D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[FrozenNorth]

"Good enough" is subjective, yeah, but I'm past the point of "tolerating mediocrity".

I am old enough to have no patience for activities that do not bring me immediate joy. Enough scary health issues to appreciate what little life I have left.

It took me years to reach that point, for sure. I've had enough bad, or simply BORING sessions to have the bar set very low for my tolerance levels.

Eh, I try to be charitable when possible. There are certain game experiences that are so bad that I would not tolerate them, but there are a lot of young DMs fumbling and making the same mistakes we did when we were their age.

I definitely remember both my phase of « here’s 5 combat encounters strung one after another with no connective tissue - that counts as an adventure, right? » and my phase of « OK, I have a weird experimental thing I want to try for the next adventure » both of which were more miss than hit.

 

[FrozenNorth]

I am amazed how many people are lousy with players that they can run exactly what they want and have a line of players waiting to get in that they can be choosy. My experience is that if you get too stuck in your way, you find on game night with a bunch of call offs and no shows.

Or players that show up but aren’t really invested in the game.

 

[FrozenNorth]

I've found that as I get older (56) I am more willing to try (or retry) things I had come to believe I did not like. Such as chillies and blue cheese.

Definitely with respect to food, your taste buds are less sensitive, so it is definitely worth while to experiment.

I find, even if I don’t like a system, I will often find a mechanic that is interesting enough that I can tweak into my game.

 

[Belen]

I make no claim that CYOA books are sandboxes.

But, it isn't like all adventures or campaigns are either clearly a sandbox, or clearly a railroad. There is more in heaven and on Earth than are imagined by those two categorizations.

The sandbox/railroad divide strikes me more as points for internet argument than classifications that actually help folks understand what their choices are when they undertake a game.

This.

My experience is that most players want the DM is have some direction or something planned.

For me, I just detail the events happening in the setting and if they choose not to engage, then those events play out without them such a the recent Darakhul plague. They had a chance to stop it but chose to explore elsewhere.

For prep, I usually have something planned out for most areas even if everything is not mapped out. I wait for the players to make a choice and then flesh out more as they move down that path.

 

[Umbran]

You are making this point to me when I ...

... inserted yourself as I was raising a point in response to pemerton, not you.

If, at that point, you're going to get in my face about largely agreeing with you... that's your problem, not mine.

 

[Remathilis]

I've DMed parties that have abandoned adventures halfway through for various reasons. Ditto parties that have unexpectedly said (to the effect of) "Screw it, we're going that way" where 'that way' is across an ocean or otherwise very far removed from where they just were and what they were just doing.

With very few justifications*, I find this attitude to be the worst insult you can give me as a DM. For all the talk of player entitlement, THIS is the truest expression of it. As the DM, I put time into creating the play experience from setting to adventures and the encounters within. It's an insult to have the players say "no, I don't want to stop the mad king from sacking the town. Let's buy a boat and go be pirates instead." These days, I'd be like "fine. Go be pirates. But find another DM or retire your characters, because I'm not running that."

* Obviously, sometimes things don't work out. Either the premise isn't working or the story goes in a direction you didn't anticipate. In the former case, talking with the DM could find ways to correct the issues. In the latter, the DM might have to retool their idea or get things back on track. I'm speaking of the idea that the players sign up for a campaign set in Neverwinter and the first thing they do is hop on a boat to Chult because hunting dinosaurs sounds cooler than whatever the DM has planned.

 

[payn]

With very few justifications*, I find this attitude to be the worst insult you can give me as a DM. For all the talk of player entitlement, THIS is the truest expression of it. As the DM, I put time into creating the play experience from setting to adventures and the encounters within. It's an insult to have the players say "no, I don't want to stop the mad king from sacking the town. Let's buy a boat and go be pirates instead." These days, I'd be like "fine. Go be pirates. But find another DM or retire your characters, because I'm not running that."

* Obviously, sometimes things don't work out. Either the premise isn't working or the story goes in a direction you didn't anticipate. In the former case, talking with the DM could find ways to correct the issues. In the latter, the DM might have to retool their idea or get things back on track. I'm speaking of the idea that the players sign up for a campaign set in Neverwinter and the first thing they do is hop on a boat to Chult because hunting dinosaurs sounds cooler than whatever the DM has planned.

I think devil is in the details in a lot of these discussions. The parties that drop what they are doing and leave are usually west marches style games were nothing they do really matters aside from getting loot and gaining levels.

 

[Umbran]

This.

My experience is that most players want the DM is have some direction or something planned.

Yeah. This often gets lost in agency discussions.

Agency that the players don't want or won't use isn't really agency that a GM should be concerned with. Presence of unused agency options is not a significant value to play. That practicality should be a primary concern for play, but it seems to be absent from agency discussions.

I'm in a break between campaigns - one of my players is running a short arc game to give me some weeks to do background work for the new long-term game. As part of doing this sort of thing, I generally survey my players what they want.

Among my questions were some crafted to figure out how much agency, and what kinds of agency, my players wanted. Not a single one of my players wanted what folks here would call a pure sandbox.

So, I'm not giving them a pure sandbox. And anyone who comes at me about how my players don't have agency can stuff it, because they are talking about something that isn't of value to us.

 

[The Firebird]

It's that, for the vast, vast majority of D&D (and D&D-alike) campaigns, the players cannot choose to do anything the DM hasn't prepared. They can't forge into unknown territory, for one of various reasons:

4. They have choices...but those choices are only things the DM already has prepared (whether fixed-sequence or a "menu" of options or a nailed-down world they can hexcrawl through)

I am quite fortunate that my players have become attached to this land (and, more importantly, the people in it), and could not accept the consequences of leaving it behind, when much is left unfinished.

*E.g. if they're 5 floors deep in an underground temple, their ability to bugger off to a faraway land is rather limited until they get back out of said underground temple. Doesn't mean they can't choose to do that, they just need to get out of the temple before they can proceed to leave the lands they're in.

What do you mean by 'nailed down' world? I run hexcrawls. What's in the hexes is specified beforehand.

Suppose the players choose to head to another continent. In case A, that continent is one I've also prepared hexes for. In case B, it isn't, but the basic details of the continent are outlined in my notes. In case C, they head somewhere I have nothing prepared for.

Is one of those allowing them to forge into unknown territory while another is preventing them?

 

[FrozenNorth]

With very few justifications*, I find this attitude to be the worst insult you can give me as a DM. For all the talk of player entitlement, THIS is the truest expression of it. As the DM, I put time into creating the play experience from setting to adventures and the encounters within. It's an insult to have the players say "no, I don't want to stop the mad king from sacking the town. Let's buy a boat and go be pirates instead." These days, I'd be like "fine. Go be pirates. But find another DM or retire your characters, because I'm not running that."

* Obviously, sometimes things don't work out. Either the premise isn't working or the story goes in a direction you didn't anticipate. In the former case, talking with the DM could find ways to correct the issues. In the latter, the DM might have to retool their idea or get things back on track. I'm speaking of the idea that the players sign up for a campaign set in Neverwinter and the first thing they do is hop on a boat to Chult because hunting dinosaurs sounds cooler than whatever the DM has planned.

However, it is also something I’ve never personally seen « in the wild ». The worst I’ve seen with disaffected players is:
1. Trying to get themselves killed;
2. Just sort of tuning out; or
3. Cracking jokes and getting somewhat silly.