D&D General How much control do DMs need?

[AbdulAlhazred]

With regard to the Dalluhn manuscript, it's absolutely not a secret; even beyond his blog, Peterson was talking about it in such diverse publications as the second issue of the now-defunct Gygax Magazine (pg. 20-21, 65).

But as noted before, that's a far and away different cry from Arneson's original notes to Gary Gygax. As the PDF you linked to noted (p. 28), "Moreover, since the Manuscript shows clear signs of collaboration in typing and artwork, it could not be the work of a sole fan, but must instead be the work of a team."

Arneson's notes, by contrast, are the work of Arneson himself, presumably with little-to-no additions from the rest of the "Blackmoor Bunch" (as his gaming group is now called), though I'm sure they inspired Arneson to come up with new rules and responses to their activities. Contemporary (i.e. written) presentations of Blackmoor as it was being played before 1974, however, remain elusive, and so any presentation of the original notes that Dave sent to Gary would be a huge find for D&D historians, amateur and professional alike.

OK, so sue me, I have not described it in exactly the terminology that is most favored by textual analysis. Its certainly material, much of which was produced by Dave, and reading through Peterson's paper, its unclear exactly who composed and edited it, or for exactly what purpose, but several people are quoted as saying it "Isn't Gary's, its Dave's work." (to paraphrase). But again, this is all rather beside the point, which was that these exchanges are clearly documented as taking place, and involving HUNDREDS OF PAGES of what can only be described as, rules! For about the 5th time, I don't expect anyone to conclude from this that Dave or Gary were interested in producing a complete compendium of all possible rules, or that they thought something like that would even be wise or useful to have. Just that their positions can hardly be described as being in the hard rules minimalist camp in anything like the sense of some contemporary commentators.

 

[overgeeked]

Strange thread.

To address the question in the title. How much control do DMs need? As much as it takes to run the game.

But the thing about power, hierarchy, control, etc that's often skipped over in regards to social situations is that the referee's power comes from the consent of the players. If the players refuse to cooperate, that's the end of the referee's power. At that point all they can do is exert social pressure or stop running the game. They have zero real power to force the players to do anything. Either the players cooperate, or there's no game. Likewise, the referee can refuse to cooperate...and that's the end of the game. Either the referee runs the game, or there's no game.

It literally doesn't matter what the books or rules say. Either the players go along, giving the referee the power to run the game or the players refuse, withholding that power from the referee, thereby making it impossible for them to run the game. At no point does, and it's not actually possible for, the rules in the books to have power over the players at the table. The referee and players at the table have to consent to use and abide by them. That's what makes the rules "binding", in as much as they actually are binding. We consent to follow these rules, therefore they have power...because we decide to give them that power. We agree to give the rules authority. (And we acknowledge that we'll inevitably argue endlessly about what the rules actually mean when they're poorly written.)

This is why it's possible to house rule things and cheat in RPGs. They're not computer programs executed by the meat-computer of the referee's brain. They're social constructs we consent to participate in and be bound by...only in so far as we consent to be bound by them. The referee decides to change the rules and inform the players, i.e. house rule the game. The players can object or dissent, but ultimately their only choice is to consent or leave. If the referee is adamant, that's that. The players might be able to talk to, argue with, beg, cajole, etc or they might not. Depends on the referee and players. The player(s) decide to "accidentally" roll too many dice, roll the wrong die, do the math wrong, etc but still report good results. The referee can only point to the social contract of the agreed upon rules, but the books have no actual power to prevent anything. If either side feels the other has violated the social contract, the social construct of the game breaks down. But at literally no point do the rules in the book (or those you've agreed to) have the power to stop, prevent, etc any of this. The rules have literally only the power the referee and players give them...and only as long as they consent to.

All RPGs are, by definition, high trust games. You trust the people around the table to follow the rules you've all agreed to, no matter how light, heavy, mechanistic, or principle based. Without that trust, it's impossible to play. So people who've never played FKR games fretting about how they can't trust the referee "with that kind of power" is more than a bit paradoxical. You are required to have an incredibly high level of trust in your referee to play every RPG already. You trust the referee with an endless string of things, but having slightly more control over the mechanics of the game is a line too far. It's honestly weird.

The more I read and play FKR games, the more they resemble PbtA games without specified moves or advancement. You generally have a simple resolution mechanic followed by clearly stated principles and the referee runs the game based on those principles. Advancement is almost always diegetic. It takes about as much trust to play in an FKR game as it does to trust a D&D 5E DM with deciding what gives dis/advantage.

The rules cannot protect you from a bad referee or bad players. Because, again, the participants can always ignore the rules. Your only real recourse as a participant is to withdraw your consent. The social contract is all about deciding these things up front. But even with the social contract, tables still run into problems all the time.

 

[Lanefan]

Well, I'm not sure that narrative and 'incomplete rules' are synonymous. There are a wide variety of games falling under this rubric. Some, like Burning Wheel, have very elaborate and complex rules! Played in a certain way, 4th Edition D&D is a quite narrative game, and yet it has quite detailed rules for a lot of things (though I admit, some of those are in tension with narrative play at times). I agree that narrative games tend to be more concerned with outcomes than with situation and process. So the Fate example where falling could generate a number of mechanical outcomes is true, the outcome "you suffered a falling injury" is more significant than the idea that the fall was a certain distance, which would be the overriding concern in D&D. It isn't that the game is incomplete, it is that the game is about "how does a character cope with a broken arm?" vs "you are now short some hit points, what do you do about it?" This is also why things like Magic are likely to be less codified in many narrative games. D&D can simply have 'cure light wounds', whatever the injury was, its fixed now. Fate might be coupled with a magic system where the characters need to do a ritual, with some sort of story cost, to heal a broken arm, and maybe they choose not to! Casting CLW is pretty much just SoP, if you're choosing not to its merely a resource allocation decision. One game is not 'more complete' than the other, it is just focused on a DIFFERENT THING.

So, perhaps summed up as a question of degree of codification of abstraction, then? For example D&D puts hard numeric values to various aspects of the abstract (e.g. hit points, spell slots, etc.) while it appears what you're describing eschews this codification.

The direct result of this is a variance in degree of precision of abstraction, which is a double-edged sword: it gives the players more latitude to describe (for example) what their PCs' injuries are and how those injuries affect said PCs, while at the same time removing the numeric precision that can help a player make informed decisions in play (e.g. I've only got two 1st-level spell slots left, maybe I'll hold off on casting that Spider Climb spell for now).

Well, as certain people have argued endlessly here, rules tend to bind game participants, though they are not literally obligated to follow them. So, isn't it likely that, in a D&D game, where the 30' fall killed the fighter, that the almost trivial nature of the incident and interest in the fighter's ongoing story arc are of no consequence in this decision? While in a Fate game, the 'same' character might suffer an injury which then bears on some other element of their story arc, but an NPC might crash to the bottom of the pit and lie stone cold dead as a matter of course.

As without numeric codification there's no way of knowing whether NPCs and PCs are being treated the same in/by the fiction as reflected by the mechanics, you can get away with this. Not a feature, in my eyes.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

For this reason, it is better to speak in terms of influences and likelihoods. So while there may be no such thing as a certainty of GM-power, there is such a thing as a greater likelihood of GM-power in virtue of some context and preconditions.

It is better to speak of how people represent their play, and what they actually do. Maybe you're trying to get at this, but in terms of 'probability' and such, I think the problem there is we don't have that sort of quantification of activities like TTRPG play, and there are considerable issues involved in even attempting to generate such data (IE much of the behavior is subjective, see the MANY recent retractions of papers on animal behavior stemming from such issues).

To me, the view that play is of no great consequence is a relic of outdated cultural conceptions. Read for example Huizinga and onward.

I think we are using the word 'consequence' in very different ways here. Play may well be a thing of great consequence in terms of human society, but its weight in the general course of things in our individual lives, the specific activity of playing a given game, is not something we generally weigh that heavily. Going to work everyday and interacting with my colleagues is heavy stuff, I have to ALWAYS get that right, and if I promise to produce some work, I know there will be consequences if I don't. OTOH I can quite easily take it or leave it when it comes to some rules question in a game I play for entertainment on Sunday Afternoons.

 

[Lanefan]

You little slippery weasel, are you going to address substance of what I said or not, Snarky Poo. S**t or get off the pot. You jumped to a conclusion about what I said,

As did I; and I too was looking forward to seeing what material you had that - from the sound of it - others did not.

Odd coincidence that this arises in a thread that has embedded within it an ongoing side-discussion on promises...

 

[Lanefan]

... the meat-computer of the referee's brain....

Apropos of nothing else, that line is so going to show up in the next song lyrics I write!

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Strange thread.

Oh yeah. But I think it was Malthaus who first remarked that there is a certain inevitability to some things.

The more I read and play FKR games, the more they resemble PbtA games without specified moves or advancement. You generally have a simple resolution mechanic followed by clearly stated principles and the referee runs the game based on those principles. Advancement is almost always diegetic. It takes about as much trust to play in an FKR game as it does to trust a D&D 5E DM with deciding what gives dis/advantage.

The rules cannot protect you from a bad referee or bad players. Because, again, the participants can always ignore the rules. Your only real recourse as a player is to withdraw your consent. The social contract is all about deciding these things up front. But even with the social contract, tables still run into problems all the time.

Back in 2021, I had a thread here-

D&D General - D&D's Evolution: Rulings, Rules, and "System Matters"

Late last night, I ran across an interesting and excellent post by @Malmuria which helped crystalize some thoughts I had been having recently about D&D's evolution. Just to make this clear- you can blame Malmuria for this short essay. Repeat- you can blame Malmuria. Unless you really like what...

www.enworld.org

I was noodling around at the time with the idea that fundamentally, rules-lite games (like FKR) and games that came from a more story-now tradition were in many ways, fundamentally getting to the same point.

It's something I've thought about since originally messing around with Cthulhu Dark-

http://catchyourhare.com/files/Cthulhu%20Dark.pdf

In looking at this very basic ruleset, I kept going to the same two issues.


First, there was the idea that this simple ruleset could be simple because it assumed a shared fiction. This is the same idea that you see in both FKR games (playing the world) as well as PbTA/FiTD game (explicit and narrow scopes).

Second, there was the section called unanswered questions-

Who decides when to roll Insanity? Who decides when it’s interesting to know how well you do something? Who decides when something disturbs your PC? Who decides whether you might fail? Decide the answers with your group. Make reasonable assumptions. For example, some groups will let the Keeper decide everything. Others will share the decisions. These rules are designed to play prewritten scenarios, run by a Keeper. If you try improvising scenarios or playing without a Keeper, let me know.

That, right there, is it. Do you need to have a central authority? What does the central authority decide, if anything? Is there prep, or is it improvised? At a certain abstract level, it doesn't matter.

 

[Aldarc]

I disagree, in that I think Rule 0 very much does include hacking and kitbashing. Hacks and kitbashes are really nothing more than discretionary GM rulings writ larger and deeper into the system, and (usually) done up front before play begins rather than on the fly at the table.

Rule 0 can be nearly anything and everything when DMs move the goal posts of the rule so permissively.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This is the premise I've been missing. If folks are operating under this sort of sentiment, a lot of posts in this thread make more sense.

Unfortunately, it does mean that there's really not much else I can say in regards to this perspective, other than that has not been my experience in many areas of life, including TTRPGs. It's certainly not how I behave. Even entirely self-enforced social conventions have a great deal of force to them. Maybe I have just been fortunate in who I play games with. Regardless, I'm inclined to push back on the likelihood/universality of that assumption, though, obviously, it's a thing neither of us can satisfyingly prove.

WTF? Seriously? I mean, look, I don't know what the agenda is that makes you want to try to cast me as some sort of moral leper or whatever because I admit that I don't find the moral strictures of things happening around the game table to be of the greatest consequence. Its just how it is. You, me, nobody else who's a well-balanced person is going to consider some agreement they made about how to play a game to be THAT CRITICAL. Sure, if I say 'X', then generally speaking I do X, and I'll probably be pretty reliable about it too. But if I find that X is onerous, and it involves some gaming, then chances are I'm going to consider not doing X. I may also consider whomever else I'm playing with and weigh all the different factors. I'll also, generally speaking unless there's some impediment to that, be up front about things. Frankly I've always found that the EVEN MORE important central question is whether you're open with yourself about what your priorities are, what you actually do, and who you are. A lot of people in this world PRETEND a lot of things. Few people are totally honest with themselves, let alone anyone else. I at least aspire to be.

 

[Umbran]

You little slippery weasel, are you going to address substance of what I said or not, Snarky Poo. S**t or get off the pot. You jumped to a conclusion about what I said, perhaps that's attributable to how I put it, but if you cannot address the POINT OF THE STATEMENT, after you've made all these insulting and dismissive remarks to me, then maybe you should just go away? Eh? In fact, that's it. You are now gone, congratulations, you're the ONE ENTIRE PERSON on EnWorld that I have ever put on ignore in 14 years of posting. Good riddance.

Mod note:
You have apparently allowed your temper to get the best of you. You're done in this discussion.