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

[pemerton]

I don't like when folks just passively want the game to entertain them. I don't like the idea that the GM is there to provide the bulk of "the show" and the players have little input.

Hmm. I feel this ground has been trodden before in this this thread . . .

 

[Thomas Shey]

Only thing I’d add is that disliking meta currency isn’t the same as disliking it because it allows power sharing.

I'm not sure you can entirely separate it out, though, unless your view is most GMs hold themselves to what used to be called "hardkeyed" design in their games (i.e. never changing things on the fly). Metacurrency, at worst, systemizes and hands off some elements of that many GMs have done since forever.

 

[Thomas Shey]

While true I think your missing most of the purpose of the analogy.

Maybe, but honestly I'm not sold my statement isn't as true with the analogic subject too. That being the case, I think its not much of an answer.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I often see this idea posted - that the only permissible player response to poor GMing is to change GMs.

Yet when I post about times I've done just that, it often provokes howls of outrage - including in this thread, I think, or perhaps it was one of the parallel ones.

In any event, I don't see why that is the only possible response. What about talking to the GM about dissatisfaction with their approach? Or the BW idea, of using one's authority as a player to introduce content/situations that are more to one's taste? In D&D - which tends to lack mechanical support for this sort of thing - that might mean making a request to the GM for a particular event to happen in the game.

There's also the further question about what is meant by running the game? If that is supposed to mean establishing the fiction without constraint other than whatever is self-imposed, the claim that this is core to D&D is implausible to me. The game rules set out ways of establishing the fiction, and if I were to join a game of D&D, or offer to run one, I would expect that those rules are going to be used.

The idea that you either leave the game or find another GM as the only option implies that either the GM is incapable of improving, or that players are not patient enough to help with that.

Most of us would likely say we're better GMs now than we used to be, and I imagine a lot of that is due to advice that comes from players.

 

[pemerton]

There's too many people who don't entirely even like as simple a power-sharing as is embodied in some of the stronger metacurrency systems, let alone anything more extensive.

I don't think you (the poster Thomas Shey) necessarily intended what I've taken away from your post, but I'm going to post my take-away because it speaks to a more general issue.

I find that there is a very strong tendency to equate player authority over the shared fiction with meta-currency, shared narration, etc. But to me, those are rather boutique forms of player authority, and do not play a big role in most of my RPGing.

To me, the typical distribution of roles in a RPG means that the bulk of what players do is declare actions for their PC, either expressly - I do such-and-such - or implicitly - What can we see? or What's in the chest? which bring with them implicit declarations like We look around? or I look in the chest. And it is by way of the resolution of these declared actions that players exert authority over the shared fiction.

We can see this in @hawkeyefan's Folk Hero example: that doesn't play out as a meta-stipulation I decree that there are common folk willing to give me shelter. It plays out as an action declaration: I approach these common folk and ask them to shelter me and my friends. The background ability says (or seems to say) that in such circumstances, the action declaration will typically succeed.

That's why, in these sorts of discussions, approaches to framing and to resolution are fundamental. I think it' self-evident why resolution is fundamental; and framing is also fundamental because it plays such a big role in establishing the fictional context for declarations and resolutions of PC actions.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Hmm. I feel this ground has been trodden before in this this thread . . .

DANCE FOR ME, GM!!!!

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah, I agree. I don't mind that some players are less invested than others, or that some folks engage with certain games differently, as long as the group and game can still function in the face of such differences. But I don't like when folks just passively want the game to entertain them. I don't like the idea that the GM is there to provide the bulk of "the show" and the players have little input.

Again, this is another potential source for imbalance at the table. And it comes from both sides. There are GMs who feel this is the way it should be, and there are players who feel that way, too. If they're all together at one table, good for them, but that's not a game for me.

Thing is, its not usually that tidy. Most players don't want no input; they just have sharp lines where they want their input to stop (often anything beyond the reach of their character's actions, and almost always beyond the extent that directly bears on their character's backstory) and anything beyond that makes them uncomfortable and requires them to engage with parts of the game existence that, if they put it bluntly, if they wanted to do they'd be a GM.

I don't think its so much "passive" as "sharply bounded."

 

[Ovinomancer]

IMO. The reason games have DMs is the same reason that Democracies have presidents.

Um, you must think that democracy means US style strong executive democracy, and not, like, all the other forms of democracy that exist, including those that lack any executive at all? I mean, if we're going with the analogy.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I don't think you (the poster Thomas Shey) necessarily intended what I've taken away from your post, but I'm going to post my take-away because it speaks to a more general issue.

I find that there is a very strong tendency to equate player authority over the shared fiction with meta-currency, shared narration, etc. But to me, those are rather boutique forms of player authority, and do not play a big role in most of my RPGing.

I'm not directly equating them, but as I said to a poster above, I also don't think you can entirely separate them from the question, either.

To me, the typical distribution of roles in a RPG means that the bulk of what players do is declare actions for their PC, either expressly - I do such-and-such - or implicitly - What can we see? or What's in the chest? which bring with them implicit declarations like We look around? or I look in the chest. And it is by way of the resolution of these declared actions that players exert authority over the shared fiction.

We can see this in @hawkeyefan's Folk Hero example: that doesn't play out as a meta-stipulation I decree that there are common folk willing to give me shelter. It plays out as an action declaration: I approach these common folk and ask them to shelter me and my friends. The background ability says (or seems to say) that in such circumstances, the action declaration will typically succeed.

That's why, in these sorts of discussions, approaches to framing and to resolution are fundamental. I think it' self-evident why resolution is fundamental; and framing is also fundamental because it plays such a big role in establishing the fictional context for declarations and resolutions of PC actions.

I don't know that I disagree, but I still think part of the issues that arise on this is the question of who gets to decide when action resolution is necessary at all. Both players and GMs can have some pretty strong feelings about that, and I think there's a fair bit of ground where its not abundantly clear which side of the fence who should land on (for example, what are the borders of what a player is allowed to say about his backstory?)

 

[pemerton]

A further thought, following from my post 1495, and treating @hawkeyefan's Folk Hero story as more fodder for analysis:

What is going on when the GM, in effect, disregards the action resolution process the rules seem to provide for, and has the PCs betrayed and surrounded?

The answer seems to be that the GM has decided, in advance, what scene they want to frame - and is determined to stick with that regardless of player action declarations.

In it's structure, it's no different from a GM who really wants to frame a fight with the bad guy on the edge of the volcano, and so finds a way to fudge or negate the apparent killing of the bad guy by the PCs when they're still down in the valley.

How do we address this problem? I think there are other solutions beyond walk from tables of GMs we don't like.

For instance, the rulebooks could be more upfront about approaches to framing. Eg hawkeyefan's GM could have framed the fight with the soldiers before the players spend what sounds like quite a bit of play time trying to make themselves safe from pursuit. Or my imaginary volcano-framing GM could narrate over events in the valley and cut straight to the scene that they want to frame.

Or to put the point more generally, just be more upfront about what sort of authority is going to be exercised by the GM.

And the flip side is: if the GM is expected to be responsive to player priorities in framing scenes (as @hawkeyefan seemed to expect in the Folk Hero story) then the GM needs tools to make it easy to frame scenes without prepping them in detail. This is also something that rulebooks can tackle head-on.