D&D General Fighting Law and Order

[FrozenNorth]

That's a really interesting question. I've seen Dungeon World and actually recently gotten the rules set. But I'm not familiar enough with it yet to give a proper answer.

But what I can say, is I can't see the OP running a proper DW session EVER. His style just involves too much DM authority to want to respond to player input/moves like DW requires. Also, his style is to have a set path for the PCs to follow with a defined end goal. From everything I've seen DW expressly rejects that.

Which is an interesting point. There is a certain amount of self-selecting going on: a system that constrains GM power is less likely to attract GMs interested in exercising unrestrained power.

 

[bloodtide]

So I will tell you what the solution isn't, and that is to make all the NPCs that aren't supposed to be killed more powerful than the PCs. That's the most common solution you will find in published materials, both in tRPGs and video games. And it sucks, both because it's a form of railroading, and because it ends up deprotagonizing the PC's and tempts the GM to creating DM PC's, and because it creates a wholly unrealistic world filled with fridge logic where you are like, "Why didn't you solve your own problems?"

Well, that is the way I do it. I run a high level, high power, high magic game that is both unfair and unbalanced. It's not railroading to have a world that makes sense. Though it could be railroading to have a super weak world of zero level nobodies that must call on the PCs for help.

If I'm understanding correctly you are in the process of ruining another DMs campaign. Let me suggest you hard step back from that course of action. If the PC's want to or have created a game where they are criminals, then let them have the game where they are criminals.

It is not like I was in any way opposed to what they chose to do. Their actions did ruin their DMs urban set game....but I don't care about that.

I don't entirely blame you for the situation. It sounds like there is a ton of railroading going on in the notes handed over to you as well, and this is a situation that is entirely predictable. No experienced GM would be surprised that a PC party would murder all the guards attempting to arrest them. That's the normal expected result of attempting for force PCs into prison.

It is in no way a "normal expected result" for normal, well adjusted people. Even if we are talking about Pure Fiction, normal people would never do something like that.

OK... umm, so you ARE just going to ignore the problem, and do a do over AFTER asserting some hard GM force to get the PCs back in line?

I'm not sure what problem you saw me ignore? Nothing about my plot forces the Players to do anything.

Well, I don't know about your players, but after that I'd be leaving the group.

Well, they are not my players....

One really interesting question to me is does this city really have the resources to easily hunt down and kill the PCs? Because if they do, why the heck where they so taken by surprise by the PCs and unable to prevent them from murdering large numbers of guards? Chances are, any city that doesn't have the resources to prevent PCs from murdering large numbers of guards probably doesn't have the resources to easily hunt down PC's and kill them. Sure, you could employ some DM pet NPCs to dispense justice, but that's to me obviously shady.

Well, it was not my city...but yes it is a typical mis-mashed mess of a city made up by many DMs.

So yeah. The PC's story is that they have become criminals and mass-murderers. This doesn't end their story, it just means that this isn't the story you had in mind. You can go with that story. It could be an interesting and fun one. If you are willing to go with that story to see where it goes, then I have suggestions.

I was willing to go with it, but the players were not.

So, I am left to reflect on what I have heard here.

There are players, who seem to have been simply young and inexperienced, who were clearly unhappy with how things played out, and their usual DM was surprised that things went as poorly as they did just for the first substitute session.

Well, I'd point out that the wrinkle is the play style of the players and their DM. They have the Goofy Cartoon style of not thinking and just doing stuff randomly that is fun to them in the moment. I'm sure their normal DM is a Buddy DM. If this was their normal game, I'm sure the Buddy DM would have stopped them before they attacked the first guard with a "yuck, yuc, yuc, hey guys your characters are good guys you don't want to kill the good guards...just escape!" And the player would just be "thanks for the tip Buddy DM, we just escape!" And all would be good with the game.

I'm not a Buddy DM. I don't give the players advice or tell them what to do. They are free to do whatever they want...

There is a DM, who openly and explicitly says he never adjusts for anyone else's preferences, ever, not just behind the DM screen. Said DM sees it as an imperative to reach the players a lesson, and that certain outcomes will definitely happen, no matter what the players might think about that. Compromise and consideration are verboten, and the very idea of sitting down to talk to the players about what happened was rejected from the beginning.

I still would like an example of how you adjust a game for the whim of each player and ignore the GMs wishes. I get that when a player says something you agree with, and that you only play with players that agree with you on everything........BUT what happens if they don't?

Player One says "GM I want no rated X stuff", and the GM agrees with this and says "As you command player one". But what if Player Two says "GM I don't want the game to be any kind of Sandbox", and the GM disagrees.....does the GM still do it and say "as you command player two" and adjust the whole game to not be a sandbox?

And I'd ask again what good would "talking" have done?

I cannot help but go back to all the times I've been told that this sort of thing never happens, or only happens with "bad" DMs that you should simply refuse to play with. What choice did these players have but to be "taught a lesson," and in the process likely driven away from the hobby, possibly forever? I know this isn't a representative game. But it's not hard to look at this and say, "if there had been some reasonable, prudent limits, this could have all been avoided." But trying to get anyone to even consider such things is like pulling teeth—in part because people deny that this sort of thing ever happens.

So what am I to make of it when an example thereof gets presented for us "as it happens"?

Well, I doubt any of them will flee from the hobby forever.

Limits of what? Where do you see adding limits? I agree that if this game used ALIGNMENT more strongly then the players would have had a better chance of understanding "good" and "evil". So if they had the Limit of "tour playing good characters and can't do murderhobo acts on good people", that would have fixed everything.

 

[Oofta]

First, I appreciate that you are watching/listening to the videos that I had posted.


(1) I would recommend reading the GM principles of Dungeon World. These principles help direct the sort of Moves (hard or soft) that a GM is supposed to be making with the PCs:

• Make a Move that Follows (the Fiction)
• Be a Fan of the Characters
• Think Dangerous
• Begin and End with the Fiction

(2) The GM will usually only make hard moves when the following conditions have been met: (a) the players trigger a PC move with their action in the fiction, (b) the player roll to resolve the PC move (if applicable), and subsequently (c) fail with 6- on their roll (2d6 + Mod).

However, the text of DW says that a soft move may be more appropriate in the fiction than a hard move, and so it's acceptable to make a soft move instead:


(3) If you are curious about how these Moves play out in practice, and I can reassure you that IME I have been steamrolled over by the GM in D&D far more frequently than I have in DW. And this is even considering that DW is designed (much like PbtA) to have a certain degree of dramatic downhill snowballing.

I guess I can't speak to your DMs because the only time I've felt at all steamrolled was when one of the PCs did something really stupid and committed the group to some action. I also think the DMG should talk more about this than just a paragraph in the intro. Assuming anyone read the DMG in the first place. But the OP is an example of someone who doesn't care at all about their player's experience with the game. They're running the game their way, full steam ahead torpedoes (or player's enjoyment) be damned. They aren't listening to the advice in the DMG or people on this thread. I don't see why they'd listen to the advice of any ruleset.

I'll continue listening when I get a chance and probably go back to read some more. If nothing else it gave me some ideas for helping people generate their backstories.

 

[Aldarc]

I guess I can't speak to your DMs because the only time I've felt at all steamrolled was when one of the PCs did something really stupid and committed the group to some action. I also think the DMG should talk more about this than just a paragraph in the intro. Assuming anyone read the DMG in the first place. But the OP is an example of someone who doesn't care at all about their player's experience with the game. They're running the game their way, full steam ahead torpedoes (or player's enjoyment) be damned. They aren't listening to the advice in the DMG or people on this thread. I don't see why they'd listen to the advice of any ruleset.

I'll continue listening when I get a chance and probably go back to read some more. If nothing else it gave me some ideas for helping people generate their backstories.

The GMing section of Dungeon World may have some advice that you find portable to your games, even if the mechanics of the game are not to your liking.

FYI, I don't think that Dungeon World is a perfect game. There are some rough spots and design choices that I find questionable, though that has less to do with the overall architecture of the game and more to do with its old school aesthetic and playbook design choices.

 

[Mort]

Well, that is the way I do it. I run a high level, high power, high magic game that is both unfair and unbalanced. It's not railroading to have a world that makes sense. Though it could be railroading to have a super weak world of zero level nobodies that must call on the PCs for help.

It is not like I was in any way opposed to what they chose to do. Their actions did ruin their DMs urban set game....but I don't care about that.


It is in no way a "normal expected result" for normal, well adjusted people. Even if we are talking about Pure Fiction, normal people would never do something like that.


I'm not sure what problem you saw me ignore? Nothing about my plot forces the Players to do anything.

Well, they are not my players....

Well, it was not my city...but yes it is a typical mis-mashed mess of a city made up by many DMs.

I was willing to go with it, but the players were not.


Well, I'd point out that the wrinkle is the play style of the players and their DM. They have the Goofy Cartoon style of not thinking and just doing stuff randomly that is fun to them in the moment. I'm sure their normal DM is a Buddy DM. If this was their normal game, I'm sure the Buddy DM would have stopped them before they attacked the first guard with a "yuck, yuc, yuc, hey guys your characters are good guys you don't want to kill the good guards...just escape!" And the player would just be "thanks for the tip Buddy DM, we just escape!" And all would be good with the game.

I'm not a Buddy DM. I don't give the players advice or tell them what to do. They are free to do whatever they want...


I still would like an example of how you adjust a game for the whim of each player and ignore the GMs wishes. I get that when a player says something you agree with, and that you only play with players that agree with you on everything........BUT what happens if they don't?

Player One says "GM I want no rated X stuff", and the GM agrees with this and says "As you command player one". But what if Player Two says "GM I don't want the game to be any kind of Sandbox", and the GM disagrees.....does the GM still do it and say "as you command player two" and adjust the whole game to not be a sandbox?

And I'd ask again what good would "talking" have done?



Well, I doubt any of them will flee from the hobby forever.

Limits of what? Where do you see adding limits? I agree that if this game used ALIGNMENT more strongly then the players would have had a better chance of understanding "good" and "evil". So if they had the Limit of "tour playing good characters and can't do murderhobo acts on good people", that would have fixed everything.

Forgetting all the other stuff for a moment.

You say they could have chosen to escape quietly but didn't. Can you elaborate?

They did EVERYTHING else voluntarily (surrendered, stayed in jail, made the deal with the stranger...) what happened BETWEEN them accepting the deal to escape and then instead of going quietly - alerting all the guards and fighting their way out?

 

[W'rkncacnter]

It can, but usually doesn't.

So there's a single layered afterlife for people who die on the prime. The first layer is a spiritual copy of the material with its topography affected by psycho-emotional connections formed to specific areas on the material. People here are those still attached to their lives, forming societies and trying to resist the call of the bottom layer, the Well of Souls where souls got to be reincarnated.

As this connection fades, these souls descend into fissures in the top layer and enter a set of wandering catacombs where they introspect on their lives. They eventually arrive in a layer where those who are no longer attached to their former life, but not yet ready to return to the well live in a number of communities more adapted to no longer being alive and needing sustenance.

Eventually, they find themselves ready and reincarnate.

What the living world understands about this is skewed by the fact that it is very difficult to enter and leave the afterlife and any memories are dreamlike and easily forgotten. From these accounts, people imagine that the afterworld is a path of perdition with the central layers being known ad the Seven Interlocking Hells and that 'pure' souls go straight to the Well.

This means any PC trips to the afterlife is a constant series of contravened expectations and then you forget most of it when you get back.

...wait...wait, is this formulated in such a way as to explain how the resurrection spells work? like, revivify grabs the soul before it gets to the afterlife, raise dead pulls it from the first layer, reincarnate punts it from the first layer straight to the well, resurrection grabs it from the catacombs, and true resurrection grabs it from the layer between the catacombs and the well, and nothing works after that because the soul isn't in the afterlife anymore? because if so then that's clever, you sly dog.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Wish I could say that was my intention, but I honestly just didn't want people knowing how the afterlife works and wanted an afterlife detached from religion.

Plus, the Well came first as an explanation for certain types of non-arcane/divine magic.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

So what advantages, specifically? Because this seems to be what it comes back to. That other systems are inherently better with no explanation of how. I've had very few bad DMs. I didn't have them for long, it tends to be a self correcting problem.

How would rules change this scenario (from badly planned prison break to "teaching the players a lesson") from being FUBAR to being truly enjoyable for everyone? Or even improve the result? Other than "it would ". It's not that I refuse to consider, but you have yet to explain how it would make much of a difference. I have listened to a few hours of a DW stream and it's just not for me for a variety of reasons that aren't relevant here. But I also don't see how anything would change the end result. Sure, the players could question the GM on what the f*** is going on, but there's nothing stopping that in D&D either.

So I'll ask again: given the OP's attitude and the scenario how, specifically, would different rules change much?

Good rules provide guidance. E.g., Dungeon World's Principles expressly forbid much of what was done here. The relevant ones are:

1. Address the characters, not the players: "teaching lessons" to the players means you're addressing players, not characters. Bad player behavior is certainly an issue, but it's one that should be addressed separately.
2. Embrace the fantastic: Obviously, this should adapt to context (e.g. Apocalypse World uses "Barf forth apocalyptica"), but the core idea remains. Fill the world with magic, with mysticism and mystery. "Just die as outlaws 'cause there's no other solution" isn't fantastical.
3. Make a move that follows: Mentioned in prior threads, moves must follow fiction. Much of the setup here (like the mysterious stranger breaking them free but...not actually getting them out) did not do that.
4. Be a fan of the characters: This is the big one. Nothing about this reflected being a fan of the characters. Much the opposite, in fact--the characters were seen as being a problem to be fixed. It was punitive, and explicitly so to "teach a lesson" to the players.
5. Begin and end with the fiction: Anything you do should be tying back into the fictional state of play, advancing the story to something new and dramatic (which does not mean happy.) That, pretty obviously, didn't happen here, indeed the fiction by all accounts was left very muddled.

Following the guidance of these Principles, this whole situation would never have come to pass in the first place. There's much more depth involved than these high-level gloss statements alone; each is given a full multi-sentence explanation in the DW SRD, and you can find even more explanation in the actual DW text itself.

That is what guiding behavior looks like: explaining what's better to do, why it's better to do it, and (when space permits) giving examples of how to do that. Rules that are tools; rules that have been thoroughly tested and found to be highly effective for pursuing the right goals at the right times. There will, of course, always be components of individual preference and applying these things to specific contexts. Human choice isn't going to be removed. In fact, even if you could remove it (and I don't think you can), you shouldn't. But just as the rules of writing exist to guide, and should be followed in the vast majority of situations, well-made rules like those of Dungeon World should be followed in the vast majority of situations.

Because detrimental. the outright alternative often is and counterproductive
Because the alternative is counterproductive and often outright detrimental. See, I broke the rules of English writing there, by having the second half of the sentence woven in reverse into the first half! Totally better for communicating than following the dull-as-dirt ideas like "subject verb object," or adjectives preceding the word they modify, or the unspoken rules about the correct order for adjectives.

D&D is, of course, not actually identical to DW. You cannot simply rip out its rules and apply them to D&D, even though DW was made in emulation of a particular idea of how D&D can be played. You would need to do design work and testing before you could determine what constitutes good guidance and how to go about supporting the most effective actions. Much of this will, in the end, be a matter of codifying the intuitive "best practices" many current D&D DMs already use. Which is part of the point! We want to be able to take the wisdom and experience that previous generations of DMs have built, and condense that into useful guidance, so that the next generation can condense "20 years of DMing" to "a few hours of reading and a few months of practice." That's why we develop any body of technique and teaching, to make it so you don't need every single person to start from banging rocks together before they can move on to forging metal.

 

[W'rkncacnter]

D&D is, of course, not actually identical to DW. You cannot simply rip out its rules and apply them to D&D, even though DW was made in emulation of a particular idea of how D&D can be played. You would need to do design work and testing before you could determine what constitutes good guidance and how to go about supporting the most effective actions. Much of this will, in the end, be a matter of codifying the intuitive "best practices" many current D&D DMs already use. Which is part of the point! We want to be able to take the wisdom and experience that previous generations of DMs have built, and condense that into useful guidance, so that the next generation can condense "20 years of DMing" to "a few hours of reading and a few months of practice." That's why we develop any body of technique and teaching, to make it so you don't need every single person to start from banging rocks together before they can move on to forging metal.

i think your post accidentally shifted from "how would rules have helped the situation described by OP" to "what would a good DMG look like" right around here, and i'm not entirely sure that's the worst thing that could've happened to it.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

i think your post accidentally shifted from "how would rules have helped the situation described by OP" to "what would a good DMG look like" right around here, and i'm not entirely sure that's the worst thing that could've happened to it.

Well, the idea (or perhaps the hope) is that the two are synonymous as one approaches some limit (in the mathematical sense.) Rules that would have helped this situation being included in the DMG would make it a more effective, productive book. A more effective, productive DMG would provide the kinds of guidance and support that mitigate issues of this kind--not eliminate them, since that's impossible, but forestall them before they take root, identify the ones that slip through before they can flower, and/or resolve the ones that slip through that before they can poison the game.

As noted, nothing will be perfect. But we definitely can do better--if we work for it. Where "we" means both "the people who actually make the product D&D," "we DMs who run D&D," and "we general members of the D&D-loving community."

Mentorship would be part of that process. Good, supportive, guiding, effective rules would be another part. Community support would be another--both in the sense of giving support to the community, and the community working to support itself.

Rules don't make men virtuous, any more than handholds make infants walk. But good handholds, carefully placed and spaced, can certainly help us master the basic skills so we can start walking on our own. Rules work just the same for virtuous behavior, for whatever context that takes on. As I'm fond of quoting from Aristotle, "Some vices miss what is right because they are deficient, others because they are excessive, in feelings or in actions, but Virtue finds and chooses the mean." (Nichomachean Ethics.) By which Aristotle means, for each situation, Virtue finds and chooses the point between excess and deficiency that is appropriate, which may differ from one situation to the next. What is cowardice (deficient courage) on the battlefield may be foolhardiness (excessive courage) in the shopping mall.

And it turns out, rules are actually really useful for developing practical wisdom--phonesis, the ability to make correct judgments--because they help us to learn what "excessive" and "deficient" mean.