D&D General How much control do DMs need?

[pemerton]

Yes, this is indeed what I said. I'd be interested to hear your reflections on what it means to make a promise.

I wrote a PhD which discussed, inter alia, what it means to make a promise.

I teach and study private law which includes, inter alia, considering what it means to make a promise.

The most recent piece that I had accepted in a major scholarly journal had a footnote discussing some aspects of what it means to make a promise (with reference to one of the important figures in the field, John Rawls).

But there is no need to enter in the theory of promise-making, or the discussion of whether and when promises are binding, in order to discuss how RPGs work.

Here's why:

Suppose that promises are not binding. Then they are not ways of creating or imposing rules, and hence we can set them to one side.

Suppose that promises are binding. And suppose that I promise to X not to stick to the written rules of a game, without changing them. Here are three possibilities that I believe cover the field.

X is someone who has no connection to the group of people with whom I am playing (eg I made the promise to my dying aunt on her deathbed). It then has no binding effect on anyone in the group but me. If others choose to play by the rules out of respect for my promise to X, that's a choice they make moment-to-moment. Promising makes no difference here except to reinforce the weight some might accord to my desire to play by the rules as written.

X is one of my fellow players, and we are playing in a social/friendly context: X can release from my promise at any time, and hence the promise has no effect on what rules are binding.

X is one of my fellow players, and we are playing in an institutional context such as a tournament: my promise is part of the institutional infrastructure, and it is that infrastructure that does the work of establishing which rules are binding (as per my post not far upthread).

In my view, the preceding disposes of the relationship between promise-making and RPG play.

 

[pemerton]

I can see arguments for that, and they dovetail with the proposal that rule zero has the form of one or more regulatory rules (regulating that preexisting behaviour.)

And?

If you mean that rule zero expresses a commitment, by participants, to follow one particular participant in setting the rules of the game, then the question becomes: is such a commitment actually feasible? And the answer, in the context of a social pastime (cf a tournament or other institutional contex) is No.

I mean, people can agree to go along with the GM. But if they don't like what the GM is doing, nothing stops them from withdrawing that prior agreement! Whatever the proper theory of constituent power might be in various constitutional contexts, it seems pretty straightforward when we're talking about a group of friend playing a game together!

 

[pemerton]

Do you think that people are more likely to accept an unofficial rule than an official one?

That's also an empirical question. I'm fairly confident that the US, Japan, Bulgaria, the DRC and the UK (just to pick a few examples where I have some moderately-informed intuitions) will all suggest different answers (if the question is asked about rule following in general).

In the context of RPGing, I personally doubt the conjecture you suggested.

 

[pemerton]

So swinging back to DW and things following or not following from hidden knowledge and prep-notes ... In the DW SRD part of the GM rules states this...

<snip rules text>

Seems to imply that pre-prep, mapping and actions that can be based on knowledge that is not available to the players are all viable and expected parts of DW.

As I've posted upthread, and as @loverdrive has posted upthread, DW (like AW) has strict rules that govern when the GM can make a hard move.

One typical function of prep in D&D is to establish hard moves that can be made in ways that don't conform to the DW and AW rules (see eg the example of the sniper upthread; or "I look for X" "Sorry, there's no X here").

That's a very fundamental difference.

 

[clearstream]

Suppose that promises are not binding. Then they are not ways of creating or imposing rules, and hence we can set them to one side.

Suppose that promises are binding. And suppose that I promise to X not to stick to the written rules of a game, without changing them. Here are three possibilities that I believe cover the field.

X is someone who has no connection to the group of people with whom I am playing (eg I made the promise to my dying aunt on her deathbed). It then has no binding effect on anyone in the group but me. If others choose to play by the rules out of respect for my promise to X, that's a choice they make moment-to-moment. Promising makes no difference here except to reinforce the weight some might accord to my desire to play by the rules as written.

X is one of my fellow players, and we are playing in a social/friendly context: X can release from my promise at any time, and hence the promise has no effect on what rules are binding.

X is one of my fellow players, and we are playing in an institutional context such as a tournament: my promise is part of the institutional infrastructure, and it is that infrastructure that does the work of establishing which rules are binding (as per my post not far upthread).

In my view, the preceding disposes of the relationship between promise-making and RPG play.

I said "I believe folk can enter into a prior agreement to a rule, that has a determining effect on their acceptance of that rule at subsequent moments within the governed activity." This claim withstands the above, noting two caveats -

1. When I say "determining effect" I mean that it changes the probability that the given behaviour will be observed. So that I am saying that prior agreement changes the probability of later acceptance. Thus it forms a testable hypothesis (and one that is tested, repeatedly, in ordinary life.) IIRC you have elsewhere implied that adopted principles make it more likely that some rules will be followed in a certain (intended) way.

2. As I have argued elsewhere what's at issue is the neurological state at the moment it's tested, which will have been updated by everything happening in between. For example, if the institution was found, between making the promise and determining acceptance, to be disreputable, that might weaken the effect (i.e. the predictive power).

 

[clearstream]

If you mean that rule zero expresses a commitment, by participants, to follow one particular participant in setting the rules of the game, then the question becomes: is such a commitment actually feasible? And the answer, in the context of a social pastime (cf a tournament or other institutional contex) is No.

That would on-surface entail that GM-power is not feasible. Is that your meaning here?

I mean, people can agree to go along with the GM. But if they don't like what the GM is doing, nothing stops them from withdrawing that prior agreement! Whatever the proper theory of constituent power might be in various constitutional contexts, it seems pretty straightforward when we're talking about a group of friend playing a game together!

The reason in my above post that I emphasised that we should be speaking of probabilities, not certainties, is with this sort of thought in mind. Yes, nothing prevents withdrawing from a prior agreement. However, a prior agreement makes it less probable that they will withdraw. Folk will have experienced this in the form of expectation-setting in ordinary life.

 

[Aldarc]

But maybe it's more of a question of how the complexity, open nature and/or specificity of the rules affects this. If at all. D&D has a ton of optional material, a lot of things like stealth that were left intentionally open. There seems to be a correlation between people who push back against DM as final arbiter and those who don't like the open ended nature the designers decided to go with.

Part of what I personally like about D&D is that open ended nature of the rules. I think having the traditional role of DM helps with that, especially if you play with different groups and not just the same static group year after year.

First, your play preferences are valid, and there is nothing wrong with having those play preferences.

Second, I'm not comfortable making any statement about the correlation that you have found because I don't necessarily want to speak for others.

However, I'm not sure if D&D is necessarily more open-ended. There are places where it is but also places where it isn't. On the one hand, it does have rules lacunae, some of which are intentional and others are not. These gaps may require the GM to step in to provide their interpretation about Stealth and how it works. On the other hand, D&D has a tremendous amount of specific rules and sub-systems that cover specific situations.

There are rules in 5e D&D, for example, regarding falling damage and how much damage a character takes based upon how far they have fallen. Even if we acknowledge that the GM can change or modify those rules so they are more open, we can still acknowledge the initial rules start from a place of specificity.

Contrast this with games like Fate, Cortex, Dungeon World, or Blades in the Dark. There are no rules for falling damage in these games. However, characters can surely still fall and die in this game, right? Sure, but there are more generalized rules or principles that govern what happens, particularly "fiction first" principles: i.e., understand the fiction before consulting the mechanics. This is the Golden Rule of Fate. There may be times when the table agrees that the rules should be side-stepped for the sake of the fiction. This is incidentally the Silver Rule of Fate. The example used here is of a PC who punches a glass table to intimidate someone. The PC doesn't fail the roll, but the table agrees that the PC should take a mild consequence (i.e., "Glass in My Hand") because that follows the fiction.

But let's go back to a PC falling. A D&D PC fails an ability check to climb. The fiction of how far they have fallen is important in so far as it determines how much damage the PC takes: i.e., 1d6 bludgeoning damage per 10 feet. So the GM declares that the PC takes 4d6 bludgeoning damage. So what happens if that same PC fell in Fate? Good question. Does the PC take damage? Not really. When the GM and player talk about what happened, the GM may decide that the PC takes Stress, though I think it likelier that the GM would rule that a Mild or even Moderate Consequence. So now the PC may have the Mild Consequence aspect of "Sprained Ankle." And because aspects are always true, the PC now has to deal with a sprained ankle, which can be invoked against them by the GM or other players. However, a different GM could rule based upon the fiction that the PC has the Moderate Consequence of "Broken Arm." Ouch.

So there is still a lot of open-endednes when it comes to implementing the rules for these latter games.

 

[Manbearcat]

If it is me who should raise their hand, then I suspect whoever you are responding to has failed to grasp my arguments. I queried an on-surface contradiction with prior positions by stating what folk might be understood as saying, in order to get at the differences between rule zero and freely hacking rules. Aside from allergic reactions, this has yielded a reasonably clear picture of what folk feel is at stake. Essentially -

Rule zero is connected with traditional GM empowerment, so to invoke it skirts invoking that empowerment.
Freedom to hack rules is either a preexisting behaviour, a principle, or a rule (it doesn't matter which and there are arguments for all three).

My contribution is to propose that if the second statement is true, then rule zero amounts to one or more regulatory rules that act upon it. Rule zero is only able to have any effect because there is a prior ability to hack rules. The practical upshot of rule zero then, is

1) to exclude others from similarly exercising their ability to hack rules
2) to put in place a prior agreement that will go on to effect moment-to-moment acceptance

Its not clear to me that its you that the person I was responding to was invoking. But that is because I'm struggling to parse how what you seem to be getting at above intersects with Custom Moves in Apocalypse World. So I guess I'll make a few statements here and if you could respond to each statement specifically, I think we can sort out what is what here:


* Rule 0 is not about hacking. Rule 0 is about discretionary GM Rulings, in-situ, historically unilateral, to move the game forward in some GM-desired direction. At GM discretion, a given ruling may reference input from system and/or players.

* Individual Custom Moves in Apocalypse World are not about hacking. They're bog standard Apocalypse World (or layer 4 in concentric design); a legal move (formatted by simply following the template for moves) which gives expression to some particular aspect (general or specific, broad or focused) of setting/Threats when players interact with it.

So a Custom Move, or even a collection of them, while necessary, are not sufficient to constitute "hacking" or "a hack." They're just "playing Apocalypse World."

Now add together and integrate a large enough collection of Custom Moves along with new playbooks, new xp triggers, a new mileu, a new play premise, and possibly alternative tech/gear? Now you have transcended "playing with the form" or "changing the action" and you're into the equivalent of a "PBtA Hack." Now we're in "sufficient territory."

---

Are we on the same page?

 

[Alzrius]

Yes, there are extant rules drafts, written by Arneson, which were presumably used by Gygax while incorporating material into his codification of the system.

Right, and you said that you have those as a PDF on your hard drive, so I'm asking you to please post them here, share them via a PM, email, etc.

I bring this up because, insofar as I know, instances of "Arnesonian Blackmoor" (i.e. Blackmoor as Dave himself ran it during the early 70s) are vanishingly rare, typically being either after-the-fact reconstructions or thoroughly edited by someone else. The archetypal instance of this is Supplement II: Blackmoor (affiliate link); as Shannon Appelcline notes in his write-up: "Decades later, Tim Kask would say that the book "was about 60% my work, 30% Dave Arneson’s and the remainder came from Gary and Rob Kuntz"."

Likewise, First Fantasy Campaign (released by Judges Guild in 1977) is much closer to what Arneson was doing in those early years, but it's still something that he cobbled together from his notes after play had largely ceased (a lot of which was due to Dave's involvement, and subsequent departure from, TSR at the time). The same can be said for Arneson's two-part "Garbage Pits of Despair" adventure, published in Different Worlds #42 and #43 in 1986. Similarly, Jon Peterson's incredible research on the Dalluhn manuscript, Mornard fragments, Guidon D&D first draft, and COMTAX suggests that all have some degree of Gary's influence present, since by that point early designs of D&D were starting to proliferate throughout the Lake Geneva/Twin Cities region.

As such, a copy of the original notes that Dave sent to Gary constitute a glimpse into how Blackmoor was being played at the time by him and his group, without any "contamination" (for lack of a better term) from any other groups or individuals, which is unprecedented. If you have a copy of that, I urge you again to please make it available to the wider community...or at least just me.

 

[clearstream]

Its not clear to me that its you that the person I was responding to was invoking. But that is because I'm struggling to parse how what you seem to be getting at above intersects with Custom Moves in Apocalypse World. So I guess I'll make a few statements here and if you could respond to each statement specifically, I think we can sort out what is what here:

I was not getting at any intersection with Custom Moves in AW. So it is unsurprising that you might struggle to parse them out!

* Rule 0 is not about hacking. Rule 0 is about discretionary GM Rulings, in-situ, historically unilateral, to move the game forward in some GM-desired direction. At GM discretion, a given ruling may reference input from system and/or players.

Yes. Setting aside debate on mechanisms, I felt that there is a helpful observation that can be teased out, and which I did tease out-

• Most folk don't object to the possibility of game participants changing rules, in fact they see it as basic
• What is particular to Rule Zero is that it appoints GM to hold that power exclusively

This observation separates concerns: that's its value. A group could do any of the following

• Appoint someone to hold the power to change rules exclusively, based on their birthday date (Rule Birthday)
• Agree not to change any rules
• Agree to change rules, but only according to certain principles
• Agree to change enough of the rules to form a new game
• Agree to follow the rules of the new game, and not the rules of the old game
• Appoint someone to decide which rules they will follow
• etc...

Some objections to rule zero in this thread are to my reading connected with objections to GM-empowerment. My observation avoids throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It separates the question of GM-empowerment from other questions about changing rules. If someone wants to say - "I dislike rule zero" - then I am saying that is distinct from - "I dislike changing rules". And I am offering a reason why it is distinct i.e. that rule zero is about assigning rule-changing authority exclusively (no matter to what extent doing so is effective.)