D&D General DM's: How transparent are you with game mechanics "in world?"

[FrozenNorth]

My perspective on DM "cheating" (which seems to be what the last few pages are about) is that it's only cheating if you do it to try to "win at DND" against the players. If you move HP or save or AC values around without it fundamentally changing the end-result the players get, it's not really "cheating" imo.

I can get behind this approach, though I would add a couple of other situations:

• you want to punish your players (some or all of them). This is orthogonal to wanting to “beat” them.
• you want to preserve your “story” at all costs.

 

[prabe]

I can get behind this approach, though I would add a couple of other situations:

• you want to punish your players (some or all of them). This is orthogonal to wanting to “beat” them.
• you want to preserve your “story” at all costs.

Or if you have some element of your setting you don't want changed, which is ... adjacent to story-preservation, I think.

 

[FrozenNorth]

I’d say that, in general, while the effect might not be visible (I do agree that it is very hard visually to tell someone is charmed) that the casting of the spell is generally visible. It could be a media and expectations thing, but the idea of casting a spell on someone in a crowded room and no one having any chance of noticing, is weird to me.

It also completely neuters the Subtle metamagic, which is one of the few advantages Sorcerers get over Wizards.

 

[wedgeski]

I'm open almost as soon as the effect is in play. If a PC has an ability that negates my bad guy-ness, I want that ability used, not mentioned as a passing regret once the battle is over!

 

[Maxperson]

I don't doubt that the vast majority of people would still be decent, but that has nothing to do with the point. The point is that some people would stop acting decently. You say laws don't prevent crimes, and yet to a degree they do. Speed Limit signs don't prevent everyone from speeding, but they do prevent most people from speeding, and there are a few that wouldn't go 30 miles per hour through a residential section if the sign wasn't there. In fact, they didn't, which is why the sign exists.

It's the entire point. Without it, there are no speeders and the vast majority drive safely anyway. With it, the reckless drivers still go well beyond the speed limit and can be punished. Those signs serve no purpose other than to punish the reckless drivers.

Without limits the vast majority of DMs do not act the way you are talking about, and none of bad DMs will stop being bad because rules that you want to implement.

So, it isn't part of how the game works because most DMs don't take their authority as far as they are "legally" allowed to in most games? If that is the case, what would be the issue with putting a sign post up at those extreme edges where you don't see it in typical game play and saying "You are reaching the limits of your authority"? In typical game play, you wouldn't even notice the difference. It would be a purely hypothetical limit on your power as a DM.

Did you miss the example above where I did one time this campaign appropriately make a ruling opposite to what the players wanted? The power is there for judicious and appropriate use. It's only the rare DMs who will abuse it, the same ones who won't stop because you wrote some rule, that are a problem.

If there is no expectation about either of us lying, why did you feel the need to specifiy THREE TIMES that you will not lie, and therefore you must say yadda yadda yadda. No one was bringing up lying.

Three times you either asked or wondered why I was doing what I was doing. I gave you the answer about why I wasn't. The rest is you once again reading something that wasn't said or implied into my words. Especially since I went out of my way to say why I thought you were arguing what you are arguing, and it wasn't lying.

Right, and DnD is an anomaly in this respect. Holding onto these out-dated notions of needing absolute control over the game held by one person. Looking to other games that run in similar fashions, there is no issue brought up by balancing the power more between players and DMs. And I think it leads to a far healthier game, because it makes it more true that the game is about a group of people telling a story together, rather than one person telling a story and a group of people trying to conform to that story.

I didn't say it was an anomaly. I said I don't know if there are other games out there like it. There may well be. I haven't read all RPGs.

Yes, it does matter. Because you have played in games where people were unhappy, where the game was bad. And since you have, by your own admission, never once played a game without DM ultimate authority, you have no idea if those bad games had been held in a different context, if they'd have turned out differently.

Yes I do, because I know why they were bad. The games were bad, because of bad DMs. The kind of DM that isn't going to stop because Chaosmancer wrote in the book that they shouldn't do stuff like that.

And considering the sheer number of stories I have heard of terrible DMs who make up rules on the spot to enforce the story they want to tell... I think there is some evidence that there are bad games created by this rampant idea of unlimited and unquestioned DM authority.

You do know that people are many times more likely to complain than to compliment, right? It's human nature. It's especially true now that the internet lets people come together to complain in misery together that you see a very, VERY disproportionate number of complainers vs. happy players, even though DMs like that are pretty rare.

Okay, I'm not playing this game yet again Max. Evidence of a trend does not need to be identical in every way to a proposed situation. Not having identical situations is not a False Equivalence.

Presenting a very different situation as equivalent is, though. Stop using the fallacy.

And, again, I don't think setting up conversations that start with the premise that one-side is nearly always in the right, barring extreme abuses, is a healthy way forward.

The truth isn't a healthy way to go forward? That's an odd sentiment.

People began posting about how this player was entitled, this player was a problem, this player ect ect ect. And yet, looking at the rules of the game, a PC is supposed to know when a spell is cast. And reading their actual questions, none of them were distrusting the DM or seeking to undermine them, it was all just analysis.

The PC is not supposed to know what spell was cast, or if a spell was cast and not on him. You get to know if it's cast on you, and even then you don't get to know what spell it is unless it's Charm Person or a similar spell that tells you.

I agree with you though, that calling that player entitled wasn't cool. He sounds from the OP like maybe he might be on the spectrum and has difficulty with not knowing why something is happening. It seems more of a mild mental(not crazy) issue of some sort.

Not what I said. I'm not talking about occassionally rolling the die, then deciding that you didn't want to roll the die. I'm talking about for an entire session, rolling the die, then declaring the numbers you want to see, instead of what the die says.

Why bring up a situation only a bad DM would do like it's an AHA! moment that proves your point?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Not sure why you laughed at my non-humorous post, but I wanted to single this out and reply to it specifically. You seem to think that people who are talking about DnD, which has a specific structure baked into the actual rules text, don't have any "inkling of the idea" of a different way to run games. That is...confirmation bias run wild, at best. In fact, we are simply discussing a specific game which has a specific structure.

DnD 5e specifically and intentionally works by having the DM run the world, and decide how to apply and use the toolkit presented in the rulebooks, to create their groups version of DnD.

When my friend runs games whose only mechanic is "2d6, pbta style success ladder, if your character seems like they would know about the thing or how to do the thing, roll 3d6 and take the higher 2d, if they are a noob, take the lower 2d", we aren't playing GM-may-I, we are building and running and playing the game collaberatively with the role of the GM being only to establish the scene and present the world. We have played games where the presentation of the world is a group exercise, or where there is no GM. I've considered not having a GM in my own system.

Said system features a mix of traditional and indie devices, and gives a broad set of tools to the players to create the fiction as an equal partner with the GM and other players.

But this thread is in the DnD forums, using DnD examples from OP's DnD 5e game. So that's the context in which most of us are participating.

Edit: snobbishly trying to tell people that they just aren't aware of other ways to do things is...not great.

This thread is not tagged 'D&D 5e'...

 

[Lanefan]

To which a smart DM actually replies, "Oh we are, its just Ser Bertrand has a special crit ability."

And done. Because NPCs are not beholden to the same rules as PCs, a DM can always tailor npc rules on the spot.

The problem with both those lines of thinking* is that internal setting consistency - a vitally important element for a believable game world - goes out the window, making for an objectively worse game experience in any campaign longer than a one-off.

* - one being NPCs and PCs aren't the same, and the other being that a DM can tailor rules on the spot.

 

[Stalker0]

The problem with both those lines of thinking* is that internal setting consistency - a vitally important element for a believable game world - goes out the window, making for an objectively worse game experience in any campaign longer than a one-off.

* - one being NPCs and PCs aren't the same, and the other being that a DM can tailor rules on the spot.

Actually I would go with exactly the opposite. The idea that every tom dick and harry fighter has the EXACT same abilities, even if they trained on different continents or even worlds.... strains internal consistency.

The notion that an NPC has a special trick or unique abilities from his particular flavor of training is MUCH more believable than one who is so predictable that a player could immediately guess his powers.

 

[Mannahnin]

The problem with both those lines of thinking* is that internal setting consistency - a vitally important element for a believable game world - goes out the window, making for an objectively worse game experience in any campaign longer than a one-off.

* - one being NPCs and PCs aren't the same, and the other being that a DM can tailor rules on the spot.

That sounds like 3E talk.

No thanks.

 

[Ovinomancer]

That sounds like 3E talk.

No thanks.

Which is weird, because @Lanefan plays a homebrewed offshoot of 1e exclusively, if I'm not mistaken.