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

[EzekielRaiden]

I think Micah has never been on Reddit . I remember a group of new players I took on had only done a little one shot before, the GM for that told them that they lit the field where they were camped on fire because nobody explicitly said they'd put the fire out (even though the party included a Barbarian with Survival proficiency; or that even novice adventurers wouldn't be that dumb).

I mean, I would suspect he has at least used it, but I've no idea whether he frequents it or not. Not that that's necessarily got any bearing on the discussion.

But yes, I too have seen such things. The horror stories of strangers are a dime a dozen, of course, but literally every experienced player I have brought into my Dungeon World game has had at least one terribad DM experience they had previously discussed with me. (Obviously, those players who had never played a TTRPG before cannot have such experiences, thank goodness!)

I've GMed for people who just due to the cultural expectations much less play expected all NPCs to be secretly waiting to betray them.

Yes. A great many GMs/DMs/STs/etc. out there don't quite seem to grok that they train their players to produce behavior. They seem to fundamentally fail to understand how their actions directly shape and produce player behavior. A large number of murderhobo groups are murderhobo groups not because players are dicks or inherently in-universe-antisocial or whatever, but because one or more DMs have taught them that mercy is a sucker's game, traitors lie behind every smiling face, and authority figures cannot be trusted and are usually bumbling, incompetent idiots who literally cannot make things better even by accident.

It's a topic I've long thought about making a Snarf-style post-article about, the way DMs create problem players and then get angry about having problem players.

I've had people turtle up and horde their resources because they expected to be dropped into unwinnable combat at a moment's notice.

Yep. That's a defensive strategy I've had to adopt with most DMs I've never played with before as well, especially with 5e, where the DM culture-of-play is "pshaw, this game is always 100% easy street for players, gotta make it ULTRAMEGADEATHBRUTALITY just to even remotely challenge them!"....which has directly contributed to multiple TPKs and campaign failures in my experience. (And even if the TPKs are unrepresentative, I know simply from perusing this forum that "gotta make every encounter Deadly++" is VERY much a common sentiment among 5e DMs.)

 

[Lanefan]

Where are you people finding such stable groups?! Stop hogging them!

You can't have mine! It's mine!

 

[JConstantine]

the GM for that told them that they lit the field where they were camped on fire because nobody explicitly said they'd put the fire out (even though the party included a Barbarian with Survival proficiency; or that even novice adventurers wouldn't be that dumb).

So, this GM acknowledged that the adventurers were competent enough to build and start a campfire (one that didn't burn out, at that), but not put it out? Top tier GMing that.

I've had people turtle up and horde their resources because they expected to be dropped into unwinnable combat at a moment's notice.

That's just standard operating procedure!

 

[SableWyvern]

I genuinely have not seen a post from you that constituted any kind of answer, as I understand "an answer" to be.

I am not being flippant. I am not being disingenuous. I have not seen one single thing.

Perhaps I am mistaken. The thread has, at times, moved at lightning speed and sometimes I log in to 40+ notifications, meaning even if I try I may not see all of them. If I have missed a reply from you that contains something you consider a substantive answer, I truly apologize and would love to see it so I can respond to it.

But from where I'm sitting, I haven't seen one single thing about actually building or maintaining trust. It is consistently "why don't you just TRUST your DM???" or the fundamentally ad hominem insults like "wow it must really suck to be unable to trust people". (Yet another underhanded rhetorical trick, but does it get called out by those who favor this style? Even once?)

Yet again, making it personal instead of actually participating in the discussion or engaging in any way.

"It works for us, so you're wrong and bad and emotional" isn't an argument. It's a rejection of discussion, with an insult for spice.

You have made it clear that it doesn't work for you; I don't think it's unreasonable for people to suggest that you accept this. It really does feel like your insistence on fighting this good fight is causing you nothing but stress and anger.

Bluntly, when you demand that I explain what steps I will take to make you more comfortable at my table and tell me that if I'm not willing to adapt to your needs that I am being "excessively exclusionary" you are being wrong and emotional. It is very hard to engage with you because you do make everything personal.

I am going to stop engaging with you at all, because any attempt I make to mend any bridges or empathise is overlooked, disregarded, or is simply not expressed well enough by me. Anything I say that you don't agree with gets misrepresented and then thrown back in my face with what seems like genuine rage, and whenever I say something you do agree with, you still seem enraged, and respond with demands that I explain why other people have supposedly told you something different.

All the best.

 

[JConstantine]

Interesting, which ones? The only one I can see is the suggesting a specific action - he explicitly builds that into the Deep Cuts Threat Roll (but I think that’s more Weasel enforcement since it’s still up to the player to pick).

He did the standard "that sounds like X" as well, but he explicitly called for specific actions - not just suggested - and I'm pretty sure it was at least once every session. There was also rolling twice for the same thing, without the fiction changing much. And requiring a roll without having a consequence established - the amount of times he sat there, chewing on his pen, umming. Sheesh.

 

[Lanefan]

My problem with this answer is that it's saying because for SOME players, a few months is nothing, that means that for EVERYONE a few months needs to be nothing. Nobody is allowed to complain because the DM has done seven things without explanation in the past three, four, five months, because the DM always needs to be given that much time.

Part of the solution is to not let these things bother you any further than mild "how did that happen?" curiosity. It's all in fun, or so I thought.

It just cycles back to what I said earlier: the DM needs to be given functionally infinite trust, and nothing short of open, egregious, aggressively offensive violation of trust--in other words, trust is either perfect or nonexistent!--is ever a valid reason to do or say anything at all.

When does the DM do anything that actually justifies you spending literal months bothered about any number of unexplained, "you'll find out later" moments?

If it bothers someone to that extent, I'd probably give an explanation sooner if asked - once. If it bothers someone to that extent every time something unexplained happens, my responses would get less explanatory in a hurry because that's not a me problem, that's a them problem and not mine to fix.

Just declaring that you're putting on the Viking Hat is not enough. I'm sorry, it's just flat not enough. There has GOT to be more than that! Some minimal allowance is required to get the game going, but I haven't seen anyone give even the slightest thought to how trust is built and maintained in a group. It's always just presumed to be there and functionally perfect.

Perfect? No. Good enough for rock'n'roll, sure.

And things ebb and flow over time, of course.

"This style isn't for anyone who isn't willing to accept a wink and a smile as justification for suspicious-but-not-egregious DM behavior" means this is a pretty damn restrictive playstyle. It's not just not for everyone--it's for pretty few people at all!

Thing is, I think - or at least this is how it comes across - your definition of "suspicious DM behavior" is far more all-encompassing than it is for most of us.

And so, a question: what would be your take had you been in my game 5 months ago when they encountered sea water that was inexplicably unable to pour down a shaft into a dry chamber?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

To be fair, the book itself points out a set of "GM Bad Habits" to watch out for that while not explicitly so, are more or less "hey, you may be used to doing the following things in other games, dont do them here." Some of those are bad habits for all games arguably!



Right, there's implicit limits on the GM in a lot of these systems based on who gets "say." Eg: In Blades in the Dark, the GM cannot call for a specific action roll to be used, they state the fictional position and their gauge of effect from the player's stated action to use as the jumping off point for mechanics. Players are likewise admonished to "not be a weasel" and pick an action which matches the fictional movement they're doing. In a PBTA, generally "to do it, do it" in that if a player says their character is "squaring up to Drogan, getting up all in his space and asking 'so whatcha gonna do about it?'" they're doing the move of go aggro on someone and the GM should confirm that just to make sure the fiction is clear but it's the player doing the thing fictionally that has the mechanical trigger.

There's some exceptions ("Check moves," resistance rolls, etc), but these player-facing mechanics with delimited outcomes based on roll limit the GM's management of play as well as binding their response (eg: if the stakes are an outcome and they roll a full success, they get the outcome).

Haven't looked at the player bad habits yet (must have missed the callout in the ToC) but here's my two bits on the GM ones....which pretty much vary from "qualified yes" to "100% total agreement".

Spoiler: GM bad habits analysis

GM Bad Habits

"Don't call for a specific action roll"
Analysis: Don't tell players "that's an X roll", ask players how they want to make their intent happen. The advice allows for a little negotiation/discussion, but is (primarily) about talking to the player about what the character does, not which rule they invoke, which is generally good advice (even if the title is a touch misleading.)

"Don't make the PCs look incompetent"
Analysis: Exactly what it says on the tin, and something I 100% agree with. Note: don't MAKE the PCs look incompetent. If they CHOOSE to do something incompetent, that's a whole other ballgame.

"Don't overcomplicate things"
Summary: Again, pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. Some consequences can be just obvious expected bad results, not necessarily "spicing up" things. Simply put, "spicing things up" has its place, but don't overdo it.

"Don't let planning get out of hand"
Analysis: I've seen this as a pretty major issue in a lot of games, of both old- and new-school varieties, though the former seems a bit more prone to it. It's not that planning is inherently bad, but...well. It's like when I watch a YouTube video analyzing a video game story, where the speaker pauses to spend 15 minutes on a lengthy theorized explanation of what's going on....only for the very next sentence to completely negate all of that stuff. Sometimes, planning does go too far and should be reined in. Not often, but occasionally. I'd call this not so much a "bad habit" as a "possible risk".

"Don't hold back on what they earn"
Analysis: Excellent advice that I have found some DMs (particularly, but not exclusively, of the old-school persuasion) really, really need to think on for a while.

"Don't say no"
Analysis: This is........complicated. On the one hand, I'm a HUGE proponent of basically any other alternative besides just flat saying "no": "yes, and", "yes, but", and "no, but" are almost always better choices, as in 99.99% of the time better choices. But there's that 0.01% of the time that does still need to be considered. Very rarely--as in, so rarely it might only happen once or twice a year in a game with weekly sessions--I find players really do truly want to do something completely unreasonable, unacceptable, and/or unjustifiable. In those contexts, saying "no" is appropriate. So I guess what I'd say with this is, if you say a flat no as a habit, then it is definitely a bad habit. Make your habit be some mixture of the above: "yes, and", "yes, but", and "no, but". (This is another topic upon which I have long wanted to make a "Snarfticle", the power and necessity of saying "yes" with complications.)

"Don't roll twice for the same thing"
Analysis: This is "let it ride" in a formal suit. Excellent advice, and this is a notorious bad habit MANY DMs, of all persuasions, fall into. No notes. If you have this as a habit, you SHOULD break it as soon as possible, for nearly any game you run, not just BitD.

"Don't get caught up in minutia"
Analysis: Another "complicated", though not as much as the previous one. Sometimes, the minutia really, truly are important enough to get caught up in them. Rarely, the players may legitimately have fun focusing on minutia, and if they are, don't brush past it just because YOU don't find it that interesting. But there is a bad habit for DMs of all stripes to spend way too much time on the nitty-gritty, the plodding step by step by step by step by step by step, with every...single...step...needing to be meticulously carried through. Having that as a habit is generally counterproductive.

Overall Analysis
None of these "bad habits" strike me as things people shouldn't try to avoid. Most of them have at least the teeniest, tiniest grain of "well akshully...", in that there CAN be times where following where the habit leads is better than rejecting it. But having them as your consistent pattern, deviated from only rarely? No, I think that is clearly less productive than trying to break these as habits, and instead turn them into "sometimes food" type things.

I'll check out the player bad habits later.

 

[Lanefan]

Are you asserting that nearly all players always have a long, established history with their players before a campaign begins? (If so, how can that established history have occurred when they're starting their first campaign???)

I'd assert that the bolded is almost always a good idea, and for someone's first campaign can be done by being friends or work/schoolmates outside the game before it starts.

 

[Bedrockgames]

And yet you keep saying you want the setting "independent". That you want a "physics" engine or the like. That you want an "objective" world. Etc., etc., etc.

You can't have your cake and eat it too, here.

I keep saying I don’t want a physics engine, that a physics engine is a straw man. I want a world that feels external to the characters, and that has a sense of objectify to it (and I have explained what I mean by this). I said I wanted plausibility, some amount of cause and effect, a setting that felt real enough with NPCs who are alive like PCs. And I want the players to have agency. These are perfectly reasonable things and they are what we do in our sandbox campaigns

 

[Maxperson]

I appreciated @robertsconley walking through way he evaluated the decision space around the noblewomen reacting to possibilities. Arraying the set of outcomes the players would expect based on what they knew of her, what the reasonable outcomes were, and then picking the one of those that if I remember correctly he felt would be the most interesting for further play. It showed how at least for him it’s a combination of heuristics, not just “what does the world demand” but “of the most reasonable and consistent actions based on my setting and the NPC - let me pick the one that will further an interesting table experience.”

I think that contrasts well with the heuristic I’d use for my play which is “what choice would most challenge what the characters hold dear” or something similar. Same starting point of “what makes sense for this NPC to do” but as I narrow it, the focus circles back to those espoused “flags” on the character sheets. I think that’s a good example of the same starting point in abstract encountering a different creative direction / mechanical trigger and resulting in potentially different GM choices.

Yeah. A number of us sandbox DMs have said, or liked posts that said something to the effect of, "If there are multiple logical responses, it's perfectly fine to pick the one that's the most interesting."