D&D General How much control do DMs need?

[EzekielRaiden]

The claim doesn't sound bizarre to me...at least not after DMing some long-time players I had who often intentionally chose to eschew information gathering in favour of just diving in.

There is a difference between:
It is possible for someone to go somewhere without knowing anything about what's there first.
and
It is impossible for someone to go anywhere while knowing anything about what's there first.

And frankly, I find your experience more than a little unrepresentative, based on the way pretty much everyone describes old-school D&D. That is, that's exactly the kind of behavior that gets characters killed. Repeatedly and intentionally. The rules do not care--they will chew you up and spit you out if you try that. Caution dominates, and leads to ossified SOPs, which was why the DM/player arms race of cloakers and cursed items and ear seekers became such a thing.

Edit: And, to be clear, my claim was that players have major incentives (in every edition, not just old-school ones) to investigate before they act. That investigation will, in part, be an effort to learn whether it is worth their time to do something. It may be that they really, really want whatever is in a particular place, but if they know it's full of monstrously powerful undead and an ancient black dragon, they're not going to go there until they are prepared, by whatever means (gaining levels, finding/buying gear, recruiting allies, whatever.) Likewise, a place that has just a mere kobold warren is unlikely to be of interest to someone who can slay dragons; that doesn't mean they have no interest at all in the place, but time and resources are finite. If the kobold warren is a concern, as others have said, buy them off or pay people to clear it up (and thus the cycle of adventuring turns!)

 

[Lanefan]

@Swarmkeeper

The contention that @Lanefan made was that different structures of play that put different sorts of constraints on the GM reduce the GM role to that of a soulless robot and scene setter.

Close-ish, but not quite.

The contention I was trying (and, apparently, failing) to make was that it seems there's some here who would prefer it if the GM role was reduced to soulless robot and scene setter, regardless of system in use and-or constraints already in place. I don't think this is a healthy way for the game/hobby to go and thus stand ready to argue with any who (appear to) hold such a preference.

 

[Lanefan]

It isn't flagrantly unrealistic though. No more than any other edition of D&D.

Perhaps, but for some reason its unrealisms (new word for the day!) kinda stood out stark to me on reading through the (first) core books; and mostly before I heard/read anyone else's opinions.

 

[soviet]

The contention I was trying (and, apparently, failing) to make was that it seems there's some here who would prefer it if the GM role was reduced to soulless robot and scene setter, regardless of system in use and-or constraints already in place. I don't think this is a healthy way for the game/hobby to go and thus stand ready to argue with any who (appear to) hold such a preference.

Examples?

 

[Lanefan]

There is a difference between:
It is possible for someone to go somewhere without knowing anything about what's there first.
and
It is impossible for someone to go anywhere while knowing anything about what's there first.

And frankly, I find your experience more than a little unrepresentative, based on the way pretty much everyone describes old-school D&D. That is, that's exactly the kind of behavior that gets characters killed. Repeatedly and intentionally.

I know that. They knew it too, and carried on regardless.

The rules do not care--they will chew you up and spit you out if you try that. Caution dominates, and leads to ossified SOPs, which was why the DM/player arms race of cloakers and cursed items and ear seekers became such a thing.

Yep. And I don't mind that to some extent. Adventuring is a dangerous way to make a living, and many elements of the game world are out to kill you dead.

That said, in almost 40 years of DMing I don't think I've ever run ear seekers.

Edit: And, to be clear, my claim was that players have major incentives (in every edition, not just old-school ones) to investigate before they act. That investigation will, in part, be an effort to learn whether it is worth their time to do something. It may be that they really, really want whatever is in a particular place, but if they know it's full of monstrously powerful undead and an ancient black dragon, they're not going to go there until they are prepared, by whatever means (gaining levels, finding/buying gear, recruiting allies, whatever.) Likewise, a place that has just a mere kobold warren is unlikely to be of interest to someone who can slay dragons; that doesn't mean they have no interest at all in the place, but time and resources are finite. If the kobold warren is a concern, as others have said, buy them off or pay people to clear it up (and thus the cycle of adventuring turns!)

Fair enough, but there's a certain type of player (including me sometimes, when I'm in a more gonzo mood) who thinks the best means of investigation boils down to trial and error. As in: "There's a cave system up there - we think something might live in it but we don't know what, so instead of spending days in town asking questions, let's go find out firsthand by exploring the place." And if turns out to be trivial, then so what; and if it turns out to be way above our pay grade then maybe some of us die while the rest escape.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I know that. They knew it too, and carried on regardless.

Yep. And I don't mind that to some extent. Adventuring is a dangerous way to make a living, and many elements of the game world are out to kill you dead.

That said, in almost 40 years of DMing I don't think I've ever run ear seekers.

Fair enough, but there's a certain type of player (including me sometimes, when I'm in a more gonzo mood) who thinks the best means of investigation boils down to trial and error. As in: "There's a cave system up there - we think something might live in it but we don't know what, so instead of spending days in town asking questions, let's go find out firsthand by exploring the place." And if turns out to be trivial, then so what; and if it turns out to be way above our pay grade then maybe some of us die while the rest escape.

But you recognize that--even for yourself--this is the minority opinion. That, as a rule, players care about trying to do things that are achievable but also which give rewards (XP, loot, holdings, safety, knowledge, what-have-you) fitting the work done. They will not always reach that. In the words of the great philosopher Saxa Voluta, "you don't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need." That this is not always practical does not mean that, in general, they do not care. Pretty consistently, human beings engaged in more or less rational action (not homo economicus nonsense, but practical rationality, phronesis one might call it) will try to do things that they believe are possible, if sometimes difficult, and which give rewards worth the work.

Hence, the players themselves will--in general--self-select for things that are very roughly appropriate to their level, when they are able to select at all. Sometimes they can't select in the first place. Even when they can, there will always be variation, and that is okay. My problem is in decrying the very possibility that the GM can make solid (not perfect) predictions about whether and to what degree the forces they go against will be threatening to them. A well-constructed encounter-building system gives you a good idea, but never a perfect one, of what the opposition is capable of and how that matches the PCs. That's balance--even if it means there are fights the party essentially cannot win. Even if it means fights the party is essentially guaranteed to win! Balance is in the knowing, not in the perfect lockstep matching. But of course, whenever anyone criticizes it, they always hold up the infuriating straw-man effigy of "who wants dull, lifeless combats that are always perfectly calibrated to match the party? Certainly not me!"

 

[Aldarc]

It's impossible to remove game rules.

Point of Discussion: We've established in the prior discussion in this thread that this isn't the case, whether we subscribe to Rule 0 or not. Game rules can always be removed or altered. If you also believe that the GM has no constraints, that also extends to their ability to remove game rules. The game may suffer as a result of those changes, but that's a different matter than the rote point of whether the rules can be changed.

But I'm still thinking of it as a dragon, not that the GM spent X points so therefore they have Y left.

You know that you are reading a book and watching a TV show. You have not lost your sense of being a meatbag. Likewise, you as a meatbag player see and hear your GM make a roll or two as they open the Monster Manual behind the screen while your characters are delving a dungeon. Do you choose to ignore what the GM is doing? Does having an awareness of what the GM could be doing interfere with your immersion? Why or why not?

Likewise, even if you know that rolls and moves constrain the GM, would you be able to tell in the case of the 16 HP Dragon? Maybe you would; however, in my own experience, I was too engrossed in the game fiction of similar situations to notice anything other than what my character was doing and what was going on in the surrounding fiction. As the PbtA adage goes, "to do it, do it," and I was too busy "doing it" by engaging myself with the fiction.

People have stated that controls on the GM are a universal good with no explanation why. They just assert it as truth. That makes me try to guess why they believe what they do because they won't explain.

Why are you not equally concerned when people in this thread state that a lack of controls on the GM is a universal good with no explanation and asserted as truth?

Not all games have to operate the same. In fact over the past half century the most popular games don't have hard constraints on the GM. I don't think their necessary, it seems like they don't harm the popularity and growth of games that do not have them.

B/X (and OSE) provide a fair amount of constraints on the GM as does OSR for that matter. Even if the GM is hypothetically sans contraintes, the GM has some pretty tight expectations for how they should run the game, because B/X is honestly a fairly focused game.

The OSR community does acknowledge that nothing technically binds the GM's authority. The OSR community also eschews balanced encounters. On the other hand, the OSR community does value things like "skilled play," which does require the GM to respect and honor when the players' skilled gameplay overcomes their prep. The GM is expected to restrain themselves there and not just streamroll the PCs because the players "ruined" the GM's prepped ideas and encounters. OSR also tries to put in safeguards that constrains the GM's ability to railroad the PCs or to force GM pre-authored story on them: e.g., random tables, non-linear dungeons, wandering monster checks, etc.

So you're saying different games work differently. Shocking.

More condescension.

Ah - thank you for the explanation!
I suspect I'm not the only one around here unfamiliar with some of these non-D&D games. Much appreciated synopsis.

If you would like, I or others could either tell you more about some of these games or point you in the direction of threads, videos, or articles where these are discussed in greater detail. I can share now that my own experience of going from GMing more traditionally-structured games like D&D or CoC to games like Dungeon World/Stonetop or Blades in the Dark was that it demanded a lot of me as a GM in the moment since you don't necessarily have the same sort of prep to fall back on since you are reacting to the PCs from moment to moment and scenario to scenario.

 

[Retros_x]

DMing was becoming much more fun the moment I started to include player more in narration role a few years ago. They get chances to add stuff to the scene, narrative connections etc. Of course as the DM I still have veto power, but I think it improved the game for me and for my players to give up some control.

 

[clearstream]

DM: "Six months ago, you killed Jareth."
Pat, whose PC is now dead: "...who now?"
DM: "Jareth. Mercenary, back in Townsville?"
Pat: "I literally have no idea who you're talking about. That was six months ago. I barely even remember what we did in Townsville."
DM: "Well, he was part of an assassin guild. They put a bounty on your head. Someone finally came to collect it."
Pat: "And...I was supposed to know any of this how, exactly?!"
DM: "Guess them's the breaks."
____________

DM: "A red dragon lands on the party. Roll for Initiative."
Sam: "Can't we talk to it? Reason with it? Or try to run away?"
DM: "No. You are scorched by dragonfire. Get a new character sheet. Everyone else, roll for Initiative."
____________

DM: "As the battle continues, the necromancer's forces recoiling from your daylight, you see her cackle madly. A portal of woven shadow opens, and a squad of soot-blackened skeletons comes through it."
Eli: "I thought we destroyed her skeletons last week."
DM: "These are new skeletons. Their blackened bones probably got that way in a fire."
Eli: "Then what was the point of destroying her skeleton army if she could just build a whole new one in a few days?!"
DM: "You still weakened her. She just rebuilt."
Eli: "She rebuilt. Instantly. Just like that."
DM: "No, you see, she had standing orders to collect remains from nearby events and there was a fire in Cityburough just after you destroyed her skeletons."

All three of these are scenes that have, to one degree or another, actually been defended in this very thread.

I was thinking these over from a resolutely immersionist perspective. The second one reminded me of events in an RQ campaign. The player characters were outside the glowline in an area where there had been some rebellion against the Lunar Empire. In background I'd established that the Crimson Bat was in play, but IIRC the characters weren't aware of it's existence (it would have been possible for them to learn about it, but they were more interested in other things.)

So the sky turns reddish and minutes later in drops the Crimson Bat; then while the Bat itself was focused on eating rebels its keening and some stray ticks gave the player characters a tough time. I would call this a fair encounter from an immersionist perspective. That the Bat was there had nothing to do with the player characters. It's movements were preestablished by me in background based on facts about Glorantha established by the game designers. There was effectively no chance characters would survive if they chose to attack it. On the other hand, it was setup (the Bat creates its own glowspot) and by no means a cause of instant no-interaction death.

Thus, I believe it works out fine in that mode to have things in play that have nothing to do with the characters. This might be like your third case, which I see as borderline (not at all okay in some modes, okay in others.) In fact, the problem in your third case is most likely a lack of alignment on what kind of campaign is being played, which can easily lead to dissatisfaction.

The second case would be more like - "a giant glowing bat with Lunar priests on its back drops on you and eats you." We've discussed a similar case under 5e before and depending on how you understand certain rules, it's not something that can happen in 5e. At most you get "a giant glowing bat with Lunar priests on its back drops on you and... roll initiative."

Your first case I feel relies on helping oneself to the psychological state of Pat. One could help oneself to a different state - one where Pat was engaged with what was going on, recalls perfectly well the encounter and how hard they griefed the mercenaries, and is rather thrilled by the danger their characters are forced to navigate. I had something like that in an FKR once, and we had a clear social-contract up-front that it was a gloves-off game involving a lot of political intrigues and outright assassinations... including in your sleep if you vexed the wrong people and didn't look to your security! In a sense, there the setup or soft move is a meta-move: we as a group established an intent to play in a way that put hard moves based on hidden-information on the table. I can easily picture a PbtA game design that does exactly that. Some mightn't like it, and some might reject the notion of meta-moves, of course. You could also note the "vexed the wrong people" and "didn't look to your security" which certainly put it in player hands... but then there were some hidden laws that players didn't start the game knowing, only knowing they existed, and breaking one of those could also lead to a hard move.

 

[loverdrive]

One mode - that I label immersionist - does picture that the trap can be there only if it fits with the world, and the world is not about the players.

The point is, the actual "maker of a trap" is a real human being in our real world. People who laid it are fictional, they don't exist as entities of their own, and start existing only when interacted with by other real humans in our real world. If a tree falls down in a forest...

The value of a trap is the same as any other thing in RPGs: to either create gameplay or provide "colour". A signposted trap does both at the same time, a hidden one does neither.

Given the nature of the medium, the only interface the players have is spoken words. You can create an interesting gameplay of figuring out barely noticeable environmental clues in a videogame (like how mimics in Dark Souls are distinguishable from chests, but only if you are observant enough). You can't do so in a TTRPG. The gameplay of looking for a trap is "OK, I'm going to look for traps". That's it. What's the point of wasting time on such a pointless endeavour?