GMs: Guiding Morals in GMing

[Composer99]

My guiding principle is that I as GM am a facilitator of an enjoyable and fun gameplay experience (by the standards of hobby gaming) for myself and for the other players, according to my aesthetics of play and their aesthetics of play. Everyone is responsible for this to some lesser or greater extent, but - and especially in GM-centric games such as D&D - this responsibility falls heavier upon me than upon the other players.

At a broader level, it means knowing what I want out of TTRPG gameplay and what the players want (or seem to want), and then using a system that seems to best match what the table as a whole wants.

For some specifics of how I might approach things:

• If it's been an hour and a half since the last fight and I have a player or two who are getting bored and antsy, it's time for a fight!
• If I'm running a game for players who are interested in enacting a power fantasy, I'm going to find ways to enable them to feel awesome - landing a killing blow on a monster that would otherwise have 1-2 hp left after their damage, for instance.
• If I have a player who really appreciates atmosphere and setting, I'll make sure to add narrative flourishes of description here and there for them to enjoy.
• If I'm running a game for players who enjoy "purity of procedure" in an old-school-style game, then I'll be a stickler for things like die rolls, careful exploration of the environment, dungeoncrawling/hexcrawling procedures, and the like.

(I'm finding I tend to prefer curating gameplay around the player characters' stories, which strikes me as being what might be referred to as "neo-trad" gameplay. By this I mean the players come up with character concepts, including connections and backstories and hopefully goals and objectives, and then I riff off of those to come up with the challenges they'll face.)

 

[Umbran]

Certainly in my experience of talking about RPGing, it's common to see assertions/instructions set out in a blanket (ie categorical) fashion, when in fact the assertion/instruction is useful only relative to a particular goal which need not be universal among RPGers.

Yep. And this has a tendency to start arguments when people push back on them.

 

[Professor Murder]

You realize that other than the word "morals," that contention isn't present in your OP?

I apologize for my initial lack of clarity. Much of my initial post was an immediate, off the cuff musing, which I expected to develop further if this threat persisted.

 

[Professor Murder]

Because it's a lie. The high fives and celebrations are unearned. If you are the musician improvising the main solo then your players are simply your audience.

This is what I am referring to. Calling a game decision "a lie" is a moral judgement. It's not merely saying doing it this way is suboptimal or won't accomplish goals for a GM. It is stating that conducting the game this way would be immoral. That doing this causes harm to the game experience and therefor to those participating. That it is cheating.

 

[Professor Murder]

There is no category of things which should/must be done in all RPGs, except to obey ordinary moral principles. So I have to interpret the OP as being a question about agenda and principles of play for GMs. I'd point out that Dungeon World and Apocalypse World SPECIFICALLY state these in plain language.

I would certainly agree that a given game may have its own culture which governs how one see to running it. But there will be a large amount of overlap I would expect, with only very distant extremes within the hobby not having at least some things in common.

 

[Fenris-77]

My best and most useful too in this regard is a solid session zero. I find that when everyone, GM included, knows exactly what the game is going to be, and has a chance to maybe put in their two cents, and plan with the rest of the players for characters or whatever, that buy-in tends to be easier to come by. Buy-in, IMO anyway, is what I want and need in a game. I know that's not super specific but it's also true that exactly what buy-in means can differ quite a bit from system to system and genre to genre. - although broadly speaking it means engaging honestly with whatever the group decided the game was going to be.

 

[Professor Murder]

Few (sincere) questions:

1) Is the intent of this thread to smash together notions of “morals” with “amoral organizing principles for content generation” in a given TTRPG?

2) Is the intent of this thread to prescribe whatever the answer to (1) is across all TTRPGs (rather than on a game-by-game basis pending on what this particular system/game does/is)?

I'll give some answers to the lead post based on what might be answers to the above (1) and (2).

* IMO its a terribly fraught idea to attempt to smash together notions of "morals" with "amoral organizing principles for content generation" in a given TTRPG.

* Different TTRPGs should be doing different things so a clever, heterogenous, and holistic (with respect to the considerations for its place within the design of the whole game) systemizing of "amoral organizing principles for content generation" is what I want out of the TTRPG hobby at large.

The intent is to not endorse any specific viewpoint, though I do have my own which I can illuminate if needed. What I am more speaking to is behavior and conduct towards each other. People mistaking taste judgements for moral judgements.
As I didn't make clear earlier: I would say that conflating "you are playing the game wrong" with "you are wrong as a person" is harmful to the space but it is a very common refrain. In my opinion, game play is only morally wrong when it actually violates moral lines, which for me revolve around concepts like harm.

 

[pemerton]

* IMO its a terribly fraught idea to attempt to smash together notions of "morals" with "amoral organizing principles for content generation" in a given TTRPG.

* Different TTRPGs should be doing different things so a clever, heterogenous, and holistic (with respect to the considerations for its place within the design of the whole game) systemizing of "amoral organizing principles for content generation" is what I want out of the TTRPG hobby at large.

You might be interested in my post upthread where I distinguish between categorical and hypothetical imperatives, including in the context of discussions of RPG techniques!

 

[overgeeked]

This is what I am referring to. Calling a game decision "a lie" is a moral judgement. It's not merely saying doing it this way is suboptimal or won't accomplish goals for a GM. It is stating that conducting the game this way would be immoral. That doing this causes harm to the game experience and therefor to those participating. That it is cheating.

It’s also literally true. If the paper says AC 15 and the player rolls 14 to-hit…it is a lie to say that hits. If the paper says 2 HP and the player rolls 1 damage…it is a lie to say that kills the monster. It’s a moral judgement only in that people tend to think lying is bad. But it’s still a lie, regardless of one’s moral position on lying.

What is gained by such a pointlessly minor lie? So it takes one or two more swings to kill the monster? So what? The referee’s job isn’t to bolster the morale of the players. So the person had a bad night? So what? It happens in games. Especially those involving randomizers. It’s a shared glory and everyone still high fives when the monster dies. The only difference is someone else gets the extra minor dopamine rush of being the one who finished it off. Everyone still contributed to the win.

This is a common disagreement between those who see the referee as a neutral arbiter of the rules or as a storyteller who’s supposed to be a fan of the players.

Just deciding when the fight’s over and who gets the killing blow defeats the whole point of having all those rules and rule books. Why bother if you’re just going to make it up? As referenced on here recently, it’s like Who’s Line Is It Anyway…where the points don’t matter and the rules are made up.

 

[pemerton]

I would certainly agree that a given game may have its own culture which governs how one see to running it. But there will be a large amount of overlap I would expect, with only very distant extremes within the hobby not having at least some things in common.

On this point, I'm closer to @Manbearcat and @AbdulAlhazred. That is, I want to distinguish between approaches and principles apposite for different sorts of RPG.

Not that I don't have my own preferences (which, perhaps unsurprisingly, overlap with my own capabilities): but given what these are, I tend to avoid RPGs that don't suit them (eg I'm not very good at running classic dungeon crawls, and so don't set out to do that).

My guiding principle is that I as GM am a facilitator of an enjoyable and fun gameplay experience (by the standards of hobby gaming) for myself and for the other players, according to my aesthetics of play and their aesthetics of play. Everyone is responsible for this to some lesser or greater extent, but - and especially in GM-centric games such as D&D - this responsibility falls heavier upon me than upon the other players.

<snip>

I'm finding I tend to prefer curating gameplay around the player characters' stories, which strikes me as being what might be referred to as "neo-trad" gameplay. By this I mean the players come up with character concepts, including connections and backstories and hopefully goals and objectives, and then I riff off of those to come up with the challenges they'll face.

Some differences between "story now"/"indie"-type character-driven play, and "neo-trad" approaches, came up in a recent thread that I started: Approaches to prep in RPGing - GMs, players, and what play is *about*

I think sensitivity to differences of approach, and different principles that are appropriate - as comes out in your post - helps us better grasp these differences. Hence, to reiterate, my preference for not running things together as if there could be system-and-approach neutral "good GMing".