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

[TwoSix]

So you assume no guards, no locked doors?

Of course not. I'm not assuming anything. But it's your job as the DM to tell me what the obstacles are, not for me as the player to find out if there are any.

 

[Oofta]

I was interviewing someone for a very entry-level position many years ago (think intern type), and I threw them a softball question.

Where do you see yourself in five years?

Their answer? I'm going to be an astronaut. I'll be in space.

Yeah. I mean ... let's say that the person was barely qualified for the position they were looking at. The rest of the interview went as well as you might expect (they were insistent on bringing up a divisive political topic, for example).

One more thing? When I asked them what they really liked?

I like maps!

I would invoke Poe's Law, but unfortunately I knew that the person was serious.

I was always tempted to say something like "I'm going to claw my way up the ranks by any means necessary to get to a position where I can have you fired for asking such a stupid question."

 

[Mort]

Being a noble gets you into the queue. Getting an audience with the monarch is likely to take months of greasing the right palms.

On a sidenote, stuff like the noble background needs to be discussed when taken. As in what does the feature actually mean or do?

I would be irked, if the DM said it really did allow me to obtain an audience with a local noble, but then when I tried to use the feature caveated it into near uselessness.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I turn toward the entrance.

I move my left foot in front of my right.

I put my right foot in front of my left.

"The guards stab you".

I continue this sequence until I am inside the entrance, rolling a DEX check at each step to ensure I do not fall over in the process.

Being a functional castle outside of wartime, the entrance will necessarily be open unless the king never wants any servants or goods.

The entrance to the outer court might be open, if it is daytime. It still has guards though. But the keep where the monarch lives would most definitely be shut, locked and heavily guarded. There are plenty of assassins arround, even in peacetime. You know what, I live in London, but if I tried to walk into a royal residence to see King Charles I would find myself very quickly in a maximum security cell; or shot dead.

 

[TwoSix]

Well actually . . .

Most long-running franchises that get RPGs based on them change up their "nailed down" settings all the time. Almost every time a TV series gets another season, a movie gets a sequel, or a franchise gets expanded into novels, comics, and games . . . the setting changes and expands.

The idea that the writers and creators behind these franchises stick to a "nailed down" setting is patently untrue.

Not to mention that any fictional show set in the present or past is creating fictional people that obviously violates Earth's canon by existing. That's just easy to gloss over because we all expect to not be aware of the details of the existence of 99.9999% of people on the planet.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Sure, but a conversation will at least help define the issue (usually).

With the player who just does it by nature? Functionally, that's no different than someone who's doing it for kicks! If the player "Can't help himself..." but is ruining the fun of the table?

I'm not a babysitter or caregiver, I'm there to have fun with a group of friends/acquaintances. It's one of the big fallacies that all groups have to welcome all players.

And that was my point. At some point most of the time a GM is, either unilaterally or by group communication, going to start to interfere with some player decisions for the overall good of the game (barring some GMs who are perfectly happy to just watch it burn). But the line between that and a player that's just making choice the GM doesn't want made is not exactly bright-line.

 

[Oofta]

Being a noble gets you into the queue. Getting an audience with the monarch is likely to take months of greasing the right palms.

And ... that joke fell flat. There were several threads about what the Noble background meant. Some people felt it meant they could just instantly get an audience with any ruler anywhere.

The real answer is that the player states what they're attempting to do and the DM narrates the results. At least, going by what the core rule books say.

 

[TwoSix]

The entrance to the outer court might be open, if it is daytime. But the keep where the monarch lives would most definitely be shut, locked and heavily guarded. There are plenty of assassins arround, even in peacetime. You know what, I live in London, but if I tried to walk into a royal residence to see King Charles I would find myself very quickly in a maximum security cell; or shot dead.

No you wouldn't. You would be stopped by guards. If you then made a second choice to continue on, then things might escalate.

State action. Raise complication.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

On a sidenote, stuff like the noble background needs to be discussed when taken. As in what does the feature actually mean or do?

I would be irked, if the DM said it really did allow me to obtain an audience with a local noble, but then when I tried to use the feature caveated it into near uselessness.

That's how royal courts worked. Being a noble could get you in, but then there are hundreds of other nobles all competing to get close to the monarch.

 

[pemerton]

My vision of an individual character is not more important than the vision of the DM has for their world or the style the DM and other players have decided to play. For me, the PC is the character idea du jour, for the DM? The DM has likely spent hour upon hour building a campaign world. If they're like me, they've spent thousands of hours over years running games in that world.

I too tend to attempt ways to contribute to the unfolding story by selecting options that make it easy for the DM to realise the campaign premise and accentuate the setting. I keep wondering if this is a common trend for DMs like myself (long campaigners, generally forever DMs, old-schoolers).

I've been mostly GMing for 40+ years. I have GMed campaigns long and short.

But as I posted not too far upthread, I haven't approached things in the way being described in the quotes - the game is virtually defined by the GM's setting, and the job of the players is to help the GM bring that setting to life - for most of those 40 years.

I certainly wouldn't regard the fact that the GM has been running games in their world for 1000s of hours as a reason that they have to keep doing so!