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

[Thomas Shey]

I’m going to hone in on 2 possible player reactions to that. 1) I’m going to play and try to find out about what is different in this situation because I know my character doesn’t know everything In the game. 2) Obviously the dm is just out to get me and shoot my character down, he better have a good reason right now or I won’t be back.

I agree having an action not function as expected should mostly be a rare event as the extreme of having nothing work as expected is very bad. IMO there’s alot of room between never say No and always say Yes. And never unexpected vs always unexpected.

But of course I did qualify with the "barring rare event" clause. Without that, it seems the idea the player should not have any understand why something didn't work out just by the process of doing so and failing in most cases seems very odd to me. The number of times I've failed at things in my life and not understood why has not been large, why would it be so for an RPG character?

 

[Pedantic]

The potential problem with MMI for me is not the fact of a single authority but rather the arbitrariness and uncertainty that can come when that figure is not clear and consistent in relaying information to the players. In fact, the more the GM has a singular, consistent vision for their world, the less you get problems associated with MMI. The lack of clarity could be about a particular situation, setting details the characters would/should know, or the theme of the game.

I don't know if MMI is best understood in relationship to the the game world in the play culture you're describing, so much as action resolution, at least as regards 5e. I think your characterizing of the GM as creating and running a game world definitely aligns with player expectations, but I think the issue is less likely to come up when players/GM lack clarity about an element of the world, and more when they lack clarity about a given action a PC is deploying.

The MMI breakdown at the worldbuilding level occurs when the GM starts creating/changing elements in reaction to a proposed PC course of action, thus that the action fails. That's not necessarily a flaw endemic to 5e, so much as a flaw inherent to any game where the GM has ultimately authority over the contents of the world. You can put down some suggestions to behave as if the setting exists without regard to the PCs and maintain consistency, but it's not fundamentally enforceable.

The issue that makes this mind of MMI issue more likely to occur with the 5e ruleset comes from not specify the effectiveness of player actions and abilities. Outside of spells and some specific combat actions, 5e is generally very loose about the scope/effectiveness of any given move a player might make. The whole "7 stealth checks to get across a keep" problem is made manifest because there aren't sufficiently clear/defined rules about what each stealth action achieves, not necessarily because the GM is adding a new guard around every corner to limit the effectiveness of the infiltration.

I think it's important to differentiate the rule of GM-as-world-builder, and the role of GM-as-adjudicator (or in 5e in particular, GM-as-game-designer when they're creating resolution systems wholesale) because those present different opportunities for failed play states and are influenced differently by different design choices.

When I see 5e players talking about the game world, it is discussed as the DM's responsibility. There's less a sense of the the DM "gets to" have authority over the world than the DM "has to" have authority over the world. They are also, per rules and play culture, responsible for entertaining the players, keeping them engaged, and centering the PCs. The DM, after all, is the only one who has to do "prep," keep notes for each PC and the world, arrange everything in the VTT, often even do the scheduling. Not only are the players uninterested in authority over the game world, but in some cases they will even pay a professional DM to take over the responsibility of creating/running the game world.

If, in the "neo-trad" style we're talking about as most commonly associated with 5e, GM-as-worldbuilder is a given (and I think that's a pretty fair characterization), we should be looking at what else could lead to a negative MMI experience, and whether any of that is rooted in the rules design. Rural Hospitality is a strange case, because it's at odds with the assumption of GM authority, which I think is mostly indicative of 5e's kitchen-sinky throw a little of every tradition design choices more than any particular intent. That could lead to an MMI failure because it risks causing dissonance with the assumed role of the GM, and essentially requires negotiation to proceed.

On the other hand, you have MMI issues that lie entirely in player ability resolution. They world outside of the action doesn't really matter in those cases, what matters is a differing understanding of what a PC action does. A GM might imagine a horizontal cavern roof surface is unclimbable, and a PC might imagine a sufficiently high climb DC exists to traverse one. The issue isn't that the GM placed an unreasonable obstacle, nor that the nature of the world wasn't well enough explained, it's that the ability the PC is deploying isn't spelled out precisely, and the parties around the table have differing perceptions of what it provides.

I think that particular MMI failure is kind of built in to the 5e rules, because they are so sparse. If you specifically wanted to avoid that breakdown, you could put more detailed actions in for PCs to perform.

Which is not to say that this is an unresolvable problem at most tables. Most faults that unclear actions throw up can be solved by establishing precedent over play, negotiation between the GM/PC in the moment, or could straight up be desirable in some cultures where the PCs are not expected to be entirely sure of their own capabilities before making decisions. I think it is something you could design to minimize though, if that was a goal, and I think it's something 5e clearly hasn't, and that the game would most likely cite "flexibility" and "simplicity" as the trade-off benefits it gained by not doing so.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Sure. But the decision to do that has an impact. If we’ve accomplished anything in this thread, it had seemed to be that MMI as a problem comes from mismatched expectations.

Well, barring my take on it, which is that simply having a low-information expectation is a problem in and of itself.

 

[James Gasik]

Trust is vital between players and the GM. It has to be, since the GM is the source of most information about the world- you see nothing, hear nothing, unless the GM says you do.

Even if you say "well, everyone can make Perception checks", we've had several threads on this very forum recently with people saying "not unless the DM says you can"! And what a successful check tells you is still up to the GM.

Because of this, and the vast narrative powers a GM wields, it is vital that their players feel like things aren't arbitrary, like a foundation built on sand.

They want to feel their choices matter, their abilities matter, and they have agency. It doesn't take much to erode this trust.

Having seen a lot of GM's lose their player's faith, there's a lot of things I do to maintain the trust mine have in me. All of my die rolls are open and can be witnessed. I allow players to make checks to divine monster abilities. I tell them the AC of the target.

If a strange magical effect is present, I let them make checks to divine it before it has any effect. Even if they cast the spell without a valid target or without thinking about the considerations, I allow for a Wisdom check, assuming their characters know better than they do.

But sometimes all of that still fails, and the players feel frustrated.

A good example of this happened when I had a Bard who wanted to cast a spell (I think it was Command) on some Gnolls. He had seemed very proud of his character's capabilities up to this point, and boldly cast the spell.

Glancing at the Gnoll stat block, I noticed something. I allowed him to make a check to know something about Gnolls (failed) and even a check to realize his mistake so he wouldn't have to waste the spell slot, but he rolled bad (it was like a DC 5 or 10 Wisdom check, I can't recall which).

So he cast the spell, and I pointed out to him that it was language-dependent; the targets had to understand what he was saying to them.

"Well, don't Gnolls speak Common?!" He asked.

"Not according to this stat block." I turned the book around so he could read it.

"Whatever", he replied, and he didn't do anything other than fire his bow for the rest of the session. He didn't return for the next session, and his friend explained that he'd spent hours griping about "that DM who doesn't like spellcasters and nerfed me for no reason".

Note that every member of the party could cast spells!

In retrospect, maybe I should have just told him the spell wouldn't work up front, but this does strike me as the very essence of "rulings, not rules". Players aren't, by default, entitled to any checks in this scenario.

They are expected to know how their spells work, and if they waste them, "oh well". So how a scenario like this plays out varies from table to table.

Some DM's, I'm sure, would have just let it fly- players having fun is more important to the game than obeying the letter of the rules.

But this, to me, is the real issue at hand. There is no consistent benchmark we can use to tell a GM what they should do in these situations. Should they allow for checks to realize they are dealing with a Mimic? Or just always be surprised when the treasure chest isn't a treasure chest?

Are GM's beholden to wave red flags at parties, or be very specific about context clues? Or do they just chuckle at their foolishness and let this be a "learning experience"?

Because there is a wide variety of possibilities when a player says "I want to do X action", and no reasonable way to be sure what is involved, or how hard it would be, any response can seem arbitrary.

Thus leading to one feeling that they are constantly at the GM's whim or mercy.

I mean, consider this video I saw on YouTube the other day. Group is hired to take out some bandits. They head out of town and come across a camp of seedy looking men. The Bard says "hello friends, we are looking for some bandits, perhaps you can help us?".

The NPC's, being, in fact, the bandits, but not very keen on attacking powerful heroes on sight, mislead the party, then backstab them at first opportunity, even after the PC's being given checks to realize the men were wounded and had recently seen combat.

The response of the party? "BS, we had these guys on our side! You just decided they were bandits to screw us! If they were bandits, they would have attacked on sight!"

And in some games, that would certainly be true, unfortunately.

Thinking about it, this may even be part of the problem as it currently exists (the "player culture", if you will). So many tales of bad GM's have been told online over the past two decades plus, that groups are always on the lookout for bad GMing, and it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I'd like to probe this a bit deeper. Did you guys just go to a stopping point and then switch, say "Okay Bob, you have 8 weeks until Jay takes over," or use some other method of switching? Also, what about things that one DM might have had in the works when the reigns were turned over? Did the old DM step back from things he would know or was that thread delayed until he got back into the chair?

I'm wondering if this could work with my group, where we have 3 DMs that all have different styles of running the game.

We didn't set things that firmly in place. Each GM ran as long as they wanted, usually a few weekly sessions. I think the first one was like 4 weeks, then I ran next which went 5 weeks, the next GM went for 2 weeks, followed by another at 8 (this is all to the best of my recollection). Then the one who ran last went for 6 sessions, and then after that went into Wild Beyond The Witchlight, which probably went another 6 to 8 weeks.

The agreement we made was that anything was open game. So if you ran something and there was some kind of thread dangling, you were not the owner of that... any other GM could pick that up and do whatever they'd like with it. The result of this is that there was far less "secret GM knowledge" steering events. No one was designing anything with those kinds of long term plans. That doesn't mean that there were no longstanding elements, though. As a new GM came on board, they could craft whatever they wanted from what was available.

This is what I meant by nothing was "precious" and there was no ownership of NPCs or anything like that. Honestly, it was a pretty good way to avoid having one primary source for how play goes. There was a lot about it I liked, which only made the eventual breakdown that much worse.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

On a theoretical level I could agree. And yet on a practical level that design philosophy has made 5e a very successful business venture. So i think there must be something to that kind of design.

Remember the problem of the complex object: "X is successful" does not mean "every single part of X is directly responsible for X being successful." It is entirely possible for a very successful thing to have very bad characteristics in it which are not bad enough to put it below its competition. 1e was a riotous success and included things like gender-based ability score caps, which (I hope) we all agree were not contributing to its success.

I'm just going to note, without going down the rabbit hole again that this requires that the primary cause of that success is the system design, which is not a self-evident truth.

That too. A designed thing can succeed for many reasons other than its design, and even if its design is a primary driver of its success, one cannot assume that that makes every individual part of that design a positive contribution.

It's more like an Elder Scrolls game. "Sure it's only 75% complete and the graphics are terrible, but don't worry, the modding community will fix it for us."

Oof. I would almost call that comparison too harsh, but yeah, you're not wrong.

I agree with that. Perhaps you are taking my use of ‘concern’ to be different.

If I might try to rephrase.
Players absolutely should have expectations about what their actions are likely to achieve. That’s a big part of playing the game. I am saying they shouldn’t be concerned when some action isn’t resolved to their expectations.

Why shouldn't they? This seems to be the "you should never stop trusting your DM, no matter what dubious calls they might make" position, simply phrased in a more upbeat way.

Or, to put it otherwise "As always [when running a table satisfying TTRPG]" seems more like the intent than "As always [when you're already in the process of eliminating this choice]".

Whereas I see it as exactly the reverse,1 the intent seems quite clearly the latter to me.

Basically, unless its a rare event, getting different results than you want without further information is the sort of thing that can progressively destroy the ability to make sensible decisions.

Indeed it is. This is yet another reason why I so heavily emphasize the need for players to be able to make informed decisions.

Is it really surprising that such (non) guidance leads to so many different interpretations? They're hedging their bets at every step.

More like taking all sides of every issue. You can't be wrong if you encompass every answer, even contradictory ones, right?

Does anyone ever actually play in one of these games where the players try absurd goals that make no sense in the setting? It comes up a lot in these discussions... the idea that the players need to be reined in or else they'll just go bananas. But the GMs can have absolute authority and handle it just fine, and any suggestion that their authority need not be absolute is met with skepticism and doubt.

Based on statements made here and elsewhere, @tetrasodium seems to. Haven't seen anyone else talk about it except in theory, AFAICT.

The argument that a critical piece of 5e GM advice is buried in the back of the book, under 'Modifying Classes' in a subheading 'Restricting Class Access' that opens with encouraging the GM to restrict class access, and then offers that advice in the clear context of the GM deciding to restrict class access... is somehow general advice is odd.

Yeah, definitely agree with you there.

I think it's more a function of the fair criticism that 5e books take a little too much institutional knowledge for granted, and assume certain practices are understood without needing to be mentioned. They can say "As always" because the general advice is just so obvious (/s). I'm not saying it's not a failing. I just think the text makes more sense in that context.

And my argument is very specifically that by relying on institutional knowledge, the books directly contribute to flawed application and a higher likelihood of problems...which is what I have been arguing for the entire time. That 5e is more prone to MMI than other editions in part because of how it is written, both in terms of rules and in terms of the context surrounding those rules.

And, again, I think that's not a bad thing for 5e. Clearly a successful strategy.

See above. "Complex thing X succeeded" does not entail "absolutely every individual part of complex thing X was indispensable to its success."

I absolutely agree that GMing advice in 5e is lacking and it often just assumes that the GM knows how to handle things. However, I don't consider "these are different ways you could approach this matter, and here are pros and cons of each" as bad advice; in a mass market game designed to appeal wide variety of people with different tastes that is perfectly sensible.

If that's what the book actually did more than a small sliver of the time, I would agree. But it doesn't. It's mostly "You can do X, or you can do not-X," or "you can do 100% Y, or 0% Y, or fall somewhere between."

That's why I said the game needed to be rewritten to emphasize the "toolkit" nature of its contents. To discuss, ideally with examples, the "pros and cons of each," as you say. I find 5e woefully inadequate at covering the "pros and cons" part, which neuters the benefits of the advice you describe.

That's where player/DM discussion is born. Once the group discusses it and it reaches resolution, everyone is going to have an explicitly clear view of that process and their expectations will align. The players aren't going to have to keep guessing and guessing about what needs to be done.

My problem is, I find lots of 5e DMs adamantly opposed to discussion. "My way or the highway" is both a literal phrase people have used, and a good gloss of how a LOT of 5e DMs describe their style. People who question their judgments or expect explanations of their rulings are apparently unwelcome at their tables! And they 100% believe that the books support them to the hilt on that.

You mean innovative for its time and kept alive by the active community?

Oblivion came out 2006, skyrim came out 2011. Regarded as highly competent for their time.

That's an incredibly rose-colored glasses view of both things. There were plenty of complaints about bugs in both games, and people straight up accusing Bethesda of abdicating their role as game-makers on the assumption that the community would fix it.

There were also more than a few people calling out the Bethesda fanboys for the widespread excuses they made for Skyrim's bugs while simultaneously criticizing Obsidian for (if anything) fewer and lesser bugs in Fallout: New Vegas. I played both games. I never ran into a game-breaking, story-blocking bug that never got an official patch in New Vegas. I got two in Skyrim. I was forced to install the Unofficial Skyrim Patch in order to continue the game.

Like others, I somewhat struggle to apply MMI to the Rustic Hospitality example specifically. Mismatched expectations, for sure. Not how I would have run it, I don't think. But, the player said what they wanted to do, the DM described the outcome of that action to a degree that they thought respected the text of the ability, and then described what they saw as the next salient world state for the players to act on.

I have already articulated the difference between overt and covert MMI.

Maximally overt, blatant MMI isn't used very much for exactly the same reasons that maximally overt, blatant railroading isn't used much. People can almost instantly identify it as a Bad Idea, and players will not put up with it for long, if they put up with it at all. Instead, it shifts to more subtle things. Prepping in advance to give a reason why a host of answers can't work (and quickly improvising moderately justified answers when the players inevitably propose something unexpected.) Saying yes, but then undercutting that answer by making the task so impossibly difficult that it's almost certain to fail (this one can even happen accidentally due to the "roll every round for Stealth" problem.) Saying yes, but then effectively (or sometimes actually) saying no by neutering the result or straight-up contradicting the rules thereof, e.g. several posters said it was okay for a DM to approve the use of charm person and then, despite the spell working, having the target physically attack the caster, even though that explicitly breaks the rules for the charmed condition.

Covert MMI is just as much an issue as overt MMI. It's just harder to spot because it reflects the DM learning that the technique is disliked, and instead of not using it, they learn to cover their tracks better.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

They want to feel their choices matter, their abilities matter, and they have agency. It doesn't take much to erode this trust.

While pretty much everything in this post is great, I wanted to draw this bit our specifically because it is so terribly important.

People frequently act like players should have near-invincible trust in their DM, that that trust should be extremely expensive, and that only the most openly and actively antagonistic actions should ever affect that trust.

None of that is true. Trust is always a fragile thing, and in an environment like 5e doubly so. Expansive trust takes a long time to build and only one unwise decision to break. Subtle signs and creeping suspicion are a much more common danger to trust, with blatant and undeniable breaches of trust being very rare in most cases.

Saying "well don't you trust me?" in response to someone expressing their concerns about trust makes the situation worse, often MUCH worse, not better.

 

[Maxperson]

My problem is, I find lots of 5e DMs adamantly opposed to discussion. "My way or the highway" is both a literal phrase people have used, and a good gloss of how a LOT of 5e DMs describe their style. People who question their judgments or expect explanations of their rulings are apparently unwelcome at their tables! And they 100% believe that the books support them to the hilt on that.

I don't know if it's a lot of DMs who are like that, but they are definitely out there. I've played with some, but fewer than back in the 1e/2e era. Fewer of them will kick people out just for questioning, but I've seen a few posters who have said that. Never encountered one of those in real life.

For the most part, though, I think DMs will talk with the players and work things out.

 

[Xamnam]

Covert MMI is just as much an issue as overt MMI. It's just harder to spot because it reflects the DM learning that the technique is disliked, and instead of not using it, they learn to cover their tracks better.

But this is supposing conscious malice. I disagree, based on the situation as told, that was at play, and neither of us can know for certain. To me, Rustic Hospitality was adjudicated in good faith by the DM, even if different people would reasonably rule it differently. It was the action after that, posting a watch, that I question the DM's adjudication on given the lack of apparent direct result. But I don't know the full details, and there could be an argument that makes sense to me there.

To my eye, unless there's a pattern/consistency that leads to a fracturing of trust between the two, it's very hard for me to assign that phrase, especially in a combative sense, to what can also be called an honest misunderstanding, or just a disagreement in adjudication over a vague ability text. Per Hawkeyefan:

Some other instances came up here and there under this GM, but relatively minor stuff; an obvious solution to an obstacle being very clearly favored and that kind of thing. Nothing too drastic.

 

[hawkeyefan]

When I see 5e players talking about the game world, it is discussed as the DM's responsibility. There's less a sense of the the DM "gets to" have authority over the world than the DM "has to" have authority over the world. They are also, per rules and play culture, responsible for entertaining the players, keeping them engaged, and centering the PCs. The DM, after all, is the only one who has to do "prep," keep notes for each PC and the world, arrange everything in the VTT, often even do the scheduling. Not only are the players uninterested in authority over the game world, but in some cases they will even pay a professional DM to take over the responsibility of creating/running the game world.

Yeah, I think this is relevant. @Maxperson also talks about players resisting some kind of shared authority. And I think that's true.

But do you think this expectation on the part of the players may have something to do with how things are described in the book? And how things have often worked for D&D in the past? I think this is a huge part of it.

Now, I think what players want is for their characters to no be arbitrarily and unnecessarily stymied, which in some cases could be seen as an expression of wanting authority over the world, but mostly is about the GM matching their content to the style of the players (that quoted section from the 5e dmg is entitled "knowing your players"). Other games say things like "be a fan of the PCs."

I don't think it has to be about the world, though. Or at least, not specifically so. The player wants to change the game state in some way, right? Anything they're attempting is an attempt to change what's going on in the fiction of the game world. From "I want to kill this gnoll" to "I want to convince this sheriff to let my friend go" and so on.

Now when the process of play about how they may do so is clear, and can be clearly followed, then players are less likely to feel stymied. Hence, combat being very clear cut, but then ability checks for exploration and social situations being less so. The feeling of being stymied is more likely in those situations when the process is less clearly defined. So many processes in 5E D&D amount to "the DM decides this" that when players feel stymied, it's largely because of the DM, and the DM may not even realize that's what's happening or how it seems to the players. They're not violating any rules or principles!

The potential problem with MMI for me is not the fact of a single authority but rather the arbitrariness and uncertainty that can come when that figure is not clear and consistent in relaying information to the players. In fact, the more the GM has a singular, consistent vision for their world, the less you get problems associated with MMI.

I agree with your first sentence here in that I think the GM should be consistent and should err on the side of abundance when wondering how much information to provide. I don't think that the players having some say about the world really causes conflict.

Like if you have a PC who's a cleric of the god of civilization.... let the player decide what kind of vestments they wear and what kind of rituals they perform and so on. Authority of this sort can be granted in specific ways and not just in some carte blanche manner that leads to conflicting ideas of whats going on in the game.

The lack of clarity could be about a particular situation, setting details the characters would/should know, or the theme of the game. Now, let's say you have 4 players, including GM; if you split that authority for the game world among the 4 players, now you have potentially 4 competing understandings about a situation/setting/theme. To make this work you need a game that has a very strongly focused theme and players who buy in to the premise and work together to realize it. Recently this came up for me playing John Harper's Lady Blackbird. If the players ask the gm "can I do x," the appropriate response would be, "I don't know, can you?" The only thought I expressed as GM up front is that I thought the game would work best if everyone played their characters very sincerely and with an eye toward what would make a good story.

Right, this is an example of a game that doesn't follow the same authority structure as 5E D&D. Would you say that Mother May I was a concern that occurred to you as GM of Lady Blackbird?

If so, in what way? If not, why not?