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

EzekielRaiden · 2025-05-11T04:06:15+0100

Micah Sweet said:
In my experience, if someone has a problem and it is agreed to discuss it after the game, that nearly always occurs. It is not a "really common problem" IME, and IMO you have failed to prove otherwise.

See? Just as firm a positive example as your negative assertion.

And yet I'm not the one who is making the strident claim: "Thus your concerns are never valid and I don't have to do anything to respond to them."

I've presented clear, specific examples--made up, but still clear and specific. Others have presented factual, personal experiences. You--and others--have consistently dismissed them without even attempting to address them.

It's quite frustrating when one side is clearly participating in good faith, and the other side says, "Your concerns are irrelevant. Next?"

Faolyn · 2025-05-11T04:08:38+0100

Lanefan said:
To me the distinction is fuzzy enough that the two just kind of bleed together into one, for me.

If the players recruit an NPC or even a hench to come adventuring with them, I'm going to give that NPC just as much personality etc. as a PC would have. It's still an NPC by definition only in that it doesn't have a player attached.

I do try to find reasons to send long-serving party NPCs down the road before they become too powerful, but there's been times the players simply wouldn't let me because the NPC was too well-liked and had become an integral part of the party's core.

Agreed on this.

That said, having such a stupidly-powerful NPC join a party for a short time only can sometimes be a useful tool in the toolbox; as in, when being assigned a mission: "Jane Superhero will come with you until you meet Mr Bigdragon; her job is to deal with him and distract him away from you while you lot go on to the real mission that lies beyond his lair."

Which means, until the party meets Mr Bigdragon they've got Jane along to help deal with any other annoyances.

I found a line on a blog once that described a GMPC as a "pet NPC." They're often self-inserts or otherwise "main character" types. They take over from the other PCs. They're given special attention by the GM who controls them.

DinoInDisguise · 2025-05-11T04:13:44+0100

nevin said:
nice very long do it my way or hit the road. My previous statement stands. If the game is going well they'll want to sit and talk about it. If not your just back in High School being forced to talk about something that you weren't into to begin with.

Strange reading of my post.

I don't see people walk away. Isn't that strange? It's almost like there are two possible explanations for why a middling DM, like myself, running games for random people off the internet, would have so few issues;

1) I'm not actually middling, and I am instead really darn good at this, and never have any disgruntled players because of my unbelievable skills. Even though I've only been in the hobby for about 7 years with several breaks.

2) Players are receptive to the idea of talking it out, and take the opportunity to do so. And if listened to, will forgive mistakes and continue on.

I lean towards the latter. For example;

Last year I had a combat 4 sessions into one of these games with random people. In that combat I used a heavily modified Kobold press stat-block that had a "save or go to 0 hp" ability on it. A player died in that combat as a result of that ability.

I heard about that combat in the post game chat for that session. In fact, the voice call was passionate and negative. The player did not like that, and wasn't alone in his feelings. Yet, no one walked away. We played that campaign to it's conclusion several months later. The next time that enemy came up, that ability was gone and people had a much better experience.

Take what you will from my statements. It's all anecdotal. But I find it odd, that I don't have many of the common issues around here. And since I am far from the best DM on these forums, there has to be another reason. Maybe it's got something to do with how I interact with my players, or maybe it's blind luck.

EzekielRaiden · 2025-05-11T04:16:58+0100

Faolyn said:
You said "The party goes to Hut-Waret seeking guidance on how to stop the awakening of an avatar of Tiam-Apep" and then "The party [...] finds other allies in Hut-Waret who can help them understand the ritual being used by the cultists of Tiam-Apep.", so I took that to mean that you got your information in the end. With Hussar's example, that group was prevented from achieving a goal they had set for themselves (performing a heist). With your example, your group was not prevented from achieving a goal you had set for yourself (getting the information). You were prevented from getting it via one specific method...

Nope. The party was instead deflected to a completely different course which, yes, did contribute to their ultimate goal, but in a way that was very overtly less realistic and less logical than their stated plan, which the DM had tacitly approved of by, y'know, having the party go to that place and only find out once they had arrived that it was a bust.

Faolyn said:
...which is why I pointed out that she could still be a bad GM for other reasons; it just wasn't a railroad.

Again, I do not understand how this isn't an egregious example of railroading. It seems self-evident. The DM hard shut down a solution that was logical, justified, and setting-derived, with no explanation then or after beyond "trust me". I admit I was perhaps less overtly specific than I should have been, but the point was, NOTHING would get the Hyksos priests to listen. Nothing. Despite the fact that their priesthood is LITERALLY about revering the god who protects their land. If that isn't railroading, what is it?

Faolyn said:
If she was only preventing you from entering the temple or talking to the priests because she has a problem with you, that's bad. She could have been a "pixel-hunting" GM who required you to say or do the exact right thing to be let in (and neither asking, demanding, nor bribing was it), and that's also bad.

...pixel-hunting is a form of railroading.

Faolyn said:
She could also have been trying to set up a mystery and just gone about it in completely the wrong way. (Another real-world example: Someone I used to play with was thinking about running a modern day game, having never run for us before. We would be students at a university somewhere in New England. Which university? "M" university. Does it have a full name? Yes, but nobody calls it that. It's just M university. We quickly figured out that "M" stood for Miskatonic and she didn't want to tell us it was going to be Lovecraftian horror because that would ruin the surprise. The game never actually happened.)

I mean, sure, that's pretty obviously ham-fisted, but again my point here is: when you are presented with what even you agree is evidence of poor DMing, why is it we must then give them second and fourth and seventh and tenth chances? Particularly when the reverse is not true, as has been said repeatedly in this thread, DMs giving players no second chances, no re-tries, one strike and you're gone, bye-bye, never darken my door again.

The intense, overwhelming bias in DMs' favor is really obvious in this thread. Why? Why should we presume DMs are saints until proven otherwise by a litany of abuses, but players get one, maybe two strikes and then they're summarily booted? "The DM is running the game" isn't an acceptable excuse.

Faolyn said:
Now, you could deal with this problem by talking to the GM and trying to figure out her deal. If her only response is "trust me" without giving you any reason to trust her--and you have no reason to trust her from your previous games together, or from out-of-game interactions--then it's perfectly sensible to either leave the game or to talk to the other players to see if they're also having problems with her and if so, maybe get her to leave or at least step down as GM.

Okay. So...you fundamentally agree with my point then? That, in context, for a group that hasn't built trust up yet (which is literally what I said thousands of posts ago and you argued against...repeatedly...), where a DM leans super hard on this "trust me" thing, it would in fact be a problem?

Because I'm more than a little frustrated to see you pretty much repeating my own points back at me as if it were somehow new or divergent from what I've been saying this whole time.

Faolyn said:
True. But this wasn't supposed to be a sandbox (or at least not a "strong" sandbox). It was a heavily modified Curse of Strahd. That wasn't important for my example of why a GM might railroad in the way that Hussar's did, so I didn't bring it up before.

(Heavily modified because I found CoS to be the least horror-evocative, cringiest thing I'd ever read from the Ravenloft line.)

Alright. It's...a little hard to grapple with the examples when we're going back and forth and back and forth about whether it's a sandbox-y game or not. I apologize for any rudeness I may have given. By that same token, I hope you can see why this would feel like whiplash, where what we're talking about seems to shift on a moment's notice.

thefutilist · 2025-05-11T04:20:04+0100

SableWyvern said:
When I was able to throw everything into the role of that envoy, working as hard as possible to have the PC agree, but the player still felt comfortable saying, "No", it was one of the proudest moments of my GM career.

To me that's just normal play.

I want to bring attention to something.

The elements in play were:

A brewing civil war

An envoy who wants to recover a corpse

A priestess

A PC with differing allegiances

To the extent the player choice was fun, then you can easily create a set of elements such as the ones above and have those type of consequential choices occur almost every scene.

Although this goes back to earlier in the thread, some people don't want that and like that it's a special thing.

Anyway the 'agency' at play here is how the relationship between established elements changes due to player action. To the extent that the players were excited about it being a moral/thematic choice. then you've just described the basic play loop of Narrativism (that loop ending when you describe the botched attempts to get the body and the changed political landscape)

Faolyn · 2025-05-11T04:21:48+0100

pemerton said:
A few years ago, I turned up to my friends' place for a RPG catch-up.

Nothing in particular had been planned: so I pulled out White Plume Mountain, everyone rolled up some AD&D PCs, and we played a session of classic dungeon-crawling.

There is no railroading in what I've just described - there is just everyone sitting down to play White Plume Mountain.

Nor is there railroading in what Gygax describes (nor in Moldvay's version of those instruction). There is just everyone sitting down to play classic D&D.

More generally - everyone agreeing to do a thing is not, in itself, railroading. It's just agreeing to do a thing.

Like your example of starting play in The Cloisters. That's not railroading, any more than what Gygax describes is railroading.

Except here's the difference: if the players had decided that they didn't want to engage with the guards and stop them from hassling the shoppers, that would have been OK. They would have done something else. There were other events going on in the world they would have experienced.

With your Gygax example, if the players had decided to go back home, that was it; the game would have been over.

zakael19 · 2025-05-11T04:23:01+0100

EzekielRaiden said:
Sure, I think that's a perfectly reasonable reason, and almost surely what actually causes it. I am not in any way saying that the failure to address things between sessions is an intentional thing (for any but the, as I have said before, quite rare truly ill-intentioned DM), I'm just saying it is a very common thing. People forget. Doesn't mean they're "jerks" as the thread likes to say, just means they're human. And this runs the other way too; forcing functionally all serious discussions to only occur outside of session can mean that real problems get overlooked because people are forgetful.

And I'm sure someone will come along with the crappy non-argument "well if you forgot then it couldn't have actually mattered to you", which...no, sorry, that just doesn't follow, not in the slightest. I'm an extremely forgetful person IRL, and so are many others I have known over the years, but forgetting to raise an issue after something problematic happened doesn't mean it suddenly doesn't matter at all. Instead, that's a great way for a simmering issue to faster, to grow from a minor issue that could have been solved with a conversation and an adjustment of behavior on one or both sides, to a huge campaign-ruining problem because of a slow buildup of annoyance, frustration, or resentment, leaving both sides feeling used and angry. ("You did X so many times and it made me so angry!" "Okay but you never SAID anything!" "Because you never LET me say anything when it was happening!" Etc., etc.)

Hence why I get more than a little leery when folks talk about never sweating the small stuff and keeping functionally all conversations totally excluded from session time. Yes, session time is very valuable and should not be wasted on tiny mostly irrelevant crap, like whether it's your one free "interaction with an object" to do a certain thing or whatever. But there are a lot of issues that are much more than ultra-trivial, but far less than the (IMO patently ridiculous) standard of "never, ever stop play at all for any reason short of instantaneous character death". This inviolable stance, especially when added to the other things I see, very much speaks to an attitude of hostility toward even the possibility of a player speaking up, a "chilling" of the discourse to use the common term nowadays, a "your complaints aren't welcome, either accept what I do or begone from my sight because you are the only possible disruptive element here" stance.

As noted, I have other issues with this consistent framing. E.g. it pretends that the only possible issue is one and only one player being a petulant jerk—again, player as villain, DM as beleaguered victim—as is always the case whenever this topic comes up. It's never two players out of five, or three players out of six, or whatever. Further, DMs are assumed to come in two and only two types: saints and jerks. You are warned to never play with jerks (even though as Hussar has noted it seems quite difficult to distinguish jerk behavior from things working correctly and earnestly), and since no allowance is ever made for a spectrum of DM behavior (e.g. merely mediocre, fair but not great, flawed but not truly bad, inexperienced, etc.) nor for variability in a single DM (e.g. a DM who is wonderful in 90% of situations and a real pain in the remaining 10%, or pretty good 75% of the time and mildly annoying 25%, etc.) Players are only ever described in proud-nail terms, consistently never presented as having any legitimate complaints unless they bow and scrape, etc.

Again, all of it seems to boil down to a presumption that DMs do no wrong unless they're outright villainous people, but players who speak up are presumed to be hostile, disruptive elements unless they meet extremely exacting standards and sign their forms in triplicate. A player doing a single, merely mildly disruptive thing is enough for any DM to summarily kick them out, while a DM must have committed a consistent pattern of egregious abuse before player action is even remotely warranted.

Quite honestly, even as a primary DM for a while I hesitated to raise concerns I had about where the DM of the dungeons of drakkenheim game was going with table time and emphasis because I was playing in somebody else’s house that he was friends with; and everybody else seemed happy. I don’t think he was being purposefully “bad” and may have even thought he was balancing table time well and stuff - but he clearly had more content for his existing acquaintances then the rest of us.

Wound up tapering off and bailing instead, in part because the 45m of driving each way just wasn’t worth it on a weekday night. Edit: exercising my agency

zakael19 · 2025-05-11T04:23:53+0100

SableWyvern said:
Yeah, my comment on agency was written as if it was a value judgement, when it shouldn't really be. It was there because I know I've engaged with people in this discussion who spoke very strongly about agency, and I assumed you were one of them but, on reflection, I don't actually recall if that was the case.

So, to be clear (as I hope I clarified towards there end of my post), while expecting players to go investigate the hook is, IMO a limit to player agency, that doesn't automatically mean it's a bad thing. The correct amount of agency is the amount everyone is happy with; it's not necessarily a simple matter of more is better.

It’s also a pretty common recommendation in the OSR space to do what @pemerton was citing back from ole Gary with “drop them at the dungeon.” Let’s you see who survives, so you can start adding to those characters; gets some gold and renown building; avoids lots of back and forth around tavern hooks and stuff. Then when you get back to town loaded with treasure, kick the full “sandbox“ experience off as they figure out next steps. ‘S what I did with my Dolmenwood game - offered the players a couple hooks to pick from, and we started traveling up to the dungeon.

EzekielRaiden · 2025-05-11T04:43:46+0100

Faolyn said:
I found a line on a blog once that described a GMPC as a "pet NPC." They're often self-inserts or otherwise "main character" types. They take over from the other PCs. They're given special attention by the GM who controls them.

I have been quite fortunate in that the one character who is kinda-sorta a GMPC in my Dungeon World game, Tenryu Shen, is beloved by the party and basically seen as their adoptive dragon uncle/grandfather. The party was most pleased when Shen treated his fiancee, the wizard/artificer Hafsa el-Alam, to a two/three week honeymoon in his faraway homeland.

I've always made sure to keep him off to the side, only there to provide guidance, support, and hands-off assistance. They earned his trust, so he took them into his trust as well, which I think helped cement the party's relationship to him. Plus--he has his own goals that are related to but distinct from the party, and many such goals limit how much he can interfere with the world in general.

DinoInDisguise · 2025-05-11T05:39:30+0100

EzekielRaiden said:
Again, all of it seems to boil down to a presumption that DMs do no wrong unless they're outright villainous people, but players who speak up are presumed to be hostile, disruptive elements unless they meet extremely exacting standards and sign their forms in triplicate. A player doing a single, merely mildly disruptive thing is enough for any DM to summarily kick them out, while a DM must have committed a consistent pattern of egregious abuse before player action is even remotely warranted.

I agree with almost everything you said. I think a lot of people forget that this game is played—and run—by people. People who want to have fun together. I also agree that communication is the key to making that fun happen in a sustainable way. Once someone feels shut out of communicating, the game’s over for them. And when communication dies at the table, it’s only a matter of time before the game dies too.

I think DMs feel empowered because they are the role in short supply. They are the role that very few want, but every table needs. So when someone does step up, they may feel like they're taking the bullet for the group, and in return, are owed something by their players. Sometimes this manifests as phrases like, “If a player leaves, I’ll just find another one.” Or, “If I’m doing all this prep, then I deserve to have things my way.”

And I think this dynamic causes a counter-response. I think that’s where a lot of the more player-focused arguments come from, advocating hard because they’ve had experiences where communication broke down, or never existed. It doesn't take much pushing and it can start to read like the DM’s role is just to facilitate fun for others, like a kind of subservient party host. That the DM’s fun only matters in the worldbuilding and prep, not at the table itself. That mindset is, obviously, unproductive.

When we frame the conversation around “who’s to blame,” we lose sight of the actual problem. The real question should be: how do we build a sustained feeling of mutual respect and trust." It is only when we answer that question that, I believe, many people will find solutions to the problems that plague their games.

I think Chris Perkin's once said, in one of his DM tip videos, that DMs should "listen more." I think that advice applies to everyone at the table.

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

EzekielRaiden

Follower of the Way

Faolyn

(she/her)

DinoInDisguise

A russian spy disguised as a t-rex.

EzekielRaiden

Follower of the Way

thefutilist

Adventurer

Faolyn

(she/her)

zakael19

Hero

zakael19

Hero

EzekielRaiden

Follower of the Way

DinoInDisguise

A russian spy disguised as a t-rex.

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