D&D General The DM is Not a Player; and Hot Topic is Not Punk Rock

[Weiley31]

There are also NPCs.

Non Player Characters.

And yet Non has never been in my group.

Probably because their name is Anon.

Geez, no wonder why Anon is so bitter about it all.

 

[Lanefan]

But he still made the poor decision of naming one of the two player roles “player.”

But not the other, and that's the key thing.

 

[Charlaquin]

It's like some weird law of animation. Mickey Mouse, the Simpsons, the Flintstones, Bob the Builder...

Hands are hard to draw.

 

[Weiley31]

I feel like these kind of discussions are brought around by people who don't get that Andy isn't the protagonist of the Shawshank Redemption.

Morgan Freeman is both the DM of Shawshank Redemption and Bruce Almighty.

 

[Charlaquin]

But not the other, and that's the key thing.

The key thing in that it’s the source of this pedantic argument, yes.

 

[Azzy]

It's hard to imagine English of all languages having a lexographical shortage, but ... apparently it does.

That just means that we need to pillage other languages for more words, as is our time honored tradition.

 

[Guest User]

The word you were looking for in that quote is “disinterested.” Let’s try again.

"In all cases, the GM must do his best to remain disinterested while retaining the power of absolute arbiter."

Sure which brings us to Plato and the Republic. People, in general, have a hard time being disinterested philosophers dedicated to The Good.

Lanefan, based from what he has written, will allow his players to do anything they chose inside the game world. To get inside his game world, you do have to build a character that fits. Even a 'Disinterested DM' has interests.

Gary Gygax, was not a disinterested DM. In the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, he provided
text for a Magic Mouth effect that provided clues to the adventuring party.

A truly 'Disintrested DM' would have ignored their creation, and let the party wander blindly around. A truly 'Disinterested DM' would have not cared if the party had left the dungeon.

Gary was interested...he was interested in seeing what the party did to the dungeon and what the dungeon did to the party.

The 'Disinterested DM' is a fiction or a CRPG.

 

[DemoMonkey]

A good disinterested DM is simply one who grants the players agency to die by their own stupidity, without unnecessarily hastening the process.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The 'Disinterested DM' is a fiction or a CRPG.

Fully agreed. True absolute disinterest is not a thing DMs do. If you were genuinely disinterested, you would as like as not simply not show up for play. If you were truly indifferent, it wouldn't matter that the players decide to concoct a ritual to transport themselves to a magical land of hope and wonder where everyone is some variation of a beautiful, majestic small horse, and where the affection that arises between close associates is itself a form of powerful (even sometimes dangerous) sorcerous energies. It wouldn't matter if the players decide not to adventure at all, but to set up a small curio shop together with their initial money and exclusively do money-trading. Etc.

The DM is not disinterested. The DM is outright interested; they WANT to see adventure, and even the most sandbox DM wants the players to play in the sandbox rather than ignoring it entirely.

 

[Lanefan]

Sure which brings us to Plato and the Republic. People, in general, have a hard time being disinterested philosophers dedicated to The Good.

Lanefan, based from what he has written, will allow his players to do anything they chose inside the game world. To get inside his game world, you do have to build a character that fits. Even a 'Disinterested DM' has interests.

Er...I'm not quite sure how this strings together. Can you elaborate?

Gary Gygax, was not a disinterested DM. In the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, he provided
text for a Magic Mouth effect that provided clues to the adventuring party.

The provision of the text doesn't make him 'interested'; in part because he has no way of knowing how the module will be played out or what the PCs will do with the clues or even what PCs will be there at the time. He just neutrally and disinterestedly writes the module and after that all he can do is let the chips fall where they may n terms of how it gets played.

Now had he inserted those clues specifically because a particular PC in his game would be able to decipher and act on them, that would mean he's 'interested'. Same principle as when a DM places magic items in a dungeon that are specifically geared to the PCs at her own table (interested) vs. placing items without regard for which PCs might ever go through that dungeon (disinterested).

A truly 'Disintrested DM' would have ignored their creation, and let the party wander blindly around. A truly 'Disinterested DM' would have not cared if the party had left the dungeon.

Completely agree; and that can still happen even after those clues are encountered!

Gary was interested...he was interested in seeing what the party did to the dungeon and what the dungeon did to the party.

We might be defining interested a bit differently, then. Any author is going to be interested in seeing how their works are received, it's only natural. But he has no way of having any interest in what happened when I ran the module (just finished it last weekend); and as DM it's on me to present the module and its encounters in as disinterested a way as I can and leave it up to the PCs/player to figure out what to do.

Edit to add: I'm using disinterested as a substitute word for 'neutral'.