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

Ruin Explorer said:

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.)

Click to expand...

Yea, not much talk about "Monty Haul" anymore. In a weird backwards way it kinda makes me nostalgic....mix it with munchkin gaming and what a blast.../shakes head laughing.

And I ADORE Champions/Hero...but my players now adays are math averse...so...

Thomas Shey said:

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.

Click to expand...

Yeah, there were definitely people who at least espoused an Agatha Christie approach to adventure creation and this is still common in the OSR, especially amongst the Baby Boomers and Gen X creators.

"Well, all the information is in there. If you chose to get yourself killed, that's your fault."

Of course, the information "being there" is often debatable. If the players found that rock dust on the stone floor of the dungeon, was that really sufficient indication that there was a stone block trap over their heads? Maaaaaybe?

Whizbang Dustyboots said:

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.

Click to expand...

True, the term has come to mean something other than “the DM tells the players a story” - which there doesn’t seem to be a term for, despite it still being a popular format. My players seem to quite like to kick back whist I tell the story quite often. It’s a bit irritating.

SkidAce said:

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.

Click to expand...

I want to believe you. I'm sure the silent majority of players are completely normal people having completely normal fun. But I'm of the opinion that a lot of the advice that floated though the community for a while was not made by or for those normal people. They were made by people who either had good intention but bad advice or were invested in the antagonism of early gaming to the point of poisoning the well. And I feel a lot of the so called advice DMs are given still come from that well.

In the enlightened year of 2025 on this very board you see people talking about players as if they are the enemy. They will stomp on your campaign with weird PC species and 10 page backstories. They will min/max the fun out of your game if you let them. The DM must treat them as if they are unruly children; a with firm limits and strict punishment for misbehaving. Even today, the discussion of the Games relationship with this players is discussed more like a parent and children rather than a facilitator amongst peers. That is an attitude that starts with Gygax and ran a game for his children and so naturally didn't see co-equality among the players.

But thankfully that attitude is changing. CR has mostly moved the role of DM as All Father towards party host. Much better voices are getting the amplifier they need. Antagonist DMs are not looked on as "the way it is".

Maybe more normal people will have overall better games now.

Paul Farquhar said:

It’s a bit irritating.

Click to expand...

It sure can be yeah!

Especially when they suddenly decide they're "enjoying the ride" but actually, I'm really wanting them to make some decisions and drive the story. This is part of why I much prefer scenario-type adventures to any kind of more directed story with or without decision points. They engage with those a lot better. Or maybe I'm better at making those engaging. Hard to say.

Skill issue on my part I'm sure (though I've seen even the mighty Matt Mercer furrow his brows at this sort of thing before - I daresay BLeeM can handle it but I've seen less of his work).

Remathilis said:

In the enlightened year of 2025 on this very board you see people talking about players as if they are the enemy. They will stomp on your campaign with weird PC species and 10 page backstories. They will min/max the fun out of your game if you let them. The DM must treat them as if they are unruly children; a with firm limits and strict punishment for misbehaving. Even today, the discussion of the Games relationship with this players is discussed more like a parent and children rather than a facilitator amongst peers. That is an attitude that starts with Gygax and ran a game for his children and so naturally didn't see co-equality among the players.

Click to expand...

I've been running Heroes of the Borderlands for coworkers and I mentioned to one that, when we're done, if they want to do a full-on campaign, we can sit down, find out what stuff they like, and build a campaign world around those ideas, rather than just dropping them into a pre-made thing based around someone's else's interests. That completely blew her mind, despite having played D&D for about seven years.

There are definitely still modern DMs (this player is a Millennial and I'm the first Gen X DM she's had) out there with a my way or the highway approach to things.

Distracted DM said:

I think what we're reading here is someone who has come to accept that the direction WotC's 5e has taken is no longer for them.

Click to expand...

I think I’m there too, mostly.

tetrasodium said:

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.

Click to expand...

Thomas Shey said:

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.

Click to expand...

I think back in the day, the base system was hard. But the game intended for you to step off the gas sometimes so that you can continue play or mitigate long series of unfortunate accidents or unforeseen consequence. However that was not told so this allowed people to play fair but fair was hard.

And if you wanted but since fair was hard this allowed people on power trips to purposely go hard or even harder.

Umbran said:

Can you name any of them, or tell us where the average gamer was supposed to find that advice?

The 1980s, pre-internet, was not exactly a golden age for information discovery. If someone gave that information in a mimeographed fanzine, it got seen by like, three people.

Click to expand...

Paul Farquhar said:

Memory isn’t that good, but there was stuff in White Dwarf, along with non-D&D RPGs, such as Traveller (and Travellers’ Journal). Bunch of other RPGs with suggestions about how to run the game I read at the time as well (Ghostbusters FTW!) The RPG community wasn’t all about D&D back then.

Click to expand...

Yeah, zines like Different Worlds, and Alarums and Excursions, had this kind of discourse and advice in them- people writing to one-another responding to letters published in previous zine issues.

The advice was being given, but you're not gonna find internet-level knowledge distribution pre-internet. But people were treating RPGs as more than just killing orcs in a dungeon, and there were many schools of thought on DMing.

One funny thing here is his comment that the debate about roleplaying intelligence seldom reappears nowadays, considering we had a similar discussion in the So You Rolled a 3 at CharGen thread recently.

One section I thought of was from Different Worlds #3, on roleplaying. Honestly the entire thing is fascinating, but it does include a section on "good GMing" encouraging roleplaying by asking good questions, but never telling someone how to roleplay their character, never taking away that players agency "your character would act this way," because that's for them to decide.

Well, I came into gaming in 1980, and I can't remember a killer DM, but it certainly made sense at the time. I feel that any killer DM you ran into, either you didn't play with them again, or you told them you weren't having fun and they changed their way. The game was considered different back then where the game being played out was "see how much resources you can pull out of the dungeon without dying". One of the reasons for AD&D being created, IIrC, was to provide a common framework for convention tournaments at the time. Many of these tournament modules became D&D modules sold and thus influenced play. The novel mechanic being used that made the game different was "What does your character do, and how do they do it?" You can see that in the infamous frictionless room in White Plume Mountains module. The advice in the encounter was just to tell the DM that the goal was to get a rope attached to the two ends of the room and once that is done, the players didn't even have to make any rolls to pass the challenge. That sort of game play does lend itself to telling stories I would say. I would say I thought it was. I remember, at the age of the younger Stranger Things kids, trying to get the English teacher to let me basically novelize one of my D&D games for the given assignment because that was creating and telling a story.

Still, one can only move the paradigm so much. Convincing the early D&D players they are telling a story is one thing. Trying to convince them to play using modern role playing expectations in doing so, especially before most of the vocabulary used to explain such was not a thing yet, would meet with much more opposition. Still, I had D&D games that did just that. One, we barely rolled any dice. The good games were always the ones where the story played out naturally. The DM even narrated combat and did so well enough even in our failure that we never demanded die rolls. I think my real advancement came with the Die Hard movie. I and my gaming friends got out of it and one said "I want to play in a RPG game like that, not as the guy going in and killing everybody, but the PCs are making their own objective like the robbers, plan it out, and then carry out the heist." I thought, that would be an interesting way to run a game. I tried it out and quickly found out that most players don't have that much initiative. I've stopped awarding individual awards for personal goals and actions just because, typically I find, one player acts to get those all the time, and most others just forget or don't care. You get into why players are playing and some want to tell the story, some want the story told to them, and some just want to roll dice to kill things and take their stuff.

I'll also end with that I think that the Dragonlance stuff is just a bad attempt at storytelling, at least every time I encountered it. Everytime somebody wanted to run it, they seemed to be infatuated with the story, ran a railroad game from one of the modules, where if the players deviated from the expected plot, their actions would be dictated to them. All while the DM's SO or best friend decided to play a kinder character which was attempting to win the role of "most annoying and disruptive PC ever". I had some of the modules myself, and they looked beautiful, but I always had a hard time using them for anything except the given Dragonlance plot, unlike the other D&D modules which could be put into your own plots fairly easily.