D&D General How much control do DMs need?

[hawkeyefan]

Gee, that makes me all warm and fuzzy knowing that I've finally met the keeper of ultimate truth.

Not at all. But I know what I was trying to say!

Right. The player decided that something relatively important actually happened even though they didn't state that it happened when we were prepping to leave. I understand the flashback scenario as part of a game, I just dislike it unless it's truly trivial stuff. You may not consider it going back in time, but based on the descriptions I've read in other discussions on this topic, I would.

Well there's no actual time in fiction. It's all artifice. We can do whatever we want.

I think how suitable such a rule may be depends on the game and the genre/vibe. The impact of such a rule on how real the fiction may seem to someone will vary. As I said, if I'm playing a warrior and I say I unsling my shield, and the DM says "Oh, you didn't say you brought it" that's going to be much more jarring to me than if I'm allowed to retroactively declare that I have it.

It's very contextual in that sense. But I will add that D&D retroactively determines things pretty routinely. Sometimes what people find acceptable and what they don't seems a bit odd to me.

Or ... another example. I can't declare that my character has established business connections in the town we're visiting if I haven't previously established that reality with approval from my DM.

I think it depends. In 5E, there are backgrounds that say you can declare such connections, and they don't mention needing DM approval to do so. The rule itself implies that no such approval is required.... otherwise, why would it exist?

There is no objective reality in a fictional game so calling something objective is meaningless. Every judgement, every opinion of how well the world is represented and how real if feels can only be subjective. The character affecting the world outside of their actions that can impact the world feels less realistic to me.

I agree with the first two sentences here. For the third, I think this is an example of you mixing up the player and the character.

Preparation ahead of time versus improvising things at the time of the game have nothing to do with DM control.

No? They seem to impact each other, I'd think. Like if a character finds himself in a burning building and the player says "My character jumps through the window".

If the DM has to decide if there are windows present at the moment of play, that would seem to give them a good deal of control over what the player is allowed to do, no?

I'm not sure how I can be any clearer. The game world my PC inhabits feels more real if the only impact I have on the ongoing fiction of the world is due to the actions and deeds of my PC. I enjoy the game more, it feels more logical, if the DM controls the fiction of the world. It doesn't change whether I'm the DM or playing a PC.

This is a clearly stated preference. Previously, it seemed you were mixing up player and character, or claiming the world was more objective the more the DM had control and so on.

Depending on the campaign, as a player I have an impact on the world outside of my PC is when I'm establishing my character's background story. Even then, I make proposals and the DM makes the final call. There may be times when I ask for additional clarification for the description of the world (i.e. "Is there a blacksmith in town?") but that's not changing the fiction of the world, it's just the DM deciding if something they didn't include in the description really does exist.

So you think that the DM needs that level of control? Or is that just the way you like the game to work?

 

[Oofta]

Not at all. But I know what I was trying to say!



Well there's no actual time in fiction. It's all artifice. We can do whatever we want.

I think how suitable such a rule may be depends on the game and the genre/vibe. The impact of such a rule on how real the fiction may seem to someone will vary. As I said, if I'm playing a warrior and I say I unsling my shield, and the DM says "Oh, you didn't say you brought it" that's going to be much more jarring to me than if I'm allowed to retroactively declare that I have it.

It's very contextual in that sense. But I will add that D&D retroactively determines things pretty routinely. Sometimes what people find acceptable and what they don't seems a bit odd to me.



I think it depends. In 5E, there are backgrounds that say you can declare such connections, and they don't mention needing DM approval to do so. The rule itself implies that no such approval is required.... otherwise, why would it exist?



I agree with the first two sentences here. For the third, I think this is an example of you mixing up the player and the character.



No? They seem to impact each other, I'd think. Like if a character finds himself in a burning building and the player says "My character jumps through the window".

If the DM has to decide if there are windows present at the moment of play, that would seem to give them a good deal of control over what the player is allowed to do, no?



This is a clearly stated preference. Previously, it seemed you were mixing up player and character, or claiming the world was more objective the more the DM had control and so on.



So you think that the DM needs that level of control? Or is that just the way you like the game to work?

This is going round and round. I've stated my preference, that the DM has control over everything external to the PC. Is it "needed"? Well very little is "needed" to play an RPG, it's all about preferences and what people enjoy.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I never said everything HAS to be pre-prepared...

It is an absolutely necessary consequence of the question asked. That is, you said, "But...How do you know if the players will or won't dwell on it/bring it up if it's never included because you don't think the players will dwell on it or bring it up." The structure of the question indicates that things are included, or excluded, only by the GM: "if it's never included because you don't." Hence, for something to be included, it must be forethought by the GM, which the players may subsequently run away with (perhaps unexpectedly.)

But perhaps I have simply misunderstood your meaning, and the phrase was simply meant to indicate "how does anyone (GM or player) include anything they've never even conceived of," and of course the answer is they can't, no more nor less than is true for "trad" play, it's just that you have (metaphorically) all hands on deck, as opposed to just the GM.

How do your players know they will be interested in something that they may or may not have even conceived of.

They can't. How can you as DM know they will be interested in something you have never conceived of? You can't know that either. Instead, you make use of three things.

1. Session Zero. This is where the world gets built, together. For example, I originally ran this game for a different group, and we collaborated to work out what was in it. I was interested in running an Arabian Nights kind of experience, so that was established early. One of my players wanted to play a Grim World playbook I found....iffy, shall we say, so we collaborated to develop an explanation for how someone could survive effectively being addicted to violence without being an ultra dark serial murderer, leading to a fascinating subculture of "hunters in the waste" who track and slay nasty beasts and have a mutual love-hate relationship with the fat cats who own private estates out in the desert.
2. "Ask questions and use the answers." This one cuts both ways. I, as GM, constantly ask about a character's history, beliefs, family, skills, etc., and use those answers to build up stuff I never would have thought to make otherwise. Likewise, the players ask me questions, and this leads them to take actions, often ones I never anticipated. I had no idea the "Riddle-Makers," a long-vanished mini-civilization of religious nerds for lack of a better term, would go from "fun background piece" to "core personal motivation for the Bard, adopting them as His People," but that's exactly what happened. Or the time a single "failed" roll resulted in an awesome time-crash adventure full of weird and "wrong" things.
3. Solicit feedback outside the game. I almost always ask for feedback from my players about what they like, how they're feeling, whether my offerings worked for them, how they would change things if they could go back, etc. This is, of course, imperfect (I sadly often get nothing more than, summarized, "good session, I had a lot of fun," which is heartening but not very enlightening.) Still, I always strive to listen, and every now and then ask my players to tell me about what kind of adventure they would be excited to have. I prioritize genuine player enthusiasm over nearly everything else, as I have said elsewhere.

These three tools have served us well. I am always surprised by exactly how things shake out, and my players often are too. After five years, I have a decent idea what makes the characters tick and how to give them things they will hunger and thirst to play.

You're basically claiming all people have total knowledge of everything that would or could possibly interest them in a ttrpg and will also bring this knowledge unerringly to the forefront in a game... that seems...an odd expectation

I...have absolutely no idea where you're getting that or why.

In Session Zero, the players (including the GM, who is a player with an asymmetrical role) describe the world together. I brought more than might be typical, because I was building off a previous DW group's game, but we still built the world together. E.g., the party Bard has a well-to-do family now, but when he was a kid, they were immigrants to the big city and barely able to afford food on the table. So Mr. Bard, despite having a decent education and such, grew up a guttersnipe, making friends in low places before his family made it big...and thus allowed him to make friends in high places. This added the "Silver Thread," a Robin Hood-style underworld society geared toward building up the poor and protecting the common folk from exploitation by the rich. (And, of course, making a decent living at it along the way, but the helping people part comes first.) Or our Battle master, who fleshed out the hierarchy within the military and gave us insight into the culture of tactics and warfare in the Tarrakhuna. Etc., etc.

This is how the world comes into being. Then, over time, new elements are added, usually when a (literal or metaphorical) "blank" on a "map" needs to be filled in. Sometimes I fill blanks as part of prep. Usually, either I or a player fills them as part of someone asking a question and someone else using the answer.

There is no need to have this ridiculous infinite advance knowledge of everything you could ever like or enjoy. There's just the game, the players (including me), and us collectively expandinf what the game contains. We surprise one another by the additions or alterations we make, and in so doing have adventures we often did not expect or even could not have expected. Because every voice at the table enriches the world, not just the GM's, the unexpected is actually much more common than it is in a "trad" game, where it's the DM's world, you just play in it.

 

[Clint_L]

@Clint_L

I know you've at'd me a few times, but as a general rule that I have learned over time I have found that some discussions are just not fun or productive given the subject and participants.

So...I'm just realizing that I have been using @ wrong - I've been more thinking of it as a citation, a way to acknowledge that I am building on someone else's idea. When apparently I have actually been poking people, like a horrible nag. I sincerely apologize to you and everyone else. I will stop using it wrong!

The rest of your post is excellent, and I will probably reply to it in a bit.

 

[pemerton]

Different attacks in D&D actually have different attack bonuses, thus it it is not equally easy to avoid them.

A given character attacking with a stick of celery or with a 20 kg rock rolls the same attack bonus. Even though the actual threat posed by each is quite different. It passes the degree of threat issue off to a different mechanical sub-system, namely, damage rolls and hit points.

We can even spell out an example.

Jumping across a pond will have a variable DC depending on its width (and assuming it is wider than the minimum auto jump distance).

But whether a spray of acid from a given character/creature is a small light spray or a big intense one, the Dex save required will be the same (eg set by the caster's spell save DC). The AoE might affect number of creatures targetted and the intensity of the spray might affect damage, but doesn't affect the difficult of getting out of the way.

Then how?

<snip>

What does this mean?

DW doesn't have a formula for the distance you can jump, but it has STR and some special athletics moves for certain playbooks. So its quite possible the Barbarian can just leap across like a cat, and that the wizard will fall to his death on a 9 or less on 2d6! And the GM is perfectly free to frame it that way as "hey, STR 8 Wizard, you suck at jumping things, are you SURE you want to try to leap a wide and bottomless looking chasm?" My guess is the player will think twice!

AbdulAlhazred illustrates one possibility here - the soft move made by the GM as part of framing.

Other tools include consequences narrated. Eg:

GM: You see a housecat lying by the fireplace. <soft move: presents an opportunity>

Player: I pick it up.

GM: It seems pretty unhappy to be disturbed - it's scratching at you <soft move: announces an approaching threat>

Player: Well, I hold on to it tightly!

GM: OK, Defy Danger (STR) <if you do it, you do it>;

Player: <rolls dice, gets a 7 to 9 total>

GM: If you don't let it go it'll scratch you! <soft move: offers a hard bargain>

Player: I hang on.

GM: OK, take 1 damage. <hard move: deal damage>​

Or consider:

Player: <rolls dice, gets a 6- total>

GM: It wriggles out of your grasp and runs away <hard move: take away their stuff>​

As an alternative, consider:

GM: You see a box sitting by the fireplace <soft move: offers an opportunity>

Player: How heavy does it look?

GM: You're discerning realities? Roll the dice. <if you do it, you do it>

Player: <rolls dice, gets a 7-9 total and so gets to ask one question from the list> What should I be on the lookout for?

GM: The box looks pretty heavy - if you try and pick it up, you could injure yourself <soft move: presents an opportunity with a cost>

Player: OK, I'll take the chance - I pick it up.

GM: OK, roll Defy Danger (STR) don't forget your +1 forward for acting on your discern realities info <if you do it, you do it - and its established that the box might be hard to lift up>

Player: <rolls dice, gets a 7-9 total>

GM: What are you doing with it? <ask questions . . .>

Player: I'm trying to carry it out of the room.

GM: OK, you get most of the way to the door, but it's a heavy box: if you keep going you'll strain yourself <. . . and build on the answers; soft move: offer a hard bargain>

Player: I want the box - I keep going.

GM: OK, you get it through the door but you might have herniated yourself: take -1 ongoing to physical actions until you recover <hard move: inflict damage>​

Or consider:

Player: <rolls the dice for Discern Realities, gets a 6- total>

GM: What are you worried about? <soft move: turn their move back on them>

Player: That it's too heavy to lift.

GM: Yeah, well, you look at it and give it a poke. If you lift it, you'll probably herniate yourself, and will take -1 ongoing for sure <hard move: turn their move back on them>

Player: OK, but I need to get it out of the room. I pick it up.

GM: Defy Danger (STR) <if you do it, you do it:.

Player: <rolls the dice, gets a 7-9 total>

GM: You pick it up, the strain is immense - take -1 ongoing to all physical actions until your recover - and you stumble towards the door. Do you keep going? <soft move: offer an ugly choice>

Player: Yep, I need that box.

GM: OK, you stumble through the door. When you drop the box, you realise the strain is worse than you feared. Take 2 damage (armour piercing) <hard move: inflict harm>​

Or consider:

Player: <having rolled 6- on Discern Realities as bove, rolls 10+ total to Defy Danger>

GM: It's heavy, as heavy as you feared, but you get it out of the room. Take -1 ongoing to all physical actions until you recover <following through on the earlier hard move>​

Those are just examples, and incomplete ones in the sense that we don't really know why the cat or the box is being narrated. But they illustrate some of the ways that DW easily handles the difference between picking up a cat and picking up a heavy box.

 

[pemerton]

As far as I can tell you're using specific forge waffle terms or game specific terms and expect everyone else to use the same coded word meanings.

WTF?

Here's what you quoted:

Preparing fronts in DW has relatively little in common with (say) writing up an adventure like Keep on the Borderlands or The Sunless Citadel. I mean, both are types of GM prep for a RPG, and both involve imagining some stuff - but what is prepared, how it is prepared, and its role in framing actions and resolving declared actions is completely different.

And @loverdrive and I have explained why we prefer other RPGs.

My disagreement with you is in respect of your assertion that DW is just like D&D but with lower fidelity of resolution.​

You have been using the notion of "fidelity" so I assume you know what that is.

You've read DW, so you know what a "front" is.

You've played D&D, so presumably you know what Keep on the Borderlands and The Sunless Citadel are.

You a human being, so presumably you know what "imagining some stuff" is.

You don't know what "framing" means? Like "to set up", "to establish the context for". Googling a definition gives me "to formulate (a concept, plan, or system)" which does similarly well, although I think the use in RPGing might be closer to a usage from film or theatre.

You don't know what "resolving" an action means? Like "to establish what flows from something". Googling a definition gives me "to clear up, resolve doubts, resolve a dispute".

Anyway, upthread you asserted that DW is just like D&D but with less fidelity (your phrasing). Are you still asserting that?

I like that in D&D there is an objective fictional world and that when I am running a PC I can only change that fictional world in the manner that my PC could. When I DM if there's a chasm, it's because of my vision of the environment it makes sense. It's not necessarily there because I expect the PCs to cross it, it could easily just be descriptive fluff and they're doing something I don't expect. I may or may not be thinking in terms of creating challenge when I added the chasm, it simply exists whether the PCs interact with it or not. The players can decide their PCs are going to to cross the chasm and the capabilities of their PCs reflect how they can achieve that. For me that feels more like the real world, or at least an action movie version of reality.

I prefer the way that D&D handles obstacles that we do have to overcome. My options to overcome an obstacle depend on my PC's capabilities. The difficulty of overcoming that obstacle is not arbitrary as some people claim, it's based on a judgement call by a DM on how difficulty something should be based on the guidance in the DMG or, in the case of contests, the capabilities of the opposition.

That's why I think the DM having ultimate authority over the world my PC interacts with works for me, and for a lot of people.

So your answer to the question "how much control do DMs need" is LOTS.

Your preference in RPGing, as a player, is to learn what another person has imagined about some stuff.

(I'm not putting much weight on "my options to overcome an obstacle depend on my PC's capabilities" because as far as I'm aware that's true of every RPG.)

Btw, no one said that the GM's decisions are "arbitrary". I didn't. @loverdrive didn't. I said that they make the GM almost all of the game. And in what I'm quoting you're agreeing with that and saying that that's what you want!

Hence why I don't understand your tone - as if you disagree with me - when it seems obvious that you in fact agree.

 

[pemerton]

Why do you need to prepare everything before your players will be allowed to ask about it? Can you not just...enable your players to ask about what they like?

(Edit: also, check the edit to my previous post.)

You're missing an unstated premies in @Imaro's question:

How do you know if the players will or won't dwell on it/bring it up if it's never included because you don't think the players will dwell on it or bring it up.

@Lanefan often makes similar remarks that rest on a similar unstated premise.

The premise is this: that it is important that the imagined stuff the players engage with is the product of someone else's imagination.

This is also, as best I can tell, what @Crimson Longinus and @Oofta mean by an "objective fictional reality" (which of course read literally is somewhere between waffle and oxymoron).

Because it's the product of someone else's imagination, a player can learn about it by asking that other person to tell them what they're imagining!

Whereas something that is the product of one's own imagination is not an object of discovery.

Now even good storytelling games (eg like A Penny For My Thoughts) have techniques to mediate between just making up one's own stuff, and engaging with or integrating the stuff that others imagine. And once we get to RPGs like (say) DW or BW, there are very sophisticated design features that exploit the asymmetric participant roles to achieve this sort of mediation and integration. Most posts from @Oofta and @Lanefant don't acknowledge those design features, and the associated techniques, and so just presume that if the player gets to exercise imagination then the player is just making it all up - but that's simply a result, as best I can tell, of not having any or any real familiarity with the games in question.

But the previous paragraph doesn't alter the basic point, that there is an unstated premise about where the imagined stuff should come from.

My experience is that if you bring this premise to the surface by describing it as "an objective fictional reality" you will be praised, and if you bring it to the surface as "learning what someone else has imagined" or "learning what someone else has written down about what they imagined, perhaps in note form" you will be criticised. But the different descriptions are all referring to the same thing.

If you thing that discovering what someone else has imagined is fundamental to being a RPG player, then you will naturally think that the GM should have a LOT of control!

 

[pemerton]

I think what frustrates me about these conversations is that one form of making things up is offered as "more real" or "objectively real" and so on than another form of making things up. Which is just odd since in both cases, things are being made up.

GMs simply don't need to have the level of control over the world to the extent that is often suggested. What's happening is not the creation of an "objectively real" fictional world, but it is instead a fictional world that is more controlled by one person.

See my post just upthread. You are neglecting the "relational" aspects of this - ie who is making it up, vs who is learning it.

If the desired dynamic is that person A learns what person B has imagined, then it matters that B is the one doing the making up. From A's perspective there is a type of "objectivity" in the sense of "externality" about the content of B's imaginings.

And of course this requires B to have a LOT of control over what is imagined.

Typically, what most people are saying is that they want or need (or believe that they need) that amount of control to depict a consistent fictional world.

<snip>

Folks should instead say "I can't depict a consistent fictional world unless I prepare much/most/all of it ahead of time".

This is also a thing, but I think it's secondary to what I've mentioned above.

 

[pemerton]

On D&D and prep: the Monster Manual, the lists of magic items, etc - these are all GM prep. It's hard to do D&D without them.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think this is where the theoretical-absolute vs practical latitude distinction is useful. In theory, the 5e D&D DM has no constraints at all, aka "the rules are merely suggestions." In theory, the DW GM has several constraints, some qualitative ("be a fan of the characters") and others quantitative (you must answer Discern Realities questions honestly.) But, in practice, the 5e DM cannot realistically use the vast majority of their theoretical latitude, because it would upset the players and/or damage the group's game to do so. Contrariwise, the DW GM not only can but is expected to use every ounce of the latitude they are given, to push the envelope ("think dangerous," "think offscreen, too"), drive the action forward ("make a move that follows," "ask questions and use the answers"), and enliven the experience as much as possible ("embrace the fantastic," "give every monster life.")

Both sides have latitude, and it is latitude regardless of whether we consider it in terms of theory or practice. But it definitely looks--as someone who has played both games and run DW quite a bit--like 5e cannot meaningfully capitalize on its theoretical latitude, while DW (or any system Powered by the Apocalypse) almost perfectly capitalizes on all of the latitude it claims to have. To use a pithy business phrase, when it comes to latitude for the coordinating player (DM/GM), 5e over-promises and under-delivers.

OK, yes, but Dungeon World makes that latitude CLEAR and makes HOW TO USE IT clear. 5e does not! 5e also leaves the GM with a lot of dangerous gizmos in his hands, most of which he better not use. Where it does give advice it doesn't explain how various techniques fit together, or even explicate them very well. By contrast, again, DW is extremely clear and concise and gives you a precisely calibrated set of options that work together as advertised to deliver its results.

So, yes, we are agreeing. Of course its fine for people to simply prefer 5e, for whatever reasons, though I would think general familiarity is the main selling point, along with the network effect that most people will likely consider playing it.