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

Whizbang Dustyboots · 2025-12-24T05:40:08+0000

jdrakeh said:
There are still some bad Storytellers out there who were brought up on bad Storyteller advice from the early era of WoD games. I talk about one of them in a thing I'm currently writing. Like, holy crap. This guy was big on removing all player agency and then bragging about how clever he was for master crafting his brilliant story/plot and pet NPCs. It was... not good.

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.

jdrakeh · 2025-12-24T05:45:55+0000

Whizbang Dustyboots said:
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?

It would've literally changed how I played/run games decades ago, instead of like 15 years ago.

Whizbang Dustyboots said:
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.

Right? The game I'm currently writing has a discussion of safety tools, failing forward, when to roll dice (and when to not), and a really in depth discussion of player agency (and why taking it away is crappy). All things I wish I'd learned sooner.

SableWyvern · 2025-12-24T05:47:42+0000

Whizbang Dustyboots said:
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.

Yet again I just can't get my head around the games and groups some people have experienced. At 14 years of age, in the 80s, my players would have mutinied if I'd actually pulled anything like "rocks fall, everybody dies". I would have gained zero pleasure from arbitrarily declaring all the PCs were dead, even if my players were OK with it.

Whatever advice anyone might have pointed to saying this was OK would have made zero difference to my feelings or my player's. If such advice actually existed, it was dumb then and is dumb now (unless everyone at the table wants that in their game, in which case it's fine then and fine now). Nothing has changed in that regard.

Whizbang Dustyboots · 2025-12-24T05:52:58+0000

SableWyvern said:
Yet again I just can't get my head around the games and groups some people have experienced. At 14 years of age, in the 80s, my players would have mutinied if I'd actually pulled anything like "rocks fall, everybody dies". Whatever advice anyone might have pointed to saying this was OK would have made zero difference. If such advice actually existed, it was dumb then and is dumb now (unless everyone at the table wants that in their game, in which case it's fine then and fine now). Nothing has changed in that regard.

I think a lot of groups were taking their cues from the former wargamers running TSR. A lot of the 1E material, especially when Gygax was running the show, has a very us vs. them attitude.

Unfortunate and frustrating, but not terribly surprising.

Paul Farquhar · 2025-12-24T06:57:32+0000

Whizbang Dustyboots said:
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?

There were people giving that advice, at least by the early 1980s. It was TSR that was still driving adversarial gaming - as mentioned above, probably because it was still run by wargamers. But Dragonlance was the turning point, with players expected to take on the role of novel characters with plot armor.

jdrakeh · 2025-12-24T07:28:50+0000

Paul Farquhar said:
There were people giving that advice, at least by the early 1980s.

There were also a lot of people not giving that advice for decades. Again, look at the early WoD offerings in the 1990s. Early WoD Storyteller advice leaned hard into the idea that the story belonged to the Storyteller, first and foremost, and that the other players were just lucky that the magnanimous Storyteller was kind enough to invite them to act as observers. A lot of Storytellers still live by this advice, unfortunately. Because it's what they were brought up on, taught. And that advice was definitely not rooted in war games.

Paul Farquhar · 2025-12-24T08:46:25+0000

jdrakeh said:
There were also a lot of people not giving that advice

Sure, there was lots of different advice given then, just as there is now. None of it is "right" or "wrong" you just have to get with a table who likes the same style of play as you do.

The issue in those early days was that Gygax was by far the biggest fish in the sea, and he liked an adversarial game.

jdrakeh said:
Early WoD Storyteller advice leaned hard into the idea that the story belonged to the Storyteller,

That's not what an adversarial game is. In an adversarial game, both the players and the DM try to "win" the game. The players by escaping the dungeon with the loot, the DM by killing the PCs.

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.

jdrakeh · 2025-12-24T08:55:51+0000

Paul Farquhar said:
That's not what an adversarial game is. In an adversarial game, both the players and the DM try to "win" the game.

I've seen plenty of (countless?) instances of that in WoD games, as a direct result of the power paradigm that I called out. Including the one I explicitly mentioned earlier in this thread of the Storyteller abusing his authority to take agency away from players. That game was absolutely a fight between the Storyteller (trying to protect his plot and pet NPCs) and the other players (trying to do anything to meaningfully impact the narrative).

Paul Farquhar said:
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.

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.

Paul Farquhar · 2025-12-24T09:15:47+0000

jdrakeh said:
I've seen plenty of (countless?) instances of that in WoD games, as a direct result of the power paradigm that I called out. Including the one I explicitly mentioned earlier in this thread of the Storyteller abusing his authority to take agency away from players. That game was absolutely a fight between the Storyteller (trying to protect his plot and pet NPCs) and the other players (trying to do anything to meaningfully impact the narrative).

Again, that is not what an adversarial game is. The DM tries to kill the PCs. They don't care about plot or NPCs. See The Temple of Elemental Evil. It's just a big dungeon full of evil things to kill and treasure to loot. It doesn't have much of a plot to speak of.

That's just a GM who wants to run a storytelling game with the wrong group of players.

jdrakeh · 2025-12-24T09:25:35+0000

Paul Farquhar said:
Again, that is not what an adversarial game is. The DM tries to kill the PCs. They don't care about plot or NPCs. See The Temple of Elemental Evil. It's just a big dungeon full of evil things to kill and treasure to loot. It doesn't have much of a plot to speak of.

That's just a GM who wants to run a storytelling game with the wrong group of players.

Your definition of "adversarial" is extremely narrow. From the Oxford Dictionary:

Adversarial: Involving or characterized by conflict or opposition.

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

Whizbang Dustyboots

Gnometown Hero

jdrakeh

Front Range Warlock

SableWyvern

Cruel Despot

Whizbang Dustyboots

Gnometown Hero

Paul Farquhar

Legend

jdrakeh

Front Range Warlock

Paul Farquhar

Legend

jdrakeh

Front Range Warlock

Paul Farquhar

Legend

jdrakeh

Front Range Warlock

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