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

[overgeeked]

Because I used the ability in an attempt to avoid the fight. And then that didn’t happen. And before @overgeeked or anyone else says that I’m just a sore sport or an unreasonable player, I’ll add that it’s not that my move didn’t work. It’s that it seemingly worked, but then the result was the same as if it hadn’t, with no other chance to try and avoid the fight. No indication it wouldn’t be enough, no chance to make rolls or gather new information.

To be clear, I did not say you were an unreasonable player or a sore sport. I said you had unreasonable expectations. If you’re going to be upset that I said something, fine. But be upset about what I actually said, not what you changed it to.

Honest question: under what specific circumstances would you be okay with this plan not working as intended?

 

[Hussar]

I don't think you can do that in D&D terms, at least not fairly. If he had skipped ahead he would be accused of railroading and not giving you the chance of avoiding that encounter. Kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.

Since there was no chance of avoiding the encounter anyway, then isn’t it basically railroading? The two are very often hand in hand. The player didn’t announce the magic phrase to succeed this the encounter becomes inevitable.

 

[Ovi]

Since there was no chance of avoiding the encounter anyway, then isn’t it basically railroading? The two are very often hand in hand. The player didn’t announce the magic phrase to succeed this the encounter becomes inevitable.

An MMI structure of authority really has to be in place to even enable railroading.

 

[Manbearcat]

Not for nothing but I’ve GMed @hawkeyefan in a few different games.

He’s absolutely bang-on as a player; extremely considerate and conscientious when it comes to all the other participants while simultaneously locked into making the inputs, outputs, and process of play as good as it can be.

Any assessment of him as anything other than that as a player (and that includes assessment of the lens through which he views play excerpts he participates in) is a poor reflection on whomever is making the observation, I can tell you that.

 

[tetrasodium]

Elements who shouldn’t be capable of knowing? The characters? The players? Both?

Sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both.

• One: I've had groups with phenomenal players I can say "xyz is the state of things but you don't know" & know they would fork that off into [player only knowledge]... That is exceedingly rare & even still depends on what specifically along with the thing they are doing that made the revelation relevant.
• Both: In my current game there is a war in a neighboring kingdom & the players have reason to solve a resource shortfall caused by a "collapsed" mine. I know who collapsed it, why they collapsed it, & where they are. The players have even met them & known about them for months of real world time (like five or six months!) but never had reason to go there. Nothing would be gained from skipping over the two factions they are about to collide with in order to jump on henchmen grade help kinda sorta related by proxy to one of those two. Telling them would also exhibit signs of gross incompetence of the culprits & result in a mindless slaughter
• The other: For lack of a better term, the "quest" in 209 was given to the players by a literal dragon in goblin form posing as a lawyer.. in eberron. The lawyer was modeled after Jimmy Mcgill from breaking bad & kept u[ the charade until an effort at intimidating him into giving information resulted in a single blink of all four eyelids->"make a wisdom save"->"Yeaaa goblins don't have nictitating membranes... you all realize that was a bad idea [insert description]"

It’s a game. There are players. If you want the players to make choices that matter, then you have to give them the chance to do so.

They absolutely have the chance. The key is that "winning right now" is not the start & end of "choices that matter"... a choice like "my character doesn't want to get involved" or "lets go somewhere else the NPCs are nice to us [the party was banished & the town knew it]" are almost never going to be a choice that matters at anything but sabotaging the game.

The GM is free to handle the situation however he likes. He can do so in a way that the players are aware, or he can do so in a way that they’re not.

Correct. Using the example from "both" above, the route I expected to involve them didn't happen for various reasons (vacations & filler) & the route that the players are stumbling into now is one that was completely unplanned. They are not aware of either

Why do that? Why keep stuff like that from the players?

Had the players known all the connections their PCs have no reason to know be aware of or even understand they would have made some simple investigations & slaughtered them with no plot or story just because, now they stumbled into the iceberg beneath the surface long after I assumed it was a thing never to be seen. Since the powers that be & such are mapped & linked out in something similar to the dfrpg city sheets the growing collection of seemingly unrelated "stuff" accrues into a hidden glacier for the players to go wild in as they stumble in & start going deeper. That won't happen if everything is a rather one or two dimensional collection of random & unrelated foes for the PC's to neatly wrap up after learning everything knowable.

Just as the PCs have been growing in power resources & connections so too have the NPCs & powers that be making waves in the world. Some of those NPCs are barely or completely unaware of the PCs while others are very much aware but not in a position to drop everything & pointlessly harass the PCs.. Still others very much wish they could drop everything to stomp them but can't risk the losses that would come from dropping everything. When the PC's do stuff that changes the power balance it causes some groups to react by doing other stuff & new groups to enter the picture somewhere to fill the void. The group has been playing since like december 2021 with these PCs & are only now hitting level 7-8ish. Barring another icepick I expect the campaign has another five or so levels worth of stuff just in what they already have under the surface. That's only possible because the players did not know & had no reason to even suspect that there were things they didn't know.

 

[Hussar]

Show me the bit in the rules of chess where it talks about the freedom of the DM to interpret rules. Or the bit from Axis & Allies about how roleplaying works. Or the bit in WoW that says the DM can let you try anything. Or the part in Monopoly about making a character.

If you choose to play RPGs like boardgames, that's your prerogative. But it's more than a bit odd that you're claiming, apparently with a straight face, that you think RPGs function exactly the same as games without a referee.

Not quite.

My point is that games teach players to expect to know the repercussions of decisions. Rpgs for all their differences are still games. And large swaths of play are very strongly governed by rules that tables expect to be followed. If a dm turns a hit into a miss, most people would have pretty strong opinions about that.

Additionally lots of rpgs allow for stronger player declarations. If the player succeeds on something the expectation of the game is that the gm will never subvert that success.

One of the best dm tips I ever read was in an old module. I cannot remember which one now. But the advice was, “so long as the players come up with something that resembles a plan, it succeeds”.

Granted that’s paraphrasing from memory.

But it has been the guiding principle in games I run for a very long time and I thing the games are better for it.

 

[pemerton]

As I understand it, MCS basically boils down to the mentality of “my character is the most important thing in this world/game, and therefore everything else should bend to my whims and happen as I want it to” sometimes this goes up to and even includes other player’s characters.

Given that RPGing is all about playing a character in a shared fiction, the idea that the player characters are - from the point of view of the audience of that fiction - the most important things in the fiction hardly seems out of bounds.

How that importance plays out is a further question - there are big differences between (say) the Dragonlance modules, a Fate scenario, and Burning Wheel.

 

[FrogReaver]

I thibk Mother May I and Railroading have some things in common for sure. Main Character Syndrome is something else, I think, and seems to have been evoked in this thread as more of a “oh yeah, well we can do that, too” kind of thing.

Let me be more clear.

No one here has a problem with the label railroad.
No one here has stated a problem with the label Main Character Syndrome.
Nearly everyone here has stated there's no problem with the label Mother May I when used a few particular ways.

It's only for a particular use of the label Mother May I that people have complained about. Why do you think that is?

Because I used the ability in an attempt to avoid the fight. And then that didn’t happen. And before @overgeeked or anyone else says that I’m just a sore sport or an unreasonable player, I’ll add that it’s not that my move didn’t work. It’s that it seemingly worked, but then the result was the same as if it hadn’t, with no other chance to try and avoid the fight. No indication it wouldn’t be enough, no chance to make rolls or gather new information.

Me: Mother May I avoid the battle with the Duke’s men?

GM: Nope!

IMO, the DM granted success of your ability. The Rustic Hospitality feature of the Folk Hero background states people will shield you from the law or anyone searching for you, though they will not risk their lives. You were shielded for enough time to benefit from a long rest - at least 8 hours. During which time the DM determined that off screen some towns people were threatened and thus eventually gave you up - playing into the 'will not risk their lives for you' aspect of the ability.

Are you saying the DM should have had towns folk risk their lives for you (i don't think you are)? Are you saying the DM shouldn't have had the Duke's team threaten town members at all (i don't think you are)? Are you saying town members should have been threatened in such a way that you could have intervened (i don't think you are)? So what part here do you think should have been different?

IMO, at some point the scene had to transition from you resting in the common folks home to something else. The current complaint really seems to be two fold 1) you believe the rustic hospitality feature should have done more than giving you a long rest and 2) you believe the DM railroaded the encounter onto your group during the transition scene.

I don't really agree with either of those, though I am a bit more sympathetic to (2).

 

[pemerton]

Sure but in this case there doesn’t really seem to be any way that you or your character would know those consequences would result from taking that action, if your character wouldn’t of reasonably known that that would result why should you of been told that it would happen? So that you could choose not to seek shelter in the barn and instead done something else?

You write this as if the fact that those consequences would result is some objective thing, outside anyone's control. But it's not. It's the GM making some stuff up. As @hawkeyfan said, the GM . . .

had an idea about the way things should go, and so that’s how they went. His conception of the fiction won out.

And hawkeyefan's GM was quite open about that:

When I talked to the GM afterward, he said he thought it would be cool to have a scene like the end of “Young Guns” where the heroes are trapped in a burning farmhouse surrounded by enemies.

It's possible to play RPGs in which the balance of authority over how the fiction unfolds is different from what hawkeyefan has described.

 

[FrogReaver]

Since there was no chance of avoiding the encounter anyway, then isn’t it basically railroading? The two are very often hand in hand. The player didn’t announce the magic phrase to succeed this the encounter becomes inevitable.

In this situation we don't know if there was or wasn't a chance to avoid it some other way. All we know is that the rustic hospitality feature followed by a long rest and a watch was not enough. Perhaps if they had spent those 8 hours doing something else?