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

[AlViking]

I 100% agree with this. Which means that for simulationist play, we need written rules that actually SIMULATE something. IOW, they have to provide any information about how a result was achieved. Otherwise, it's just magic pixies all over the place. See, in actual sim systems, my magic pixies narration don't work because that would contradict the information provided by the system. But, since D&D provides no information, then any narration is 100% equal.

You have yet to explain how a TTRPG could accurately simulate the risks of climbing a cliff.

 

[Umbran]

I would have said, "Are you going to believe in this hunch your CHARACTER seems to have or are you going to believe your own eyes?"

And the player would have continued to argue.

Because - and let us remember the real point - players don't always take the GM's word as gospel.

While they might usually do so, it cannot be assumed, and our thoughts on GMing and games need to include the less-than-optimal situations.

 

[The Firebird]

Yep. Go to University. Get a doctorate in an appropriate social science.

Huh. The social science PhDs I speak to disagree with you. Maybe it didn't take.

 

[AlViking]

My point is that rules are by far one of the most effective tools for helping GMs identify where their skills are mediocre to poor and correct that behavior so that, even if it doesn't become great, it at least becomes pretty okay.

There's a great deal of advice in the DMG on respect for the DM, but also respect for the players. That you should listen to your players and do what you can to ensure they are also having fun. But there's no way to force a GM to listen to any of this advice. In every social situation we encounter throughout our lives there are unwritten rules, things we just have to learn through experience. If you have a GM that doesn't work for you and they won't listen to feedback then you have options. Approach the feedback in a different way, such as discussing the issues with the other players and present it as a group issue, and hope that the different approach to feedback means the GM changes. You can choose to accept what the GM does because no GM will ever be perfect. You can find another game. I don't know what else to say.

 

[AnotherGuy]

How can one "foster a spirit of sincerity and co-operation" when one is secretly modifying the rules whenever one feels like doing so, concealing the actual processes by which player actions produce consequences, and employing techniques like illusionism or fudging?

Right - good question!

• Rolling often in the open and claiming your bad rolls, having players experience your frustration is good.
• Opening dialogue when possible about which actions produced which consequences in the fiction. I realise many guard a lot of secret backstory as they try have PCs fully immersed and separated by the mechanics and fictional consequences but one should learn to be a little more flexible on what needs to be kept hidden and what can be communicated to the players. The openness also helps retrain players away from Players vs DM.
• Highlighting/rewarding good player choices/character actions.
• Ask for player feedback.

NOW, secretly modifying the rules whenever one feels like doing is not great and will indeed hurt your attempt to foster this spirit of sincerity and co-operation.
I discuss rule changes at the table, but I do not change them mid-game. That is a red-flag I think. I mean I cannot think of an example of desperately needing to change a rule mid-game, and I've likely missed whatever examples may have been posted in this thread as I do not read every post.

I've introduced more gamist techniques into my games so the above is my attempt to answer the question from a DM who does all you said they do in your post.

 

[Umbran]

How can one "foster a spirit of sincerity and co-operation" when one is secretly modifying the rules whenever one feels like doing so, concealing the actual processes by which player actions produce consequences, and employing techniques like illusionism or fudging?

For example, by setting expectations in something like a Session Zero.

For every campaign, even with my regular group who have been playing with me variously for a decade or two, I first poll the players for their preferences, and then inform them of what deviations from strict adherence to the printed rules might be in play. They all have the option to bow out if they aren't comfortable with the editing rights I reserve as a GM.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

@EzekielRaiden This is almost uncanny. Reading your writing feels very much like something I might very well have written myself if having been exposed to slightly different experiences. I am providing detailed replies to your main sections below, but I think all of them boil down to being examples of one single main point.

I do have certain strong autistic traits. This has included a frustration over social maneuvering, people being prone to not just saying things plainly and honestly, and extreme aversion for social gatherings and contexts I don't see the point of. Games was a safe haven. It was and is a social arena where it was clear what was going on. I should be as averse to unwritten rules as any. Still for some reason TTRPGs have always provided sufficient structure for me to feel comfortable with it - even in it's most freeform of iterations.

I think one of the reasons is that at some point I just got what was the purpose of the unwritten rules of TTRPGing, and why they stay unwritten (I can't claim actually having gotten all of the rules themselves though). I might still have frustration over this, ref my complaints in this thread regarding the absence of a good uncontroversial way to express and describe play preference (something that would be very useful to navigate the now unexpressed and unwritten expectations players enter a game with). But I do not press this matter hard, as I recognize it is not necessary to get a reasonably good experience most of the time. I would in my own words say I have over time come to terms with a pragmatic approach to the "problem" of rules (both written and unwritten). You might perhaps be more inclined to say I have grown cynical.

Nevertheless here comes some glimpses into my thinking around why it might be best to just accept unwritten rules as a pragmatic necessity for good play.

I have been told (by non-professionals, so take it with a grain of salt) that I might have neurodivergent traits, so it's not entirely surprising that you see a similarity there. I would not call that "cynical" personally; that seems far too harsh. Instead, I would say that it seems cavalier about the problems that can--and in my experience consistently do--arise.

There are typically no word in unwritten rules? The process of trying to turn unwritten rules into (something like) written rules is insanely hard. If that is your go to approach to resolve diverging expectations on the meta plane I can definitely see how you might have bad experiences!!

There is no word prior to the disagreement, yes. But once we finally discover that there's a huge disagreement that needs to be reconciled, we have to go through the painful, laborious process of turning unwritten into written, so that we can reconcile it. When it is unwritten, unspoken, invisible, it's not possible to reconcile those deep disagreements because we have no words to express them.

Indeed it might in this case explain how a dislike for unwritten rules can become a self fueling self fulfilling prophecy. If your reaction to encountering challenges with some unwritten rule is to try to make them no longer unwritten, I would expect that to produce a much worse experience than applying techniques that operate on a social-relational level. (Active listening; showing understanding for the various concerns; social pledges to take various preferences into account; vote regarding incident without necessarily creating precedent etc.)

How do you then resolve a deep disagreement where person 1 says "A" and means <X> but person 2 says "A" and means <Y>? The differences are entirely obscured by not having words to express them.

Exactly. This thread is what happens when you try to bring the complexity of individuals' understanding of gaming into words. Doing this can be a highly engaging, enlightening, and a few times practical experience. But it is hardly a quick and easy process to consensus. This is why resorting to letting the unwritten rules stay unwritten is most often the pragmatic choice if trying to interact in a playful way.

Well. I was more meaning how we've had to do things like spend 500+ posts hashing out what "simulation" means before we can even begin having a conversation of any utility.

Possibly. That is a completely unrelated topic tough. It is clearly possible to be opiniated, even strongly so, without getting to this extreme.

I don't see how it's not utterly essential to this topic. Those strong opinions are where the aforementioned "person 1 says 'A' and means <X> but person 2 says 'A' and means <Y>" situations arise. If strongly-held opinions cannot, even in principle, be reconciled--if person 2 will never, under any circumstance, ever accept that 'A' should mean <X> and not <Y> even under limitations--then person 2 is unwilling to cooperate with others. The only result they'll ever accept is total capitulation to their opinions. That's an insoluble situation, and thus, such people absolutely should not be playing any game, TTRPG or not.

I guess, but again are we really discussing these?

Even more than "cannot play games" :O

Certainly more than "cannot play games". They'll almost certainly struggle with all parts of socializing in our world. There's a joke I'm tempted to crack here but it might run afoul of bringing IRL topics into game discussion.

I have encountered rules lawyers that can really milk a game text, internet opinions, and other written sources to argue their interpretation. I have a hard time understanding how someone with no evidence whatsoever can be considered in a stronger position? You might argue that it is harder to argue against them given you have no access to any counter evidence. But this assuming that evidence and knowledge is the right level for this argument at all. Rather I would say that as is at it's core a social disagreement, there are a host of completely different techniques that is effective for resolving such arguments.

They're in a stronger position because how can you tell them they're wrong when there's no information to base that on?

It's stronger by way of being almost totally immune to refutation.

The unwritten rules don't make conversation about them easier. But they are still there to make conversation and other interaction between humans easier. This is best seen if two individual or groups from different cultures with differing unwritten rules meet. Their interaction tend to be significantly hampered by the absence of a common set of unwritten rules. Efforts to write down and agree on a common set of written rules are generally not considered the best way of resolving cultural clashes. We are rather typically prescribed dialogue with a mindset of achieving a mutual understanding and acceptance. This new understanding and acceptance can abstractly be understood as a new set of unwritten rules governing the interaction between members of these two cultures.

I mean, maybe they do, but general conversation isn't what is most relevant here, is it? It's how we resolve ambiguous situations. That's what gaming is....kind of about? If we could just declare resolutions to ambiguities, we'd truly be doing pure improv theater (or freeform roleplay, more or less the same thing). Relying on unwritten, unspoken, invisible rules in order to resolve ambiguities is extremely likely to, sooner or later, produce an ambiguity where critical parts of what make it ambiguous are obscured behind the things we have no words for because they've been offloaded into the "invisible rulebooks". That's when the nightmare begins.

And finally

Yes, I know those stories, but I have never heard that advice before. Good stuff! Hope I never need to apply it

It frankly generalizes to other things too but it's most effective in gaming circles and other computer-related fields. It's risky (in that people may be very mean), but shockingly effective. People driven by righteous indignation to correct others' errors are truly a very driven bunch.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

For example, by setting expectations in something like a Session Zero.

For every campaign, even with my regular group who have been playing with me variously for a decade or two, I first poll the players for their preferences, and then inform them of what deviations from strict adherence to the printed rules might be in play. They all have the option to bow out if they aren't comfortable with the editing rights I reserve as a GM.

But then you aren't doing this invisibly, behind-the-scenes. You aren't relying on what is unspoken. You are speaking it aloud. You most likely also don't go out of your way to prevent the people in the group from knowing you've done this, I assume? May even check in with the players on how they think a given deviation should be handled?

At which point you're doing exactly what I've already said, and you aren't just acting unilaterally through unspoken, unwritten "rules".

 

[AlViking]

Players, both good and mediocre, are pretty definitively restrained by both the written rules of D&D and the DM’s power within the game. They are of course, also bound by the social contract.

I've had players at the table that ruined the experience for others. Fortunately rare but sadly occurs just as often or more often than hitting a bad DM. It's just a numbers thing, 1 DM versus 5 other people sitting at the table.

Some posters seem to be arguing that the DM should only be bound by the social contract, despite the fact that mediocre DMs exist, and that because of the amount of power they have, they can be more disruptive than mediocre players. It is argued that DM’s should be free to unilaterally modify the rules of the game. The DM’s vision of the world should be definitive and final.

There's a lot of things in there. I think everyone at the table is bound by the social contract and if any one individual violates that it can be an issue. I think the power of the DM to make or break a game is sometimes overestimated. DMs typically have more influence than one individual but I've had DMs that weren't the best but we still had a lot of fun because we players had fun playing off each other.

Even further, certain posters seem to push back against elements that seek to improve teaching DMing:

• DM principles in PbtA and other games are dismissed because they constrain the DM, even where they reflect common DMing advice in both the D&D and the trad space;

There is a lot of advice in the DMG on how to run the game. Just like any game the GM can choose to follow that advice or not.

• There is pushback against the D&D DMG being targeted at beginning DMs and providing advice on running the game;

I haven't seen a lot of that but I'm sure some people complain because the sky is blue. I think the 2024 DMG is better than the 2014 version but it can't be everything for everyone.

• Whenever anyone posts that the DM should be making the game fun for everyone, there is invariably and immediately a response implying that by doing so, the DM is subordinating their fun to that of their players.

I think you've read things into statements that are not there. What I remember people saying is that the game should be fun for everyone including the DM.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Right - good question!

• Rolling often in the open and claiming your bad rolls, having players experience your frustration is good.
• Opening dialogue when possible about which actions produced which consequences in the fiction. I realise many guard a lot of secret backstory as they try have PCs fully immersed and separated by the mechanics and fictional consequences but one should learn to be a little more flexible on what needs to be kept hidden and what can be communicated to the players. The openness also helps retrain players away from Players vs DM.
• Highlighting/rewarding good player choices/character actions.
• Ask for player feedback.

NOW, secretly modifying the rules whenever one feels like doing is not great and will indeed hurt your attempt to foster this spirit of sincerity and co-operation.
I discuss rule changes at the table, but I do not change them mid-game. That is a red-flag I think. I mean I cannot think of an example of desperately needing to change a rule mid-game, and I've likely missed whatever examples may have been posted in this thread as I do not read every post.

I've introduced more gamist techniques into my games so the above is my attempt to answer the question from a DM who does all you said they do in your post.

Okay. This is a good reply. But it seems to me that it is (perhaps excessively) summarized laconically as: "Stop doing those things." Or, at the very least, "Avoid those things as much as you can, and if you really have to, do it only under direst need."