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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bawylie" data-source="post: 7743696" data-attributes="member: 6776133">You’re DMing for a group and a player starts asking some questions that seem out of the blue and barely relevant to the matter at hand. “Is the stone rough hewn or worked? How high is the ceiling? What’s it made of? Can I see the enemies behind cover? Can I roll perception here?” And after like 10 minutes of this (while the other players yawn and wait for their combat turns) you finally lose it and shout, “Jaysus H Crepes, just what the **** do you want to do here?”And that’s how you cut to the chase and realize the only relevant info you need is the player’s goal. So on each player’s turn you ask them to state a goal so you can cut 10 minutes of questions. Then those goals start getting weirdly detailed. Multiple steps. And again the questions. Oftentimes trying to find out if the goal is at all possible or valid. Another 10 minutes pass and you know you’re about to invoke your pastry savior. You start to skip the player’s descriptions because now that you’ve got the goal, you can just say what they do, right? Player says they want to search for traps (nice goal!). So you start your narration “As you move your hands across the door and feel for...”“I wouldn’t do that,” they interrupt. An argument starts. They don’t want to set off the trap they suspect is there by touching it. But they explicitly said they were searching. The argument takes 15 minutes until you throw up your hands and ask “Fine then, how do you search for hidden traps without touching the ******** door?” And that’s when you realize you’re gonna start asking for an approach - some brief description of how they plan to go about accomplishing their goal. Then it dawns on you - you’ve been adjudicating backwards. You’ve been setting DCs for things and asking for rolls and the players have been rolling dice but they’re basically random number generators and not necessarily making decisions so much as going through a series of time consuming motions. So you decide you’re gonna wait and set DCs based on the goal and the approach and not on the obstacles themselves. You get about half the questions you used to get. Then a tenth. You spend more time playing and way less time jibbering about random details. The players are making decisions. They talk at least half the time now. It’s not a one man show anymore. They’re terrified. They’re tense. They’re ecstatic when things go right. It’s streamlined. It’s less frustrating and more fun. Your rules lawyer has a lot less to argue about. The players stop asking to make rolls and start thinking of ways to take actions that avoid the dice as much as possible. You don’t fudge rolls anymore because the players are making decisions with full awareness of the consequences of their actions. They get smarter. You add more monsters and more obstacles. Your totm phases are lightning quick and you have time for huge set piece encounters with elaborate maps and terrain. The time you spent arguing and answering questions can be used for anything. Mostly play. Often setting up a new map. Goal and approach. I want to dm better games by enabling the players to make meaningful decisions with real consequences. I got a 17.</blockquote>

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