D&D General Fighting Law and Order

[Pedantic]

The game Root has good examples of how any particular GM move could be either hard or soft. For one of them, "Make them an offer to get their way," the example soft move is for the mayor to say "I'm going to need a scapegoat; go plant this evidence on the captain of the guard. Then I can help you," while the hard move is for the mayor to say "I'm going to need a scapegoat and it's going to have to be you; nobody else will work for this. Go cause some problems and make sure that you're seen doing it. Then I can help you." In this case, there isn't an instant consequence for the players after the hard move is used, but if they want to get their way, then there will be danger aimed directly at them. With the soft move, the players will be slightly inconvenienced, since they have to do a thing before they get what they want, but they will be in very minimal danger--it would be easy for them to sneak into the captain's house when they're away, plant the evidence, and sneak away, nobody the wiser. With the hard move, no matter what they do, they have to be in harm's way and very likely will get hurt in the process.

This is the thing that always rubs me wrong about these systems right here. The construction of a hard or soft move as the means of introducing a conflict and giving the PCs something to do is intuitive and makes sense here. I can see the value in introducing either one of those two scenarios, "go frame someone" or "go become infamous" as interesting problems/scenarios that PCs want to engage with. What I find baffling is that the system makes the resolution of all gameplay into yet more such moves, when I mostly feel like I'm done with that now, and ready to go see how resolving the situation turns out. I find myself wishing there was some other system that was used after a conflict was introduced, where I could do the standard game thing (minimize bad outcomes, maximize positive ones, determine the most efficient/safest/highest reward play to get to whatever goal we just established), but the loop just keeps iterating instead, which feels exhausting and unrewarding.

There might be a design there that moves that kind of generation up and back one level, less targeted at each specific fictional declaration and more targeted at providing a GM with "and here's how to hook them next" that would prove a more comfortable synthesis of those principles into something like D&D. I think the problem still comes down to treating the core idea, "there is no fictional world, just authority to say what comes next in the fiction" as too fundamental. If you started with the premise of exploring a consistent fictional setting as a given (ignoring for a moment any imperfection in how such a thing is achieved) and then treated this as a system to keep play moving on top of that, you might get somewhere. Downgrade it from a series of moves rolled out each time the GM does something, to a tool that's invoked at specific points in time to create new problems, before dropping back to task resolution.

Here we disagree. Rolling where "no change" is one of the outcomes means that there's a good chance that time--both the time spent dealing with the obstacle and the time spent making the obstacle--was wasted. We only get to play for about two hours each week; I don't want to waste it on rolls that don't mean anything.

The problem is that this is inimical to the portraying a consistent setting. "Nothing" literally can't happen, time always passes. The real thing that's occurring is "nothing important (or noticeable) to the players happens," which is a reasonable but inefficient outcome. I think there's better solutions than simply not doing thing at all, so that you're not messing with which actions are available to the players. I'd push for a robust defaulting system, so that you don't actually have to roll most of the time, you're just expending time in different increments and if those don't matter, then they don't matter and you get the highest result.

 

[Oofta]

While there may not be One True Way, there are also apparently "Bad GM ways"? So how do we sort out the good GM ways from the bad GM ones? Should we not try to cultivate, nurture, and promote the growth of Good GM practices? Not playing gotcha here. Just wanting to engage in some friendly discussion.

The reason the DMG gives options, not just one way of doing things, is because they want to make it clear that people should make the game their own. Which, for the most part, D&D does a decent job of doing. Some people play old school dungeon crawls, others spend hours on shopping for an outfit for the big banquet. Some people roll dice for overcoming every obstacle others don't touch a dice outside of combat.

There's just a difference between saying "Your game will be better if you [insert advice]" and "Here's what I do."

 

[Faolyn]

Yes. I'd explain but it's been explained a dozen times already. This question and responses are just on spin cycle now.

OK, then explain how "nothing happens" is actually interesting.

 

[Faolyn]

Drama and themes come out through the setting the GM creates and the nature of the players interactions with it. I cannot stand any rules that attempt to engineer narrative.

In my experience, this nearly always leads to "and now what?" when the PCs have done everything they can think to do and the GM sits back and waits for the players to do something.

 

[Oofta]

Right, but "be a fan of your players" is from PbtA games, not D&D.

The advice I was referring to was in response to the DM being antagonistic. I've quoted the DMG a few times on that.

 

[Micah Sweet]

A world in which nothing happens and everything is static, a wonderful landscape painting by the GM, sounds impossible to create drama in. The GM must provide some hooks and potentials and challenges, or it's dead in the water.

This post borders on obtuse. Do you really think they are saying the GM provides nothing to interest the PCs and spur them to action? My setting that I've just finished has 80 points of interest, all of which have a fictional connection to at least one other point, and a reason to go there. Once they get started, they see these connections and decide what they want to pursue, or to do something else entirely. It's not up to me, but there are plenty of things they might want to do.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Does the time you spent rolling dice and having anything happen add anything interesting to the game?

Of course it does. I don't understand this question.

 

[Oofta]

OK, then explain how "nothing happens" is actually interesting.

Because now you have to figure out some other option. It's called "being challenged" in addition to "being realistic" that sometimes you try to do something and the only result is that it doesn't work.

 

[TwoSix]

There's a difference between "This is how I do it, why, and how I find it useful. Here are some other options you can look into." and "If you do it this way it's better." Because when it comes to DMing, there is no one true way.

That's the whole point of these threads for like, the last 15 years. It's just that the majority of the TTRPG community thinks that trad play with a focus on verisimilitude and worldbuilding IS the one true way, and it's taken a long time to chip away at its dominance so that more people realize it's just one way to play among many.

No one method of play is "better" than another as a whole, but there are other styles of play that are better than trad for a large amount of players and play agendas, and they simply haven't been exposed to them because of D&D's overwhelming shadow.

 

[Lanefan]

Adventuring NPCs and DMPCs are very different.

A DMPC is an NPC played by the DM as if it were one of his own characters and often used to overshadow the PCs and "come up with" ideas to succeed at things. It's a blight upon the game as it takes away a large portion of the game from the PCs and is the DM putting himself into a role that isn't his to play.

An adventuring NPCs is simply an NPC with class levels that is going along with the group. In my experience it's usually, but not always, a cleric or rogue. Clerics are sought by the players to fill in the healer gap, and rogues the skill monkey gap for dungeon adventures. The DM will have the NPCs act like real people, but he's not using them to get ahead in the adventure and usually will not take a leading role in the party unless asked to by the PCs. Even then if the NPC isn't the type to lead it will often be refused.

Yeah, the latter is how we use them about 95% of the time; with the caveat being that sometimes those NPCs end up becoming long-term beloved members of the party. (the other 5% is when the NPC is also a specific plot device e.g. is a double agent, a high-powered rescuee that the module expects you to find, a field observer sent along by the quest-giver, etc.)

That said, I still play those adventuring NPCs as if they were my own character(s), having them act like real people but also giving them personalities, quirks, likes and dislikes, and so forth.

As for what they are, it's unusual to see an NPC mage-type in my game but every other common class - Cleric, Druid, Thief, Ranger, Fighter - quite often get recruited as gap-filling NPCs. That said, in the game I play in we fairly often have to bring an NPC mage into the field; there's not many PC mages (and most of them are mine), so if I'm playing a different class of character the options for mage become a bit thin.