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

[Aldarc]

This is the issue.

I agree that this was a terrible experience (a "ridiculous game"). But this is the crux of the problem with the term. At it's core, everyone agrees in the tautology that Bad GMs are Bad GMs.

Just like if I came up with some clever term, say, "One Ball, 11 Quarterbacks," or "Lowest Common Denominator Play," to describe unruly players who try to dominate the game by inventing fiction or rules lawyering, I would be doing nothing more than employing the tautology that ... wait for it ... Bad Players are Bad Players.

The trouble, of course, is that there is a group of people that chose to use "Mother May I" as a way to describe ... not Bad GMing, but an entire way of playing. A playstyle. In the same way that I might call certain games, "Lowest Common Denominator." And then turn around and say, "Hey there, I'm not being negative- just describing it! Don't take offense at the terms I use! After all, some other person also used them, so it's okay. Suck it up, buttercup!"

There is a simple way to get to the heart of the issue- go and ask people who play a certain style* if they describe their games in that way. If they (absent a failure point- like Bad DMing) would describe the way they play as "Mother My I."

Now, if they don't ... maybe you shouldn't use that term to describe them? That's basic courtesy. If you want to have an actual conversation with people (as opposed to trumpet your own preferred playing style), it's usually best to not try and rubbish the other side with loaded terms.

Then again, if your purpose is not to have that conversation, then don't bother. The choice is yours.



*In order to head off the inevitable, it has to be their preferred and most common playstyle. Not, "I used to play Mother May I, but now I know better!" Or, "Sure, sometimes I have to play Mother May I, but that's only because the sheeple don't play the games I like."

While I agree that MMI is often a negative term - along with a wide range of other commonly used terms in TTRPG parlance (e.g., metagaming, power gamer/munchkin, railroading, etc.) - I personally don't agree that it's a tautology for "Bad GMs are Bad GMs" as I don't think that the fundamental issue with MMI is about "Bad GMs." MMI can happen with Good GMs and it can happen with Bad GMs.

I think that a lot of the issues (or even frustrations) with MMI stems from the uneven distribution of authority or decision resolution in some roleplaying games and tables, particularly with how player actions and character knowledge are gated through the GM or what is gated through the rules system itself. So players can feel like they are having to play MMI with the GM in order to make informed play decisions about how their character can act and interact in this world. While MMI may seem like a pejorative, I do think that it speaks to a real frustration of players and that those feelings are valid. I don't think that dismissing MMI as a pejorative or a "Bad GMs are Bad GMs" tautology really does anything to address the underlying issues behind it. I think that it risks sweeping it all under the rug.

 

[gorice]

I don't see why this fundamental dynamic is a problem, and if it is, what hard coded ruleset solves it. Why are we investing so much authority in the "game designer" who doesn't know you or your friends or what you enjoy at your table? Particularly since the example you cite (Tides of Chaos) clearly shows game designers not doing a good job? Doesn't critique of this design (rightly) imply that you, you at home, can do better?

I've been following this thread on and off, and felt the (perhaps unwise) need to butt in at this point. The argument above is tantamount to saying that bad design exists, therefore there is no point in critiquing design. I don't buy it.

If you go back to 'rulings not rules' B/X D&D, there was a structured exploration turn of the dungeon. Wandering monster checks were rolled every other turn. In 5e, the DMG says this:

You decide when a random encounter happens, or you roll. Consider checking for a random encounter once every hour, once every 4 to 8 hours, or once during the day and once during a long rest—whatever makes the most sense based on how active the area is.

Worse than useless. It also suggests that one of the reasons you might use one is because the players 'are getting off track'. So, when it comes to random encounters, 5e encourages and relies upon arbitrary use of DM authority, while B/X has rules which the DM must implement and adjudicate. B/X does not encourage MMI, while 5e actively encourages the DM to punish the players with random encounters for not following the (secret, to them) script. It's built-in dysfunction.

 

[Hussar]

@gorice I think you make a pretty valid point.

Here's another example. Someone has gone out and done the math to make a "make a 5e monster on a business card" Here. Now, here's a fantastic idea that would be so incredibly helpful to DM's. This is the kind of thing that really should be in the DMG. Obviously, because the math actually does fit, there are at the very least rough guidelines for making monsters.

4e had this right off the bat. This was one of the first things that I ever saw made for 4e and it was brilliant.

But, again, because 5e is forced to sort of hide how the sausage is made, we don't get this kind of guidance in the game. Note, this isn't even adding more mechanics. This is actually stripping away several pages of stuff in the DMG and simplifying it down to an easy to use guideline.

I don't think it's unreasonable to call something poorly designed when you can actually back it up. I do think it's unreasonable to call something badly designed when it is based purely on personal preference. But, if you can actually give concrete examples, such as @gorice has done above, then, sure, let's call it bad design. I'm not sure I agree that it's all that bad, but, I can at least see his point. I don7t really think I'd call the random encounter rules "Mother May I" since the players aren't actually being asked to do anything - but, I also can sort of see where he's coming from with this.

 

[Ixal]

While MMI may seem like a pejorative, I do think that it speaks to a real frustration of players and that those feelings are valid.

Is it in all cases?
I have seen enough players who complain about MMI in some form out of entitlement because they think their creative plans must always work and be to their benefit and its the DMs job to alter the game world to make that happen.

 

[Aldarc]

Is it in all cases?
I have seen enough players who complain about MMI in some form out of entitlement because they think their creative plans must always work and be to their benefit and its the DMs job to alter the game world to make that happen.

I don't see why it needs to be true in all cases for it to be a valid issue for players who are frustrated by it.

 

[Manbearcat]

There is a reason no one uses illusion spells.

Too many ogres instantly realizing that the shadows aren't just right, or city guards that literally know every single street in a massive city and KNOW there isn't supposed to be a wall there.

I've seen plenty of illusion and enchantment spells that are effective in play. It all depends on the DM and the Players and the communication/trust between those parties. The same is true for something like a persuasion roll, where the effects of a success are fuzzy but still possible to be adjudicated.

The reason why I'm sympathetic to Vaalingrade here (and that general position in this thread) is that without robust, table-facing archetecture to resolve the following question:

* Does this particular guard know every single street in this massive city so well?

* Were they out on a bender last night with their mates?

* Did they have a terrible night of sleep due to fallout with a friend/loved one do they have an affliction like insomnia or just general anxiety about a tough day on the job tomorrow?

* Are they contemptuous of their boss or hierarchical corruption within their ranks and...maybe they pierce the illusion but they're quite happy to see things go wrong for their ranking officer?


...how do we know the GM is performing a legitimate (in all ways that a thing can be legitimate and illegitimate, including fairness and competency) conception and extrapolation of a complex imagined space? There are so many variables that could possibly impact "whether this particular guard sees through the illusion" or "is there even a guard there to see through the illusion in the first place?"

When one of the primary priorities of play is for the GM to somehow conceive of an enormously complex system (a single person is complex system enough!) >

* run a mental model of all the varying parameters of this system >

* pick the results of this instantiation of that model over that one (and any complex, legitimate model should have profoundly differently results with respect to "guard on duty piercing illusion" if run 1000 times) and do so fairly as a neutral referee without softballing or being intentionally adversarial >

* successfully convey the outputs of their complex mental model in a way that is comprehensible to the players (foregrounds the stakes/conflict and telegraphs potential consequences of subsequent interaction with the imagined space so the player can infer/build out the risk profile and opportunity cost of this move made vs that move made) >

* all without the aid of a UI that converts imagined space dynamics to player in meat space

...well, that is just a hell of an ask for both the GM and the players and stresses human competency (breadth and apex) and communication and comprehension and patience and trust to its limits. If I'm a player, I have to (a) believe you can model all of this stuff, (b) believe in your methodology of parameterizing a complex model (like above) and legitimately run it in your head in-situ, (c) believe that you're making the correct (meaning neutral, fair, sensible) decision in picking this instantiation of your model vs one of the hundreds of other ones (where the state of the guard is different), (d) believe in your capacity to convey all the relevant information so I can upload it and build out my decision-space, and (e) believe in myself to comprehend all of this stuff without the aid of a UI (particularly when the stakes are high and consequential).

Its a hell of a lot to believe and a hell of a lot to ask.

I was discussing a Blades in the Dark combat scene that we had to cliffhanger for this Sunday. Its been built out in the following way mechanically:

1) Grinders mutant barring the way in the tight quarters of Sausage Alley to the junkyard that houses their "Allamo" (a bunker under a scrap pile). A 3rd party gang (the brutal Billihooks) has their slaughterhouse as the northern building of this alley (with an alley-facing entrance/exit). These things will inform the Position and Effect and Consequence-space for various Action Rolls (as well as potential Devil's Bargains).

2) Mutant is Quality 2, Master Threat, Large Thug

3) 2 x defenses (these are discrete so you can attack them separately):

* Armor that you have to destroy to kill him. You need Great Effect to destroy his armor.

* Bracer on Massive Wrists/Arms (he has huge ape index) - "Break Guard": This is a 6 Tick Tug-of-War Clock, starting at 2 for his guard. You have to get to 6 to Break his Guard to kill him. I'm going to use Complications to tick it back down.


Now there are a host of several other intersecting components in this Assault Score (after a massive Score last session put the Crew to At War status with The Grinders, the Crew has decided that 3 of them are going to take the fight to the Grinders and try to wipe them out while the other two fulfill an obligation to The Red Sashes by breaking into the Spirit Warden's Bellweather Crematorium and "break out" with a Red Sash ghost that is about to be creamated in the electroplasmic spirit removal plant!) that will inform Position, Effect, player move-space, Consequence-space, etc. But let us just focus on 1-3 above.

There is no one on this board...not a single soul...who is more confident in their ability to build out and articulate a fight scene in a TTRPG (due to the varying intersections of my background/experience/expertise). But if you ask me to go with my own mental modeling of the above + fair and objective model run selection + executing the difficulty of articulating complex concepts in a table-time and pacing-friendly way to players such that they can confidently build-out the risk profile and opportunity cost of their deicison-space and confidently execute a move (like a highly capable Scoundrel would in the world of Duskvol)...without the aid of all of the individual and integrated aspects of Position, Effect, Threat Level, Resistance Rolls, Stress, Clocks/Ticks, Harm, Armor, Special Armor, etc etc etc to serve as a User Interface?

I'm going to kindly say "no thank you." When I say "no thank you" I'm coming from a place of simultaneous extreme confidence yet extreme humility (at my limitations and the limitations of human conversation and the limitations of players).

So again...in my assessment, its just a massive ask (of a GM of the limits of human conversation of the limits of players).

Or, in other words, this post from @hawkeyefan

I think the issue is that there is no way for a GM to actually convey the amount of information or level of detail to the players that would equal the info available yo the characters simply by being in their environment. It simply cannot happen.

So if we accept that, then it’s less about precise correlation than it is about informing the players sufficiently enough that they can make decisions for their characters.

That some of this information may be beyond what the character knows isn’t really all that relevant, it’s more that the information provided to the player informs their decision making just as in-world information would inform the character.

This is the reason for rules. They’re the translation from fiction to non-fiction, character to player. The less these are known to the player, the more we move into a Mother May I kind of situation. The reason many view that as problematic is that without the rules, we’re putting the GM in a position to achieve the impossible: to create a situation that’s as vivid and clear to the players as it would be for people experiencing things firsthand.

Simply put; informed player ——> informed character.

That the GM is also then responsible for determining the results of choices made by players, consequences for the characters’ actions, just compounds the concern. I’m not averse to GM judgment, I just prefer when that judgment is more related to the process than to the outcome.

 

[Hussar]

Even in cases where the player is 100% in the wrong, I’d say it’s still useful. There is an obvious mismatch in expectations and quibbling over the verbiage seems to gloss over that.

If someone is describing their experience as a MMI situation, even if they’re totally in the wrong it still indicates a problem at the table.

I don’t think getting fussy about terminology is terribly productive to resolve the conflict.

 

[Manbearcat]

Given that "Mother May I" feels like an epithet to people who endorse the underwriting machinery of play being "Invisible Rulebook + GM Conception of Imagined Space + Player Ask + GM Decides," (IR+GMCoIS+PA+GMD) would "GM's Formulation" as a descriptor for play be more palatable? That seems to me to be pretty good shorthand for that obnoxious acronym I've put in the parenthetical.

I mean, we can haggle over the edges of any given formulation all day long (Dungeons & Dragons is overwhelmingly about neither or it might be wholly about one and not the other) and find fault and motte & bailey our way to a standstill. But the reality of this type of game is that the throughline of play is overwhelmingly governed by "GM-facing process (the IR + GMCoIS) leading to GM assent/veto (GMD) of a player asking if they can do a thing (PA)." In the end, its the GM's formulation of everything that matters (their conception of the imagined space, their model run of the imagined space, their evolving and accreting process, their mental modeling of action declaration prospects) most to play (and this contrasts with many other forms of play where this isn't the case).

 

[tetrasodium]

Sure, that’s possible. I would think that those people would be able to offer some examples as to why heavily-GM-directed play is not vulnerable to Mother May I.

People keep pointing out that it's extremely "vulnerable" to it because mother may I from a player plays out as a destructive & toxic protest aimed at undermining the entire gamestyle that the GM is running rather than a mere disconnect. There was a great blogpost on the alexandrian earlier pointing out a number of ways it can be done & it even notes how the problem is one that more railroady gms are unlikely to ever see or even notice it if it happens at their table.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

For folks wanting an example that doesn't cleave to the usual pattern (e.g., it's not only not OSR, it's about as far from OSR as you can get), I give you: Alignment and Paladins in 3e specifically (and to a certain extent 2e as well).

Alignment has always been weird and loosey-goosey in D&D, but 3e tried to implement it as an encoded part of the rules. The Paladin goes and mucks this up in a really bad way, which is extremely prone to causing arguments and bad behavior from both DMs and players, despite having (comparatively) "simple" rules and specifically depending on DM adjudication and judgment.

On the DM side, we get the classic dick-DM move of forcing a Paladin to fall no matter what they do, of giving a paladin a choice between doing something Lawful (but evil) or something Good (but chaotic), such that no matter what the player does, they're screwed. This happened. It happened a lot. Many perfectly cromulent players would refuse to play Paladins, not because they didn't like the theme, nor even because the class is underpowered*, but because there was a perception that playing a Paladin was an invitation for the DM to screw you over. But this "screwing over" was even more potent than it was in previous editions (as I am given to understand), because a Fallen Paladin loses everything--all class features and benefits other than baseline "you're a crappy Fighter" stuff (BAB, HP, and saves, basically)--and they do so instantaneously, as God pulls the divine plug and the power just winks out. (As noted, this was technically also sort of a thing in 2e, but the "pull the plug, instantly lose abilities" thing was new to 3e IIRC.)

On the player side, however, we get the ever-classic Lawful Stupid Paladin, something that has existed for about as long as Paladins have. But for some reason it got even worse. Maybe it was the aforementioned bad DM reputation driving the good players away, maybe it was something about the unified mechanics and (theoretically) easier access due to lower stat requirements. I dunno. All I know is, Paladin sadly had an equally-deserved reputation of drawing the WORST players, who would do all sorts of horrific (and, frankly, BOTH Evil and Chaotic) things, allegedly in the name of Good and Justice. They were cruel, harsh, punitive, absolutely incorrigible, immediately leaping to the most violent and brutal responses to even the smallest offenses, and generally just terrible to be around--and they would absolutely become the party's Moral Policeman, sometimes actively starting PVP with other characters because of so-called "evil" deeds, all while declaring themselves the ultimate paragons of Lawful Good.

The DM side of this is "Red Light/Green Light" gaming, and specifically a problem as a result. Capricious, inconsistent, or biased presentation will almost surely result in screwing over the player. Theoretically there should be no problem with the DM saying when certain actions would cross the line contextually but might be acceptable in some other context, but the temptation toward drama and the likelihood of imperfect consistency even from purely well-meaning DMs makes it a huge risk fostered and encouraged by the rules. The player side of it is something else (not sure what I'd call it, maybe "below the belt" play?), included here simply to show that I'm not ignoring the player-facing side of this stuff, that that is also a problem, it's just not the main focus of this thread.

4e's Investiture concept is at least equally rules-light (since, really, it doesn't actually have any rules**), but actively avoids causing these problems, because it has no alignment requirement after Investiture. You are required to start off with a compatible alignment, IIRC, but after that point, you're your own person. Your deity cannot simply pull the plug and neuter you. That doesn't mean you're off the hook (see the asterisk note below), there are still things in place to explain there being consequences for betraying your deity, but the outright loss of everything your character is for a single mistake is gone. And the game thus avoids encouraging bad results from both players and DMs.

*Though it absolutely is underpowered in 3rd edition, just to be clear. PF1e boosted it a tiny bit, but Paladin was still weak even there.
**For anyone unfamiliar, in 4e's default setting, the "points of light," the gods cannot directly project their power into the mortal world--or at least, not without enormous cost to them. So they employ mortal proxies--Divine classes. But in order to empower those proxies, they must willingly give up a mote of their divine power, which will grow as the character grows (gains levels.) That power is transferred, it cannot simply be "taken back" if the deity who gave it doesn't like how the person uses it. Deities are thus very cautious about who they give their power to, and their churches likewise put people through rigorous training and testing to ensure durable loyalty before the Investiture ritual is conducted. The Avenger class was specifically created because they serve as the "internal police" of a given faith, hunting down and capturing...or more likely killing...heretics who have betrayed the god who empowered them.