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

[FrogReaver]

Seems reasonable.

Main problem is, DMs will freak out and tell you you're trying to kowtow to player entitlement and box them in if you give any systematic improvement,

IMO, how their actions are described here is a bigger problem.

Ex: 'freak out' / 'kowtow' - IMO that's not a constructive way of addressing their legitimate concerns.

and any unsystematic effort won't actually address the issue.

I'm not sure this is true. IMO, suggestions and examples go a long way.

 

[hawkeyefan]

If the Noble background is relative to region/culture, is the same true of the CHA stat and associated skills like Persuasion? If not, why not? Are the stat and skill magical? Or is there some other explanation?

This is very relevant. If we take away the Position of Privilege ability, I imagine many of us would resort to Ability Checks to resolve scenes. I also imagine that many of us… assuming the lack of specific fiction that would tell us otherwise… would expect such Checks to have a chance of success.

The Position of Privilege basically just removes the need for a roll.

 

[Maxperson]

That it’s possible is all that’s needed.

All that's needed for what. Being possible doesn't make it happen. When I say possible, it fully depends on the fiction. In an actual game it may not be possible at that point, or it might. There's no way for me to know that in a white room discussion.

What’s the distinction you’re making here between fictional circumstances and fictional consistency?

The circumstances dictate what is consistent with the fiction and what is not.

The truth about what? Why would there be no leverage to gain? Treating people well can be rewarded… alliances can be formed that way. People can be obliged to return the favor.

What can an alliance with a minor noble from the other side of the world gain him? It's too far away for anything meaningful to come out of it.

Of course there could be. Perhaps my fellows will look down on me for not treating this foreigner with proper respect. Perhaps my house will gain a poor reputation in those nations with which we do engage in diplomacy. Perhaps another noble will wind up assisting him and gain some unforeseen benefit.

Perhaps in this country helping a foreign noble makes you untrustworthy and your fellows will destroy you and your house for it, so to see him is suicide. Perhaps you will only be assassinated by your the lord you swear fealty to because he thinks you are plotting to betray him and you want to live, so you turn the foreigner away. Perhaps helping nobles from another country is viewed as weakness so you cannot afford to see him.

Again, it doesn’t take a lot if work to come up with answers to the question “why would this work?” It certainly doesn’t seem like significantly more effort than to come up with reasons it wouldn’t.

The circumstances and the fiction will determine yes, no or maybe.

There are a lot of assumptions in here, all made with the goal of shutting down a player idea.

Wrong. I have no goal of shutting the players ideas down. Ever. It has not happened in 37 years of DMing and won't if I DM for another 37.

It seems I was unclear. Yes, fire immunity is a defined trait that affects fire damage in a clear way in the game.

What similarly clear rule would you jnvoke to have a noble NPC resist the use of Position of Privilege?

The DM decides if the outcome is in doubt generating a roll, an automatic yes or impossible.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

IMO, how their actions are described here is a bigger problem.

Ex: 'freak out' / 'kowtow' - IMO that's not a constructive way of addressing their legitimate concerns.

I mean, we've seen it in this very thread, people throwing around some rather over-the-top responses, explicitly calling out "player entitlement" as an insidious force needing to be opposed. How else am I supposed to take it? I haven't been given reason to think the concerns are legitimate.

I'm not sure this is true. IMO, suggestions and examples go a long way.

Given one of my complaints has been, more than once, that DMs treating the rules as merely suggestions is to blame for a significant chunk of MMI stuff, that's not exactly encouraging.

 

[AnotherGuy]

I already quoted, upthread, the text of the Hermit background feature which tells the player to work with their GM to establish the details and implications of that feature. So 5e D&D in its core rules rejects the proposition that the GM should enjoy sole authority over setting. Clearly some people don't follow the rules of 5e D&D in that respect. Of course that's their prerogative to do so.

Why do you suppose the player has to work with the GM to establish details and implications of his own character's feature? Why can he not just establish those details alone, like he does with a spell?

EDIT: Furthermore @Ovinomancer, later @Ovi, appears to disagree with your assessment of 5e specifically about the core rules rejecting the GM having sole authority given the below excerpts from 2 of his posts in this thread. Not having played 5e yourself, do you still maintain that some people don't follow the rules in this regard or do you disagree in that respect with your fellow poster Ovinomancer? I should also remind you that you XP'd the latter post, although there is a chance it wasn't for the excerpt specifically.

5e is strongly MMI, as intentionally designed. You can drift it otherwise, but you have a lot of work in front of you to do so. I say intentionally designed because by putting the game so much in the GM's hands you actually open the game up to a much more broad appeal to the various different flavors of Trad and some Neo-trad play -- cultures 5e is squarely aimed at.

I mean, you should probably recall that I 100% state that when I run 5e there's a lot of MMI involved. Has to be, the system is pretty much built that you can't avoid it. It's endemic in the core play loop.

 

[clearstream]

That’s too collaborative for many.

I think it's not a constant. Sometimes an individual wants collaborative. Other times they do not. When they don't, then different principles will apply.

If the Noble background is relative to region/culture, is the same true of the CHA stat and associated skills like Persuasion? If not, why not? Are the stat and skill magical? Or is there some other explanation?

That's a fantastic question, with many, many ways to answer. Already proposed are interpretations that should lead one to say that Noble is a supernatural ability.

Another group might answer simply, no, they're different. They may choose to not articulate why. Or they may say that features - minor perks - are different from ability scores - fundamental system parameters... in their eyes.

That is, I think readers give different parts of the game text different weights, and that this can cause pretty large differences in how they apply each part. I recall a debate in which one poster regarded a part of the game text characterised in the text as a "guideline" as having the same weight as other parts that to me seemed more strongly like rules. Another debate in which one poster believed a list of examples to be limiting - giving them a decisive weight - when to me most of the lists of examples in the game text seem more reasonably read as implying without limitation.

 

[AnotherGuy]

Its a big assumption that the GM being the creator of the setting makes him an expert about it.

What I mean by that is that GM's often make decisions about how a setting they're making and the way that should work out based on their understanding of real-world historical parallels. The problem with that is its not at all uncommon for people's understanding of such things to be to one degree or another, in error.

Now, of course, there's no assurance that a player understands the matter at hand any better than the GM. But it doesn't take many repeats of a GM saying with assurance that "just like historical situation X, things work like this here" that they have some reason to question before they start to take such statements with more than just a grain of salt.

So the problem with the basis of GM control being expertise is not exactly unquestioned, and I'd suspect in most cases the acceptance of that authority has only passing connection with that.

My players rely on me for the setting and thus defer to me. They can of course make objections or offer suggestions in the moment and I consider them and rule accordingly.
When it comes to a specific field of study, technology, science and the like - I do not take lead in that and rather that question is answered by the table. We look at what the rules say and we predominantly reach a consensus of how it would work in the game world.
Although we are a pretty homogenous group - I honestly do not think our play style is unique.

Just yesterday the player of the cleric used his 10th level Divine Intervention ability to please his deity for an Earthquake as per the spell. He made a passing comment (as a joke really) of using his Inspiration. I thought the scene was thematic and dramatic enough and I liked the idea of using Inspiration. Not giving it much thought at all I offered to double his percentage for the ability. One of the other players made the comment that the ruling was generous and so I asked the table what they recommended. A player suggested rolling the percentile dice twice which I preferred to my ruling, so that is what we went with in the end.

What I'm getting at, is that many of us post here how things are black and white and they are but often at the table there is much gray.

 

[Maxperson]

Why do you suppose the player has to work with the GM to establish details and implications of his own character's feature? Why can he not just establish those details alone, like he does with a spell?

Exactly. If the player had any control at all over the setting, he wouldn't need to work with the DM. He would simply implement them. The player can only get control over the setting if the DM invokes the optional rules for it(plot points, etc) or cedes some authority via a house rule.

 

[Maxperson]

I think it's not a constant. Sometimes an individual wants collaborative. Other times they do not. When they don't, then different principles will apply.


That's a fantastic question, with many, many ways to answer. Already proposed are interpretations that should lead one to say that Noble is a supernatural ability.

The problem with the noble ability being a supernatural ability is that it automatically makes deception and persuasion supernatural abilities as well, since people with those skills can impersonate nobles, fooling the supernatural noble background power. And since everyone has both of those skills, everyone is supernatural!!

Except not. Neither those skills nor the background ability are supernatural. It's certainly a house rule a table can enact, but it's not the default.

 

[clearstream]

Personally I don't see it.

In Free Kriegspiel, there is a shared goal, in a teaching/training context, of doing a thing well. An expert in that thing helps with the teaching. In some ways it's like when I judge a moot, and I use my knowledge of law and legal argument to pretend to be a judge and put the student advocates on the spot.

The students can get better by going off and studying more law and more advocacy. And I'm a better moot judge now than I was fifteen years ago because I've had more experience and training of my own.

Likewise, the junior Prussian officers can go off and study more, speak to other more experienced soldiers about their experiences, etc; and then they will do better at Kriegspiel.

Both the wargaming and the mooting can work like this because there is an external reference for adequacy: the real worlds, respectively, of warfare and of legal practice.

In the D&D case, what is the GM an expert in? What is the external reference that establishes criteria of adequacy? How does the GM know better than the players what will happen if you strike a bronze statute with a war hammer, or if you try to seek an audience with a noble, or if you prey to Corellon in Orcish?

All we really have is the assertion that the GM should enjoy authority over these things. Cloaking it in the language of expertise is just misleading.

Suppose a group are using the Forgotten Realms, and a DM has an unusually high-level of mastery of realms lore and express mechanics and norms of interpretation and application governing imagined events. This would be to say that the external reference is that thousands of pages of realms lore, thousands of pages of express mechanics, and thousands of hours of interpretation and application. The latter in particular has sometimes been cited as cause to concede expertise.

I already quoted, upthread, the text of the Hermit background feature which tells the player to work with their GM to establish the details and implications of that feature. So 5e D&D in its core rules rejects the proposition that the GM should enjoy sole authority over setting. Clearly some people don't follow the rules of 5e D&D in that respect. Of course that's their prerogative to do so. But the notion of expertise, which does a lot of work in the context of Free Kriegspiel, does none in this case. Its authority over the fiction that is at issue.

The above said, I agree that D&D and FK are modally different. What do you think of this game text addressed to the DM in DMG 9:

"In creating your campaign world, it helps to start with the core assumptions and consider how your setting might change them. The subsequent sections of this chapter address each element and give details on how to flesh out your world with gods, factions, and so forth.
The assumptions sketched out above aren't carved in stone. They inspire exciting D&D worlds full of adventure, but they're not the only set of assumptions that can do so. You can build an interesting campaign concept by altering one or more of those core assumptions, just as well-established D&D worlds have done. Ask yourself, "What if the standard assumptions weren't true in my world?"