D&D General GMing and "Player Skill"

[mixmastashizz]

How does this square with the way a lot of old-school adventures are presented? Because, frankly, a lot of them look like"door-kicking hack and slash" to me, from the outside looking in. Especially if the adventure is quite linear.

I think when talking modules its important to be specific to which ones youre thinking of.

There's a difference between Dragonlance and I6, T1 and B2, and the Caverns of Thracia and other JG products in expectations for modules. Not to mention the modules that were explicitly tournament modules which have their own constraints and assumptions based on the format and original context.

Just as there are people who claimed to never play the way the primer suggests, it didnt come from nowhere, and there are people who really did play that way from the start that informed Finchs work. Both can exist and be true.

 

[overgeeked]

Some video game RPGs would be a good training module for GM on how to handle consequences of player actions, good and bad.

Examples:

• avoiding a battle with antagonists through socializing (and still getting XP for “defeating” the encounter)
• having NPCs and factions treat the PCs better for positive interactions and doing favors for them (they become allies, give discounts at shops, better rewards etc)
• having past choices coming up later in positive (the villagers here remember how you saved the local farmers from goblins, so they give you discounts and support) and negative ways (the villagers recognize you as the murderhobo “butcher of Hamletville, and fear you; they don’t go out of their way to help you, refuse to give you any reliable info and certainly won’t take your side later unless out of fear or intimidation).
• The merchant remembers the fact that you saved them from the prison cells and kept them alive throughout the rest of the dungeon; they offer you significant discounts and even a few freebies, along with information to help you).

This is one of the keys to running a world that feels like it’s living and breathing. Many referees who run open-world sandboxes do this. But it absolutely should be more widespread.

 

[bloodtide]

And yet I've never seen this. Not once.

Your "Buddy GM" is a fiction you invented to make fun of others. It's extremely tiresome.

I can't really speak to what you have or have not seen.

Honestly, your patronizing tone is tiresome. You seem to think you are the only one who knows how the game is meant to be played, and all things would be perfect if only those tiresome players would do as they're told.

I have no idea how you "read" that.

From experience: "seem" is unnecessary. That is, in fact, exactly what Bloodtide believes, and they pride themselves on being "cruel" to their players until only those who behave as you describe remain in the game. It has an extremely low retention rate and an extremely high rate of generating irritated impatient gamers.

I do count things such as Paying Attention something players must do in my game. I don't put up with the players that endlessly good around and play on their phone. A lot of DMs do, you can see tons of games where the player do so for the whole game. The same way I don't put up with players that don't know the rules. And again there are plenty of other games where such a person would be told "just roll the d20, we will take care of what happens."

And cruel is subjective. The vast majority of RPGs, even more so a lot of 5E games, play it safe to say the least. Things like no character death or very much of any hardships the players don't like. In my game as an Old School type game, things like character death are common. Even such things like a PC falling in a deep river, being unable to swim and drowning. This type of thing is rare or more likely unheard of in many other games.

I believe, the last time numbers were given, Bloodtide claimed that something like 75% of all GMs are outright bad, and most of the remainder aren't good.

Those are some high numbers.