D&D General DM Authority

[Chaosmancer]

(10 pages behind, what the heck. Chunking a lot, since otherwise this is going to be unreasonably long)

Of course the problem is, as I referenced, that a lot of groups will have one or more players who are non-confrontational; that's a two-edged sword in this situation because, on one hand, they aren't going to tell the standalone player that he's being unreasonable, but they're also far, far less likely to tell the GM they think that he's wrong, not the least because of the assumed power dynamic there in the hobby as a whole.

Right, but I'm also wondering how much the unreasonable player is a bit of a red herring.

Still, yes, some people are going to be very non-confrontational, but I also think that thinking about this only in terms of confrontations makes us miss some of the bigger points.

For example, the analogy to board games makes a great point. If you and your friends pull out a game of monopoly, or a card game, who is empowered to resolve the conflicts and set the house rules you'll be using? There isn't a formal role for that, it is just assumed that the group can reach a consensus on their own. In fact, no board or card game assumes that position exists.

Players of those games could still cheat, but do they really tend to? Are there very many confrontations about the rules, at least those that require more than just pulling the rulebook and checking them again?

Very similar social situation. Very different social organization.

Well, when you have on one hand the idea that the GM defaults to being right, and the other than anything that interrupts the flow of the game is "bad", that's pretty much the expected final result.

And why I'm often suspicious of claims from GMs online that "My players have no problem with it." No, at best your players have no problem they've chosen to share with you, and there can be all kinds of reasons for that, and having no problem is only one of them.

Yeah, I've often had very shy players. And sometimes getting them to speak up about anything is very hard.

Getting them to speak up about disagreeing with me? It would never happen. Even if it should.

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Absolutely. Even if all of my players said “we want Genasi to be from the material plane,” I would not make that change to my setting. I would offer an alternative; I’m willing to work with a player to figure out what their Genasi character is doing on the material plane, if they’re willing to accept that their character will be totally alien to the people they encounter. I would be willing to run an interplanar adventure within my setting, where PCs native to other planes would be more fitting. I would be willing to run an adventure in a setting other than my homebrew one, where genasi are more common. But I am not willing to change my setting on the players’ say-so. It’s my setting, I put a lot of work into it, and you aren’t going to get me to change it because you want to play a genasi, any more than you’re going to get Timothy Brown and Troy Denning to change Dark Sun because you want to play a gnome.

See, I find this is kind of strange.

I mean, there is value in sticking to your guns I suppose, but this is a group activity with the goal of group enjoyment.

Edit: I almost missed it, but you did say you would be willing to run a different setting. Would you be willing to run a different homebrew setting?

I mean, hypothetically, if you take a setting to the table, and every time you bring it, the group says they aren't interested, would you create a different setting? Or would you insist that if you are running the game, you have to run your setting, whether they like it or not?

I feel like this gets into this idea of the DM authority vs the Group. Where do we start seeing the DM overriding the entire group? I've never seen it happen, and most of the time I've heard about it, it is a story about a Bad DM.

 

[loverdrive]

All those things can be taught by text. But, the result will no longer be 102 words. It won't fit on an index card, and so, for a person who already knows how to knead and shape and such, the result is not as good a reference, as you need to scan over more material in order to find the temperatures and times.

Repeat the same, for a 200+ page book. The teaching how will expand the book significantly - it is now more costly, with more information that you don't need much once you have learned, but now have to carry around and flip through to find the embedded reference information.

I don't agree with it either.

First, reference-style text can still be included in an appendix, where it can be compressed even better than a "semi-normal" style allows.

Second, at least some explanation on some stuff (like player principles or "hey, kids, remember, HP aren't health") wouldn't be that big, but would've make PHB into something more than just a reference. Right now with D&D Beyond and similar resources, PHB as a book is kinda redundant.

But since PHB isn't free, I seriously doubt that it would be actually useful as a "teaching" book -- it's not like you can (legally) direct a new player to information hidden behind a pretty pricey paywall.

 

[Don Durito]

The problem with the PHB is it doesn't even do a good job of helping you locate information.

This actually happened to me in a game.

• I checked my spells. I had fog cloud and I thought it might be useful so I opened the book and found the spell, I saw it makes an area heavily obscured. Hmmm what is heavily obscurved?
• Checked the index - heavily obscured - page 183.
• Check 183 - find 'heavily obscured' - It means the creature suffers from the blindness conditon (see Appendix A)
• Flip to the back and find Appendix A - finally here it is.

I shouldn't need to look in 3 different parts of the book during a combat to check what a single spell does!

 

[Don Durito]

Especially optional rules make me think that whoever was writing DMG was some kind of Monte Cook fan, who've decided to put "system mastery" and trap options into a book for game masters.

This particular meme is wrong. In the interest of not derailing the thread I'll just link to this here.

 

[Maxperson]

I'd say that PHB is mostly okaish, but DMG is just... I don't even have words to describe a book for (potentially new) game masters that contains next to zero actual advice on how to run games, starts with damn COSMOLOGY instead of "ok, here's how manage spotlight, here's how to pitch the campaign in a clear way" and optional rules 90% of which can't provoke any reaction except "wtf these guys have been smoking".

Probably because there are many ways to play and they are going to start with the traditional D&D way.

 

[Jack Daniel]

I am unapologetic in my love for my style.

Loving your style doesn't entail attacking someone else's.

Be more apologetic.

 

[Chaosmancer]

I cannot sympathize with this idea.

I play with friends, and we all try, together, to have fun playing role-playing games. But, ultimately, it's my campaign.

No one is entitled to a DM. In fact, I started DMing because I couldn't find anyone to play with. I'm not under some sort of legal obligation to accept everyone at my table or run games for the majority. It's a f---ing game, not a job, or a public service.

On one hand you are right, it isn't a job or a public service.

On the other hand, there are a lot of things like that, and that doesn't mean I shouldn't care about the "health" of those hobbies.

It isn't healthy for Football (either one) fans to go on rampages and destroy public property. It is a game you watch, not your job or a public service, but setting a good example as a fan is still the right thing to do.

It isn't healthy for some entertainment groups to be doing the things they are doing. It isn't my job to correct them, but I can still do things and model good behavior to help show that what they are doing isn't acceptable.


So why is it so strange to say that it isn't healthy for the game to treat the DM as a King, and that DMs just cycle through players leaving behind hurt feelings and horror stories, and this pervasive idea that this is how things work, especially since since you play with a group of friends, it doesn't harm you at all. It isn't like you are accepting a lot of new players, right?

Wait, so what is it? Does the DM have authority over their game, or are they obligated to run a game which others want to play?

At least keep it consistent.

If they players don't want to play the game, how are you forcing them to play? Why are you forcing them to play? What do you gain by forcing players to play a game they don't want to play?

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That's the player's job. If they're not doing it, or at least trying, they're failing to fulfill part of their role.

It's the DM's job to resist this.

I wholly reject that it is the players job to cheat. Or to seek every possible advantage they can, no matter what.

Nor do I agree that it is the DMs job to resist the players actions.

I mean, this just gets absurd very very quickly. Players altering their hp totals would then be expected, maybe not writing down their damage properly. Then the DM has to track their hp as well as the monster's hp.

Reading the Module? Expected. It is part of the role.

That just... sounds like a horrible experience.

Again, it depends where the disagreement stems from.

The disagreement stems from having different interpretations of the rules. I thought that was fairly clear.

As a player who is also a DM, I very much dislike this in myself when playing: I know stuff I shouldn't know.

I feel a bit guilty about it sometimes, but sometimes I also wonder why the heck I should feel guilty about it. After all, if knowing the monster's abilities is enough to win the fight, it wasn't a very hard fight anyways.

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Being unable to find a DM to run your preferred type of game is not being forced to play a game you do not want to play.

Depends. How much are you willing to bend to play DnD.

I have a friend who has been really craving face to face DnD since the pandemic began. She's left the college campus, so she is no where near any of the people she's grown used to gaming with. How long does she wait until she's willing to play a less fun DnD campaign just to play a DnD campaign?

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There's a difference between telling the players what kind of campaign/s you usually run, so they have a feel for the range, and telling them specific facts about the setting you want their characters to find out.

There can be, but they can also be the same thing.

If a DM wants to keep it a secret that the "dungeon" the group is entering in "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks" is a spaceship, because their characters would have no idea, then the players might not react well to their sudden "Thundar the Barbarian" or "He-Man" game, where space ships and laser play a big part in how their sword wielding characters are fighting.

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Apparently you need to make a near infinite long list of all the banned things from the game and cover all those in a nearly infinite long session 0, lest you be required to allow whatever wasn't explicitly banned into the game.

Makes perfect sense to me

Counter point (because this did come up in the thread that spawned this one) if you aren't explicitly banning something, don't get upset if your player thinks it is okay to try.

In the other thread, there were a lot of DMs who seemed to get very upset that their players weren't matching their exact vision for exactly how a genre worked.

Not to be a party pooper - but communication is a 2 way street. All the onus of being clear cannot necessarily solely be left at the DM's feet. That's the other part of the issue IMO. A DM should try to be clear about what your game is about but even the clearest DM doesn't always enlighten as sometimes different people have different ideas about the boundaries of genre/setting/etc and so outside exhaustively listing in specific terms everything that is allowed or isn't allowed you always run into the issue that communicating your idea fails.

I agree.

My addition to this is that instead of assuming bad faith on the part of the players, maybe give them the benefit of the doubt.

Something a lot of DMs don't seem to be willing to do all the time, because they have "seen their type before" and assume this player is a bad person like some other extreme problem player they ran into in the past.

 

[prabe]

If a DM wants to keep it a secret that the "dungeon" the group is entering in "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks" is a spaceship, because their characters would have no idea, then the players might not react well to their sudden "Thundar the Barbarian" or "He-Man" game, where space ships and laser play a big part in how their sword wielding characters are fighting.

Sure. If the DM is planning to radically alter the game from the expectations, that's probably worth talking with the players about. So, maybe the dungeon being a spaceship doesn't need to be mentioned, if the players are cool with that particular flavor of gonzo. Might be a thing better done if you really know your players--or maybe with total strangers.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Huh?

How is it not fair? I get no one wants conflict, but saying that everyone should be empowered to weigh in and feel like their voice matters to the discussion isn't a burden that is unfair to put on them.

Yeah. "Its not fair to the other players" comes across as paternalistic at best (perhaps letting them decide if they want a say would be how you should handle adults) and at worst, is an excuse.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Ehh. While I tend to agree that DMs can run a game however they like that one sent up red flags for me too. Requiring everything to be in first person sounds unworkable (unless I'm understanding it wrong) and is certainly not something that should be advertised as new player friendly.

I've seen that one before. I wouldn't describe it as "unworkable" but it sure as hell seems like it demands a certain way of approaching roleplaying I'd find damn well intrusive. Sometimes I'm trying to convey something that makes no sense to convey purely in first person, and the fact someone else doesn't like my method of doing so seems to be pretty damn well not their business to the degree of telling me how I'm permitted to do it.
It's exactly the kind of poor communication I referred to above.

It doesn't really tell me anything about what I could expect from the game.

I also can't help but think (based on personal experience) that if the GM can't clearly describe the kind of game they want to run then quite likely they haven't thought it through clearly to themself.

Eh. They can have a clear internal model and just be crappy at conveying that. Its unconnected skillsets.