D&D General How much control do DMs need?

[pemerton]

Post-DL means post Dragon Lance?

Yep. It's just a rough way of dividing the mainstream culture of play into epochs. I think the 3E/5e-type D&D you're describing began with AD&D, became mainstream some time in the 80s (with DL a convenient marker), and became very clearly "official" with 2nd ed AD&D. The only "official" attempt to depart from it was 4e. Whoops!

other systems I've tried at the time (GURPS and World of Darkness mostly) did nothing to persuade me otherwise. Cool, I still have to do all the work myself, but now I also need to learn how this new system works, how I need to design the adventure, all that. What's the point?

Very nice point!

the whole situation is setup by the DM. DM decides, whether there's something useful in the barn. DM decides, if the door is locked or not, and if it is, whether it's secured by an old rusty lock or a masterpiece of dwarven engineering.

The DM is constrained only by things they establish, and only in a very short term. I mean, narrative justifications are a dime a dozen.

Speaking to D&D, I don't find any major gaps in the games rule system. The way of resolving uncertainty in the game is clearly defined. It's just defined as "here are some options and you need to decide what works best for you".

There's no contradiction between these two posts.

The 5e D&D DM (i) decides what's uncertain in the fiction, (ii) decides whether a roll is needed, (iii) decides what counts as success on the roll, and (iv) decides what happens if the roll succeeds or fails.

 

[pemerton]

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.

<snip>

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.

I regard this as quite a controversial claim to make. By any standard metric of artistry, I think there is more art in (say) what I experience GMing Burning Wheel compared to what I experience GMing White Plume Mountain. I'd make the same assertion about using the Keep on the Borderlands as a setting in Burning Wheel compared to as a setting in AD&D.

I'm happy to explain why if you like - at this point I'll just say that the reason for the difference is because of what Burning Wheel makes salient in the play experience, compared to what AD&D does.

D&D quite literally intended for the DM to take the role of a benevolent God.

<snip>

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.

<snip>

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.

I think this is perhaps more accurate: D&D as played in the post-DL style is a vehicle for the GM inventing a fiction and then sharing it with their friends.

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

This, on the other hand, I think is less accurate. The point of a system like (say) Burning Wheel or Apocalypse World is not to "find one's voice within the parameters of someone else's design intent". Rather, the system provides an alternative structure for creativity from the one you've identified for D&D: rather than a vehicle for a single designer to share their vision, these RPGs invite multiple participants to execute their visions during the course of play.

I don't think that Gygax knew exactly what D&D was, at a theoretical level,

<snip>

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.

I think Gygax had quite a clear idea of what D&D was (as conceived of by him and Arneson). It was a type of wargame.

Hence he took for granted that many features of wargame resolution would be applied by D&D players - for instance, that they would be familiar with the use of "feet/inches per turn" methods for resolving movement; that they would be comfortable treating terrain-and-architecture marked maps as a "board" on which players make moves and referees resolve them; that dice might be used to resolve "fog of war"-type questions (eg do we notice the somewhat concealed doo-dad in the corner of the room?); that a referee would adjudicate the "hidden gameboard" aspects of this; etc.

I think Robin Laws has it right, in his essay "The Literary Edge" which is in the Over the Edge rulebook (p 193 of my 20th anniversary edition):

Role-playing game changed forever the first time a player said, "I know it's the best strategy, but my character wouldn't do that." Suddenly an aesthetic concern had been put ahead of a gaming one . . . At that unheralded moment, role-playing stopped being a game at all and began quietly evolving into a narrative art form . . .​

But who is the "narrator"? Mainstream D&D answers that one way (as per your - Clint_L's - post and my reply above); some other RPGs answer it the same way ( @loverdrive mentioned V:tM, Shadowrun and maybe others, and there are many many more RPGs that adapt basically the same approach as mainstream D&D); yet other RPGs answer it a different way (eg AW, DW, BW etc).

It's fairly clear how the "hidden gameboard" aspect of wargaming D&D has been adapted to the "GM shares their fiction" approach of mainstream contemporary D&D. But what is the role, in mainstream contemporary D&D play, of legacy wargame elements like sword damage dice, spell and bow ranges, areas of effect for fireballs, etc? That's an interesting question. They feed into the wargaming remnant of the combat system. And they provide some colour to feed into the GM's narration. They are not a particularly useful set of tools for players to contribute to the fiction, and I think that's a reason why they're not part of the best "indie" RPG designs. (And there are a couple of currently active thread discussing how to handle them in the context of 4e D&D, which has starkly different combat and non-combat resolution systems.)

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

From what I've read, Arneson wasn't the first to come up with the idea of evolving the war-game referee into more of an active storytelling; I believe that was another member of his group when they were playing a nautical game? I'll have to look it up again. I don't know that I would be comfortable calling Arneson a genius of game design, because he wasn't very productive. He did have the concept of a dungeon crawl and, crucially, organized character progression, which are cornerstones of the initial game, but I think most of his written contribution was maybe a dozen pages of notes? To be honest, I find it difficult ascribing credit to the birth of D&D because there were a lot of folks influencing each other.

Well, there was a whole kind of an evolution that happened. Roughly speaking, and I'm sure there are other 'threads' that existed, you had the original 'Kriegsspiel' which was simply TT miniatures wargaming in essence. That was proposed as a way of training officers in Prussia, but it proved to be too inflexible and evolved into 'Free' Kriegsspiel in which the referee went from simply adjudicating 'fog of war' to making judgments about outcomes and capabilities of the various forces. This allowed the players to 'try anything', and these games were elaborated to produce entire large scale general staff/officer corps operational training.

This type of training and 'wargaming' of possible situations became standard fare, especially after 1872 when the Prussians demonstrated just how far ahead their officer corps was in its ability to execute war plans. Dave Wesely introduced Arneson to a generalized form of this, the so-called 'Braunstein' in the late '60s. Arneson then ran some of these scenarios, which were very similar to LARPing in a sense, as they were live action scenarios, though not necessarily acted out, but role played physically.

Later one of the other people involved created a 'Braunstein' that was centered on playing Wild West scenarios, and Arneson basically took that and fused it with rules being used by the Castles & Crusades Society (Chainmail being part of that) to make Blackmoor. It was all a bunch of the same people, and undoubtedly the ideas were not all from one person. Dave apparently did develop the mechanics however, and things like leveling, and his game was the first that was distinctly table top and wargame-like. The earlier Braunsteins didn't use table tops, and didn't have recurring characters, which the Wild West 'Brownstone' had introduced. So, Dave's game is the first one with all the elements.

As for his ability as a game designer, how many people have made a career of that? He did, at least to a degree. He did author a number of wargames prior to the development of D&D, and some of the elements of at least one of those (Hit Points and Armor Class) made it into D&D as well. Braunstein (game) - Wikipedia is a pretty good, if sparse, description of the overall history of that evolution.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

So maybe you're using terms that are just going over my head, but I disagree that the DM must make rules for when to let the players roll dice. The books are quite clear on this and give a fair amount of guidance (even if I hope the 2024 edition adds and clarifies). There are different options presented, but it basically comes down to dice are rolled when there's uncertainty. There are also guidelines on what the DC should be based on difficulty.

I will agree that the DM has to make judgement calls on difficulty of achieving a task that varies from automatic to dang near impossible. But that's not "inventing" anything. This is a game of imagination and make believe, the only reality is the reality that the DM and players make so someone has to make a judgement call. I'm always reminded of D&D 3.5 and it's climb wall DC chart that gave difficulties for different types of wall. But the thing is, the DM still had to decide what kind of wall it was to use the chart, it just offered the illusion of impartiality.

Sometimes I feel like people are talking about a different game then the one I play.

I dunno. I agree with the you when you say "the DM still had to decide what kind of wall it was to use the chart, it just offered the illusion of impartiality." and I've always felt that this type of game, where the GM is arbiter of a set of rules, and a set of fictional situations, where the mechanics and the situations are all open-ended is inherently like that, the GM is the game. I agree that GMs then limit themselves, or the players force them to limit themselves perhaps so that some sort of principled play happens (or not...). I do have a pretty good sympathy for @loverdrive's position though, that 5e D&D is so loose in terms of what it prescribes, that you practically have to write the game.

Like I'm looking at the DMG P236 where it talks about 'The Role of Dice', and its like, the game punts! I mean, it describes some things you could do with dice, but there's no actual process of play there! Does the author of 5e actually want you to take the 'Middle Path'? Maybe... but basically that's no criteria at all! Now, right after that another section tries to rectify that, sort of... But all it really says is "make them roll if they might fail", but how does that even mesh with the previous section on the Role of the Dice? Now it talks about whether you can roll again if you fail, and guess what, it doesn't answer the question! In fact nothing actually makes clear what a check resolves, intent or action, nor how it relates back to fiction.

This is all before we even got to difficulty, which is on P238, supplemented by various added sections on P239 (and I never could understand why the DMG talks about the GM granting advantage/disadvantage when they already have the set-a-DC lever).

There is after this a section that seems to be basically optional rules for degrees of success/failure, but fundamentally says "When a check equals or exceeds the DC it succeeds", but what does success mean? Failure isn't really discussed here at all, either except in noting that you could make bad things happen if the check result is really low.

I mean, is this actually a game design? I would say it is game designer notes! I don't want to sound too harsh, but its very wishy washy. The first section of the PHB doesn't really elaborate either. In fact it doesn't even commit to the GM ever needing to consult the rules at all! The Section How to Play on P6 literally does not mention dice, except once in passing as something the GM might possibly use! I could literally follow the rules of 5e to the letter and never pick up a single die or ask a player to do so, and I would be running the game verbatim as described on P6, and consistent with the DMG section on running a game. I admit, it would be very odd, but its actually a VERY ODD GAME. I contrast this with Dungeon World, because the contrast is so stark. Chapter 1 & 2 of DW, and then supplemented by the start of Chapter 13, COMPLETELY defines a game structure just as surely as the rules of Monopoly describes how you play it. AFAICT 5e D&D never actually does this. It never clearly articulates the purpose of making checks, nor does it articulate a rationale and thus requirements for the GM's authoring of fiction.

So, the observation that the GM can set anything to anything, and thus all the 'rules' of 5e are an 'illusion of impartiality' is true, but even more profound is that there's no actual process described for how or when to even invoke those rules! Meanwhile DW is utterly impartial; 'difficulty' isn't even really a concept, and the game very carefully spells out when and how every rule works! Sure, there are some judgment calls about "is this possible?" but there's no partiality there, the table decides, as a whole! And in practice those situations don't intrude on play much, everyone knows halflings cannot simply leap into the air and fly away...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm not quite following how this would be more constrained than ability checks in 5e? Bearing in mind that I'm always thinking of the whole core game text.

The move needs to say what counts as doing it, and what to drive back to fiction. Perhaps you just mean that one could use the basic dice method for FKR / rules-light play? Which I'd agree with. There are FKR games that do more or less exactly that.

Because there's an agenda, and principles of play, so all the stuff on DW P160 and following applies! In other words, the GM has a set of criteria governing their introduction of fiction, as well as all the stuff that tells us what the genre is, who the PCs are, etc. in the first chapter. So what is the problem? The GM describes the starting fiction, addressing some aspect of one of the characters or maybe introducing a threat, etc. The PCs react, making nonspecific moves essentially, and the GM calls for checks to resolve things. If a player says "Groz leaps across the chasm!" the GM can ask for 2d6 to be thrown. On a 10+ Groz has made the leap, on a 7-9 he's at the other side, but maybe he's in immediate danger, or he has to drop his backpack, etc. on a 6-, uh oh!

I can definitely run that! I mean, it is not going to be the most straightforward thing to run, you can immediately see why the basic moves exist! However it will work, and its intended not as a proposed game design, but as an illustration of the simplicity and completeness of the PbtA 'core'. Everything else that adheres to that is superstructure intended to improve game play.

As for 'FKR', I have no idea. Free Kriegsspiel, actual real FK, is the model that trad play is built on. It has an all-powerful referee, and if there are rules they are all scenario-specific and simply provide a toolbox for the referee to use to adjudicate situations as they see fit. FK has no 'top level' structure beyond "the referee adjudicates everything and each player assumes a role, has objectives, and can declare any action they wish" Even turn structure is defined entirely by the referee. I have no idea what 'R' adds to this, but if FK uses dice it is simply at the pleasure of the referee for their own utility. This is NOT what I'm proposing at all! I'm proposing simply playing 'Dungeon World' without bothering with specific move rules. Again, its an exercise, not a game design, but it is quite doable and is not anything like FK. In fact it gives the GM LESS POWER than normal DW because normally the GM decides which move the PC made. Here that decision is moot...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The 5e D&D DM (i) decides what's uncertain in the fiction, (ii) decides whether a roll is needed, (iii) decides what counts as success on the roll, and (iv) decides what happens if the roll succeeds or fails.

Again, even this is rather generous in a strict reading of the game text. P6 of the PHB describes the 'game loop', dice are mentioned once in passing in step 2 as something the GM might use. As you say "decides whether a roll is needed", but even more strongly "decides if dice even exist in the game" in a technical sense. There is no actual linkage drawn in terms of general rules between P6, core game process, and any other part of the rules. All of the rest of 5e D&D exists as a kind of codicil that is simply implicated by tradition. This may sound silly, but it means that players have, in effect, no formal say in anything beyond telling the GM what their PC does right now. Reading the rules in a completely objective light is kind of a weird experience actually...

I suspect, heavily, that all versions of D&D basically do the same thing. The game never actually spells out the linkage between the players and GM having a conversation about what the PCs do and what the situation is, and any of the rest of the game rules or systems.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Again, even this is rather generous in a strict reading of the game text. P6 of the PHB describes the 'game loop', dice are mentioned once in passing in step 2 as something the GM might use. As you say "decides whether a roll is needed", but even more strongly "decides if dice even exist in the game" in a technical sense. There is no actual linkage drawn in terms of general rules between P6, core game process, and any other part of the rules. All of the rest of 5e D&D exists as a kind of codicil that is simply implicated by tradition. This may sound silly, but it means that players have, in effect, no formal say in anything beyond telling the GM what their PC does right now. Reading the rules in a completely objective light is kind of a weird experience actually...

I suspect, heavily, that all versions of D&D basically do the same thing. The game never actually spells out the linkage between the players and GM having a conversation about what the PCs do and what the situation is, and any of the rest of the game rules or systems.

One might summarize this by saying: the entire game is merely a set of suggestions, which the DM can and will sweep aside whenever and wherever it suits them. Consistency is the result of DMs choosing to be consistent, and nothing more; same for fairness, impartiality, and whatever other virtues one might invoke. There isn't even a way to talk about being a "good" DM versus a "bad" DM, because nothing in the text says enough for that to be judged. We can't even talk about "trust," because there aren't any grounds upon which trust may be established. There's just a person at a table saying some words. Are they good words? Bad words? Weird words? Who knows! The DMG certainly won't help you figure that out.

 

[pemerton]

I suspect, heavily, that all versions of D&D basically do the same thing. The game never actually spells out the linkage between the players and GM having a conversation about what the PCs do and what the situation is, and any of the rest of the game rules or systems.

I don't think this is true of the 4e PHB. It explains phases of play - exploration and encounters - and what the role of players and GM is in each of them, and how encounters are resolved.

 

[Umbran]

Speaking to D&D, I don't find any major gaps in the games rule system. The way of resolving uncertainty in the game is clearly defined. It's just defined as "here are some options and you need to decide what works best for you".

I'm sorry, but that's more rhetorical trick than a real observation about rules.

In mathematics, there's a concept of a "degenerate case", where you have some definition that seems perfectly legitimate, but you then find a situation in which you have to either say the definition falls apart, or you say the thing is honestly some other object, despite meeting the definition.

Triangles here are a good one Three sides, three vertices, three angles - you have a triangle, right? Except when one of the angles of the triangle happens to be 0 degrees, in which case the triangle is really a line segment.

When the rules "officially say" that to resolve a thing, you don't use rules, that doesn't make the rules actually complete. For whatever version of "complete" we are using.

 

[Umbran]

There isn't even a way to talk about being a "good" DM versus a "bad" DM, because nothing in the text says enough for that to be judged.

It would seem to me that being a good GM or bad GM has little to do with the ruleset, and much to do with the satisfaction of the players. You're a good GM if your players have a good time. The text can go bark up a tree.