edition thing. Pathfinder has one too, and when we were finishing up our Kingmaker campaign many players were using their (unofficial?) character builder. D&DN will have one, and will probably run into the same issue.

I've found things often weren't codified enough in older editions or Pathfinder. We had a player alchemist in Kingmaker who made explosives far more powerful than they should have been due to a lack of codification. (It didn't help that the problem was probably solvable within the rules, but only if the DM is given an hour to figure out the problem...) In 4e I'd just consult my "damage expressions" table, say you can make four explosives (as "minion traps") based on your level, and that's that. Didn't kill all the trolls? Well, too bad. You weakened them, because you thought outside the box, but thinking outside the box is not an "I win" button.

Curiously, 4e was touted as being easier to DM. So how does this theory mesh with that claim?
I often found 4e's claimed easier DMing not to be the case. Building encounters was trickier as I couldn't just pull a single monster from a book but had to pull 4-8 and see if their powers synergized and also think of the terrain in the encounter area and provide a map for the encounter and each fight had to be a big setpiece fight. You couldn't just have a quick filler encounter to act as a break between long stretches of roleplaying, or small mood building encounter.
Monster building was somewhat easier. Kinda. While there was far, far less math involved making a 4e monster also involved writing two to five unique powers. The math was annoying and slow, but brainstorming unique snowflake power could be even slower. Having designed quite a few monsters, eventually your brain just starts to shut down.
Often DMing was easier, often it was not. So at best I'd call this a tie.

I heatedly disagree. I currently have a word document containing 80% of the monsters I've designed, and it's over 1 MB in size. It has no artwork, it's just text and tables. It takes forever to save because of that.

I had filled 5 index card file boxes with them, and when I realized I needed 2 more, I gave up and bought a laptop. (I hate using computers at a game, and only use it for DMing. When I show up to play, the laptop stays at home and I use a paper character sheet.) Juggling 5 monsters is no problem for me; I simply open my "Holding Pen" document (not the one in Adventure Tools, in fact my laptop hates that program for some reason) and plop down the 4-5 monsters I might need. When I was using index cards, one reason I did that was I could go through my boxes and pull up the cards I needed, rather than try to juggle the MM3 and Monster Vault and Dark Sun Creature Catalog simultaneously; this was in addition to the index cards storing my own homebrew monsters.

If you're finding the math annoying and slow, use one of the math charts found "out there". I've made a table based off the one from Sly Flourish, with a few additions (for high AoE + control powers, or brute encounter powers, etc) so I don't have to consult a calculator. It takes two pages to print, and I just put it in my binder. If I need a trap right away, the numbers are already there.

For terrain and so forth, I find that to be just as big an issue in 3.x. Same with "synergizing" monsters, though it's not always necessary to do that. Only in a boss fight. Often our Kingmaker DM would spot a weakness in our PCs (for instance, we were very weak to AoE damage) and throw monsters at us with said abilities. Like that time he attacked us with several half-dragon/were-whatevers. So many breath weapons! Or (for my 4e campaign) I've found my PCs are very bad at resisting ranged attacks or fighting anything that can fly. There's no need to custom-design monsters. Elven archers riding on griffons would do the trick, just reskin for Dark Sun.

Yes, coming up with cool setpieces takes time away from the table, but the exact same thing applies to any edition. There might be more pressure to run things that way, but you don't have to. And honestly, I can just steal setpieces from old copies of Dungeon Magazine or my collection of Dark Sun and free adventures. Plus, I think Piratecat is a great DM, and I recall him asking people on the boards for help setting up setpieces, and people even answered questions such as the volume of water pouring down every six seconds. I have no problem using R&D (research & duplicate) as long as it's not violating copyright, so I guess I'm going to R&D a great DM.

I wonder if this is the potential appeal of D&D Next. More power and focus on the DM. A DM's game, because they're the swing vote that will drive up sales.

Maybe at first, but I've participated in the playtest, and to me it looks like 3.x written in 2e style, so often-bad rules but written in a less clear format. I'm just looking at the "ability score" save system and saying "yuck". It's basically saying "you're not allowed to use ogres or other low-Dex creatures because they'll spend the whole time prone from being greased" (as an example). In 4e, a monster with very low stats doesn't suffer such a penalty to NADs. Since it'll be reasonably balanced, I only need to spend time creating the scenario and picturing tactics. Naturally I figured the ease of DMing would give me more time to write plot and what not, but I'm lazy, so instead I find the ease of DMing means I spend less time DMing away from the table.

This ended up much longer than planned. I might expand it into a blog...

I hope you do.

 

[Jester David]

If you're finding the math annoying and slow, use one of the math charts found "out there". I've made a table based off the one from Sly Flourish, with a few additions (for high AoE + control powers, or brute encounter powers, etc) so I don't have to consult a calculator. It takes two pages to print, and I just put it in my binder. If I need a trap right away, the numbers are already there.

Quite the opposite. The math is easy. It's everything else. You can't just "math" three unique attack powers.

Yes, coming up with cool setpieces takes time away from the table, but the exact same thing applies to any edition. There might be more pressure to run things that way, but you don't have to. And honestly, I can just steal setpieces from old copies of Dungeon Magazine or my collection of Dark Sun and free adventures. Plus, I think Piratecat is a great DM, and I recall him asking people on the boards for help setting up setpieces, and people even answered questions such as the volume of water pouring down every six seconds. I have no problem using R&D (research & duplicate) as long as it's not violating copyright, so I guess I'm going to R&D a great DM.

4e encounters seem to work best when you think of them like an blockbuster action movie fight scene. You're spending ten thousand dollars per minute on the scene so it had better count and not be this throw away moment. Fights have to "matter".
If you're going to spend 30-90 minutes on a battle you don't do it for no reason.
Which means they should have some elements of a set piece.

As a DM I always found this frustrating. My stories seldom fit the 4e action design and I always had to balance what I wanted to tell with what the big action scenes. The first year of my game suffered for this until I found the groove.

 

[DEFCON 1]

In a Legend & Lore column a few weeks back Mike Mearls made the claim of players:
You aren't edition warriors. You want the game to support a variety play styles in equal measure. You're not attached to any specific ways of doing things as long as the game works.

But how do we reconcile the idea that players - as a collective whole - are not edition warriors and will play what works with the reality that many groups never upgraded from earlier editions or left 4e for Pathfinder?

I don't think it's that hard to reconcile the statement at all. And the answer is... many players just didn't think 4E worked for their particular playstyle and game.

If you had a campaign that was working fine in 3.5 and found that adapting it to 4E when it was released would not give you the same experience... then you didn't switch. It didn't work for you. You might not have anything against the game as a whole (and in other situations, sure you might play it)... but if there was no reason to switch, then you didn't. Nor should anyone have expected you to. But HAD 4E worked for your campaign (and on fact gained you something you felt was missing)... you would easily have switched the campaign over to it. Just like many people switched their 3.5 game to a Pathfinder game.

Most players aren't "edition warriors" in that if a game works... they will play it. Probably not for every type of campaign, but they aren't going to forsake a game "just because". Now some players definitely will. A few players still play only AD&D and will insist that every edition since then is a bad game and shouldn't be played (even if the other 99.9% of roleplayers think they're insane)... but that's why Mearls was talking about the predominant results from the surveys. Most players think there is something good to be said about every past edition of the game... and thus will be fine to play it is that's the game and campaign available at the time.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Quite the opposite. The math is easy. It's everything else. You can't just "math" three unique attack powers.

That's why I often copy PC powers, only using monster math instead of PC math. But then I've got lots of experience with this now.