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

[Ovinomancer]

I don't agree. I've run AD&D quite successfully using shared backstory authority (especially in PC build, but also the GM taking suggestions from players on the way through) and GM authority over situation/scene-framing.

I don't see why 5e D&D couldn't be run the same way if a group wanted to do so.

Because, functionally, you'd have to rely on the GM or table consensus to create the resolution mechanics to give this teeth. 5e, and I'd argue AD&D, lack any way to resolve conflicts that have teeth. There just don't exist the kind of mechanics to do this. Instead, you have resolution mechanics that are divorced from intent and focus on the atomic nature of task resolution, and I find this fights against playing the game in this way unless the table just decided to implement some kind of additional rule structure for how to pass the conch or resolve conflicts of intent.

 

[billd91]

This is making the exact mistake @Manbearcat is talking about -- ignoring the short term in favor of an argument for the long term (which also doesn't hold up, but different topic).

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Okay, in the Rime of the Frostmaiden game I'm in, my character has a number of goals. We just sacked a duergar keep. My win con here was to get information on what the duergar were up to, and to not be killed in the process. Also, I have the win con of showing that I'm useful to the group, because my character is an outlander with a very "if you are not useful, exile" mentality. I also had a player goal of continuing my fun rivalry with the artificer. All of these things have win cons. I took very little damage, I was able to find an invisible duergar who was trying to sneak away, and I rescued a party member from a trap with clever thinking. All things that align to the various win condtions I had for the session.

Now, is there a win condition for the game? Sure is, complete the module. We're playing this game for the module, with little expectation to continue to a longer campaign. The idea of the never ending game without a point is one I increasingly find odd.

From where I'm sitting, you're mostly restating overgeeked's argument. Your Frostmaiden example is focusing on the finite game of the adventure module and opting to shorten the potentially infinite game that is D&D in general. As far as I can tell, you're just ignoring the idea that a typical RPG doesn't have an inherent, defined endgame with overall win conditions because... you're not interested in playing out that aspect of RPGs.
So, exactly how he's ignoring the short term I'm not seeing. It's rather a case of you, and I guess Manbearcat, downplaying the open end in favor of shorter term victory conditions.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I would say there's a spectrum of what a car is. It used to be that cars were either 2 door or 4 door with some variations on whether or not there was a hatch or trunk. On the other hand you had pickup trucks and SUVs. Despite the occasional weird hybrid El Camino there was a distinct difference. Now? It's blurry. On the one end you have traditional cars like a Toyota Camry, on the other end you have something like a Chevy Suburban. My sister was looking at a Mazda 3 which is definitely a car and ended up with a Mazda CX-3. The vehicle she ended up with is only slightly taller than the car she was looking at, it's not really a truck it's some weird in-between. To the other extreme you have something like the Polaris Slingshot which isn't really a car or a motorcycle, it's just a weird combination of the two.

So I think you're setting up a false narrative, or at least a narrative I disagree with. Saying things are on a spectrum is one useful way to categorize something which is no more less useful than just about any set of categories that we use. In other words all categories we put on styles of game are going to be artificial and subjective. It can still be useful to most people if you don't insist on using a concrete, objective, definition that does not exist.

Which is more carlike -- a 2 door coupe or a 4 door sedan?

Which is more carlike -- a hatchback or a trunk?

Your saying there's a spectrum, and offering difference, but not actually putting them into, you know, a spectrum.

 

[Ovinomancer]

From where I'm sitting, you're mostly restating overgeeked's argument. Your Frostmaiden example is focusing on the finite game of the adventure module and opting to shorten the potentially infinite game that is D&D in general. As far as I can tell, you're just ignoring the idea that a typical RPG doesn't have an inherent, defined endgame with overall win conditions because... you're not interested in playing out that aspect of RPGs.
So, exactly how he's ignoring the short term I'm not seeing. It's rather a case of you, and I guess Manbearcat, downplaying the open end in favor of shorter term victory conditions.

I don't see I'm downplaying anything.

I see the argument for no win condition for the game to take one of two variants. The first is usually predicated on the idea that since you pass through many win conditions during play, and can always generate new win conditions, that there are effectively no win conditions for the game. I don't find this at all persuasive, as it's postulating that there's some meta-conception of the game that disconnected from actual play and that can never be resolved at any moment. To me, this is more a game that just iterates. When one set of win conditions is achieved or discarded, then another set is created, play continues.

The second version I see is more tautological -- there's an idea that you can't win D&D so therefore you cannot win D&D. This approach just ignores how play actually occurs in favor of an idealistic adherence to the idea that you can't win D&D. It tries to toss any notion of short, medium, or even long term goal and the achievements as irrelevant because you can't achieve everything. I don't find this compelling.

RPGs have win conditions. They are the essential motivator in the game. Experience systems are predicated on win conditions. Disclaiming their existence or impact because there's some idealistic conception of infinite possibility doesn't actually remove win conditions or their impact.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Added realism is IMO the only justification I need.

Well sure, I guess. It's a hypothetical since you don't actually play 5E. But still, you'd expect that the players' input would likely matter here. That a reduction of a PC ability based on your desire for realism would likely need to, if not cleared by them, then at least explained to them.

What if a player felt differently than you do? You explain the situation, and they say something like "This is likely to come up maybe 4 or 5 times over the course of the campaign. I find it far more unrealistic for a trained outdoorsman to get lost in his chosen terrain 20 to 25% of the time. I don't like this change."

What do you do at that point?

That said, there's also another one: see below...

That if an ability always works perfectly and then one time it doesn't, it's a metagame red flag to the players that there's something funny going on. This is not desirable.

Contrast this with an ability that works most of the time - even as high as 95% - but occasionally doesn't. Here, if the ability fails there's no meta-flag, in that it might simply be a bad day at the office for that particular character.

Okay. I'll admit I'm generally not a fan of keeping things from the players like this. There may be reasons to do so at times, and of course it's subjective and I expect our thresholds are pretty different, but do you have an example in mind?

Like, any example I'm thinking of in relation to the Folk Hero ability would seem to have some indicator that I could use in the fiction to communicate the idea to the characters. I'm sure I'm not considering all possibilities, though.

 

[billd91]

I don't see I'm downplaying anything.

I see the argument for no win condition for the game to take one of two variants. The first is usually predicated on the idea that since you pass through many win conditions during play, and can always generate new win conditions, that there are effectively no win conditions for the game. I don't find this at all persuasive, as it's postulating that there's some meta-conception of the game that disconnected from actual play and that can never be resolved at any moment. To me, this is more a game that just iterates. When one set of win conditions is achieved or discarded, then another set is created, play continues.

That's probably more dependent on you choosing to see it as a game that iterates rather than a broader game that has various iterating cycles within it. To me, that's downplaying the potentially infinite nature of RPGs.
It's like the difference between focusing on a sports team's games/season vs looking at the team's overall existence. Your description here suggests that your focus is on the team's season as the game that then iterates with the next season and overgeeked's focus is on the team's existence with each game/season being the smaller iterative games within it. In the former, there are definite victories for the game at each iteration (better records, championships, etc) while in the latter the overall goal of continued existence has no predefined end even if each season has one.

 

[prabe]

I just don't think there is a spectrum. When we say a game is "less sandboxy" do we mean that (i) the players have less authority over situation or (ii) the players have more authority over backstory or (iii) something else?

First: I hope I didn't do your position too much violence, trying to explain it.

I don't think I've ever claimed to be running sandbox campaigns, but there have been moments that were plausibly sandboxy, when the characters had finished one thing and were trying to decide what was the next thing they wanted to do. This is how one campaign ended up in a city I didn't have prepped. Since those moments are occasional, I personally wouldn't object to someone describing it as "less sandboxy" than some West Marches style campaign somewhere.

Maybe what I'm getting at, at least here, is that the sandboxy aspects may be less the focus of my game than someone else's, and it would seem reasonable to describe my game as "less sandboxy" than theirs. Is that clear?

 

[Xetheral]

I'm not seeing what the posited spectrum is. All the options in a sandbox are presented by the GM - the players have no authority to author backstory that would present options. All the options in "linear" play are presented by the GM, for the same reason.

In my original post where I specifically defined the spectrum, I'm using the phrase "options presented by the GM" to mean options laid out for the PCs at the time of the players' decision. The spectrum runs from campaigns where players are always expected to always choose from among the options laid out by the GM when making strategic choices, to campaigns where players are never expected to always choose from among those options and instead always face open-ended decisions.

I'm not using the phrase "options presented by the GM" to refer to who gets to author content about the game world. Sure, even the open-ended strategic decisions are constrained to be within the sandbox, and the sandbox is usually of finite size. But since strategic choices don't consist solely of where to go within the setting or what setting element to interact with, but also consist of how to interact with setting elements, even a finite sandbox can offer infinite strategic options all without the players authoring anything new about the setting.

 

[Oofta]

Which is more carlike -- a 2 door coupe or a 4 door sedan?

Which is more carlike -- a hatchback or a trunk?

Your saying there's a spectrum, and offering difference, but not actually putting them into, you know, a spectrum.

A car, traditionally has been primarily designed for transportation. That's it. Utility vehicles (pickups, SUVs) had a different niche as vehicles you bought for work. The majority of people who bought pickups or SUVs generally bought them because they needed to go into fields or haul things. It was a clear distinction. That's gone now.

Don't care if you agree with me or not, as with virtually all categories (i.e. people's race) it's pretty arbitrary and subjective.

 

[Ovinomancer]

That's probably more dependent on you choosing to see it as a game that iterates rather than a broader game that has various iterating cycles within it. To me, that's downplaying the potentially infinite nature of RPGs.
It's like the difference between focusing on a sports team's games/season vs looking at the team's overall existence. Your description here suggests that your focus is on the team's season as the game that then iterates with the next season and overgeeked's focus is on the team's existence with each game/season being the smaller iterative games within it. In the former, there are definite victories for the game at each iteration (better records, championships, etc) while in the latter the overall goal of continued existence has no predefined end even if each season has one.

The sport's team example seems to be confusing participants as independent things with the game itself and saying that since a participant doesn't have a win condition defined in the game, that the game therefore can't have win conditions because it has participants. It's not logically compelling.

Rather, the best I get from this would be to make the argument that baseball as a concept doesn't have a win condition -- that no matter how many games of baseball are played and won, no matter how many seasons of baseball occur, no matter how many WS championships are awarded, the game of baseball cannot be "won." As an abstract concept of a game, baseball doesn't ever resolve in this manner. Sure, we can similarly treat D&D this way, but then we're only every talking about the abstract concept of D&D as a game -- the entire hobby as it were. I can say that D&D doesn't have a win condition, like baseball does not. But, we don't play that D&D, just like you don't play that baseball. Instead, you play a realized instance of baseball, or D&D. Everyone does. You can't play the abstract conception. It's abstract.

So, D&D as a concept doesn't have win conditions, but D&D as a game that you actually play does. It iterates a cycle of these win conditions, and the ones left at the end of the game (all games end) will be fulfilled or not.

As another point here, discussing D&D as infinite is flawed because every instance of a D&D game is finite.