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

EzekielRaiden said:

I would expect that things the books tell people to do, do in fact get done a lot. Absolutely not ALL the time--but by that same token, I would expect it to be fairly common because...I mean it's what the book literally tells you to do! There's no way it was the most common experience--if it were I don't think D&D would have survived!--but it doesn't have to be the majority to still be a horrendously toxic issue. Put it at say, a fifth, a quarter, perhaps a third at absolute most. That'd still be an ENORMOUS chunk of the player base getting the nasty end of the Viking Hat.

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yeah, pretty sure some did, I just don’t think it was anywhere near as ubiquitous as some make it sound… I basically went with ‘I would hate if this were done to me / my character’, and never did as a DM. YMMV of course

mamba said:

yeah, pretty sure some did, I just don’t think it was anywhere near as ubiquitous as some make it sound… I basically went with ‘I would hate if this were done to me / my character’, and never did as a DM. YMMV of course

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Many tables in the early days mooshed together original with Advanced. Many rules in Advanced were dropped or not noticed.

Gary himself kept shifting his opinions from, "It's your game, play anyway you like and change the rules to fit you" to "These rules must be followed to the letter or you're not playing D&D. And your game will be broken."

Players fought over the rules and game styles just as much then as now. Many of the same arguments too. Fans fought in letter pages, at conventions, in fanzines, at clubs and in gaming stores. We weren't that isolated pre-internet.

My husband, who played way more D&D than I did back in the day, says killer and adversarial GMs tended to lose players. Players could jump to other tables at stores, clubs or find games through postings on store bulletin boards. And he lived in a small town.

I know some areas had very few opportunities for play and someone might get stuck with what they could get and it might be bad.

Whizbang Dustyboots said:

So, everyone who says this happened to them is lying, to help bolster the reputation of a multinational corporation?

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Has anyone in this thread actually claimed this happened to them?

If so, I missed it - I’ve seen “I heard this was a thing”.

haakon1 said:

Has anyone in this thread actually claimed this happened to them?

If so, I missed it - I’ve seen “I heard this was a thing”.

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Do "Seeing GMs brag about it" count? Does having sometimes leaned a bit in that direction yourself in your younger days count? If so, yes, I saw both.

haakon1 said:

Maybe stop yelling?

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Maybe reading other people's claims as yelling isn't helping?

Thomas Shey said:

Maybe reading other people's claims as yelling isn't helping?

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I deleted that part of the comment, but you saw it in time. Oh well.

haakon1 said:

If so, I missed it - I’ve seen “I heard this was a thing”.

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I seem to recall several people complaining about killer/adversarial DMs. It happened to me in the 1980s and it lowkey happened to me this past November.

It's definitely a real thing.

mamba said:

is it? to me it is about being less powerful characters, less hard rules and more actual descriptions of what you do vs rolling against a DC, not about the DM being adversarial

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It was also a rejection of The Hickman Revolution style of story focused play and embrace of The Dungeon as a duel of whits between DM and player. While it wasn't explicitly adversarial, it was keen on recreating the elements necessary for that type of adversarial element to thrive.

But yes, in the beginning Gary was the rallying cry for that movement. And he was brought back and platformed as the wise fatherly guru who understood what was best, and that included the bad aspects with the good.

mamba said:

yeah, some grognards were upset, by and large that was a tempest in a teapot however. Basically no one noticed and many of the few that did, did not care (see e.g. this forum for that)

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I'm not saying it was a big deal on the larger world, but I think that a frank and honest discussion that starts with the phrase "Maybe Gygax wasn't the be-all, end-all when it comes to the DMing" is automatically going to be rejected by a number of people, most likely the ones who need to hear it.

I made the realization while going through my photos over Christmas break that I purchased my set of all three 2024 core D&D rulebooks in June. I've flipped through them once. It's a wild observation to me that in the span of 6 months, I've barely looked at the current edition of D&D. It's not that I haven't been gaming - I've been playing 2+ games a week. It's not even that I haven't been playing 5e D&D - because I've played in and ran a campaign of Level Up in that time. I've also DMed sessions of 2014 D&D in that span.
I just have no motivation to start a 2024 campaign, nor to switch my very casual and occasional 5e games to 2024.

haakon1 said:

Has anyone in this thread actually claimed this happened to them?

If so, I missed it - I’ve seen “I heard this was a thing”.

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I've been open about at least two DMs I've known who I would categorize as adversarial. One was a long-time friend who was very manipulative and used the role of DM as a way to exert power over the group and another I briefly played with who was the proverbial killer DM. Both took advantage of the fact that "DM is God" was the prevalent ideology and used it to browbeat players into submission.

So yeah, I saw it twice with my own eyes. Once in my home group and once at college. There is a reason I'm big into player advocacy and dislike overbearing DMs. That's why.

Again I think that the Rules from 2000 and earlier were much harder than they are now and this allowed DMs who didn't read the rule books heavily to play harder than a game expects and allows to learn DMs and power hungry DMs to justify the difficulty of their games.

I mean if the base game lets you kill a mid-level character on a single roll, it lets the lackadaisical DMs and the killer DMs off the hook when they do it