DMs not playing by the rules (Forked Thread: What are the no-goes for you?)

[Rolflyn]

I'm intrigued. Could you expand on this for me please?

Simple example: The party is attacking their nemesis, and they have enlisted the help of an NPC ally. A battle ensues, the nemesis gets low on hit points, an NPC swings and hits, and rolls enough to kill. The next few actions are all by PCs.

The DM cheats by giving the nemesis some extra hit points, so a player can be the one to defeat him. Later the DM lies about it because revealing this cheat would make players feel worse than just letting the NPC die.

A more complex example might involve changing around an adventure based on the player ideas and excitement, and then claiming it was that way all along.

The DM is in control of the rules, so from one point of view, he cannot cheat. Since you often have to lie to cover up a cheat and you aren't cheating, perhaps you aren't lying either.

 

[roguerouge]

Just so you can calibrate your DMing, you should put down another vote for "I would leave your game without regrets for lying to me." I would regard you as treating me as a sock puppet for changing ALL the rules of the game without telling me. It's also possible that I would never play another game of any sort with you again, unless it was Illluminati, which has rules for cheating. This kind of dishonesty makes me go aggro. If you run across an enraged player, don't say you weren't warned by EnWorld denizens about the possible consequences of bad faith.

 

[roguerouge]

If you and your players are happy then all is well.

But as a player I would absolutely hate this. If I'm shielded from my mistakes then that means my victories weren't really my own either. Perhaps it's just a sign that I lean towards the gamist end of the spectrum, but I do like to play D&D for the challenge. Part of that is the chance to lose, which makes any victory all the sweeter.

Basically, yes. It's one thing if the DM says that he's going to fudge dice rolls and summarily change rules based one his or her decisions of what's good for me ahead of time. It's quite another thing to do this systematically as an "experiment" without announcing it or telling the players what they are in for. One has informed consent and the other does not. One treats me as a sock puppet for the DM's amusement and the other does not.

This is not, in any way, something akin to fudging a role or two. This is a systematic mindjob for your own amusement at the expense of people you know and who trust you. You must be quite charismatic if they still game with you.

Frankly, OP, you should know that having someone engage in an "experiments" without their consent or knowledge is immoral and illegal in the social sciences.

If the moderators are paying attention to this thread, they can be assured that I will not be returning to post to this thread. I recognize that the OP has seriously PISSED me off. I've edited this down to be less irate as much as possible and, if I've failed to get under the line, I apologize. I find such manipulation outrageous.

 

[MichaelK]

Simple example: The party is attacking their nemesis, and they have enlisted the help of an NPC ally. A battle ensues, the nemesis gets low on hit points, an NPC swings and hits, and rolls enough to kill. The next few actions are all by PCs.

The DM cheats by giving the nemesis some extra hit points, so a player can be the one to defeat him. Later the DM lies about it because revealing this cheat would make players feel worse than just letting the NPC die.

I understand this philosophy and I can see why people would do it. If that's what your group likes then how could I possibly object.

But for me, I look at that situation and see it differently. The DM is worried that the players will feel like they have no involvement, that everything is in the DM's court because an NPC was slain by an NPC. This isn't the case, it's just some random chance. The dice are to blame, not the DM. But in order to avoid the appearance of the players having no role, they're given the actual fact of their contributions being ignored by the DM who then covers the whole thing up wtih a lie.

The PCs chose to involve the NPC ally, and that decision and its relevant consequences are being ignored.

The PCs selected tactics that resulted in that outcome and now can't adjust their tactics because they haven't realized how effective they are/aren't.

On a more roleplaying based note, the PCs have lost the opportunity to roleplay their reactions to that outcome as well. Some people may enjoy seeing how their character reacts to victory being at someone else's hands.

A more complex example might involve changing around an adventure based on the player ideas and excitement, and then claiming it was that way all along.

Well as long as it doesn't defy anything you've already told them, or it doesn't mean there's something you should have told them earlier and didn't, then that seems fine.

I mean, what's the difference between designing the adventure with player enjoyment in mind at 7pm the night before or at 4pm during the middle of the adventure?

So that doesn't bug me. I run all my games on the fly, so technically I'm constantly doing that.

The DM is in control of the rules, so from one point of view, he cannot cheat. Since you often have to lie to cover up a cheat and you aren't cheating, perhaps you aren't lying either.

I see the point. I don't agree with it, but I can see where you're coming from there and it does make sense.

 

[wingsandsword]

My "GM not playing by the rules" horror story:

The campaign was a New World of Darkness campaign.

I'd never played in (New) WoD, just the Old one, so I was looking forward to trying out the system, especially since I actually had the books for once. Heck, I got one of the first copies of Mage: The Awakening at the Gen Con release in '05.

Unfortunately, the GM (Storyteller, whatever) didn't know anything about rules differences (or setting differences) between the two editions/versions and had only loosely read both editions and figured they were much the same. Top that off with a "GM is God, thou shalt not question him/her" attitude and it's trouble in the making (since the PCs were expecting a fairly standard, by-the-book NWoD game).

Combat with NPCs typically went with us going through our normal rolls to attack and such, and then she'd just arbitrarily narrate what happened, then look at us, roll a couple of dice and just randomly hand out damage or debilitating injuries. Her NPCs never, ever failed at any task they really wanted to do, their magic/powers never botched (but PC's did all the time), and difficulties for using skills were so random that there was no point.

My PC was a (starting out) normal mortal, his backstory was that he was a US Navy Fleet Marine Force Hospital Corpsman, fresh home from Iraq and wanting to use his GI Bill benefits to go to college and the seminary. He had loads of Academics (Religion) and Medicine skills, but even doing trivial tasks had ridiculous . Set a broken bone? 4 Successes, Difficulty 8. Doing difficult things was nigh-impossible, stabilizing somebody who is dying slowly of a gunshot wound to the abdomen? 6 Successes, Difficulty 9. Simply put, if she wanted you to fail, she'd set the difficulty absurdly high (and on the off chance you succeed, something comes along later and undoes it: stabilize the dying guy and he takes a random hit from a stray round in the next fight that finishes him off, for example), and if she wanted you to succeed she'd probably just tell you not to roll and you succeeded.

In retrospect, the best we could figure, she was just doing some diceless roleplaying using character stats as guidelines and narrating things while using dice to create the illusion of randomness.

It was clear after the first few sessions she didn't know the rules, and really didn't want to know the rules (she snapped at somebody fierce when they tried to politely tell her how combat really worked, saying that she will not stand to have rules thrown in her face at her own game). The game had a busload of other problems too (heck, I had two ENWorld threads about those roughly 3 years ago, simply put the plot of the campaign was a bad cross between a Laurell K Hamilton novel and the Saw and Cube movie series).

 

[ggroy]

In retrospect, the best we could figure, she was just doing some diceless roleplaying using character stats as guidelines and narrating things while using dice to create the illusion of randomness.

It was clear after the first few sessions she didn't know the rules, and really didn't want to know the rules (she snapped at somebody fierce when they tried to politely tell her how combat really worked, saying that she will not stand to have rules thrown in her face at her own game). The game had a busload of other problems too (heck, I had two ENWorld threads about those roughly 3 years ago, simply put the plot of the campaign was a bad cross between a Laurell K Hamilton novel and the Saw and Cube movie series).

Sounds like a form of covert railroading done to the extreme.

Every "chapter" was already written and predetermined from the start.

 

[ST]

The game anyone ever actually plays, at the table, isn't the one in the book. It's made up of the dialog between people at the table, talking about what happens in the imaginary game world.

The mechanics reinforce this, and provide support to it, but the mechanics aren't really descriptive of everything that happens during the process of playing a RPG.

It really comes down to group preference, too -- I don't think I've ever had anyone in my games in the last five years who particularly cared much about the mechanics beyond "What resources do I have, and how can I use them?", so it wouldn't be an issue.

I pretty much ran a modern occult game this way; we started with D20 Modern, with the appropriate character sheets, but early on the player's nonmechanical plots and plans (along with Action Points as kind of a currency) took center stage. We didn't end up using the mechanics much at all, and we in fact switched over to FATE after two sessions. It didn't really change the way the game played out much at all. To be fair, this wasn't hidden at all -- it was kind of like, okay, we can use the basic rules as written, but how about we do things more cinematically and give players more narrative powers. It was more "Oh, look, we sort of houseruled enough addon stuff to the system that it's taken over."

If your group's social contract includes a strong focus on the mechanics, then yeah I wouldn't do this, but I think in general everything from fudging dice to downright ignoring the rulebook entirely and freeforming for a while still falls under the realm of roleplaying, so it doesn't bother me in the abstract.