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

[pemerton]

Let's take the extreme (and ridiculous example) of the player whipping out his helicopter to travel from A to B. Now, let's be honest here, that's not something the other players are going to be groovy with, so, it's perfectly understandable that the DM steps in. But, let's stipulate that the players all think this is a great idea and it's tons of fun. At that point, who is being served when the DM says, "Nope, no helicopters"? It's making the DM happy and making everyone else unhappy.

I GMed a session of In A Wicked Age for a couple of teenagers a week or so ago.

One of those players was playing the Warlord Romulus. Whose pet cat was Mr Fluffington. While my image of the setting was pulp-y, swords & sorcery West/Central Asia (along the lines of REH, and reinforced by the default name lists), the other player described their illusionist PC as being dressed in the style of a court jester - and held up the joker from a deck of cards to illustrate.

If I had sole authorship of the fiction, those particular story element would not have turned up. But there seemed to be no need to contradict what the players were introducing. It's their fiction too!

A different example, also inspired by the helicopter, fits with @Campbell's idea of the system taking some load of the GM. Here's the story:

The PCs in my 4e game have gone to the Feywild looking for the Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, so they can destroy the Frost Giants who are massing, in alliance with Lolth and the Prince of Frost, to start a War of Seasons that will overthrow the Summer Fey and steal control over winter away from the Raven Queen.

<snip>

I'm using photocopies of my old G2 maps, blown up onto A3 paper, with notes on cavern occupants and stats written up where necessary.

<snip>

At the end of the session, the eladrin, edritch giant and griffons were all dead, and the invoker had tamed the giant's frosthawk (with a successful Nature check plus some gentle words spoken in elven). The paladin was inside the remorhaz (but, being a tiefling, was mostly enduring the auto-fire damage it does to swallowed creatures).

<snip>

The next session began with the ranger spotting the 5th PC, the dwarf fighter wielding Overwhelm, in melee with a group of giants on the ledge at the other end of the rift (around areas 16-20, for those who know the module).

<snip>

Eventually the sorcerer killed the remorhaz and the paladin was able to cut himself out, but they then had to make it to the other end of the rift. The sorcerer has at-will fly (via Dominant Winds) but that is not very good for two people.

Then a solution suggested itself.

In an earlier session (linked to above), the PCs had helped an eladrin noble deal with a demon that was cursing his apple grove. I told the players that the noble gave them a reward, and gave them licence to choose their own item or items of 28th level or equivalent value. They chose some sensible, eladrin-noble-appropriate stuff (a couple of elfin chain shirts, the winged boots, a ring of regeneration and a surge-boosting belt) but the player of the sorcerer also liked the idea of the 25th level magical vehicle the Thundercloud Tower (from a Dungeon magazine, maybe one of the Giants ones). It seemed unlikely that an eladrin noble had such a thing on-hand to gift to them, so we agreed that the best they got was to learn rumour of its existence on the Elemental Chaos from the noble, while discussing the threat that the Elemental Chaos (especially its giants) poses to the Feywild.

It had already been discussed that the Glacial Rift was very cold (the PCs are under the protection of an Endure Primordial Elements ritual, cast by the sorcerer), infused with the stuff of the Elemental Chaos. And so the player of the sorcerer decided that perhaps the Thundercloud Tower was somewhere here, having crossed over from the Elemental Chaos. This actually wasn't as farfetched as it might seem, because I had already decided that the mad Storm Giant Mirkamaur (sp?), a servant of the Crushing Wave detailed in the Plane Below, was visiting the giants (in the original I think it is a storm giant princess who is in the lower levels), and a Thundercloud Tower seemed like the sort of vehicle that he might travel in.

So the player made a perception check, assisted by the player of the paladin, and indeed they realised that one of the spires of rock half-buried in snow and wind-blown ice was in fact not a natural outcropping at all, but a 30' tall tower. They made their way in, up the stairs and to the top where the drow made an Arcana check to attune himself to the control circle for the tower. The next round they were up and away.

What made this particularly easy is that 4e has a robust system for assessing the value of treasure, and the amount of treasure to be awarded per PC level. So the Perception check didn't determine whether or not the players get a free bennie, but only whether or not they get it here and now when they want it, or - if it had failed, and I'd narrated some appropriate complication - whether something else comes to pass before they get it.

I think everything that a GM, and a system, can do to help make it easy to say "yes", and/or to frame checks so that the players have their chance to impose their conception onto the fiction as an upshot of succeeding, is making life easier for the GM, and helping ensure a cohesive and enjoyable shared fiction.

Whereas I think a lot of "gating", postponement, saying "not", etc tends to have the opposite effect. It makes the players turtle, disengage, even become resentful. And to what end?

 

[pemerton]

MMI is in part about expectations. And this is something we consistently see in player behaviour (i.e. the impact of matches/mismatches between expectations). Speculatively, it may be to do with the magical nature of stepping into the circle of play. The rules of the normal world may well be suspended, so that extra weight rests on our expectations about what we have all agreed to.

Personally I don't see any need to speculate. I'm pretty confident that I can describe what is going on in these various play examples (the barn and the soldiers; the child and the Tiny Hut; etc).

The player turned up hoping to play a game. The way that game is played is by making contributions to a shared fiction, via the vehicle/medium of declaring actions for a particular character in the imagined world. The GM is using their authority over their bit of the fiction to block, gate or postpone the player's contribution. And so for the player the game sucked. As @hawkeyefan put it, they didn't get to play the game.

 

[clearstream]

The player turned up hoping to play a game. The way that game is played is by making contributions to a shared fiction, via the vehicle/medium of declaring actions for a particular character in the imagined world. The GM is using their authority over their bit of the fiction to block, gate or postpone the player's contribution. And so for the player the game sucked. As @hawkeyefan put it, they didn't get to play the game.

To my reading, different posters have different ideas in mind when they talk about making contributions to a shared fiction. For some, those go beyond simply declaring actions for a particular character, to include how those actions are resolved, and as we have discussed up-thread the outcome of those actions. For that reason inter alia I feel "hoping to play a game" doesn't do the work needed to capture the diversity of expectations that players can have upon entering the magic circle.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

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!

Despite the mentions,I have tried to stay out of this one as frankly the discussion doesn't seem like it is all that relevant to me personally. I felt I should speak here though.

It really is important to distinguish character knowledge from player knowledge. Kahina (druids and shaman, collectively) know stuff about spirits, that's my implementation of those concepts into an Arabian Nights type setting, based on advice from a friend with good reason to know North African/Arabian contexts. However, at this specific point in the campaign, we had never done anything intersecting the concepts of "working with spirits" and "using the Ritual move." Ritual is an extremely powerful and flexible move in Dungeon World, one I have relied upon several times to cover the vast and trackless wastes of "that sounds like a cool magical thing that doesn't have a specific spell for it," which I'm fairly sure is the intent of the move. Because it is both powerful and flexible, it gives me as DM a lot of leeway for framing things, more than is typical; the move says:

When you draw on a place of power to create a magical effect, tell the GM what you’re trying to achieve. Ritual effects are always possible, but the GM will give you one to four of the following conditions:

• It’s going to take days/weeks/months.
• First you must ______.
• You’ll need help from ______.
• It will require a lot of money.
• The best you can do is a lesser version, unreliable and limited.
• You and your allies will risk danger from ______.
• You’ll have to disenchant ______ to do it.

Notice the bit "Ritual effects are always possible." That's an extremely strong thing. Players get a guarantee that something will happen, so long as they are willing to pay the price for it. Conversely, being able to pick up to (but not more than) four restrictions from that list is a similarly powerful and broad response. The GM is naturally constrained by the Agendas and Principles in how to use these, but if the players are asking for the Moon, well, there's a way to get it, or at least a lesser version of it. But there are an infinite variety of possible preconditions ("First you must bring us...A SHRUBBERY!"), dangers, or dubious parties one might need to court in order to proceed ("You'll need help from Jafar, that smug snake.") Ritual is technically a Wizard move, but I have allowed selective use of its mechanics for anyone with proper spellcaster training (though Wizards are better at it) in order to cover edge cases where prescribed magic falls short. This has generally worked out fine because we don't have a Wizard in the party so there's little risk of this stealing anyone's thunder.

Getting back to the overall point about character knowledge and player knowledge: the players and I had no baseline for connecting the Ritual move to spirit activity. The rules explicitly support this move being applicable, but that it may come with costs (such as long windup time.) Hence, when I say the players have no way they could know, I very specifically mean the human beings sitting at their computers (we play over discord, half the group is in another state.) The Druid (and possibly Bard) characters, on the other hand, would absolutely have some idea of whether such a thing is possible and, if so, what stuff one needs must do to accomplish it. Hence, there was no way the players could know such an effort would work, but by asking questions, making declarations, and working together (with each other and with me) to establish the fiction, we can collectively find out what this process would look like.

Sometimes, characters know things players don't. Actually a lot of the time. I try to keep that fact at least a little out of frame as it can get distracting if it's constantly brought up, but I absolutely do lean on it now and then (usually to help support or focus player interest/desire.) Likewise, sometimes players know things characters don't. The players know what a beholder is and that it's something very dangerous; all but one of the characters has no idea what a beholder is, and the one who does (the Bard, via his Bestiary of Creatures Unusual) may not know everything there is to know about them because they're very rare. The players know what gold dragons look like and that they are good aligned; the characters were awestruck when Tenryu Shen, their mysterious priest ally from a foreign land, revealed his true appearance to them while helping out with some important Kahina business. Such knowledge differences are not to be ignored, but managed, so they can serve the game rather than detract from it.

 

[clearstream]

Despite the mentions,I have tried to stay out of this one as frankly the discussion doesn't seem like it is all that relevant to me personally. I felt I should speak here though.

It really is important to distinguish character knowledge from player knowledge. Kahina (druids and shaman, collectively) know stuff about spirits, that's my implementation of those concepts into an Arabian Nights type setting, based on advice from a friend with good reason to know North African/Arabian contexts. However, at this specific point in the campaign, we had never done anything intersecting the concepts of "working with spirits" and "using the Ritual move." Ritual is an extremely powerful and flexible move in Dungeon World, one I have relied upon several times to cover the vast and trackless wastes of "that sounds like a cool magical thing that doesn't have a specific spell for it," which I'm fairly sure is the intent of the move. Because it is both powerful and flexible, it gives me as DM a lot of leeway for framing things, more than is typical; the move says:

Notice the bit "Ritual effects are always possible." That's an extremely strong thing. Players get a guarantee that something will happen, so long as they are willing to pay the price for it. Conversely, being able to pick up to (but not more than) four restrictions from that list is a similarly powerful and broad response. The GM is naturally constrained by the Agendas and Principles in how to use these, but if the players are asking for the Moon, well, there's a way to get it, or at least a lesser version of it. But there are an infinite variety of possible preconditions ("First you must bring us...A SHRUBBERY!"), dangers, or dubious parties one might need to court in order to proceed ("You'll need help from Jafar, that smug snake.") Ritual is technically a Wizard move, but I have allowed selective use of its mechanics for anyone with proper spellcaster training (though Wizards are better at it) in order to cover edge cases where prescribed magic falls short. This has generally worked out fine because we don't have a Wizard in the party so there's little risk of this stealing anyone's thunder.

Getting back to the overall point about character knowledge and player knowledge: the players and I had no baseline for connecting the Ritual move to spirit activity. The rules explicitly support this move being applicable, but that it may come with costs (such as long windup time.) Hence, when I say the players have no way they could know, I very specifically mean the human beings sitting at their computers (we play over discord, half the group is in another state.) The Druid (and possibly Bard) characters, on the other hand, would absolutely have some idea of whether such a thing is possible and, if so, what stuff one needs must do to accomplish it. Hence, there was no way the players could know such an effort would work, but by asking questions, making declarations, and working together (with each other and with me) to establish the fiction, we can collectively find out what this process would look like.

Sometimes, characters know things players don't. Actually a lot of the time. I try to keep that fact at least a little out of frame as it can get distracting if it's constantly brought up, but I absolutely do lean on it now and then (usually to help support or focus player interest/desire.) Likewise, sometimes players know things characters don't. The players know what a beholder is and that it's something very dangerous; all but one of the characters has no idea what a beholder is, and the one who does (the Bard, via his Bestiary of Creatures Unusual) may not know everything there is to know about them because they're very rare. The players know what gold dragons look like and that they are good aligned; the characters were awestruck when Tenryu Shen, their mysterious priest ally from a foreign land, revealed his true appearance to them while helping out with some important Kahina business. Such knowledge differences are not to be ignored, but managed, so they can serve the game rather than detract from it.

I am by no means resisting the notion that you intended actually, specifically, human players. I share the notion that there can be imagined facts implied by inter alia our characters, that we as human players around the table may come to know (decide we know, whatever.)

That said, would you be able to acknowledge that it is not by any means outre to read "players" in a discussion about TTRPG as a synonym for "characters", "PCs", "player-characters"? That, concretely, for the purposes of drawing conclusions about what I might mean or imply, my example should be read as if there were the preestablished fiction in place even accepting that was not your intention.

I share your feeling of being exhausted by some lines taken in this thread. Of which this was not even the top-most surprising.

EDIT I have bolded one line that chimes with what I was envisioning happened next... in further conversation. Your clarification changes things somewhat, because now I know that it wasn't ruled out (by you, the DM, in preestablished fiction) that this was knowledge it could turn out the druid (character, not player) already had access to.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

To my reading, different posters have different ideas in mind when they talk about making contributions to a shared fiction. For some, those go beyond simply declaring actions for a particular character, to include how those actions are resolved, and as we have discussed up-thread the outcome of those actions. For that reason inter alia I feel "hoping to play a game" doesn't do the work needed to capture the diversity of expectations that players can have upon entering the magic circle.

I feel it does a pretty good job. "Game" is of course a crazy diverse term, much like "art," but as a general rule "games" are understood to...

(A) be open-ended within the context of the available moves. That is, even in a complex game like chess, there are only a finite number of moves, but there are a lot of them, so there's a lot of freedom inside the box;
(B) include a notion of fairness, equitable results, and an approximate parity for participants unless specifically spelled out otherwise (that is, an asymmetrical game.) I say "approximate" because stuff like chess has to have a first player, which must be managed (usually via multiple games and switching sides.)
(C) multiple valid solutions to most difficulties encountered, which is what differentiates a "game" from a "puzzle" in most contexts.

I find that each of these necessarily implies some expectations beyond merely and exclusively declaring actions. Open-endedness implies a degree of respect for choices made, and thus for choices that have yet to be made. Fairness etc. is explicitly an expectation about how results will be determined and what those results will be. And a general trend of multiple solutions to difficulties necessarily means an expectation that, in most cases, the player will be free to try to solve issues "their way," even if the attempt may not end up working.

I don't think it is a strange use of the phrase "hoping to play a game" to mean all of these together or any one individually, and any combination of them necessarily leads to expectations of the kind you seem to be excluding.

 

[Bedrockgames]

To my reading, different posters have different ideas in mind when they talk about making contributions to a shared fiction. For some, those go beyond simply declaring actions for a particular character, to include how those actions are resolved, and as we have discussed up-thread the outcome of those actions. For that reason inter alia I feel "hoping to play a game" doesn't do the work needed to capture the diversity of expectations that players can have upon entering the magic circle.

Definitely in these threads, there seem to be very different expectations around that, and around how that impacts agency and impact on what happens.

 

[clearstream]

I feel it does a pretty good job. "Game" is of course a crazy diverse term, much like "art," but as a general rule "games" are understood to...

(A) be open-ended within the context of the available moves. That is, even in a complex game like chess, there are only a finite number of moves, but there are a lot of them, so there's a lot of freedom inside the box;

Let's narrow to "play a TTRPG" instead of "play a game" to help out your argument. Do players all expect the same moves to be available in a TTRPG? What if I expect TCoE to be in play, and you expect that it will not be? Or suppose I expect feats to be available and you expect they will not be (seeing as they are an optional rule.) Our expectation about "available moves" can differ.

If it is just that there will be at least some available moves, then I think that says too little.

(B) include a notion of fairness, equitable results, and an approximate parity for participants unless specifically spelled out otherwise (that is, an asymmetrical game.) I say "approximate" because stuff like chess has to have a first player, which must be managed (usually via multiple games and switching sides.)

Which then is it? Parity or asymmetry, that is expected by our hypothetical player? And in which regards? Do they expect parity over authoring the fiction? Or parity over interpreting the rules? In this thread we have read differing takes on where parities should lie, and that were not specifically spelled out. Do all DMs see their role in the same way? Do all players?

Some players - notoriously cheaters - do not expect to play fair. Yet the normal view is that cheaters indeed enter the magic circle, only on different terms than other players. In fact, some researchers associate their cheating with their earnestness in playing the game - their desire to win.

If it is just that approximate parity was expected except where spelled out otherwise, we would not be having many of the debates we have had in this thread.

(C) multiple valid solutions to most difficulties encountered, which is what differentiates a "game" from a "puzzle" in most contexts.

I guess you are saying here that players enter the magic circle, expecting more than one solution to most difficulties encountered. But this says too little. Literal powergamers might expect that every solution they can manufacture from all published sources must be available, and they must be free to use them. They feel their solutions are too limited if that is not the case. Are you saying this will be the expectation of all players entering the magic circle?

If it is just having more than one solution to most difficulties encountered, then again that says too little.

I find that each of these necessarily implies some expectations beyond merely and exclusively declaring actions. Open-endedness implies a degree of respect for choices made, and thus for choices that have yet to be made.

And yet we have in this thread described participants who we seem to believe have entered the magic circle without the expectation of respecting all choices.

Fairness etc. is explicitly an expectation about how results will be determined and what those results will be. And a general trend of multiple solutions to difficulties necessarily means an expectation that, in most cases, the player will be free to try to solve issues "their way," even if the attempt may not end up working.

You have made a lively go at it, but it's too far a stretch. Your definition, if right, would leave no room for players who don't expect the game to be open ended, who don't expect to play fair, or who don't expect parity in all things except where spelled out otherwise. It is silent on other expectations, such as what it means to play a character of a given alignment or gender. And it is silent on expectations about treatment of moral and political concerns and diversity both in the shared fiction and around the table.

Folk regularly expresss expectations about these and a myriad of other things.

I don't think it is a strange use of the phrase "hoping to play a game" to mean all of these together or any one individually, and any combination of them necessarily leads to expectations of the kind you seem to be excluding.

Excluding? Where do I exclude any particular expectations? I wrote

To my reading, different posters have different ideas in mind when they talk about making contributions to a shared fiction. For some, those go beyond simply declaring actions for a particular character, to include how those actions are resolved, and as we have discussed up-thread the outcome of those actions. For that reason inter alia I feel "hoping to play a game" doesn't do the work needed to capture the diversity of expectations that players can have upon entering the magic circle.

 

[Ovi]

I am by no means resisting the notion that you intended actually, specifically, human players. I share the notion that there can be imagined facts implied by inter alia our characters, that we as human players around the table may come to know (decide we know, whatever.)

That said, would you be able to acknowledge that it is not by any means outre to read "players" in a discussion about TTRPG as a synonym for "characters", "PCs", "player-characters"? That, concretely, for the purposes of drawing conclusions about what I might mean or imply, my example should be read as if there were the preestablished fiction in place even accepting that was not your intention.

I share your feeling of being exhausted by some lines taken in this thread. Of which this was not even the top-most surprising.

EDIT I have bolded one line that chimes with what I was envisioning happened next... in further conversation. Your clarification changes things somewhat, because now I know that it wasn't ruled out (by you, the DM, in preestablished fiction) that this was knowledge it could turn out the druid (character, not player) already had access to.

I find making a clear and consistent distinction between players and characters is critical to useful discussion about how games play. Had you made it clear that you do not see any difference between what a character might know about the setting and what the player knows about the setting, this would have been an entirely different conversation from the start. Instead, you got frustrated and had an unproductive set of exchanges with multiple posters. So, it appears very useful to make this distinction or call out that you do not.

I will admit that many do routinely swap, but I don't view that as an indication of underlying ideology (as you seem to) but rather as the usual mess of imprecision of communication when you aren't trying to be clear. It took me awhile to break that habit and make deliberate the distinctions between player and characters. I think D&D in general tends to conflate the two in thinking in broad ways because the only authority a player has in D&D is over their character, and character is general considered inviolate (ie, off limits to GM play), and also because, generally, play often goes to MMI in that the players are asking the GM to allow actions knowing they're going to be gated by the GM's thinking on the matter.

And, given how the discussion with others has progressed, your admonishment to me that characters cannot know things because they're fictional seems increasingly like a semantic point rather than one useful to discussion of play. I say this because you're now allowing for thinking that the characters can be imagined to know something that the players do not. I believe you have to do this, because otherwise when the Druid wildshapes we need to ascertain if the player knows how to wildshape first. Or casts a spell. Or when an INT (nature) check is successful to gain some bit of setting information that the player doesn't already know. I'll admit to being guilty of a shorthand in talking about the character knowing things the player does not -- clearly the character is fictional and so we only imagine they know things the player does not. That this was seized upon as if it wasn't obvious is, frankly, a bit bizarre to me.

Also, going back to this:

This conversation feels like the boy at the dike. Each post that I write is read to find fault.

I disagree with some of the points you're raising and I'm engaging in conversation about those. This isn't an exercise in finding fault with you, it's a discussion.

 

[Ovi]

Those sound like super ideas and play experiences (and helped me start my EN day with a smile).

Tying in to some other topics upthread, how was it decides it should to take a full subplot to get the skeleton declared a citizen instead of just letting it be an easy win?

I can't argue for @Hussar, but for me that would be a conversation asking the player if they want their status as undead to be a focus of play and a challenge or just color. In 5e. In other systems, like FATE or PbtA games, the player making this choice is already telling me that they want this to be a focus of play, so it would be.

This question exposes another bit of how D&D has traditionally strongly leaned towards MMI -- the idea that it's the GM that determines what things play is about, how much play will be about these things, and when they stop (or pause) being about these things. This starts the MMI right at the start, when whatever players bring to the table for play to be about has to be approved and then implemented by the GM.

Note, this isn't a dig at this structure. There's tons of great play in here, and honestly a lot of D&D's history of grand plots is supported by this framework. It's 100% valid. People can prefer to not engage in it, but that doesn't mean you can't have a blast in playing this way. It does mean that there's a huge load on the GM and relatively little on the players, which is another bit of attractive design for many (GMs who love putting in the design work and players who enjoy showing up and playing through some great designed and curated play).