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

[Scribe]

Good response. I detest that question in interviews. I never use it. I do not find it helpful.

I did end up getting that job, but I think that question is really asking a lot of folks, especially entry level/young, and ESPECIALLY in the modern west.

I mean my son laid out his "5 year plan" a few months ago on a road trip, queue up "and then God laughed" and where is that plan now?

Dust, absolutely gone, out the window.

 

[Belen]

I'm not talking about evil characters. I'm talking about (in D&D terms) chaotic characters. There are all kinds of ways that can be expressed, but it just ends up sowing chaos for no real reason but impulse (usually; sometimes sowing chaos is the point).

The only time I have seen players disrupt things was when they went evil.

Never seen them just sow chaos.

 

[Mort]

This is a question with a lot of questions you need to ask.

At what point do you prevent players from doing uncaring things because it'll wreck the setting/campaign? Is there any self-evident way to distinguish this from, essentially, micromanaging their play?

(To be clear, I'm kind of on the fence about this because I'm not a big fan of players sowing chaos just for the heck of it, but at some point along that line they're just running the characters by permission).

Are the players engaging with the setting in good faith? If they are not (they're just trying to be chaos agents or some such) then the DM has to decide if he wants to run with that, or to pass and end things. Best to have a conversation with the group.

If they are, but it seems like they're just flailing about? Maybe the hooks etc. the DM thinks are obvious are just not. I had a game once where we (the players) spent several sessions looking for stuff to do, and not really finding it. Finally we confronted the DM, he asked (seemingly honestly) something like "Well why aren't you grabbing the hooks I'm throwing out?" We (the players) were all "what hooks?" the hooks he thought were blatantly obvious, can't miss adventure opportunities had all sailed right by us!

After that talk, he was a lot more obvious about it and fun was had by all.

 

[AnotherGuy]

Several of those would have moderate, even possibly major impacts on character creation. I would present them prior to character creation and give a brief example of why I thought they were good additions/changes. And I would be prepared for some pushback on a few of those.

We must have a very easy table compared to some here because our table is quite chilled and allows the DM to tinker. I've kinda stopped now, thankfully. But we have another player who is running something and tinkering at the same time. We kinda trust the process, mistakes could be made, but ok we learn, hopefully, what works and what doesn't.

Many of my changes I introduced were during our almost decade long campaign, so 100% not at the start. Many of the players have 2 characters or more, so their later characters have had the benefit of having these rules from the start.

Though everytime there was a major change that would affect character creation I would allow changes to be made retroactively to their characters. It is only fair obviously.

As a DM I'm a fan of their characters, their backstories and the personalised goals they pursue, allowing them to expand on/increase their TBIF's. I think playing with friends makes a HUGE difference and we play in person.
Many posters here just do not seem to have that luxury and perhaps that is why we have this ridiculous disconnect and you hear words about dictatorship, authority and the rest.

 

[pemerton]

if you didn't want people to think you were comparing your players' intelligence to that of animals...which is precisely the thing that makes an animal overeat when it shouldn't...then you probably shouldn't have compared your players to animals that lack the intelligence to avoid overeating.

Once again I'm reminded of this:

The key assumption throughout all these games is that if a gaming experience is to be intelligent (and all Fantasy Heartbreakers make this claim), then the most players can be relied upon to provide is kind of the "Id" of play - strategizing, killing, and conniving throughout the session. They are the raw energy, the driving "go," and the GM's role is to say, "You just scrap, strive, and kill, and I'll show ya, with this book, how it's all a brilliant evocative fantasy."

It's not Illusionism - there's no illusion at all, just movement across the landscape and the willingness to fight as the baseline player things to do.​

The same essay goes on in an interesting way, that is relevant to this thread:

The Explorative, imaginative pleasure experienced by a player - and most importantly, communicated among players - simply doesn't factor into play at all, even in the more Simulationist Fantasy Heartbreakers, which are universally centered on Setting.

I think this is a serious problem for fantasy role-playing design. It's very, very hard to break out of D&D Fantasy assumptions for many people, and the first step, I think, is to generate the idea that protagonism . . . can mean more than energy and ego. These are fine things, of course, but it strikes me that playing with them as the sole elements provided by the players is a recipe for Social Contract breakdown.​

A lot of the posts in this thread seem to me to be addressing the relationship between player contributions (energy, ego, . . . anything else?), setting, and GM-centred methods for either avoiding, or managing, social contract breakdown.

 

[Belen]

Yeah, I don't know if Lanefan was the person who I'm thinking of, but there was someone on here who was sufficiently proprietary about their setting they wouldn't let someone define things about the village their character came from. Even things that didn't seem inappropriate given defined setting elements.

At seems, at best, pretty excessive.

I did not see that in this thread. If a player helps out by adding stuff and taking time to flesh things out, then I want that person in my game.

I will go back and forth with that type of person to fit things into the game.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Excellently put.

A lot of the things I see here read like "running the characters by permission(s)." Now, I recognize that I am...shall we say more sensitive on this topic than the average player would be. But there are some alarmingly specific, extensive things I see here on ENWorld and elsewhere on the internets that...I struggle to understand how anyone would play it and not feel at least some "running the characters by permission(s)."

Well, I think sometimes that may be not-inappropriate. Let me unpack that, since there's at least two cases.

1. Game systems that have character nature/behavior things defined in character generation (usually as defects). Some degree of enforcement may be sometimes necessary if the player isn't great about engaging with it (and often there's some kind of mechanism baked in for that, but it still mandates some degree of judgment on the GM's fault).

2. Situations where the definition of the campaign means certain actions are going to, effectively break it; at best render the character(s) no longer playable within the framework of the campaign, at worst, make it hard to keep running the campaign at all. For example, if you're running a campaign where all the PCs are police in a special unit, having one of the PCs decide to just execute someone they're investigating is a giant brick thrown through the campaign structure, and potentially one the other players may not appreciate. It seems likely some kind of intervention should occur there, even though its technically within the purview of the player.

That all said, I think this often gets waaay overextended (for many years this happened with alignment in D&D fairly often).

 

[TwoSix]

A lot of the things I see here read like "running the characters by permission(s)." Now, I recognize that I am...shall we say more sensitive on this topic than the average player would be. But there are some alarmingly specific, extensive things I see here on ENWorld and elsewhere on the internets that...I struggle to understand how anyone would play it and not feel at least some "running the characters by permission(s)."

One habit I've gotten into over the years is never stating my character's actions as a question; I always frame them as a statement. I ask questions that seem reasonable, but I never frame anything as something like "Can my character meet the king?" I always say "My character walks into the castle to meet the king." The DM can then frame a complication that is encountered.

It helps establish a framework that I don't expect the DM to give me permission to realize my character's intent, I expect them simply to tell me what would make it challenging.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Is it harsh? Because various people have spoken of rigidly nailing down things to the point of knowing all possible nations, factions, species, etc. without any uncertainty at all (for them, at least). That would seem to be precisely what I described.

So what? There are a ton of games based on established IPs where the setting is nailed down from the get go. Hell, people have written countless movies, books, and tv-shows set on this Earth of ours, even without any added imagined fantastic elements, and still managed to come up with compelling characters and stories even though the setting was fully known and defined. It is totally alien idea to me that you cannot come up with compelling characters with agency unless you get to redefine the setting before the game even begins.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The only time I have seen players disrupt things was when they went evil.

Never seen them just sow chaos.

Then you've been fortunate. It doesn't require evil behavior at all; something as simple as "We're having a meeting with the Evil King, so let's try to kill him right now" can be, shall we say, something of a problem in all kinds of cases, and when only one player goes for it...