D&D 5E How do you define “mother may I” in relation to D&D 5E?

[Vaalingrade]

If one wants players to make good roleplaying choices that are not good game choices, you can't then have harsh consequences for doing so.

If a player sticks their next out and does something for pure RP reasons and that gets their character killed and then the DM tells them that character wouldn't have died if they'd made good game choices; that after all that's the consequences of their actions... guy what they're not going to do anymore?

 

[briggart]

I am personally a big fan of "Playing to lose". When I'm playing, I have no problems whatsoever making poor or deadly choices if I think they make sense for the scene... and that comes directly out of my improv background when I've had no choice but to "play to lose" in a scene just so it can end.

All you need is to be stuck onstage doing an improv scene that goes on and on and on because the booth operator won't kill the lights on it that the offer of "I'm going to just kill myself right now!" becomes a very attractive option.

I understand the last sentence is meant to be a humorous comment, but to me this summarizes most of the gripes I have with certain roleplaying or story-first styles. In a life-or-death situation any reasonable persons would play-to-win, using whatever means at their disposal. There are situations in which self-sacrifice makes sense, but I expect people would still act rationally in those circumstances. The new win condition is no longer "I survive", but "I ensure other people survive", "we have time to complete this critical task", etc.

I very rarely saw cases in which these "roleplaying" decisions seemed to make sense for the character (at least to me), in most cases the goal was to provoke some kind of reaction from the other players, but that to me is just another kind of metagaming.

 

[briggart]

And the obvious answer to that is the characters do not and basically cannot exist in such an information-rich environment. The player's desire for precise metagame information is at odds with the amount and quality of information reasonably available to the character in the fiction. No monster living in a dungeon is going to paint 5ft markings across the floor, for example.

The only time a character would know precisely how far away something is is if they happen to be in their home and happened to have measured the distances precisely before combat for some reason. And then, it's not going to be precise. You might know the couch is 40-some inches and the door's a little smaller than that. But unless you've taken a tape measure to your living room, and memorized those numbers, and can recall those numbers perfectly in a life-and-death situation, you're not going to know exactly how far something is from you. The further from those ideal conditions you are, the less precise your information will be.

You're in a dimly-lit dungeon 100ft underground some 200 miles from your home. There's about a 0% chance of you knowing exactly how far away is that drooling monster who wants to eat your face.

No, we referees should be more honest and prepare the setting in an honest way. As above, unless the conditions are literally perfect, the characters will not have precise information. That the players decide that's not enough, that's cheating, that's not fair, etc is 100% on them. That the players want more information to make a split-second decision than hours worth of scans and measurements could possibly provide is not reasonable and referees should not cater to that.

What a self-contradictory statement. Trying to find out what's going on is acting on the setting. Do you want to know what's behind that door? Guess what, you have to go over there and open it. To gain information you have to act on the environment.

ETA: Try this experiment. No need to report the results. Grab a small cup or bowl and a tape measure or ruler. Go into the biggest room of your home, keeping your eyes on the floor. Don't bump into anything, but don't scan the room. Pick a relatively centered spot and put down the cup/bowl and tape measure between your feet. Close your eyes and stand up straight. Angle your self about 5-10 degrees off-center from the walls. Now...point out your arm at some small object in the room, against the walls, or on the walls, like a TV or picture. Say out loud the number of feet you are away from that object. Open your eyes and look. Now, be honest. I bet you were close, but not spot on with your directions. Now measure the distance from the cup/bowl to the object you picked. Again, be honest. I bet you were off by more than a little bit. And that's the objects in a room you regularly interact with. Now extrapolate that out to a place you've never been before, in less than ideal conditions, in dim light, and knowing your life is in jeopardy. There's no chance you're going to have perfect knowledge of relative distances.

Sure, real people are not able to exactly eyeball distances down to the Planck scale or pay attention to every direction around them all the time. But "you misjudged the distance to the target", "you were distracted and didn't notice the orcs sneaking up behind you", etc. are what attack rolls, skill checks, and saving throws are for.

You seem to me in this kind of superposition state in which you are willing to accept that within the game world targets become significantly more difficult to hit if they are 60'+1" away from you than if they are 60'-1", but not willing to accept that characters within that same game world would be able to spot the difference between the two situations.

Also, I personally prefer systems in which there is a symmetry in the ways PCs and NPCs/monsters interact with the setting. So if if I wanted to introduce an element of "the spell fizzled because the target was outside maximum range", etc., as a DM I would need to know exactly, e.g., how far everybody is from everybody else, and I feel I would not be able to replicate this imperfect information for the NPC.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Yes, by the book means no creativity. After all there are no rules for creativity. A by the book player will only consider doing things that are listed in the rules in the book. They would never even consider the "swing on a rope and spread a bag of flower around". They look at the book for "attack actions" and do only one of them. Most often in combat, a by the book player will only attack...do damage..kill foes...just like the rules say to do. The same way if there character walks into an area, they will want to make a check to do anything.....just like the rules say.

You can play by the book and still be creative--extremely so. It is simply not true that 100% of "by the book" play is anti-creative. I've seen it in OSR games, I've seen it in 4e, I've seen it in games that weren't even tangentially related to D&D.

 

[Hussar]

Right. Trouble is, this is all because of the rules. See the discussion about battlemasters and superiority dice "ruining" martials. The rules defining action X as an ability for class Y de facto means that no one else can attempt that thing. Spread that across 13 classes, 40-some subclasses, scores of feats, hundreds of spells, etc and you end up with a very tiny window of things the PCs can simply declare they try without having to stop the game and looking things up.

Hard disagree from me here.

The reason that players automatically look at their character sheets is because they can actually determine objectively what they can do in the game. If they have to ask if they can do something, then it's out of their hands. "Can I sneak past the guard" means that they are going to have to make stealth checks. How many stealth checks? Well, as many as it takes to fail so that the DM doesn't waste his encounter is far more often than not the answer here.

That's what is mean by Mother May I. The player wants to do something that the DM isn't terribly keen on but doesn't want to shoot it down. So, the DM simply leverages the rules in place in such a way to guarantee failure.

So, the players respond to this by turning to the magic system. Why bother trying diplomacy when I can use charms to get the information out of that NPC? After all, I know that I can succeed with that spell - Mind Reading or some such thing that grants me more or less an automatic success.

The more the game relies on the DM's judgement to resolve tasks, the more the players will rely on whatever else the game gives them concrete results.

 

[Hussar]

With respect, you live in a full-fidelity environment 24/7 and I'm willing to bet you'd have a problem with the experiment from my post you quoted. We have this very strange notion of how much information we have and how easy it is to access, but in a lot of cases we're wrong. Like the old saw of knowing something like the back of your hand, there have been experiments on this, most people can't tell the back of their own hand very well at all. To say nothing of guessing directions and distances.

I'm going to tell you that anyone with military experience, or any hunter worth anything, can probably tell you within a few feet how far something away is. At least anything you could reasonably expect to shoot anyway. Part of training is spent on exactly that and being able to accurately eyeball ranges is very, VERY important. It's a skill just like any other.

Or do you think a pro-football quarterback couldn't accurately throw a ball within a few feet of any range you cared to call out? Again, presuming he's actually physically capable of throwing that far? Or, heck, ask any golfer how far away they are from the hole and they'll probably be close enough. Certainly within tolerances anyway.

I find that people vastly underestimate how much information people are capable of processing.

 

[Ixal]

Most instances of MMI I have seen were firmely in the player complains category.
For example complaining that their "cool move" did not bypass game mechanic like "I throw a rock at the unaware guards head and knock him out instantly",
or when the world does not automatically reshape itself so that the plan of the PCs would work like how some DMs here on the board seem to run their campaign.
"The PCs want to board a ship by pretending to be in trouble and expect the enemy captain, a member of a evil secretive society, to throw all caution and protocol out of the window and dock the whole ship instead of sending a launch like it is normal while being in viewing distance of the port which is responsible for rescuing people anyway.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I very rarely saw cases in which these "roleplaying" decisions seemed to make sense for the character (at least to me), in most cases the goal was to provoke some kind of reaction from the other players, but that to me is just another kind of metagaming.

I have to imagine that it really comes down to the players themselves, and all told it's going to be a spectrum. If some players take dramatic action for their characters not because they make sense for the scene or battle they are in but because it's the "biggest" thing they can think of... then sure, I understand your frustration. "Look at me!" syndrome can rear its ugly head all over the place. So we would all hope that self-sacrifice or dramatic action would be based on the truthful reaction to whatever the situation was, rather than a need to "present yourself" as it were.

But the other side can be just as frustrating and indeed could be claimed as "metagaming" just as badly. The life-or-death situation where one ally is getting pummeled to death but other players have their character hang back and just plink away at it with ranged weapons because they don't want to risk their own character being hurt. It's okay if the "tank goes down"... that's the "tank's job" after all... but I can risk MY character dying by getting into the fray and drawing attacks away from the downed tank.

That kind of "play to survive" or "play to win" mentality I find to be just as egregious. And indeed not at all truthful either.

 

[DEFCON 1]

That's what is mean by Mother May I. The player wants to do something that the DM isn't terribly keen on but doesn't want to shoot it down. So, the DM simply leverages the rules in place in such a way to guarantee failure.

So this statement I think gets to an important point of the discussion. If this is your experiences with Mother May I? gameplay... where the DM only pretends to 'Yes, And' as a matter of politeness but has every intention of working things to say 'No' because they want something else to happen... then of course I understand why you don't like it and would rather have a fuller set of concrete rules. I get that wholeheartedly! With more set rules the DM has less chance to talk out of both sides of their mouth. That makes all the sense in the world and I'm sorry you experience that.

But just know there are some of us out here who will say 'Yes, And', and then actually do 'Yes, And'. If you find yourself playing a game with one of us at some point, hopefully we'll be able to show you that this style of play isn't always as bad as you have experienced.

 

[Tallifer]

I define "Mother, may I" as an extreme only of rule zero: in most games i am very happy to let the dungeon master have the final word, but I have been in ridiculous games where the dungeon master caused my character to be killed because I called the NPC a hobbit instead of a halfling.