Dealing with an "oldschool" DM

[Raven Crowking]

Thank you, Umbran.

 

[SkidAce]

Old skool is horribly overrated by those nostalgic for their thirteen year old selves.

I was 20 years old.

 

[Storm Raven]

So, you don't understand it, or why it should be so...

...so it must go away?

Yes.

Take your pick - either you understand it and you think it is bad, or you don't understand it, and are not in a position to judge.

I don't understand the idea that the DMG should be off limits to PCs. It's that simple. The idea is so confoundingly silly, that it is incomprehensible.

Honestly, I read your basic premise as, "I know what is good for others - that which I do not like should perish from the Earth entirely." Some folks would refer to this as "One True Wayism" - you know the one way people should game, and anything that doesn't agree with that in your head is wrongity wrong-wrong, with wrong sauce, and should die. You come across as the man who wants to ban chocolate from the supermarkets, because he himself does not care for it.

I am all for you not using the idea in your own games. Go to, play how you like! But banishing the idea so that others cannot use it if they wish - that is hubris. Others may have fun with things that you detest. And that's okay. Really. The idea doesn't have to die - it just needs to not be at the table where you play.

No, the idea needs to die so it doesn't keep getting trotted out like a propped up aged soldier used to demonstrate the defense bona fides of a cheap politician. The ideas that the DM is God, that the DMG should be off-limits to players, that the players should just sit down and mind their manners and not complain, and so on are all ideas that need to simply die. In my experience, they seriously turn off new gamers, especially anyone who comes to the game as an adult. They are a meme that should be done away with and left in the dustbin of history.

 

[S'mon]

I agree with Umbran. There's room for both approaches to GMing, both can work. But posts like Storm Raven's above should "be done away with and left in the dustbin of history".

 

[billd91]

This causes a lot of issues in our games because he's not balancing things properly. Here's a few examples:

• He doesn't balance encounters; we only have 4 PCs but he uses encounters as-written in the published adventures. He says that the math WotC uses is flawed because we easily deal with encouners designed for 5 PCs but this is because half the time he forgets creature's powers, gets them flat out wrong, and/or plays monsters as mindless AI.
• Not only does he not scale down encounters, he also cheats us on XP as he divides the encounter by 5, not 4. He thinks that when a 4e adventure says it's for "14th - 17th level" it means like 1st edition where the PCs can be between those levels, when in fact it means it's supposed to take us FROM 14th level TO 17th level. We're playing through Demon Queen's Enclave right now but we're only level 13, about to hit level 14.
• He skimps on treasure; I'm not sure exactly what the ratio should be but we seem to have slightly less powerful items than we should have at 13th level.

I really don't know how to deal with it; I have the 4e DMG myself and the stuff he says makes no sense at all to me, and IMO it's not how the game is designed to work; I've played 1st, 2nd, 3rd and now 4th edition of D&D. Sure, he's the DM, but IMO 4e supposed to be a lot more "these are rules, not guidelines" than previous editions were, because the game is intended to be balanced on core assumptions, or require DM interaction to bring things into balance. Once you start changing the core rules or things like that, you're breaking that balance, more so if you don't compensate for it like my DM seems to do.

Any advice on this situation?

With respect to this subset I quoted in the list, my advice is to live with it. Just as the actions your character takes (when not under some kind of magical compulsion) are entirely your prerogative, setting up the encounters and determining the rewards for them is the DM's prerogative. If you don't like them or the way he's doing them, let him know. But if the majority of the table isn't similarly dissatisfied, he's playing well within his role as DM.

DM's have been adjusting how the PCs get rewarded since the begining of RPGs. 4e isn't any more set in stone just because more of its internal assumptions have been laid bare.

 

[Ariosto]

4e isn't any more set in stone just because more of its internal assumptions have been laid bare.

I am not sure, but I think the designers themselves put forward that view in the books.

The thing is ... was that not so with 3e? The designers offered their lowdown to inform DMs, advice as a starting point for judgment. Many players, though, decided to treat the guidelines as hard-and-fast rules. If memory serves, even some things still within the guidelines got blasted for being wrong.

That was, what, nine years ago? No surprise if folks already steeped in that game-culture approach 4e the same way.

 

[Celebrim]

I have a slight dilemma. I'm currently in a 4e campaign but until we started this campaign, my DM hadn't played since 1st edition in high school. He doesn't seem to grasp the fact that 4e is simplified and that the rules are more "set in stone" than previous editions to ensure balance; he still seems to think that every rule in the game is a guideline that he can change as he sees fit.

Cry me a river. But on the other hand...

This causes a lot of issues in our games because he's not balancing things properly. Here's a few examples:

• He doesn't balance encounters; we only have 4 PCs but he uses encounters as-written in the published adventures. He says that the math WotC uses is flawed because we easily deal with encouners designed for 5 PCs but this is because half the time he forgets creature's powers, gets them flat out wrong, and/or plays monsters as mindless AI.
• Not only does he not scale down encounters, he also cheats us on XP as he divides the encounter by 5, not 4. He thinks that when a 4e adventure says it's for "14th - 17th level" it means like 1st edition where the PCs can be between those levels, when in fact it means it's supposed to take us FROM 14th level TO 17th level. We're playing through Demon Queen's Enclave right now but we're only level 13, about to hit level 14.
• He skimps on treasure; I'm not sure exactly what the ratio should be but we seem to have slightly less powerful items than we should have at 13th level.
• My girlfriend recently said she wanted to play, so I made her a character at the same level as us; until I convinced him otherwise the DM was wanting her to start a level or two behind, and STILL not scale the encounters or scale her XP accordingly to have her catch up; I can't seem to find an exact rule that says what XP amount new PCs are supposed to start with. He keeps saying that we blast through encounters with 4 PCs so "even if she was at 2nd level you would be better off than you are now, since you'd have 5 PCs".

On the other hand, this particularly list of complaints doesn't sound like 'old school DMing'; it just sounds like bad DMing.

It seems like in 99% of the case where people are complaining about 'old school' or 'anime D&D', they are really just complaining about bad DMing. Bad DMing hasn't changed from edition to edition. My guess is he was probably a bad DM back in the day too, and he may (or maybe not) have just gotten away more with his arbitrary yanking people around because 1st Edition was far less brittle than 4e is by the possibly dubious virtue of not having a very tightly integrated ruleset or being very balanced at all.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Many players, though, decided to treat the guidelines as hard-and-fast rules.

Did they? Or were they just using it as a justification to ask for more treasure or easier monsters? I bet you 20 pence players don't cite the wealth-by-level guidelines as often when they they have more gear than they 'ought' to have.

There's always been a gamist element, especially in D&D. Players have always used arguments of all kinds as to why their PCs should be more powerful. Appeals to realism or fairness or whatever. It's just like a player in 1985 arguing he should get to use an OP class cause it's in Dragon magazine. It doesn't matter, the justifications shift and change. But the desire for power is eternal.

 

[Ariosto]

"Writing RPG rules to counter bad DMs is like writing software to fix a broken computer." - Mike Mearls

 

[drothgery]

"Writing RPG rules to counter bad DMs is like writing software to fix a broken computer." - Mike Mearls

So he's saying that depending on what the DM's doing wrong, it may just work? (Really; a fair number of pure hardware problems can be corrected in software.)