Is the DM the most important person at the table

[pemerton]

I'm reading a lot of posts that seem like they could be summarised: if you want exploratory play, in which the main thing the players do is learn the content of the notes the GM has made during prep time, then GMing will be a lot of work. That seems to be trivially true. If someone wants to know how they can reduce the GM's prep burden, then I think they have to accept that we're going to be moving away from that italcised paradigm of play.

 

[Hussar]

Look, it's a spectrum. There are all sorts of options here. From the very traditional where the DM is the source of 99% of the work, all the way to sitting around the campfire, pass the story stick type games (which I don't particularly enjoy either). It's not binary.

Take the example of the town adventure. Ok, we have the traditional setup where the DM spends 4 hours prepping the town.

Or, we step back a bit. At the end of the last session, the players were just entering town. So, the DM plays a variation of 2 Truths and a Lie. Each player has to tell the DM (probably through email or a note) one thing that their character believes is true about this town. Now, the DM can decide what is true and what is not and then prepare based on the input from the players. So, it takes a bit of the workload off the DM, but, not much.

Or, we step back a lot. At the end of the session, the players were just entering town. The DM asks each player, say within the next three days (presuming a weekly game) to give him a one page scenario in the town. Two, three encounters, a bar, something. Anything. The DM then stitches these four scenarios (possibly making changes) into the town, maybe even adding a scenario of his own. Now, not every scenario is going to get used. So, the unused scenarios go into the DM's hand folder for use later.

Repeat that every couple of sessions and the DM winds up with hundreds of scenarios/scenes/NPC's in very short order and has to do virtually zero prep. Heck, these can be carried forward into the next campaign as well. Sure, it means that any given player might have a better insight into a given scenario, or, maybe not. The DM can certainly change things as needed.

Note, none of these are the "right" way of doing things. Just options. I'm sure there are tons more. But, to me, the notion that we must stick with the traditional "DM does 99% of the away from the table work" is not necessarily the best solution. It's one solution. And it has strengths and weaknesses. To me, the weaknesses - DM workload and burnout - more than outweigh the benefits.

 

[Ovinomancer]

What I meant by that is the D&D playstyle is far more popular. I like dungeon world, my players do not. That is often the case with games outside of D&D. I like them and talk people into playing for a short time but everyone wants to go back to D&D pretty quickly.

From my experiences most players do not like other games all that much unless they keep to what D&D does.

I find this good"I do like D&D a lot" and bad"I would like to play other games and other play styles far more than I get to.

I think I got four or five sessions in with Dungeon World and actually only just started to understand the system when the guys came to me with"we want to go back to D&D".

Same thing happened with Fate,Savage Worlds and 13th Age.

A lot of it was the players seem really comfortable with me doing all the work. When I asked for player input for Dungeon World for example and said"You come from a Elven village? What was its name and what was it like there ....it didn't go over well, that player got slightly hostile as if I was trying to put something on him".

That's a MUCH better point!

 

[Nagol]

I still incline to the view that, if no one can remember it, it doesn't matter. Conversely, a necessary condition of something being relevant is that it can be remembered by those at the table. If the players don't remember something, they're not going to leverage it (which is the case that I was responding to in my post that you quoted).

I'm not saying that GMing doesn't require any note-taking - it may or it may not, depending on context and circumstances, how much of what matters is recorded on various sheets (eg do we need to note that so-and-so suffered a broken shoulder if broken shoulder is a condition recorded on the appropriate character sheet?), etc. But I think the degree of note-taking required can be exaggerated, and that the idea that it is necessary to so for the players to leverage some detail doesn't seem right for me.

Nor do I think the degree of prep really helps here. The main thing that needs to be noted is stuff that matters and stuff that changes. And that is likely to have to be done even if there is prep. In my personal experience, doing prep doesn't change the amount of session notes I need to take.

I already posted upthread that (in my view) the main challenge in GMing is juggling the fiction. The scenario you have set out is an example of that. But it doesn't seem to bear upon the prep issue or whether extensive notes are particularly necessary in a low-prep game (which is what I was discussing with @Imaro): given what I've bolded, I don't see how this shows that preparation is necessary or makes things easier. Even if the existence of the miner was recorded in some pre-authored notes, you would have to record the interaction with the paladin and it's significance.

To me this example does seem to relate to a different aspect of this conversation, namely,who is responsible for driving play. There are systems in which the paladin's treatment of the NPC would be something that the player is responsible for recording on the PC sheet in some form. Even if that's not the case (eg D&D PC sheets tend not to have a "relationships" box), if the player does hope to leverage this relationship down the track then I would expect him/her to make a note of it. But as you present it this doesn't seem to be an instance of extensive notes being required; it doesn't seem that prep would have made any difference; and your reason for making the notes is not that the players are going to leverage something later on.

It just seems to be an example of a GM keeping track of material to use for subsequent framing and consequences, which are some of the aspects of "fiction juggling" that I identified upthread.

No one remembering right now doesn't mean no one remembers on their way to the fridge for a drink.

Nor does it mean that the fact isn't salient in undershoring a whole bunch of previous precedents and actions.

Nor does it mean the it won't become pivotal again in the future.

 

[Nagol]

Does anyone actually care if the players know a given NPC's statblock? Seriously?

Depends entirely on the NPC and their role in the campaign. One 1e game I ran, the crown prince was accused of killing a prostitute and the PCs were tasked to (very quietly) ascertain his guilt. It would have blown the scenario wide open if the players knew a new member of court -- the sister to the prince's betrothed -- was a 7th level Illusionist.

In a 3.X campaign, the local shopkeeper the PCs liked and used to sell their goods was a spymaster for the duke.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Yeah, I feel like they’re starting from a fundamentally flawed position: that there’s something wrong with the GM being the most important person at the table.

The GM is generally the most important person at the table because they put in the most work at the game usually collapses without them. “But it doesn’t need to be that way,” critics contend - and it doesn’t. But it is, because it works, and people are usually happy with the way things are. “But you could implement X, Y or Z to reduce the GM’s burden,” they say - and you could, except that X, Y and Z reduce the fun of many GM’s and players, or in some cases make it harder, not easier, to run a game. Many people are already implementing X, Y or Z in their games to the extent they are comfortable with them, but still leaving the GM with the most critical role at the table.

Yes, you can probably come up with a system and a social contract that results in a collaborative story telling experience that results in everyone at the table as equal participants, and the find a group of gamers who would love it. And meanwhile everyone else goes back to playing DnD, because they enjoyed it more. The GM being the most important person at the table isn’t a problem. It’s resulted in enjoyable gameplay for decades.

I'm not certain it's an "enjoy it more" as much as it's "what I know." It's hard to, as a group with a near mono-experience in play, shift to a new style of play in a satisfactory way. This is trivially true, as ot's hard to be good at a thing your first try. This results in a poor experience which is reinforcing. I've seen a lot of people say things about their foray into other games that leap out at me this way. Heck, I bounced off of other games until it 'clicked' in my thinking I needed to have some very different assumptions about play. I still have preferences, though, so that remains a valid point.

 

[Nagol]

I'm reading a lot of posts that seem like they could be summarised: if you want exploratory play, in which the main thing the players do is learn the content of the notes the GM has made during prep time, then GMing will be a lot of work. That seems to be trivially true. If someone wants to know how they can reduce the GM's prep burden, then I think they have to accept that we're going to be moving away from that italcised paradigm of play.

Absolutely! But, it is a common style of play that many tables enjoy.

 

[Hussar]

Depends entirely on the NPC and their role in the campaign. One 1e game I ran, the crown prince was accused of killing a prostitute and the PCs were tasked to (very quietly) ascertain his guilt. It would have blown the scenario wide open if the players knew a new member of court -- the sister to the prince's betrothed -- was a 7th level Illusionist.

In a 3.X campaign, the local shopkeeper the PCs liked and used to sell their goods was a spymaster for the duke.

But, even then, no one is saying that the DM can never prepare anything. So, none of these scenarios are impossible. The DM can still do stuff too. It's just that, in my proposed method, the DM isn't doing 99% of the work.

Let's say, though, that one of the players proposed the crown prince scenario. And as part of that, the player introduced the sister that was a 7th level illusionist. Remember, the DM is SUPPOSED to change stuff. So, wouldn't the simplest solution be to use that scenario but change who the illusionist is? Or, hey, even more interestingly, add a second illusionist that is the actual culprit? So, now the party is chasing down the sister, who is being framed for framing the prince. Layers of the onion to peel back.

It doesn't seem to me to be too much work to keep things interesting. You've got the stat block of a 7th level illusionist already since the player gave you one. Change up a couple of spells, and poof, now you have two. Several sessions worth of prep all done for you.

 

[Fanaelialae]

I still incline to the view that, if no one can remember it, it doesn't matter. Conversely, a necessary condition of something being relevant is that it can be remembered by those at the table. If the players don't remember something, they're not going to leverage it (which is the case that I was responding to in my post that you quoted).

I'm not saying that GMing doesn't require any note-taking - it may or it may not, depending on context and circumstances, how much of what matters is recorded on various sheets (eg do we need to note that so-and-so suffered a broken shoulder if broken shoulder is a condition recorded on the appropriate character sheet?), etc. But I think the degree of note-taking required can be exaggerated, and that the idea that it is necessary to so for the players to leverage some detail doesn't seem right for me.

Nor do I think the degree of prep really helps here. The main thing that needs to be noted is stuff that matters and stuff that changes. And that is likely to have to be done even if there is prep. In my personal experience, doing prep doesn't change the amount of session notes I need to take.

I already posted upthread that (in my view) the main challenge in GMing is juggling the fiction. The scenario you have set out is an example of that. But it doesn't seem to bear upon the prep issue or whether extensive notes are particularly necessary in a low-prep game (which is what I was discussing with @Imaro): given what I've bolded, I don't see how this shows that preparation is necessary or makes things easier. Even if the existence of the miner was recorded in some pre-authored notes, you would have to record the interaction with the paladin and it's significance.

To me this example does seem to relate to a different aspect of this conversation, namely,who is responsible for driving play. There are systems in which the paladin's treatment of the NPC would be something that the player is responsible for recording on the PC sheet in some form. Even if that's not the case (eg D&D PC sheets tend not to have a "relationships" box), if the player does hope to leverage this relationship down the track then I would expect him/her to make a note of it. But as you present it this doesn't seem to be an instance of extensive notes being required; it doesn't seem that prep would have made any difference; and your reason for making the notes is not that the players are going to leverage something later on.

It just seems to be an example of a GM keeping track of material to use for subsequent framing and consequences, which are some of the aspects of "fiction juggling" that I identified upthread.

I disagree that it doesn't matter. In one of the newbie groups that I run, the guys like to get a bit inebriated during game. I don't mind.

Sometimes they remember things more in the way they wish they'd occurred rather than how they've actually occurred. When that happens I usually tell them that doesn't sound quite right and I check my notes, then let them know what actually happened.

These things can have significant bearing on the campaign. So at least part of it is about keeping the game on track. Not in the sense of a railroad, but rather in making sure that the players don't declare the score 3:2 when it was in fact 2:3 (or whatever).

Maybe you'd be fine with retconning the score if that's how your players remember it and you aren't sure, but not me. You're opening yourself up to someone remembering at any time that it was in fact 2:3, and then having all sorts of inconsistencies that cascaded from there (generally, at that point, it's better to accept the retcon and just go with it, but that undermines the consistency and verisimilitude of the campaign).

Prep doesn't impact my note taking directly, except in the sense that I need to take more notes when I'm improvising. For example, if I prepped an NPC named Bernard, I can just jot down that they made a deal with Bernard. If Bernard is an NPC that I've made up on the spot, and I described him as a flamboyant gnome with red hair, then it would be best if I wrote that down so that the next time they meet him I don't describe him as a cheery blonde halfling. Maybe the players wouldn't catch the inconsistency. But maybe they would. I know I've caught inconsistencies in other GM's games, but said nothing if it was minor because I didn't want to be impolite. It was nonetheless not ideal, like the veneer on the walls was peeling.

Can a DM take too many notes? Sure, pretty much anything can be overdone. A GM can make their world too realistic, barraging the players with detailed minutia until they fall asleep from boredom. That doesn't mean that injecting extra details for the sake of realism is a bad thing, it just means that most things are best in moderation.

Similarly, taking notes is a good idea to consider. I know, personally speaking, that my game improved noticably once I started taking notes during game. The first campaign I ever did it for, the players complimented me saying it was the best campaign I'd ever run. Was it all the notes? Doubtful. But they undoubtedly helped me provide a higher degree of fidelity and persistence than had been present in prior campaigns, because I wasn't trying to remember over a year's worth of sessions from memory.

 

[Nagol]

But, even then, no one is saying that the DM can never prepare anything. So, none of these scenarios are impossible. The DM can still do stuff too. It's just that, in my proposed method, the DM isn't doing 99% of the work.

Let's say, though, that one of the players proposed the crown prince scenario. And as part of that, the player introduced the sister that was a 7th level illusionist. Remember, the DM is SUPPOSED to change stuff. So, wouldn't the simplest solution be to use that scenario but change who the illusionist is? Or, hey, even more interestingly, add a second illusionist that is the actual culprit? So, now the party is chasing down the sister, who is being framed for framing the prince. Layers of the onion to peel back.

It doesn't seem to me to be too much work to keep things interesting. You've got the stat block of a 7th level illusionist already since the player gave you one. Change up a couple of spells, and poof, now you have two. Several sessions worth of prep all done for you.

Actually, the PCs found the crown prince guilty and he was exiled from the kingdom. They never twigged that there might be a bad actor attempting to frame him. It wasn't even that good a frame.

Had a player offered the scenario, that wouldn't have happened regardless of who the framer was.

That written, can the players take over creating some NPC details? Sure! Occasionally, a few have even offered. That generally offers marginal savings though. Some is better than none, I guess. The more pivotal the NPC the more time I need to spend on it and the less likely a player construction is sensible. Bob and Doug, the guards at the gate to the wintry land, won't take more than a few moments because they'll either get generic stat blocks or none at all until they need them.