D&D General How much control do DMs need?

[Oofta]

I don't think it is vastly different. There's one clear difference in that we really deal much more in intent in games like DW (although DW itself doesn't quite put it that way). So, in 5e you either jump a sufficient distance to get across the chasm (and what that distance is has some rule associated with it). If you don't get across, well, you presumably fell into the chasm, though the GM might follow some of the suggestions in the DMG and have you clinging to the edge or whatever. In Dungeon World the reasoning is more like; you rolled a 7, clearly you are on the other side, but at the same time, not all is well. Its a bit more natural, but what about 6-? The GM could have you fall in, or the GM could even think about what you wanted to achieve, which was perhaps to chase after the bat which just stole your last sandwich. 6- you leap across, but you had to really back up and get a huge running start, by then the bat had disappeared into the darkness, looks like your sandwich is probably gone for good! You got across, but failed your goal. D&D just has no mechanism for dealing with that, but DW does. This is because its mechanics relate to the narrative and the character's intent and actions vs relating more to some imagined setting details.

So, while they are both dealing with a similar situation, the range of possible outcomes and impact on the following fictional position are rather different.

The DMG discusses success at a cost and degrees of failure, which is the same thing DW does. You won't get any disagreement from me that the concept could be expanded on discussed further, we'll have to see what they do with the 2024 edition.

 

[Clint_L]

I think a lot of games do a much better job than D&D of helping a DM create an adventure. In fact, I think the focus of the revamped DMG should be on helping DM's create better adventures.

For instance, Fiasco (where every player is a co-equal GM) is pretty much all about the tools for creating neo-noir adventure. That's basically all the game is - story beats and instructions on how to organize them to facilitate a cohesive and fun experience. Dread does a much better job than D&D of instructing players in how to create characters with depth so that better role-play can happen. Monsterhearts assumes a lot of specific story details up front (i.e. John Hughes-style high school but with monsters and so on), specific instruction on how to design sessions (i.e. The Party, The Fight, The Disappearance for session 1) and adventure beats are integrated into gameplay via mechanics like strings and conditions. Then the seasons mechanic gives clear structure to a campaign.

A lot of 3PP have built 5e materials to cover this gap in D&D (Lazy DM series, etc.), but I am surprised that WotC prefer to leave adventure design so vague. Maybe it's to encourage players to just buy their canned adventures.

 

[pemerton]

I have no idea why they think their games are any more referential of actual Free Kriegsspiel than any other RPG though.

Yeah, this puzzles me too.

A Free Kriegsspiel referee, as I understand it, has actual expertise in a particular technical endeavour (military logistics and military operations) which is then deployed to adjudicate others imagined efforts at those things. For me, the closest analogy is this: I can judge a moot, and I can coach moot teams, at least in a few fields of law. But I couldn't be a Free Kriegsspiel referee!

I won't say NOBODY ever masters D&D 'cold'

I don't know about masters - when I learned D&D I had read (but not been able to operationalise) the Classic Traveller Books 1 to 3 (1977 version) and had played Warlock of Firetop Mountain (the Fighting Fantasy Gamebook). The book that I learned D&D from was Moldvay Basic.

I don't know if I could have learned direct from the AD&D books - I didn't read them until a year or more later, and when I did read them it was very much through the Moldvay lens.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Skill challenges in 4E had a set number of successes and a set number of failures. In addition, the DM was told to let people know what the appropriate skills were. There was no way in 4E, if you were following things strictly, to bypass the challenge or to get more than 1 success with clever play.

You might want to reread the SC rules... Yes, they do tell the GM to decide what the 'primary' and 'secondary' skills are. OTOH you are allowed to employ ANY skill that fictionally makes sense, and you can employ other things besides skills, powers, rituals, items, etc. The GM can also grant multiple successes (this is likely to be rare, but the option exists). IMHO the whole 'primary and secondary' thing was a bit of a boondoggle. I think it is meant to kind of explicate the framing, but certainly the GM should carefully consider revisiting those designations if the PC's approach the challenge in a radically different way as you describe here. But even with the most basic DMG1 definition, you can still use different skills. The GM is told they 'probably' can only be used once, might require hard DCs, etc. but these are all guidelines.

Let's take the example of getting a message to some important person that was given a while back. There are obstacles in the way and various ways of avoiding those obstacles. You can ignore the monster in the way and try to take an alternate route, you can bluff the monsters, you can bull rush through, whatever. The details don't really matter (and I'm probably f*ing up details, it's been a while). The point is that you have to get 5 successes before 3 failures using acrobatics, athletics, bluff.

But then one of the PCs takes the very important note and bypasses the obstacles completely and hands the note to the target. Should be challenge complete, right? But at most it's one success because they used a resource instead of making an ability check. The party can still fail because following the rules you still have to get 5 successes and you only have 1.

Well, OK, so MAYBE there's a case where its just overwhelmingly obvious that the player found a tactic that basically negates the whole challenge. There's a small section on that in DMG1, it just basically says "hey! Great! Give 'em the XP, they deserve it!" OTOH I kind of suspect in 95% of cases the GM can reasonably interpret things as the character gets SOME advantage that is short of bypassing the entire challenge. Finally, how common is this? I think both of us have GMed for a LONG time. I can pretty much suss out challenges and approaches. High level parties can make that tougher, perhaps, but I think either of us can manage to craft something that will require the party to keep rolling MOST of the time.

It's that kind of set structure that I dislike. It was consistent and spelled out in great detail, I understand why they did it. But I did not find it enjoyable. Not only were people thinking not in terms of the fictional narrative because they're thinking "how can I convince the DM that I'm really use my arcana skill to succeed because that's my highest bonus", the 5 successes before 3 failures felt artificial. What kind of failure? Why is the failure not just a setback that can be countered? I want my players to solve based on the best effort of the PCs, using knowledge and skills the PCs have. If they figure out a way to overcome the challenge in a way I didn't expect, they shouldn't be penalized, that kind of thinking should be encouraged.

I mean, again, sometimes you can remove a failure. I think the main problem most people had with SCs is that they created these very static kind of 'puzzle scenarios' where most of the challenge is poking at some situation and trying to get something to happen. Those were not really well thought out, and DMG1 has some examples that basically ARE exactly that (the miserable Duke Convincing one is a poster child for this). My answer there was always to widen the scope. So instead of just browbeating the Duke, maybe you also have to thwart the evil suitor for the daughter, uncover the malicious plan of the councilor, unmask the assassin, etc. Or maybe the challenge includes things like research and scouting to ascertain facts that will make your argument. Thus instead of some blah scene full of attempts to use Diplomacy on the Duke where all that changes is "he doubts you a bit less now" or something silly, instead there's the scene with the painting of the Duke's ancestor, the duel between the fighter and the evil suitor, etc.

And I don't know why anything would be 'penalized' in SCs. As I say, the whole notion of primary and secondary skills I look at a bit askance. I think its probably useful from a DESIGN perspective, I'm not sure its something that should be player facing.

Or, of course, I'm just totally missing what you're asking.

I don't know about that. I think it can be a productive discussion. The other pretty decent thing that I find with SCs is that they regulate the GM! So, once I've set a complexity (number of successes required basically) then I'm bound to it. If the dice say you did what is needed to convince the Duke, by gosh I'm not really going to be able to make you keep rolling just because I now think it was too easy. Likewise I am going to think through what makes this worthy to be an encounter and do my due diligence on it (as I mentioned above, like adding various dimensions to the convince the duke scenario). This is most readily apparent in 'race' type situations where the PCs need to face a gauntlet or race a clock. In classic D&D we don't have a good way to know when the party has won (or lost)!

 

[Oofta]

I had great trouble with 5e in that regard. So, for example in our first campaign my character wanted to establish his own 'kingdom'. When he got to the crumbling castle in Phandelver, he immediately decreed he was now its lord by virtue of conquest (nobody disputed him on this). I kept at this, having him send materials, henchmen, guards, etc. to this castle, which the GM ruled was on the edge of civilization. Actually the GM was mostly helpful here, but 5e wasn't particularly. There's just no conceptual framework at all here to build on, beyond "make some ability checks". How many is enough, and what do they accomplish? In a Dungeon World game I would expect that this is less of a problem because, as long as I can describe my goals, I can make a move! Or at worst the GM can frame a more specific scene if she wants to and I can make moves in that. Granted, there's no specific number of these scenes/moves that are required to accomplish a specific thing. Even in DW the 'granularity' is pretty much up to the GM.

However, there is at least that set of pesky agenda and principles! So, as the DW GM she has a clear set of things to ask herself. Is this portraying the fantastic world? Is it filling the PC's life with adventure? Is it uncertain (IE do we need to play to find out what happens here)? And then She can use her principles, 'Ask questions, use the answers' seems like an obvious one. 'Think Dangerous' should produce some good results too. 'Be a fan of the characters', so let them try to do their stuff, just don't hand it on a platter. 'Think Offscreen' seems pretty useful, and goes along with the techniques of fronts and such (obviously something is going to threaten my castle rebuilding project!).

The 5e version kind of derailed, mostly just because these sorts of obvious guidelines weren't spelled out. My character got yanked away, the GM ruled that we were gone for years (why?) and everything was taken over by someone else in the meantime. It just didn't really make sense in any kind of narrative character-centered way. It was more like the GM was interested in running the setting, not the game or something. 5e has all this 'advice' but it isn't clearly focused on the actual nuts and bolts of play sometimes, and those are surprisingly little documented! This sort of thing might happen in DW, but it would have to be a result of snowballing consequences. Probably where the character would have a chance to prioritize and deal with it (or leave things on a golden platter for the GM to work with).

The main issue is that building a keep, running a fiefdom is a really different game than D&D's typical target. That, and it's difficult to handle it as a group activity. If you were to really do it justice and not just a couple of paragraphs, it would be it's own supplement. Not sure there's enough demand for that, especially when WOTC can just leave it to 3PP like Colville's Stronghold and Followers.

Having said that, the DM should have just had an offline discussion with you if they didn't want to deal with it. I would have handled it similar to any other downtime activity. Hopefully the 2024 edition will have more guidelines on how to set up unique downtime activities in a way that doesn't bog down the game for everyone else. Then again it's Dungeons and Dragons, not Keeps and Vassals.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm just not sure how any system can compensate for GM's weaknesses. Either you can weave a compelling narrative or you can't. In a DM-less game it's different of course, but even then I can only imagine a player without the proper skills could be detrimental to the game, even if not as much of course.

Story Now at least means I'm doing it all at this point in time, and using the inputs of all the other game participants in real time so to speak. If critical parts of the story were written last month, its harder to make it work RIGHT NOW. I mean, in our BitD game we explored the fiction somewhat outside of our play sessions, like one player would post some thought, or some downtime action, or a comment reminding us of some previous established clock or whatever. But a lot of things would simply come into being as we played. Now, I agree, if the GM is a nincompoop then BitD probably won't work. I'm not sure its less likely to work than D&D though, in general.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

My thought was to differentiate between adding, such as adding "roll one die if" or adding Position and Effect, and hacking... which I was picturing to be a change to what is there. In hindsight the distinction is tenuous.

OK, well, I'm willing to grant you that if I replaced the 'stress die' with some other way of reducing the dice pool, it might produce a pretty different game in important ways. Certainly if I added an entire detailed combat system onto the game, it might EFFECTIVELY make it a really different game, even if I didn't change the core rules. There's certainly some room for interpretation. I mean, is Stonetop an entirely new game, or some houserules on Dungeon World? Well, its published as a standalone game so I won't dispute 'entirely new game' on those grounds, but from a mechanical perspective its an arguable point, and its game play could be achieved using DW (which I think is exactly how it originally came to be).

 

[pemerton]

But it's still a judgement call on the part of the GM.

What is? (I don't know what your "it" is referring to.)

Upthread, you posed the following:

Someone upthread mentioned a game where the resolution to jumping a chasm is to roll 2d6 and it's predefined what happens. Except ... what if the chasm is so wide that it would practically take a miracle to jump? What if it should be easy, but don't trip over that root as you leap?​

Your phrase "Except . . . what if . . . ?" seemed clearly intended to pose a puzzle or problem for Dungeon World. But there is no puzzle or problem here. DW has clear procedures for resolving this, and they don't rely on "a judgement call on the part of the GM", as you are using this phrase.

There's a reason for that: every chasm, in DW, is narrated in terms of the threat or opportunity it provides to the characters as played by their players. So we already know, from the sequence of play that led up to narration of the chasm, whether a roll to jump over it is required (was the chasm narrated as a threat, or as an opportunity?) or even permitted (if a threat, was narration of the chasm a soft move or a hard move?). I've posted discussions of just this example in past threads that I think you've probably posted in, although in relation to AW rather than DW so imagining a player who declares that they jump the chasm on their motorcycle.

n D&D there are rules for how far you can jump, if you're exceeding the default auto-success distance it's an athletics check.

And this is precisely the difference from DW that underpins @loverdrive's point.

The GM decides how wide the cavern is; how difficult the Athletics check is; and what happens if the check is succeeded or is failed.

DW doesn't have a rule about how far anyone can jump. And doesn't resolve jumping by imagining how far someone can jump. More generally, DW doesn't work by having one person's conception of the fiction - ie the GM's - generate the bulk of the subsequent fiction. (What you call a "GM judgement call".) It works by way of an interplay of the narrative meaning of past narrations (opportunities, threats narrated as soft moves, threats and other unhappy consequences narrated as hard moves) and the salience, to play, of certain sorts of actions that the protagonists might perform ("if you do it, you do it").

Trying to suggest that these are similar processes of play strikes me as no more plausible than suggesting that backgammon and go have similar processes of play. I mean, both use round tokens on a roughly square board, but that's about it; in go there is no movement and no dice; both those things are fundamental to backgammon.

To work out what happens next in the shared fiction, 5e D&D uses GM framing and imagination, informed at the GM's discretion by dice rolls that are called for at the GM's discretion. DW uses a process based around an interplay of narrative trajectory and core salient activities of the protagonists in the fiction, with dice rolls having a fixed role to play in that process. Both games involve shared fiction with similar tropes, both games involve asymmetric participant functions, both games involve dice rolls, but that's about it.

Which game one prefers obviously is a matter of taste (I play heaps of backgammon but very little go). But it strikes me just as muddleheaded to suggest they are played in much the same way.

You may think that DW is straightforward and while I've never had an opportunity to play I have skimmed the rules a few times. It doesn't seem any better or worse than D&D, just different. I doubt I'd enjoy the game as much after a quick read-through, it's too prescriptive for me.

I don't know how I'm meant to reconcile this remark with your claim that both involve GM judgement calls. It makes me hard to work out what your point is. I mean, the general tone of your posts is one of disagreement with me, @AbdulAlhazred and @loverdrive but here you seem to be making a version of the same claim that we are making.

 

[Oofta]

You might want to reread the SC rules... Yes, they do tell the GM to decide what the 'primary' and 'secondary' skills are. OTOH you are allowed to employ ANY skill that fictionally makes sense, and you can employ other things besides skills, powers, rituals, items, etc. The GM can also grant multiple successes (this is likely to be rare, but the option exists). IMHO the whole 'primary and secondary' thing was a bit of a boondoggle. I think it is meant to kind of explicate the framing, but certainly the GM should carefully consider revisiting those designations if the PC's approach the challenge in a radically different way as you describe here. But even with the most basic DMG1 definition, you can still use different skills. The GM is told they 'probably' can only be used once, might require hard DCs, etc. but these are all guidelines.

Then it just means I'm thinking how I can convince the DM how to use my arcana skill to get a success. Doesn't really change anything.

Well, OK, so MAYBE there's a case where its just overwhelmingly obvious that the player found a tactic that basically negates the whole challenge. There's a small section on that in DMG1, it just basically says "hey! Great! Give 'em the XP, they deserve it!" OTOH I kind of suspect in 95% of cases the GM can reasonably interpret things as the character gets SOME advantage that is short of bypassing the entire challenge. Finally, how common is this? I think both of us have GMed for a LONG time. I can pretty much suss out challenges and approaches. High level parties can make that tougher, perhaps, but I think either of us can manage to craft something that will require the party to keep rolling MOST of the time.

That wasn't how it was run by other DMs. I ignored the official rules after a while for my home game, but most DMs were pretty strict in LFR games.

I mean, again, sometimes you can remove a failure. I think the main problem most people had with SCs is that they created these very static kind of 'puzzle scenarios' where most of the challenge is poking at some situation and trying to get something to happen. Those were not really well thought out, and DMG1 has some examples that basically ARE exactly that (the miserable Duke Convincing one is a poster child for this). My answer there was always to widen the scope. So instead of just browbeating the Duke, maybe you also have to thwart the evil suitor for the daughter, uncover the malicious plan of the councilor, unmask the assassin, etc. Or maybe the challenge includes things like research and scouting to ascertain facts that will make your argument. Thus instead of some blah scene full of attempts to use Diplomacy on the Duke where all that changes is "he doubts you a bit less now" or something silly, instead there's the scene with the painting of the Duke's ancestor, the duel between the fighter and the evil suitor, etc.

And I don't know why anything would be 'penalized' in SCs. As I say, the whole notion of primary and secondary skills I look at a bit askance. I think its probably useful from a DESIGN perspective, I'm not sure its something that should be player facing.

I don't know about that. I think it can be a productive discussion. The other pretty decent thing that I find with SCs is that they regulate the GM! So, once I've set a complexity (number of successes required basically) then I'm bound to it. If the dice say you did what is needed to convince the Duke, by gosh I'm not really going to be able to make you keep rolling just because I now think it was too easy. Likewise I am going to think through what makes this worthy to be an encounter and do my due diligence on it (as I mentioned above, like adding various dimensions to the convince the duke scenario). This is most readily apparent in 'race' type situations where the PCs need to face a gauntlet or race a clock. In classic D&D we don't have a good way to know when the party has won (or lost)!

I use variations of skill challenges now and then. It's just that they were too cut-and-dry when released. They also talk about complex challenges in the 5E DMG and I think it's something they could expand on in the future. Nowadays I just handle it differently with more degrees of failure along with success at a cost in addition to success, exceptional success and completely bypassing the challenge. I also try to take into account previous actions far more than what was typical for skill challenges while being more descriptive. If it's something that each individual needs to accomplish I'll give them some suggestions on what they can try or how they can assist a fellow PC.

Oh, and I can't look back at my old books. I was pretty much done with 4E when 5E came out but my wife was ready to burn the books as a sacrificial offering to Gygax's and Arneson's ghosts. I convinced her to give our books to the one guy in our group who still loved the edition.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think an interesting point here is that combat is the odd one out. Indeed D&D can be seen as having 2 modes. When we are talking about DM having complete control, we are mainly talking about the mode of play that happens outside combat. Once combat needs handling D&D try to take almost as tight control over the game as a board game. It is said that the golden rule trump any rule, but I would say if a DM is to significantly alter the combat mode, you are effectively playing a different game. Hence if the social contract is to play D&D the DM might not break the rules, but rather the social agreement by adjusting combat. And it is trough this social agreement the DM derives their power over the game.

I hence don't think there is anyone that has argued for weakening or further distributed the powers the DM has during the combat mode of the game? And given this extreme distinction I think it might be good to clarify which mode we are talking about when we are talking about the power dynamics of D&D, as they are drastically different in those two modes.

4e actually discusses this, but again I don't see any clear discussion of this point in 5e. Not that I am disagreeing with you that there are 2 modes. I think 4e actually states several modes, Exploration, Encounter, Discussion, Setup, and Passing Time. I'd kind of argue the last 2 are a bit less interesting in a game structure perspective for a D&D edition. Now, in my hack of 4e I identify 3 modes of play, Challenge, Interlude, and Combat, though Combat could be thought of as a type of Challenge. Interlude is 'free play', so it could subsume what 4e calls 'Discussion'.