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

[EzekielRaiden]

Rulings not rules also helps keep the rulebooks down to a weight most people can manage to carry.

I mean I don't think that's necessary. 4e doesn't have un-carry-able books and isn't what people call "rulings not rules". But then again, that just points out another annoyance I have with how folks use that term. (That is, 4e was damned if it did and damned if it didn't: not having rules for roleplay stuff was an unforgivable crime, and any time it ever did have rules or even just incredibly mild descriptive text for roleplay stuff, that too was an unforgivable crime. You may not remember the "Golden Wyvern Adept" debacle but it is burned into my memory.)

I'll have a more substantial response later (alongside my response to Max.)

 

[AlViking]

It would add predictability to resolution for players in cases where the GM isn't as good at being consistent in his decisions as he thinks he is.

But I expect you to say its not necessary or is some sort of unacceptable impediment on your GMing, so I haven't bothered for a while and I'm not sure why I am now.



This isn't about collaboration per se, though a more collaborative approach can make it less necessary.



Replace the "isn't" with an "is". Basically, my view is that the more a game system requires me to make ad-hoc decisions, the less its doing its job. There's some diminishing returns there, but that doesn't mean I don't think a far number of them are more lightweight than is desirable in this area.

I think some people are likely not very good at running sandbox campaigns and I don't necessarily see a different system helping much. Fortunately for them there are plenty of modules as options.

But you've also at the very least heavily implied that every GM and group would benefit from guardrails.

So I agree that some people need more guidance and structure but for those that don't? I think the guardrails and restrictions are unnecessary. I don't personally care for multiple aspects of PbtA games, the limits on what I can do whether I'm GMing or player is one of the reasons.

To me it just sounds like GMs need more guidance, which i think the 2024 DMG does better. When people start GMing, none of us are particularly good at it. It's one of the reasons I'd recommend linear campaigns for most newbies along with planning on short term campaigns for a while. Fortunately there are also a lot of blogs and streams out there.

This is a separate issue from preference on the games approach to play, it's great if it works for you. But as usual I ask for actual examples and details gets the expected "predictable resolution is better". Which is kind of meaningless.

 

[AlViking]

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

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

I'm sure if I looked for stories for bad GMs and players on reddit for just about any game I could find it. You find more for D&D and it's variants because more people play them. I think a lot of issues (not all, of course) would be resolved if people would just be willing to give GMs honest feedback.

As far as hording supplies that's pretty common in any game that has inventory tracking, including every video game with inventory I've ever played.

 

[AlViking]

I don't disagree. One of my annoyances with the BitD community is the amount of fans who tell new players - particularly those coming from D&D5e - that they need to "unlearn bad habits". Habits and techniques picked up from running/playing D&D may not necessarily be conducive to running/playing BitD, but that doesn't necessarily make them bad.

What I mean is PbtA games literally codify certain practices/techniques as rules for the GM to follow. Some of them are GMing fundamentals like "soft moves" and "hard moves" basically being set up (i.e. telegraphing) and follow-through, respectively, or "make a move when XYZ" which is literally just do standard GM stuff, or "disclaim decision-making sometimes".
Now, some of them are specific to the game and cannot be applied wholesale. Like Masks has "describe like a comic book", which is something I did when I ran the Sentinels Comics quickstart, but I wouldn't even do that in any and all Superhero games, never mind any other.

I never said it was a better approach. I implied it could be useful to new GMs starting out, and that once they've got their feet wet, they can experiment without the guardrails.

Sorry, I didn't mean you were saying it was better...it's just a general impression I get from many posters. Sorry if I read things into what you said that aren't there.

I guarantee that most GMs aren't very good when we first start. Just not sure how transferable the techniques are from one game to the next. I will say the 2024 DMG is much better than we've had for a long time, if ever.

 

[Bedrockgames]

ut I do know that, not that long ago in this thread, there was a cul-de-sac where someone on whatever-you'd-call-your-side said that fun wasn't the highest priority and that other things would definitely take precedence, which at least one person on whatever-we're-calling-"my"-side found hard to believe.

This might have been me, but I wasn't saying fun wasn't important. I was saying outcomes aren't chosen because of the desire to add fun to the moment. I.E. when you have an NPC take an action, you aren't thinking "what is the most fun thing they could do right now", you just think "What would this character do right now". But the only reason the GM would be using something like plausibility as their primary criteria, is overall this is what makes the game fun for those players

 

[robertsconley]

I mean I don't think that's necessary. 4e doesn't have un-carry-able books and isn't what people call "rulings not rules".

Outside of combat, it is most certainly is. It is not quite as freeform as OD&D, but fairly close. And like I said in the review too bad that Wizards didn't follow their own advice in their followup products.

Rating the DMGs (2009)

My personal ranking of the various DM Guides for D&D.

1. 1st Edition AD&D DMG, 4th edition DMG (tied)
2. -
3. Holmes Blue Book (yeah it got the player stuff in it too)
4. 3rd Edition, (gets a nudge over 2nd edition because of the NPCs Classes)
5. 2nd Edition

The central problem of the 2nd and 3rd edition DMGs is that at their heart they were just lists of items for DM eyes only.

4th edition DMG breaks with this and returns to 1st Edition and the Blue Book example of actually teaching the referee something. The 4 edition DMG gets a A+ for it's advice on running the game and handling players, it gets a A+ for having an actual mini-setting and a complete town.

It get an solid A for exposing the math behind everything in 4e and explaining it in a way that a person doesn't have a degree in Star Fleet Battle, a masters in Advanced Squad Leader, and a doctoral in Hero System can understand. Of course they get critized for doing that by people saying that how the game must be played. I found those chapters a useful tool for fine-tuning my 4e NPCs and encounters.

However the weak Dungeon gets a resounding D- and Wizards gets a D- for ignoring nearly every example in their own DMG except for that one Dungeon.

However to be fair, it looks like Wizard's is recognizing the issue. We will see what next year brings.

 

[AlViking]

This might have been me, but I wasn't saying fun wasn't important. I was saying outcomes aren't chosen because of the desire to add fun to the moment. I.E. when you have an NPC take an action, you aren't thinking "what is the most fun thing they could do right now", you just think "What would this character do right now". But the only reason the GM would be using something like plausibility as their primary criteria, is overall this is what makes the game fun for those players

I've said much the same thing, that what I think might be fun in the moment doesn't take priority. It's still a consideration of course but I value consistency and logic over what I might consider fun in the moment. Often I find it leads to a better story in the long run.

Kind of similar when I really want the BBEG to get away so I can continue to use them. I could always come up with some way for them to escape because it could be a "better" storyline.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Just to add to what I previously said about fun, something I observed in discussions on sandbox was there was wariness around things like the rule of cool, and there was a tendency to be concerned about ‘the tyranny of fun’. As I said earlier, I do think this could get taken too far for my tastes. Some sandboxes seemed too naturalistic for what I wanted. But it basically comes from a desire to avoid artifice and railroading I think

 

[AlViking]

Just to add to what I previously said about fun, something I observed in discussions on sandbox was there was wariness around things like the rule of cool, and there was a tendency to be concerned about ‘the tyranny of fun’. As I said earlier, I do think this could get taken too far for my tastes. Some sandboxes seemed too naturalistic for what I wanted. But it basically comes from a desire to avoid artifice and railroading I think

I was watching a Sarah Silverman comedy special yesterday and something that she said made a lot of sense. She was talking about the fact that her mother was always honest, no matter what. The benefit of that was that when her mother did give her a compliment, she knew it was real so it meant even more. In the same way I prefer that the GM not always let me get my way because when I do succeed it feels more like I've earned it.

That goes both ways of course. I ran a game last weekend where the group figured out a way to bypass what I thought would be a fun fight. I could have run the fight anyway because it would have been fun for me, but not as much for the players. On the other hand in another encounter they had to steal the McGuffin, did reconnaissance and made a plan for a distraction along with a stinking cloud and a silence spell. It really was a good plan that in all likelihood [edit - would have worked] ... except they forgot to check if the back door was locked. Obviously I could have just changed my notes and made the door unlocked but the realization that they could have easily unlocked the door before they started the snatch and grab was a really fun moment for us all.

I want, and encourage, people to think outside the box. I'll work with the player to figure out if there's a way to achieve their goals within the limits of what I think is possible. But I think always saying yes isn't necessarily the best approach either.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Outside of combat, it is most certainly is. It is not quite as freeform as OD&D, but fairly close. And like I said in the review too bad that Wizards didn't follow their own advice in their followup products.

Rating the DMGs (2009)

I see it as a very different kind of thing.

Again, every time I see people make a blog post or a website or a "quick primer" etc., etc. about "rulings, not rules" and its attendant philosophical extensions (like "invisible rulebooks" and "FKR" and such), there is an outright disdain for the very idea of having codified rules the DM is supposed to abide by. Past adjudications are no more than a loose guideline to future adjudications, and rules written down anywhere are viewed with overt suspicion bordering on (or outright becoming) hostility.

4e did something very different with non-combat things. It created what I call "extensible framework" rules.

There are multiple clear frameworks. Quests. Skill Challenges (which, I admit, needed some polish but were much more solid than many give them credit for....it's just that WotC had an at best 50% success rate for designing them in official adventures.) Group checks. Page 42. These things provide a solid, reliable, abstract foundation--one that can be applied to nearly any situation and produce useful gameplay and (even if done merely adequately) exciting experiences as well. Learning to work with these systems requires the DM to....y'know, actually LEARN them. They can't just go off hog wild, do whatever they want, rip out mass chunks of the system and rewrite them however they like, which is what "rulings, not rules" results in 90% of the time (or more!) in both my personal direct experience with it and in the ways folks talk about it online. There really are still systems, and those systems really do have durable importance within the experience, as opposed to the "the only system is in my head", "we don't need RULEBOOKS because we have our personal understandings!", etc. that "rulings, not rules" directly fosters.

That's...always been the key, fundamental difference between how I see nearly everyone talk about "rulings, not rules" and how...systems that have rules get talked about. Rules matter. They aren't the answer to Life the Universe and Everything, but they matter. System matters. According to pretty much every "rulings, not rules" person I ever talk to, system either absolutely does not matter one whit, or it matters only in the slimmest, most diaphanous gossamer way possible, the thinnest veneer of importance when 99.9999% of what actually matters has nothing to do with system at all.

Hell, I'm pretty sure it was in this thread where someone outright told me that system doesn't matter, and that they think it's simply a truism that it doesn't, which means my position (that system does in fact matter, a lot, not infinitely but a lot) is thus fundamentally and inherently wrongheaded.