Dragon magazine is considered official!

[Numion]

The DM is the person who runs the game, interprets rules, and must often decide how something is handled when it falls outside the rules. Without the DM, there would be no story, no encounters, no nothing.

Consider this then: without the players, there would be no story, no encounters, no nothing.

The bottom line is that if you are playing D&D, the DM is the ultimate decision maker. If the DM is not allowed to be the final arbiter of what happens in his or her game then you have chaos, or you have a player who is acting as DM in all ways except story telling. The DM should allow players to influence his or her decisions, but according to the rules, a group opinion is not enough to overrule a DM. Neither is writing in and getting an "official" answer from rules support. This isn't an ENWorld thing, this is the way D&D and nearly every other roleplaying game in existence is designed to be played.

Of course the DM is the arbiter of the rules. I was just saying that the players should have input what kind of ruleset the DM should be arbiting over. Wasn't that the issue here? Ryard said that players also had input on what books should be allowed in the game. DM is still the one that calls the shots in interpreting the rules.

I said in my previous post that players should have input on the outline of the campaign - what material is used and such, to set the ground on which the campaign stands. It's still the DMs ground, however.

For example, if I had agreed to play in a normal D&D campaign, I wouldn't necessarily be happy if the god-DM used mostly Dragonstar stuff and it was sci-fi fantasy instead of D&D fantasy, because I'm not into that.

 

[DMScott]

The question still has not been answered: "what is official"?

In this context, it seems pretty clear that "official" means "is allowed to use the Dungeons and Dragons brand name/trademarks/etc., instead of operating under the OGL or d20STL." In other words, it's a marketing distinction. I'm somewhat mystifed that so many people think that marketing distinction should have any significant impact at all on the rules a given group plays by, but I learned long ago that the world is a mysterious place and I really don't understand very much of it.

 

[Psion]

They aren't forcing their DMs oh-so-precious (more precious than a players', anyway, it seems) imagination in some small box. They're just deciding as a group the common ground on which the campaign should take place.

Sure that's fine. But by the same token, groups that rely more heavily on the DMs role as arbirter and crafter of the game world aren't "making the DM god" or "mindless devotees" of a virtual Manson. Comments that make an unflattering and/or innacurate characterization of one another's playstyle really isn't helping anyone and is pushing the discussion into flamewar territory.

 

[ST]

I still just want to understand more about how ryard's game works, because it's an interesting case.

Is the DM allowed to make things up?

 

[buzzard]

Sorry to jump in to this thread at this point, but I disagree. In our group we decide before the campaign what kind of campaign it's going to be. Naturally the DM has a lot of weight in that decision, but also the players can have their say.

Even though I'm mostly a DM I never really got the attitude that it's the DMs game, which seems to be a popular one here at ENWorld. Presumably because majority of the members are DMs themselves.

IMO, it's never just the DMs game. It's the groups game. Or has anyone ever run a game with one DM and zero players? (Actually yes, but that was some horrorstory over at Wizards boards )

I certainly can agree with ryard here. They aren't forcing their DMs oh-so-precious (more precious than a players', anyway, it seems) imagination in some small box. They're just deciding as a group the common ground on which the campaign should take place. It's basically just deciding what ruleset is going to be used. Or do you think that players have no say in the matter if the DM decides to run a GURPS campaign instead of D&D?

As a preface let me explain how I run games.
I announce at the outset the rules and conditions. They will be something like X point buy, and the rules will be taken from the books I own. These books are made available to the player to borrow if they wish to use them. If the players wish to include additional stuff, I will have to be lent the book to review it. If I purchase new material, it is announced to the players, and they can review it, though the decision to use it lies within me. If people don't like the terms and conditions, well they aren't going to be forced to play. I make the primary focus of the game that the players have fun. Beyond that, everything else is a distant concern.

Having stated my methodology, I will respond to your specific points.
A)Can a DM run a game by himself- obviously no, but this is a pointless question. The DM is the heart of any campaign. Granted, you can't get by without players, but the DM still is more important. He has to decide how to adjudicate the rules, set the tone, and keep the story moving. He also has a responsibility to make it fun for all involved. If he doesn't do these things well, the players should walk. Since the burden is mostly on him, the decisions should be his as well.

B)If the DM decides to change to GURPs, well the players have the option of playing or walking(of course they can also object which may work). I would walk. The DM will likely learn when he runs out of players. I don't think I'd even try to waste my time arguing if this were the case, as the DM's attitude is not something I'd want to deal with.


buzzard

 

[Numion]

As a preface let me explain how I run games.
I announce at the outset the rules and conditions. They will be something like X point buy, and the rules will be taken from the books I own. These books are made available to the player to borrow if they wish to use them. If the players wish to include additional stuff, I will have to be lent the book to review it. If I purchase new material, it is announced to the players, and they can review it, though the decision to use it lies within me. If people don't like the terms and conditions, well they aren't going to be forced to play. I make the primary focus of the game that the players have fun. Beyond that, everything else is a distant concern.

I'm not strongly disagreeing with you. Our groups just differ in that our group stays the same. We're friends outside the game also, so walking out of a game isn't a good option for anyone - we'll just compromise the style of play so that everyone fits in and has fun (luckily our tastes aren't that varied).

Thats the principle. Only a principle. I'm pretty sure my players would follow even if I dictated the terms of our next campaign to them. I just like to spend a few evenings brainstorming with the group when we're starting a new campaign, so that everyone gets to have their say. Not all players even have opinions as to how the campaign should be.

Because both of us have the same goal (that players have fun) it's only the means that differ. You announce what sources can be used - we decide within the group. DM has a veto right of course

 

[Desdichado]

we can talk about that all you want

Well, except that it's completely off topic. I'll make a quick part of my post about it, and then won't return again to this particular topic, but yes, I do consider sitting down and doing my kid's homework with him to be a violation of trust. As an English teacher, perhaps you are familiar with the "love and logic" school of child psychology? I know all the teachers in our local school district have mandatory training in it. Essentially, what you're proposing is a symptom of what's metaphorically called the "helicopter parent" because they tend to hover over their kids removing obstacles and challenges from their path to make it easier for them. Here's the quick summary:
Short term effect of what you propose:

• Child gets better homework score

Long term effect of what you propose:

• Child doesn't actually learn the material on the homework as well as if he did it himself.
• Child doesn't learn to do homework by himself.
• Child doesn't learn to take responsibility for things like homework

With my second grader, about the only thing I do is ask him if he has homework most evenings. It's his job to do it. I'm more than willing to help if he asks and is genuinely stuck or needs help, but I'm extremely unwilling to sit down and do his homework with him as a regular occurance. Homework is his responsibility, and if he doesn't do it, or doesn't do it well, he bears the brunt of the consequences. The basic philosophy is that you give responsibility to kids early, while the consequences are minor, and teach them to accept it and learn about consequences. If a kid screws up his homework as a second grader, the consequences are not very dire, and doing that once or twice will teach him to take responsibility for it. If you never teach your kids to do that kind on thing young, then when they're on their own, they still won't be able to handle the responsibility, and by then, the consequences of screwing up are much worse.

At least that's the theory. I've been impressed by it both from a theoretical standpoint, as well as from a practical standpoint. For that matter, when I first heard it, it verballized a lot of ideas that I already had in my head from the way I was raised, and codified them and made them more consistent and systematic. Part of the theory also states clearly that by not demonstrating this approach, you are essentially telling your children that you don't trust them to do things on their own; that they're not capable, and that you need to step in and and supervise if you expect things to be done right.

What's this have to do with DMing? It's not entirely clear, as obviously gaming groups don't have the responsibility of raising their DMs to be responsible DMs, but I tend to embrace the philosophy on a broader scale than perhaps it was originally intended. And I do see your system as being an issue of trust between players and DMs; you've said multiple times that you don't trust your DM to not make mistakes without everything being out in the open and everyone knowing exactly what's going on.

Besides the trust issue, it's probably a gaming taste issue. For me, and for a lot of folks here as well, I'd imagine, metagaming is undesirable. In the ideal world, I wouldn't even know what's on my character sheet; I'd play my character without an intimate knowledge of the numbers that go on behind the scenes and all that. However, such an ideal world is a workload strain that I wouldn't want to put on any DM, so I accept a level of metagaming that is consistent with me knowing the behind the scenes workings of my character. I do not, however, accept that I should know the behind the scenes workings of any other character, monster, anatagonist or ally in the game. Furthermore, I'd submit that that was clearly the intention of EGG back when the game was first created. EGG was a fan of surprises, of letting players figure things out by coming across things they didn't already know the answer to. In addition, that's the whole, entire and only reason for the invention of the DM's Screen, so that players cannot see the behind the scene's workings of what the DM is doing.

Clearly you do not play that way. I have yet to get a clear understanding of how it is you actually do play, but you've made it pretty clear how you don't. In your group, everyone is familiar with all the potential rules in play, both DM and player, and you expose the inner workings of the game itself to scrutiny as you play. See, to me that game is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. I enjoy the stories that result from the game, and the game is the tool that gets me there. To me, the way you play is distasteful, because it makes the game the end in and of itself, which I don't find very fun. But hey, I'm not telling you to play the way I do, so if you enjoy it, that's fine.

My ideal gaming environment (which, fortunately, matches my actual gaming environment fairly well) is that DMs (we all like to take a turn behind the screen) propose setting and gaming alternatives to the group, and the group decides what they want to play; what type of game, what type of themes and tones, etc., but we leave it up to the DM to craft the details of that game. We're fairly open on allowing rules, because we know that none of us are gamists who want to "optimize" players to be better than anyone else. Fundamentally, though, it's the DMs job and responsibility to decide what to allow, what challenges to give the players, how to handle the game, and to craft a game that we all find fun.

That still doesn't answer the peculiar questions that have cropped up as a result of this, though. For instance, if you play the way you say you do, why do you want to allow Dragon magazine material, regardless of whether or not it's official? What value does official have, anyhow? Your decision on what rules to use seems arbitrary, and there seems to be disagreement in your group (this is based in large part on greymarch's posts on the Wizards boards). And why do you (plural) assume that official rules are better than unofficial rules? (again, taken from multiple posts of greymarch's on the Wizards boards as well as here.)

 

[Marius Delphus]

For example, if I had agreed to play in a normal D&D campaign, I wouldn't necessarily be happy if the god-DM used mostly Dragonstar stuff and it was sci-fi fantasy instead of D&D fantasy, because I'm not into that.

Not to mention it would be a breach of the implicit contract between the DM and the players. You know, apart from the (unfortunate) name-calling and diatribes, this thread has had some very interesting things to say about such contracts; that they vary so from game group to game group should not be such a surprise to me, but I found myself surprised nevertheless.

I suppose it stems from my always having played in game groups where the DM was the sole "authority" as regards rules and milieu. That doesn't mean I've ever been (or played with) any kind of "tyrant" or "god" DM. It's only that, as DM, I've never felt the need to consult my players on whether they or I will use anything from, say, the Complete Elves' Handbook (to dredge up a "random" 2E example ). And I've only ever played with DMs who felt the same way (even if they disagreed with me regarding the Complete Elves' Handbook ).

I always listen to player appeals. "I wanna use this Dragon article." "I wanna use the Bladesinger kit." Et cetera. I think about it for a while, and I either grant "DM Blessing" or not. Word spreads among the players like wildfire. "Hey, Marius blessed High-Level Campaigns!" "Hey, don't even breathe the word 'Bladesinger' around Marius." Et cetera. And whatever time they spend between games on their characters gets spent accordingly (not much, by the way; it's the same with me, when I'm a player). In this regard, the rules framework, the game is run a bit like a dictatorship... but with the implicit understanding that the DM will keep things "on the level" (i.e., no Yazirians wielding Black Ray Rifles in the Caves of Chaos... unless that's the kind of game we're already running!).

It sounds like other groups have a much more "cooperative" environment regarding rulebook choice... above having input into the ruleset, it sounds like the players can effectively "veto" the DM, or in a sense "vote in" a rulebook the DM hadn't really considered. (Apologies if I've misread something.) And that's cool, I guess, even if I'm not quite sure how (or how well) that'd work with the gamers I know. Actually I'd be surprised if it did something other than devolve into a hair-tearing-out mess, to be honest, but that's just my own past history talking; I can accept that it works *somewhere*, with *some* group of players. (I guess it'd be silly not to!)

Every group has some kind of implicit contract. You know what I'm talking about. The players expect/trust the DM to do certain things, the DM expects/trusts the players to do certain things, and any behavior outside the circumscribed boundaries gets "called out." "We all agreed *that* prestige class was off-limits" is operationally the same as "The DM said *that* prestige class was off-limits," after all. Just a different way of getting at group consensus. Seems to me the framework in which any particular game's ruleset is chosen rarely even comes up in discussion... but if "official D&D" is the minimum requirement any particular addition must meet to be considered for group adoption, then that actually makes a certain amount of sense. Personally, I can't see "official D&D" being both the only necessary and only sufficient requirement (the thought gives me shivers *cough* Complete Elves' Handbook! *cough*), but it's not my group, now is it....

Just some random notes from some random guy in some random corner....

 

[maddman75]

I still just want to understand more about how ryard's game works, because it's an interesting case.

Is the DM allowed to make things up?

I'd like to second that request. Let's say the DM has a plot idea for a secret band of assassins after the party. They come from a distant land and he wants to give them some special moves to reflect that. Would he be allowed to make up his own PrCs or feats? If he is, then what is the difference between doing this and pulling it from a 3rd party book? If he isn't then do you see our point about the DM having his hands tied?

Maybe the guys could get their DM in on this discussion.

 

[Desdichado]

I suspect, in general, that there's a spectrum of "player/DM contracts" in terms of who has the most voting power, etc. Still, I've never known of a campaign that appears to be so far weighted towards the players as this particular one seems to be. Great post, Marius, by the way.