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

[Ovi]

Woah Nelly! ER says


Given there is - and here I am quoting ER literally - "no way the players could know", I gave an example in which the Druid did not know. (That's why I eventually settled on "knowledge" over "experience")

If it is your contention that DM should have created a new imagined fact in the moment, that may (conditioned on exactly what you are thinking) be perfectly reasonable. But to criticise my example on that basis is simply preposterous!

Players aren't their characters? My point rather relies on the players not knowing.

As for the creation of new facts, the point is more "why can't the player?" Especially if we let the system have a say about it.

 

[clearstream]

Players aren't their characters? My point rather relies on the players not knowing.

Strictly speaking, characters cannot know anything. The only knowledge in play is that of the players. Which @EzekielRaiden expressly ruled out.

If @pemerton is making hay of

EzekielRaiden says nothing about what the PCs may or may not know.

Then this is simply resolved. I took ER's comment to be about the PCs. Perhaps ER has a clear separation in mind between what players know, and what their characters know? I do not. My meaning is distorted if you impute another poster's mental model to me. (Incidentally, it never struck me until now that @pemerton intended their post to turn on this distinction.)

As for the creation of new facts, the point is more "why can't the player?" Especially if we let the system have a say about it.

This conversation feels like the boy at the dike. Each post that I write is read to find fault. As we were speaking of a DM-curated game, it is that "DM" that I am referring to to. I do not rule out player creating that imagined fact, if that is the arrangement at that game/table. It was not, so far as I can make out, the arrangement at the table from which ER's examples were drawn.

 

[FrogReaver]

I think we need to decide as GMs whether we are being neutral adjudicators, curious explorers of the fiction, and playing the world with integrity or we are actively seeking to frame scenes to challenge the player characters. We cannot have it both ways. If we are doing the latter than I think we need a way to maintain competitive integrity because we are no longer actively maintaining it ourselves. We cannot both be referees and not referees at the same time.

I thought this post was very thought provoking, but I really think a GM can do all that.

If a DM is being a neutral adjudicator, a curious explorer of the fiction and playing the world with integrity then it's not going to be long before the players push play toward something that he at best can provide a high level detail about. But players will typically then ask about lower level details - which forces the DM to have to fill such details in. One example might be, you've encountered a small band of orcs (DM can fairly make this adjudication based on the players geography, their stealthiness, etc). Questions will arise: How many orcs, how far away, are orcs typically hostile, can I identify what group these orcs belong to, etc.

At this point the DM really only has one course of action - make up the number of orcs and other relevant details, being as faithful as he can to the integrity of the world. Sometimes a world might have a specific answer, but most won't (at least not for all such questions). In this instance it's my opinion he can be both neutral and actively pick a challenging number as neither the integrity of the world nor his neutral adjudication is going to be compromised by having 8 orcs (a challenge) instead of 4 (a cakewalk). I do think there's a limit on how much number of enemies can be chosen.

I think it's also important to note that randomness alone cannot resolve this problem as the DM would also be responsible for setting the random table of results - all the randomness does is psychologically make the players feel as if the process was more neutral even though that alone doesn't make it any more so.

 

[FrogReaver]

Strictly speaking, characters cannot know anything. The only knowledge in play is that of the players. Which @EzekielRaiden expressly ruled out.

Just curious if you believe your character can attack an orc?

If so, what is the difference between attacking and knowledge?

 

[pemerton]

Is it your contention that a DM should never draw to the player attention the imagined facts about their shared fiction?

No one is saying this. But in @EzekielRaiden's example there were no imagined facts, because - as per what you quote in your post in 848, in play "places of power had been used to power up spells, but had never done anything directly related to spirits before". So there is no imagined fiction, either way, about places of power and their relationship to druids dealing with spirits.

Given there is - and here I am quoting ER literally - "no way the players could know", I gave an example in which the Druid did not know.

As I posted upthread, in the post of mine that you criticsed, @EzekielRaiden talked about the actual knowledge of the players - namely, because something has never come up in play (as per my paragraph just above), nothing is known by them about it. You reply with a post where the GM stipulates a lack of knowledge on the part of the PC. You think that I haven't read you closely enough; I feel that perhaps you didn't attend to my very clear distinction between knowledge of actual people in the real world, and imagined knowledge of characters in a fictional world.

You write as one determined to find fault, reaching predictably false conclusions.

I am trying to make sense of your posts, including your upthread defence of @hawkeyefan's GM's adjudication of Rustic Hospitality. You have provided any example of play that I recall in which the GM is obliged to limit their conception of the fiction by reference to something the players have introduced or stipulated. And you keep giving examples that go the other way.

It may be that you misunderstood @EzekielRaiden's post - that the statemtent that nothing has been done in relation to spirits was a statement of fact about the shared fiction rather than a fact about the play. Even were that the case, though, I don't see why it would follow that the druid doesn't know what to do to try and find out. Clearly the player wants to do something spirit-related with these places of power - the GM could easily ask "What do you have in mind?"

Like yesterday in my Torchbearer game, I asked the player of the Outcast what weapon he was equipping for the Abjure conflict against the dream haunt. He answered that he was using the Dreams-wise sword that had led them to it. I hadn't thought about this one way or another in advance of the matter, but if the player thinks that that makes sense in the shared fiction then why would I as GM contradict it?

From discussion in other threads my belief is 5e DMs are calling for checks far more often than would be meet for the game system. The advice on rolling doesn't exactly instruct to do it, but it unfortunately in its implications encourages it.

Upthread (post 811) you described the rules in 5e as "extremely skillfully put together". Now you are saying that the way its advice is written generates implications that encourage poor play.

I'm not sure if you've changed your mind since post 811, or if you regard this unfortunate feature as not mitigating the "extreme skilfulness", or something else. But I am trying to make sense of your posts. Including what you defend and the examples that (as it seems to me) you foreground.

D&D, and 5e with it, all suffer from the general need for extensive GM prep time. This causes a lot of, very warranted, attachment to play and an extreme vulnerability to pacing -- if the prepped material is gone through too fast, there's not more game for the moment and the session has to end or the GM is forced into uncomfortable ad libbing. I say uncomfortable because there are no tools in D&D to support good ad libbed play; some GMs may be very comfortable with this but you usually see this paired with a willing abandonment of the rules to go with GM Says as the only viable mechanic (even more so that 5e has as default!).

<snip>

So, it's very unsurprising that a tool to reach for for most D&D GMs is going to be the imposition of additional steps when a play is made that short circuits too much of that prepared material (or comfort in ad libbing). It's the nature of Trad play in general, nothing at all wrong with it

I like this analysis. I think I'm less pessimistic than you about the scope for ad libbing in D&D - although with a couple of caveats that flow from own experience. I've ad libbed a fair bit in 4e, where PCs are on common recovery recycles and hence roughly symmetric resource loadouts; and in AD&D, but never with a party that had a mid-to-high level magic-user.

My untutored intuition would be that I could bring the same approach that worked for me in those systems to 5e D&D. But I realise that 5e has quite extreme disparities, even at low levels, across the recovery cycles and resource suites of PCs; and so I'd be open to accepting that this somewhat distinctive feature is an impediment to ad libbing.

EDIT: It turns out the conjecture I wrote above in this post is correct:

Incidentally, it never struck me until now that @pemerton intended their post to turn on this distinction.

You may also note that @EzekielRaiden replied to me saying that

That was more or less my intention, yeah. I absolutely run a game where the PCs are quite capable of knowing things their players don't.

So I'm fairly confident in my reading of EzekielRaiden of putting weight on the point, just as I did.

Everyone can misread from time to time. It's not a moral failing. But if you don't draw the player/PC distinction, I don't see how you can ever have player-driven or even players-somewhat-equal-to-the-GM RPGing, because this requires that the players make suggestions or stipulations about the fiction which are not things their PCs are doing (given that, for the PCs, their world already is what it is).

 

[Campbell]

@FrogReaver

Sure, we all have to author details as we go. No one can contain an entire world inside their head. When you start making those decisions guided by what would make the best story or what would challenge players in the middle of the session the skill of navigating the fictional environment basically means nothing. If GM is free to stop being a referee at any moment they deem necessary that's exactly what causes that sense of Mother May I? because there is no telling on what basis from moment to moment decisions are going to be made.

If the GM is going to act with an agenda for play than we need some other way to maintain competitive integrity because the GM is not doing so, not even attempting to do so.

 

[pemerton]

I'm not sure what the 'without more' means, but I will still try to answer.

<snip>

The basic playloop itself calls out combat as different

<snip>

In that case, why do you assert that there is no "more" in the case of Rustic Hospitality?

I don't know what this means.

You quote the playloop as saying " In certain situations, particularly combat, the action is more structured and the players (and DM) do take turns choosing and resolving actions".

This is a qualification to the core loop. It is not confined to combat - it refers to "in certain situations".

The qualification doesn't call out the use of spells or background features; but I think the express mention of that qualification, especially as it is stated incompletely ("certain situations" not all of which are specified), allows room for the inference that the GM's performance of their role in other contexts might also be qualified in certain ways - such as having regard to the changes in the fiction that follow from the players' use of their ability.

Part of what supports the inference I am suggesting is this: if the use of the ability wasn't intended to qualify in some fashion how the GM performs their role, then what would it's point be? The only answer I can think of is that it contributes a type of flavourful descriptor the the PC - but I don't think I've seen that approach to spells in D&D play, and it doesn't seem to me to fit the degree of specificity with which background features are spelled out. The main context in which I have seen this "descriptor" approach used is with AD&D NWPs.

 

[clearstream]

EDIT: It turns out the conjecture I wrote above in this post is correct:
You may also note that @EzekielRaiden replied to me saying that
So I'm fairly confident in my reading of EzekielRaiden of putting weight on the point, just as I did.

For avoidance of doubt, that was in ER's post #830 subsequent to and therefore not available when I wrote my example.

Everyone can misread from time to time. It's not a moral failing. But if you don't draw the player/PC distinction, I don't see how you can ever have player-driven or even players-somewhat-equal-to-the-GM RPGing, because this requires that the players make suggestions or stipulations about the fiction which are not things their PCs are doing (given that, for the PCs, their world already is what it is).

This is an interesting point, even though it's not salient (for reasons I've explained.) I do think that every part of the imagined fiction - including the characters existing within that world - can imply additional imagined facts. For example, a porcelain vase is described on a stand in a well-appointed antechamber. Who made it? What natural history, history and culture informed the patterns we might see upon it? Who mixed the paints? From where did the clay originate?

If that is the sense in which @EzekielRaiden means that characters can "know" things that their players don't, then I would agree with that albeit I would put it that characters cannot know things in the normal sense of being aware of those things. Rather they imply imagined facts that are for the moment not known (in the sense I mean).

I took ER to mean to refer to both players and their characters. At the time, that was by no means an unreasonable parsing. It is very common in conversation about TTRPGs for interlocuters to switch between "PCs", "players", "characters" and "player-characters" without intending any special implication of weight in the matters at hand. It surprises me that you allowed your reading of my post to turn on this distinction, hence, to me, it felt like reading to find fault and filling silence with suspicion.

 

[FrogReaver]

@FrogReaver

Sure, we all have to author details as we go. No one can contain an entire world inside their head. When you start making those decisions guided by what would make the best story or what would challenge players in the middle of the session the skill of navigating the fictional environment basically means nothing.

Alot may hinge on what precisely you mean by 'skill'.

IMO, the players skill of navigating the fictional environment means a great deal as long as world integrity and neutral adjudication are play priorities. IMO, there's plenty of times that challenge level or what would make a good story aren't in conflict with either.

I think you are right to note that playing with the priority to challenge the players or to make the best story will often come into conflict with world integrity/neutral adjudication priorities. But I don't think they are always in conflict - and as above i'd say that it's actually fairly common that they aren't.

If GM is free to stop being a referee at any moment they deem necessary that's exactly what causes that sense of Mother May I? because there is no telling on what basis from moment to moment decisions are going to be made.

I would agree here, but I don't think you have necessarily have to stop being a referee to pick a challenge. Often that would be required, but not always - and in my estimation it's actually quite common to work out such that you can do both at the same time.

If the GM is going to act with an agenda for play than we need some other way to maintain competitive integrity because the GM is not doing so, not even attempting to do so.

IMO, It depends on the nuances and extent by which he does so.

 

[FrogReaver]

You quote the playloop as saying " In certain situations, particularly combat, the action is more structured and the players (and DM) do take turns choosing and resolving actions".

This is a qualification to the core loop. It is not confined to combat - it refers to "in certain situations".

I agree - but it's important to point out that those 'certain situations' are all ones in which the players and DM take turns choosing and resolving actions.

The qualification doesn't call out the use of spells or background features; but I think the express mention of that qualification, especially as it is stated incompletely ("certain situations" not all of which are specified), allows room for the inference that the GM's performance of their role in other contexts might also be qualified in certain ways - such as having regard to the changes in the fiction that follow from the players' use of their ability.

Neither spells nor background features are situations where the action is more structures and the players and DM take turns choosing and resolving actions. Thus, I don't believe this rule supports your assertion below.

Part of what supports the inference I am suggesting is this: if the use of the ability wasn't intended to qualify in some fashion how the GM performs their role, then what would it's point be? The only answer I can think of is that it contributes a type of flavourful descriptor the the PC - but I don't think I've seen that approach to spells in D&D play, and it doesn't seem to me to fit the degree of specificity with which background features are spelled out. The main context in which I have seen this "descriptor" approach used is with AD&D NWPs.

I don't think you'll find any rules support for that ability to constrain the DM's ability to adjudicate whether the common folk helping you fear for their lives at any point during which they are helping you.