D&D General GMing and "Player Skill"

[payn]

Above and beyond anything else in the thread, this is a lesson I wholeheartedly embrace and wish more GMs would heed.

Doesn't matter what the behavior is. Doesn't matter what system you're using. Reward the behavior you want to see happen, and cause genuine player-affecting complications for the behavior you don't want to see happen.

Murderhoboism arises from both a push and a pull in this sense. The "pull" comes from GMs attempting to punish folks who are naturally inclined to murderhoboism....by putting attention on them, challenging them, forcing them to fight. That's what most such folks want. Giving them what they want--attention, action, immediate consequences--fuels their behavior. It's trying to fight fire with gasoline, teaching them that they can always get a rise out of you and a good fight if they just act out. Boring them is what punishes them: make them sit through dull situations, make them wait unconscious while the other players act, whatever responses achieve the desired end, and then show them how doing things the right way gets them cool action scenes, immediate consequences, attention, praise, rewards, etc.

The "push", conversely, comes from GMs not just failing to give rewards for non-murderhobo behavior, but outright punishing such behavior. I call it the "mercy is a sucker's game" problem. The GM who always or nearly always thinks, "Ah, the party just showed mercy to a captured enemy. That enemy will reconnect with his buddies, alert them to the party's presence, and thus the enemy will be on high alert now!" The GM who makes law enforcement always obstructive and meddlesome and unforgiving and (etc., etc.), who consistently has party allies suddenly reveal treachery and stab the party in the back, etc., etc. This teaches lessons: never trust, kill first, don't take prisoners because doing so is always worse, take whatever you can while you can get it because you'll lose it if you don't, never trust authority figures, always betray your so-called "allies" before they can betray you, and so on.

Be wise. Show restraint. Ask: "If I want to see X, am I giving worthwhile rewards for X?" Because your players will notice, and they'll respond. Show them why doing something is worthwhile, and they'll do it. Consistently give outcomes they don't like for something, and they'll avoid it. Sometimes, what you think is a realistic outcome is not always the most effective thing for getting a game that you actually find fun to run. (The reverse is also true, but I find these problems crop up much more with GMs who have a very fixed idea of what is "realistic" behavior.)

Really good points. This is how folks get players that just slay any prisoner or even any NPC so they cant be betrayed. While a common trope, some GMs out there will just engage the betrayal merely becasue the players allowed an opening so you can hardly blame them.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Really good points. This is how folks get players that just slay any prisoner or even any NPC so they cant be betrayed. While a common trope, some GMs out there will just engage the betrayal merely becasue the players allowed an opening so you can hardly blame them.

The single most frustrating thing about it is that most, not all but most, of the GMs who do this think they're being good GMs.

Like they legitimately think that the thing they're doing is constructive and helpful, when it isn't. Most cases I've seen where a GM got a lightbulb moment about something along these lines, they say some variant of "I thought I was making sure actions had consequences" (or the like). Which sounds, on the surface, like an unobjectionable thing. How could anyone want it to be that actions don't have consequences? Wouldn't that directly lead to player misbehavior?

But the fact of the matter is, in at least a majority of cases (IME/IMO/YMMV/BBQ/VCR/etc.), we have the issue that storytelling "realism" often runs into: "consequences" has a really bad habit of only meaning that we add in bad results that come from choices. Doing some of this, judiciously, is very important and helps us see the world as grounded. Going overboard, however, making the world too loaded with bad results, turns the world cynical and crapsack--and that teaches the players to be cynical and cruel in return.

A lot of the more unfortunate GMing patterns out there often arise by a similar mechanism. The GM thinks they're doing something good, and they structure what they're doing in a way that sounds virtuous, without considering the implications, and as a result, confidently causing much of the very thing they wish to stop. I recall a thread, a few years ago now, where a GM was at their wits' end because of their players seemingly being the most diehard murderhobos and yet hating it. Turned out, the maps the GM thought were just useful for the players to know where things were....were being seen as "this IS a huge fight, it's just waiting to happen, we have to get the jump first or we'll die." Working through that communication barrier proved a huge improvement for everyone involved, because nobody realized that this was a complete accident.

 

[payn]

The single most frustrating thing about it is that most, not all but most, of the GMs who do this think they're being good GMs.

Like they legitimately think that the thing they're doing is constructive and helpful, when it isn't. Most cases I've seen where a GM got a lightbulb moment about something along these lines, they say some variant of "I thought I was making sure actions had consequences" (or the like). Which sounds, on the surface, like an unobjectionable thing. How could anyone want it to be that actions don't have consequences? Wouldn't that directly lead to player misbehavior?

Absolutely, the problem they slide into is thinking certain actions always have the same consequences. Which then promotes proactive behavior like murderhoboism.

But the fact of the matter is, in at least a majority of cases (IME/IMO/YMMV/BBQ/VCR/etc.), we have the issue that storytelling "realism" often runs into: "consequences" has a really bad habit of only meaning that we add in bad results that come from choices. Doing some of this, judiciously, is very important and helps us see the world as grounded. Going overboard, however, making the world too loaded with bad results, turns the world cynical and crapsack--and that teaches the players to be cynical and cruel in return.

Agreed. What I ran into with a lot of old school GMs was the survival sim mentality. If players were not making optimal decisions, at all times, the consequences were bad. It was a way of "teaching" players to "git gud."

This also slips into the combat is a failure state. I know thats controversial and not everyone's experience, but the survival sim minded GM leaned into it. The best solution avoided combat, or set combat up entirely one-sided in the PCs favor. Facing the monsters at a disadvantage was again, a failure to do the optimal thing. Reiterating the player learned behavior or get punished activity.

A lot of the more unfortunate GMing patterns out there often arise by a similar mechanism. The GM thinks they're doing something good, and they structure what they're doing in a way that sounds virtuous, without considering the implications, and as a result, confidently causing much of the very thing they wish to stop. I recall a thread, a few years ago now, where a GM was at their wits' end because of their players seemingly being the most diehard murderhobos and yet hating it. Turned out, the maps the GM thought were just useful for the players to know where things were....were being seen as "this IS a huge fight, it's just waiting to happen, we have to get the jump first or we'll die." Working through that communication barrier proved a huge improvement for everyone involved, because nobody realized that this was a complete accident.

Right, some of this thumb on scale GMing is actually against the skill play GM ethos. The philosophy isnt that a GM should curate an experience, so much as they should be an impartial arbiter of the game. Less game master and more referee. The GM is an architect of adventure design. Once they have finished design, at the table they are supposed to sit back and fairly allow the players to interact with it. Sometimes, that means very anti-dramatic results. Players cake walk through an encounter or adventure, or PCs get wrecked or TPK'd. Though, the lesson should be the GMs on being a better architect, though some of them decided placing their thumb on the scale would improve the experience, or at least head off the problematic sessions instead. Thus tainting the skill play experience.

My modern GM viewpoint is that a good GM does both curate an adventure experience and run a fair game. A great GM is one who is good at both the architecture and the game mastery piece so that the experience is a good one as much of the time as possible. YMMV.

 

[SpellObjectEnthusiast]

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.

Basically, the 'player skill' focused OSR mentality (as popularized by Matt Finch's Primer written in 2008) is a fairly recent invention.

The original 1970s-80s game/adventure designers did not really intend their games to be played in that specific way. So lots of old school adventures have designs that go against what the OSR touts as good design. Many of them are railroads, combat grindfests, or otherwise at odds with that modern ethos.

 

[payn]

Basically, the 'player skill' focused OSR mentality (as popularized by Matt Finch's Primer written in 2008) is a fairly recent invention.

The original 1970s-80s game/adventure designers did not really intend their games to be played in that specific way. So lots of old school adventures have designs that go against what the OSR touts as good design. Many of them are railroads, combat grindfests, or otherwise at odds with that modern ethos.

I think the issue is folks often fall into a "everybody played this way" and they didnt. The skill players I knew, never used published adventures becasue they "didnt do it right". So, even from the beginning there was a divide in how the game was to be run and played.

 

[Umbran]

The single most frustrating thing about it is that most, not all but most, of the GMs who do this think they're being good GMs.

I think the issue we are considering is more complex than this.

One element at hand is that we are playing a game, and that game effectively give results the players desire, or don't desire, based on choices. But, that game is also set within a fiction, and the game does not, by any means, depict the entirety of that fiction.

GM and players combined, then, have some challenges - how do we remain true to the overall fiction while also playing the game well? The game is built around exciting conflicts, the time at table largely spend resoling those exciting conflicts, and we only have so much time to play. If I only have a few hours every few weeks to play, I have to maximize the value of those sessions.

And, let's face it, NPCs and monsters who are basically nice folks do not intrinsically generate exciting conflicts. So, the GM isn't really incentivized to spend much time on nice folks. That leads to the players not being incentivized to treat figures in game as basically nice folks - to do so is sub-optimal in a game-play sense.

There are some solutions: The players can just bite the bullet and sometimes be at a disadvantage. The GM can include a modicum of stuff that's less exciting, to establish that players shouldn't be sociopaths...

On the game-design side, you can reward the players for some behavior. Many flaw systems are of the from, "You get a bennie if this flaw makes some difficulty for the characters." You can treat PCs like they have a "heroic behavior" flaw, such that they get a bennie if they treat something they see as basically a nice person, and that turns out to be a bad choice.

This last allows the GM to largely hold to keeping with most NPCs and monsters being right bastards, while still having the PCs act like there are good people out there in the fiction that might just happen to be here in-session.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Basically, the 'player skill' focused OSR mentality (as popularized by Matt Finch's Primer written in 2008) is a fairly recent invention.

The original 1970s-80s game/adventure designers did not really intend their games to be played in that specific way. So lots of old school adventures have designs that go against what the OSR touts as good design. Many of them are railroads, combat grindfests, or otherwise at odds with that modern ethos.

Multiple play styles co-existed, and were perceived to co-exist, in the 70s and 80s. In Part I of his series "D&D Campaigns" published in White Dwarf #1 (June/July 1977), Lew Pulsipher (@lewpuls) notes that "D&D players can be divided into two groups, those who want to play the game as a game and those who want to play it as a fantasy novel." Pulsipher prefers the former style, which emphasises "player skill", considering the latter to be mostly "boring and inferior".

In Pulsipher's account of novel-style play that he seems to have experienced in California, referees "make up more than half of what happens" while "the player is a passive receptor, with little control over what happens." However in a "skill-oriented campaign" the referee "should not make up anything important after an adventure has begun." Players must be able to make decisions "which significantly alter the course of an adventure".

 

[Reynard]

Multiple play styles co-existed, and were perceived to co-exist, in the 70s and 80s. In Part I of his series "D&D Campaigns" published in White Dwarf #1 (June/July 1977), Lew Pulsipher (@lewpuls) notes that "D&D players can be divided into two groups, those who want to play the game as a game and those who want to play it as a fantasy novel." Pulsipher prefers the former style, which emphasises "player skill", considering the latter to be mostly "boring and inferior".

In Pulsipher's account of novel-style play that he seems to have experienced in California, referees "make up more than half of what happens" while "the player is a passive receptor, with little control over what happens." However in a "skill-oriented campaign" the referee "should not make up anything important after an adventure has begun." Players must be able to make decisions "which significantly alter the course of an adventure".

As has been mentioned many times on this board, folks should absolutely read The Elusive Shift by Jon Peterson for a great exploration of this spectrum early in the game's life.

 

[bloodtide]

I'm not super convinced about some fundamental difference between RPGs and every other type of games.

Is the fact that you can ignore, change, alter and add to the 'game rules' not enough? You won't find many other games with that feature.

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.

Me too....and I'm the Old School Hard Fun DM!

A lot of the more unfortunate GMing patterns out there often arise by a similar mechanism. The GM thinks they're doing something good, and they structure what they're doing in a way that sounds virtuous, without considering the implications, and as a result, confidently causing much of the very thing they wish to stop.

I very much agree with this. I see this all the time with games other then my own with problems.

A very common problem I see is a game with wild, uncontrolled players....and nearly 100% of the time it is a game with a DM that is all "In my game I never kill my Buddy Players PCs". Amazingly, the players just do whatever they want and act like idiots.

 

[loverdrive]

Is the fact that you can ignore, change, alter and add to the 'game rules' not enough? You won't find many other games with that feature.

Pretty much every game I've ever played. Competitive Team Fortress 2 is for all intents and purposes a different game from the game ordinary players play due to bans, format and ruleset. No two tables play Uno by the same rules. All traditional games have miriads of regional variations. I've played and hosted several Warhammer 40k events with custom rules.


People are reverse-engineering compiled C code to modify rules of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and inject code into a library handling gamepad input to mod Dark Souls.

All games are modified, that is not a unique trait.

Emphasis on it in the RPG culture is unique, sure, but that's not a fundamental difference that makes all the game analysis and design techniques inapplicable and irrelevant.

Spoiler: amusing tangent

For a peculiar example of a game whereignoring the rules is welcome and expected — in the traditional card game Durak (translates as fool), cheating is a big part of the game — there's a rule that once you responded to or otherwise acknowledged an action without objection, then you accept it and it cannot be rolled back, even if it was illegal.

If I played a card out of turn and you defended against it, you are a foolish fool that has been fooled, and you should've been paying attention.