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

pemerton · 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.

Why not?

pemerton · 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."

<snips.

making what I'd call bad DM calls isn't against the rules.

I think it's more than semantics, but I don't think it's just about the rules. I think it's about whether or not the GM can unilaterally create a shared fiction.

Maybe the game ends when the GM says "rocks fall, everyone dies". But there are many anti-social things anyone else could do, too, that might bring the game to an end. What I'm saying is that the GM saying "rocks fall, everyone dies" doesn't, of itself, mean that that is part of the shared fiction if the other participants all reject it. And I've given some examples, less extreme, which I think illustrate the point.

And the lesson to be drawn, stated a bit abstractly, is that all RPGing - even 1970s RPGing - rests on implicit understandings of the boundaries of who has authority to establish what sort of fiction about which elements of the fiction. I don't know of any RPG, for instance, which even purports to give the GM the unilateral power to decide that a particular PC is left-handed, or talks with a lisp. (There are random attribute rolls/tables that can produce such results, but those are not the same as unilateral GM decision.)

The framing of consequences, too, sits within implicit if not explicit structures and boundaries.

SteveC said:
But the notion that the group has significant control over the story? That's a much more modern concept.

<snip>

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.

I started GMing in the first half of the 1980s. Within a couple of years, I had learned that there are limits to the GM's authority - that as a GM you can try and make certain things part of the shared fiction, but if the players don't agree then there is no practical option but to talk it out with them, and potentially to go back to the drawing board.

Because, as I've said, there is no shared fiction on one's own.

So I don't agree with you about what is much more modern. I think the need for everyone to accept that the GM's posited fiction is the fiction is core to the whole activity. (And the same is true, obviously, for any given player's posited fiction,)

SteveC said:
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.

But if you vote with your feet/logout, then the GM didn't get to do it, did they?

And once we recognise this - that the GM's unilateral imagination is not a shared fiction created by the activity of playing a RPG - then I think we can start to have more analytically fruitful conversations about how RPGing happens, what different authority structures rely on if they are to work, etc.

To wit:

Micah Sweet said:
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.

What has to happen, if a group of would-be RPGers is to agree to a shared fiction that has, as its overwhelmingly salient content, the GM's sharing of their vision of a logically consistent fantasy world?

For a start, I think we can propose that the GM's vision had better be pretty seriously aesthetically and/or intellectually compelling. And we can think about what a GM advice book might look like that had, as its goal, helping GM's to meet that requirement. It would be pretty pointless for that advice book just to assert "You're the GM, so what you say goes."

pemerton · Oct 7, 2024

Chaosmancer said:
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.

So in a RPG, if things have got to this point, something has gone terribly wrong: the participants can't agree on some basic elements of the ostensibly shared fiction.

Vincent Baker explored a scenario a bit like this in his discussion of "the smelly chamberlain": https://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/460

Chaosmancer said:
The GM's authority only exists in so far that the player or players agree to follow that authority.

I think it is more helpful to speak in terms of what the GM (or anyone else at the table) is trying to do with their authority. So I would put it this way: the GM can only contribute to the shared fiction if the people with whom he's hoping to share that fiction accept his proposals and incorporate them into the shared fiction.

If they don't do that, there is no shared fiction that includes the GM's proposal, and the GM protesting abstractly about "their authority" won't change that basic state of affairs.

Chaosmancer said:
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.

Agreed.

Chaosmancer said:
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.

I find the widespread expectation that players should share crappy fiction put forward by their GMs one of the weirder features of the RPG hobby.

pemerton · Oct 7, 2024

Distracted DM said:
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.

I wouldn't regard it as adversarial. Since the mid-to-late 80s, I've taken it for granted that players will establish key details about their PCs.

I mean, if the GM says "Well, instead of Asmodeus how about <so-and-so> who plays that sort of role in my preferred cosmology" maybe the player says yes and maybe no. Social negotiation can sometimes be tricky. But I don't accept that it is adversarial if it comes from one side, while being reasonable if it comes from the other.

Baumi · Oct 7, 2024

About the Dungeon Dudes Video .. they totaly overlooked the Thiefs most powerful Ability, that they can use magic Items as a bonus Action. Together with clever uses of mundane Objects as bonus Action (Caltrops, Nets, etc.) makes them really flexible and strong.

I do like the rest of the Video but this isn't the first time they overlooked important features, so you should't completelly really on their videos.

Azzy · Oct 7, 2024

Baumi said:
About the Dungeon Dudes Video .. they totaly overlooked the Thiefs most powerful Ability, that they can use magic Items as a bonus Action. Together with clever uses of mundane Objects as bonus Action (Caltrops, Nets, etc.) makes them really flexible and strong.

I do like the rest of the Video but this isn't the first time they overlooked important features, so you should't completelly really on their videos.

They may have not mentioned it because it's not really a change from the 2014 rules.

Crimson Longinus · Oct 7, 2024

pemerton said:
Why not?

Seems pretty obvious to me. There usually is some sort of conflict or tension inherent in the patron/warlock relationship, and it is less fun to play if you're playing both sides of the conflict.

Corinnguard · Oct 7, 2024

Crimson Longinus said:
Seems pretty obvious to me. There usually is some sort of conflict or tension inherent in the patron/warlock relationship, and it is less fun to play if you're playing both sides of the conflict.

The patron/warlock relationship is better off if the DM role-plays as the warlock's patron. Especially if the player and the DM are on good terms with one another during their role-playing sessions. Before or during session zero, the two can talk it out on what kind of relationship exists between the warlock and their patron.

Now if the player and the DM aren't on good terms with one another, then someone should be brought into the session who could take up the role of the warlock's patron during those moments when the patron and the warlock are going to interact with one another. If they can't find someone, then maybe they should amicably part ways.

fluffybunbunkittens · Oct 7, 2024

Azzy said:
They may have not mentioned it because it's not really a change from the 2014 rules.

Bonus action magic item use is the one new thing Thief got.

Micah Sweet · Oct 7, 2024

Chaosmancer said:
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

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.

Or maybe you should accept the consequences of your actions, and not play a PC beholden to a being whose beliefs you don't share if that's a problem for you as a player. There are non-evil (or at least non-pushy evil) patrons out there.

Maybe don't play a fiend warlock if you don't want to deal with a fiend?

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

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