D&D General A glimpse at WoTC's current view of Rule 0

[pemerton]

I once had a guy in the very first encounter attempt to help the guys they were chasing escape. No reason at all, his PC had no connection to them, no reason to attempt to prevent the party from successfully stopping the bad guys. He just thought it would be fun.

What reason did the PCs have to chase these NPCs?

 

[pemerton]

Or the DM can see it as an opportunity. The royal chamberlain might let the PC noble know that if a certain task or 2 is accomplished... - front of the line (and the DM makes it clear the feature helped grease some palms for this easier solution).

So I was going to post a joke-y reply - But what about verisimilitude? And wouldn't that be metagaming?

But I thought that might be too extreme, so decided not to. Until I read what was almost the very next post:

Why would the DM do that, unless it was a narrative driven adventure in which meeting the monarch was a plot point? In the royal court everyone is a noble, and when everyone is a noble, no one has an advantage from being a noble.

The GM would to that because (i) the player paid PC build resources to put an ability on their PC sheet, and (ii) the GM wants to run a game that is interesting to the players in the way that they want it to be interesting. And in this case, as set up by @TwoSix, what would be interesting to the player would be for their PC to confront the king.

 

[pemerton]

When I get the awesome opportunity to play, I select a character that would have strong ties to the setting giving the DM a number of hooks from which he can use to let him spin the story.
I think also much of my fun comes from exploration of the setting (the DM's imagination) and what you have previously described as colour which is not your primary interest as you have indicated in the past. I enjoy playing my character and bringing about cool moments but I find myself interested in the story being woven and the richness of the setting. I want to get lost in it.

When I play, which is not all that often, I design a character who has strong motivations and will drive things in directions that I think are interesting.

When I GM, I look to what the players seem to want to do with their PCs, and establish situations that will provide opportunities to do that. What exactly that looks like, and how intense it will be, depends on the system. For instance, Burning Wheel or In A Wicked Age is more intense in this respect than Classic Traveller or Torchbearer 2e.

When GMing 4e D&D, which in its default presentation is heavily setting-oriented, I looked to the players to foreground those parts of the setting that they wanted to engage with (via their PCs). That's why our campaign made certain elements - the Raven Queen; the Lattice of Heaven; the sundering of the Elves, and their reunion; the nature and fate of the Abyss; and some other stuff too - central. While other parts of the default setting were of much less significance in our game.

My role wasn't just to bring those elements that the players had foregrounded into play; but to also present them in ways that would require the players to make hard choices - eg Will restoring the Lattice of Heaven have other consequences that sit at odds with the aspirations the players (as their PCs) have? Is it possible to permanently defeat the Abyss without restoring the Lattice of Heaven? Etc.

So this is not about presenting the setting in a "neutral" fashion. It's about pushing hard where that will be interesting for me and for the players.

 

[pemerton]

maybe i'm being dumb but what do you mean by this? i don't want to interpret this in a bad faith reading but it comes across a little as 'put away your layered and long developed setting so we can play with the other toys in the box'

Edit: maybe that’s a little harsh of phrasing but the point is, anyone who put in a 1000 hours of play developing a setting all the while likely has investment in that setting, saying ‘you don’t have to keep doing it’ is overlooking the fact that if they didn’t want to be doing it then they likely would’ve quit or started a new world some time ago already.

If someone has played a setting for 1000s of hours, I assume they've been enjoying it.

But that's not a reason for me, looking to participate with them in RPGing, to prioritise that person continuing to play in that setting.

 

[pemerton]

I've had some brand new DMs that ran a fun game. Not at all professional, asked a lot of questions on how to do things, but decent. We all enjoyed the game which is all that really matters to me at the end of the day.I don't assume new = bad because it's not always true. New = not totally professional and polished? Sure.

OK? When I was a new GM we had fun too. I was still not very good at it.

My friend who GMs the Burning Wheel games that I play in is a great GM, despite having run only a tiny fraction of the sessions that I have. His first session was much better than my first session. But unlike me, he had been playing RPGs for 15+ years by then.

 

[pemerton]

I'm not following. I have an established world. It works for me because I know, at least at a high level, a great deal about the world and it's history. My players appreciate that level of depth and knowing that their PCs can have a chance to impact that history.

There's all sorts of ways of running campaigns. I happen to prefer games that have more depth than "What campaign world are we building now!" For other people? It's a fun exercise in creativity and expression.

OK? That doesn't change the truth of this:

I certainly wouldn't regard the fact that the GM has been running games in their world for 1000s of hours as a reason that they have to keep doing so!

 

[pemerton]

All of your assertions here are true, but I'd still much rather play or run a game like @KYRON45 's.

Sure. I know that you prefer GM-centred RPGing. The main role of the player, in your approach, seems to be to learn stuff from the GM about the setting. At least, that's how it seems to me.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The GM would to that because (i) the player paid PC build resources to put an ability on their PC sheet, and (ii) the GM wants to run a game that is interesting to the players in the way that they want it to be interesting. And in this case, as set up by @TwoSix, what would be interesting to the player would be for their PC to confront the king.

If the PC wants to use their noble background to confront the king, then it stands to reason the want to USE their background to confront the king. That means Wolf Hall style politics, not auto success, because auto-success is as boring as F. Adventurers encounter obstacles and overcome them, they do not automatically succeed at everything they try to do. You wouldn't say to a character with the the Outlander background "okay, you cross the thousands of miles of trackless desert without incident, what would you like to do next?"! Or if you would, I wouldn't want to play in your game, because it would be boring. If a character chooses the Outlander background they want to experience the wilderness, not be done with it in a single sentence. If a character chooses the Noble background they want to experience life at court.

 

[Lanefan]

So if the comparison of players to actors is at all literal, we're talking about a railroad.

Except in this case the players (actors) largely improvise the script, to a greater or lesser degree also improvise the plot, and choose which bits of the scenery they interact with and-or play in front of; which makes it not a railroad.

"Bringing to life" of course is a metaphor. If by that, what is meant is "prompt the GM to tell the players stuff about the setting", then I want to know what principles is the GM using to decide what to tell the players? If the players' vision for what matters and what is at stake is not relevant to that, then again we seem to me to be talking about a railroad.

Only by your definition of what constitutes a railroaded game, which from what I can glean over time seems to include pretty much anything where the players aren't also setting authors.

 

[pemerton]

If I understand you correctly, you believe it is an impossibly high task for the DM to achieve that 'something for everyone' - i.e. they're bound to fall short.

It's more that, as soon as play is framed as the GM giving stuff, a degree of GM power has already been presupposed that is at odds with what I want.

The "give everyone something" approach - at least as I've seen it in D&D books - focuses on things like having fights for the fight-y player, having catacombs for the map-py player, having some NPC encounters for the talk-y player etc. But this still puts the GM at the centre of what happens next.

I prefer this advice, to players, found in the Burning Wheel rulebook (Revised p 268; Gold p 551; the text is the same in both):

Participate. Help enhance your friends' scenes and step forward and make the most of your own. . . . If the story doesn't interest you, it's your job to create interesting situations and involve yourself. . . .​

Although that advice is directed to the players, it also tells the GM something too: let the players drive the game towards things that will interest them.

So your belief is that making everyone equal participants makes them responsible for achieving that something/fun for themselves as opposed to relying on the DM. Have I got that right?

Kind of, but I feel a hint in your comment here of pushing away from the participant asymmetry that is fundamental to mainstream RPGing. My phrase was creative equals.

The players create characters, and priorities. The GM creates situation, and (when the PCs fail) consequences. To the extent that the setting matters, it is a shared "resource" - as per my discussion of 4e D&D not far upthread.