D&D General The Monsters Know What They're Doing ... Are Unsure on 5e24

[Thomas Shey]

I don't have any comments about how much you saw it. I dispute that hobby-wide it was common in the past but not now.

There are people on this site now who will tell you most GM's to this very day are big meanies who use their power to be mean. I'm sure such people did exist and do exist, but if it is, in fact common, I see no reason to be believe its more or less common now than it was in the past.

I certainly don't believe that people in past were less capable of speaking up for themselves or choosing who they game with, or that GMs today have some special gift to read the room or socialise that people were missing in the 70s.

The big difference is its not taken generically as a given, and thus much more likely to get pushback in the modern period. If you don't understand why that makes a significant difference, I don't know what to tell you.

 

[Thomas Shey]

How different would the RPG world have been if we could take the GMing advice from Apocalypse World or Monster of the Week or any of the subsequent games that championed the idea of being fan of the player characters, rather than seeing oneself as their adversary, and sent that back in time to the 1970s?

The guy who can make rocks fall and kill everyone, anytime they want, has no reason to gloat about "beating" the players. Yeah, no kidding you beat them; you have all the resources in your hands.

The less malevolent version of that was people (usually male at the time) who prided themselves on producing a "fair challenge" and beating the players. This was usually more about the fact the GM had the advantage that coordination on the GM's part was intrinsically easier, rather than any brute force "rocks fall" thing.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think you are trying to redefine what is being discussed.

Adversarial is not a play style. You are describing old school dungeon hack where the DM is taking on the primary role of challenging the players, but within the boundaries of fairness. The DM gives the players no favor, but isn't trying to win either. He is creating difficult challenges and letting the chips fall where they may.

@jdrakeh is describing a DM who is trying to show superiority over his players. There is no neutral rules arbiter element to his play, he is looking to use the rules and his role as authority as tools to "beating" the other players. And a lot of old RPGs used language that could be considered as supporting this style of play even if they didn't mean it. Stuff like a DM having to watch the power level of players to keep game balance gets bent into "ban anything that gives a player an edge".

And unfortunately, the community is built on decades of toxic people using GM as final arbiter to justify their toxicity.

I have to say I'm not sure at least back in the day there was a very bright line in some cases.

 

[tetrasodium]

I have to say I'm not sure at least back in the day there was a very bright line in some cases.

Not sure I'm reading this as intended, but think I agree. Back in the day It was totally different for someone in the party to fall prey to some horrible hazzard as the gm is literally pointing to the page where said Hazzard is described exactly as it played out vrs while the GM is winging it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Not sure I'm reading this as intended, but think I agree. Back in the day It was totally different for someone in the party to fall prey to some horrible hazzard as the gm is literally pointing to the page where said Hazzard is described exactly as it played out vrs while the GM is winging it.

I was more suggesting that some GMs thought they were or wanted to be playing "fair but hard" but were, well, pretty blind to when they weren't. This in contrast to the total power trip crowd.

 

[SkidAce]

...
Controversial Opinion Time: Despite the vernacular, early WoD games weren't really storytelling games (at least as that term is used today). They were merely conventional RPGs couched in the language of theater and written literature that continued to push the "GM as God" model with all of the adversarial gameplay loops that entailed.

While I think the play styles for DnD were more varied and somewhat less adversarial than folks propose (this is anecdotal on both sides though)...

Your "Controversial Opinion"? I ran into that several times and being younger, I assumed WoD was like that and bounced off hard.

 

[tetrasodium]

I was more suggesting that some GMs thought they were or wanted to be playing "fair but hard" but were, well, pretty blind to when they weren't. This in contrast to the total power trip crowd.

I think that was more the result of well meaning in experience during the pre Internet age. In those cases it usually started out trying it because they saw it read something that made it sound like that was how a RealGM should act. There are even a bunch of psychological things relevant to taking that path as a GM and I even posted about it earlier. The key distinction between the well meaning gm taking that route then under tsr and players taking it now in modern d&d with wotc's blessing is that players almost always outnumber the gm at any given table and had more ability to cry foul while forcing the gym to shape up towards the 564 point at the page standard of fairness or some more collaborative sandbox of fairness after the first couple times of needing to make amends through other means (ie "oh I see, I missed this bit earlier and should have told you xxx, let's say that you since knowing that would have made you act more logically,")

 

[SkidAce]

...
And unfortunately, the community is built on decades of toxic people using GM as final arbiter to justify their toxicity.

The community is also built off of decades of normal people being the DM and providing fair and fun play.

Ultimately what we are discussing is opinions based upon personal experience and anecdotal viewpoints.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I feel there was more of the "before their time" DMs than people think. I only recall one bad then.

But the "killer" DMs certainly got/get a lot more publicity.

Oh I'm sure that's true. I don't think we'd have got here if not, and I don't think it's any accident the GMing advice in virtually every game that wasn't D&D was much more modern from the very early 1990s onwards (though still not as modern as what I got from my second cousin, I didn't see advice like that until Robin D. Laws' GMing book). But like, in say, 1991, excluding the two-three groups I ran, I knew what, four groups of D&D players (I didn't know anyone running any other RPGs except me and my brother at that time) in Britain (three of them at my school), and one in the US, and 100% of those were either Monty Haul, Killer DM, or both. To be fair Monty Haul was actually predominant, not Killer DM. And all those groups were older than us, so I think we must have been in an era of change.

That's something that's interestingly kind of forgotten, I guess, Monty Haul, I feel like 3E kind of killed it off, by making magic items essentially hard-required for the game math to work, rather than crazy OP stuff you were lucky to get, and neither 4E nor 5E seems to have brought it back (despite 5E potentially having the conditions for it to flourish). I did play in one 5E game that kind of approached it, but I blame that on the 3PP campaign writers, not the DM, who was trying to figure out out how to make it less like that (hell, even we, the players were like, "Maybe just go through and take out some magic items?").

(As aside, everything I've read about Champions/HERO campaigns in even the mid-1980s seems to show very modern-seeming, character-and-story focused approaches to the games. So that's another mark for "there has always been before-their-time" stuff.)

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

A storytelling game (e.g. Dragonlance) was very much not a Gygax thing, and didn't really appear in TSR until he started to lose influence.

D&D, whether Dragonlance or otherwise, is a long way from what's known as a storytelling RPG. Yes, there's a railroaded adventure where you will be stuck with the predetermined story, but a storytelling RPG is something else entirely as a category.