D&D General How much control do DMs need?

[AbdulAlhazred]

@Umbran Good point - it reminds me that the most popular video game of all time (aside from Tetris and Solitaire, I suppose) is Minecraft, another game where you could argue that all of the design work is really done by the player, using the tools supplied by the game. It is much more prescriptive than D&D in the sense that your potential actions are much more limited, but the goals are entirely in the hands of the player.

This is going to get even more philosophical, but where is the line (if any) between game and art? And is that relevant to this discussion?

I would argue Minecraft is a better analog to Dungeon World than to, say, 5e. There's a very small set of moves you can make within a very open structure and what you focus on is employing them creatively and the results of that. 5e is more like Unity. It's got some good stuff that you can use. You still need to define how it is used, and the GM is a lot like a designer building the actual game on top of it.

But I would not read too much into that either...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I agree with you, but this is not necessarily contrary to @Umbran's point. I don't think that Gygax knew exactly what D&D was, at a theoretical level, even though he later spend quite a lot of time writing about it, and I think this ambiguity remains in the game to this day. In fact, I think much of the history of D&D the game is of designers and players (who are as you point out de facto designers) trying to nail down what it is. So I don't think their marketing is intentionally misleading, I think it comes down to different perspectives on what the game even is.

I once referred to it as a kind of half-assed game design, but I don't see this as necessarily a criticism. I just mean that its design is somewhat accidental and the incompleteness that it depends upon was originally just assumed as a necessity rather than an active design choice. There is obviously something in it that works really well to attract a lot of people, and although I do think there is something to the power of being first, marketing, etc., I also don't want to diminish the role of choice in the game's popularity. My default position is that most people are rational agents, so I tend to agree with @Oofta that the simple fact of the game's tenacious popularity suggests that it is doing something right.

Arneson was a genius of game design, and what he did was deliberate on several levels, maybe not all intentional. GM directed refereed play is straight out of Braunstein play, tracing back to FKS. I believe this type of social setup is deeply coded in the human psyche and thus is easily tapped.

The second reason for D&D's success is it's formulation of a core game agenda of incremental progression. It's level/class system is ideally designed to create engagement.

The fantasy genre it occupies is also very flexible and most easily lets the participants imagine a wide variety of elements without a lot of hard limits.

This all make it a strong offering, culturally, and THEN it was first too! I don't think Traveller would have been dominant like D&D if it came first, nor RQ. Frankly I think Arneson had a unique set of skills and experience and if he had not created the game none of Marc Miller etc would ever have even considered the idea.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well, analyzing authorial intent, which is a significant part of what I do for a living, is much more in my wheelhouse than game design specifically, which is a passionate, life-long interest (and I do have one published game!) but something I know far less about at a theoretical level than many folks in this thread, such as you.

The problem of authorship in RPG design strikes me as fairly unique; I am trying to think of close analogies. On the one hand, pure game design is a mathematical problem, with its own kind of aesthetic, on the other you have the storytelling elements. The former has an identifiable author, but the latter farms out authorship in a variety of ways. I guess this whole thread was started by my interest in increasing player authorship in my D&D games.

The thread is definitely interesting, thx. Honestly, IMHO the 'mathy' aspect of RPG design is vastly overblown. I find it relatively trivial compared with the overall 'process of play' and fitting stuff together to make it all coherent.

 

[Clint_L]

Arneson was a genius of game design, and what he did was deliberate on several levels, maybe not all intentional. GM directed refereed play is straight out of Braunstein play, tracing back to FKS. I believe this type of social setup is deeply coded in the human psyche and thus is easily tapped.

The second reason for D&D's success is it's formulation of a core game agenda of incremental progression. It's level/class system is ideally designed to create engagement.

The fantasy genre it occupies is also very flexible and most easily lets the participants imagine a wide variety of elements without a lot of hard limits.

This all make it a strong offering, culturally, and THEN it was first too! I don't think Traveller would have been dominant like D&D if it came first, nor RQ. Frankly I think Arneson had a unique set of skills and experience and if he had not created the game none of Marc Miller etc would ever have even considered the idea.

From what I've read, Arneson wasn't the first to come up with the idea of evolving the war-game referee into more of an active storytelling; I believe that was another member of his group when they were playing a nautical game? I'll have to look it up again. I don't know that I would be comfortable calling Arneson a genius of game design, because he wasn't very productive. He did have the concept of a dungeon crawl and, crucially, organized character progression, which are cornerstones of the initial game, but I think most of his written contribution was maybe a dozen pages of notes? To be honest, I find it difficult ascribing credit to the birth of D&D because there were a lot of folks influencing each other.

 

[Oofta]

But that's much more like some note the GM wrote down to explain a way to apply the general rule than anything else. At play time the player still rolls and some new things appear in the fiction. In D&D the GM can make up an entire new subsystem. They MUST make a rule for when to let the players roll dice, etc. as the game itself only suggests.

So maybe you're using terms that are just going over my head, but I disagree that the DM must make rules for when to let the players roll dice. The books are quite clear on this and give a fair amount of guidance (even if I hope the 2024 edition adds and clarifies). There are different options presented, but it basically comes down to dice are rolled when there's uncertainty. There are also guidelines on what the DC should be based on difficulty.

I will agree that the DM has to make judgement calls on difficulty of achieving a task that varies from automatic to dang near impossible. But that's not "inventing" anything. This is a game of imagination and make believe, the only reality is the reality that the DM and players make so someone has to make a judgement call. I'm always reminded of D&D 3.5 and it's climb wall DC chart that gave difficulties for different types of wall. But the thing is, the DM still had to decide what kind of wall it was to use the chart, it just offered the illusion of impartiality.

Sometimes I feel like people are talking about a different game then the one I play.

 

[Oofta]

From what I've read, Arneson wasn't the first to come up with the idea of evolving the war-game referee into more of an active storytelling; I believe that was another member of his group when they were playing a nautical game? I'll have to look it up again. I don't know that I would be comfortable calling Arneson a genius of game design, because he wasn't very productive. He did have the concept of a dungeon crawl and, crucially, organized character progression, which are cornerstones of the initial game, but I think most of his written contribution was maybe a dozen pages of notes? To be honest, I find it difficult ascribing credit to the birth of D&D because there were a lot of folks influencing each other.

Kind of like Edison being credited with creating the lightbulb. He refined and popularized it, but he hardly invented it.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Personally, I really like TTRPGs that are more like like engines or systems, because you can play mroe games with each one. If every game of X were the same to the extent that I would either like all of them, or none of them (which I'm not sure is true of the systems its being discussed about) then I'd be done after the first time we played it. Meanwhile, games that are essentially big toolsets for putting together different kinds of games let me explore more creatively when I design things in them, and experience a lot of different things playing them. Which to loop back to the thread topic-- I think is a big part of how much power the GM ought to have, they should be able to lend the game (as opposed to the system) creative direction, a heading but not necessarily a path.

 

[clearstream]

You CAN play without specific move rules! Player declares action, rolls dice, results are described by either GM or player, possibly with complications, and so on. A lot more will fall to the participants to nail down, but it is a functional process that can actually be practiced! I would totally agree that moves, harm, etc are really valuable additions you don't want to go without, but you CAN.

I'm not quite following how this would be more constrained than ability checks in 5e? Bearing in mind that I'm always thinking of the whole core game text.

The move needs to say what counts as doing it, and what to drive back to fiction. Perhaps you just mean that one could use the basic dice method for FKR / rules-light play? Which I'd agree with. There are FKR games that do more or less exactly that.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Sometimes I feel like people are talking about a different game then the one I play.

A small price to pay for DM empowerment!

 

[Oofta]

A small price to pay for DM empowerment!