GMs: Guiding Morals in GMing

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm in a regular Dungeon World campaign and I would say it's 10% mechanics and 90% pure GM improve. Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't PbtA games set up that way on purpose?

I'm not too familiar with Burning Wheel, so can't really comment. Are you suggesting the GM can't deviate from the rules of BW?

I think you would profit from reading the Dungeon World game book. GMs are actually quite prescribed in what they are allowed to do. I mean, its an RPG, so the FICTION is open-ended, but the GM is required to present things in a way which accomplishes certain specific goals and use certain techniques. There are also GM 'moves' (although they are more like 'idea seeds' than 'rules' per se as they are very broad and don't directly engage any mechanics). The GM also has a pretty specific process for how they contribute fiction to the world outside of scene framing, that is how their prep is structured. I won't say 'improve' is an incorrect way of putting it exactly, as I'm not looking for terminological hair-splitting. Still, its not simply unstructured "90% of the time the GM can do any old thing they please" at all. Yet I will agree that the GM frames in most of the fictional details (90% perhaps).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Which makes sense, in that unless the module authors both provide pre-gen characters and expect you to use them (which, let's face it, wouldn't be a very popular option) they've no way of knowing how many or what type or which class(es) etc. of characters are going to be played in the module at any given table. Thus, the authors have no choice but to write the adventure neutrally, without regard for any one table's specific characters.

Can't blame the authors for this.

Yeah, that would bring us to the topic of @pemerton's thread about prep. I'd be hard pressed to see how you could create a 'module' for games like Dungeon World, there's simply not that much to write! I mean, someone could write a book of threats, fronts, etc. that might be handy, but nobody can ever say which will be useful to any specific group. Some degree of general setting can be more useful, like a town or a wilderness/campaign map can be perfectly usable with DW as long as it isn't TOO detailed. The Stonetop map and village are pretty good examples of course.

 

[Celebrim]

And yet the Dragonlance adventures are the VERY MODEL of a railroad. The world meta-plot is all in the hands of a bunch of NPCs and your characters are just picking up a few table scraps. What you do is irrelevant, and there are even several points where things kind of 'reset' such that the PCs cannot really derail or change anything significant at all. I mean, basically you get to figure out how to get some loot or not here and there, and how to die or not, here and there. Nothing else is at stake at all for the PCs, and nothing at all is at stake PERIOD in the greater campaign world of DL, as all of that is already carved in stone.

I think the problem is less the intention than the attempt to communicate a story line in which characters matter within the framework of a published adventure. The think about the DL modules is that they require an exceptional DM who is willing to let things go off the rails. I understand why it's impossible to present a branching path story in a published format with a limited page count. I don't think that proves that people weren't running character based stories at a very early stage using 1e AD&D. And lets remember, that even though the communication lacked something, Raistlin didn't exist as a character and his impact on the story was non-existent until a player brought that PC to life.

 

[Jahydin]

Lots of great responses and I appreciate it, but still absolutely confused why so many DMs are afraid of improvising during combat to improve the narrative; and so much so, its considered immoral? Do you really not trust yourselves to make the right decision, ever? From Gygax/Arneson to Perkins, I can't think of a single D&D author who recommend never breaking from the rules, so utterly confused where this mindset comes from.

Then I'm being told a system where 83% of the time during task resolution the DM just gets to make up what happens shows why improve during combat is bad? This system seems to be literally leaning in on what everyone is unhappy about...

I'll take a break from this thread to give it some time and think about what was said. In no way do I think I'm going to be swayed, but hopefully I can at least understand where people are coming from.

 

[Celebrim]

Lots of great responses and I appreciate it, but still absolutely confused why so many DMs are afraid of improvising during combat to improve the narrative; and so much so, its considered immoral? Do you really not trust yourselves to make the right decision, ever?

I've been doing this like 40 years now and I can confidently say that reflecting on the times when I fudged things, I made things worse more often than I made them better at least 2/3rds of the times. What typically happens is the PC's have a run of bad luck and you think, "Gee, this combat is going bad. I should put on the kid gloves", and then the luck swings the other way and the PC's trounce over the encounter without further difficulty. Or else, the NPCs are having a run of bad luck and you really think it's going to harm the drama and the BBEG is going to go down without a fight, so you fudge, and then the luck swings back the other way and suddenly you've got multiple PC's down and your facing down player deaths or TPK if you don't now fudge your fudging.

It doesn't really improve the narrative and the temptation to break the rules to improve the narrative is a really nasty temptation to greatly avoid. You really should be playing to find out what happens and not deciding what is going to happen because you like that story more. If you are frequently breaking the rules because you don't like the consequences, you should get different rules. It's better to question whether the rules really are providing the sort of game you want to have than to resort to illusionism.

On top of that, I've been a player who realized the GM was fudging and I got to tell you, it's not a good experience. If the GM fudged and that's how you won, it robs the victory of its savor. And if the GM fudged and that's why you lost a character or some other important resource, well that's a really hard thing to take.

So learn to play without doing it or do it as little as possible. Adopt rules that don't require it and which do deliver the game you want. Gain system mastery so that you have more control over how things are going to play out. Prepare for the situation more rigorously and carefully. And have realistic expectations that you can't always predict or control which fights will be the dramatic and difficult ones, but that whatever happens and whatever the story the players achieve is the story that is meant to happen and not the private fantasies you had ahead of time while preparing.

 

[niklinna]

Lots of great responses and I appreciate it, but still absolutely confused why so many DMs are afraid of improvising during combat to improve the narrative; and so much so, its considered immoral? Do you really not trust yourselves to make the right decision, ever? From Gygax/Arneson to Perkins, I can't think of a single D&D author who recommend never breaking from the rules, so utterly confused where this mindset comes from.

You keep using "DM". If you're really just mean Dungeons & Dragons GM, then I have no argument with you. D&D involves round-by-round combat with dice rolls to resolve every single individual little action.

But that kind of play, and that kind of fudging, are just not done in Apocalypse World and Blades in the Dark. They don't even have round-by-round combat. They don't even necessarily feature combat in any given session. Not fudging the dice in those games is a fundamental part of how those games work—you play to find out what happens, and when the dice say what happens, you do not override that. And so GMs of those games, I would say, trust themselves quite well to make the right decision, which as far as dice go, is to never override them. As @AbdulAlhazred said, if you haven't read Apocalypse World or Blades in the Dark, you might want to do that.

Then I'm being told a system where 83% of the time during task resolution the DM just gets to make up what happens shows why improve during combat is bad? This system seems to be literally leaning in on what everyone is unhappy about...

It's not about combat, with PbtA and FitD. Those systems are all about generating fiction on the fly. It's total improv between all participants, but that improv is generated from the dice rolls, and does not involve changing them.

 

[Jahydin]

@niklinna
When I say DM, I mean GM too since I think the principal applies to any TTRPG.

I think I see what you're saying, and would still disagree. In my DW games (as a player) there's been plenty of times where the GM takes my 2d6 roll into consideration, but for one reason or another decides not to lean in on the "something bad happens, but you still get your way" aspect. Also multiple times where rules have been ignored because they got in the way of the story being told.

I can't imagine the PbtA crowd being overly critical with this variety of "fudging" considering the easy-going nature of storytelling games, but could be wrong. Not my crowd after all.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think the problem is less the intention than the attempt to communicate a story line in which characters matter within the framework of a published adventure. The think about the DL modules is that they require an exceptional DM who is willing to let things go off the rails. I understand why it's impossible to present a branching path story in a published format with a limited page count. I don't think that proves that people weren't running character based stories at a very early stage using 1e AD&D. And lets remember, that even though the communication lacked something, Raistlin didn't exist as a character and his impact on the story was non-existent until a player brought that PC to life.

The problem, IMHO, is "The Impossible Thing Before Breakfast" (you can't make a story where one guy owns the character and another guy owns the setting and situation). 2e is the CLASSIC overall, and DL was the entree to that. You can talk all you want about story and players playing out the story of their characters, but you can't do it unless the situations respond to and arise out of the dramatic needs of the characters. You can do 2 things in D&D, assuming you play it in a way it seems intended to play. Either you can play a 'branching paths on a small scale' kind of thing, so its basically a lot of fairly equal paths, like a dungeon or an overland sandbox. Or you can play a more strictly linear thing with some degree of plot to it, but its basically a fixed plot that isn't particularly responsive to player/character. This was the problem even with games like V:tM, and it shows why Sorcerer and a few other games of that vintage are a direct response to that, and introduce a paradigm in which the choices made by the players actually govern the composition and fiction of the situations and setting.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Lots of great responses and I appreciate it, but still absolutely confused why so many DMs are afraid of improvising during combat to improve the narrative; and so much so, its considered immoral? Do you really not trust yourselves to make the right decision, ever? From Gygax/Arneson to Perkins, I can't think of a single D&D author who recommend never breaking from the rules, so utterly confused where this mindset comes from.

Then I'm being told a system where 83% of the time during task resolution the DM just gets to make up what happens shows why improve during combat is bad? This system seems to be literally leaning in on what everyone is unhappy about...

I'll take a break from this thread to give it some time and think about what was said. In no way do I think I'm going to be swayed, but hopefully I can at least understand where people are coming from.

Well, I'm totally consistent! I prefer to 'improv' basically almost everything (not 100%, I'd say 10% of the material I present in most games is prep). A player describes a character who desires wealth. What will you do for it? You're probably going to choose. I mean, it could be as crude as 'drop the bag of gold or let your friend drown', though it could be a bit more subtle than that...

 

[Celebrim]

The problem, IMHO, is "The Impossible Thing Before Breakfast" (you can't make a story where one guy owns the character and another guy owns the setting and situation).

You can, you just can't document it. You can have an entirely character driven story in with a GM that utterly owns the setting, but the problem is you can't document it and communicate it to another GM. So it can never show up in a module the way it plays out in play, because you're dealing with just too many branching paths. You can if you have an intelligent GM have infinitely many branching paths.

Now, the real impossible thing to do is to have totally character driven stories with more than one player and no coordination between the players. I learned that lesson the hard way. I ran several games where the players each started playing out their story and they didn't metagame and as a result there was never a party, just different characters living their separate lives. I even ran a game for my younger brother and his friends where after a few hours the two groups had allied with different rival organizations, one a group of slavers that kidnapped the love interest of a player in the other group. I never got a chance to play that out but it basically had become two different campaigns from either side of the fence of choices.

But there is no way to record and transmit how to do that in an "adventure". I'm not even particularly happy with the typical attempts to record that through a sand box, because even if you don't have a linear story in mind you still need to have the current state of the NPC's motivations and at least a couple of their future "moves" so that you know what the fronts are trying to do and how that will intersect and interact with the motivations of the PCs.

None of this depends on the system. Yes, if you really want to do character driven it helps to not be too lethal, but lethality is a product of system mastery and choice. And something like 2e really survivable after the first few levels if you aren't trying to push for lethality and challenge as the primary aesthetic. High level AD&D characters have massive amounts of hits points relative to the monsters they encounter, no crits to worry about, and as long as you don't hit them with save or die too often, they are really hard to kill. All you really do is feed the players challenges that are a couple levels below what you'd do in a more challenge-oriented game.