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

[pemerton]

I've told that anecdote before and been told, by multiple people, that I was 100% in the wrong here that I should absolutely trust in the DM and that there was nothing wrong with what the DM did.

That's ridiculous advice. Why would you waste your time listening to that GM tell you some boring story? Or let you sit around planning only to pull out the rug if it's not the story she wants to tell?

 

[pemerton]

But, counter, counter example: I ran a game once (yet another Ravenloft game; I've put a moratorium on them because I've run too many and there are other horror games I want to play), the players were en-route from point A to point B (they either really wanted to go to point B, or they really wanted to get away from point A; can't remember), , and I had them notice weird, spooky things in the woods. One of the players said "I keep on walking and wave goodbye to the nice plot hook." (This guy has since moved on to games that were more to his taste.)

You said the game was based on Keep On the Borderlands. I've never played it or read it, but Wikipedia says it's about investigating caves filled with monsters. To me, unless you can do a lot more than just fight those monsters, a heist sounds a lot more interesting. But it's entirely possible that all those other people who have gamed with her were never railroaded by her because they wanted to go fight the monsters, while you just waved goodbye to the nice plot hook. But where I sighed and tossed that encounter away, she tried to force you back on track.

To me, this all sounds like dysfunctional failures of communication.

Like, if your desire as GM is to have the players get their PCs to do stuff involving those spooky things, just tell them! Why go through the pantomime that you've described?

If @Hussar's GM's desire, in running KotB, is for the players to have their PCs engage with the Caves of Chaos, again why not just tell them?

Why be coy about the premise of the game?

 

[pemerton]

The reason I would have talked to the DM is that they may simply have not known how to handle the heist.

Then why let everyone waste hours of their time at the table planning for it?

As I posted upthread, this notion that it is reasonable GMing to be coy about this stuff is just bizarre to me!

 

[Thomas Shey]

There also seems to be a lesser dispute I seem to have noticed hints of, about whether or not it's OK for a GM to have the power to say, "For right now, we'll do it this way, to keep the game moving, we can discuss it in more detail later," but, in reality, that's just a subset of the above problem.

I'll flat out say that sometimes that's, in practice, a dodge. There's two reasons it can be:

1. Its easy given the time frames and such of a game session for that "talk about it later" to just never happen. Even if that doesn't happen every time it requires a very persistent player to make sure that their concerns are always at least heard out.

2. If you have a GM unwilling to roll things back, addressing a problem later is sometimes useless. Its hard for me to believe most GMs don't, on some level, know that either. While an overly dramatic comparison, "justice delayed is justice denied".

This doesn't mean that every case is important enough to justify taking the time to thrash it out, but its a very uneven process powerwise, since in practice it means that if the player thinks it is, and the GM thinks it isn't, there's a strong tendency for the latter to get to win.

And, as per my previous post, I think the correct way to deal with these things is to set clear expectations up front so they're less likely to be a problem in the first place. The issue only arises if people want different things from the game, so if the GM is clear about what they're offering and players don't choose to play unless they're comfortable with that, and any likely sticking points on those things are addressed and ironed out before play begins, I would expect a much smoother game in general.

The problem is, some of these things aren't the sort of thing that will come up in campaign setup discussion. They can be as simple as the GM being casual about things that a player thinks are important, and they may not find that out until well into the game when it keeps coming up. This can cover all sorts of ground from consistency of decision making (and transparency for reasons for the decisions) to how clear communication on things like difficulty is expected to be.

 

[SableWyvern]

I liked this post generally, but I think there's at least a case or two more:

1. The GM pitched a game of a particular type, but they and the players had a different sense of what that pitch actually meant. This is actually pretty easy to have happen with overly short pitches, but can just happen because of bad terminology mismatches, too, or people's experiences with certain genres is different than others.

2. Related, you can have players who are finding the GM's execution, bluntly, substandard; they may be trying to execute the premise given but, well, just doing a bad job of it, maybe because its too different from what they're used to. The players should cut the GM some slack, but the GM also has to be willing to accept criticism here.

Finally, and this applies to a lot of this: the fact one player is challenging the GM doesn't always mean a single player only has the issue. There are players who are really hesitant to do things that feel confrontational, and may agree with a problem, but aren't going to want to join in on it.. At the other end of this, you can have players who go along with a premise because they don't want to be the guy who throws up blocks on a game, but aren't ever really happy with it. That's obviously largely their fault, but it can still impact the success of the game, and at some point the GM and the rest of the group either needs to get used to extracting what the Tigger player feels, get used to them being a regular problem, or eject them.

No real disagreement there. I think I covered the second point as part of my final example (that was my intent at least), but it could probably have been separated out into it's own thing.

Your first point can certainly be an issue and is why I try really hard to make sure I set clear expectations before every new campaign. I guess that would be a variant of my first point, but with fault changed to "no one, really".

 

[Faolyn]

To me, this all sounds like dysfunctional failures of communication.

Like, if your desire as GM is to have the players get their PCs to do stuff involving those spooky things, just tell them! Why go through the pantomime that you've described?

Because I'm not trying to force them to play a specific story. I want to provide interesting things for the players to want to investigate. That particular player wasn't interested.

 

[SableWyvern]

The problem is, some of these things aren't the sort of thing that will come up in campaign setup discussion. They can be as simple as the GM being casual about things that a player thinks are important, and they may not find that out until well into the game when it keeps coming up. This can cover all sorts of ground from consistency of decision making (and transparency for reasons for the decisions) to how clear communication on things like difficulty is expected to be.

Yes, I clearly didn't do it fast enough, but I actually went back and changed my wording in the bit you were responding to there, because there are some situations where the advice I was giving won't necessarily apply. I think it does apply to most of the specific examples I've come across in this thread (at least with respect to people engaging with me directly), but there are certainly situations where it may be less useful.

 

[Hussar]

That's ridiculous advice. Why would you waste your time listening to that GM tell you some boring story? Or let you sit around planning only to pull out the rug if it's not the story she wants to tell?

Well, rather obviously, I agree here. But, I would point out that the defense of DM's trend here is VERY strong. Any criticism of DM practices or, really, D&D, is met with pretty strong resistance. I mean, good grief, I got dogpiled for saying that I thought that it was faster to get a sandbox off the ground in a different system, which, apparently meant that I thought D&D was a bad system for sandboxing. A point that was repeated yet again not that many pages ago.

Despite literally proving that it's faster to get a sandbox (not better, not more satisfying, FASTER only) in other systems, it's automatically taken as me saying D&D is bad. We see this over and over again when any criticism of D&D is taken as an attack on either the game or playstyle.

Thus the genesis of this thread.

 

[Hussar]

Because I'm not trying to force them to play a specific story. I want to provide interesting things for the players to want to investigate. That particular player wasn't interested.

But, you also made point of saying that the player moved on to other games more to his taste. IOW, it was a player problem that he didn't bite onto your hook. So, it's not really all that much about objective DMing is it? After all, if it was, then ignoring the plot hook would have been zero problem and wouldn't even be remarkable since it should happen all the time.

 

[AlViking]

Then why let everyone waste hours of their time at the table planning for it?

As I posted upthread, this notion that it is reasonable GMing to be coy about this stuff is just bizarre to me!

The DM made decision I disagree with but I have no idea what she was thinking. She was not a reasonable DM and I have no idea where you're getting that anyone has said so on this thread.

My solution in a case like this would be to talk to the GM like a fellow adult and see if you can come to a mutually agreed upon solution. In no way am I excusing the GM's behavior here, it was a mistake and badly handled. But I don't know a GM who hasn't made a mistake, although this one was a doozy. On the other hand I think every GM should at least be given a chance to improve. Odds are it couldn't be fixed but you don't know if you don't try.