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

[pemerton]

This thread is explicitly a 5e thread. And while I’m game for expanding that discussion a bit in scope its a bit off to complain that people want to discuss 5e in a thread about it.

I think the complaint is more that people try to establish the possible parameters of 5e, and RPGing in general, by reference to a pretty narrow class of approaches even within the 5e context.

 

[hawkeyefan]

But if you can win, then it’s just a game. And it’s not a game….it’s magic!!!

 

[Ovinomancer]

But if you can win, then it’s just a game. And it’s not a game….it’s magic!!!

I see the snark, but I have the feeling there's something to this line. The responses decrying any winning that could possibly occur in RPGs, and D&D in particular, feel very dogmatic rather than analytical.

 

[Maxperson]

But in D&D is there not the winning of combat? The disarming of traps? The solving of riddles? I'm not seeing the deep difference here.

Not for the players, no.

 

[Lanefan]

Winning combat is not winning D&D overall.

You don't win D&D by disarming a trap

The difference you apparently are not seeing, though I have said it several times now, is that I am talking about how RPGs, in general, do not intrinsically have win conditions FOR THE GAME OVERALL.

It is that simple.

All this other stuff is a tiresome distraction from that point.

It's a very rare thing for me to be in complete agreement on anything with @Umbran. I'd better enjoy it while I can!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I see the snark, but I have the feeling there's something to this line. The responses decrying any winning that could possibly occur in RPGs, and D&D in particular, feel very dogmatic rather than analytical.

Many are more or less told that it's not possible to "win" RPGs, and I suspect that the pushback against any notion of "winning" in RPGs comes at least partly from a conflation of two different senses of "winning."

In one sense, "winning" means a thing ends. There is a final, clear victor. E.g. the World Series has a clear win condition: the first team to win four games is the winner of that year's World Series. In this sense, no one "wins" D&D because its ending is generally not related to winning per se, but to the opportunity to play, or the narrative structure. A philosophical commitment to "you can't win D&D" thus becomes, when fully spelled-out, "You can't end D&D play purely through some kind of metric of wins."

In another sense, "winning" just means "finding success." E.g. winning a combat, winning a drinking contest, winning someone's hand in marriage, etc. In this sense, D&D is full of winning, and indeed the whole point of playing is to win, to achieve your goals.

D&D isn't alone in this. One cannot "win life," as in, there is no victory condition for being a living person. But people do speak of "winning at life," finding superlative success in all of one's endeavors. So, perhaps it is useful then to say, "One cannot win D&D, but one can win at D&D"?

 

[Xetheral]

Okay, but this seems a distinction that isn't teasing out a real difference -- it's still a menu, it's just whether or not the players feel bound to pick from the printed menu or if they make choices that are checked against the hidden menu. You still aren't going to be doing anything the GM hasn't prepped in these games, yes?

Where are you getting the idea of a "hidden menu" from? That isn't part of how I've specified the spectrum.

And yes, implicit in the idea of being able to make an open-ended choice is that you may be doing something the GM hasn't prepped yet. (Depending on GM style, the GM might wing it or might pause to be able to prep first.)

I'm not sure this is useful unless there's an analysis of what off adventure choices are actually available to the players. You seem to be comparing two things, either follow the GM's breadcrumbs OR do whatever you want the GM will oblige. I'm not sure this is realistic, or that a good sandbox has a high percentage of the latter as a matter of course.

How open-ended a "good" sandbox is will of course be a question of taste. But a more-frequently open-ended sandbox is (as I've defined the spectrum anyway) more sandboxy than a less-frequently open-ended sandbox. If someone wants to suggest a different measure (or a more precise measure) of sandboxiness to define the spectrum, cool. But if we're getting to the point of discussing which definition for the spectrum is most useful, we're well past the point of agreeing that the spectrum exists.

If I pull out a setting book with lots of details, for instance, and let players pick which things they want to go engage with, then I'm not really letting them do anything, I'm providing exposition based on the menu from the setting book.

Or you could just let them go anywhere they want in the setting and (try to) do anything they want. Then you're definitely "letting them do anything". If instead the expectation is that the players pick from a list of pre-defined elements to "engage with", the decisions with that expectation would tend to pull a campaign towards the non-sandbox end of the spectrum, unless you're using a much broader definition of "engage with" than you appear to be.

I think many games will be in the middle, though, so a tool that only effectively categorizes the extremes is -- well, not a very good spectrum.

I'm saying the spectrum is still useful in the middle despite the messiness. I definitely wasn't agreeing with you that the spectrum only works at the edges. But I do agree with you that most campaigns will be in the middle--a campaign at either extreme would be quite unusual. Indeed, the fact that most campaigns are somewhere in the middle is one of the reasons I think it's important to look at sandboxiness on a spectrum in the first place.

 

[Fenris-77]

Oh. Someone on here was telling me that the game is infinite? They must have been chatting bs.

Well, technically, sure it is. You could potentially play a generational game forever. No one actualy does, but that doesn't make it less possible. Some game do run for 20+ years which is, practically speaking, pretty close I guess. I'm not sure how that matters in the context of this co versation though. Probably a point about win conditions.

 

[FrogReaver]

Many are more or less told that it's not possible to "win" RPGs, and I suspect that the pushback against any notion of "winning" in RPGs comes at least partly from a conflation of two different senses of "winning."

In one sense, "winning" means a thing ends. There is a final, clear victor. E.g. the World Series has a clear win condition: the first team to win four games is the winner of that year's World Series. In this sense, no one "wins" D&D because its ending is generally not related to winning per se, but to the opportunity to play, or the narrative structure. A philosophical commitment to "you can't win D&D" thus becomes, when fully spelled-out, "You can't end D&D play purely through some kind of metric of wins."

In another sense, "winning" just means "finding success." E.g. winning a combat, winning a drinking contest, winning someone's hand in marriage, etc. In this sense, D&D is full of winning, and indeed the whole point of playing is to win, to achieve your goals.

D&D isn't alone in this. One cannot "win life," as in, there is no victory condition for being a living person. But people do speak of "winning at life," finding superlative success in all of one's endeavors. So, perhaps it is useful then to say, "One cannot win D&D, but one can win at D&D"?

IMO. Winning at life or winning at the game of life is a metaphor. Life is not a game. It cannot be won. All people mean by that is that you had what is considered a successful life.

 

[hawkeyefan]

IMO. Winning at life or winning at the game of life is a metaphor. Life is not a game. It cannot be won. All people mean by that is that you had what is considered a successful life.

Yes. It’s almost like the word win can be used in more than one way.