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

[clearstream]

Security is not the impossibility of a breach, but sufficient deterrent such that a damaging breach is unlikely to occur, or sufficiently difficult or obvious that it can be caught and dealt with before it becomes actually damaging.

This seems to be granting everything I have argued: rules and explicit principles genuinely matter, perhaps even a great deal, for how much risk of MMI there is; good rules + good principles provide an effective deterrent against MMI; poor rules and/or a lack of effective explicit principles can cover for or even encourage MMI.

I'm genuinely not sure what your third sentence is trying to accomplish. You seem, in essence, to be saying, "Yes...but...it theoretically still could happen!" I don't see how that criticism is pertinent; no one is asking for a perfect defense, just better tools and better approaches. Things that allow us to drag MMI into the light so it can be identified, understood, and dealt with quickly. Those tools will never be absolute certainties of success. Nothing made by human minds could be. Why is that a problem?

I'm avoiding oversimplification and implied universality. For many groups, there is no risk of MMI in their preferred DM'd play. They are not made any more secure by adjusted rules, and the adjustments may well put at risk purposes that they prioritise.

Consistent with my view that MMI arises out of mismatches, in the absence of those mismatches such groups are sufficiently secure. Those "good" rules, are good for those who need them and whose purposes are compatible with them. They're not universally good.

Any insistence on claiming the high-ground for some subset of preferences is not, to me, attractive.


EDIT to add an analogy. If I live in a cold country, it would likely be effective for me to have central heating. And I can discuss the merits of various kinds of heating system. But if I live in a hot country, a heating system would likely be counterproductive.

 

[tetrasodium]

I'm curious how far this goes. If a player declares their PC casts, say, Charm Person at a target, and the GM says that it works, is it a failure on the part of the player to expect things if the GM then says that the charmed target stabs the PC in the back without any more play occurring?

In all seriousness I don't follow your logic of how this could happen during play given the wording of the spell. You left out too many steps in the middle to answer though. All I can say is "Huh..."

The last few times I can remember charm being used in some form were:

• vrs a levelup fey knight
  • "sorry Andy it's charm immune"
• vrs the very mext feynight after a rest in the same dungeon same session even
  • "yea [bob] nailed it, fey knights are still charm immune"
• Players were in the middle of a kick in the door kill everyone assault on a lizardman semicult dealing with demons & were stopped by some lizardmen with a countersign. The group is covered in blood & obviously armed for bear but hemming & hawwing with no way to answer the challenge phrase. Andy casts charm on the lizardman who issued the countersign while two or three others are getting involved speaking to the first in draconic... With two dragonborn in the party it's obvious to the lizardmen that at least some of the PCs speak draconic
  • Lizardman apologizes to Alice & says "protocol" in draconic before repeating the countersign
  • Players literally begin discussing killing the lizardmen in common assuming the lizardmen can't speak it
  • One of the lizardmen runs off to report>players immediately attack the others
  • Charmed lizardman attacks someone other than Alice
• Party is meeting with a noble of some meaningful rank speaking to the gobetween servant relaying conversation between the party & the noble watching behind a screen after having explicitly been told something along the lines of "it's a fairly common practice for nobles since it allows them to keep distance from commoners and more importantly protects against mind control & such". Alice casts charm person on the servant while the noble & the noble's guards are watching.....
  • It went poorly & the players were thrown out with disdain as one would expect.
• Players rescued a bunch of hostages from the bbeg but they were all family members of various NPCs pressured to harass the PCs & several were children. The children wouldn't give "strangers" their address>Bob casts charm on one & points out that he's a friend of the family >kid gives a confused "ohhhh yeaaaa" & gives the address.

 

[Ovi]

That kind of privileges certain games as their differences being more significant than others though, when what it really says is what those differences are matter more to some people than others. My point is that unless everything in the hobby but a very limited subset is "D&D" for purposes of this discussion, writing all that off to D&D seems a bit of a stretch.

Okay, you're going to have to explain what privilege is implicated here and how that would work, because don't see how noting some games have principles that are part of the rules to play that game and some don't implicates any kind of privilege.

Secondly, D&D started the hobby, and the idea of rules as suggestions started with D&D at the same time. So when I say "D&D-born" I literally mean "born with D&D." That, near 50 years on, the market is different really doesn't speak at all to what I was saying. I'm honestly confused with this argument.

Its not just Vampire though.

Well, yeah, it was an example, not an exhaustive list.

As I said, once you get outside of the PbtA branch and close kin, its most of the hobby, no matter what else they do different. It varies considerably in degree, but the number of games that never think its okay for the GM to just go "You know what, lets look at the situation and just decide what's an appropriate roll is with what results" is pretty thin on the ground, even if they don't think that's an intrinsic virtue. There are prices for constraining the need to do that, and they aren't prices every game is willing to pay, anymore than they're all willing to have most of the game be pulled out of the GM's behind.

D&D is, by itself, most of the hobby by volume. If you instead look at individual systems instead of popularity, it's not so clear cut. We can take a pretty solid Trad game, Alien for instance. This game is strongly Trad but has clearly stated principles of play, ones that would work for 5e very well. You are intended to run the game with those principles. That's the intended play. You can, of course, ignore them because there are no RPG police ensuring compliance with game texts. But noting that you can is a weak argument because it doesn't at all imply you should, or that there's gain to doing so. Also, pointing out that some group of people like total chaos is unpersuasive to the argument, because as a matter of game design you are not considering the people that will ignore your design -- what would be the point?

I guess what I really don't like about your post here is that it's echoing common arguments used to say that system doesn't matter. And that's a valid viewpoint, but it rests on the assumption that it doesn't matter what system you use because the actual system used is going to be GM Says. It's arguing for a system (GM Says) while dismissing all other systems. And yes, GM Says as a system concept is very basic, but I guess that's it's appeal. I don't share anything at all with people who prefer 'system doesn't matter.' If system matters, then all things about that system matter and should be fairly considered.

There's kind of an all-or-nothing view on this sort of topic that tends to come up that I don't think really serves the discussion well.

I really don't get "try playing the game as it was designed" to be "all or nothing" and something said that isn't "serv[ing] the discussion well." The set of assumptions for that to be true are pretty tortured, and it's pretty much assuming that this take is in bad faith.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I was with you all the way up to the end. It’s very possible we have been misunderstanding, but it’s seemed to us there were arguments that such play couldn’t generate MMI or something akin to it at all.

If that position isn’t here then I’ve made a lot of posts and points for nothing. And that’s fine, but a bit disappointing if so.

If that's what you thought (at least of my position) then I apologize for confusing you. There is no such thing as a safe investment. Any DM who works hard enough at it, running in bad faith or paying only lip service to principles etc., can produce this kind of issue. Any DM who is just incredibly awful at communicating to players can have an issue like this even without strictly having bad intent (though honestly I would be a little skeptical about a DM being THAT bad at it...)

But, as I said (much) earlier in the thread, rules are tools. These tools can be better-made. There have been arguments in this thread explicitly saying that rules are irrelevant, that it is not possible for rules to have any effect whatsoever to hone or hinder MMI issues. My position is that rules (principles, procedures, etc.) can in fact be really important for this concern, and not only that, but they can provide an excellent (albeit never perfect) defense against such issues.

There are systems where MMI can't be done until and unless you add "except if you ignore the rules." When looking at a system to determine what play it can create, ignoring the rules seems like a bad approach to evaluate the system.

More or less this, just with the expansive definition e.g. "principles, procedures, and other things are included in the term 'rules' even if they are not technically rules themselves."

I believe there are systems that even if you follow their rules (etc.) in good faith, you can accidentally fall into, or even be encouraged into, MMI issues. I also believe there are systems that as long as you do in fact follow their rules and principles (etc.) in good faith, it is either actually or effectively impossible to produce MMI issues, because the rules and principles we're designed specifically to short-circuit that, to encourage continuous and effective communication, bilateral or multilateral resolution, equitable distribution of authority, and to focus play on those areas where questions might be asked and actually have them be asked rather than left implicit and unaddressed.

I'm avoiding oversimplification, and implied universality. For many groups, there is no risk of MMI in their preferred DM'd play. They are not made any more secure by adjusted rules, and the adjustments may well put at risk purposes that they prioritise.

Consistent with my view that MMI arises out of mismatches, in the absence of those mismatches such groups are well defended. Those "good" rules, are good for those who need them and whoses purposes are compatible with them. They're not universally good.

This insistence on claiming the high-ground for some subset of preferences is not, to me, attractive.

Then I fundamentally disagree. As noted above, I believe there are rules which, even if you try to follow them in good faith, are extremely likely to result in MMI. I gave my example of alignment and fallen Paladins in 3rd edition for that very reason. Even a DM legitimately trying to do fun things is actually given incentive by the rules themselves toward MMI issues. Even a player legitimately trying to be a productive, contributing group member may be led astray (resulting in the infamous "Lawful Stupid" moral policeman "Paladins" who have so badly tarnished the reputation of the class.)

Conversely, there are structures (rules, principles, procedures) you can employ which make it so even bad-faith efforts are significantly harder to pull off, and significantly easier to identify and address. In such conditions, good-faith errors are mitigated or even eliminated, since there is no ill intent and the problems are both harder to do accidentally and easier to fix when they do happen. As a milder example, the "X card" is a tool designed to enhance communication and make it possible for play to embrace difficult or challenging topics without fear or injury, because it establishes a formal relationship built on trust and communication. This is a useful tool that mitigates MMI by improving communication and making personal stances clear in a safe and nonconfrontational way, and by encouraging players to be active and engaged with their experiences rather than passively observing them.

These tools are a genuine improvement. They enable things and support a huge variety of playstyles. They are not denigrating. They simply recognize that the tools we use can in fact affect the experiences we have, and that better tools encourage (but do not guarantee) better experiences.

 

[Ovi]

In all seriousness I don't follow your logic of how this could happen during play given the wording of the spell. You left out too many steps in the middle to answer though. All I can say is "Huh..."

The last few times I can remember charm being used in some form were:

• vrs a levelup fey knight
  • "sorry Andy it's charm immune"
• vrs the very mext feynight after a rest in the same dungeon same session even
  • "yea [bob] nailed it, fey knights are still charm immune"
• Players were in the middle of a kick in the door kill everyone assault on a lizardman semicult dealing with demons & were stopped by some lizardmen with a countersign. The group is covered in blood & obviously armed for bear but hemming & hawwing with no way to answer the challenge phrase. Andy casts charm on the lizardman who issued the countersign while two or three others are getting involved speaking to the first in draconic... With two dragonborn in the party it's obvious to the lizardmen that at least some of the PCs speak draconic
  • Lizardman apologizes to Alice & says "protocol" in draconic before repeating the countersign
  • Players literally begin discussing killing the lizardmen in common assuming the lizardmen can't speak it
  • One of the lizardmen runs off to report>players immediately attack the others
  • Charmed lizardman attacks someone other than Alice
• Party is meeting with a noble of some meaningful rank speaking to the gobetween servant relaying conversation between the party & the noble watching behind a screen after having explicitly been told something along the lines of "it's a fairly common practice for nobles since it allows them to keep distance from commoners and more importantly protects against mind control & such". Alice casts charm person on the servant while the noble & the noble's guards are watching.....
  • It went poorly & the players were thrown out with disdain as one would expect.
• Players rescued a bunch of hostages from the bbeg but they were all family members of various NPCs pressured to harass the PCs & several were children. The children wouldn't give "strangers" their address>Bob casts charm on one & points out that he's a friend of the family >kid gives a confused "ohhhh yeaaaa" & gives the address.

The claim to elided steps is interesting. The spell is cast, at a target, and the GM confirms it works. Perhaps that skips steps, but whatever steps those are (checking range, marking spell slots, checking target validity, making saving throws) the GM still has to narrate the outcome of 'it works.' I really don't care what those previous steps are because whatever they are they're sufficient for the GM to say "the spell works on the target." I care about the bit after that -- the GM has indicated that the ability (spell in this case) functioned. Then, without any further play to change that situation, the GM has the target of the charm spell stab the casting PC in the back. Is this bad play?

And, to discharge any notion of the trap now that I'm not on my phone and responding quickly, the idea here is that I do think this would be considered bad play. I'm further convinced you would say the same because of the list above. But how is deploying this spell not the same thing as deploying the Rustic Hospitality ability in the sense that the player has an expectation of how it would work and the GM appears to be bound by how it works.

 

[FrogReaver]

If that's what you thought (at least of my position) then I apologize for confusing you. There is no such thing as a safe investment. Any DM who works hard enough at it, running in bad faith or paying only lip service to principles etc., can produce this kind of issue. Any DM who is just incredibly awful at communicating to players can have an issue like this even without strictly having bad intent (though honestly I would be a little skeptical about a DM being THAT bad at it...)

Thank you.

But, as I said (much) earlier in the thread, rules are tools. These tools can be better-made. There have been arguments in this thread explicitly saying that rules are irrelevant, that it is not possible for rules to have any effect whatsoever to hone or hinder MMI issues. My position is that rules (principles, procedures, etc.) can in fact be really important for this concern, and not only that, but they can provide an excellent (albeit never perfect) defense against such issues.

IMO. Is a shovel or a pick a better tool? They serve different purposes.

That's the way I tend to view RPG rules. Of course some shovels can be better made than other shovels and some picks can be made better than other picks, but IMO most of our differences at this point are more akin to shovels vs picks instead of shovels vs strictly better made shovels.

I believe there are systems that even if you follow their rules (etc.) in good faith, you can accidentally fall into, or even be encouraged into, MMI issues. I also believe there are systems that as long as you do in fact follow their rules and principles (etc.) in good faith, it is either actually or effectively impossible to produce MMI issues, because the rules and principles we're designed specifically to short-circuit that, to encourage continuous and effective communication, bilateral or multilateral resolution, equitable distribution of authority, and to focus play on those areas where questions might be asked and actually have them be asked rather than left implicit and unaddressed.

I would tend to agree - except I'm not convinced you can flat out get rid of MMI by any set of rules or principles. Minimize yes. Eliminate no. Even with Good Faith. I think this because MMI is effectively about subjective feelings of having to ask permission to do something. I'd also add that preventing MMI isn't the only reason for rules and that having rules actively limit MMI is going to trade off some other positive things to do so.

Then I fundamentally disagree. As noted above, I believe there are rules which, even if you try to follow them in good faith, are extremely likely to result in MMI. I gave my example of alignment and fallen Paladins in 3rd edition for that very reason. Even a DM legitimately trying to do fun things is actually given incentive by the rules themselves toward MMI issues. Even a player legitimately trying to be a productive, contributing group member may be led astray (resulting in the infamous "Lawful Stupid" moral policeman "Paladins" who have so badly tarnished the reputation of the class.)

I can conceive of a game being designed with that bad of rules, but I don't think any made in the last 10 or maybe even 20 years are like that.

Conversely, there are structures (rules, principles, procedures) you can employ which make it so even bad-faith efforts are significantly harder to pull off, and significantly easier to identify and address. In such conditions, good-faith errors are mitigated or even eliminated, since there is no ill intent and the problems are both harder to do accidentally and easier to fix when they do happen.

I agree with most here, but IMO there are always places where someone gets to make up fiction. Constraints around what that fiction can be certainly help mitigate MMI, but there's also going to be some fiction within the constraints that some players may feel as if they needed to ask permission for some specific thing to happen/not happen.

The place I see MMI happening, is in the areas where someone gets to control the fiction.

These tools are a genuine improvement. They enable things and support a huge variety of playstyles. They are not denigrating. They simply recognize that the tools we use can in fact affect the experiences we have, and that better tools encourage (but do not guarantee) better experiences.

I don't think there's many genuinely better tools in RPG rules. There are tradeoffs. You may like one set of rules better, but I've yet to see a ruleset do everything better than another one. You may say these are the things I value and so this tool is better for me or possibly even most people, but not in the broad sense that it is better for everyone.

 

[FrogReaver]

I'm avoiding oversimplification and implied universality. For many groups, there is no risk of MMI in their preferred DM'd play. They are not made any more secure by adjusted rules, and the adjustments may well put at risk purposes that they prioritise.

Consistent with my view that MMI arises out of mismatches, in the absence of those mismatches such groups are sufficiently secure. Those "good" rules, are good for those who need them and whose purposes are compatible with them. They're not universally good.

Any insistence on claiming the high-ground for some subset of preferences is not, to me, attractive.


EDIT to add an analogy. If I live in a cold country, it would likely be effective for me to have central heating. And I can discuss the merits of various kinds of heating system. But if I live in a hot country, a heating system would likely be counterproductive.

or alternatively the only thing you care about in a heating system is cost as you will mostly have it for emergencies. That's the kind of rules tradeoffs i keep talking about.

 

[pemerton]

IMO. Going back to the Duke's men surrounding the barn. That to me sounds more like a soft move than a hard move.

For reasons already posted by @Ovi, I don't agree.

There's also the possibility that a player could disagree with the particular soft move chosen from the list above or the fictional application of the chosen move. So even though everyone is technically following the rules, that could still feel bad for such a player.

<snip>

Then there's the dice roll that determines success or failure. Coming from a place where the DM could just say yes, having the dice potentially turn what could have been a straight yes into a failure - that can sometimes feel like 'dice may I'.

In Apocalypse World, there is no concept of "saying 'yes'". The operative principle is if you do it, you do it: that is, if a PC performs an action that triggers a player-side move, the dice are rolled and the move resolved. Other action declarations, that don't trigger player-side moves, trigger a soft move from the GM.

For reasons posted by @hawkeyefan in his discussion of spire, the soft and hard moves that the GM declares will be relative to the PC as played by the player: what counts as an opportunity, a threat, an unwelcome truth, etc is inherently relative to a character's established expectations, orientation etc. The risk in Apocalypse World is not "Mother may I?", it's that the GM squibs or puts forward boring stuff.

In my example, the - let's say halfling - has said what outcome they want. They find the dirt in the chest. But the move doesn't resolve that: it only resolves whether you "pick locks or pockets or disable traps". A 10+ for sure picks the lock... but who decides what's in the chest?

Apocalypse World doesn't use "intent and task" resolution. In declaring actions, players don't need to state intents - they need to state what they're doing.

If the player of the Halfling wants to know what's in the chest, before they disarm the trap on it and open it, they can always examine it closely, and thereby Discern Realities (DW p 68):

When you closely study a situation or person, roll+Wis.

✴On a 10+, ask the GM 3 questions from the list below.
✴On a 7–9, ask 1.

Either way, take +1 forward when acting on the answers.

• What happened here recently?
• What is about to happen?
• What should I be on the lookout for?
• What here is useful or valuable to me?
• Who’s really in control here?
• What here is not what it appears to be?​

Useful and valuable are like threat, opportunity, unwelcome, etc - they are relative to the character as played by the player. A GM who answers "nothing" to the question "What here is useful or valuable to me" isn't playing the game, given that that is not a move on the GM's list of moves.

I was with you all the way up to the end. It’s very possible we have been misunderstanding, but it’s seemed to us there were arguments that such play couldn’t generate MMI or something akin to it at all.

As I posted upthread, I don't see how Apocalypse World, Agon, Burning Wheel or In A Wicked Age can generate "Mother may I?" play.

The only instance that has been suggested is a Dungeon World move, Tricks of the Trade, and I've explained in an earlier post followed by this one why I don't see how it can generate "Mother May I?" play: if the player of the Halfling wants to leave it up to the GM, they can open the chest "blind"; if they want to lock the GM in, they can examine the chest closely first and thus Discern Realities.

Upthread, I posted this:

It doesn't help anyone to pretend that there aren't different approaches to play which can be distinguished from one another at least in general terms.

A corollary of that point is the following: not all RPG systems exhibit the same vulnerabilities.

The GM-side risk in Apocalypse World, Agon, Burning Wheel and In A Wicked Age is that play becomes boring or insipid, because the GM can't come up with interesting and salient ideas that drive play forward. (Burning Wheel has player-side mechanics, especially Circles and Wises, to try and reduce this risk by giving the players a chance to bypass the GM and directly introduce the content that they want.)

I don't see how it helps anyone to pretend that all RPGs, regardless of their very different procedures for establishing the shared fiction, all exhibit the vulnerabilities that 5e D&D does in virtue of its particular way of establishing the shared fiction.

 

[pemerton]

Any DM who works hard enough at it, running in bad faith or paying only lip service to principles etc., can produce this kind of issue.

Just to be clear: in what way was @hawkeyefan's GM running in bad faith, or paying only lip service to principles?

Upthread @FrogReaver and @clearstream asserted that the adjudication of Rustic Hospitality conformed to the rules. And I think they both said that there are no principles of 5e GMing that it violated.

 

[FrogReaver]

For reasons already posted by @Ovi, I don't agree.

In Apocalypse World, there is no concept of "saying 'yes'". The operative principle is if you do it, you do it: that is, if a PC performs an action that triggers a player-side move, the dice are rolled and the move resolved. Other action declarations, that don't trigger player-side moves, trigger a soft move from the GM.

For reasons posted by @hawkeyefan in his discussion of spire, the soft and hard moves that the GM declares will be relative to the PC as played by the player: what counts as an opportunity, a threat, an unwelcome truth, etc is inherently relative to a character's established expectations, orientation etc. The risk in Apocalypse World is not "Mother may I?", it's that the GM squibs or puts forward boring stuff.

Apocalypse World doesn't use "intent and task" resolution. In declaring actions, players don't need to state intents - they need to state what they're doing.

If the player of the Halfling wants to know what's in the chest, before they disarm the trap on it and open it, they can always examine it closely, and thereby Discern Realities (DW p 68):

When you closely study a situation or person, roll+Wis.​

​

✴On a 10+, ask the GM 3 questions from the list below.​

✴On a 7–9, ask 1.​

​

Either way, take +1 forward when acting on the answers.​

​

• What happened here recently?​

• What is about to happen?​

• What should I be on the lookout for?​

• What here is useful or valuable to me?​

• Who’s really in control here?​

• What here is not what it appears to be?​

Useful and valuable are like threat, opportunity, unwelcome, etc - they are relative to the character as played by the player. A GM who answers "nothing" to the question "What here is useful or valuable to me" isn't playing the game, given that that is not a move on the GM's list of moves.

As I posted upthread, I don't see how Apocalypse World, Agon, Burning Wheel or In A Wicked Age can generate "Mother may I?" play.

The only instance that has been suggested is a Dungeon World move, Tricks of the Trade, and I've explained in an earlier post followed by this one why I don't see how it can generate "Mother May I?" play: if the player of the Halfling wants to leave it up to the GM, they can open the chest "blind"; if they want to lock the GM in, they can examine the chest closely first and thus Discern Realities.

Upthread, I posted this:

A corollary of that point is the following: not all RPG systems exhibit the same vulnerabilities.

The GM-side risk in Apocalypse World, Agon, Burning Wheel and In A Wicked Age is that play becomes boring or insipid, because the GM can't come up with interesting and salient ideas that drive play forward. (Burning Wheel has player-side mechanics, especially Circles and Wises, to try and reduce this risk by giving the players a chance to bypass the GM and directly introduce the content that they want.)

I don't see how it helps anyone to pretend that all RPGs, regardless of their very different procedures for establishing the shared fiction, all exhibit the vulnerabilities that 5e D&D does in virtue of its particular way of establishing the shared fiction.

Your description of AW above baffles me even more as to why MMI cannot exist in it.