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Burning Questions: Why Do DMs Limit Official WOTC Material?
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<blockquote data-quote="epithet" data-source="post: 7762395" data-attributes="member: 6796566"><p>There seems to be a lot of DM entitlement here in this thread.</p><p></p><p>Look, there's no doubt--as a DM, the world is yours. There must be a final arbiter of rules and lore, and the DM is unquestionably that person. However, the <em>game </em>belongs to the group. It is completely legitimate to limit the options presented in the published rules, whether WotC or 3rd party, but for the most part that should be a group choice, not based on individual fiat. </p><p></p><p>If you're playing in a low-magic campaign, there need to be some limitations put in place. I think we all would agree that the DM is responsible for deciding on those limitations, taking reasonable input from the players. The choice to play in a low-magic campaign, however, is made by the group collectively, not by one of its participants. Even if it is just a matter of the DM saying "hey, this is what I have in mind for the campaign setting" and the players responding "cool," it is still a group decision and should be treated as such.</p><p></p><p>When it comes to the game rules, whether core or optional, choices should be made by consensus. If you have four or five players who want to play on a grid and use the related rules like flanking, but the DM wants to do all the combat as a "theater of the mind" narrative, well... suck it up, buttercup. If you can't run combat the way your players want to run it, you might need to let someone else DM.</p><p></p><p>You can get away with being a tyrant for a while, to be honest. Like a tank-spec'd character in an MMORPG, a DM is in demand and can force his will upon the players (who should be grateful just to have someone to run the game for them, am I right?) You can "ban" certain spells, classes, races, combat rules, or whatever... just based on your own ego and the fact that you don't like them. If all you want to do is run one-shots or campaigns that only span a few levels before moving on to something else, then you can probably do that crap forever. If you want to run a campaign for years, covering 1- 20 and even setting up the next campaign in the same world with the same players, then having genuine buy-in from your players is essential. You don't want players to be thinking "I guess we can't have tabaxi characters, because the DM thinks they're dumb."</p><p></p><p>That said, I've certainly had a great time in games that were a house rule and homebrew hodge podge of rules and systems taken from different games and stitched together into a Frankenstein's monster of a game, where things could be changed on the fly based on what seemed to working or not. The key is that we all knew what we were getting into, and we had confidence that the DM was considering our input on an ongoing basis. Even so, the campaign wasn't one that persisted for years across a broad level range and we moved on to something more stable and accessible.</p><p></p><p>D&D 5e practically requires limitation, and will especially demand it once this Magic the Gathering setting book is released. In any campaign I've ever run, a wee Babar character stomping into town trumpeting and flapping its ears would cause panic as the townsfolk realised they were being confronted with the most mage-warped and hideous ogre anyone had ever heard of. No matter what your setting (other than perhaps the Forgotten Realms,) there will be things described in the published rulebooks that just don't belong in the world. Since it is the DM's responsibility to rationalise everything in the world into some kind of coherent setting (again, unless you're playing in the Forgotten Realms, in which case "whatever, man" is the assumed approach) it is perfectly legitimate for the DM to say, after hearing the "pitch" for a weird published race, "Sorry, your character sounds great and all, but I just can't think of a way to fit her into the world. There just aren't elephant people in this setting."</p><p></p><p>Similarly, the game has published rules that offer different, mutually exclusive ways to approach certain things. There are options for everything from stat generation to initiative, and add-ons for a handful of things like insanity and honor. No one D&D group will use all of the options published, even in just the core books. Unlike the options that determine the world and setting, however, these choices shouldn't be made by fiat. In my primary current campaign, for example, I didn't want to deal with multiclassing. I presented an argument against multiclassing to the players along with a minor expansion in feat availability to cover the loss of flexibility in character development. Everyone agreed. If there had been players who really wanted to multiclass, and the group as a whole wanted to keep the rule in place, then I would have absolutely run the game that the players wanted to play.</p><p></p><p>I think too often DMs get caught up in the notion of "it's my campaign, I can do whatever I want!" Their first impulse is to start looking for crap to "ban" in their campaign, just because they can. Others get caught up in the fanaticism of the "rules as written" orthodoxy. I have little patience or sympathy for either extreme.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="epithet, post: 7762395, member: 6796566"] There seems to be a lot of DM entitlement here in this thread. Look, there's no doubt--as a DM, the world is yours. There must be a final arbiter of rules and lore, and the DM is unquestionably that person. However, the [I]game [/I]belongs to the group. It is completely legitimate to limit the options presented in the published rules, whether WotC or 3rd party, but for the most part that should be a group choice, not based on individual fiat. If you're playing in a low-magic campaign, there need to be some limitations put in place. I think we all would agree that the DM is responsible for deciding on those limitations, taking reasonable input from the players. The choice to play in a low-magic campaign, however, is made by the group collectively, not by one of its participants. Even if it is just a matter of the DM saying "hey, this is what I have in mind for the campaign setting" and the players responding "cool," it is still a group decision and should be treated as such. When it comes to the game rules, whether core or optional, choices should be made by consensus. If you have four or five players who want to play on a grid and use the related rules like flanking, but the DM wants to do all the combat as a "theater of the mind" narrative, well... suck it up, buttercup. If you can't run combat the way your players want to run it, you might need to let someone else DM. You can get away with being a tyrant for a while, to be honest. Like a tank-spec'd character in an MMORPG, a DM is in demand and can force his will upon the players (who should be grateful just to have someone to run the game for them, am I right?) You can "ban" certain spells, classes, races, combat rules, or whatever... just based on your own ego and the fact that you don't like them. If all you want to do is run one-shots or campaigns that only span a few levels before moving on to something else, then you can probably do that crap forever. If you want to run a campaign for years, covering 1- 20 and even setting up the next campaign in the same world with the same players, then having genuine buy-in from your players is essential. You don't want players to be thinking "I guess we can't have tabaxi characters, because the DM thinks they're dumb." That said, I've certainly had a great time in games that were a house rule and homebrew hodge podge of rules and systems taken from different games and stitched together into a Frankenstein's monster of a game, where things could be changed on the fly based on what seemed to working or not. The key is that we all knew what we were getting into, and we had confidence that the DM was considering our input on an ongoing basis. Even so, the campaign wasn't one that persisted for years across a broad level range and we moved on to something more stable and accessible. D&D 5e practically requires limitation, and will especially demand it once this Magic the Gathering setting book is released. In any campaign I've ever run, a wee Babar character stomping into town trumpeting and flapping its ears would cause panic as the townsfolk realised they were being confronted with the most mage-warped and hideous ogre anyone had ever heard of. No matter what your setting (other than perhaps the Forgotten Realms,) there will be things described in the published rulebooks that just don't belong in the world. Since it is the DM's responsibility to rationalise everything in the world into some kind of coherent setting (again, unless you're playing in the Forgotten Realms, in which case "whatever, man" is the assumed approach) it is perfectly legitimate for the DM to say, after hearing the "pitch" for a weird published race, "Sorry, your character sounds great and all, but I just can't think of a way to fit her into the world. There just aren't elephant people in this setting." Similarly, the game has published rules that offer different, mutually exclusive ways to approach certain things. There are options for everything from stat generation to initiative, and add-ons for a handful of things like insanity and honor. No one D&D group will use all of the options published, even in just the core books. Unlike the options that determine the world and setting, however, these choices shouldn't be made by fiat. In my primary current campaign, for example, I didn't want to deal with multiclassing. I presented an argument against multiclassing to the players along with a minor expansion in feat availability to cover the loss of flexibility in character development. Everyone agreed. If there had been players who really wanted to multiclass, and the group as a whole wanted to keep the rule in place, then I would have absolutely run the game that the players wanted to play. I think too often DMs get caught up in the notion of "it's my campaign, I can do whatever I want!" Their first impulse is to start looking for crap to "ban" in their campaign, just because they can. Others get caught up in the fanaticism of the "rules as written" orthodoxy. I have little patience or sympathy for either extreme. [/QUOTE]
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