D&D General How much control do DMs need?

[AnotherGuy]

It seems like a lot of games are far more character focused, which is fine. It's not that I don't care about character goals and whatnot, but they are secondary. But just as important, most of my players don't seem to care. I have a hard enough time getting them involved with downtime activities or fleshing out a backstory. I encourage people to speak out if they want to pursue some personal goal for their PC in my session 0 and I don't remember the last time anyone did.

In a long campaign such as the one I'm running the character development, goals and background are something I encourage and push for and my players seem to have an interest in pursuing that. Its very important to them and to me. I have even made it a factor for one of the methods in achieving a level.

In short campaigns my games would be exactly like the game @hawkeyefan is currently participating in.

 

[hawkeyefan]

As noted in my tossed-together example, the PCs had already adventured close to those hills. A player (or me as GM) post-hoc putting a Dwarven realm there retroactively changes the parameters of that adventuring. Thus, as GM I wouldn't do this but in your scenario am I allowed to stop a player from doing this?

In that example, why would you add something to a region that doesn’t make sense based on what’s already established? I’m not saying that contradictory things should be added to the setting.

What I’m saying is that (to lean on the examples you’ve provided) if you let one player craft the lore of the dwarves, and he decides they’re beardless and are clannish and somewhat barbaric, and then a later player wants to play a Tolkienesque dwarf, it’s bot a problem. You just add a more traditional dwarven culture somewhere else in the setting, where it would make sense to do so.

Not determining all this ahead of time need not cause contradictions. It also allows for player input on the world, which usually enhances engagement and also variety of content.

Your concerns about it aren’t accurate. Just as we don’t know of Rivendell or Fanghorn until they are introduced in the story, it doesn’t cause disruption. We can learn these things as we go.

Not so bonkers. If something unbalanced arises out of sheer random chance I'm fine with it. What I don't want it that it be player-selectable.

Yeah, that’s bonkers. The noble character is either an issue or it’s not. If it wasn’t an issue in your game where it was rolled, then it’s not an issue in my game where the player selected the noble background.

This is what doesn't make sense to me. I can be friends with a fellow player, respect them. But they can be running a PC I don't care for. As long as they aren't being completely disruptive and destroying the enjoyment of the game for the other players, why do I care? As a GM what could I do about it and why would I care?

There are certain social contracts we abide by when we get together to play games. Whether that game is D&D or Pandemic, we treat each other with respect. Beyond that? I can't even imagine. Which is why I keep thinking I'm missing something.

Well as part of a group activity, where the spotlight may shift to other characters from time to time, I prefer that people care about the characters. That they’re interesting enough that other folks don’t check out when play focuses on one character.

It usually also implies that some amount of creative effort had been made, which I appreciate and which possibly inspires others to contribute likewise.

It kind of creates a positive feedback loop where everyone cares, and then everyone tries, which makes everyone care more, which makes them try harder… and so on.

 

[hawkeyefan]

In a long campaign such as the one I'm running the character development, goals and background are something I encourage and push for and my players seem to have an interest in pursuing that. Its very important to them and to me. I have even made it a factor for one of the methods in achieving a level.

In short campaigns my games would be exactly like the game @hawkeyefan is currently participating in.

To clarify, I enjoy the characters in my Temple of Elemental Evil game just fine. They’re not that deep, but I dig them.

Other campaigns I’ve played have led to deeper characters that I tend to care more about.

It also depends on the situation though. One character I made for an AP game was pretty static, but I really enjoyed playing him.

 

[pemerton]

Picking up a bit more on this caring about others' contributions issue that @hawkeyefan has raised:

In 4e D&D, at least as I've experienced it, the characters are painted in fairly broad strokes. The game makes it easy to locate a character inside certain pretty clear fantasy tropes and themes - Dwarves who took their freedom from the giants; magical Elves (Eladrin) who travel between the lands of the Fey and the mortal world; incarnate immortals (Deva) who carry with them all their memories of their past lives; etc.

The creative contribution - again, as I've experienced it - tend to be not in the subtlety or nuance or beauty of the characters as such, but rather in the way the player orients their character towards those various tropes and themes and the conflicts and choices inherent in them.

So caring for others' characters means caring about and engaging with those choices.

This has implications for GMing methods. For instance, if the GM preps material, or establishes consequences of actions, which pre-empt or run over those player choices about how their PCs are oriented towards, and engaging with, those tropes and themes and so on, that is not really caring about and engaging with those player choices. It's disregarding them.

The 4e rulebooks don't have super-clear instructions about what GMing methods will work instead of those more typical ones. But luckily for me, when I was GMing 4e, I had read some other RPG rulebooks that did give me suitable advice (HeroWars/Quest and Burning Wheel being the mains ones).

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I haven't seen anyone say D&D must have a DM with total control. On the other hand, I've seen plenty of people that are incredibly dismissive of anything but cooperative games.

Have we been reading the same thread? People have explicitly said that without that Hobbesian central authority, exploration is impossible, consistency is essentially guaranteed to disappear and implicitly in short order, and participants will (not can, will) make illogical/impossible/ridiculous demands almost immediately.

If that isn't dismissive of the very idea of "cooperative games," what would be?

I can control what the player think or feel even less than the PCs. If there's antagonism in the group I'd probably step in, but that's more of a social group thing than anything to do with the game. I guess I just don't see what you're trying to get at. I don't care what people think, all I care is that they're civil and I ask that they are willing to be part of a team.

You don't want players who are enthusiastic about engaging with the other characters at the table? You don't see any value in cultivating interest and investment in characters other than your own? These things are the glue that holds a story together. Even in works with one clear, central protagonist (something not true of most TTRPGs), the bulk of a literary work's content is not the direct actions of that one character. Instead, it's the connections between that character and others. Consider how "Lancers" (in TVTropes terms) tend to be among the most popular characters in fiction, but the whole point of the Lancer is to be a foil to another character, meaning their popularity is necessarily rooted in also caring about some other character.

"Caring" doesn't have to be positive. It just means a given character's actions matter to you, that you're interested in what their eventual fate will be (and possibly would prefer a specific fate for them.) I absolutely always want to care about the other characters in the party, not because of my typical Team Dad tendencies, but because caring about them makes playing the game far more worth my time.

 

[soviet]

Being a fan of the other player characters also makes scenes that focus on or feature only one PC much more interesting. I'm watching something fun rather than sitting there bored. Splitting the party (or, allowing the party to split up naturally, or not even having a party as such) is a really effective technique that is unfairly maligned.

 

[pemerton]

Being a fan of the other player characters also makes scenes that focus on or feature only one PC much more interesting. I'm watching something fun rather than sitting there bored.

There's a flip-side to this: those characters need to be framed into scenes that are interesting, and will be fun to observe!

This might sound trivial when it's written down as in the preceding sentence, but the history and experience of RPGing tends to suggest that it's not. It takes some skill, and even moreso some appropriate techniques, to do this.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Being a fan of the other player characters also makes scenes that focus on or feature only one PC much more interesting. I'm watching something fun rather than sitting there bored. Splitting the party (or, allowing the party to split up naturally, or not even having a party as such) is a really effective technique that is unfairly maligned.

I think the maligning thereof is mostly rooted in (a) the abuse of the technique by those who didn't know or didn't care how to use it wisely, and (b) the fact that such splitting often does mean a much, much higher rate of failure than keeping the party together. It's not hard to see why players would dislike it, and why DMs would recommend against it, under those lights.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think the maligning thereof is mostly rooted in (a) the abuse of the technique by those who didn't know or didn't care how to use it wisely, and (b) the fact that such splitting often does mean a much, much higher rate of failure than keeping the party together. It's not hard to see why players would dislike it, and why DMs would recommend against it, under those lights.

Regarding your (b)… I think in a game with a more traditional approach to prep like 5e D&D, that can be an issue because everything is prepared for a party. Adventures are typically balanced with the idea of X number of PCs. So when players split the group, that can quickly lead to issues where the sub-groups are no longer capable of facing the challenges they may encounter.

Things can be adjusted on the fly to allow for this, but a lot of DMs don’t want to make such adjustments, and there’s certainly no guidance for it in the 5e material.

Also, should combat break out while the group’s split, then you have to roll initiative and resolve combat without all players, which can potentially take a lot of time.

There are other games that handle these things better than D&D does. Again, this is just because of the way the game functions.

 

[pemerton]

There are other games that handle these things better than D&D does. Again, this is just because of the way the game functions.

This takes us right back to @loverdrive's rebuttal of the claim that D&D is distinctively flexible. It's not.