D&D 5E The Neutral Referee, Monty Haul, and the Killer DM: History of the GM and Application to 5e

[Fanaelialae]

I strive for neutrality, but recognize that it is largely impossible, and not even absolutely desirable. Even the advice for neutral-facing styles (like sandboxes) tends to have advice that is essentially favoring the players over the world.

For example, allowing threats to be telegraphed. It's done in the spirit of fairness, but it's not exactly neutral. If the DM were truly striving for some platonic ideal of neutrality, then certainly there should be some "insurmountable" threats that are undetectable until it is too late. That's realistic, no?

However, that kind of thing tends to fall under the auspices of the killer DM, rather than the neutral DM, because it's fundamentally unfair. There's not exactly a challenge or skill involved in such a case, because the reality is that if the DM wants to kill you with an undetectable and unsurvivable scenario, the game gives them the power to do so.

I think that there's a degree of fairness to the neutral DM that is often glossed over. Because, fundamentally, if you're a referee between the entire world (or even multiverse) and the party, the world has what is essentially an unfair advantage. It's like a football game where there's half a dozen players on one team and 3 billion players on the other. And each team can field however many players they want. Obviously, in such an instance, a fair and impartial referee might see cause to step in and impose a few limits on the latter team.

 

[Mort]

These are contradictory though. By designing an adventure with the PCs in mind, you are showing favoritism to the PCs. To be neutral, the referee has to ignore the PCs when constructing the world. However the PCs happen to move through it is up to them. If they go into an orc encampment without a healer and start attacking...they're going to have a bad time. Designing that adventure with the PCs in mind would be changing the world to suit these specific PCs and their abilities, hence showing favoritism towards the PCs.

Thing is, as the PCs move through the world (unless they are playing an adventure path or set of predetermined adventures) they will self select into situations/adventures they are better suited for.

Is the group focused on stealth/infiltration? They will likely do many more things that require that skillset.

Is the group focused on diplomacy/political maneuvering? They will likely do many more things that focus on THAT skillset.

So the lines of designing "neutral" adventures vs. ones that tailor to the PCs will often converge much more than you'd think.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

On the other hand, you have the Monty Haul DM; this DM wants the players to be happy, to win, to get it all. DMs who want the party to succeed at all times because it's "fun" fall into this trap.

Ah I think this is attractive but ultimately is modernist revisionism and thus inaccurate.

I think you're back-projecting a 2020s take on to something that's been around vastly longer

I think this because have very clear memories of discussing and witnessing Monty Haul playstyles from 1990 to about 2000. Monty Haul DMs did not, back then, in the 1980s and early 1990s, "want the players to be happy" in at all the same sense as "be a fan of the characters". This was trivially obvious if you met or talked to an actual Monty Haul DM. It was actually something much weirder, which was more like, he wants to cheat the system, and hand reward to his friends, which is not the same thing. You often saw this dynamic in Monty Haul groups. The DM was not a fan of the characters, but rather his friends and played favourites hugely. PCs in these sort of groups weren't invulnerable unless the DM was mates with that player right then. There was basically no such thing, back the '80s and early '90s, as a Monty Haul DM who just handed out loads of good loot to everyone (I mean, I'm sure at least one existed, but they were the exception, not the rule). Rather Monty Haul was about favouritism and sometimes an adversarial approach the rules (rather than the players) on the part of the DM.

This is why it was particularly distinct from the Neutral Referee, and is also distinct from the modern "be a fan of the characters" approach.

I do think it's important to note the "Cheat the system" (in the Robin Hood sense) and "reward RL friends" aspects when discussing Monty Haul.

I would argue that 5e is mostly set up to be a "soft Monty Haul" system. I do not mean that in the pejorative sense; it defaults to heroic fantasy, with incredibly high survivability, and the default that (at most tables) encounters can be overcome.

But that's just not how actual Monty Haul games of the era worked. They weren't heroic fantasy, they were power trips (often of a quite violently anti-heroic or even basically villainous nature), which are pretty different - this was major - I remember listening to players from Monty Haul groups list their achievements and best times in AD&D, and it was always, like gross stuff. Like killing a bunch of people (not monsters, people) in some flash way, or torturing NPCs, or being a brutal overlord. They didn't necessarily have "high survivability" either. Some were definitely softball yet others were pretty fatal, but either the victims would be non-favourites, or they'd be favourites who got to pass their entire loot on to their next character. Indeed I'd say the latter was absolutely characteristic of Monty Haul in those days - if your PC died, all their stuff went to your next PC. What we're seeing here in 5E is actually adverse to Monty Haul.

"Be a fan of the characters" is not how Monty Haul actually worked. Monty Haul's principle was "hand out cool naughty word to your RL mates so long as they please you". So it's not "soft Monty Haul", even if you don't mean it pejoratively. There's a huge and fundamental shift in approach.

Both the Killer DM and the Monty Haul archetype are just exaggerations of the simple issue that most DMs had in navigating between Scylla and Charybdis; between the social pressures of a group game that is meant to be fun and played with friends, and the desire to "win" a game by taking an adversarial posture to the players. Both are just examples of the DM who is unable to avoid putting their thumb on the scale.

This is correct.

But in my experience, that's 100% of DMs, very much including every DM I've played with who claimed to be a "neutral referee". Maybe a DM does exist who successfully charts that course, but I am skeptical, and I suspect most who think they have are just letting Scylla pick off a few of their sailors and turning a blind eye.

In fact the "neutral referees" I've seen actually DM break down into basically two categories - but not quite the same ones:

1) "Mister RNG" - A guy with no ability to improvise, but a lot of dice and a million notes. I don't feel like this is really "neutral refereeing", because the game would literally be better if this kind of DM didn't exist and a computer was running the same RNG/notes stuff. It would be much faster and more straightforward. This sort of guys is absolute nightmare when you go into a new area, because he's basically accessing the HDD but the HDD is him frantically paging through and scanning endless notes and rolling on endless charts (many of the charts will also create problems he then has to solve, too). I will say I haven't seen this guy since the early '90s, I suspect everyone who played in those games just went and played video games instead because the experience is overall better (and quite similar). Solo TT RPGs of the modern era prove this didn't even need to exist. To be fair I only ever saw two of these.

2) "Killer DMs who hide behind faux-neutrality" - This is the kind of guy who say they're a "neutral referee", but somehow the world they've set up is absolutely full of surprise deathtraps, gotchas, and NPCs who are extremely powerful and will kill the PCs for really any reason or even no reason at all! This was the vast majority of people I played with who claimed to be "neutral". They're very much in tune with the "I get out of bed" "Oh you forgot to say you removed the covers, so you get tangled in them and fall and take 4d6 damage" kind of DM - often they were the same guy. I would say most of them honestly believed they were neutral, though, they were just completely delusional about what actual neutrality would involve. Like some guy who fills his house with killer deathtraps, then invites a neighbour in, and when the cops are dragging him away, is shrieking about how he didn't intend to kill the guy and this was just an accident.

Pointless story time:

The funniest time I've seen Monty Haul/Neutral DM stuff cause an issue with in a university RPG society oWoD game in 1997/1998. There were multiple different oWoD games running, and The Powers That Be of the RPG society decided they were crossing over, whether we liked it or not (!!!), and thus there would be cross-table PvP (GREAT EVERYONE LOVES IT!!!). The Storyteller for the Werewolf game was absolutely full-on Monty Haul. All his mates at the Werewolf table had suped-up Grand Klaives and hybrid-breed garou and all this nonsense. I was but a mere high-generation (i.e. weak) Lasombra Antitribu "businessman" packing a double-barrelled shotgun with silver shot (mostly because the PC was a rich guy rather than because I saw this coming, because I did not). They brought in this supposedly "neutral" Storyteller who wasn't the Werewolf guy to run proceedings as the Monty Haul werewolves basically tore up my table of vamps, horror-movie style (oh the irony!). Eventually my PC got cornered in a library, but the guy playing the ridiculous three-breed (he even looked like a silly crossbreed dog, I know they thought it was cool/badass but it just sounded he was a very large humanoid Labradoodle or something) Monty Haul werewolf in question decided to go for maximum horror movie naughty word and just threatened me with his Grand Klaive and let my character shoot him, because what was I going to do.

When saw how many dice I was rolling (don't use "WoD: Combat" rules if you don't want trouble mate! You put the book on the table!) and and found out the shot was silver, then he completely failed his soak roll, the conferring between the "neutral" Storyteller, the Werewolf DM, and the Labradoodle garou's player was super-intense. I just sat there with a naughty word-eating grin on my face (my long-term smugness is marred by my memory that I was wearing an appalling late '90s "fashion tracksuit", god help me). Eventually they figured a way the Labradoodle could technically survive, but that very thankfully caused them to end the PvP not just for that night, but for the rest of the campaign.

A victory for neutral DMing? I think not, but certainly a compromise was achieved!

 

[overgeeked]

Thing is, as the PCs move through the world (unless they are playing an adventure path or set of predetermined adventures) they will self select into situations/adventures they are better suited for.

Is the group focused on stealth/infiltration? They will likely do many more things that require that skillset.

Is the group focused on diplomacy/political maneuvering? They will likely do many more things that focus on THAT skillset.

I think what you're missing is that the game isn't limited in that sense. There aren't only stealth or diplomacy or whatever missions the PCs can pick up and engage with. They also wouldn't have complete enough knowledge of the future to know whether only those kinds of things would come up when taking on any given quest, etc. It's like thinking that because the door of a dungeon is locked all you need is a lockpick to complete the dungeon. Not so much.

The whole point is to have a living, breathing world that's running in the background. Independent of the PCs and their skills. The world doesn't care what the PCs are good at. The neutral referee doesn't only put things in the world that the PCs will have a good chance of succeeding at. The neutral referee creates a world and lets the PCs interact with it however well, or however badly, they choose to.

So the PCs are focused on stealth and they only try to complete quests, missions, etc they think are tailored to their skills, great. The world isn't designed around that assumption. The world keeps on moving and changing regardless of what the PCs do. It will change and react to the PCs' actions, of course, but if they ignore a problem it doesn't go away. Which means if they ignore the necromancer raising an army of the dead to march on the valley the PCs live in...their home will be overrun with undead. If they try to stealth their way through that and fail...okay, now they're stuck in a massive fight they aren't prepared for because they focused on stealth and not combat.

The notion of "the PCs are good at stealth so only put in stealth missions" isn't how this style of running games works. It's the almost opposite of that. Not hammering on the PCs' weaknesses, but the world is what it is...

The world exists independently of the players and their characters.

If the PCs are bad at combat and they get into a combat, they're toast. If the PCs are bad at stealth and they need stealth, they're toast. This is where the notion of needing a well-rounded party comes from. If they can't handle something, they're going to get hammered there. Not because the referee is targeting their weaknesses, rather because the neutral world inevitably includes all those things they're no good at. But they still have to face those obstacles regardless. So they either have a well-rounded party, ignore a lot of problems (thus letting them get worse), or they flail at problems they're not equipped to handle.

The referee winds up the world and lets it tick away. The players interact with the world however they want. Then the referee reacts accordingly as the world would. You stop the goblin bandits and empty out their lair...then a few weeks or months later something else moves in. You slaughter a cult and bury their bodies under the rubble of their desecrated church...only for a necromancer to come along and raise them...then she uses them to rebuild the church as her new headquarters. You ignore a fire, it continues to burn until put out...if it's near your house, and you do nothing about it, your house burns down. It doesn't matter if you're a firefighter or not.

So the lines of designing "neutral" adventures vs. ones that tailor to the PCs will often converge much more than you'd think.

Not at all. A neutral adventure is the opposite of one tailored to the PCs.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

This is where the notion of needing a well-rounded party comes from.

It's funny you say that, because whenever people show me the PCs from a supposedly "neutral referee"-style game then tend to be extremely combat-centric (particularly hard-to-kill melee types), and often have no-one who is skills or stealth focused in them at all. They almost always have a Wizard and Cleric (or equivalent) though.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It's funny you say that, because whenever people show me the PCs from a supposedly "neutral referee"-style game then tend to be extremely combat-centric (particularly hard-to-kill melee types), and often have no-one who is skills or stealth focused in them at all. They almost always have a Wizard and Cleric (or equivalent) though.

I think we're talking about a campaign run by the ideal neutral referee. Reality often fails to give us exactly the experience we want, but we can still strive for it. That's what I do.

 

[Voadam]

Reading the main section you are responding to holistically with my emphasis:

Sure. I still disagree that Gygaxian DM neutrality requires not ad libbing.

The DM, then, cannot ad hoc the area that is being explored, the DM cannot ad lib, and the DM should not be a fan of the players in Skilled Play. The DM is, for all practical purposes, the world that the players are interacting with through their characters. For this reason, the game cannot have mechanics for the players to seize narrative control of the world. The world exists independently of the player's conceptions and desires, and they (the players) are using their Skilled Play to overcome the obstacles within the world.

For that same reason, the DM must commit to preparation. This division of authority requires trust from the players to the DM that the DM is not changing the world or engaging in illusionism to help or hinder the players.


Read completely, the emphasis is not on the idea that the DM cannot "ad lib" dialogue from an NPC (for example) or "ad lib" additional details about what a room looks like. Instead, it's that the world exists independently of the players, which means that:
1. The DM should, to the extent possible, rely on preparation (and/or other outside materials or tables) when it comes to exploration. They should not ad hoc or ad lib an area being explored.
2. When the DM does not have this material, the DM must make rulings that are "true to the fiction" regardless of whether that would help or hinder the players. And when that ruling is made, then that becomes a "truth" in the world. If the DM has established that a chalice is green, then the chalice is always green from that point on. The players can trust that the DM is not going to change the color of the chalice (or the location of rooms) later on.
3. This is different than the "improv" games I reference, which allow players to seize narrative control of the world.

I am completely not arguing against neutrality and the world existing as its own thing outside of the PCs. I think that can be compatible with the DM ad libbing and improvising areas being explored.

Rolling up a lair on a wilderness encounter table or the party doing things the DM did not expect in a not overly fleshed out part of a big city can require the DM ad libbing big parts of the area being explored. Similarly early edition magic like teleport being off can send the party to some place unplanned which can require significantly ad libbing the area now being explored. This seems a natural consequence of Gygaxian world building and game procedure assumptions so I disagree with the second half of your 1.

I agree with your 2 that this should be done consistent with the world to the extent possible and if the goal is DM neutrality then do it that way without favoring or trying to crush the PCs.

As for 3 you here seem to be using improv to mean player control of the narrative codified in the game and not the DM improvisationally coming up with world elements in the moment. For DM neutrality though I think that would depend on the specifics. I don't think a charm person spell or a different specific PC controlled storytelling mechanic generally impacts DM neutrality. It is just part of the world the DM is adjudicating.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think we're talking about a campaign run by the ideal neutral referee. Reality often fails to give us exactly the experience we want, but we can still strive for it. That's what I do.

I think even in an ideal situation, the fact is that D&D has certain rules, and makes certain things important, and my feeling is that, when you know challenges aren't going to be tailored for you significantly, rather you'll have to tailor yourself to them, then survivability massively increases in value, whereas fragile highly-RNG-based stuff like D&D's takes on skills (in every edition) decreases significantly in value. Part of the issue is that most DMs treat skills as a binary pass/fail and every edition encourages them to do so (4E the least because of Skill Challenges, but they were poorly implemented), so avoiding rolling becomes more useful than having skills. Magic also becomes hard-required, because if you don't have access to it, and the DM isn't tailoring things at all, certain situations will just outright TPK you (especially in earlier editions). It also means Wizards tend to adopt more utility-heavy memorization lists which again, somewhat means RNG-based utility is invalidated.

Hence I believe even in an "ideal" case, you don't get the true "balanced party" (i.e. fighter/rogue/cleric/wizard) encouraged in "neutral referee" situations, you get survival-oriented characters + utility-oriented casters.

 

[Voadam]

I think even in an ideal situation, the fact is that D&D has certain rules, and makes certain things important, and my feeling is that, when you know challenges aren't going to be tailored for you significantly, rather you'll have to tailor yourself to them, then survivability massively increases in value, whereas fragile highly-RNG-based stuff like D&D's takes on skills (in every edition) decreases significantly in value. Part of the issue is that most DMs treat skills as a binary pass/fail and every edition encourages them to do so (4E the least because of Skill Challenges, but they were poorly implemented), so avoiding rolling becomes more useful than having skills. Magic also becomes hard-required, because if you don't have access to it, and the DM isn't tailoring things at all, certain situations will just outright TPK you (especially in earlier editions). It also means Wizards tend to adopt more utility-heavy memorization lists which again, somewhat means RNG-based utility is invalidated.

Hence I believe even in an "ideal" case, you don't get the true "balanced party" (i.e. fighter/rogue/cleric/wizard) encouraged in "neutral referee" situations, you get survival-oriented characters + utility-oriented casters.

Yeah but in 4e and 5e all characters are fairly combat competent and designed for combat survival. 4e Rogues were fantastic combat strikers in my experience. 5e bards are great for a lot of combat situations.

In 4e and 5e balanced parties generally do fantastic. In older editions the rogues and thieves were generally poor overall so they were not really contributing mechanically as much unless you got into specific skill noncombat situations.

 

[overgeeked]

Yeah but in 4e and 5e all characters are fairly combat competent and designed for combat survival. 4e Rogues were fantastic combat strikers in my experience. 5e bards are great for a lot of combat situations.

In 4e and 5e balanced parties generally do fantastic. In older editions the rogues and thieves were generally poor overall so they were not really contributing mechanically as much unless you got into specific skill noncombat situations.

Part of the problem is that a lot of thief skills are easily taken up by casters and fighters. A locked door has at least four ways of being opened. The thief can only do one. Fighter can kick it open. Wizard can use knock. The smart player can describe taking it off the hinges if the hinges happen to be facing the group. And a lot of early DMs simply didn't run the thief skills as written, so their utility is way less than it should be. Plus they suck in fights, generally. So if you can get away with not having a thief, a lot of parties will.