D&D General A glimpse at WoTC's current view of Rule 0

[Emerikol]

I think player sponsored house rules coming from a well established group familiar with the DM would be fine. The DM wouldn't have to accept but there would be no reason to reject necessarily if he thought it was good.

I think people new to the DM should probably just experience the DMs campaign style for a bit before making suggestions. Maybe one exception is defacto rules that everyone is using but which in fact are actually house rules. One example in the past was ability score generation. Tons of people used roll 4d6 and drop the lowest. It was not a rule though.

 

[clearstream]

As opposed to a "metagame entity", I think what you are describing is a particular type of network of relationships between game participants, with the GM occupying a key "nexus" role in that network.

That sounds right: a kind of ephemeral institution. In many cases (but not all) lacking a formal charter. Some - such as DM - members would author references for play over which I suppose they will retain rights such as to adapt, and others through their membership will have tacitly agreed to having those references prevail. Adventurers Guild could offer an example, and the DragonQuest Guild I alluded to earlier, as would the campaigns of local groups formed under individual DMs.

I have been thinking of this institution as an entity when I say "the campaign", but perhaps that's not a helpful way to see it as it has no fixed or precisely repeated identity. Whether or not that's right, the reason I see this as interesting is that not all that much has been said about the campaign rather than the session; another way to put that is less has been said about the metagame than the game (which of course, makes sense.)

My thought is that through identifying it this way, one can also ask questions about and challenge it. One can for example look at Stonetop and note its implicit proposal for a 'conversation' between designer, players, and GM in establishing the campaign references for play. Or think about the clockwork in Blades in the Dark for progressing the campaign as an output of scenes that may be proposed by players.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Level drain as exhaustion. That's actually an intriguing idea!

Would it always come back like exhaustion? One of the best things about level drain is that it, unlike virtually everything in modern D&D, lasts longer than a single night.

 

[Micah Sweet]

But this doesn't seem to make sense - why would a supernatural effect make an Elf age more than a Halfling more than a human?

It shouldn't. Long-lived species are simply more resistant to magical aging. Elves are serially longeval (Tolkien-style) in my settings anyway.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It certainly can, but I do not see anyone arguing along the same lines for hit point loss and ability point loss. Why are we making age loss the exception?

I do think healing ought to be proportional to the max hit points of the person healed, if the healingveffect itself is consistent.

 

[Micah Sweet]

If it were my decision to make i would say that the aging is relative to both the species and the context of the scenario.
It would all depend on the affect you are looking for. If the PCs know about the affects of aging and the elf jumps in front of the human to save him...maybe the elf doesn't age so much. If the DM is looking for some kind of horror affect to warn the PCs of the danger of the situation....the elf ages relative to his life span.
Regardless....the game allows for ways to reverse the effects of everything anyway.

To me what you're describing are metagame considerations. I generally try to avoid as much of that as possible.

 

[AnotherGuy]

I do think healing ought to be proportional to the max hit points of the person healed, if the healingveffect itself is consistent.

Ideally yes.

 

[hawkeyefan]

While I very much agree with you here, this is resisting something I did not say.

I was reiterating my original point because I don't think your bit about "intellectual property" and all that really pertains to what I was saying. If you very much agree with that point, then I'm not really worried about how we could technically, under such and such circumstances, call a campaign the property of the DM.

As I previously said, I'm not against casual use of this... "In my campaign, I always do X..." and so on.

My objection was to the idea that it MUST be so, and that anyone who does it differently "isn't a worthwhile DM."

 

[Emerikol]

As opposed to a "metagame entity", I think what you are describing is a particular type of network of relationships between game participants, with the GM occupying a key "nexus" role in that network.

I think his original description is more accurate. It's even in our vernacular. How often have you heard "I'm playing in Joe's campaign on Thursdays and Bob's on Saturday's". Even with Ptolus, the players referred to it as Monte Cooke's Ptolus campaign.

I suppose if a DM really cared they could try to copyright their contribution and ask for a release for the players but I think that would be ridiculous. Suppose those playing in Gygax's game decided to strike off on their own and start up another campaign but they wanted to use Greyhawk for whatever reason. Let's also assume at the time Greyhawk is not available as a commercially published setting. I would posit that they left Gary's campaign and went to whoever the new DM is even in that situation. Now let's suppose some new people come into Gary's original campaign. I'd argue they are playing the same campaign that the others had previously played in. People come and go in campaigns all the time. The campaign remains. Even if it were taken offline for a while it would just be in hibernation waiting on the next group.

I don't though think a campaign is a metagame entity or a network of connections between DM and players. I think it is the established fiction of that campaign which includes everything publicly known DM and players and everything known only to the DM.

 

[FrozenNorth]

How should it be written? How about...

The book is nothing compared to the judgment of an empowered Dungeon Master. Don't let the rules stand between you and the game! You are the one in control.

I prefer the 2024 DMG formulation, precisely because it emphasizes that D&D is a social activity, and your players have a say.