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

[MichaelSomething]

"Mother May I" is the retort you give after someone calls you a "button masher."

 

[hawkeyefan]

A PC can try to do whatever they want to, but it still comes down to a ruling at the DM's discretion. This is D&D 101, no?

I think it depends. Many rules are clear cut and don’t really require the GM to make a ruling. Like, an enemy caster tries a Hold Person spell on me and I roll high enough on my Wisdom save, I avoid the effects of the spell.

For many people, the rules matter more than the GM’s judgment. Rulings are only needed when the rules don’t suffice.

Mother May I is a term used for games that rely so much on GM judgment that the players cannot sufficiently predict the odds of actions or reliably engage with the fiction.

 

[Hussar]

.

Mother May I is a term used for games that rely so much on GM judgment that the players cannot sufficiently predict the odds of actions or reliably engage with the fiction.

This, right here, is the crux of the matter.

To me, yes, I agree, Mother May I is a negative. There's no positive connotation to it. It's a description of a dysfunctional play situation. Railroading was mentioned upthread. Sure, some people define railroading as neutral, or even positive, I suppose, but, I don't. And, if I use the term railroad to describe something, it's going to be pretty clear in context that I'm describing something I see as a negative.

I don't understand why I am being taken to task for using a word which everyone agrees is a negative meaning word (does anyone argue that it's not?) to describe a situation that I see as a negative play experience.

Even the whole "skilled play" thing is often loaded with all sorts of connotations. The snidely sneering superiority oozing from old school play players looking down their noses at Johnny Come Lately fans that don't know what "real gaming" is all about. It's almost never trotted out except as a way to put down other play styles.

So, I'm thinking there's a bit of glass houses going on here.

For me, and only myself, yes, I think that Mother May I is a perfectly accurate way to describe dysfunctional play at the table. In a sitatuation where GM judgement is so pervasive that the players cannot predict the odds of actions, that's Mother May I.

 

[Eric V]

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.

SO much this.

What's especially helpful about this explanation is that we see that there's no need for any bad attitude from the GM to come into play; we can get bad math rulings coming from GMs who genuinely want cool things to happen, but because they aren't good at those kinds of mathematical on-the-spot judgment calls, people learn to not attempt those cool things.

 

[Malmuria]

Over the past year and a half I've played a number of different indie 'story games,' and overall I have not noticed that they rely less on GM judgement or in every case formally curtail the authority of the GM. GM judgement still has a huge role to play. Much of the time your energy as a GM is put into constantly improvising new fiction in ways that might strike a 5e player as arbitrary. I find these games suture the difference between this potential arbitrariness and running a successful game not with extensive hard coded mechanics but rather with principles (for both GM and players) and extensive advice. It's up to everyone at the table to take those principles seriously and talk about how best to deploy them. In a different way, I also see this all the time in OSR/FKR spaces. There's an increasing emphasis on games that are light in mechanics but incorporate specific principles and procedures to ensure that a game runs successfully.

All of which is to say that many (most?) ttrpgs rely on "gm judgement" (and player judgment) in a variety of ways. This is both a strength and a weakness, as real live humans can be creative and improvisational but are not infallible. ttrpgs have many different ways of addressing the all-too-humanness of play; a large set of hard coded mechanics is one way it can be addressed. Labeling all the others as "mother may I" is not very useful, to say the least.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

That's what I have repeatedly saying. Now, if you listen to some of the people on this thread (that I do not wish to summon), they will claim that this is just a neutral term. "Just calling it like it is."

That is wrong.

Is it now? Curious. Where does this moral imperative arise?

Look, if I describe games that have a lot of rules as "Mindless Button Pushing," then you could say that (to quote you)-
- It dealt with not wanting 'permission' to do things.
- Within the context of a D&D forum, it almost certainly referred to issues with the players being able to rely on the rules to get pre-determined outcomes.
- It is being seen in a negative light.

And yet people used this or quite similar things during 4e's heyday, and none of them accepted as an argument "you are being a big meanie" as a retort to their criticism. Why is that? Why is it that intentionally crappy and incorrect takes about asking for RAW-focused playstyles are totally kosher, but slightly pejorative terms for rulings-focused playstyles that actually do describe a real problem (that is, DMs who enforce arbitrary, capricious, and inconsistent rulings with poorly-explained justifications, such that the players feel they must plea before the magistrate for each and every action they take) are totally unacceptable and should be stricken from every record, to not even be discussed in a thread about how we personally define the terms?

Right? Simple. But the third point is the most important. If someone uses that term, I know that they are using a derogatory remark, and are planting a very clear flag as to what their preferred style of play is. It's probably not worth engaging with them substantively.

Then you should know that you have said several things on this forum which I have viewed in exactly that light. It is more than a little frustrating to see such a spirited defense of respect for playstyles in general now, when it is your preference on the line, when such defenses have been very thin on the ground if styles you don't like are so criticized.

*Again, OSR play became popular during 3e as a reaction to the abundance of rules.

I'm not entirely sure this actually follows. OSR play did arise then, but it came from numerous factors, one of which was the OGL which permitted the legal reconstruction of older rulesets ("retroclones"), and another was that people who never stopped playing said rulesets wanted to keep creating new content for them.

More importantly, have you read Finch's "Quick Primer For Old School Gaming"? Because it is extremely frequently cited for advocacy of the OSR style, and yet is dramatically worse in every possible way than the phrase "Mother May I."

A lot of this comes down to trust and mutual respect: Trust in the DM's adjudication and, yes, ultimate authority; but also mutual respect - including the DM respecting the desires of players. Some people seem to take issue with that basic element of D&D, that the DM holds ultimate authority. I realize that some games take a co-DMing or more collaborative approach, but my point is that MMI is a completely useless term in a game in which the basic assumption is that the DM runs the world and where the buck ultimately stops. Meaning, unless you're playing a fully and equally collaborative approach, the buck still eventually stops with the DM and their best judgment.

Does it? I disagree. I have told my players that they have a say. Now, that doesn't mean the buck never stops with me. But my players can collectively be where the buck stops, and sometimes individually. That's exactly the function of stuff like the X card, for example. If players aren't comfortable, they have the power to unilaterally say "no, this isn't for me, I can't do this." We work around those things. It's very rarely necessary because I am a huge softie, hopeless romantic, and generally more sensitive about things than my players are, but it's happened once or twice and I have respected it each and every time. It's hard to say that the buck always (and only) stops with me if my players can unilaterally declare certain kinds of content as a no-go zone.

That premise is baked into the very fabric of the game; again, there are variations, but they're just that: variations. The term MMI seems based upon a complaint about that basic approach, as if the players should be able to over-rule the DM's authority, or worse, implies that DMs are generally--or at least frequently--untrustworthy, and the players need to be protected from them by...rules? And if that is the case, I think there are much larger problems to deal with, because if nothing else, the social contract of a D&D game requires basic trust and mutual respect.

You seem to be of the opinion that rules provide absolutely no utility whatsoever for creating a climate of respect and trust. This incorrect assumption would be the issue, then. As I already said, rules cannot prevent bad-faith behavior. But they can be extremely useful for (a) cutting off problems before they even happen, (b) improving the communication and clarity needed for trust and respect, and (c) addressing and eliminating perverse incentives that can undercut that trust and respect.

Rules are tools.

It also sometimes used as a negative term to describe games that don't have concrete conflict resolution systems and rely heavily on DM adjucation. This 2nd usage I disagree with. When used on the system level we should use a more neutral term. Non combat 5e boils down to 'DM arbitrates' in terms of resolution, wheras 4e skill challenges is a mechanism that is much less DM arbitrates (closer to the way DMs participate in 5e combat).

Well, the core problem is that "relies heavily on DM adjudication" accurately describes both this and the preceding thing, and it is specifically a breakdown of "relies heavily on DM adjudication" (or, rather, "relies almost exclusively on DM adjudication") that is the problem. A breakdown that can happen both from DMs acting with bad intent and from DMs making errors despite having good intent. Neither of these can be eliminated by rules, but both can be made more obvious, and thus easier to address, by rules. Again: rules are tools.

But I wouldn't say 5e is automatically "mother may I" as long as players and DM are on the same page of what could work or not and roughly how difficult it is to do things. But since it relies heavily on DM arbitration, it is probably easier to get stuck in a mother may I situation than some other games.

This sounds like a distinction without a difference. Edit: That is, you seem to be asserting that there's no relationship whatsoever between "DM arbitration" and "mother may I," and then immediately undercutting that by saying "except there actually is a relationship, it's just not guaranteed."

The key is that they did it piece by piece rather than wanting to make a DC9000 stealth check to do the whole thing with one skill from one player all at once.

Which is a sound strategy regardless of whether one plays Labyrinth Lord or 4e D&D (to use two emblematic games I have personally played.)

The entire thing was really only possible because I run a game that is apparently arbitrary & capricious "mother may I" gameplay secretly supported on the GM side using a mix of Fate & 3.x style bonus types/gm's best friend on the GM side to heavily support 5e's void of rules that would otherwise help.

Your description did not sound "mother may I" to me. Nor did it sound like it had to be that mix you describe (though I find it ironic that you use the "gm's best friend" in 5e, since one of the core principles of 5e was specifically to eliminate that and replace it with Advantage.) What you describe sounds, in fact, like a perfectly cromulent parallel to a 4e skill challenge. Not a 100% match, as noted below, but essentially the same concept: succeed on enough things, and manage missteps enough such that they successfully climb the proverbial wall, even if they had some nail-biting moments along the way.

Did they succeed on all of those things?... no not even most of them, but the important part is that they found solutions to handle their failures

I am curious about this. My experience of so-called "freeform" gaming, both personally and from others' reports, is that failure is almost always harshly punished. It sounds to me like you took a very (indeed, shockingly) lenient stance regarding failed efforts. A failure here was apparently at most a nudging of things in an unwanted direction, which could be addressed by doing something else. My experience of OSR, and the way others have described it to me, is almost diametrically opposite this: success is meager and failure is massive.

A PC can try to do whatever they want to, but it still comes down to a ruling at the DM's discretion. This is D&D 101, no?

It used to be, yes. Hopefully it still is.

My discussions with a significant number of OSR DMs is that the answer is theoretically yes, but practically no, because "DM discretion" will end up being such that whatever you want to do will either be denied by outright fiat, or will be so-called "permitted" but given such awful chance of success and such pitiful reward that there would never be a reason to attempt it in the first place. Even with genuinely well-meaning DMs. I listed several of the mathematical, statistical, and cognitive-bias reasons why this is the case. Rules help address these mathematical, statistical, and cognitive-bias problems, because it is easier (in the sense that it is actually possible in the first place, as opposed to being essentially impossible) to follow a set of rules, as opposed to trying to resolve these problems by making the human DM herself consistently mathematicalily rigorous, statistically sound, and flawlessly logical.

 

[overgeeked]

SO much this.

What's especially helpful about this explanation is that we see that there's no need for any bad attitude from the GM to come into play; we can get bad math rulings coming from GMs who genuinely want cool things to happen, but because they aren't good at those kinds of mathematical on-the-spot judgment calls, people learn to not attempt those cool things.

Conversely, there are players who have a wildly over-inflated sense of what their character can do and get bent out of shape when told no or the referee sets a high DC the player thinks is unfair. And so they throw out the intentionally derogatory and insulting chestnut of "mother may I."

 

[Mercurius]

Mother May I is a term used for games that rely so much on GM judgment that the players cannot sufficiently predict the odds of actions or reliably engage with the fiction.

To me that sounds like the result of one of several options:

• Poor/inconsistent GMing and/or
• Poor compatibility between GM style and player(s) style, and/or
• Inability of player(s) to understand the judgment style of the GM

The phrase "rely so much on GM judgment" implies a disconnect in one of those three areas - not necessarily a problem with reliance on GM judgment itself.

For instance, it could arise when a GM has a free-wheeling fiat style and the player(s) prefer a more strictly RAW approach. Or it could be due to the personality of the GM and/or the personalities of the player(s), or a disconnect between the GM and players in terms of underlying table agreements about GM authority, etc.

Meaning, I think it has more to do with the people involved--and either incompatibilities and/or individual quirks and preferences--than the style of play itself. A lot of the conflict in this thread seems due to mushing, whether intentionally or not, the two together.

 

[Hussar]

/snip

All of which is to say that many (most?) ttrpgs rely on "gm judgement" (and player judgment) in a variety of ways. This is both a strength and a weakness, as real live humans can be creative and improvisational but are not infallible. ttrpgs have many different ways of addressing the all-too-humanness of play; a large set of hard coded mechanics is one way it can be addressed. Labeling all the others as "mother may I" is not very useful, to say the least.

Totally agree.

Is anyone actually doing that? Is anyone categorically stating that the only way forward is hard coded mechanics? I certain am not.

In games where the principles are clearly laid out and known by everyone at the table, then it obviously isn't a Mother May I situation because the players know and understand what needs to be done to resolve situations and play the game. In a Mother May I situation, the players don't know, and the DM isn't given enough guidance by the system to make judgements that are actually fair. That second part is very, very important. It's when the system forces the DM to be amateur game designer that it becomes a problem. It's the old, "Can my character swim in armor" argument. The answer was, "Well, maybe. Depending on how much your DM understands about medieval armor in a pre-Internet game." IOW, the player had no way of knowing, without directly asking the DM, if he could, in fact, swim in armor. It's the definition of Mother May I because the answer doesn't depend on the game at all. It depends on the DM's understanding of armor, which, as a teenage young man, I can honestly say, I had very, very little knowledge of.

Or, to use another example, we have @overgeeked example of judging distances. In his mind, judging distance is a very difficult task that people cannot routinely do. But, it ignores a couple of things. On a battlemap, there's a LOT of grey area. You place the center of the circle on a grid intersection, sure, but, that's a game thing. In fact, because of the vagaries of the battlemap, you could actually be off target by 4 feet in any direction and still place that circle in the same location.

Now, can you hit an 8 foot diameter circle? I'm pretty sure that most people could routinely hit that circle. Now, it doesn't make all that much sense to make it more difficult to place that spell effect. Note, I find it incredibly frustrating to watch players do exactly what @overgeeked talked about. It makes me want to gouge out my eye with a spoon. I hate it because it just sucks all the energy out of the room when it happens. But, I also understand why the players are doing it as well. My solution would simply be to go back to square effects. Which is a house rule I'm going to institute in my next campaign just to nip this sort of thing in the bud.

But, my point being yes, Mother May I play is dysfunctional. It describes a dysfunctional situation. If your game isn't dysfunctional and everyone is happy at your table, then I'm not describing your game. At the end of the day though, it largely says more about my play preferences than anything. Which, honestly, I don't have much problem with. I do see Mother May I play as dysfunctional for all the reasons that have been outlined in this thread.

 

[Mercurius]

Does it? I disagree. I have told my players that they have a say. Now, that doesn't mean the buck never stops with me. But my players can collectively be where the buck stops, and sometimes individually. That's exactly the function of stuff like the X card, for example. If players aren't comfortable, they have the power to unilaterally say "no, this isn't for me, I can't do this." We work around those things. It's very rarely necessary because I am a huge softie, hopeless romantic, and generally more sensitive about things than my players are, but it's happened once or twice and I have respected it each and every time. It's hard to say that the buck always (and only) stops with me if my players can unilaterally declare certain kinds of content as a no-go zone.

Of course players have a say - and there's always the possibility for dialogue (or should be). Stating that the buck stops with the GM doesn't mean that players don't have a say. But it does mean that for the game to work smoothly, there has to be an underlying table agreement about adjudication, and usually that means that, when push comes to shove, the GM's discretion is paramount. In truth, I think that is generally important for an immersive experience.

I personally have never been in a situation in which all the players revolted against a GM ruling, whether as a player or GM, so that sort of scenario is just a hypothetical to me.

You seem to be of the opinion that rules provide absolutely no utility whatsoever for creating a climate of respect and trust. This incorrect assumption would be the issue, then. As I already said, rules cannot prevent bad-faith behavior. But they can be extremely useful for (a) cutting off problems before they even happen, (b) improving the communication and clarity needed for trust and respect, and (c) addressing and eliminating perverse incentives that can undercut that trust and respect.

Rules are tools.

No, that's not my opinion. The rules are the framework for the narrative of the game - as you say, they're tools but I would add only tools. But I agree in that they give the basic structure that everyone agrees on, or should agree on, for the game to run smoothly.

I would also say that if a group is overly relying upon rules for "a climate of respect and trust," there's a potential problem there because it implies that the respect and trust is only skin-deep, when it should be based more firmly on human connection. I mean, it isn't unlike the rapport of teacher and student in which the best way to foster a climate of learning is getting the students to trust you; rules have an important role, but they're secondary to that human rapport.