D&D General How much control do DMs need?

[Clint_L]

@soviet I played Warhammer for a long time (yes, was talking about FB and 40k, though I also played the RPG, but that is a different thing) and remain a miniatures and terrain enthusiast, so I certainly intended no disrespect! I think we are in agreement, actually: there is a huge amount of player creativity happening, but not at a game design level, unless you are building your own variant game. Player creativity comes in at the execution level, whether it is in your narratives, builds, painting, army composition, strategy, etc. But it's all optional.

I don't know that I would say that all the rules in D&D are what free up DMs to make more story, I think it is that, as @loverdrive has argued, that freedom is a precondition of the game itself - it is empty design space that it is assumed the DM (mostly) will fill, with fairly minimal guidance as compared to a game like Monsterhearts or Fiasco. Those games are significantly more prescriptive about story beats.

I don't know the answer to your final questions; no one does. Like you, I have speculated that D&D's success might be due to the fact that it colonized brains first, it might be due to the fact that it has particular addictive properties, or that it might be due to the fact that in dovetails with powerful cultural structures. @loverdrive suggested marketing. @Oofta, above, points to the crunchiness of the game itself, which it gets from all those thousands of pages of rules to which you allude. Likely a combination of those things, and more besides. Would Traveller have become the default had it come first? Maybe, though I think the limited progression would have hampered its addictiveness. Runequest? More likely than Traveller, IMO, though again I don't think it hits the reward schedule parts of the brain as hard as D&D does, by design.

 

[loverdrive]

I think the issue at hand is in the "should have".

There is a big business out there in selling hobby kits to people. If they're selling a mechanical wristwatch, they "should" assemble it for you! Unless, of course, part of the point is for the customer to enjoy the act of assembly, and the feeling of pride they can get from having assembled it themselves when they wear it.

I don't feel like WotC position D&D as a "hobby kit" or a "game engine". They seem to market is as a game ready to be played, when it obviously isn't. D&D players certainly don't seem to view their babies as entities of their own, independent of D&D.

I wanted to go with Unity as an analogy, but I guess it's too abstract, so I'll go with FPS Creator, which is, like the title would suggest, an FPS game creation suite. It comes prepackaged with a bunch of characters, guns, wall textures, props, etc. A decade or so ago, I was active on a forum dedicated to it, and the way people talked about their creations was drastically different from the way DMs talk about their campaigns.

In a similar manner to DMing guides, there were discussions and guides on level design, balancing and also more FPS Creator-specific things, but they were coming from the place of game creation rather than game playing. No one was under the illusion that they were playing anything. The thing was called FPS Creator, not FPS Game Ready To Be Played, after all.

 

[Oofta]

I don't feel like WotC position D&D as a "hobby kit" or a "game engine". They seem to market is as a game ready to be played, when it obviously isn't. D&D players certainly don't seem to view their babies as entities of their own, independent of D&D.

Millions of people seem to disagree. If the game wasn't ready to be played it wouldn't be the most successful TTRPG ever published. If you're just starting to play and want additional help, they also provide starter kits like LMoP which you can download for free.

They made a conscious decision to leave a lot of flexibility in it's implementation up to the group playing which was a different direction than the previous couple of editions had gone. While there are many reasons for 5E's success, I think that direction is part of the reason. It certainly didn't hurt, even if you don't personally care for it.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That raises an interesting thought. One could see PbtA moves as regulatory rules on the premise that the preexisting activity is the conversation, and the job of the rule is to regulate the conversation (just as red lights regulate the preexisting activity of driving a car.) The constitutive rules of PbtA games are then things like Harm and Healing, which establishes a system of hit points and damage that moves can regulate. Hack and Slash then indeed does bind that to the fiction in a quantitative way, e.g. doing your damage and choosing to do +1d6 damage. Low hit point quanta are used in order to ensure that change to hit points has clear fictional impact.

Other kinds of rules include guidelines, meaning "do something like this" as opposed to "do this", and principles, which are about what we ought to do. There is a subtle distinction between narrow and wide scope principles, which comes down to whether we feel one "ought to prefer Y and do X", or "if one prefers Y, one ought to do X". It might be that when folk speak about principles as preferences, that's actually what they have in mind. I mention these because a game text like DW is replete with guidelines and principles.

I mention the above to say that I do not believe DW can work if all you have is generic "move" and 6-, 7+, 10+. Unless you assume that to imply the principle of giving momentum to the fiction? Which to enact requires additional text. Thus, coming back to your comment, PbtA moves end up being constitutive, but only because they are not generic.

My view on things like hit points in DW or AW harm is that it's a useful mechanism for helping to translate 'what you did had some fictional consequence' into more fiction, like "and you are now standing at Death's Door". Now, this is also true in D&D, but it is far less unusual to say in DW "the giant fell on you, DD failed, you're just plain dead!" than it would be in 5e. Much like early D&D, things like HP are just a tool, not an iron rule.

I think the rules of DW which constitute it as a game are the designation of GM and player roles, the definition of the game as a conversation about a fiction, and what that's about (PCs, fantastic world, magic, heroes, adventure). Then comes the move structure, including the use of dice, and finally specific moves, playbooks, etc.

You CAN play without specific move rules! Player declares action, rolls dice, results are described by either GM or player, possibly with complications, and so on. A lot more will fall to the participants to nail down, but it is a functional process that can actually be practiced! I would totally agree that moves, harm, etc are really valuable additions you don't want to go without, but you CAN.

 

[niklinna]

First, thank you to everyone who has and continues to contribute to this thread. I know that everyone does so for their own reasons, and am not so narcissistic as to think that I, a stranger on the internet, have much if anything to do with why you made that choice. Still, I feel like I have been given a gift of your knowledge and ideas, and I am grateful.

@loverdrive and @pemerton, you have been very patient in explaining your thoughts and I fear that I have been a bit thick at times. I do now think that I have wrapped my head sufficiently around your ideas to have more useful points to add. In particular, this has become a discussion about authorship. It seems to me that a game such as Monsterhearts reserves significant authorship to the designer, even if the execution is in the hands of the GM and players. A game such as D&D or even Dread gives much more authorial agency to the GM. A game such as Warhammer gives all authorship to the designer, really (you can make up whatever story about why you are fighting that you want, but it has no effect on the game).

This leads me to a couple of observations: first, that this might explain some of the popularity of D&D-style RPGs (another big part I think comes from hard-wired mechanisms that @Snarf Zagyg has been exploring). D&D quite literally intended for the DM to take the role of a benevolent God. It, in effect, reenacts the central patriarchal assumption at the heart of Western culture (I write this not as a criticism, but as an observation). This makes sense, considering its origins with a bunch of mid-Western dudes, and with its chief codifier, Gygax, being a practicing, proselytizing Jehovah's Witness at the time that he was writing the game. These were folks very comfortable with the notion of the hand of a benevolent God in all things.

So when we become the Dungeon Master, we are in effect taking on a role that we have been culturally trained to understand and to covet. I would go further and state that storytelling is a defining trait of humanity, so we want to do it anyway, but the Judeo-Christian model gives us a particular formula for how to execute the job. Gygax himself starts the introduction to the AD&D DM's Guide by speculating on whether the job is art or science (he correctly leans towards art), and he often uses religious language to describe the job (i.e. the DM is the "creator and ultimate authority" of their world, even if somewhat limited by the "mutable" rules of the game). So these sorts of games lean into a worldview that, I argue, we are heavily conditioned to accept, and offer DM's a taste of godlike power. That seems pretty attractive; I get why people keep doing it, despite the "countless hours" (Gygax again) that DMs are expected to put into doing their own design work.

RPGs where the hand of the designer is heavy offer less of this heady attraction - to play you have to buy in pretty heavily to someone else's original design intent, and then work with the players to find your own voices while exploring within those parameters. The Yoko Ono performance art piece is a fascinating example of this approach. Indeed, it seems to me that these games can more properly be considered art in themselves, whereas a D&D-style game is more like loose rules to apply to your own art. As @clearstream observes, this does not necessarily make one approach better than the other; as @loverdrive points out, this means that if your PbtA-style game is great you can largely thank the designer, while if your D&D game is great you should thank your DM.

I think Warhammer is really a distinct style of game that is basically just a complicated boardgame; the attraction there is in taking fixed rules and pitting your problem-solving skills against those of another human being - essentially more complicated chess.

@Oofta I get it, and in addition to expressing my gratitude to everyone who has contributed, including you, I express my apologies to those who find this kind of discussion a bit off the deep end, and I am sorry that you have found yourself misrepresented. I heartily agree with your core premise: that ultimately, these are subjective questions of taste. My brain is such that I am quite fascinated by trying to figure out how things work, but in the end, the fact that they do is what matters.

I'm really enjoying this thread, thanks for starting it, and for being open to the fairly radical views some are expressing. One key insight of yours was a bit revelatory but in a way I probably need to explain:

@loverdrive and @pemerton, you have been very patient in explaining your thoughts and I fear that I have been a bit thick at times. I do now think that I have wrapped my head sufficiently around your ideas to have more useful points to add. In particular, this has become a discussion about authorship. It seems to me that a game such as Monsterhearts reserves significant authorship to the designer, even if the execution is in the hands of the GM and players. A game such as D&D or even Dread gives much more authorial agency to the GM. A game such as Warhammer gives all authorship to the designer, really (you can make up whatever story about why you are fighting that you want, but it has no effect on the game).

Authorship and narrative/authorial agency are things that come up fairly often in such discussions, but the way you put it right here made me realize there's a difference between "authorship", the abstract process by which one authors—and "authoring", the actual doing of the job. The designer of Monsterhearts (or Yoko Ono) has established the process by which we will craft our experience/story, but it remains us who actually do craft it. Now "authorship" has, I expect, usually been meant for both, but something in your phrasing and its context caused me to differentiate these two. Maybe there are better terms for the distinct parts, but it's the distinction that matters to me in the moment. We can argue about terminology if you want!

Edit: Fixed a typo.

 

[Clint_L]

I don't feel like WotC position D&D as a "hobby kit" or a "game engine". They seem to market is as a game ready to be played, when it obviously isn't. D&D players certainly don't seem to view their babies as entities of their own, independent of D&D.

I agree with you, but this is not necessarily contrary to @Umbran's point. I don't think that Gygax knew exactly what D&D was, at a theoretical level, even though he later spent quite a lot of time writing about it, and I think this ambiguity remains in the game to this day. In fact, I think much of the history of D&D the game is of designers and players (who are as you point out de facto designers) trying to nail down what it is. So I don't think their marketing is intentionally misleading, I think it comes down to different perspectives on what the game even is.

I once referred to it as a kind of half-assed game design, but I don't see this as necessarily a criticism. I just mean that its design is somewhat accidental and the incompleteness that it depends upon was originally just assumed as a necessity rather than an active design choice. There is obviously something in it that works really well to attract a lot of people, and although I do think there is something to the power of being first, marketing, etc., I also don't want to diminish the role of choice in the game's popularity. My default position is that most people are rational agents, so I tend to agree with @Oofta that the simple fact of the game's tenacious popularity suggests that it is doing something right.

 

[Enrahim2]

I don't feel like WotC position D&D as a "hobby kit" or a "game engine". They seem to market is as a game ready to be played, when it obviously isn't. D&D players certainly don't seem to view their babies as entities of their own, independent of D&D.

I wanted to go with Unity as an analogy, but I guess it's too abstract, so I'll go with FPS Creator, which is, like the title would suggest, an FPS game creation suite. It comes prepackaged with a bunch of characters, guns, wall textures, props, etc. A decade or so ago, I was active on a forum dedicated to it, and the way people talked about their creations was drastically different from the way DMs talk about their campaigns.

In a similar manner to DMing guides, there were discussions and guides on level design, balancing and also more FPS Creator-specific things, but they were coming from the place of game creation rather than game playing. No one was under the illusion that they were playing anything. The thing was called FPS Creator, not FPS Game Ready To Be Played, after all.

I am so happy you brought this up just now, as reading over the posts since last I logged in I realise that this is indeed what appear to be the key. I would say D&D is and positions itself as a game engine, but not Unity. They position themselves as RPGMaker. RPGMaker is a hugely popular computer game creation software that comes with a ton of assets, basic setup for easily creating various standard battle styles, control schemes etc. Someone without any programming skill can quite easily make a decent old school jrpg with it, and there are hundreds of enthusiasts that have.

Noone would claim that RPGMaker is a game, but the effort that is needed to make a game out of it is magnitudes easier than to do it using Unity. Unity would be more like PoTA as a concept - it requires more effort to make a game out of it, and hence it typically are done by more serious designers and developers. However the completed games that come out of it can tend to be a bit more professional than those made by the average entusiast. However due to the shere volume of entusiasts that can and will make games based on D&D instead, you might be more likely to find someone creating something that touches you personally. Especially as making a game on top of D&D is so easy that it can be done on the fly with you as a player giving direct input to the "designer".

So you might have a point that it might be a bit misleading marketing to advertise D&D as a "complete game". However might it be that the majority that buy into it doesn't really care, because it is indeed a ultra simple game maker with tons of assets they want, rather than a complete game? And given the extreme ease it is to make a decent game from it - how would you have described it in a way that wouldn't be misleading in the other direction? "Game maker kit" for instance would give associations that likely would make people think it to be more work involved than what it actually is.

Indeed what they are labeling themselves is a system for running adventures. If you read "system" as "engine", and "adventures" as "game", isn't this exactly describing what you claim they are?

 

[niklinna]

@Umbran Good point - it reminds me that the most popular video game of all time (aside from Tetris and Solitaire, I suppose) is Minecraft, another game where you could argue that all of the design work is really done by the player, using the tools supplied by the game. It is much more prescriptive than D&D in the sense that your potential actions are much more limited, but the goals are entirely in the hands of the player.

This is going to get even more philosophical, but where is the line (if any) between game and art? And is that relevant to this discussion?

You could apply this to PbtA on that meta-level too. While PbtA games tend to be every bit as specific as D&D in terms of predefined "classes", and genre, the PbtA engine is quite small and easily ported to kitbash new "classes" or new settings—as is quite apparent in the explosion of PbtA games of all genres! d20 and 5e also got ported to a few new genres, but I don't think it was quite as many and it was almost certainly more work.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This is a fantastic example. Thank you for posting it!


I do not feel that MC as game designer is ruled out by the AW rules text, in fact it is ruled in

But that's much more like some note the GM wrote down to explain a way to apply the general rule than anything else. At play time the player still rolls and some new things appear in the fiction. In D&D the GM can make up an entire new subsystem. They MUST make a rule for when to let the players roll dice, etc. as the game itself only suggests.

 

[Clint_L]

I'm really enjoying this thread, thanks for starting it, and for being open to the fairly radical views some are expressing. One key insight of yours was a bit revelatory but in a way I probably need to explain:


Authorship and narrative/authorial agency are things that come up fairly often in such discussions, but the way you put it right here made me realize there's a difference between "authorship", the abstract process by which one authors—and "authoring", the actual doing of the job. Do the designer of Monsterhearts (or Yoko Ono) has established the process by which we will craft our experience/story, but it remains us who actually do craft it. Now "authorship" has, I expect, usually been meant for both, but something in your phrasing and its context caused me to differentiate these two. Maybe there are better terms for the distinct parts, but it's the distinction that matters to me in the moment. We can argue about terminology if you want!

Well, analyzing authorial intent, which is a significant part of what I do for a living, is much more in my wheelhouse than game design specifically, which is a passionate, life-long interest (and I do have one published game!) but something I know far less about at a theoretical level than many folks in this thread, such as you.

The problem of authorship in RPG design strikes me as fairly unique; I am trying to think of close analogies. On the one hand, pure game design is a mathematical problem, with its own kind of aesthetic, on the other you have the storytelling elements. The former has an identifiable author, but the latter farms out authorship in a variety of ways. I guess this whole thread was started by my interest in increasing player authorship in my D&D games.