D&D (2024) I have the DMG. AMA!

[mamba]

Petulant DMs who want to ignore the rules and setting and just do whatever they want to characters are toxic bullies and have ruined far more games and the D&D experience for far more people than single players ever have.

the rule is the DM can change the rules, and in many settings gods being able to withdraw the powers they granted are the norm

As to who is ruining experiences, neither one should, but your post reads more like ‘and now it is the player’s turn to do so’

Having the "you lose your powers" rules in the game rather than leaving them in the dustbin of history where they belong is the game teaching DMs who are acting in good faith to be bad DMs.

no, they can still act in good faith, having the option does not change that

And I don't believe I misinterpret a DM who creates the world to force players to do what they want.

that already is a mischaracterization, so to me it looks like you do…

 

[Emerikol]

You might be surprised. I have in my experienced reality of regularly running open tables and teaching newbies to play seen in absolute terms more toxic DMs than I have toxic players. And I know people who have stayed with toxic DMs despite hating it for months or years. Indeed a group I've just joined has thrown the DM out after six months and we had a player at a club I go to telling stories of an online DM she's staying with out of morbid curiosity - and that game's been going a year. It takes far far more work to kick out a bad DM than it does a single player.

Or they throw them out. I even managed to ditch one in the middle of a con game last weekend.

Good for you. And I mean it. But that doesn't mean I accept that bad DMs are as prevalent as bad players. I don't.

I have a question for you - did 4e mysteriously ditch all the toxic players because they were on the anti-4e side of the edition war or were there simply more DMs for 4e because it was a better game to run? Because 4e was not short of DMs. (And neither IME was 1e)

Really, in my area I didn't see any difference. I ran one 4e campaign but everyone including me as DM hated it.

We have trouble getting DMs for 5e because the 2014 DMG is bad at teaching people to DM (why on earth did they make the first two chapters about worldbuilding and multiversebuilding?) and provides almost nothing in the way of tools to make the job easier. And then it provides almost nothing to the DM. I predict that some of the problem will be mitigated because the 2024 DMG is massively better than the 2014 one at teaching people to DM.

I think for my style and the traditional style of D&D that worldbuilding is an essential skill for a DM. A poor world almost guarantees failure in my style of gaming.

And mine is to establish good practice for DMs. And I've had a player commuting over 100 miles each way once a fortnight for a three to four hour session to a campaign I've just finished.

Good. I am not saying you don't run a good game of the style you prefer. It probably would be a game I don't like but the key would be to teach DMs how to telegraph their style and to perform their style. I've been toying with writing a DMG guide solely for my style of play. I wouldn't use that name of course but something along those lines.

As I have pointed out the idea that sacraments are permanent is a religious idea. It is the official doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. I'm not the one taking religious elements out of the cleric by making them work like Jedi, falling to the dark side. You are the one making them not work like actual religions here - so why are you bothering?

Yes but you made up the idea that receiving spellcasting power was a sacrament. The fact is in most of D&Ds history you got your spells by praying day to day.

So why haven't you disposed of your fake religious class? Because with the enforcement you are making them not work like actual religious people.

There is no such thing as a "fake" religious class in the way you are using it. My use was to point out that GIVEN there are active Deities in the world who give out spell power to their faithful. The normal result would be that power being withheld from those who are rebelling.

We do however have religious sacraments. And the rules are clear. Once you are ordaned that is permanent. And we're also talking 5e here - where paladins are different from clerics because they aren't tied to a deity. The badly designed paladin that loses their powers for a single sin is simply bad religion. Alas the muskrat has broken UrsulaV's Paladin Rant so I don't know if you can read it but the "one mistake and you're done" is nothing like any sort of sane religion. And by making it that way you're actually taking the religious elements out. So why bother?

This is all interesting in isolation and maybe a good option for a campaign but we aren't just sharing ideas on world building and cosmology building. We are talking about the default for a game as I described above.

 

[TwoSix]

To me it seems clear that these ideas were changed not for any change in fiction, but simply because players don't want their PCs to lose their superpowers, whether they follow the tenets of their faith or not. In other words,, player entitlement. The rules trump the fiction.

But to be clear, nothing stops you from changing your fiction to match the rules other than the fact you like the old fiction better.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I just find it curious that @Micah Sweet proclaims a strong affinity for Gygax's AD&D, but also complains about the DMG expressing a strong view on how clerical magic works.

The game began with a strong view and then expanded it with alternatives. I object to it contracting again.

 

[Maxperson]

I guess what you are saying is that if a player wants to roleplay a crisis of faith, that should come from the player, not the DM. I believe Critical Role did this.

Absolutely. I'm not going to force a crisis of faith on a PC. The player decides if or when one of those happens to the PC and then roleplays it.

And how is a DM supposed to fairly arbitrate when a character has "broken the tenants of their faith"?

In 5e new DMs have to either establish them on their own, or else look up older editions where the god's tenets are spelled out in much more detail. Looking up older editions won't work with a new setting like Exandria, but would work for the ones that 2e and 3e put out. I'm fortunate enough to have 2e and 3e books to reference when I need them.

In the real world, followers of the same god often believe very contradictory things, and it doesn't have any effect on their magical powers.

I'm not going to go into any kind of detail, because it would quickly get into religious discussion, but I will say the bolded is highly suspect at best.

And in D&D, alignment is downgraded, so cannot be used as a judge. Although I haven't abolished alignment officially, I don't even know what alignment is written on my players' character sheets. It's up to the player to decide how their character behaves, judging that is outside of the DM's purview.

Same here. I keep alignment for 3 reasons. 1) It's still a decent aid to roleplaying for people new to the game. It gives them a something to grab onto and use for character motivations. 2) I still use it heavily when roleplaying monsters and unimportant NPCs. I don't have the time or energy to give every creature a detailed personality and background. 3) Tradition. My players like to write it down on their character sheets, but half the time I think they forget about it as well and just roleplay their characters.

For my part the world just reacts to what they do. If a cleric of a god of healing and mercy walks around torturing enemies to get information and then cutting their throats, the cleric's god is going to have problems with that behavior. As will many secular authorities and NPCs if they find out about it.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Dragonlance argues against this. By the time of the Cataclysm, all clerics who actually held faith (and thus kept their powers; they made the connection), were gone. Those who remained were members of the clergy but no longer had cleric powers. In the case of the Kingpriest himself the gods went with the series of divine warnings method in an attempt to turn him from his path.

The only way I can make any sense of Dragonlance morality is with the assumption that Paladine is the Lawful Neutral God of Balance. Even then how the heck did people not realise that the priests could no longer cast spells?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Aside from the setting doesn't really let you play an "against the gods" storyline, since the gods have a monopoly on power (and a past history of dropping asteroids on the heads of any uppity mortals).

Sure it does. You just have to power up first. Look at Raistlin.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I think players want the DMG to reflect how they want to play the game so that they do not have to houserule... as opposed to being the one who has to houserule to get the game to be the way they want it.

People still have this reflexive discomfort for houseruling. And it is this discomfort that WotC has been trying to break people of for years. But it's never worked-- if people can't get the book to be written in the manner they want... then it's WotC that has failed.

Needless to say... I do not share in this discomfort with houseruling. Printed rules and house rules are all the same to me.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I guess what you are saying is that if a player wants to roleplay a crisis of faith, that should come from the player, not the DM. I believe Critical Role did this.

And how is a DM supposed to fairly arbitrate when a character has "broken the tenants of their faith"? In the real world, followers of the same god often believe very contradictory things, and it doesn't have any effect on their magical powers. And in D&D, alignment is downgraded, so cannot be used as a judge. Although I haven't abolished alignment officially, I don't even know what alignment is written on my players' character sheets. It's up to the player to decide how their character behaves, judging that is outside of the DM's purview.

People don't have magical powers in the real world. And alignment means as much as you and your table want it to mean.

 

[Emerikol]

The hit is overwhelming is part of the problem. And just to reiterate something - why do you want D&D religion to not be like actual religion?

And I'm arguing that the current default is a massive improvement over the 1974 version. And leads to both better religion and better stories. Gygax got things wrong.

This reference to real religion is getting ridiculous. Being ordained is not the same as receiving your daily allotment of spell power. A cleric is likely not out of the faith for failing to receive spells that day. So let's drop this whole line of ridiculous argument.

And if you want examples where someone went against the will of God and were punished I'm sure if you try you can find them.