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

[hawkeyefan]

The 5e DMG is pretty light on that kind of advice and so it wouldn't surprise me if most principles/advice from Dungeon World could be incorporated into 5e play without doing anything against the DMG advice.

So if you take the list of principles from Dungeon World that @Helpful NPC Thom posted and think about how they would apply to 5e, some interesting ideas come up.

• Draw maps, leave blanks- you can do this in just about any game; it suggests to define the world loosely, and leave room for new things to be introduced as needed/wanted. However, take a published adventure or similarly crafted work of the GM's and this becomes more difficult.
• Address the characters, not the players- nothing stopping you from doing this in any game, really, and I imagine many who play D&D will do this.
• Embrace the fantastic- this seems obvious, but I think that it's good to keep in mind especially for people who have been playing D&D for many years; familiarity doesn't always go along with fantastic
• Make a move that follows- this one is more specifically aimed at the mechanics of Dungeon World, but to translate it to 5e, it would be about establishing danger first, and then following through; and while that general take on it might be helpful to keep in mind, 5e kind of fights it structurally with its rounds and turns and initiative and the like.
• Never speak the name of your move- keep the focus on the fiction. I'm not crazy about this one and how it would apply to 5e because I think 5e works best when the players have a sense of the mechanics. The nature of the game and how it works means that there can be a lot of variables. In DW, by contrast, there are less such rules, and the GM moves are consequences of rolls made by the players, so this advice makes more sense.
• Give every monster life- probably useful advice in 5e overall, but sometimes the game will make this very hard due to the need to have many fights. Obviously, this can vary a lot from table to table, but I imagine most D&D games will feature more monsters than the average DW game. It kind of ties into what I said about familiarity and the fantastic above.
• Name every person- I'd say this is good advice in any game.
• Ask questions and use the answers- this is great advice in general, but the way 5e functions by default fights this hard. So much of the game is about taking on challenges and obstacles or learning backstory that's created by the GM. Where is the maguffin? Why is the duke out to kill the king? Who's rallying humanoids in the fell forest and why? These elements are almost always predetermined to some extent if not completely by the GM.
• Be a fan of the characters- you can do this. It's not about being unfair, but is about recognizing that the PCs are the stars of the show.
• Think Dangerous- this works just fine, I'd say. It's about putting the characters in the crosshairs. Make the world they inhabit dangerous and challenging in whatever way is suitable.
• Begin and end with the fiction- this one kind of touches on the same things as Never Speak a Move's Name. It's about letting everything flow from the events of the game. DW and 5e will likely go about this in different ways, but the advice can apply to either.
• Think offscreen, too- I suppose this one is about what many call a "living world"; it's aimed at thinking about what happens outside the immediate scope of the characters; how their actions and everything else that happens in the game may ripple out and have impact. Or even about how unrelated events may develop along the way and how they may come into play.

I think a lot of these can apply to 5e or other games, albeit in slightly different ways. Some of the specifics of the game mechanics mean that some are just not suited, and there's no real corollary in 5e. I think they apply best to a GM who is crafting his own material for play and once you look at using them to run something like Tomb of Annihilation or another adventure, a lot of the conflicts become much more obvious.

Edited to Add: Well, poo.....looks like @Ovinomancer ninja'd me by a few minutes while I was typing.

 

[niklinna]

And some of it just seems false. Mightn't it affect the play experience quite a bit if I as a player decide that my PC has a murdered brother whom I hope to avenge or if the GM decides that my PC has a murdered brother?

Eh, I never liked my brother much anyhow.

What's that? He hid a treasure map somewhere right before he was killed? Now you have my attention!

 

[pemerton]

@hawkeyefan - I edited my post with quite a long addition, so thought as a courtesy I should let you know!

 

[pemerton]

From the very little experience I've had with "living sandbox" play and the maybe a little bit more or less experience I've had with Story Now play ... I'd be inclined to say that pacing as such isn't really a big concern for the GM in either. The "living sandbox" GM is waiting for the players to do something, so the GM can make things happen in response to what the players are doing; the Story Now GM is waiting for the dice to come up with a given result, so the GM can make things happen in response to what they feel fits the dramatic needs of the characters and the scene. Neither GM is really pacing the story.

I think the GM in PbtA-type play has a crucial role in pacing things, by the choice of how to manage the soft move/hard move sequence. And upthread I already quoted the BW rules text that expressly discusses the GM's responsibilities for managing pacing.

Now it's true they are not pacing the story, because there is no the story - but they are modulating the way dramatic tension is established in pretty significant ways.

The bit of bolded stood out to me for a different reason. What sorts of things does the GM make happen? Until we start to talk about that, we can't even describe the difference between a "living sandbox" and the DL modules (which also require the GM to make things happen in response to what the players are doing).

 

[pemerton]

I can look at a lot of D&D module play and come away with some typical principles.

I can look at living sandbox play and come away with some typical principles.

Would you care to state some of these then?

 

[hawkeyefan]

@hawkeyefan - I edited my post with quite a long addition, so thought as a courtesy I should let you know!

I’ll let the laugh stand.

But yes that’s a significant addition.

 

[pemerton]

This is a good description of the area I struggle most with in reading examples of story now play.


I think I'm okay with 'creation ex nihilo' when something is being created in the immediate context for color.
I think I'm okay with 'creation ex nihilo' when it's related to NPC temperment/agendas/etc.
I'm not really okay with 'creation ex nihilo' when its related to timing, as in because of this failed check the guards show up right now.
I'm not really okay with 'creation ex nihilo' when it's related to physical objects intended to impact play in this scene.

I suppose that might can be summarized as I'm only okay with 'creation ex nihilo' when it doesn't involve temporal/spatial positioning for anything intended to impact this particular scene.

OK. Having said this, now reconsider the contrast between "backstory first" and "situation first"!

 

[pemerton]

you can analyze play reports all day, but the result of any analysis is only to shore up the framework (the basket A, basket B problem).

I don't understand how you can be so confident in this conjecture in the absence of any reports being provided, let alone analysed! (Other than my own accounts of exploration-oriented play in 4e D&D and Classic Traveller, which I am perfectly able to - and have - analysed.)

 

[Ovinomancer]

Huh. Well, you have a framework for analysis that works for you. From my perspective, this framework is overly rigid, the problem being that it becomes self-referential, where sure, you can analyze play reports all day, but the result of any analysis is only to shore up the framework (the basket A, basket B problem). Consequently, something like actual 5e players (as well as the designers) being influenced by dungeon world doesn't register as meaningful.

Yes, my rigid framework is that system matters. You've caught me.

What would be interesting, though, would be if you actually presented cases of importing play from DW into 5e in a coherent way that shows 5e adopting DW style play. Instead, your one example was taking Fronts and turning it into a fairly generic bad guy descriptor for driving GM plotlines at players. That this is pretty far from how it's implemented in DW seems to have escaped you?

 

[Malmuria]

I don't understand how you can be so confident in this conjecture in the absence of any reports being provided, let alone analysed! (Other than my own accounts of exploration-oriented play in 4e D&D and Classic Traveller, which I am perfectly able to - and have - analysed.)

I'm referring to my reading of the way that this theoretical framework have been used in this thread, in several other related threads on this site, and in general from what I've read of forge-era theory/big model discourse online (in case I was not clear, the ability to analyze a play report is not in question, but that it seems that this analysis is about filtering varied experiences of play into baskets A, B, C, etc, all of which have been predetermined and don't seem very amenable to change).