D&D General How much control do DMs need?

[clearstream]

I considered this question, in both cases. So, I think it is mostly true, but there are degrees. My speculation is that D&D-style games have a weird combination of a ton of rules and a ton of ambiguity. So you've got lots to work with, in order to hack, and much of the art is in figuring out what ways to do so are best suited to your own taste and talent. And the game is almost unplayable without hacking. I don't think that is true of all RPGs. I can sit down and play Fiasco out of the box without changing a single rule.

As a counter-example, take my favourite RPG, Dread. You can hack Dread, and I do, but when the rules fit on the back of a napkin, there's only so much you can do (more than you would think, with a Jenga tower, but still). Whereas half of this entire forum is people discussing ways to hack D&D and related games, or expressing their personal approach to how to play it.

Hacking Messerspiel, is another example! One could add to Messerspiel to create a version of Messerspiel (the designer discusses that IIRC), but to hack it would be to change it into a different RPG (rather than a version of Messerspiel.)

 

[clearstream]

I would disagree. Like, really, really disagree. D&D isn't hackable. Well, it isn't any more hackable than any other tabletop game by the virtue of humans resolving all the rules and being able to agree to resolve them differently.

To be brutally honest, I can't help than to scratch my head in confusion every time someone says that D&D is hackable/flexible/just a toolbox. No, it isn't! Look at the rules! If a game "designed to be flexible" can't handle the most basic stuff, like "nobody really cares about this trivial fight, can we just condense it into a single roll?" or "we really care about this non-combat scene, can we add more mechanical gravitas to it?", then it failed miserably!

As an example of a "toolbox" game, let's take a look at Fate. The Golden Rule of Fate is that there are many rules that can be used to resolve any particular situation, and you must choose the most appropriate one.

Talking to someone can be (when I say "you", I mean "your character"):

1. Nothing, if there's nothing substantial to be accomplished. You just say what you want to say and the other character responds: saying "Hi" to a friend; contemplating about the nature of free will while gazing upon the false sun; etc
2. A single roll, if there's something to be accomplished, but it's not interestingenough to drag out:
   1. Overcome roll, if it's an obstacle to, well, overcome: persuading the bouncer to let you into the bar; getting your ma to let you sleep over at friend's house; etc
   2. Create Advantage roll, if the goal is to sow seeds to be used later: convincing someone that you are actually bitcoin millionare, so you can scam them; cheering up your friend with a "friendship is magic!" speech, so they can act at 101%; etc
   3. Attack roll, if your goal is to hurt them with words: making fun of an NPC; etc
   4. Defence roll, if they are attacking you, and you are choosing words to defend yourself: "please don't hit me!"
3. A Challenge, if you want to focus on the process more: convincing Legate Lanius that Hoover Dam ain't worth it
4. A Contest, if you and some other characters have mutually exclusive goals, but can't harm each other: making a case that it's your department that needs to receive a budget increase, not Janice's
5. A Conflict, if you and another character can and want to hurt each other: an explosive falling out between lovers, "I'm the one carrying this family! Do you think we could live off your indie RPGs?! You will starve in a ditch!", "Oh, yeah, do you know why you still have that job? Because I'm banging your boss!"; etc

....and then there's Bronze Rule that allows to enable all the rules that apply to characters to apply to anything, but that's a bit too Fate-y to explain here.

And the same applies to any situation: swordfight, picking a lock, whatever. Fate doesn't say "any swordfight is always a conflict" the way D&D does. You consider the situation and what do you want to get out of it, and pick the most appropriate tool.

D&D doesn't work that way. It gives you tools of very limited applicability, doesn't explain how to use them, and then you are expected to hack something on the fly when the situation arises.

And even if it's not hacking per se, Fate allows you to adjust the level of detail whenever you create any content. Let's say you need a monster. You write "Mind Goblin: 2" on a piece of paper, boom, done! You have a perfectly usable monster that has a single aspect (Mind Goblin) and a single skill (Mind Goblin) that it can roll if needed. Need more detail? Sure, you can add more aspects, create dedicated skills, add stunts, hell, create a separate statblock for each of Hydra's heads. If you need to.

D&D has two modes: you either just wing it, or you have a full-blown statblock. No in-betweens.

On the one hand, I know what you mean. D&D often proves to be far more tightly stitched together than it looks on surface. Hacks can have unintended effects. And on the other hand, I think about the list of the most successful RPG kickstarter's and how many of those were 5e mods. If they game weren't hackable, then those should be unplayable.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

As much as I am enjoying this discussion, I can see why it might be off-putting to many folks on this particular sub-forum. In thinking more about some of @Oofta's comments, I would like to pose a challenge, to myself and others: can you explain the persistent popularity of D&D in a way that is complimentary towards its fans? Ideally, in the context of this thread, taking into account DM control?

I am not sure I understand why anyone needs to explain anything. However, I did make a comment that was relevant, though I'm in a few threads so maybe it wasn't here. Deeply coded in the human psyche is a group dynamic that manifests as handing all responsibility, and the corresponding authority, to a central figure. Trad D&D (and classic D&D for that matter) and other RPGs utilizing a similar structure, tap into that. Its obviously not the ONLY factor, but I think it is a factor. People find it very hard to break this habit (I state this as a professional, as a lot of my work has involved 'transforming' organizations that are stuck in, basically, this same rut).

I pose this challenge on the premise that, while quality is ultimately subjective, popularity, particularly popularity over time, offers its own evidence of quality. I am appealing here to the consensus truth test, whereas much of the discussion to this point has been focused on coherence.

Yeah, we'll have to disagree on that... A lot of stuff is popular that is just basically crap. I'm not saying D&D falls into that category, but I don't think popularity and quality are somehow inextricably linked. The subjectivity factor you mention is, however, going to make any judgments in this space rather hard to defend though.

If we assume that most fans of D&D are rational people with good reasons for choosing to do what they do, perhaps it is the incompleteness itself which makes the game good. I am a rational person with good reasons for making the choices that I do, and I enjoy playing D&D. I typically am the DM, but I enjoy playing it, as well. I have to confess @loverdrive, that many of the aspects of the game that you point to as design flaws, I find to be features when it comes to my actual experience playing the game. In particular, the way the rules are ambiguous make running a game an art rather than science, as Gygax suggested more than 40 years ago, and I find in that ambiguity a scope for making the game my own.

But I would counter that I find most of the 'ambiguities' as you put it, or deficiencies as @loverdrive might put it, are the things that are most likely to cause games to not work. I've run D&D games that have fizzled. I have not yet ever run a PbtA game that fizzled. I don't think the sample size is sufficient to say a lot, but standing those two sets of experiences side-by-side I can clearly see where one can outperform the other.

D&D is very hackable, and as someone who generally likes to ask "what if I did this instead of that?" this offers a great starting place. It almost demands hacking. Is there a single table that does not have a plethora of house rules?

I hear this again and again, but where's the pudding? I mean, sure, people hack on 5e, but its very rare to see games that are actually much different, or differences that wouldn't be able to exist in games with other sorts of process of play approach. I'm utterly unconvinced by the argument that 5e is somehow 'more flexible' in any way than Dungeon World, for instance. Yes, there are games that each one is more suited for, but they can each cater to some range of different styles/genre/tone/etc.

 

[loverdrive]

So, one of the things I base my choice of system off of, is actually the way the texture of the mechanics and player options align with the theming and fantasy of what they express. Your system, in theory, should be able to perform any of these narratives, but it's texture will remain static as the same mechanics are used for Dark Souls, Cyberpunk, Vampire, etc-- you have a core resolution system, but at least in comparison to other titles (and granted, some people really don't care about this, so it's only true idiosyncratically for me and other people who think like me) your game is incomplete. This problem is presumably what guided Cortex Prime to work the way it does with all of it's modules to help craft a 'finished' game out of them that can support the genre or setting its working off of. The PVP should feel different if we're chasing eachother in X-Wings vs. when we're having a firefight down a trashy alleyway, or when we're clashing with swords.

I'm not entirely sure what texture you are talking about, honestly.

Like... The game is about conflicts. It is peppered with religious imagery, grand cathedrals and crucifix-standins, but that's mostly because it's my style as an artist. I have a thing for grand cathedrals.

With the cyberpunk thing, it went like this: players have played a scene "Crisis of Faith" in a faux-european, Dark Souls-y setting, where they came up with the characters of the Warrior and the High Priest, and they enjoyed the way these characters bounced off each other. The scene concluded with the Warrior taking the side of the High Priest, despite the discovery that the Church is heretical.

In the next scene, one of the players, who is really into pink mohawks and chrome hips, asked "hey, what if we keep these characters, but place them in a different setting? The Warrior is like a street samurai, and the High Priest is a yakuza boss." and, well, it works. Because the setting is a set-dressing, and there's very little difference in internal struggle of a knight in shinning armour and a cyborg in shinning chrome.

 

[loverdrive]

On the one hand, I know what you mean. D&D often proves to be far more tightly stitched together than it looks on surface. Hacks can have unintended effects. And on the other hand, I think about the list of the most successful RPG kickstarter's and how many of those were 5e mods. If they game weren't hackable, then those should be unplayable.

...why?

As always, a videogame example: Skyrim is moddable, it provides robust tools to modify the game. Sekiro isn't moddable, there are no real tools to create mods for it, it requires hacking together some technical wizardry with code-injections into XInput library Sekiro uses to handle gamepads, yet there are mods for Sekiro. They are playable. Some of them are very cool! But the amount of effort required to do things that would take five minutes in Creation Kit is just insane.

Arguing that D&D is impossible to hack is, of course, lunacy. Nothing is impossible to hack. But arguing that hacking D&D is actually pretty damn hard, compared to some other games...

 

[loverdrive]

Yes. I prefer it that way. I like the freedom. Any resolution of fictional events is ultimately going to be arbitrary.

OK, let me get this straight: you are praising D&D for giving you an ability to do something you can just... Do? Or you couldn't just roll dice and invent your own rules before 5e came out?

 

[clearstream]

Yes, I know what the acronym stands for. I have no idea why they think their games are any more referential of actual Free Kriegsspiel than any other RPG though. FK is not about 'less is more', and it could care less about 'empowering'. FK was about presenting situations that were true to life such that engaging with them in the game exercises would prepare the participants for the real thing. Referees in FK generally had available to them LARGE rule books which they were expected to know and understand, and to employ. The absolute power of the referee was intended to free them from silly things like corner cases and allow them to extrapolate onto situations not already covered. It also COULD provide a way to adjudicate in a situation where a player selected an entirely novel approach.

For sure there are significant differences. I believe the term is used in order to identify a distinct practice rather than original FK.

As such I don't believe that what Messerspiel is doing has much to do with the above. I get why they think it does, but I think the two are pretty divergent actually.

I'm not sure what you mean here?

I think they almost always come into a game with someone else who has already learned these things. I won't say NOBODY ever masters D&D 'cold', I've seen it, but I've also seen instances where that lead to some VERY idiosyncratic interpretations! I think basically if you read all of 5e in a fairly loose way, which most people are likely to do, they will generally pick up a certain set of ideas about play that are pretty close to 'trad' and the pieces will fit together for them. It just strikes me as a bit of a slipshod approach when you could instead do something like what DW does. Its not like people can't drift DW either, they do it all the time and I can tell you there are various posters on this very thread who have pretty divergent opinions as to how it 'should' be played, or who have done different things with it.

Oh, that's absolutely true. As I've said in the past there's Basic Rules 5e and PHB 5e and DMG 5e, and to get to the latter you'd have had to have read the game text pretty much completely, with close attention and reflection on certain sections of it. The design work is in my view very sophisticated, but it kind of sidles up to the problem of how to explain an RPG rather than grasping the nettle as some other landmark designs do. In a way actually that's one thing I like about it. One can reread a section and notice something new... which is a feature of many of my favourite works.

 

[Oofta]

OK, let me get this straight: you are praising D&D for giving you an ability to do something you can just... Do? Or you couldn't just roll dice and invent your own rules before 5e came out?

Since you don't seem to accept any answer I give I don't see the point of answering yet again. Have a good one.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I considered this question, in both cases. So, I think it is mostly true, but there are degrees. My speculation is that D&D-style games have a weird combination of a ton of rules and a ton of ambiguity. So you've got lots to work with, in order to hack, and much of the art is in figuring out what ways to do so are best suited to your own taste and talent. And the game is almost unplayable without hacking. I don't think that is true of all RPGs. I can sit down and play Fiasco out of the box without changing a single rule.

I think the difference here is in what we really consider to be meaningful hacks. I mean, sure, you can make up an infinite set of spells, monsters, classes, items, and even stand-alone subsystems that handle specific situations (lE one for logistics during overland travel/exploration) but I don't think those are really all that meaningfully changing the RANGE of things you can do with D&D. They might make certain specific activities easier, or more compatible with a certain desired play style, but they're on the order of coats of paint, or fancy rims, if you compared them to customizing cars, say.

When I say I see little reason to believe that D&D is highly flexible, I mean something a bit more significant than that, like playing a narrative form game. Now, I don't think Dungeon World is going to play Trad very well either, it isn't very good for that. OTOH I'd say that the sort of hacking you seem to be suggesting, new classes and such, is no harder in DW than in 5e. Likewise if you were wanting to take either game and translate it into an entirely different genre, either game might work, though the sheet number of highly variable PbtA games might tell us which 'engine' is really easier to do that with (though again, each one will produce different games, so its not to say one should be preferred, but one is probably easier to do).

I think its safe to say that the range of play you will get out of Fiasco is pretty specific. Each game can vary a lot, but within a pretty narrow range. More narrow than most games. I think that allows it to be pretty much a 'complete' game.

As a counter-example, take my favourite RPG, Dread. You can hack Dread, and I do, but when the rules fit on the back of a napkin, there's only so much you can do (more than you would think, with a Jenga tower, but still). Whereas half of this entire forum is people discussing ways to hack D&D and related games, or expressing their personal approach to how to play it.

Edit: maybe another way of looking at it is: what does this game do great? Dread is great at building narrative tension, which is something that I greatly value. Is it accurate to say that D&D is great at getting players, especially the DM, to build? I feel like I am fumbling in the dark for what I actually want to express.

I think D&D is extremely good at presenting 'canned stories'. It basically does 'neo-classic' play pretty darn well! You delve into the 'dungeon levels' (they can be anything analogous to a dungeon) and there you go. I believe the AP Descent into Avernus is a perfect illustration. Some have called the framing 'heavy-handed' but I don't look at it that way. It is delivering exactly what the majority of the D&D audience is after, a straightforward 'delve'. You can spend 13 whole levels just basically focused on one huge adventure. Yeah, the rules are a bit rough about how PCs get past obstacles, but the most obvious approach is going to perform OK when the scenarios are fairly simple and just aimed at mostly 'exciting moments' of play.

I write about music a lot, and one of my favourite reads is "The Number Ones", over on Stereogum. The writer, Tom Briehan, begins with the premise that it doesn't really matter whether he personally likes a song or not, the simple fact that it managed to make it to the top of the charts makes it worth discussing (though he explicitly does not rule out the popular audience being wrong, he avoids resting on this possibility as much as possible, with a few notable exceptions). I don't want to focus on what makes D&D good or not good, but on what makes it work for so many people.

I mean, that's fine, I've already proposed reasons, and within the context of this thread, allocation of all authority to the GM is actually one of them. Its easy to understand, and as long as the GM understands that the object is fun for everyone at the table, it should work out for the sorts of basic story scenarios outlined above. Heck, the actual PLOT of the story can get quite involved, as long as narrative structure is simple. 5e pretty much guarantees that with how it presents narrative.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Dungeon World and similar games have fairly straightforward solutions to these "problems".

I think what @Oofta is trying to suggest is that Dungeon World isn't actually solving all the problems simply by having 2d6 "I jumped the chasm" but that there are some tests of the fiction that also occur. This is true, if the chasm is trivial, then it isn't a problem to be solved, wouldn't be introduced as part of the fiction (it might exist as color I suppose) and won't require any moves to overcome. If the chasm is a huge and uncrossable gulf then again no moves happen here, its no different than a wall, we know we can't (normally) walk through walls, so we don't declare actions to do so. However, I don't think this sort of observation carries a lot of weight, as it simply notes the existence of the most basic precondition for any sort of plot, action, and narrative to exist whatsoever. Its even more basic than RPGs! If we all sat down around a campfire to tell a story round-robin fashion we'd all have to live by the same basic rule, that fictional position has effect, else you have nothing at all!