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

[kermit4karate]

Probably not, but it’s done with teachers all the time so .

Didn't you also have teachers who said, "Two wrongs don't make a right?"

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Didn't you also have teachers who said, "Two wrongs don't make a right?"

They were graded Inadequate.

 

[Lanefan]

I agree and that's been one of my main sticking points. If every table had that guy there's no way so many people would play the game.

And yet, when you get a whole table full of that guys it can produce one rockin' and entertaining game.

I speak from experience on this one.

 

[AlViking]

Given that the thread was arguing about what percent of them are "bad" and throwing around things like 20-25%, it didn't seem like that far of a leap.

Further, I didn't call for such a scale, I said it feels like such a scale should be out there. I meant in the sense of our hobby that it is surprising such a thing doesn't exist.. This didn't feel like much of a leap to me given D&D once rated characters physical appearances from 3-18 and still defines their (the in game analogs of people) as having intelligence, wisdom, and charisma on 3-18 scale (something I have posted against before).

I am perfectly accepting of someone implementing such a scale as not being a good idea!!

I did wonder if the thought experiment of what traits would generally be considered as moving someone up and down it might be more useful than a mere binary classification of good and bad - and might hint at skills folks could work on or what people might look for in games.

Finally, I wonder what the line is in terms of rating other things that human beings put their heart, sweat, and tears into like running restaurants and hotels, or making movies and writing books. Does the touchiness about rating subjective things change if it is, say, huge corporate owned pizza chains vs. local restaurant? Does it change based on how personally connected one is to that industry? On how many people are involved? On the age of people doing it (high school football recruits)? On whether it is something mental or appearance wise (gross?) versus athletic prowess (more objective?)? On the plus side, I am glad to be able to guess that many of you would presumably feel the same about how ratings of professors and teachers are currently done online and on campus as I do (not done well at all and leading to some bad repercussions).

You might be able to get a ranking with a large enough pool of people rating, but that doesn't mean the rating would matter much to any individual. When it comes to restaurants for example I have very simple tastes. I'd rather eat at Culver's because I get exactly the portions I want and I really like their chocolate shakes. Meanwhile I don't care for a ton of toppings so I don't care if that half pound burger is made from Waigu beef and smeared with avocado-Dijon kewpie mayo.

So wisdom of the crowds is better, but it's still far perfect.

 

[Lanefan]

Is it just as you don't like the word "bad"?

As with most things, you have to have 'ranks'. To say "everyone is average" is not every helpful.

I think there's a difference between 'bad', where a DM is actively trying to hose the players or constantly repeats the same mistakes due to refusal or inability to learn, and 'poor' or 'inept' where a DM is earnestly trying but doesn't know the ropes well enough or keeps unintentionally blundering into mistakes or simply can't handle the task.

I'm more than willing to admit 20% of DMs at any given time may fall into the 'poor' or 'inept' categories and that probably 100% of us have done our time in these categories at some point in the past, if not still there now.

Truly 'bad', though? That's just a few percent overall, if that.

If you have to pick between two "average DMs", and one does not know the rules well, does not care to learn them and spends large amounts of game time looking up the rules, and the other DM knows all the basic rules by heart and only looks up a rule once in a while. One of those DMs is better then the other.

In that one aspect of things, sure. But there's a lot more to DMing than just rules knowledge, and someone who knows the rules inside-out and backwards could still be poor, inept, or outright bad in other aspects of running a game.

 

[Enrahim]

Micah thinks that narrative games have rules that limit what a GM can do, when in reality, they generally have guidelines that provide information as to the GM's role.

I mean, if you want to talk about games that limit a GM's power, then that's any game that doesn't say that the GM can do whatever they want to do. A GM has to make initiative and attack rolls for their NPC combatants, rather than just letting them go whenever they want and auto-hit? That limits what the GM can do. A GM is running a monster that has 3/day Legendary Resistance instead of saying that they auto-save whenever the GM wants? That limits what the GM can do.

This was the post you responded to when I came back into the chat

None of the examples you're using are rules governing GM behavior. That, specifically, is what I have a problem with. I'd rather have advice.

My impression was that you expressed a problem with understanding this statement. I tried to supply my understanding.

I cannot think of any modern games that has the feature described, narrative or otherwise. However there was a period during the forge craze where this was a big thing in at least some of the narrative design scene. As such I think it is more constructive to explain how modern narrative games differ from those, than to question if games that have never had that kind of GM facing rules at all can be said to have something similar.

Edit: I brought up a BW example of rule directly governing GM behavior just upthread, in case you missed it.

 

[kermit4karate]

And yet, when you get a whole table full of that guys it can produce one rockin' and entertaining game.

I speak from experience on this one.

I'll echo that! It's like front-row seats to a reality TV show. Ooh! Hand me the popcorn!!!

 

[DinoInDisguise]

Given that the thread was arguing about what percent of them are "bad" and throwing around things like 20-25%, it didn't seem like that far of a leap.

Further, I didn't call for such a scale, I said it feels like such a scale should be out there. I meant in the sense of our hobby that it is surprising such a thing doesn't exist.. This didn't feel like much of a leap to me given D&D once rated characters physical appearances from 3-18 and still defines their (the in game analogs of people) as having intelligence, wisdom, and charisma on 3-18 scale (something I have posted against before).

I am perfectly accepting of someone implementing such a scale as not being a good idea.

I did wonder if the thought experiment of what traits would generally be considered as moving someone up and down it might be more useful than a mere binary classification of good and bad - and might hint at skills folks could work on or what people might look for in games.

Finally, I wonder what the line is in terms of rating other things that human beings put their heart, sweat, and tears into like running restaurants and hotels, or making movies and writing books. Does the touchiness about rating subjective things change if it is, say, huge corporate owned pizza chains vs. local restaurant? Does it change based on how personally connected one is to that industry? On how many people are involved? On the age of people doing it (high school football recruits)? On whether it is something mental or appearance wise (gross?) versus athletic prowess (more objective?)? On the plus side, I am glad to be able to guess that many of you would presumably feel the same about how ratings of professors and teachers are currently done online and on campus as I do (not done well at all and leading to some bad repercussions).

I think there is a lot here. Something being a thought experiment does not inoculate it to moral scrutiny. Even "what ifs" can have flaws. The hypothetical ranking of DMs is such a "what if." The morality of the idea doesn't vanish because it's hypothetical.

The analogies to things such as ability scores, movie ratings and sports statistics are fundamentally flawed. The first two are obviously works of fiction, not human beings. While the latter is a collection of objective performance metrics. Metrics with quantifiable outcomes.

A ranking of DMs as bad or good simply lacks all of these. We are not judging the creative works they offered. We are not judging performance based upon objective statistics. No, we are categorizing them based solely on subjective opinions. Opinions that we know are meaningless.

An individual can judge a DM to be "bad" after playing with them. That is not my objection here. My objection is to communal ratings based on subjective and nebulous criteria. And to doing so in a way that simply deems humans as not being worth playing with. We become the arbiters of the hobby. The secretive cabal that decides who gets to play.

It is gatekeeping. And it's gatekeeping done by people who largely never played with the person, using metrics no one agrees on.

 

[Faolyn]

This is the same debate between different philosophies. When I DM, I honestly couldn't care less what the monster stat block says, because I don't think the author ever truly intended every member of an entire species to only be able to use Legendary Resistance 3/day...because that would be absurd, even in a world of fantasy monsters. I trust my ability to referee an encounter and interpret the spirit of the game better than some little stat block.

That's my point. The book can't force you to run the game in a specific manner. It can't force you to, say, use Legendary Resistance the first three times the monster needs to make a save*. You can choose to have the monster hold onto them for when it needs them. There's nothing that forces you to let the monster have any legendary saves, if you don't like the idea in the first place.

And that's true of GM agenda and principles in a narrative game. Even if the game actually says "you must do this" ...no, you don't have to. And very few games actually say "you must do this." If you want an example of a game that does, apparently Synnibar said that GM's must run exactly by the adventure, the players may see the adventure afterwards, and if the GM deviated, the players got extra XP or something like that. That's a limitation on GM behavior.

==

* Which is something I've seen people claim, saying it means that parties use three low-level spells right away to get rid of those saves, thus legendary resistances are a bad rule.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

I have no idea what the GM was thinking. Other than this was the 90s and people were somewhat more likely to think of it as "naughty" rather than "criminal."

It was only a decade previous when peeping at women showering was a comedy movie staple.