D&D 5E (2014) What's the rush? Has the "here and now" been replaced by the "next level" attitude?

[Manbearcat]

Wonderful post # 158 @Balesir . That perfectly captures my philosophical outlook on gaming (and other things) and the accompanying GMing principles that I hold paramount and attempt to consistently observe. I hope most of my posts on these sorts of subjects reflect that.

 

[Celebrim]

I came to the realisation sometime around the early 2000s - and I think [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] has come to the same view - that there is a very serious issue that runs far, far deeper than "DM impartiality".

However impartial, a DM - like any human being - has a "world view" that describes (models, even) the way that they think of the world as working. It informs how they believe any circumstance arises, how any event works. And these world models all have one important thing in common. They are all wrong.

I probably came to this view sometime in the early 90's. During the '80's, I - like probably many gamers - thought that at some level the rules were wrong or incomplete when they failed to simulate 'reality'. The push in most rules systems was toward greater and greater degrees of 'realism' as a goal in and of itself. Conflicts over the rules and vagueness in the rules where settled by appeals to realism, which would often lead to long debates over what was realistic.

I fear you are describing something about 20 years too late in my own development of my DMing philosophy. This would have heavily informed my play back in 1991 when it would have been something of a revelation. I'm not being superior or contentious, but I think you are off on a tangent.

If anything, I think your view of the purpose of the rules is probably closer to my view of the rules than it is to Hussars. I tend to approach the rules as if they were the physics of the world, for that I would for example, never narrate a high level NPC having died of a broken neck after being thrown off his horse, because the players understanding of how the world works based on the rules (rather than reality) would inform them that this was not merely improbable, but impossible. I've been in lengthy threads here at EnWorld discussing how I approach the game through that perspective, and I don't really want to go through them again, but I've also been in lengthy arguments with Hussar where he denied that perspective and approach in favor of one where the rules were ignored in favor of loosely defined rule of cool (as defined by the player, though exactly how the DM and player were to agree on what was 'cool' wasn't explained, the DM is just supposed to be a mind reader I think).

What does this mean for RPGs?

It means that the story teller must accept the burden of communicating the model of how the world works in some fashion. In my case, this means a 534 page house rules document and occasional interruptions to explain the cultural expectations of the setting as they comes up based on the assumption that even if the player's themselves don't understand the setting, the character's themselves grew up in it and are versed in it. It means consciously not playing 'gotcha' as the story teller, particularly with hidden assumptions and knowledge. It means generously interpreting player actions according to the fortune mechanics, and it means approaching question of, "Can I say, "Yes", here?" from the prespective of, "What does it means for the game to make this a legal precedent about how the world works?"

The second reason that the approach is problematic is that, in order to give the players of the game a sufficiently good idea of how the game world really works, a huge amount of communication is needed.

Oh noes. Horrors.

Worse still, this communication is likely to cover large areas that the GM does not consider needs communicating because it's "obvious". It is, after all, their baseline assumption (even if wrong) for life.

And we get back to the whole, "You can't trust your GM", crap. The fundamental assumption here is that there is an adversarial relationship with a DM that is manipulating the flow of inframation to the PC's in order to surprise them with their unwise uninformed decisions. Put to analogy, the idea here is that the GM is a bad mystery novelist, who fails to put sufficient information into the story for the resolution of the mystery to make sense to the reader when it happens. Or in other words, the idea is that the GM cheats.

My own experience, looking back and over the last few years, is that players end up not playing by any model of "how the (game)world works". They end up looking to the GM for social cues and body language that tells them whether or not their "great idea" fits what the GM can slot into his or her world model. In other words, they end up "playing the GM" rather than "playing the game".

It's a world view grounded in the idea that the sort of play at a table looks like that described by Grimtooth's Traps, where indeed, it would not be possible to play either the rules or the setting, because the GM is playing 'gotcha'. For the life of me, I can't think of any situation in the last 3 years which fits the scenario you describe. If I could give my players advice on this it would be, "Please dont' do this. You try to figure out what I want you to do based on the body language of someone that is autistic and you are almost certainly going to be wrong. I don't 'want' you to do anything. I don't have a preferred solution." The PC's almost always come up with actions and solutions I didn't think of. By no means does this mean the answer is, "No." or worse "Wrong!" The answer is defined by the rules and the setting. I define the answer only to the extent I'm the author of both, but I would like to think that there is pretty thick bandwidth in terms of communicating how things work. This issue isn't even operative.

And the time that, in the midst of dodging assassins that were trying to kill them, one of the PC's had broadsheets printed up and posted about town, and hired criers to go about town informing everyone where he'd be at a particular time on a particular evening, and then the assassins knew exactly where he'd be and prepared ambushes - I'd like to think that made sense to everyone at the table in retrospect.

In other words, GM impartiality is needed, yes, but it still doesn't address the core of the issue. Even an "impartial" GM has 'biases' that arise simply from the way they believe the world is. You can't remove that - it's part of being human.

Sure. But this isn't the core of the issue either.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I've been in lengthy threads here at EnWorld discussing how I approach the game through that perspective, and I don't really want to go through them again, but I've also been in lengthy arguments with Hussar where he denied that perspective and approach in favor of one where the rules were ignored in favor of loosely defined rule of cool (as defined by the player, though exactly how the DM and player were to agree on what was 'cool' wasn't explained, the DM is just supposed to be a mind reader I think).

It is my belief that a game has to be believable and fun. We watch movies where things happen that aren't believable but are still fun and we accept them because the "realistic" way of doing things would be no fun for the story. However, in general, I think Hussar and I agree that realism is the "default" way of resolving issues and that the rules attempt to model "realism" but with some abstraction in order to make it easier to handle. The abstraction often causes issues that you ignore simply because it would take too much time and effort. However, in situations were you don't need the abstraction you can just substitute realism or what you want to happen in its place. Someone falls off a building and none of the PCs are involved...either the fall kills them or it doesn't. It's really up to the DM what happens. He doesn't need to use the rules for this.

If it involves the PCs in some way, then the rules should be followed in order to be fail and impartial.

It means that the story teller must accept the burden of communicating the model of how the world works in some fashion.

Agreed. The easiest method is to use the rules as how the world works. However, the rules don't ever cover everything. That generally means relying on the one thing everyone has in common, reality or an agreed upon version of reality. Reality works because because there are probably billions of things the rules don't cover that we've encountered in our day to day lives that we all sort of understand.

However, as was said above, the problem is that people are really good at filter the world through their own world view and it often ends up with weird results. Random examples I can think of from games I've played in include:

1. The time that our DM felt that jumping 10 feet while wearing full plate(back in 2e with no real rules on jumping distances) was completely impossible while a player was pointing to the fact that he had 18/00 strength and the world record for long jump was something like 30 feet. So, if he had the highest strength out of any human ever, certainly he could do the same.

2. The time our DM felt houses hit by a fireball spell should burn down in less than 2 minutes and it would take less than 1 before everyone started taking fire damage. It took about 5 minutes before all the buildings nearby that building were also on fire. Most of the group felt fire shouldn't spread quite that quickly.

There's no good way to communicate these sorts of things in advance since they seem like "common sense" to the DM or to the players involved. Our DM thought we were completely stupid for casting a fireball spell inside a building because we should know that within 1 round of 2e combat, we'd all die due to fire damage. Everyone just assumes common sense is the same for everyone. It isn't.

And we get back to the whole, "You can't trust your GM", crap. The fundamental assumption here is that there is an adversarial relationship with a DM that is manipulating the flow of inframation to the PC's in order to surprise them with their unwise uninformed decisions. Put to analogy, the idea here is that the GM is a bad mystery novelist, who fails to put sufficient information into the story for the resolution of the mystery to make sense to the reader when it happens. Or in other words, the idea is that the GM cheats.

DMs don't manipulate information on purpose most of the time. But they do so unconsciously or unknowingly. Take the example above. If the DM considers it common sense that you can't jump 10 feet in full plate and that obviously everyone should know that, he's unlikely to explain that the chasm in front of your is impassable or that you need to look for another way around. He'll just assume you already know that and let you decide.

To take another example. We had a DM who gave us a mission that in our estimation was impossible to complete: We needed to get a caravan full of wagons and animals to a nearby town in a couple of hours with a bridge over a 50 foot chasm destroyed while we were first level. He expected us to complete the task because the rest of his game was dependent on it. He expected us just to build a bridge and get it done in an hour. To him that made perfect sense. To us, it was completely insane. Our characters didn't know how to build a bridge, we didn't have tools with us and even if we did, getting it done in an hour seemed unmanageable.

There were no rules in the game for how long it takes to build a bridge or what tools you need or what knowledge you require so there were no rules to fall back on.

It wasn't his goal to confuse us with a "gotcha" or to be adversarial. He wanted to provide us with a challenge we needed to solve but based it around information that was different in his head than was in our own.

I don't 'want' you to do anything. I don't have a preferred solution." The PC's almost always come up with actions and solutions I didn't think of. By no means does this mean the answer is, "No." or worse "Wrong!" The answer is defined by the rules and the setting. I define the answer only to the extent I'm the author of both, but I would like to think that there is pretty thick bandwidth in terms of communicating how things work. This issue isn't even operative.

The problem comes down to when the rules don't cover something, which I assume even yours don't. Each person has their own idea on what is possible, impossible, easy, and hard.

Tell one DM that you'd like to shoot an arrow into the ceiling in order to cause a cave in and he'll say "Awesome, roll damage and if you can do 15 damage, that'll crack the rock enough to cause a bunch of big rocks to fall on your enemy killing them instantly."

Tell another DM you are going that and he'll say "your arrow bounces off the rock harmlessly, that's what happens when you shoot arrows at a rock, idiot".

A 3rd DM might say "Your are purposefully trying to cause a cave-in the the room you are standing in? You succeed. The entire room is filled with rocks and everyone dies, including you and the party."

When you attempt something not covered by the rules, you should expect all 3 equally. People have REALLY large differences in their view of "reality". Which is why most of the time attempting out of the box thinking that isn't covered by the rules is the equivalent of Russian Roulette.

Most DMs can think of at least a couple of solutions to problems off the top of their head. Those ones are always easy because the DM already thought of them and "pre-approved" them. Then there are the ones that he didn't think of. Some of those are going to be labelled "awesome", some "interesting" and some "stupid" almost entirely based on the DMs world view. If you come up with one of the awesome things, you will succeed with flying colours. The DM will assign an easy DC to roll or skip rolling all together and will come up with rules mechanics on the spot that make the action have a huge effect. If you do something he labels "interesting", you're likely to have to succeed at moderate DCs and the effect will likely be the same as if you had taken the safe route by choosing one of the "pre-approved" options. If you do something "stupid", you should except to fail, possibly spectacularly.

 

[Balesir]

And we get back to the whole, "You can't trust your GM", crap. The fundamental assumption here is that there is an adversarial relationship with a DM that is manipulating the flow of inframation to the PC's in order to surprise them with their unwise uninformed decisions. Put to analogy, the idea here is that the GM is a bad mystery novelist, who fails to put sufficient information into the story for the resolution of the mystery to make sense to the reader when it happens. Or in other words, the idea is that the GM cheats.

You are not reading what I wrote. How can it possibly be a GM trust issue if the GM isn't telling you stuff because he or she considers it obvious? How is the GM "cheating" if they consider some assumptions to be essential, with no possible alternatives? The GM is, by definition, unaware of these assumptions and biases. They are unconscious "givens" - things that the GM considers simply the way things are. If they were aware of their assumption they could "cheat" about it, but if they are unaware that they are assuming something how can they possibly tell you something else? How is not telling you duplicitous if they don't even realise that an alternative is possible?

Sure. But this isn't the core of the issue either.

I'm sure you're right. You know best.

 

[tomBitonti]

Returning to the original question, in D&D 3E (not sure about 4E or 5E), the mechanics of skills and feats rather limits character advancement.

Using skills and feats as "game physics", a character must represent new skills (including knowledge) through skill points, and must represent new abilities either class abilities or as feat selections.

That is, a character who is hired as a mercenary on a large sailing ship, and who spends a lot of player time on the ship, but advances just one or two levels, doesn't have a mechanism to represent the basic knowledge they would expect to gain for the experience. If, say, the crew spoke a foreign language, you would expect the character to gain a smattering of knowledge of that language. Being a sailing ship, assuming the character assisted with basic tasks on the ship when not otherwise occupied, you would expect the character to gain a little bit of Profession: Sailor.

(Or maybe not: If the player didn't put points in intelligence, they might be considered to be somewhat thick-headed lunks who wouldn't pick up any of these things. But, still, you would expect some state updates.)

The problem is compounded by the frequent need to reserve limited skill and feat selections to fit their character advancement path, which may require very specific selections, leaving no room for story based selections.

Put another way, there is no place for "story based character development" in the character's state. They can gain a world history and through that gain relationships with particular world agents, they can amass wealth, but otherwise they can only advance and thereby change their character state by leveling.

There is a little room on the edges: Wizards can learn new spells (but, often, they don't pursue this, instead taking the default additions as they level, or, they do, but restricted by the wealth-by-level guidelines).

With these limitations on story based development, I have little wonder that player motivation focuses on level advancement. Players need to have some way to advance their character state.

Thx!

TomB

 

[Celebrim]

It is my belief that a game has to be believable and fun. We watch movies where things happen that aren't believable but are still fun and we accept them because the "realistic" way of doing things would be no fun for the story.

I believe that 'believable' is a very high objective for the most part you never hit. I think you can hit a point where everyone willingly suspends enough disbelief to become immersed in the story, and that's enough.

However, in general, I think Hussar and I agree that realism is the "default" way of resolving issues and that the rules attempt to model "realism" but with some abstraction in order to make it easier to handle.

I disagree. In general, realism is the default assumption - walls are solid, for example. But, this assumption must be backed up mechanically. If your rules say that rock walls are actually tissue paper, then its time to laugh, go out of character and discuss the issue with your PC's, and then repair the damage to the desired reality by getting new rules. Hense, while I expect players to assume stone walls are solid barring any other knowledge to the contrary, the rules will back this up upon inspection. The default way of resolving issues is the rules. The rules model the setting - not 'reality'. The goal is versimlitude, not 'realism'.

However, in situations were you don't need the abstraction you can just substitute realism or what you want to happen in its place. Someone falls off a building and none of the PCs are involved...either the fall kills them or it doesn't. It's really up to the DM what happens. He doesn't need to use the rules for this.

While the DM could use whatever he wants, in fact, by resolving the situation outside the rules he is now playing the game that Balesir warned against. To understand the situation you must read the DM, because you've just arbitrarily reduced the bandwidth of communication between the GM and the players. If someone fell off the building, the PC's have a reasonable expectation that the events can be determined in light of the rules. If someone was murdered using magic, the PC's have a reasonable expectation that the NPC followed the same rules that apply to them. DM impartiality is meaningless if it only applies to the PCs.

Agreed. The easiest method is to use the rules as how the world works. However, the rules don't ever cover everything.

In theory they can. In practice, they don't in a way that gets down to the heart of the matter I mentioned in the prior post.

That generally means relying on the one thing everyone has in common, reality or an agreed upon version of reality. Reality works because because there are probably billions of things the rules don't cover that we've encountered in our day to day lives that we all sort of understand.

No no no no. This is exactly the false expectation Balesir rightly warns against. Reality is not something we all have in common. Reality may be the same but no one of us actually owns reality and knows it, so perforce everyone's perception of reality is different.

1. The time that our DM felt that jumping 10 feet while wearing full plate(back in 2e with no real rules on jumping distances) was completely impossible while a player was pointing to the fact that he had 18/00 strength and the world record for long jump was something like 30 feet. So, if he had the highest strength out of any human ever, certainly he could do the same.

Won't happen if you have explicit rules for covering jump.

2. The time our DM felt houses hit by a fireball spell should burn down in less than 2 minutes and it would take less than 1 before everyone started taking fire damage. It took about 5 minutes before all the buildings nearby that building were also on fire. Most of the group felt fire shouldn't spread quite that quickly.

Won't happen if fireball explicitly doesn't set objects on fire, thus simplifying the resolution of complex events like burning something down. Simply put, fire doesn't spread unless the rules provide for it. If you want fire to spread in a mechanical way, there has to be a rule. I have no intention of arguing over how fast fire should spread in the setting. If I needed to model it, I'd write rules and then derive average rates of spread of fire in the setting from basic rule principles.

There's no good way to communicate these sorts of things in advance...

Rules. I told Balesir my approach went far beyond what he was suggesting; he evidently didn't believe me. If a player objects to the reality created by the rules, or I find I object to the reality created by a rule, I try to revise it before the next session.

DMs don't manipulate information on purpose most of the time. But they do so unconsciously or unknowingly. Take the example above. If the DM considers it common sense that you can't jump 10 feet in full plate and that obviously everyone should know that, he's unlikely to explain that the chasm in front of your is impassable or that you need to look for another way around. He'll just assume you already know that and let you decide.

I should hope at least for this sort of example I've fully addressed your challenge.

To take another example. We had a DM who gave us a mission that in our estimation was impossible to complete: We needed to get a caravan full of wagons and animals to a nearby town in a couple of hours with a bridge over a 50 foot chasm destroyed while we were first level. He expected us to complete the task because the rest of his game was dependent on it. He expected us just to build a bridge and get it done in an hour. To him that made perfect sense. To us, it was completely insane. Our characters didn't know how to build a bridge, we didn't have tools with us and even if we did, getting it done in an hour seemed unmanageable.

There were no rules in the game for how long it takes to build a bridge or what tools you need or what knowledge you require so there were no rules to fall back on.

This entire scenario depends on the fact that there are no rules for building bridges. Further more, the scenario plays out badly because no one bothered to stop the DM and say, "How long does my character think it would it take to build a bridge?" or even, "What are the rules for building bridges?" , nor did the DM, upon seeing the player's confusion stop play and say, "In your estimation, you could fix the bridge in an hour." This is therefore only a failure of communication, and one that would be fully expected by me because there were no rules. IF there are no rules for crafting things, you can't expect players to believe that they can do it. If there are no rules you know as a player for crafting things and you think you may need to craft something, to immediately ask what the rules for crafting are would be a very good idea.

It wasn't his goal to confuse us with a "gotcha" or to be adversarial. He wanted to provide us with a challenge we needed to solve but based it around information that was different in his head than was in our own.

It doesn't matter what his goal was, he was in fact adversarial and played gotcha. It was his responsbility to convey to you the players something that your players would know, namely that in his world it takes 1 hour to build a bridge over a canyon even if you don't have tools.

The problem comes down to when the rules don't cover something, which I assume even yours don't.

True, but not in the sense that you mean it presently. Take the following situation:

Tell one DM that you'd like to shoot an arrow into the ceiling in order to cause a cave in and he'll say "Awesome, roll damage and if you can do 15 damage, that'll crack the rock enough to cause a bunch of big rocks to fall on your enemy killing them instantly."

Why does the player have this perception that shooting the rock might cause a cave in and yet this result - this stake on the success if you will - is in doubt? He has this perception because either there are no rules on destroying ceilings or he doesn't know them. Immediately, the DM should be aware that he's about to play 'gotcha' with the player. The player's perception of the world is false, and the DM has a burden to inform the player of the false perception.

So, generally I'll do something like, "Make a Knowledge (Geology and Mining) check to assay the strength of the ceiling."

On the basis of that result, success or failure, you inform the player of the particulars regarding the crack, "You don't think it is very deep. It looks quite sturdy and probably would survive any mortal blow without much damage." OR "You think the ceiling is actually unstable and a well aimed blow could very well bring down the ceiling over a wide area. If you continue examining the ceiling for another round, you might be able to determine what areas of the roof are stable or how much you'd expect the roof to fall."

On that basis, we now have communication about the stake. If on the other hand, the player has no relevant knowledge, you say something like, "Well, it's hard to say what would happen if you shot the roof. The arrow might bounce or it could bring the whole roof down. You have no way of knowing."

Either way, you direct the PC's to the rules governing the hardness and hit points of stone, where he'd note (at least in my game) that thick stone has a maximum hardness of 20, and takes half damage from physical attacks not explicitly designed to harm stone. His 15 hit point arrow is therefore, at least in this world we are playing in, highly likely to snap and do no damage to a ceiling that is hundreds of feet thick and survived earthquakes for centuries. You do this because the character has lived in the world and knows how it behaves. He knows stone is quite durable, and arrows generally ineffective in damaging it - or if your rules say otherwise - stone has 8 hardness and 5 hit points per cubic foot, for example - he knows that too.

All the DMs in your example are playing "gotcha!" with the PC's, because the PCs have no way of knowing the stakes and are given no path toward establishing the stakes. Before I'd attempt to bring down the ceiling with an arrow, we'd need to establish if my character has any reason to believe that any particular thing would result. Many DMs don't want to say, in large part because they fear their game would be meaningless if they actually empowered PC's with knowledge that they otherwise keep behind the screen. Their whole game is 'figure out what I'm thinking'. Balesir rightly warns against that, but he can't imagine how you get away from it despite protesting that you need to follow 'rules'.

Most DMs can think of at least a couple of solutions to problems off the top of their head. Those ones are always easy because the DM already thought of them and "pre-approved" them. Then there are the ones that he didn't think of. Some of those are going to be labelled "awesome", some "interesting" and some "stupid" almost entirely based on the DMs world view. If you come up with one of the awesome things, you will succeed with flying colours. The DM will assign an easy DC to roll or skip rolling all together and will come up with rules mechanics on the spot that make the action have a huge effect. If you do something he labels "interesting", you're likely to have to succeed at moderate DCs and the effect will likely be the same as if you had taken the safe route by choosing one of the "pre-approved" options. If you do something "stupid", you should except to fail, possibly spectacularly.

The problem isn't that you can't design a rules set that covers every situation, because you can and its trivially easy. The central and important problem is that you can't design a rules set that covers every situation in the way you'd like it to be covered. But even so, your responcibility is still to communicate with the players.

 

[Celebrim]

You are not reading what I wrote.

Yes I am.

 

[Stalker0]

DnD has generally forced players to wait before they get to play the character they envision during chargen. If you want to be Conan you have to wait for several levels before you can really claim to be Conan.

Couple this with the huge number of games which fade and die long before player goals are realized, it's not surprising that players have a hurry up mentality.

I think this sums it up nicely.

Its also why in most of my games the players start at 3rd instead of 1st level.

 

[Balesir]

Yes I am.

OK, then - you are not understanding what I wrote.

 

[Celebrim]

OK, then - you are not understanding what I wrote.

Well, that at least has a possibility to be true, although I will still claim that it isn't.

Are you willing to accept that the questions you thought were rhetorical, might not be? I've not got a lot of interest in answering the questions of someone who thinks the questions can't be answered and anyone that disagrees just doesn't understand him.

How can it possibly be a GM trust issue if the GM isn't telling you stuff because he or she considers it obvious?

Because a good and experienced DM should have long ago given up on the idea that anything is obvious. You shouldn't have to run more than a few sessions to realize that the idea that things are obvious is false, and you the GM are an idiot for thinking that they are. Ideally, a few sessions after that you start wondering about how you can bridge that gap instead of thinking, "Well, it's my players fault for not understanding me."

Unfortunately, some players only experience GMs that blame the players for their own poor commuication skills and badly designed plots filled with leaps of intuition that no one should expect anyone else to make or who actually enjoy screwing with the PCs by forcing the PCs to make uninformed choices. Those players get 'burned' and they take antogonistic stances to their GMs.

So you start looking for ways to get your game on common ground because its really the informed choices of the players that are interesting. The choice between A and B is only interesting if it reflects an actual choice and not a coin flip. The choice between 'left and right' isn't interesting unless the players know where left and right lead. And one of the key ways to do that is get rid of the idea that your game world is based on 'reality' or your perception of it or that the PC's can be assumed to have the player's knowledge. In fact it is reverse, you have to treat the character's knowledge and perceptions of surroundings as broad stream of information that the players can choose to drink from because you want them to make informed choices.

And it means sometimes just avoiding ever doing reverse logic on the players or other kinds of logical traps. It means a conscious effort to never play gotcha in any form. It could still happen, but it becomes such a rare event that it fades into the noise. You gain the player's trust because you earned it. If the GM is going around thinking, "Well, gee, the players should obviously know this..." but he doesn't communicate that, then of course he isn't going to earn the player's trust because either he's a noob or he's an idiot.