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

[FrogReaver]

This seems to indicate otherwise. As I said, it makes participants the only relevant factor, be it tolerance or sensitivity, while relegating system to such a secondary state that even systems I consider very prone to MMI (albeit for nearly opposite reasons) are "unlikely to invoke MMI," emphasis in original.

That's not how I read that post or any of the others at all. I guess we will have to wait for @clearstream to elaborate.

Game design matters. Game design plays a major role in participants determining what their expectations should even be. It is the source of both mechanical and policy/procedural methods for addressing all sorts of issues, MMI among them. Policy and procedure can also be introduced in a post-design situation, but they will necessarily be harder to implement, because the design won't necessarily follow them. You may run into situations where your efforts are good but conflict with the rules, at which point you either become an amateur designer yourself (with the costs and benefits thereof) or you take a step which pushes things even more toward MMI, namely, reducing the rules to being merely suggestions, undercutting the intended goal.

I don't disagree with any of this - well maybe slightly in the last sentence, but overall we are in agreement. I would just add that an individual's tolerances around DM decisions also play a major role in what causes feelings of MMI. This is to say that one person can experience MMI in a specific set of circumstances and another may not experience it at all in that same set of circumstances.

I think it will be helpful to explicitly state that the following 3 beliefs need not be in conflict

• D&D is significantly more prone to MMI than a game like 'example - Blades in the Dark'. (System matters)
• Some individuals experience MMI in situations where others would not (Player tolerances matter)
• D&D is not very prone to MMI

Obviously, we can disagree on the truth of any of these beliefs, especially the last one. I'm not trying here to state these are unequivocal truths, just that all of these things can be true at the same time.

Note: I'm going to switch gears a little and examine that last bullet - D&D is not very prone to MMI. With this framing in mind:

• Do you believe most D&D players have experienced MMI when playing D&D?
• If so, do you believe it often occurs within their games?
• If so, how do you explain them coming back to the game again and again?

To me there are so many players that seemingly play and enjoy D&D that it's hard to believe MMI is a significant problem for most of them. That's why I believe D&D overall is not very prone to MMI, even if it is more prone to it than other games.

 

[chaochou]

• Do you believe most D&D players have experienced MMI when playing D&D?
• If so, do you believe it often occurs within their games?
• If so, how do you explain them coming back to the game again and again?

• Yes, all of them
• Yes, overwhelmingly often​
• Because the claim that it must prompt a negative reaction is false

 

[Maxperson]

Suppose a 5e table adopts the principle The GM will never negate a player goal/intention unless a check has been called for and failed.

Would you agree that this means that there won't be "Mother may I?" at that table?

5e by default already lacks the derogatory "Mother May I." If I want my PC to try and jump across the pit, I'm going to tell the DM what I am doing and barring a social contract violation the attempt will happen. If I want my PC to go north to try and unite the norther barbarian tribes under my leadership, I'm going to tell the DM that's what I am doing and barring a social contract violation, that is what will happen.

At no point am I asking the DM's permission for what I want my PC to attempt.

 

[pemerton]

@Maxperson, "Mother may I" in RPGing is generally understood in terms of changing the fiction through action declarations beyond just the PC forming certain intentions or performing certain bodily motions.

 

[clearstream]

@Maxperson, "Mother may I" in RPGing is generally understood in terms of changing the fiction through action declarations beyond just the PC forming certain intentions or performing certain bodily motions.

There's the rub, though. We discussed earlier the chain of resolution, and formed a notion that where there is agreement on who owns what along the chain then as @Maxperson testifies to, groups won't hit MMI.

In D&D generally, the change to fiction players control is what their character does. Supposing one is satisfied with that, then MMI doesn't arise from how the results of that are narrated. Supposing one isn't satisfied with that, this happy picture changes.

 

[clearstream]

This seems to indicate otherwise. As I said, it makes participants the only relevant factor, be it tolerance or sensitivity, while relegating system to such a secondary state that even systems I consider very prone to MMI (albeit for nearly opposite reasons) are "unlikely to invoke MMI," emphasis in original.

Just to note I've read your last couple and am formulating a reply. It's just requires a bit of rigour so won't be up immediately.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think it will be helpful to explicitly state that the following 3 beliefs need not be in conflict

• D&D is significantly more prone to MMI than a game like 'example - Blades in the Dark'. (System matters)
• Some individuals experience MMI in situations where others would not (Player tolerances matter)
• D&D is not very prone to MMI

Obviously, we can disagree on the truth of any of these beliefs, especially the last one. I'm not trying here to state these are unequivocal truths, just that all of these things can be true at the same time.

I draw a distinction between "D&D" in general, and any specific edition. I think the earliest forms of D&D, for example, were only prone to MMI in the sense that the whole field was still extremely new, which is why Gygax at first questioned whether D&D was even a "game" to begin with. However, as things developed, he started to take a stronger stance on design issues, and understood the game to be (in some sense) an open-ended enigma for the players to untangle by whatever clever manipulations they saw fit to use. 3e, despite being very rules-heavy, had a lot of really faulty design, which sometimes caused those rules to be contradictory or even totally irreconcilable, and the baroque nature of its rules meant enforcement was...fraught, to say the least. This led to "MMI" in a very system-first sense, as articulated by (IIRC?) Mike Mearls in the original use of the term as applied to RPGs: there is no freedom because the rules are so dense and constraining. 5e, as a result of its diehard commitment to de-emphasizing the rules, runs into it from the other direction: with no rules at all, there's no mooring, nothing to guide except DM preference, which all too easily becomes DM whim.

Some versions of D&D are relatively much more prone to MMI than others. I'm of the opinion that 5e is one of the most MMI-prone editions ever written, for a variety of reasons, as I have previously said.

Note: I'm going to switch gears a little and examine that last bullet - D&D is not very prone to MMI. With this framing in mind:

• Do you believe most D&D players have experienced MMI when playing D&D?
• If so, do you believe it often occurs within their games?
• If so, how do you explain them coming back to the game again and again?

To me there are so many players that seemingly play and enjoy D&D that it's hard to believe MMI is a significant problem for most of them. That's why I believe D&D overall is not very prone to MMI, even if it is more prone to it than other games.

1. Yes. I'm also fairly sure that, when they have experienced it, they usually did not realize it was happening. MMI, especially covert MMI, can be quite subtle. Blatant overt MMI is so obviously dysfunctional that even openly "Viking Hat" DMs will usually try to avoid it. Overt MMI can still happen though, otherwise we wouldn't see the many (many, many) discussions out there about DMs requiring four or five or six (etc.) rolls just to sneak through one small area, or eavesdrop on a single conversation, etc.
2. "Often" is relative, no? I would say most games that run long enough (say, covering 3-4 months of once-a-week sessions) will have at least one instance of it, if played in the ways people online describe it and run in the ways the 5e DMG recommends doing things. Active efforts to prevent or forestall MMI require one to break at least somewhat from the DMG advice, and usually require some kind of deviation from the way 5e play is usually described.
3. Lack of awareness or understanding of the roots of the issue, the issue not being egregious enough to put them off D&D entirely, or (perhaps the worst of the bunch) the issue is egregious enough to put them off D&D entirely, and we never find out because they just cease engaging with anything D&D related. They become invisible to us, because they just decide D&D isn't for them and never come back or speak about it--why should they, it was a bad experience and complaining about it online isn't going to ake that bad experience better.

One can enjoy an overall experience while still having problems with it. Indeed, this is exactly what happened to me with 3e, albeit for different reasons.* I knew I liked playing D&D in general, but I kept being...shall we say, unsatisfied with the results. Like eating a meal you've cooked, and liking it, thinking it is more than just edible, it is flavorful and pleasant, but knowing that it's just not quite what you wanted, that there's some thing you're missing and you just can't put your finger on it.

But, as I've mentioned earlier, there could another reason. The players don't complain because they start "fighting back." Instead of distancing themselves and giving up on D&D, they accept the terms and engage with them. When the social contract is the only recourse, they accept that and start leveraging the social contract to get what they want. This leads to exactly the kinds of complaints Tetrasodium has mentioned, and which Malmuria linked in those tweets: players who negotiate at the social-contract level, and who (rightly or wrongly) employ social-contract appeals and condemnations when those negotiations fail for whatever reason. In other words, the players come back to the game because they accept MMI, not as a dysfunction, but as a baseline mode of play to be handled like any other.

Things can be dysfunctional without being ruined. And things that become dysfunctional can be addressed, not by trying to deal with the root cause of the dysfunction, but by adopting coping mechanisms. Both of these player responses involve something other than throwing in the towel and calling it quits when dysfunction occurs.

*It wasn't MMI, but rather that 3e billed itself as a cooperative-teamwork experience, a party of allied adventurers taking on challenges of body, mind, and morals; the problem is, it's really a personal-optimization experience, a gaggle of individual adventurers who happen to adventure in the same places at the same time while attending to their personal interests. It took 4e, a game actually designed to be a cooperative-teamwork experience, to make me realize exactly why I had been dissatisfied.

If I want my PC to try and jump across the pit, I'm going to tell the DM what I am doing and barring a social contract violation the attempt will happen.

That's the problem. You are expecting an absence of social contract violations, as you define your end of the social contract. Many DMs either do not consider this to be a violation of the social contract, or believe that it is inherently, and implicitly, actually encoded into that contract. They think this is so fundamental, so unquestionably core, that they don't even think it needs to be mentioned. Much like the significant number of DMs out there who think that illusionism is not merely a possible technique they can use, but rather the only technique that ever gets used. Further, that it is their job to keep players from discovering that the game is always fundamentally built on illusionism for as long as they can, so that the magic, the beauty, can be preserved as long as possible before the inevitable breakdown thereof.

Yes, I have straight-up been told almost literally that (in less flowery terms), on this very forum.

 

[pemerton]

In D&D generally, the change to fiction players control is what their character does. Supposing one is satisfied with that, then MMI doesn't arise from how the results of that are narrated. Supposing one isn't satisfied with that, this happy picture changes.

Upthread we already discussed the example of the player whose character charges the demon, to have the GM declare that the the demon kills the player. And you said that that was contrary to the rules.

So you seem to think that it's not true that generally, in D&D, the fiction the players control is their characters mental states and bodily motions.

(Also: I think it's obvious why it would be a terrible game if it was true that that is all the players controlled.)

 

[Manbearcat]

It’s conversation is missing the consequence of a whole lot of “P words.”

* Proportionality.

* Pervasiveness/prolificness.

* Paradigm.

Exceptions that rarely see play have little to no impact on the through-line of play (the process of play, the experience of that process, and what governs the perpetual status and transition gamestate). For instance, I believe saying “nothing here” to one of the questions of DR was brought up. Well…(a) even if there is “nothing here” the player still takes +1 forward when acting on the impact of that “nothing here” and how it effects the array of the imagined space and (b) in all of my GMing of DW (1000s of hours…including easily that many DR moves as it’s the most prolific move in the game), “nothing here” felt like the right response maybe…twice ever?

Citing that (given (a) and (b) above) as consequential to this conversation seems less than helpful to sussing out the question of the lead post.

If something is an extreme exception (and of a particular type…eg, it’s still mechanically useful because it firms up the imagined space and is a lever to pull to impact downstream move-space), it’s a different kettle of fish than a governing paradigm. I mean…we all know this in every other aspect of our lives. Why would it be different in gaming? It’s akin to bringing up an Unsportsmanlike Conduct foul on the sideline for violating sideline decorum of an NFL Football game and framing it in the same consequential space as the rules for Offsides/Line to Gain (and all the other rules and rules paradigms that integrate with that).

 

[clearstream]

Upthread we already discussed the example of the player whose character charges the demon, to have the GM declare that the the demon kills the player. And you said that that was contrary to the rules.

Again, referring to the chain, in D&D the rules will at times specify a result or process for choosing between specified results. Player continues to have fiat over how their character acts, and at times what rightly follows from fiction + system (and thus will normally be narrated by DM) will include any specified results.

For avoidance of doubt, the demon case is one where - in cases where the game rules are followed - there is a process for choosing between specified results.

So you seem to think that it's not true that generally, in D&D, the fiction the players control is their characters mental states and bodily motions.

Say that I operate a light switch with my hand to turn on the light. (This is the thought-experiment discussed way up thread.) My mental state is probably a desire that there be light and my bodily motion includes the positioning and articulating of my hand to activate the switch. Not anticipated is that a prowler is also present, and will be revealed by the light. However, in my variant of the thought-experiment, the prowler has unfortunately cut the power lines.

This is comparable to, for one example, casting a spell while inside a previously unnoted antimagic zone. Player chose how they acted. Following the rules (as I think they should) DM narrates the result, which may not be as player hoped because DM, not player, narrates results.