GMs: Guiding Morals in GMing

[Micah Sweet]

@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.

See, to me how the player's choices interact with the rules  is the story being told. You don't decide the narrative in advance and nudge it along in my games. You let it play out, for good or ill, and you admit your mistakes when they occur and try to do better next time. That goes for GMs and players.

 

[SteveC]

My guiding principle is that we all have limited time to game with, and busy lives that make gaming something we have to actively choose to do over other things, so let's make the best use of our time and maximize the fun parts. That might seem obvious, but in practice it does have real effects and informs how I run a game as well as what I'm looking for in a game I play in.

I'm an almost "forever GM" so when I play I am very aware when the GM gives us plot hooks and I'm all-in to explore them right away. The problem comes when the GM doesn't give those hooks or makes it difficult to get them. Most of the time that's done with a desire to give the group more agency and less rail-roady, but in practice it can just end up being a game of "find the plot hook!" and "find the fun."

I know that the sentiment of D&D as "15 minutes of fun in a four hour session" is largely hyperbole but it does reflect what can be an underlying problem for me. If I have to spend a significant portion of the session tracking down what to do, it's not a game I want to be in. For my players, I've found that about 15 minutes is the limit for engaging with things they're not interested in. Some players love roleplaying chatter, some love purchasing or planning ... but you have to read the group and keep them engaged.

Now I have a lot of other principles too, but most of them were already mentioned, so I thought I'd mention something that hasn't seen a lot of discussion.

 

[Jolly Ruby]

The problem comes when the GM doesn't give those hooks or makes it difficult to get them. Most of the time that's done with a desire to give the group more agency and less rail-roady, but in practice it can just end up being a game of "find the plot hook!" and "find the fun."

The solution I find for this problem is doing the opposite: giving plot hooks like candy. You can't have real agency without information, and plot hooks are nothing more than information about things you can do in the game world.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This isn't right. Normally, people follow rules. There was earlier a discussion on whether folk treat rules as guidelines or laws. It's on surface reasonable to say then, that some people normally treat rules as either guidelines or laws. I refer back to my note that folk often start out by denying that such 'meta-norms' exist.


As all rules in TTRPG are interpreted, the on surface simple distinction between RAW and RAI is not so simple. As you say, what might count as the "proper rules" is something recognised by a sample of people who have agreed on an interpretation. As you're defining it then, normative has local application... but what comes to bring that sample of people to all agree? What happens if whatever that is, is passed on to others? Wouldn't they then be foreseen to come into agreement with the sample?


With one eyebrow raised, one might ask the very same thing of this statement. To expand on what I was saying, I occasionally read discussion that envisions that what the designer puts in "plain language" has the same meaning and weight to all readers. Debate on these boards are testimony to how very much any appeal to plain language stands on shaky ground.

In other threads, some very good reasons have been given for following the rules and accepting constraints. Those have almost always been framed in terms of principles that when upheld produce a (for the given advocates) preferred kind of play. They're absolutely fundamental.

I don't think anything here actually addressed the sense of my comment. The fact that different people do or do not interpret rules the same may indeed be a criteria for evaluating whether they are meaningfully normative, but the cutoff reasonably needs to be something like at least a plurality of players have a consistent interpretation and orientation. There's always someone who won't agree.

 

[soviet]

I don't think anything here actually addressed the sense of my comment. The fact that different people do or do not interpret rules the same may indeed be a criteria for evaluating whether they are meaningfully normative, but the cutoff reasonably needs to be something like at least a plurality of players have a consistent interpretation and orientation. There's always someone who won't agree.

NO THERE ISN'T!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I did say it wasn't necessarily planning the course of what would happen. I didn't say it couldn't be. I haven't made those sorts of detailed plans as a GM in decades. I just need to know what the situation is. I never decide what the situation will become as the PCs interact with it.

It's really not that slippery a slope. Just don't plan what will be. Plan what is and what might be. Internalize the situation the PCs are in and respond. If you know how the players are playing their PCs then anticipating their actions seems like a way to focus prep but only if you're willing to admit being wrong and let that prep lie fallow.

Well in the games you mention much of what will happen as the PCs set out to kill Count Evil will be shaped by the extent to which their dice rolls tell the GM to add new looming threats or activate existing ones. Or tick on threat clocks. In principle as I understand those games the results of at least filling a threat clock should be knowable to the players. Whatever the outcome is of killing Count Evil the timing of how it affects play is not much in the GM's hands. Blades in the Dark does recommend that GMs have ideas for possible consequences and suchlike but it also recommends GMs keep in mind those are just possibilities.

Yeah, DW style prep is generally OK, and you could do it in trad games too, where it's a lot like a sandbox. The GM is likely to steer towards it, and those games lack PbtA-like principles. So it does work if you have figured that out. The best solution IMHO will always be a game with deliberate narrative design for best results with low myth.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Other than formalists, of course. I go by what I read in games studies papers and forums discussing games. Often I read folk talking about a game as if there is a right way to play and other ways don't count as playing the game (the formalist position, essentially.) They often also seem to fail to notice the benefits of considering incorrect or abnormal ways to play.

It's true that there has been an increasingly strong voice given to the view that there are multiple "right" ways to play TTRPGs. Formalist positions seem more common in relation to the rules of sports. Perhaps because of the stakes involved.


In discussion on rules and meaning there's certainly a notion that it ought to be possible to not follow the rule, but what of constitutive rules?

Constitutive rules are necessitated in order to constitute the activity, not because there are choices as to conduct. Without the rule, there would be no conduct that counted as the constituted activity.


What counts then as incorrect play, if anything? It's so far been suggested that it is where norms prevail in a group and a participant transgresses those norms. Based on their prevailing norms, the group sees what the constituted activity ought to look like. When they see something that does not look like that, they call it incorrect.

For a constitutive rule - where the activity did not preexist the rule - how did anyone know the proper way? I think they base it on how they have followed previous rules, and the designer's advice if any.

From there, it can become hard for them to see that incorrect play is not always a case of the transgressor seeing their "proper" way to play the rule, and playing it improperly. What they call incorrect play includes the case where their supposed transgressor sees a different proper way to play the rule, and plays it - that way - properly. This is what I was getting at. The implications are useful, for example both aspects (norms to rely on, rule novation) facilitate game design.

Seems like the parsimonious way to say this is just that well-written and well-designed games reliably convey their actual rules, either explicitly or implicitly. In such a case norms are likely to be consistent. I believe that is what EGG was addressing way back in '78 in the DMG intro.

 

[Lanefan]

The fact that different people do or do not interpret rules the same may indeed be a criteria for evaluating whether they are meaningfully normative,

And is certainly a criteria for evaluating whether they are well written.

A well-written rule doesn't leave room for interpretation, and (ideally) at the same time doesn't read like legal text.

 

[Gorgon Zee]

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.

As a counterpoint, I have been improvising during combat regularly for several decades and cannot think of a time where it hasn't worked out for the better or at least not made much difference.

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.

Well, most of the time I change the encounter parameters or add new features (my usual way of improvising / fudging) not to determine the outcome, but to determine HOW we get to the outcome. So I do quite often add or remove monsters, add or ignore their powers, or add or ignore terrain and effects to make an encounter more fun. Sometimes fun is just not spending 10 more minutes defeating surprisingly tanky enemies, sometimes it's upping mooks' hitpoints because they were not up the standard of the main enemies, sometimes it's having enemies run away because everyone is yawning and it's time to wrap up. Sometimes it's keeping the enemy alive for a turn to let their nemesis have a chance at delivering the KO blow.

Many times it has been when playing with kids and not injuring their animal companions.

For me, the "typical" case is not "the PC's have a run of bad luck"; it's "I, the GM didn't get the encounter pre-planned quite right". Even though I am a good GM, I will make mistakes often enough, and admitting those mistakes and fixing them is, for me, the most common reason I modify and encounter in-flight. I'd estimate about 75% of the time it's to increase the difficulty, and I don't recall a time I've been unhappy with my decision.

It doesn't really improve the narrative

That's kind of an odd assertion -- I think the reason everyone does this is to try an improve the narrative. Earlier you said that it made your stories better 33% of the time. for me, it's virtually always made things better -- saved boring time, added fun elements, allowed a hero to meet their nemesis -- good times!

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.

I think you are focusing on changing the outcome of a combat; the strawman here is the thought that people who adapt encounters mid-flow are railroading GMs who want their version of the story to occur, no matter what. But that's a rarity. Most of the time we don't want to modify it to enforce an outcome (I certainly never have done so and based on comments, others rarely do), we do it to make the encounter itself more fun.

Even when we adjust the degree of challenge, it's not to enforce an outcome, but to make the challenge closer to how we had envisaged it. So when I "fudge" and encounter to make it harder, it's not because I want to change the outcome and have the players lose, it's to make the encounter closer to the fun that I was trying to design into it.

For me, this activity of ours is about having fun. That is the primary goal. Saying that you will not modify an encounter mid-flow to make the game more fun for people contradicts that goal. Now maybe when you do make these adjustments it doesn't work out for you, and so you don't do it. Fair enough, not everyone is good at all aspects of GMing. But if you could modify encounters so that everyone has more fun, and you choose not to, then it's you deciding that your principle is more important than your players' fun. And for me, there are very few times that can be the case for any principle I use in GMing.

 

[soviet]

I disagree that it is more fun for every combat to be stage managed into a medium length scene that the players narrowly win.

Unexpectedly quick victories due to good fortune or good planning are fun. Unexpectedly tough fights and losing occasionally are fun. Rolling dice out in the open so that everyone is in suspense of the outcome is fun.