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

[SableWyvern]

It depends on the game and what the goal of play’s meant to be about. It also may depend on when and how whatever idea the GM has comes up. I don’t think the GM having an idea that they want to see in play is the same as railroading. I mean, it could lead to that, sure, but it doesn’t have to.

I started a sandbox campaign with the PCs being given a mission. It was something immediate that they had to deal with, and it made them engage with a few elements of the setting. Once it was completed, then they could do whatever they wanted… but having that first situation gave them a good deal of context for engaging with the setting.

It all depends on the context.

Yeah, my comment on agency was written as if it was a value judgement, when it shouldn't really be. It was there because I know I've engaged with people in this discussion who spoke very strongly about agency, and I assumed you were one of them but, on reflection, I don't actually recall if that was the case.

So, to be clear (as I hope I clarified towards there end of my post), while expecting players to go investigate the hook is, IMO a limit to player agency, that doesn't automatically mean it's a bad thing. The correct amount of agency is the amount everyone is happy with; it's not necessarily a simple matter of more is better.

 

[nevin]

The older so get, the more I think it is a complainer problem. I haven’t had issues in years since I learned to avoid people who spend an inordinate amount of table time complaining. Doesn’t mean there aren’t occasional disagreements or disputes. But if does Jean peopke act like adults and move on

I think the complainers are far more likely to be the problem than the non complainers but you have to be careful. No one likes to hear complaints so it's easy to just cut off the justified complainers who really just want to make things better. Humans have been killing the messenger for as long as there are humans. And I think older humans have less patience and willingness to listen long enough to tell the difference. Including me.

 

[robertsconley]

Far more often by all standards I can say, it reflects expectations about authority and challenging same.

Speaking as someone who has successfully defied authority on multiple occasions, I can say: not every situation where someone is in charge is about 'defying the man.' Sometimes leadership is just that, leadership. And frankly, adopting defiance as a default attitude is a dead end. It rests on the assumption that all authority is inherently evil. But authority, in itself, is neither good nor bad, it’s the conduct of the individual wielding it that merits judgment. Invoking a debate as old as Socrates versus Thrasymachus in The Republic feels like overkill when applied to a group of friends trying to have fun together.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I think the complainers are far more likely to be the problem than the non complainers but you have to be careful. No one likes to hear complaints so it's easy to just cut off the justified complainers who really just want to make things better. Humans have been killing the messenger for as long as there are humans. And I think older humans have less patience and willingness to listen long enough to tell the difference. Including me.

Sure. I am not saying complaints are never justified or that constructive criticism isn’t helpful. I am saying chronic complainers and players who make a leisure time activity feel like a job are a problem.

i don’t agree with the last sentence though. I think when you are young you tend to fall more for other people’s drama, you haven’t seen patterns of behavior as much before. But as you get older it gets easier and easier to navigate these kinds of social environments for problems. I have gotten much happier as I’ve aged in my gaming because you just learn to stopping spending energy on people who make life difficult

 

[nevin]

Sure. I am not saying complaints are never justified or that constructive criticism isn’t helpful. I am saying chronic complainers and players who make a leisure time activity feel like a job are a problem.

i don’t agree with the last sentence though. I think when you are young you tend to fall more for other people’s drama, you haven’t seen patterns of behavior as much before. But as you get older it gets easier and easier to navigate these kinds of social environments for problems. I have gotten much happier as I’ve aged in my gaming because you just learn to stopping spending energy on people who make life difficult

I agree with 90% of what you said. But sometimes the difficulty we ignore is that complainer pointing out a valid thing that needs to be changed. It's far easier to walk away than face it, it's easier and when you walk away you'll probably never know you were wrong. But I do believe those types of situation are the minority. Most of the complainers don't add anything you want to the situation.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Speaking as someone who has successfully defied authority on multiple occasions, I can say: not every situation where someone is in charge is about 'defying the man.' Sometimes leadership is just that, leadership. And frankly, adopting defiance as a default attitude is a dead end. It rests on the assumption that all authority is inherently evil. But authority, in itself, is neither good nor bad, it’s the conduct of the individual wielding it that merits judgment. Invoking a debate as old as Socrates versus Thrasymachus in The Republic feels like overkill when applied to a group of friends trying to have fun together.

Yeah, I am pretty resistant to people telling me what to do. In life it makes sense to be skeptical of authority sometimes. But I think there is also something a bit silly about treating a person who is just a glorified MC like they have been made first citizen of Rome or something.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I agree with 90% of what you said. But sometimes the difficulty we ignore is that complainer pointing out a valid thing that needs to be changed. It's far easier to walk away than face it, it's easier and when you walk away you'll probably never know you were wrong. But I do believe those types of situation are the minority. Most of the complainers don't add anything you want to the situation.

Look if something is not working on a campaign, I am happy to change things up. But RPGs groups are not group therapy. I am not getting into a group to change or improve people and vice versa. I am there to relax and have leisure time.

 

[SableWyvern]

But I think there is also something a bit silly about treating a person who is just a glorified MC like they have been made first citizen of Rome or something.

The Pope and (I believe) the King of England were the two actual comparisons made via analogy earlier in the thread.

 

[Faolyn]

Well, the intent was: the ancient enmity was gone a long time ago. As in...I literally specified that the two gods in ancient scripture had resolved their differences...just like the real-world Egyptian religion believed that Set/Seth/Sutekh had fought with Horus, and then later resolved their differences peacefully and worked together from there on out, hence why Set was revered in Egypt for thousands of years, and why we had several Pharaohs named after him (e.g. the various "Seti" pharaohs). The Hyksos were a real people who did rule Egypt for a time, by force, but they really were integrated into Egyptian society and nobody seemed especially hateful toward them or Set (their deity since they were foreigners originally!)

Further, as I specifically said, the party never got their answer at all. They had to take a completely different route and never really accomplished what they had set out to do....which is specifically why it would be indistinguishable from railroading, because the party followed the breadcrumbs left by the DM rather than doing the very obvious thing.

You said "The party goes to Hut-Waret seeking guidance on how to stop the awakening of an avatar of Tiam-Apep" and then "The party [...] finds other allies in Hut-Waret who can help them understand the ritual being used by the cultists of Tiam-Apep.", so I took that to mean that you got your information in the end. With Hussar's example, that group was prevented from achieving a goal they had set for themselves (performing a heist). With your example, your group was not prevented from achieving a goal you had set for yourself (getting the information). You were prevented from getting it via one specific method...

The latter was intended to be 100% possible. Also, I wasn't meaning any "targeting"--just that this situation was evidence that the player's effort, approved backstory, in-character RP, and logical, "realistic" rationale for their actions....never mattered. The DM was taking an absolute hard stance against something that was...

...which is why I pointed out that she could still be a bad GM for other reasons; it just wasn't a railroad. If she was only preventing you from entering the temple or talking to the priests because she has a problem with you, that's bad. She could have been a "pixel-hunting" GM who required you to say or do the exact right thing to be let in (and neither asking, demanding, nor bribing was it), and that's also bad.

She could also have been trying to set up a mystery and just gone about it in completely the wrong way. (Another real-world example: Someone I used to play with was thinking about running a modern day game, having never run for us before. We would be students at a university somewhere in New England. Which university? "M" university. Does it have a full name? Yes, but nobody calls it that. It's just M university. We quickly figured out that "M" stood for Miskatonic and she didn't want to tell us it was going to be Lovecraftian horror because that would ruin the surprise. The game never actually happened.)

Why does frequency matter? I thought the standard was logic, "realism" (which folks have pretty clearly backed off to, as I have always insisted, "groundedness" even though they are always drawn back to "realism" like moths to the flame...), consistency, coherence with established fiction, etc. Now, it's not just that those things are the standard, but you need a long, repeated series of unequivocally really, really bad breaches of this process, you need a pattern of severe, egregious violations to even be allowed to start worrying.

Because coming to a conclusion based one one data point is rarely a good idea, unless the data point is truly a severe, egregious violation. For instance, if you, and you alone, got stonewalled while other PCs went in and got the audience they wanted, then that's pretty damning evidence that she has a problem with you.

Now, you could deal with this problem by talking to the GM and trying to figure out her deal. If her only response is "trust me" without giving you any reason to trust her--and you have no reason to trust her from your previous games together, or from out-of-game interactions--then it's perfectly sensible to either leave the game or to talk to the other players to see if they're also having problems with her and if so, maybe get her to leave or at least step down as GM.

Still, plot hooks in a sandbox are controversial, and that's been pretty well-established in this thread.

True. But this wasn't supposed to be a sandbox (or at least not a "strong" sandbox). It was a heavily modified Curse of Strahd. That wasn't important for my example of why a GM might railroad in the way that Hussar's did, so I didn't bring it up before.

(Heavily modified because I found CoS to be the least horror-evocative, cringiest thing I'd ever read from the Ravenloft line.)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I DM a lot for randoms. I say in the session 0 that the first 15 minutes is for banter and the last 15 minutes is for meta discussions. I also say that you can walk in at any point during the first 15 minutes, but must stay for the final 15 minutes. So the meta discussions are mandatory. I even prompt each player for their thoughts during this time. As such, I see many issues resolved after the game during this 15 minutes.

Maybe the timing isn't the issue. Maybe it's a lack of commitment to actually having the conversation that's the issue. If we don't set that time aside, its easy to just not do as we say. Just a thought.

Sure, I think that's a perfectly reasonable reason, and almost surely what actually causes it. I am not in any way saying that the failure to address things between sessions is an intentional thing (for any but the, as I have said before, quite rare truly ill-intentioned DM), I'm just saying it is a very common thing. People forget. Doesn't mean they're "jerks" as the thread likes to say, just means they're human. And this runs the other way too; forcing functionally all serious discussions to only occur outside of session can mean that real problems get overlooked because people are forgetful.

And I'm sure someone will come along with the crappy non-argument "well if you forgot then it couldn't have actually mattered to you", which...no, sorry, that just doesn't follow, not in the slightest. I'm an extremely forgetful person IRL, and so are many others I have known over the years, but forgetting to raise an issue after something problematic happened doesn't mean it suddenly doesn't matter at all. Instead, that's a great way for a simmering issue to faster, to grow from a minor issue that could have been solved with a conversation and an adjustment of behavior on one or both sides, to a huge campaign-ruining problem because of a slow buildup of annoyance, frustration, or resentment, leaving both sides feeling used and angry. ("You did X so many times and it made me so angry!" "Okay but you never SAID anything!" "Because you never LET me say anything when it was happening!" Etc., etc.)

Hence why I get more than a little leery when folks talk about never sweating the small stuff and keeping functionally all conversations totally excluded from session time. Yes, session time is very valuable and should not be wasted on tiny mostly irrelevant crap, like whether it's your one free "interaction with an object" to do a certain thing or whatever. But there are a lot of issues that are much more than ultra-trivial, but far less than the (IMO patently ridiculous) standard of "never, ever stop play at all for any reason short of instantaneous character death". This inviolable stance, especially when added to the other things I see, very much speaks to an attitude of hostility toward even the possibility of a player speaking up, a "chilling" of the discourse to use the common term nowadays, a "your complaints aren't welcome, either accept what I do or begone from my sight because you are the only possible disruptive element here" stance.

As noted, I have other issues with this consistent framing. E.g. it pretends that the only possible issue is one and only one player being a petulant jerk—again, player as villain, DM as beleaguered victim—as is always the case whenever this topic comes up. It's never two players out of five, or three players out of six, or whatever. Further, DMs are assumed to come in two and only two types: saints and jerks. You are warned to never play with jerks (even though as Hussar has noted it seems quite difficult to distinguish jerk behavior from things working correctly and earnestly), and since no allowance is ever made for a spectrum of DM behavior (e.g. merely mediocre, fair but not great, flawed but not truly bad, inexperienced, etc.) nor for variability in a single DM (e.g. a DM who is wonderful in 90% of situations and a real pain in the remaining 10%, or pretty good 75% of the time and mildly annoying 25%, etc.) Players are only ever described in proud-nail terms, consistently never presented as having any legitimate complaints unless they bow and scrape, etc.

Again, all of it seems to boil down to a presumption that DMs do no wrong unless they're outright villainous people, but players who speak up are presumed to be hostile, disruptive elements unless they meet extremely exacting standards and sign their forms in triplicate. A player doing a single, merely mildly disruptive thing is enough for any DM to summarily kick them out, while a DM must have committed a consistent pattern of egregious abuse before player action is even remotely warranted.