D&D 5E Respect Mah Authoritah: Thoughts on DM and Player Authority in 5e

[Paul Farquhar]

What I was calling a railroad was where there was a foregone conclusion. The PCs will solve this problem that way.

Well, yes. There's a difference between "here's a problem" (a situation) and "you'll do this and this then that then this than that then these things in some order then fight the BBEG then find out the BBEG was a patsy for some BerBerEG ..."

These look like stawmen to me. I have never seen these happen, and certainly not in WotC adventures.

These events will happen in this order.

Events happen that are outside the PCs' control, just like real life. If they PCs have no control over the events, they are not going to be able to influence the order of those events.

 

[prabe]

In this thread there has been reference by more than one poster (most recently @prabe just upthread) to a "spectrum" which has sandboxes at one end.

I think this is an unhelpful and even misleading confusion. It makes discussion of authority over the fiction harder than it needs to be.

I wasn't trying to be unhelpful, but it does seem that some games are more sandboxy than others, and that was what I was trying to convey. I shall endeavor in the future to use comparative (and maybe superlative) descriptors and eschew axial implications.

 

[prabe]

These look like stawmen to me. I have never seen these happen, and certainly not in WotC adventures.

In my experience, that's what every published adventure (with the possible exception of the most location-based (see what I did there?)) is. So it's less a strawman than it is several games/campaigns/adventures I have sat through.

Events happen that are outside the PCs control, just like real life. If they PC's have no control over the events, they are not going to be able to influence the order of those events.

I'm not referring to events outside the scope of the PCs' experience of things. I'm referring to the fact that in published adventures, the things that happen around the PCs in the adventure seem typically as though they must happen in a specific order.

 

[Mort]

I want to share an experience I had as a player in a fairly recent 5E game. I think it's relevant to some of the points in the discussion and may help by presenting a specific example rather than hypothetical.

My PC is a ranger with the folk hero background. He's a bit of a Robin Hood type. The other PCs are as well. We'd recently escaped capture by the archduke, who's kind of our Prince John; he's placed a bounty on our heads. This was as a result of the first few sessions of play; the PCs have effectively become outlaws, but the reigning government is at least corrupt, if not outright evil (there's some hint of possible black magic at play).

So we had to flee the town we had been in, and we arrived in another nearby town. We crossed a dangerous stretch of river in order to throw off any pursuers. So we arrived in the other town with some sense of safety; we'd evaded the law for now, but night was coming, and there was a storm forming. So our rogue scouted the town out a bit, and discovered that the Inn was overrun with the archduke's troops. The last thing we wanted to do was to wind up in another showdown with the duke's men, so we needed to avoid the inn.

I decided to use my Folk Hero Background Feature: Rustic Hospitality. It says:
Since you come from the ranks of the common folk, you fit in among them with ease. You can find a place to hide, rest, or recuperate among other commoners, unless you have shown yourself to be a danger to them. They will shield you from the law or anyone else searching for you, though they will not risk their lives for you.

We went up to a farmhouse on the outskirts of town, and I asked the farmer and his wife if we could take shelter in their barn. We mentioned that the inn was filled with the duke's men, which wasn't exactly safe for us. The farmer took our meaning, and recognized my character, and granted us shelter.

The characters woke in the morning to find the barn surrounded. The duke's men had "discovered" they were in the barn. There was no sign of the farmer or his wife. The GM had essentially overrode my use of my PC ability in order to ensure that there was a fight with the duke's men.

Is this acceptable per the rules as written? Per the spirit of the rules? Per the social contract among the group? For the purposes of discussion, assume that we're a group who knows each other well, and has played together long enough that we're comfortable with each other. Also assume that the GM hasn't yet shared his reasoning behind the duke's men arriving.

What do you all think? How would you have handled it?

Late to this discussion, but I find this a very interesting situation.

First, the DM seems to have given you a benefit for your background. You got a long rest (presumably, not fully stated); and were thus able to engage the Duke's men fully healed, all spells ready to go etc. If you had confronted them at the inn you would have had to confront them after a long day of travel/adventure and likely a significantly depleted state (or maybe not maybe you guys were at full heading to the inn)? Anyway, while not ideal, that's something.

That said, I would have handled it differently. I'm not a big fan of springing something on the players after they've done something creative/clever that would seem to negate their work - at least not without them knowing what happened!

For example here - If I made the farmers loyalists, I'd have telegraphed it. One of the PCs notices the farmer's Common is tinged with speech patterns common to loyalists. Then that PC (or another perceptive one) spots a plaque that only loyalists tend to have even remotely displayed. Then (depending on tech level) there's a newspaper crumpled in a corner - one that loyalists favor. You can't just go with one clue, my rule is at MINIMUM 3 that the PCs could pick up on.

Another way, say they're not loyalists - The PCs see one of the farmhands slip away as they are talking to the farmer. Then that night, at the communal meal, one of the other farmhands comments on the absence at dinner, that Biff NEVER skips dinner unless there is a REALLY good reason. Etc. Make sure the PCs see the ambush coming and can act on it - or not.

What the DM actually did here, is an issue I see with too many DMs - refusing the party information that they really should have - likely because he felt that giving out that information would have made things "too easy" or some such. Or, of course, he just wanted the PCs to fight the Duke's men and that's that.

TL/ DR: Did the DM "abuse" his authority? No not really, it's well within DM purview to have a bottleneck fight. But could it have been handled better? Absolutely.

 

[pemerton]

If you present the players some problems they can try and solve (AKA plot hooks) isn't that what you where calling a railroad?

Well I think it can be. It depends where the hook comes from. That's why I've talked, not far upthread, about the player hooking the GM.

Eg in the same Burning Wheel game where I used Maiden Voyage, here is the first session. (Which, to be clear, was run with no prep on my part.)

Here's an extract, to illustrate what I mean about players hooking the GM:

One of the players had bought rulebooks and built a BW PC (a noble-born Rogue Wizard inspired by Alatar, one of Tolkien's blue wizards of the East). I had built a PC for another player to show him what the system was capable of - a spell-using necromancer ranger/assassin (hunter-wizard's apprentice-rogue wizard-bandit).

<snip>

Writing up beliefs took a little while. The rogue wizard, Jobe, had a relationship with his brother and rival. The ranger-assassin, Halika, had a relationship, also hostile with her mentor, and the player decided that was because it turned out she was being prepared by him to be sacrificed to a demon. It seemed to make sense that the two rival, evil mages should be one and the same, and each player wrote a belief around defeating him: in Jobe's case, preventing his transformation into a Balrog; in Halika's case, to gain revenge.

Each player also wrote up a "fate mine"-style belief: He who dares, wins for the sorcerer, and Stab them in the back for the assassin. And each also wrote up a immediate goal-oriented belief: I had pulled out my old Greyhawk material and told them they were starting in the town of Hardby, half-way between the forest (where the assassin had fled from) and the desert hills (where Jobe had been travelling), and so each came up with a belief around that: I'm not leaving Hardby without gaining some magical item to use against my brother and, for the assassin with starting Resources 0, I'm not leaving Hardby penniless .

Some instincts were written up too: the ones that (sort of) came into play were, for the mage, When I fall I cast Falconskin and, for the assassin, I draw my sword when startled.

<snip>

I started things in the Hardby market: Jobe was looking at the wares of a peddler of trinkets and souvenirs, to see if there was anything there that might be magical or useful for enchanting for the anticipated confrontation with his brother. Given that the brother is possessed by a demon, he was looking for something angelic. The peddler pointed out an angel feather that he had for sale, brought to him from the Bright Desert. Jobe (who has, as another instinct, to always use Second Sight), used Aura Reading to study the feather for magical traits. The roll was a failure, and so he noticed that it was Resistant to Fire (potentially useful in confronting a Balrog) but also cursed. (Ancient History was involved somehow here too, maybe as a FoRK into Aura Reading (? I can't really remember), establishing something about an ancient battle between angels and demons in the desert.)

And so it goes on.

Also, you can see - I hope - the way this fits with @Mannahnin's "knife theory".

It's true that some of this depends on distinct features of Burning Wheel action resolution - eg the narration of the curse as a direct response to a failed Perception/Knowledge-type check - but I think something broadly similar could be done in D&D.

 

[Mannahnin]

Well, if that is your definition!

But That's not consistent with what is being said. But I'm seeing people here saying WotC adventures are railroads. But I've DMed several, and I've never seen a situation where there is only one choice.

I will opine (with apologies to Pemerton) that modules/scenarios vary in what degree of linearity they possess.

Some are strongly scripted as a plot, like, say, The Crimson Bull EDIT: A Prodigal Son In Chains as Pemerton described it. These events MUST happen in this sequence, even if the PCs choices might have otherwise precluded them.

Others might have a timeline of events which are beyond the PCs' control, but don't prescribe how the PCs react to them. Maybe they present a situation the PCs will wind up in at the start of the adventure, but allow for many possibilities of where the PCs will be, in accordance with their choices and rolls, by the end of the adventure.

Others might be purely location-based and give no pre-sequenced events at all.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

In my experience, that's what every published adventure (with the possible exception of the most location-based (see what I did there?)) is. So it's less a strawman than it is several games/campaigns/adventures I have sat through.

I'm not referring to events outside the scope of the PCs' experience of things. I'm referring to the fact that in published adventures, the things that happen around the PCs in the adventure seem typically as though they must happen in a specific order.

There is no point in any WoTC adventure I have read that takes control out of the players' hands. It sometime makes assumptions about what the players will do: in a fight or die situation, it generally assumes they will fight. Books have limited number of pages, that's what the human DM is for, to deal with things the players think of that there wasn't room to put in the book.

And generally, if the players do one thing, then the NPCs will react to that. Adventures try to predict what the players are most likely to do and describe the reaction to that. But that doesn't mean the PCs can't do something else, in which case what the reaction is is beyond the the scope of the book. That's why you have a human running it instead of a computer.

 

[pemerton]

I wasn't trying to be unhelpful,

I didn't mean to suggest that you were trying to be.

But you are not the only person I've seen use the spectrum phrasing. (And not only in this thread, or indeed in this decade.) And I am serious that it can block some issues from sight.

Although early on in this thread @niklinna and I tried to distinguish various aspects of the fiction over which authority might be exercised, there is still a tendency for some posters to write about it as if it's all-or-nothing - eg as if because players can't just unilaterally rewrite the setting map, therefore the GM has authority over all of the shared fiction. Which as you know I think is not true, in general of RPGing nor of mainstream approaches to D&D.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The Crimson Bull as Pemerton described it. These events MUST happen in this sequence, even if the PCs choices might have otherwise precluded them.

I'm not familiar with the adventure, but if the actions of the PCs preclude something form happening then it doesn't happen. It's the DM's job to describe what happens instead. That is a basic assumption of the role of the DM, it's impossible for any written adventure to cover all possibilities.

 

[wicked cool]

i would disagree-The DM unless an explanation was given railroaded the barn encounter with the dukes men. Have i been guilty of this in the past sure but different. dming an encounter you hadnt planned for can be tough especially if you mapped out several you expected the pcs to tackle . Waht should have happened is some of the dukes men show up at the barn and you see them asking the farmers maybe even harming the farmer . Give the pcs time to flee or ambush the dukes men etc

Would love the know what the dm said.