D&D 5E How do you define “mother may I” in relation to D&D 5E?

[tetrasodium]

So, I realize that no example offered is always complete… I’m curious about a couple that you shared.



Why not just say “yes, it looks incredibly dangerous” and be done with it? I would assume the player wasn’t quite on the same page with what a “swirling vortex of elemental energy” meant. So why not just make it clear? Why all the back and forth and the requirement of using an action?

I mean, you seem to have thought it would be obvious to the player. So given the chance, why not make it so?

Ogh the player knew it was incredibly dangerous because it was one of four & they had analyzed two learning that they were channeling an incredible amount of elemental energy deeper into the eldritch machine where they learned a bit more about the function of the whole. There was no disconnect , the player was simply wheedling in hopes of doing:

Spoiler: this

Again, why draw this out? Just say “it’s wood” or “it’s steel” or whatever and move on? If it doesn’t matter, why would you take steps to make it seem like it matters?

The player has the revenant feat from LU & fancy's his PC a vampire but has no intention of taking any of the later steps with actual drawbacks. Literally nothing would change with how his ThatGuy PC acts if I said yes and there was no mechanical reason for him to care even if he took the later steps in the chain. It was just drama because the spotlight was on some other player by virtue of it being another player's turn in combat.

 

[overgeeked]

Ph the player knew it was incredibly dangerous because it was one of four & they had analyzed two learning that they were channeling an incredible amount of elemental energy deeper into the eldritch machine where they learned a bit more about the function of the whole. There was no disconnect , the player was simply wheedling in hopes of doing:

Spoiler: this

The player has the revenant feat from LU & fancy's his PC a vampire but has no intention of taking any of the later steps with actual drawbacks. Literally nothing would change with how his ThatGuy PC acts if I said yes and there was no mechanical reason for him to care even if he took the later steps in the chain. It was just drama because the spotlight was on some other player by virtue of it being another player's turn in combat.

Between the Seth Skorkowsky video on not automatically blaming everything on the GM, and Professor Dungeon Master’s video on That Guy, I really get the impression a bunch of these people talk and synchronize video topics.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

True, I'd say it's 75%. That is still a ton of people who will never have a character "swing from a chandelier" as they don't have that ability written on their character sheet.

Whereas I would say that you've massively overestimated that--while simultaneously massively under estimating the number of people who get burned by a bad DM exploiting "freeform" rules to be a viking hat tyrant. There's way too many DM horror stories out there, and history alone is no longer enough to explain the pattern I've observed in them leaning toward the dictatorial DMs specifically leveraging the "my word is law" aspect of "freeform."

I'm one of those DMs. I want the players to try all sorts of things. Though I do require the player put a bit of effort in to doing so.

Sure. So am I, on both counts. Which is why I actually want rules, so I can be sure what my players get for their stunts and cleverness is actually rewarding. Because it turns out, giving genuinely rewarding results is hard. Doing so consistently is even harder. It's so easy to accidentally or unintentionally fall into perverse incentives or miscommunication. And every one of these things is intensified by having no mechanisms which encourage self-reflection--which is one of the oft-unwritten but very important benefits of using a system with rules that actually matter.

 

[Hussar]

The problem I find with freeform mechanics is that people are spectacularly bad at calculating math. And often the risk/reward calculations are just WAYYY off. Take swinging from the chandelier to attack. Now, if I just use my bow, I know that I have X chances of hitting and dealing Y damage. It's a pretty easy calculation. Now, say that swinging from the chandelier reduces my chances of success by 50%. ((I'm picking random, easy numbers)). That means that unless my damage output is more than doubled, there's zero reason to do it.

But, you almost never see DM's advocating this. Something that reduces my chances of success by 50% should triple the damage, not double, otherwise, it's not worth it. It's a fools bet. But, you'll see DM's over and over and over again argue that you have to "earn" things. Which means that at best my 50% increase in chance of failure might result in doing 50% more damage. Totally not worth it.

That's the primary problem with ad hoc systems. It forces the DM to play amateur game designer, on the spot, with virtually no guidance. And, IME, it results in never actually getting any sort of benefit from doing something creative. At best, it's a wash and most of the time, you're worse off than if you had just done a normal attack.

And this applies to virtually all aspects of the game.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The problem I find with freeform mechanics is that people are spectacularly bad at calculating math. And often the risk/reward calculations are just WAYYY off. Take swinging from the chandelier to attack. Now, if I just use my bow, I know that I have X chances of hitting and dealing Y damage. It's a pretty easy calculation. Now, say that swinging from the chandelier reduces my chances of success by 50%. ((I'm picking random, easy numbers)). That means that unless my damage output is more than doubled, there's zero reason to do it.

But, you almost never see DM's advocating this. Something that reduces my chances of success by 50% should triple the damage, not double, otherwise, it's not worth it. It's a fools bet. But, you'll see DM's over and over and over again argue that you have to "earn" things. Which means that at best my 50% increase in chance of failure might result in doing 50% more damage. Totally not worth it.

That's the primary problem with ad hoc systems. It forces the DM to play amateur game designer, on the spot, with virtually no guidance. And, IME, it results in never actually getting any sort of benefit from doing something creative. At best, it's a wash and most of the time, you're worse off than if you had just done a normal attack.

And this applies to virtually all aspects of the game.

Exactly. And there are several other mathematical issues here, ones that have been known for years, such as:

• The iterative probability problem, perhaps better known by the example of "continuous stealth checks." Even at 80% chance to succeed on a stealth roll, if you have to succeed at five rolls in a row, you've got less than a 1/3 chance of overall success!
• The opportunity cost problem: by taking a risk to possibly get a benefit, the player must give up something non-risky that will definitely give a benefit, or at least definitely avoid something nasty happening.
• The unequal-risk problem: as previously noted, you might get a benefit for doing a daring stunt, but a large chunk of DMs (even well-meaning ones) will put nasty costs in for failure when attempting something creative. Even if humans weren't psychologically risk-averse, this would discourage risk-taking.
• The problem of survivorship bias: characters who succeeded at doing lots of cool things are the ones who accumulate major stories and get talk of needing to be brought down a peg, ignoring the mountain of characters who died along the way to that happening.
• The problems associated with flat distributions, where "extreme" events are equally likely, vs the typical human assumption that extreme events are unlikely (which is true of most things.) This comes up even for folks who are both well-meaning and can explicitly say they know that a natural 20 is equal in likelihood to a natural 11. It gets even worse because damage dealt is usually not a flat distribution, causing a high likelihood of errors in the opposite direction due to working with fundamentally different probability distributions.

Point being, doing the actual math of designing a game based on statistics is a difficult thing. (E.g. I couldn't decide whether to laugh or to cry when Mike Mearls explicitly said that math was easy, but flavor was hard.) And even beyond all the actually mathematical issues above, you have biases within the DM as a person (we all have them, let's not pretend otherwise), the vagaries of human memory, and the limits of human attention. That last one is especially important, because it can cause (again, well-meaning) DMs to believe that their players succeed much more often than they do, or that their players have unfair/excessive success rate when it is in fact perfectly in keeping with designed intent. (Players actually succeeding on 2/3 of rolls they attempt can easily feel like they succeed nearly all the time, or like they fail way more often than they should, or anywhere in-between, particularly if the successes tend to coincidentally cluster on workaday rolls like ordinary attack rolls, or on vital life-or-death rolls.)

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Something else I'd point out. Mother May I and "Yes And" are not the same at all. I'd argue they are, in fact, polar opposites. In a Mother May I situation, the DM determines that only a certain phrase (or set of phrases) will resolve the challenge. Unless the player specifically states this phrase(s) the player cannot succeed at this challenge. In a Yes And situation, the player can state any solution (presuming that it is made in good faith) and the DM is beholden to accept that solution as true. It's the complete opposite of Mother May I.

Now, @Snarf Zagyg, I will freely admit my ignorance of Free Kriegspiel and related games. It's not anything I've ever looked into. So, as a question, do they base resolution on "Yes and"? So long as the player makes a reasonable (for a given value of reasonable) attempt to resolve the challenge, is the DM beholden to accept that resolution?

So, this warrants a different thread - and maybe I'll generate one that discusses the issue at more length. But given I've been a little lazier recently, I'll try and succinctly address this.

1. I hope you can now agree that "Mother May I" is a pejorative term. Again, you are using it to describe a playing style that you do not enjoy. It's infantilizing and does not promote good conversation.

2. I think you are conflating decision resolution with division of authority when you are asking about "Yes and" in comparison to so-called "MMI."
Division of authority is only about the ways in which "authority" in the game is split up. This could be anything from DM Decides to Player Collaboration to something in between.
Decision resolution* is how decisions get made. These can be heuristics ("Yes, and ..." or "No, but ..." or "Rule of Cool" or whatever) or they can be dice rolls or they can be coin flips or whatever.

When you are complaining about what most people have referred to as "Skilled Play" (which is the term I think the individuals who do it prefer) or if you prefer "Neo-Gygaxian Play" (NGP) - this is actually a complaint about the division of authority. About the DM having the final say. Within NGP, DMs can use a number of different heuristics to resolve actions, just like with 5e. They can call for dice rolls. While they are supposed to be "neutral" between the players and the world, they can use decision resolution mechanisms that promote "fun" or "good" play.

Same with FKR. FKR does not specify the heuristics that a GM uses; for example, when I GM FKR, I employ a lot of techniques I learned from decades running other games (diceless games, yes and, fail forward, etc.). But these are all decision resolution techniques; fundamentally, FKR games are all what you would call (disparagingly, IMO) "MMI" since in the end, the gameworld of FKR games is within the ultimate control of the GM and the players are "playing the world."

At a fundamental level, this might mean that you would not enjoy FKR games. But ... other people do! Which is why we should always pay attention to the language we are using when we are discussing things we did not enjoy.


*I am using the neutral term "decision resolution" to avoid getting caught up in a jargon issue. If you want to really explore various ways of resolving issues in TTRPGs, this is an interesting translation that I found useful.

 

[jmartkdr2]

So, this warrants a different thread - and maybe I'll generate one that discusses the issue at more length. But given I've been a little lazier recently, I'll try and succinctly address this.

1. I hope you can now agree that "Mother May I" is a pejorative term. Again, you are using it to describe a playing style that you do not enjoy. It's infantilizing and does not promote good conversation.

2. I think you are conflating decision resolution with division of authority when you are asking about "Yes and" in comparison to so-called "MMI."
Division of authority is only about the ways in which "authority" in the game is split up. This could be anything from DM Decides to Player Collaboration to something in between.
Decision resolution* is how decisions get made. These can be heuristics ("Yes, and ..." or "No, but ..." or "Rule of Cool" or whatever) or they can be dice rolls or they can be coin flips or whatever.

When you are complaining about what most people have referred to as "Skilled Play" (which is the term I think the individuals who do it prefer) or if you prefer "Neo-Gygaxian Play" (NGP) - this is actually a complaint about the division of authority. About the DM having the final say. Within NGP, DMs can use a number of different heuristics to resolve actions, just like with 5e. They can call for dice rolls. While they are supposed to be "neutral" between the players and the world, they can use decision resolution mechanisms that promote "fun" or "good" play.

Same with FKR. FKR does not specify the heuristics that a GM uses; for example, when I GM FKR, I employ a lot of techniques I learned from decades running other games (diceless games, yes and, fail forward, etc.). But these are all decision resolution techniques; fundamentally, FKR games are all what you would call (disparagingly, IMO) "MMI" since in the end, the gameworld of FKR games is within the ultimate control of the GM and the players are "playing the world."

At a fundamental level, this might mean that you would not enjoy FKR games. But ... other people do! Which is why we should always pay attention to the language we are using when we are discussing things we did not enjoy.


*I am using the neutral term "decision resolution" to avoid getting caught up in a jargon issue. If you want to really explore various ways of resolving issues in TTRPGs, this is an interesting translation that I found useful.

I think there’s an easy way to split this hair: “Mother May I” is FKR-like resolution (in the sense of not relying on pre-agreed-upon rules) done badly.

How to do it well is a whole conversation.

 

[Iosue]

I'm going to tell you that anyone with military experience, or any hunter worth anything, can probably tell you within a few feet how far something away is. At least anything you could reasonably expect to shoot anyway. Part of training is spent on exactly that and being able to accurately eyeball ranges is very, VERY important. It's a skill just like any other.

Or do you think a pro-football quarterback couldn't accurately throw a ball within a few feet of any range you cared to call out? Again, presuming he's actually physically capable of throwing that far? Or, heck, ask any golfer how far away they are from the hole and they'll probably be close enough. Certainly within tolerances anyway.

I find that people vastly underestimate how much information people are capable of processing.

Agreed. I probably could not fulfill overgeeked's room-distance challenge with any degree of accuracy. But, I've been doing Japanese swordsmanship for 15 years. Put me in the middle of a room with a weapon in my hand I know with a high degree of accuracy what things are in my range to hit. I not only have a clear understanding of my own range, but I can eyeball to a degree of inches what another person's range is. I can't put this is discrete units of measurement, but I can say, "At that range he can't reach me, but a half-step forward and he can."

I enjoy Theater of the Mind, so it's not that I don't understand overgeeked's point. It's just that there are trade-offs no matter what method you're using. Physical aids on a grid can provide more perfect information than the characters might have. But theater of the mind can often provide less. In order for the DM to provide to my fighter character the information that I, the player, could tell at a glance, he needs to tell me every round the combative distance/time interval (ma'ai, in Japanese martial arts) for every combatant in relation to me, as well as each of my allies in relation to their opponents, as well as the opponents in relation to my allies. That could be tedious and time consuming! There are of course work-arounds for this, so this is not a criticism of TotM. Just noting how each system has advantages and drawbacks.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I think there’s an easy way to split this hair: “Mother May I” is FKR-like resolution (in the sense of not relying on pre-agreed-upon rules) done badly.

How to do it well is a whole conversation.

Well, no. Because (again) that's not how people are using it. But let's use the example in the post above-

In a Mother May I situation, the DM determines that only a certain phrase (or set of phrases) will resolve the challenge. Unless the player specifically states this phrase(s) the player cannot succeed at this challenge.

That's not FKR. That's not even Skilled Play. Do you know what that is?

If you're of a certain age, you remember text-based Infocom games. And in those games, you would have a text "description" of an area, and the game had a text input, and in order to accomplish something in the room, you had to type the exact phrase necessary.

That, here, is what is being described.

Adversarial or bad DMing can exist in any type of game. And yes, it can exist even when there are pre-agreed-upon rules! So when people are using that particular phrase, they aren't really discussing bad DMing. Or adversarial DMing. Instead, they are discussing their preference for certain styles of play.

Again, that's fine! People like different things! Some players thrive on having specified rules, and some players don't. But when you categorize the style of play you don't like as a failed state- that's problematic to me.

 

[jmartkdr2]

Well, no. Because (again) that's not how people are using it. But let's use the example in the post above-



That's not FKR. That's not even Skilled Play. Do you know what that is?

If you're of a certain age, you remember text-based Infocom games. And in those games, you would have a text "description" of an area, and the game had a text input, and in order to accomplish something in the room, you had to type the exact phrase necessary.

That, here, is what is being described.

Adversarial or bad DMing can exist in any type of game. And yes, it can exist even when there are pre-agreed-upon rules! So when people are using that particular phrase, they aren't really discussing bad DMing. Or adversarial DMing. Instead, they are discussing their preference for certain styles of play.

Again, that's fine! People like different things! Some players thrive on having specified rules, and some players don't. But when you categorize the style of play you don't like as a failed state- that's problematic to me.

I’m not sure - who is arguing for Mother May I as a description of their own style?

The phrase is only being used negatively near as I can tell. It’s adjacent to legit styles, but those aren’t being called MMI by proponents of those styles. They have other, non-perjorative names for what they do.