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

[hawkeyefan]

In a game where not all information is player facing, how does one tell the difference between a block and a negative outcome of player actions?

Probably by considering what is gained by keeping the information hidden. And by considering what is lost by keeping the information hidden.

 

[Cadence]

But that's just it... there are plenty of ways that the characters could know. The only reason in this case that the characters don't know is because the GM decided that they didn't. That's my problem with it.

The GM could have just as easily narrated soldiers going door to door in town, or a sketchy neighbor taking notice of us, or any number of other things. He could have asked us to make rolls to notice these things, and if we rolled poorly, so be it.

If your characters were anywhere they could have noticed such things or had set up precautions, then I certainly would have telegraphed! If they were hiding in the barn loft under the hay... well, I would have looked at you odd (and maybe said "really?") when that's what you said you were doing and you wouldn't have found out things.

 

[Aldarc]

You may have misread the tone of my 1, it is less ‘i have high dex and stealth proficiency, i hope i get to use it’ and more ‘I have high dex and stealth proficiency, I expect the GM to cater to this and create a situation where stealth is the expected solution’, character build choices not as limitations of what they only can do but as another way to express where they want the game content to head towards.

If one of my players picked a Ranger and had Favored Enemies: Dragons, that's a pretty big indicator that this is what the Ranger character may hope to fight and see in the campaign. IMHO, that's a valid perspective and assumption. Otherwise, I'm denying opportunities as a GM for the PCs to shine. If on the other hand we were playing an AP where I knew Dragons weren't prominent, then I would honestly tell the Ranger player. I would even potentially give them a list of more relevant alternatives for potential Favored Enemies.

FWIW, Favored Enemy was also an ability that was explicitly linked to MMI back in the heyday. It was a class ability that was absolutely pointless unless the GM put such monsters in the way of the party. So it was an example of "Mother, may I fight dragons?"

 

[Bedrockgames]

As for immersion... I don't agree with your assessment. While I would say that rules can sometimes feel intrusive to the fiction that's being established, it's certainly not a given. And I would argue that rules can serve... I'd even go as far as to say must serve... as part of the player's understanding of the fiction. They help provide context to the player that they otherwise cannot have compared to the character, who is a person in a specific location, with an abundance of information available to them.

I think people would be surprised how differently everyone responds to this stuff. Personally for me, rules that face into the background definitely help with immersion, but more importantly, I like the speed of systems where you don't even have to think about the mechanics. It isn't a hard and fast rule, but I don't find that the rules help me to imagine more clearly what is going on. I am a lot more focused on what is being said and done at the table, and any time we have to stop for rules, that can pull me out a bit. Not that we don't stop. In any game with listed abilities with descriptions, there is going to be stopping to read them, and I like games like that, but I view them as a trade off.

 

[Bedrockgames]

If one of my players picked a Ranger and had Favored Enemies: Dragons, that's a pretty big indicator that this is what the Ranger character may hope to fight and see in the campaign. IMHO, that's a valid perspective and assumption. Otherwise, I'm denying opportunities as a GM for the PCs to shine. If on the other hand we were playing an AP where I knew Dragons weren't prominent, then I would honestly tell the Ranger player. I would even potentially give them a list of more relevant alternatives for potential Favored Enemies.

FWIW, Favored Enemy was also an ability that was explicitly linked to MMI back in the heyday. It was a class ability that was absolutely pointless unless the GM put such monsters in the way of the party. So it was an example of "Mother, may I fight dragons?"

To me this is more like a wish list than mother may I. Personally wishlists were one of the things I didn't like about the 3E era. I also saw picking a favored enemy as something you picked with a sense of the frequency or you accepted it would be rare. I do think it is totally fair for the player to ask about their frequency or the GM to warn the player about frequency if he or she seems someone making a choice unlikely to come up in play. But am not a fan of the thing factoring into the campaign because the player chose it. I remember having a similar reaction as a player to some of the character options in the supplements that could force the GM to include things in the setting the setting hadn't had if it were selected. It just made the game world feel wonky to me. But in the 2E era, while there were plenty of characters options (it had the complete books as well), things felt much more optional and like there was an expectation that the GM would decide if it fit the setting, needed to be altered, etc. With 3E there was more of a culture like "I bought the book so I should be able to use it, even if the GM doesn't want it". Maybe I am old fashioned in my gaming tastes but I do much prefer a setting, particularly when it comes to D&D, where the GM is meant to curate those kinds of things

 

[overgeeked]

It's the heart of the definition of "Yes And".

So what? RPGs involve improvisation, but, importantly, RPGs are not improv.

Ok, you infiltrated the lair of the dastardly bad guys. You wanted to scout it out so that you could make informed decisions about what to do next. Fantastic. You succeeded. Here's a map of the area that you scouted, here are the guards that you saw, here's this and that thing that you noticed and here are a few other bits and bobs that might have caught your attention along the way.

Now what do you do?

Is a FAR FAR better way to play than. "Ok, you sneak past the first guard. Roll stealth. Great. You sneak past the second guard, roll stealth. Great. You sneak past the third guard.... oops fail, the alarm is run. Roll for initiative."

It's bizarre to me that you're framing things in one of two extremes and strawmanning my position. You said the best advice you ever got was to just let the players always win. I said no thanks. To which you replied with the above. Is that really the only other possible way you can think of to run games? To make the players roll everything and wait for them to fail? That's equally dull to them always succeeding.

Not that it matters, but that's not how I run games. The old advice of rolling to climb walls when the PC is halfway up is my benchmark. Roll too early and the player will sulk and rescind their action if they fail, so you roll once at the halfway mark. Then go from there. If they fail, now they have guards who're aware of their presence and they must deal with that. Not necessarily combat. Or they succeed and and move on to the next objective. I can't imagine anything more boring than a "fast travel" summary of something that's supposed to be exciting.

See, even in your advice of being a fan, and what would a fan want, means that sometimes the fans want to see the players actually play competent characters and not fail every single thing they attempt all because the DM wants them to "face challenges".

Keyword there is sometimes.

I have infinite challenges. I will never, ever run out of challenges for the PC's. Letting them get past one for free in no way cheapens anything.

It's not a challenge if the players just succeed at whatever they have even a vague plan for.

Additionally, @overgeeked, I would point out that I'm not the one having problems at my table, you are. You are the one complaining about having player issues and having play problems. If you are insisting that all the problems are 100% the fault of the players and refusing to take any responsibility or even consider any sort of change to what you are doing, then what is the point of this thread? Every suggestion to you has been met with, "I don't want to play that way" and "it's all the fault of bad players".

Is this just some sort of weird plus thread where everyone comes in, pats you one the back and commiserates about bad players?

Or are you actually interested in fixing the problems at your table(s)?

Wow. LOL. That's just packed with assumptions. You have offered literally one piece of advice. That one piece of advice doesn't match with my play style. Sorry if that bugs you this much. But damn.

What's the point of the thread. The point was spelled out in the OP.

IME, it's largely 100% of the time. And it's 100% of the time for precisely the reason that @overgeeked talks about - the players need to be challenged. At no point can the players ever actually succeed. Just succeed. No succeed at a cost. No yes, but. Just flat out succeed.

That's the problem and that's what's causing problems at tables.

Again with the strawman. Autosuccess on everything is the antithesis of challenge. Tschüss.

 

[bert1001 fka bert1000]

The reason I considered the rustic hospitality example railroading (though I probably wouldn't say Mother May I, as it has little to with that problem in my opinion, since it seemed to skip over even the players trying to do something), is two-fold.

That's how I see it as well. A MMI situation could occur with this ability if pending no other information, sometimes it

1) works as automatic safe haven until you do something that would up your "exposure meter" or a long period of time passes
2) works for a long rest and then there might be some mehanical signal it might not work for much longer (narration and rolls) which are influenced by whatever percautions you took and
3) sometimes you get automatically discovered right after a long rest no matter what percautions you take.

Player doesn't really have any idea which option it will be without asking the DM "may I use this ability this way?"

 

[overgeeked]

But that's just it... there are plenty of ways that the characters could know.

Point being, anything that would let your characters have information is also a path to give up information. The only way you can get good, clear information about what's going on outside of a barn is to be outside of that barn. If you're taking watches and patrolling around that barn, you can be seen. If you're holed up inside the barn and never leave the barn, you can't see if people are approaching. If you're looking out small holes in the barn, your field of vision is quite limited. You take less risk of being seen (effectively none), but in exchange you give up all the information not directly in front of the hole you're looking out of.

The GM could have just as easily narrated soldiers going door to door in town, or a sketchy neighbor taking notice of us, or any number of other things. He could have asked us to make rolls to notice these things, and if we rolled poorly, so be it.

If you're holed up in a barn, how would you know the soldiers were going door to door? Someone running you food and information from the outside? Why assume they're invisible? If you're outside the barn for a sketchy neighbor to see you, 1) why assume you couldn't have been spotted, and; 2) why would you assume you'd notice someone else paying attention?

In the before times, have you ever been in a public place and later at some point a friend told you that they saw you there, maybe even called out to you, but you didn't notice? Yeah. That's a thing that happens. Just because someone sees you has no real bearing on whether you see them. As an example from the game, stealth. That's literally the point of stealth.

This is part of that main character thing. RPGs aren't movies. They're not TV shows. The audience (the players) shouldn't get to see things that the characters don't know. Why? Because the audience is the players...the one's controlling the characters in the fiction. The players will almost certainly immediately act on that information. Like the party is separated and one person is off on their own and in trouble...magically, everyone else at the table suddenly has super urgent business with that PC. Gamers metagaming instead of roleplayers staying in the fiction.

He had a choice... decide what happens on his own, or set things up so that the players and the system have a say in what happens.

That's the crux of the issue. The system is agnostic on this point. It's explicitly left up to the referee to decide. The referee railroaded you. And that sucks. That's a terrible move.

What if they can't know something solely because the GM decided they can't?

That describes almost literally everything in the game. The referee decides that your character cannot know what's happening on the far side of the world, but that's not generally a problem as it doesn't directly affect your character. But yeah, that's how RPGs with referees work. It's up to the referee. Even in games like PbtA. Fronts and factions and NPCs continuing to exist outside the characters' ability to perceive is standard. This is also why I'm an over prepped referee rather than an improviser. The NPCs have a plan and they stick to it unless the PCs interfere. That way there's less chance of players being justifiably cranky. Some player calls me out on something and I'll have a section of notes to show them. Yes, in fact this is exactly what they had planned. They were in the middle of carrying it out and you happened to blunder in. Sorry.

I would think anyone would prefer that there be a chance for the players to learn relevant information so that they can make decisions.

If it's justified in the fiction, absolutely. I'm not going to impart spot instances of omniscience to the characters. If the players want information they have to position their characters in the fiction in such a way as it would be possible for their characters to learn it. They players don't simply get information their characters could not possibly have.

The argument against that... that the GM should just be considering all this in his head to determine the outcome... doesn't seem a strong argument against Mother May I. It seems to embrace it.

If how you define MMI is the referee gets to make decisions, then I don't know what to tell you because that's the defining feature of RPGs. If you want a game where there's either no referee or the referee cannot make decisions, you should look outside of RPGs for that. Again, even games like Fiasco and PbtA have (even temporary) referees and they are able to make decisions. In FKR, referees are advised to be open and honest and freely discuss their decisions and decision making process with players after the fact. That's the approach I take even when not running in that style as I think it's solid advice all around. If the referee makes a decision it should be solidly justified by the fiction and nothing else. That's clearly not what happened here. The referee railroaded you and you're justifiably upset.

I just would have liked to play!

You did get to play. The referee simply didn't give you the outcome you wanted from a declaration. You played up to that moment and you played after that moment. The question is how much are you "playing" in that moment when the referee negated your agency I'd say none. But that's railroading. The referee negating the players' agency so their plans can be preserved.

As for immersion... I don't agree with your assessment. While I would say that rules can sometimes feel intrusive to the fiction that's being established, it's certainly not a given. And I would argue that rules can serve... I'd even go as far as to say must serve... as part of the player's understanding of the fiction. They help provide context to the player that they otherwise cannot have compared to the character, who is a person in a specific location, with an abundance of information available to them.

Totally disagree. Rules just get in the way, simple as. But then this goes back to the notion of invisible rulebooks and how much a shared understanding of genre can stand in for "proper rules" to play a game. I think you can free-form RP without a single die ever tossed. I also think you can RP with only a few rolls over an entire campaign. I honestly prefer it. The dice only need to come out when there's something at stake and the outcome isn't obvious from the fiction. And even then, the dice mechanics don't need to be more involved than 2d6. But that's me.

Probably by considering what is gained by keeping the information hidden.

Verisimilitude.

And by considering what is lost by keeping the information hidden.

Metagaming.

You keep information from the player that the character wouldn't know to increase verisimilitude and decrease metagaming. That's a trade I will gladly make every single time. If the player thinks that they cannot play an RPG without a boardgame-like god's-eye-view of the situation, well, then they are not a good fit for my table.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think people would be surprised how differently everyone responds to this stuff. Personally for me, rules that face into the background definitely help with immersion, but more importantly, I like the speed of systems where you don't even have to think about the mechanics. It isn't a hard and fast rule, but I don't find that the rules help me to imagine more clearly what is going on. I am a lot more focused on what is being said and done at the table, and any time we have to stop for rules, that can pull me out a bit. Not that we don't stop. In any game with listed abilities with descriptions, there is going to be stopping to read them, and I like games like that, but I view them as a trade off.

Oh it’s definitely subjective. I understand that at times folks can find the rules intrusive. I get that. But, it’s simply not true for all people all the time. So any claim that if the rules don’t fade away, it always breaks immersion is not true. And one step further, we need rules to inform players.

The rules are the setting-to-game translator.

So when a barbarian looks at a goblin and feels confident that he can hit it with his throwing axe, that confidence is translated into the player knowing that the goblin’s within range and there will be no penalty.

The more we take that understanding away from the player, the more we’re putting onto the GM to present to the player in a clear manner. The more we put onto the GM, the more the game risks veering into Mother May I.

 

[Bedrockgames]

So when a barbarian looks at a goblin and feels confident that he can hit it with his throwing axe, that confidence is translated into the player knowing that the goblin’s within range and there will be no penalty.

But this is also highly subjective. For me seeing that something in range doesn't translate into that sentiment for me on an immersive level. I mean, I can make the leap that my Barbarian would understand it, but it is a lot less meaningful to me than if I am not even having to think about that because the GM says to me "the goblin looks easy to hit from here". I think one of the deep divides in these conversation are between those for whom the numbers, mechanics and math are clarifying and immersive and those for whom that stuff interfere with their sense of the world. Again there is no right or wrong, I am just pointing out the path of logic you follow, which is a sound one from your reaction, is a subjective path.

The more we take that understanding away from the player, the more we’re putting onto the GM to present to the player in a clear manner. The more we put onto the GM, the more the game risks veering into Mother May I.

This just sounds like a slippery slope argument to me. Yes there are obviously risks with any approach you take to a game, and it is useful to be mindful of those risks, but this sort of set-up can functional perfectly fine, works great for many people, and doesn't need to lead to mother may I play. I realize you aren't explicitly saying this here, but does kind of exaggerate the danger I believe.