D&D (2024) D&D 2024 Player's Handbook Reviews

pemerton · Oct 7, 2024

SteveC said:
Could a DM decide to take a warlock character's powers for not doing what the patron wanted? Yes. Could they do the same thing for a paladin or cleric? Yes.

I can see two possible meanings of "could" here.

One is: do the rules of the game, as set out in the rulebook, give the GM such a power? In Gygax's AD&D, the rules do expressly give the GM the sort of power over paladins and clerics that you describe, as a particular application of broader rules for alignment. This means that, for the player of a cleric or paladin PC even moreso than any other player, a key challenge posed by the game is adhering to the requirements of alignment as adjudicated by the GM.

4e D&D is in sharp contrast to Gygax's AD&D in this respect: it has no rules for the adjudication of alignment by the GM, nor for consequences to follow for a PC's abilities based on such adjudication.

I'm not aware of any rules in 5e D&D for the GM to adjudicate a player's play of their warlock PC. Even when it comes to paladins, the rule is stated in much less strict terms than it is in AD&D:

If a paladin willfully violates his or her oath and shows no sign of repentance, the consequences can be more serious. At the DM’s discretion, an impenitent paladin might be forced to abandon this class and adopt another, or perhaps to take the Oathbreaker paladin option that appears in the Dungeon Master’s Guide.

(That's from the Legacy class description on DnD Beyond; I didn't see any similar text in the 2024 class description.)

For the 2014 Warlock, all I can find is this:

Work with your DM to determine how big a part your pact will play in your character’s adventuring career. Your patron’s demands might drive you into adventures, or they might consist entirely of small favors you can do between adventures.

That doesn't even purport to give the GM unilateral power.

That idea of unilateral power brings me to the second meaning of "could": namely, can the GM actually change the shared fiction, and the mechanics, in the fashion that they are attempting to? And the answer to that depends entirely on what the whole table is prepared to accept. No one can have a shared fiction on their own.

SteveC said:
I think the long and the short of it is that the players need to trust their DM, and buy-in on the game, or there simply is no game.

<snip>

The DM gets authority in the game, but if they put on the Viking Helmet too often, I expect their players to want to go elsewhere. But to say that the same person who can say "rocks fall, everyone dies," can't take powers doesn't make sense to me.

But the GM can't just, unilaterally, declare that "rocks fall, everyone dies". If the players decide that this is nonsense, and that their PCs are still alive, they can keep going - perhaps appointing one of their number to continue as GM of the game in lieu of the GM whose attempted contributions to the fiction they reject.

This is not just idle speculation, either. Players express doubt about, or outright reject, GM contributions to the fiction all the time. In D&D this is most common in the context of combat, which is the most heavily rules-regulated part of the game, and hence the place where the GM is most likely to make a mistake. But it happens in other contexts as well. Probably the most common is when the GM forgets some prior-established fact about a person or a place (prompting a player response like "But hang on, didn't we <do/change such-and-such> last time we <were here/fought this person/etc>"?). But a player can equally contest some adjudication of a consequence as inappropriate or unfair, and it's not a given that the GM will stick to their initial position.

I think the notion that the GM has some unilateral authority over the whole of the fiction tends to make for bad play. But I also think it leads to inaccurate descriptions of the way that play actually works.

Micah Sweet · Oct 7, 2024

Chaosmancer said:
You've posited that the patron's requests might be fulfilled partially, or poorly... but do you really think, if you want to go with full in-story logic here, that a being of pure evil who wants you dead to get your soul, isn't going to just kill you for not being a good enough follower? It is a rather classic villain move to kill their underlings for their failures.

That wasn't me.

This is the same old story. You're looking at this from the perspective of playing a game around a table, and I'm looking at it from the perspective of creating a logically consistent world the players explore through their PCs and the choices they make with them.

Micah Sweet · Oct 7, 2024

pemerton said:
In what way?

I posted "if the GM is proactively telling the player what sorts of actions they need to declare for their PC on pain of losing their core PC abilities if they don't go along with what they're told to do, then something has gone pretty wrong." You seem to be disagreeing with that, on the assumption that the "consequences" you refer to are the player losing their core PC abilities.

Well the "modification" being canvassed here is so easy it barely needs to be stated - the player plays a Warlock, but the GM does not play the patron as an aggressive NPC. Rather, as @Paul Farquhar posted not too far upthread, "the player creates the patron as a secondary character, with the distinction that they can’t actually do anything apart from talk to the primary character".

That doesn't seem like a practical solution, if what you mean is that the player portrays both the patron and the warlock.

SteveC · Oct 7, 2024

pemerton said:
But the GM can't just, unilaterally, declare that "rocks fall, everyone dies". If the players decide that this is nonsense, and that their PCs are still alive, they can keep going - perhaps appointing one of their number to continue as GM of the game in lieu of the GM whose attempted contributions to the fiction they reject.

This is not just idle speculation, either. Players express doubt about, or outright reject, GM contributions to the fiction all the time. In D&D this is most common in the context of combat, which is the most heavily rules-regulated part of the game, and hence the place where the GM is most likely to make a mistake. But it happens in other contexts as well. Probably the most common is when the GM forgets some prior-established fact about a person or a place (prompting a player response like "But hang on, didn't we <do/change such-and-such> last time we <were here/fought this person/etc>"?). But a player can equally contest some adjudication of a consequence as inappropriate or unfair, and it's not a given that the GM will stick to their initial position.

I don't know how much of this is a semantic argument, and how much is about the actual rules, but the DM or GM or almost anyone running a game in a traditional sense, does indeed have the power to just up and kill the group and end the game. I remember the t-shirts from the 70s with "rocks fall, everyone dies."

Now is this a good idea? No. Should the GM listen to and respect player input? Of course. I have managed to make it through almost 50 years of gaming and have never done anything like it as a GM. But I have seen it done, usually by someone wearing the Viking Helmet.

What happens after that? Usually the game ends. The players can certainly just pick up their characters (although there was this horrible thing in the 70s and early 80s where the DM held onto the characters, again not something I did) and elect someone else to run the game and give the GM the boot. That's the risk you take when you pull nonsense on your group.

But the notion that the group has significant control over the story? That's a much more modern concept. I'm reading Fabula Ultima right now, and it's a game that explicitly tells the GM to mix authority. And it's an unusual game that skims the borders of traditional RPG.

Of course players chime in when the GM makes a rules mistake, or forgets something that happens in a previous session, but actual authority over "nope, don't like this storyline, try again," isn't the same thing.

All of the stuff you're talking about in terms of giving the players agency is a very real thing and a very good idea, but that's not really what D&D is about. And it's why I enjoy playing other games. If my GM pulled a "your patron says X, so you must do Y," and it made the game unpleasant for me, I'd vote with my feet. Or, as it is today, I'd sign off of Discord. But the GM gets to do those things in games like D&D. As I've said several times, the question is if they should. I don't. DMs I continue to play with don't. But making what I'd call bad DM calls isn't against the rules. And, of course, if that's not how you want to play, hey, you do you. I do me, and we're not that far off in the kind of game we want to play in.

Edited: math is hard.

Corinnguard · Oct 7, 2024

Micah Sweet said:
That doesn't seem like a practical solution, if what you mean is that the player portrays both the patron and the warlock.

"You want me to role-play against myself by being my warlock character and my patron? Do I look like I have a split personality issue?"

Chaosmancer · Oct 7, 2024

Micah Sweet said:
That wasn't me.

Looks back Ah, so it wasn't. My apologies. Reading six or so pages back to back, I can get a little turned around on who said exactly what

Micah Sweet said:
This is the same old story. You're looking at this from the perspective of playing a game around a table, and I'm looking at it from the perspective of creating a logically consistent world the players explore through their PCs and the choices they make with them.

Sure, but that still brings me to the same point. In a logically consistent world, the Millenia old force of pure evil and corruption, capable of schemes even the Gods cannot predict isn't going to bamboozled by a farm boy. You would be utterly and completely incapable of not doing exactly what that force wants you to do, when they want you to do it, and defying them in any way would simply lead to your own destruction. That's the "logically consistent world" that would occur.

And that makes for a pretty terrible game. Which while that may not matter at all to you, Micah Sweet who never cares about the game and only the world, that probably does matter to the player who sits down at the table to play a game, not to spend months or years of their life living through a parable about why dark forces beyond mortal ken are actually beyond mortal ken and impossible to fight once you've sold yourself to them for power.

"Why would they want to play a warlock then?" Well, maybe they wanted to play it in a slightly less logically consistent way, such as the myriad of superheroes and folk heroes who somehow bested such beings, despite such things making no logical sense. Because fantasy and myth isn't about logically consistent worlds.

Chaosmancer · Oct 7, 2024

SteveC said:
I don't know how much of this is a semantic argument, and how much is about the actual rules, but the DM or GM or almost anyone running a game in a traditional sense, does indeed have the power to just up and kill the group and end the game. I remember the t-shirts from the 70s with "rocks fall, everyone dies."

Now is this a good idea? No. Should the GM listen to and respect player input? Of course. I have managed to make it through almost 50 years of gaming and have never done anything like it as a GM. But I have seen it done, usually by someone wearing the Viking Helmet.

What happens after that? Usually the game ends. The players can certainly just pick up their characters (although there was this horrible thing in the 70s and early 80s where the DM held onto the characters, again not something I did) and elect someone else to run the game and give the GM the boot. That's the risk you take when you pull nonsense on your group.

This is likely a semantic argument, but also a bit of a Ship of Theseus. Is it the same game if the same characters are pursuing the same plots, but under a different GM?

I also do think there is a level of ... I'm not sure what to call it. Authorial Disconnect? I touched upon it earlier in this thread when I pointed out that a DM has no capability to stop a player from declaring who their patron is at level 1. Sure, the DM can say the character doesn't know, but they can't stop the player from referring to the contract explicitly and telling people exactly who they made the deal with. The DM can say that the deal happened at noon in a church, and they cannot stop the player from telling everyone and saying that it happened in the forest at midnight.

The GM's authority only exists in so far that the player or players agree to follow that authority. Which is fine and I have no problem with, but I think this is something that does bear thinking about. Because, in the end, the more you try and force something on the players, the more likely they are to just stop listening to you and doing their own things. Because if you lose that respect and buy-in, then that's it. And we've known this for the life of DnD, we just often found this behavior to be poor sportsmanship on the side of the player who refuses to cooperate.

Demetrios1453 · Oct 7, 2024

Corinnguard said:
"You want me to role-play against myself by being my warlock character and my patron? Do I look like I have a split personality issue?"

One of my players wants to play a warlock whose patron is herself in our next game, with exactly this sort of scenario.

Mistwell · Oct 7, 2024

Micah Sweet said:
That wasn't me.

Couldn't you just role play it was you that said that? I mean, I know that's not the Text As Written, but it seems like this is an opportunity to portray the role of the person who did say that...

You know, I'll just shut up now.

Distracted DM · Oct 7, 2024

Chaosmancer said:
I touched upon it earlier in this thread when I pointed out that a DM has no capability to stop a player from declaring who their patron is at level 1. Sure, the DM can say the character doesn't know, but they can't stop the player from referring to the contract explicitly and telling people exactly who they made the deal with. The DM can say that the deal happened at noon in a church, and they cannot stop the player from telling everyone and saying that it happened in the forest at midnight.

Isn't it the GM that typically sets the setting? Sort of like a cleric- it's a discussion between GM and player. The player chooses the deity or what kind of cleric they want to play, and the other is matched up. You can't say "I made a deal with asmodeus" if there's no asmodeus. You can, but that's a pretty adversarial relationship with the GM that you're starting off the game with.

D&D (2024) D&D 2024 Player's Handbook Reviews

pemerton

Legend

Micah Sweet

Level Up & OSR Enthusiast

Micah Sweet

Level Up & OSR Enthusiast

SteveC

Doing the best imitation of myself

Corinnguard

Hero

Chaosmancer

Legend

Chaosmancer

Legend

Demetrios1453

Legend

Mistwell

Crusty Old Meatwad

Distracted DM

Distracted DM

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