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

[hawkeyefan]

Am I correct in understanding that you would strongly object to a GM changing an NPC's actual statblock behind the curtain for any reason, but you have no issue with a GM showing the players a phony NPC statblock in order to preserve a mystery? You would consider the former to be a breach of trust but the later not to be?

I'm more-or-less the opposite. I have no issue with a GM changing unestablished-in-play elements of an NPC's statblock behind the curtain, but if the GM is ostensibly pulling back the curtain by showing me the statblock, I would consider it a serious breach of trust if the shown statblock was inaccurate.

That's a good question. I think it all depends on the game and the table expectations.

In the scenario as described, there was clearly nothing more to the girl, and there was no compelling reason for the GM to not share that information as indicative of what the characters could derive from the scene. So it was shared. The players were informed and they based their decisions on how to engage with the encounter accordingly.

If there's information beyond what's obvious in the scene, and the discovery of that information or not could impact how things play out, then I'd probably account for that. I'd call for checks or if I shared a stat block I'd leave certain spots blank, or only share the relevant stats, etc. Does this cue the players that there's something more there? Yes, very likely. Do I care? Nope, because without knowing what it is, how can they act on it?

The hesitation for many seems to revolve around letting the players in on a little bit of something even if their characters wouldn't be aware of it. I don't really get that. I expect my players to handle that in a way that seems fit to them, and I don't really worry about it.

Now, as for changing stats "behind the curtain"....I don't know. It depends on the reason for doing so. As far as I'm aware, there's no rule that says you should do that. There are general bits of advice that could be interpreted as supporting such a decision, but I don't think most of the time that folks say "You should take the stats of a monster and change them mid fight if things are too tough or too easy". So I'd have to have a really compelling reason to do so.

It's hard to not see the reason as being to Force an outcome. Like, "this may be a TPK, I better adjust the monster" seems kind of pointless and doesn't seem to be letting things play out as they may.

I don't know if I'd say I'm dead set against it, but I think there has to be a really compelling reason to do it, and my threshold for compelling is probably pretty high.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

The hesitation for many seems to revolve around letting the players in on a little bit of something even if their characters wouldn't be aware of it. I don't really get that. I expect my players to handle that in a way that seems fit to them, and I don't really worry about it.

I don't metagame and I can roleplay being surprised. But I definitely prefer to be genuinely surprised!

 

[niklinna]

The way Edwards describes story before games seems consistent with how adventure paths and pre-written scenarios are meant to play out, in that it is defined as "meaning the basic course of events is pre-conceived and treated as something to be implemented" in which the GM is responsible for such things as "Sequence and climax," "Staying on track," "Staying on schedule." So the experience of a kind of reactive sandbox that @FrogReaver and I are attempting to describe may fall under the description of "story before," but strike me anyway as quite different than the type of game Edwards describes here. He doesn't really talk about it much here except a bit at the end, but I would have thought that sandbox-style games (including the classic hexcrawls and megadungeons) would correspond more to "story after."

There is a difference between "the story that has gone before" (backstory), and "the story that has been decreed before" (script, and what I think Edwards meant by "story before"). If you don't describe any events in the backstory, just people, things, and places, history can be inferred from those (by the GM and the players, and they needn't agree).

I agree with you that sandbox games correspond more to "story after". (Although, as some have mentioned, a single game can encompass both, with players free to explore a large open world, in which they will encounter prescripted stories (to whatever degree) to engage with or not.)

(incidentally, this makes me realize again why I have trouble with Edward's frameworks, to the extent that I've encountered them, because they seem most interested and keen to separating story now from not-story now, even though they are presented as neutral and universal.)

Yep. Binary categorizations have a way of excluding situations with more, as well as situations with blurry lines rather than sharp boundaries and situations where different combinations of attributes interplay.

 

[Campbell]

There's nothing wrong with nudging if that's the sort of experience the people you are playing with are looking for. I just wonder why it's so contentious that some of us would rather not run or play in that sort of game.

Sure the sort of play I prefer tends to come with a lot more creative risk. Everyone's play has to be on point and I have to trust the people I play with to create and play interesting characters who do interesting things. I have to trust that they will not screw it up. I have to trust that game will lead to interesting outcomes. Sometimes stuff will not work. Often our hopes and dreams for these characters will not be fully realized. That's like the compelling part for me though. We all get to find out what happens.

When it comes to things happening that run counter to player wishes, desires, and hopes for their characters due to the actions they take here's my answer: Good.


That's the entire damn point. We don't know who these characters are when push comes to shove. They have not been tested yet. We don't know what their arc will be until we find out. We're putting them through the damn crucible. That's exciting to me! It might not be to you or the people you play with. That's cool. My yum can be your yuck. Your yuck can be my yum.

I am looking for players who are looking to send their characters through the crucible. I want people who are excited that things might not always turn out as they hoped. I'm not looking for players that get attached to character concepts or especially predefined ideas of what their character's arc should be.

That sort of play can be fun, but it's not what gets me excited. I'm not trying to yuck anyone's yum here. I hope we can have space in our hobby for everyone's yum.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

There's nothing wrong with nudging if that's the sort of experience the people you are playing with are looking for. I just wonder why it's so contentious that some of us would rather not run or play in that sort of game.

Sure the sort of play I prefer tends to come with a lot more creative risk. Everyone's play has to be on point and I have to trust the people I play with to create and play interesting characters who do interesting things. I have to trust that they will not screw it up. I have to trust that game will lead to interesting outcomes. Sometimes stuff will not work. Often our hopes and dreams for these characters will not be fully realized. That's like the compelling part for me though. We all get to find out what happens.

When it comes to things happening that run counter to player wishes, desires, and hopes for their characters due to the actions they take here's my answer: Good.


That's the entire damn point. We don't know who these characters are when push comes to shove. They have not been tested yet. We don't know what their arc will be until we find out. We're putting them through the damn crucible. That's exciting to me! It might not be to you or the people you play with. That's cool. My yum can be your yuck. Your yuck can be my yum.

I am looking for players who are looking to send their characters through the crucible. I want people who are excited that things might not always turn out as they hoped. I'm not looking for players that get attached to character concepts or especially predefined ideas of what their character's arc should be.

That sort of play can be fun, but it's not what gets me excited. I'm not trying to yuck anyone's yum here. I hope we can have space in our hobby for everyone's yum.

Sure. It's about preferences, not right or wrong.

And actually even agree with most of your sentiments. Bad things can happen, characters don't need to get what they want and unexpected is welcome. As GM my nudging is not so much towards some specific outcome, it is more just to keep things moving if the game seems to be stalling, and to avoid dull and anticlimactic. And perhaps other games have different processes for that, but D&D is very GM driven and I feel it works best if the GM recognises that.

 

[Malmuria]

This topic has come up in a couple of recent threads - this one on GMing, and this one on railroading. (EDIT: And also in one of the S&S threads.)

responding my thoughts on this in this thread rather than necro-ing the other one

3. The players declare actions for their PCs that engage the scene. If the GM has done his/her job properly at step 2, then the players' declared actions can be expected to be fairly vigorous rather than tentative - more about impacting the situation then just finding out more about it.​

This seems like a practice that can travel across different types of games? As in, best practices
for gms: build your situations around the goals of the characters, present opportunities for them to impact the situation; and for players: be proactive

Some of that new material might be created by the GM - eg imagine a scene which, as framed, includes a building, and suppose that a player declares that his/her PC sneaks into a building; the check fails; and the GM narrates the failure by saying "You try to sneak in, but as you creep up the stairs you see someone who looks rather drunk, half-sitting, half-lying on the staircase landing; as you see her she sees you too, half-opening her eyes and her hand going to the sword tucked into her belt." Now it's established, as part of the content of the setting, that in this building there is this person in this state doing this thing.

...

Just as there can be variations of the traditional approach, so there can be variations of this alternative approach. For instance, the GM might use a setting book to help get material for framing scenes, or to help get material for narrating consequences like the drunk warrior on the landing; and different systems will have different ways of resolving action declarations, particularly those that implicate new player-author content like Shadowfell echoes. What is key, though, even when a setting book is being used, is that the content is introduced as an output of play; it's not treated as a constraining input in the manner of the traditional approach.

Best practice: don't be constrained by your prep. The typical example of this might be the random table, not because the table represents a pre-authored exclusive list of things that could possibly happen, but because it provides a basis for improvisation and content generation that is to greater or less degrees gm-neutral (depending on who made the table).

By the same token, I don't mind a dice roll of any kind-->half-drunk warrior npc, but I think in practice it would be rather indiscernible whether that was an pre-authored or improvised "input" or an "output."

 

[Lanefan]

If this is an RPG the big questions beyond that are who am I and what is this world? Am I @Neonchameleon , the real world person in a world where krakens don't actually exist so I'm likely to assume I'm watching someone filming something and a sensible thing to do would be to record it on my smartphone? Am I a 1920s mythos investigator, hoping that it's only a kraken? Am I Beowulf, probably outmatched by one kraken but able to hold my breath and with four comrades in arms I should be able to take it? Am I Cuchulain, able to cut the tops off mountains? Can I talk to the kraken? Is this the Harry Potter universe where the squid in the lake is actually pretty friendly?

Silly me - I was assuming, as with the in-fiction weather, that these things would have long since been established, and that the lake encounter was part of an ongoing campaign.

The more you hide the mechanics from me the more you hide from me the nature of who I am and what the world is. And Dungeons and Dragons in specific covers an absurd power level range. A rough idea of how the world functions would be part of the information available - and the mechanics of the game provide an approximation as to that.

I agree with the bolded part. Beyond that, yes - if the Kraken encounter was the very first thing that occurred in the campaign then you-as-players would still probably be figuring out your characters and what they might have going for them; that's more than fair, and I'm not going to punish you for it. The first few combats with a new party always take a bit longer to play out, for just this reason.

 

[Lanefan]

Soldier is a Tag which thematically conveys exactly what you would (hopefully infer); this NPC is a willing and capable protector of those in his/her charge. Then you'll have a suite of abilities that are integrated to express that in play so there is gamestate: fiction synthesis. Skirmishers are mobile, getting into and out of trouble/places.

I try to avoid keywords or tags when possible as IME they tend toward pigeonholing. But yes, I get what you're saying.

And I also have the initial framing of the situation (this was right after the Skill Challenge to navigate the rushing river hazard so this framing is the bridge between this conflict to that immediately preceding conflict). This was a PBP solo game by me and my partner while we were both away for several months so I have the entire text of the game.

Finally, out on the water you see a singular vessel. As you pole yourself near the mouth of the river and into the bay, you can hear the sounds of voices. A father is teaching his daughter to fish and her innocent laughter is hushed by her father. It is clear by his tone that his fear isn't that her laughter will spoil their opportunity at a catch. He runs her through a few dry-runs at casting until finally she gets one far out. Her celebratory squeal is cut short by a tentacle exploding out of the water near their small flatboat. She falls back on her rump and screams as several tentacles erupt from the water around the vessel, groping for the both of them...

Let me know what you plan to do with the above. You are on your raft, entering from the mouth of the river into the bay, roughly 200 ft (just within your long range with your bow; - 2 to hit at this range) from this vessel being attacked by the tentacles in the bay.

She spent the next rounds using her action economy to Twin Strike with from her bow to protect the girl from tentacles from afar > stow it > get her raft to distance where she can leap to their vessel and physically aid them (this game was 7 years ago so the memory was foggy).

[the description didn't quote so I had to insert it manually]

That description is great! It sets the scene evocatively while giving clear info as to what's going on, all without any more mechanical intervention than necessary (I'm on board with the reminder of bow ranges; IME this is something no-one ever memorizes, and fair enough ). And now it's squarely on the player to take the reins and determine what happens next (in this case, she stood in and helped the boat occupants).

I wish my scene desriptions were that good.

Yet in the version of it you posted way upthread you included a bunch of mechanics info, which to me made the scene-set far less evocative and far more...well, gamey, for lack of a better term.

 

[Lanefan]

Just building a bit on what hawkeyefan says here: as a player I am not looking to be entertained by the GM; and as a GM I am not looking to entertain the players.

I am, in both directions; and I make no bones about it. Further, as player I'm expecting to entertain the other players and DM in return (and I'm doing it wrong if I fail in this), and as DM I'm expecting to be entertained by the players.

An RPG, at its heart, is a form of entertainment. What makes RPGing unique is that the participants are tasked with bringing that entertainment to the table themselves.

If RPGing wasn't entertainment, I wouldn't do it.

 

[FrogReaver]

I don’t agree that posting and analyzing play excerpts pivots on “is it Story Now or other.”

Ive run every type of game possible:

* 100 % freeform with all e of GM as sole arbiter, table negotiation to consensus, combo of both.

* AD&D and White Wolf GM Illusionism-fest + setting tourism + imposed metaplot + Cosplay Power Fantasy.

* Skilled-play Setting Hexcrawls.

* Pawn Stance Dungeon Crawls.

* Procedurally generated sandbox/setting (dungeon, wilderness, et al) - so a mix of Story Before and Story Now.

* Horror Spiral.

* Story Now whether intensely focused premise and loop like MLwM or more structured freeform like AW.

* Skilled Play/Story Now hybrid like 4e, Torchbearer, Blades.


Probably the only thing I have done is FKR (and I’m not convinced that it’s not just a title given to 100 % unstructured freeform + premise + random action resolution…I’ve done that too.)


In every one of these forms of play (and they’re extremely disparate), I can easily use the same template for analysis (and I have).

* Analyze premise/priorities.

* Analyze in extreme detail how we got from here to there (gamestate and fiction changes)…particularly honing in at the action resolution and conflict resolution intervals and how setting responds (or not).

* Analyze incentive structures

* Analyze how well those things cohere.

Sure. Those are all ways to accomplish that. I’m more thinking of this question and it’s aha moment you just had as more of an explanation for why players of GM driven games tend to have trouble analyzing play the way you and others here prefer.