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

[J.Quondam]

I can't just arbitrarily declare "This Gnome goes to 19".

Why not?

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Why not?

View attachment 143605

There's something about svirfneblin that's so deep, it's like how much more deep could those gnomes be?
And the answer is none. None more deep.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

There's something about svirfneblin that's so deep, it's like how much more deep could those gnomes be?
And the answer is none. None more deep.

"The 19 Strength Gnome, listen to it."
"I don't hear anything"
"Well you would though, if you were playing"

 

[Chaosmancer]

The bolded bits have less to do with fudging and more to do with a DM engaging in railroading to make their own story happen. The fudging is just the chosen tool in this case. I mean, really? Building a scenario around the PCs failing and fudging die rolls to ensure it? DMs should be focused on building interesting challenges - presenting the players with in-world problems and letting the players attempt to solve them. In the case where something comes up that truly is impossible, then that should be clearly telegraphed to the players - in which case there are no rolls and the players' solution can be to avoid that particular encounter for the present time. Fudging need not play a role (or roll) here.

I don't disagree, but many DMs want the illusion of choice, because the players will chafe under being told exactly what is going to happen to their characters.

I actually encountered this where a DM placed my character under a "curse". I'm not going to go into full details, but an evil NPC wanted us to do a quest, and I got in a confrontation with guards that my allies abandoned me to, so I was beaten unconcious, arrested, and then cursed. The curse could be removed by the NPC. The NPC was demigod level strong, so likely we could not remove it ourselves.

If we left the area of these two kingdoms, my character permanently died and only a wish could restore them (we were level 8 or 9, and our main goal was getting out of this area)
If we took more than 20 days to complete his quest and return, my character permanently died and only a wish could restore them.
He would only remove the curse if we traveled to the citadel of his enemy (of equal godlike power), retrieved an object of power, and brought it back to him. The Journey would take more than 20 days one way.
So, the NPC was going to provide transport to the citadel of their enemy, so we could arrive before I died, and then provide me with a single person teleport so I could return alone to give him the artifact, restoring him to even greater power, and then he would send me away from these kingdoms... while I left my friends and companions behind to rot.

There were other details that made my character a burden on the party and a drain on resources as well.

And the guy was insistent that he wasn't railroading, that I still had choices, and that because I had been in that conflict with the guards within the first hour of us being in this city, it was a natural consequence of my actions, and I should be grateful he didn't just kill my character off.

And he wanted to stage an execution of my character, that the other PCs would try and stop, but have me signal to them to not stop it, because trying to stop it would get them killed, and they were supposed to just do something else rather than try and rescue me, so we could go on this quest.

Because he didn't want to take away our ability to choose, because railroading is bad.

So, yeah. We can change up the labels, but I can see the tools being used horrifically badly, and that makes me quite hesitant to lionize DMs. Because if you get it in your head that it's okay to do things to make the story happen in the way you want, it can get out of hand.

 

[Chaosmancer]

You don't design a game around a small minority of people. The vast majority of bad DMs will still be bad and abuse their authority, regardless of what you want written in the game. Meanwhile you would ruin a great tool for a great many DMs.

What great tool allows you to use weighted dice and lie to your players? I don't need a tool like that. And, you already said, you don't think limiting DM authority would affect homebrewing, so what tool is so great here?

Your proposed rules are rules to limit DM authority. Those won't work. Virtually the bad DMs will still abuse their authority.

I proposed no rules. And since I have proposed no rules, you can't claim that rules I have not proposed would not work. I have spoken about changing perspectives.

Also, changing the perspective or the rules or the culture will prevent some Bad DMs from abusing their authority, which is why you said "virtually all" instead of "all"

There is no fake argument. Your rules(those rules which limit DM power, regardless of specific wording) won't work. I don't need you to have come up with specific wording to argue against your stated argument. Just in case you've forgotten already.

" It seems to me that if you think the rules justify bad behavior, then we might want to look at those rules and consider if they need adjusting."

Those rules "adjustments"(new rules) won't work.

And you have zero proof of that. After all, they worked for other games. The goal isn't to remove 100% of all Bad DMs, so the fact that some of them will still continue doesn't mean the changes will have failed. So, you are just arguing that the status quo is the best we can be, and I disagree.

Societal pressures, otherwise known as the social contract have already failed if the DM is abusing his power. Making new rules won't change someone like that.

It might. Especially since it would make it clear that the DM and the player are in actuality on far more equal footing than you seem to believe

I've claimed that many people I know and game with have enjoyed playing in games where the DM had ultimate authority. They would just need to say, "yes I did." and I have proven it. It's a waste of bloody time, though and I'm not going to ask that of them.

It certainly would be a waste of time since that doesn't even address the question at hand, which is if a Bad DM would be an average DM is the culture of the game was different. Saying "I had fun playing the game as it is" answers nothing. You might as well answer the question of "can we improve plane safety" by asking someone if they died during the flight. After all only a "small minority" of planes crash, so there is no reason to try and improve, and you know plenty fo people who didn't die, so that proves plane safety can't be improved.

Yes. The very rare bad DMs are a small issue that have driven a relatively small number of players from the game. Out of the dozens of DMs I've played with, I've come across a couple as well. I left those games and found a better DM.

Man, for a "small issue" and a "minority" it sure does seem like almost everyone has encountered at least one. I wonder if we could make that more rare. Like, by altering things. Nah, improvement is impossible. Bad people are just bad people, you can't change that through anything.

Truth and status quo are two different things that you are conflating there. The truth is that England was oppressive and many colonists wanted to be free of Britain.

And it was also true that England was their mother country, provided them with protection and many colonists wanted to stay with England. It is almost like just saying "it's the truth" isn't enough to support an arugment that may be more complex than asking "what is the truth"

The other side you mention there is an extremely small number of bad DMs, none of which are even on the forum as far as I'm aware.

Most DMs aren't on these forums. That proves nothing about my point. And you keep saying it is "extremely small" but you have nothing but an anecdote of your "dozens of DMs" over decades

Yet, I've provided my own anecdote. Of half a dozen or more Bad DMs I've had in the last ten years. you have no proof of how many Bad DMs there are, or that changing things wouldn't reduce that number.

 

[Maxperson]

What great tool allows you to use weighted dice and lie to your players? I don't need a tool like that. And, you already said, you don't think limiting DM authority would affect homebrewing, so what tool is so great here?

Just like you can kill someone with an ordinary hammer. Abuses don't mean the tool is bad like you want it to mean. It's a good tool regardless of these obscure abuses you keep drumming up.

I proposed no rules. And since I have proposed no rules, you can't claim that rules I have not proposed would not work. I have spoken about changing perspectives.

Also, changing the perspective or the rules or the culture will prevent some Bad DMs from abusing their authority, which is why you said "virtually all" instead of "all"

Okay. So the rules giving DMs absolute power are bad, but you don't want them changed. Got it.

It certainly would be a waste of time since that doesn't even address the question at hand, which is if a Bad DM would be an average DM is the culture of the game was different.

Nope. Bad DMs are bad because of the kind of person that they are. That doesn't change. They'd be jerks playing Monopoly or D&D(regardless of edition and rules).

Most DMs aren't on these forums. That proves nothing about my point. And you keep saying it is "extremely small" but you have nothing but an anecdote of your "dozens of DMs" over decades

And the fact that the game is thriving. If bad DMs were as common as you want them to be in order to win this argument, the game wouldn't be doing anywhere near as well.

 

[Lyxen]

Not even close. Saying that it's lava gnomes(or some other story reason) is far better than, "Because magic!!!!!" In order for it to "work because story," you need to come up with the story. I thought you said that you gave up powergaming for roleplaying. If that's true, then I would think that coming up with a story reason for things would be preferred by you.

Not really, we always did storytelling and roleplaying, but dropping powergaming not only allowed us to spend more time on the former, but also switched us into a much more friendly cooperative game without the slightest hint of competition.

As for the Lava Gnomes, I have told you, it's a fine explanation if you want to use it (although it does have the additional requirement to need creatures that could be interacted with and therefore need some level definition), I was just pointing out that, when you're stuck, there is an official background explanation that you can always pull out of your hat.

It's the very principle of 5e, you have a basic rule which is fairly bland, good job when you enhance it with a local "ruling", it's just that sometimes you don't have an explanation or can't find one that both looks cool and doesn't introduce other consequences down the line.

 

[Lyxen]

That's a fault of the system, not the principle.

It's both, see below.

Character creation in 3.x was wa-ay too complex, no argument there at all; and that's what needed fixing.

It's right, but the principle in itself is compounding the difficulty by forcing you along paths that will have you spend time defining things that will never see play, because the NPCs have a very different life cycle from PCs. So it makes you waste time anyway, although I agree that the more complex the system the more time you waste.

And on top of that, it shackles the DM's creativity along specific path (and that is really not acceptable to me) while providing players with a reason to metagame (YMMV on this point, but in my book it's a bad thing compared to the games that we want to run).

 

[Lyxen]

There's a big difference between players demanding that everything "under the hood" be made available to them and players expecting the setting to function in consistent and believable ways.

I completely agree, which is why I agree for a consistent world, which can only be done through rulings, not rules, as the rules for a really open TTRPG cannot be both finite and consistent without infringing on the openness. See the introduction of the SAC, which I completely agree with: "Many unexpected things can happen in a D&D campaign, and no set of rules could reasonably account for every contingency. If the rules tried to do so, the game would become unplayable. An alternative would be for the rules to severely limit what characters can do, which would be counter to the open-endedness of D&D."

I don't think a DM should be expected to show everything (or anything, for that matter, that they don't need to know) to the players; but I do expect the DM to have her setting be consistent and believable in how it functions on an ongoing basis, thereby making any exceptions (such as a lava river that doesn't generate insane amounts of heat in an enclosed space) easily called out as exceptions by PCs in the game-world just like they would be by us in real life.

I think we agree, which is why a player trying his best to dig for technical explanations is violating this principle, because it's attacking the world from the rules perspective.

Note that it's a bit the same with real world physicists (I've done quite a bit myself but deliberately leave it at the door when playing), because it's clear that there is no way that a D&D world can be consistently explained in terms of real physics. You have to let it go and handwave it like it's done even in the best fiction, look at Sanderson and the Stormlight Archives, there are strange physics involved, but it never goes down to the root of how it works and interacts, it's just used as really nice consistent background

In particular, I resist any attempt at defining air as mosty O2-N2 compound, air is the stuff from the elemental plane of air. Looking at chemical compositions is really the way to madness in D&D, and leads to parodies only, like the silly elementals in OotS...

 

[Lanefan]

It's right, but the principle in itself is compounding the difficulty by forcing you along paths that will have you spend time defining things that will never see play, because the NPCs have a very different life cycle from PCs.

Depends on the NPC. Some last for ages, other are one-hit wonders - just like PCs.

So it makes you waste time anyway, although I agree that the more complex the system the more time you waste.

And on top of that, it shackles the DM's creativity along specific path (and that is really not acceptable to me)

Once a DM sets the rules of whatever game she wants to run she too is bound to honour those rules, just like a player is, if she intends to run her game in good faith.

while providing players with a reason to metagame (YMMV on this point, but in my book it's a bad thing compared to the games that we want to run).

Metagaming is bad, I agree there; but I don't see how this promotes it.