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

[pemerton]

@Bedrockgames

I think in post 348 you are describing both (i) an authority structure, for establishing and changing the shared fiction, and (ii) a possible consequence of that, that is probably a degenerate one, namely too much "no" from the GM.

You call (ii) "mother may I". I think so does @Hussar. @Ovinomancer and @Manbearcat seem to call (i), which is what makes (ii) possible, "mother may I".

I don't see much difference between you all in the analysis of how play is working, only differences in how you would apply an informal label.

 

[Ovinomancer]

But if MMI is the cause of the failed play state then saying that MMI caused the failed play state is entirely accurate. And since no one ever describes MMI as a positive, the only time it will be used is to describe a failed play state.

It’s a negative term.

The example you responded to is the same if we swap MMI for Bob's BO. The problem isn't that MMI is present, but that you, individually, decided you didn't like something the rest of tge table was good with and then that you decided to stay and complain about it. This seems an individually based fail state, with MMI only being incidental.

 

[Bedrockgames]

The part you might be missing is the 3E Monkey Wrench. So the 3E creators were made up of players that hated the MMI way of 1E/2E. So they made lots and lots of rules. The idea was a player would grab the rules and hold them up to defend themselves from the DM. "My player takes ''action A'', just like the rule on page 44 says, and you DM must approve and allow it as it is in the Rules" And then the DM would nod "yes, all hail the rules.".

5E goes back to the 2E style: much less rules for everything and letting the DM just make stuff up on the fly.

Neither MMI or Railroad is "always negative". Most of the time it's just a person complaining because they want to complain.

I played tons of 2E and tons of 3E, and definitely system mastery was a big part of 3E. And 3E prioritized players as customers (the books were very much written towards players rather than GM). That didn't mean you didn't have rules expectations in 2E. Yes the GM was the final arbiter, which is one of the big things that I think makes older school style play work because it allows the GM to be so much more flexible to specific requests by the players (neither the players nor the Gm are straightjacketed by the rules). But rules still mattered. If a Gm didn't let you use a spell, there was an expectation that the GM had a very good reason for doing so.

I would argue that railroad and MMI are always a negative criticism. Again no one advocates for railroads and no one advocates for mother may I play. They are either criticisms of how other people play or complaints by frustrated groups when play breaks down in their own games.

 

[Bedrockgames]

@Bedrockgames

I think in post 348 you are describing both (i) an authority structure, for establishing and changing the shared fiction, and (ii) a possible consequence of that, that is probably a degenerate one, namely too much "no" from the GM.

You call (ii) "mother may I". I think so does @Hussar. @Ovinomancer and @Manbearcat seem to call (i), which is what makes (ii) possible, "mother may I".

I don't see much difference between you all in the analysis of how play is working, only differences in how you would apply an informal label.

I don't think its worth getting into here again, as we've gone over it a number of times. But I would quibble and say while I think there is some truth to 1. I also believe they are very much overplaying the role of GM authority and not paying as much attention to the fluidity of play and how GM authority is meant to be in service to player agency (whereas mother may I is very much about things being in service to the whims of the GM). And there is also a lot more fluidity to this authority structure. I.E. GM authority of this kind exists in order to maximize the players ability to interact freely with the world and/or to influence the direction of story (often times the focus in these discussions is on the GM as setting manager because the debate is revolving around OSR style campaigns, but this kind of GM authority is also used in games meant to engage a story around the player characters as much as it is in a sandbox). And importantly there are still rules, procedures, etc that the GM is expected to defer to. The GM can always nullify those outcomes if it is needed. But the reasoning behind that is very important. The GMs power in that situation only exists so long as the players support him or her being the GM.

 

[Hussar]

The part you might be missing is the 3E Monkey Wrench. So the 3E creators were made up of players that hated the MMI way of 1E/2E. So they made lots and lots of rules. The idea was a player would grab the rules and hold them up to defend themselves from the DM. "My player takes ''action A'', just like the rule on page 44 says, and you DM must approve and allow it as it is in the Rules" And then the DM would nod "yes, all hail the rules.".

5E goes back to the 2E style: much less rules for everything and letting the DM just make stuff up on the fly.

Neither MMI or Railroad is "always negative". Most of the time it's just a person complaining because they want to complain.

Really? You see someone calling an adventure a "railroad" and think that this is a neutral, or even positive description?

As far as "Most of the time it's just a person complaining because they want to complain", that's every bit as problematic IMO. It's so dismissive. Someone has told you that they are not enjoying your game. At that point, you have a few choices. Sure, you can just ignore it, that's one option. Or, you can actually sit down and discuss the issue and try to find some common ground. Or, you can part ways.

Far too many DM's IMO, option for the first option - it's just players complaining. Players always complain about something, so, we'll just ignore it.

The example you responded to is the same if we swap MMI for Bob's BO. The problem isn't that MMI is present, but that you, individually, decided you didn't like something the rest of tge table was good with and then that you decided to stay and complain about it. This seems an individually based fail state, with MMI only being incidental.

No, the only reason that I'm complaining is because of the MMI aspects of the game. That is the sole, root cause of the issue. If I'm not present, then no one has any issues with how the game is being played. Saying that there are MMI aspects there doesn't really mean anything, because no one is actually having any sort of issue. MMI is always negative. It's not neutral.

So, when people talk about games like FKR, and not having any real issues at the table, then they are not seeing MMI aspects impacting people's enjoyment of the game. That's the difference between describing things like "play the world" and "player skill play" - both of which are fairly neutral and not really going to raise any hackles.

The only time someone trots out MMI is when they are not enjoying the game.

I have no idea why you insist that this must be some sort of neutral term. It's not. It's negative. It's describing a failed play state.

 

[tetrasodium]

The example you responded to is the same if we swap MMI for Bob's BO. The problem isn't that MMI is present, but that you, individually, decided you didn't like something the rest of tge table was good with and then that you decided to stay and complain about it. This seems an individually based fail state, with MMI only being incidental.

IME a player in that situation will dig in and resist until I'm forced to boot them because they don't need anything from the gm & can place them in a situation of either accepting the problematic behavior or crossing a line into what is easy to paint as YTA. That's not to say that I don't or won't talk to them off to the side, I frequently even attempt to. Those attempts however are dismissed as the problem with what they do to cause the conversation being completely ignored. stop the game to push too hard & you get "it's only a game, it's supposed to be fun relax bro", Push with a laundry list of every single transgression & the GM looks like they are being an anal control freak. Sure the players at the table might know otherwise but now the problem player can walk away with a story to broad brush paint the gm as problematic.

 

[Iosue]

So, I find myself in agreement with much, pretty much all, that Bedrockgames has said here, and—

GM authority is meant to be in service to player agency (whereas mother may I is very much about things being in service to the whims of the GM).

Holy God. Bingo, bingo, bingo, this, this, this! You've not only hit on the difference between MMI and GM-based resolution, you've expressed just why those of us who enjoy and play GM-based resolution dislike the term "mother-may-I" so much (aside from the connotations of childishness and implicit onetrueway-ism).

The historical underpinnings of DM authority in D&D lies in this fundamental stance. The intent in giving the DM this authority, going back to Wesely’s Braunsteins and Arneson’s Blackmoor, was in giving players the agency to do what they wanted, not limited to what might be covered in a rulesbook. Now, ever since the TSR days, more and more mechanical handles have been given to players, and that's fine. 5e is a hybrid of rules-based resolution and GM-based resolution, and IMO, strikes a nice balance in giving players fun mechanical handles within a GM-based resolution framework. Of course, some folks will find themselves on either side of that balance, feeling that it's too much of one or the other.

(If it hasn't been made clear, I find the term "GM-based resolution" to be the ideal term for what we are discussing here, and agree with Bedrockgames that "MMI," in as much as it has any usefulness to the discussion, can only apply to GM-based resolution gone horribly wrong.)

(And just to be clear, though I am an adherent of and advocate for GM-based resolution as a style of play, I certainly don't believe that it's the only way to achieve player agency. There are a lot of ways to skin that cat.)

 

[overgeeked]

Gygax got the idea of a referee with authority from Arneson, who got it from Wesley, who got it from Totten, who got it from Verdy's invention of free Kriegsspiel based on Meckel's treatises complaining about Reisswitz's rigid Kriegsspiel. Free Kriegsspiel gained popularity because it did away with cumbersome rules and more realistically mirrored officers' actual experiences in war when compared to the volumes of rules and charts of rigid Kriegsspiel.

The use of a referee with authority to make decisions in free Kriegsspiel gave the officers training with it two very important things which made the game easier to learn, easier to run, easier to play, and more useful as a training tool. It gave them tactical infinity, i.e. the ability to try anything rather than being limited to only what's in the rules, and it gave them informational blindspots, i.e. the inability to have perfect information and perfect communication between units. In other words, free Kriegsspiel is a wildly more realistic representation of actual war than rigid Kriegsspiel because in the real world you can try anything and you never have perfect information.

Now, D&D clearly isn't a wargame (anymore? if it ever was?) and it clearly was never meant as a training tool in the sense that Kriegsspiel was, but when dealing with the realism that free Kriegsspiel provides the more appropriate term for immersive roleplaying is verisimilitude, in the sense of literary realism. Being limited to what's on the character sheet or what's explicitly permitted in the rules destroys verisimilitude. Having perfect information destroys verisimilitude. Without verisimilitude you cannot have an immersive roleplaying experience. To me, having neither tactical infinity nor informational blindspots pushes the game closer to a boardgame than an RPG. There's nothing wrong with boardgames. There's nothing wrong with emphasizing the game over the roleplaying in D&D, or other RPGs, but that's the opposite of what I want.

As mentioned above, a referee with authority specifically exists to give the players agency (i.e. tactical infinity) and to give the players' agency a sense of verisimilitude (i.e. informational blindspots).

The trouble comes in because there is a gap in information between the player and their character combined with the human desire to reduce ambiguity and avoid cognitive dissonance. There are basically three options to deal with that information gap in a traditional RPG: 1) portal fantasy, i.e. the player has to play themselves in the fantasy world, therefore there is no gap between player knowledge and character knowledge; 2) the player assumes, i.e. the player simply decides what their character knows without talking to the referee, and; 3) the player talks to the referee.

Portal fantasy is fun, for a time, but it gets old kinda quickly. It can also be problematic, especially if your character dies, but it also drastically limits your character options (duh). The player simply assuming what their character knows is problematic because it's guaranteed that there will be a difference of opinion between the player and the referee on what the character would actually know. If I'm reading most of the posts in this thread right (not guaranteed), then this is where claims of MMI come in. The player has chosen to make assumptions about their character knowledge instead of talking to the referee and is then upset when the referee points out that the player has made and acted on erroneous assumptions. The negatives of this could, of course, be preemptively avoided by simply not assuming in the first place and instead talking to the referee.

The most common advice to referees is: talk to your players. Perhaps the most common advice to players should be: talk to your referee.

But, as mentioned a few times, many experienced players don't enjoy roleplaying a character that has basic, 1st-level beginner knowledge of the world and its expectations. Something along the lines of not having fun roleplaying a character who doesn't know about troll regeneration and vulnerability to fire, or some other, similar examples. Likely because it increases ambiguity (what would my character know?) and causes cognitive dissonance.

It sounds a lot like players want something akin to system mastery but for their knowledge of the setting, genre, or games' assumptions. Something like genre awareness or "setting mastery," as it were. With system mastery the rewards are obvious, the game runs smoother and the player is more able to create powerful characters, but with "setting mastery" the rewards are purely informational. The character is given, basically, a download of the player's knowledge that the character otherwise wouldn't reasonably have. While that desire makes sense, coming up with reasonable in-fiction excuses for why a beginner adventurer would have knowledge that more closely matches the veteran players' knowledge of the fiction becomes increasingly difficult and less and less realistic. One resolution would be to simply start veteran players' characters at higher levels, but that would create problems for mixed experience groups.

 

[Ovinomancer]

So, I find myself in agreement with much, pretty much all, that Bedrockgames has said here, and—

Holy God. Bingo, bingo, bingo, this, this, this! You've not only hit on the difference between MMI and GM-based resolution, you've expressed just why those of us who enjoy and play GM-based resolution dislike the term "mother-may-I" so much (aside from the connotations of childishness and implicit onetrueway-ism).

The historical underpinnings of DM authority in D&D lies in this fundamental stance. The intent in giving the DM this authority, going back to Wesely’s Braunsteins and Arneson’s Blackmoor, was in giving players the agency to do what they wanted, not limited to what might be covered in a rulesbook. Now, ever since the TSR days, more and more mechanical handles have been given to players, and that's fine. 5e is a hybrid of rules-based resolution and GM-based resolution, and IMO, strikes a nice balance in giving players fun mechanical handles within a GM-based resolution framework. Of course, some folks will find themselves on either side of that balance, feeling that it's too much of one or the other.

(If it hasn't been made clear, I find the term "GM-based resolution" to be the ideal term for what we are discussing here, and agree with Bedrockgames that "MMI," in as much as it has any usefulness to the discussion, can only apply to GM-based resolution gone horribly wrong.)

(And just to be clear, though I am an adherent of and advocate for GM-based resolution as a style of play, I certainly don't believe that it's the only way to achieve player agency. There are a lot of ways to skin that cat.)

The thing here is that the authority structure is tge same between what you're advocating as good play and what bad play you're saying MMI refers to. The only difference I see is that you advocate for using tge GM's some authority to deny or allow to be more permissive than blocking, and that MMI only refers to the more blocking usage. But permissive usages can be viewed negatively as well. Thus is tge problem with insisting MMI is only negative rather than a fairly accurate description of the authority structure where a GM must approve outcomes, regardless of if that approval is liked or disliked by the players.

Agency is not enabled by the GM approving of things.

 

[Bedrockgames]

The thing here is that the authority structure is tge same between what you're advocating as good play and what bad play you're saying MMI refers to. The only difference I see is that you advocate for using tge GM's some authority to deny or allow to be more permissive than blocking, and that MMI only refers to the more blocking usage. But permissive usages can be viewed negatively as well. Thus is tge problem with insisting MMI is only negative rather than a fairly accurate description of the authority structure where a GM must approve outcomes, regardless of if that approval is liked or disliked by the players.

Agency is not enabled by the GM approving of things.

Again, mother may I refers to a broken mode of play where the GM is constantly denying players requests. It doesn't refer to the traditional Gm-player power structure. Mother may I is a pejorative term, it is a criticism of this type of power structure, but it fails to describe it (it only describes it in its broken mode). It's like using the term wrecked vehicle to describe an intact vehicle because an in order to have a car wreck you first need a functional car. Mother may I is a child's game where you are constantly trying to guess what one person in the group has in mind. It is about giving one person arbitrary control over others. A GM with this kind of authority is not supposed to be using it arbitrarily or for their own amusement.

On the topic of whether an empowered GM can enable agency, I think I would just have to strongly disagree with you. This is subjective I think to a degree. Not everyone is going to have the same experience with the same power arrangements in RPGs. But I think one of the problems I often ran into with more robust rules systems was they actually ended up constraining player agency because all of their actions are expected to be filtered through the rules. So if you want to make a magic item, you need to do so through the subsystem for that. This can be liberating for some people, but it can also be very constraining, especially if a player is trying to do something that feels like it comes out of a story or out of legend. This is where, for me, rulings over rules, can be very helpful in empowering players and promoting agency. The player tries doing something very interesting and the GM is able to find a way to make that happen using the system. If you are in a campaign where the GM is always blocking you, it is going to feel like mother may I. But if you are in a game where the GM is seriously considering all the things you suggest (and using pretty consistent principles and ideas to render a ruling), to me it feels much more real, like I am there, than if I am constantly going through a set of complex rules or procedures. It empowers the player to try something legendary, dramatic, cool, mythic or clever, and it empowers the gm to say "something mythic/cool/dramatic/clever/etc is happening, let's see where this leads".

And again, very importantly, the GM's authority in this situation requires player buy in. A GM isn't just issuing decrees in a vacuum. He is considering player reaction to his judgements.