D&D General How much control do DMs need?

[AbdulAlhazred]

So a question. In, say DW, the GM(?) has moves. Soft moves and hard moves. Let's say the GM does a hard move "Rocks fall and everyone dies." What happens? How does the group decide what qualifies as a legitimate move?

Edit: or anyone else of course.

Well, that's a very interesting question, and basically the point of the most substantive rules, the statements of agenda and principles, and GM move descriptions, are meant to answer that. The GM in DW is actually VERY powerful, they present all the dangers to the PCs, as well as describe all the scenes. It is these explicit statements of what the GM's goals are, and acceptable techniques, that tell us what the GM should do (and obviously real-world GMs will or will not adhere to that, etc.).

In terms of 'rocks fall', the GM DOES have the power to make a hard move, but generally it wouldn't serve any valid purpose to make it out of the blue. So, a more realistic situation might be "A huge rockslide is headed right for you, what do you do?" The GM has now posed the clear threat "do something or die" as any reasonable interpretation of 'crushed by a rockslide' is going to involve character death. Basically, unless a player just describes her character giving up, a Defy Danger move of some sort will be triggered. I mean, this is a HARSH move! However, it could reasonably arise as the final step in a rising series of the players upping the risk level (IE they have been told rockslides here are dangerous, they climbed up here anyway), as such climbing must have been pretty urgent! Maybe the GM gave a choice, slower path with lower risk, or faster path with higher risk. When you stack a few of these sorts of things, maybe with a failure on a DR to fully note the specific instance of danger, a lethal hard move COULD be reasonable.

As for assessing whether or not this WAS justified, that's hard. I mean the rules leave it up to the table to work out any issues of this kind, ultimately. I would hope that the GM has sufficiently conveyed the risk and created enough tension to make it clear that this move is warranted, but if they haven't, well, I guess it will get turned into a soft move, perhaps!

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

And yet none of us narrativists have a plugged nickle for any of that, lol. I mean, there's people who have all sorts of odd beliefs and preferences. If I gave them all equal credit I'd surely be in sad sad shape. I mean, more generously, its not 'wrong' to play with less rules, but there are plusses AND minuses. My response to the FKR crowd is "and then Dave Arneson wrote a whole bunch of rules called Dungeons & Dragons, and his buddy Gary Gygax added a lot more rules to that!" Both of them were WELL VERSED in very low rule refereed play of various types. Yet they felt there was value in creating more structure. They were no fools, contrarily very experienced gamers.

This is ... not my understanding of this, at all.

You don't seem to have the same understanding that I do of history of D&D vis-a-vis Arneson and Gygax. I recommend Game Wizards as a place to start.* I would just say that instead of responding to the "FKR crowd," you simply invest in a relatively cheap book on the history of the game ... there's quite a few good ones that have come out recently.

For that matter, you don't seem to appreciate exactly what FKR is. As I've stated innumerable times, there is something profoundly wrong with people who keep insisting that they know exactly how it works yet aren't playing or running it. Allow me- how do you feel when someone forum-splains to you how PbTA games, or FiTD game run, and then admit that they've never played one?


*The main issue is that Arneson was, in fact, running the game without the benefit of many written rules. That was the source of the initial friction with Gygax. This is further exemplified by the manner in which Arneson would run games later at conventions and the like.

 

[Umbran]

The levels of stupid required ...

Mod Note:
We're going to need you to step back from insulting people.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Can you find some examples? I ask because I honestly cannot recall a post on these boards making that claim.

Are we living on the same boards? Lots of people, even in this thread, have posited that it is not possible to resolve problems in play practically without an authoritarian GM who can assert control. I agree that I don't see a recent thread in a very quick search that illustrates a hard denial, its still a very prevalent attitude IME. I mean, basically you can just search for any post made by 'Bloodtide' and I'm 99% sure it will say the equivalent of "The GM must be GOD!!!!" I realize he's a bit outside the realm of most posters, so I was a little hesitant to invoke that example, but it is out there! He seems to have a lot of agreements too!

 

[niklinna]

I must point out that this is not how magic in Blades works.

Whispers aren't D&D wizards, their immediate magical abilities are constrained to talking to ghosts and perceiving the ghost field (which is something everyone can do with Attune action). There are special abilities Tempest and Compel that allow to shoot lightnings and command ghosts respectively. Other than that, arcane is done through rituals and creation of magical trinkets.

Playtest version of Blades used to have an ability that allowed to "cast spells" by spending stress on magnitude table, but it was replaced by Tempest in the release version.

Mm, I was describing the fundamental process, I just didn't get very detailed about the scope, and I see I should have. Your clarification about that scope is spot on.

So the sorts of effects I produced were along the lines of scrying, traveling through "ghost doors", which is a bit like a dimension door spell, only the door has to already be there in the ghost field, and "counterspelling" actual playbook abilities of NPC casters (one of whom was trying to throw lightning). But yeah, to do something that impacts the world rather than yourself or a ghost, you generally need a special playbook ability, or to do a ritual. That said, I pulled off a fair number of more flashy fantasy effects by compelling ghosts to do the heavy lifting. (And compelling a ghost is also a special playbook move.)

 

[niklinna]

No, because nobody cares whether NPCs get a chance to act or not. From narrative perspective PCs are more important, and from the gameplay perspective, GM's ability to participate in the process isn't predicated on NPCs, so they are significantly less valueable.

And yet NPCs can be significant threats! Especially if the player ignores what a threat they are—that's when the hammer drops, hard.

 

[niklinna]

I think basically that's how it worked for us. There were a lot of times when various AAA moves, some setting logic, etc. was used in order to describe an 'effect'. It wasn't ever described in terms of 'casting a spell' that I can recall. Rituals also figured in heavily there, as did variations of spiritual combat. It felt pretty 'magical' a lot of the time, but it wasn't that much like 'D&D magic'. @niklinna also cribbed some abilities from a 3rd-party playbook towards the end and reflavored them a bit to represent some of the supernatural evolution of his character. Obviously our game may have strayed into territory that was a bit outside what the authors of Blades envisaged, but by the end we were Tier 5 and frankly the game gets a bit wonky when you are that powerful. Our characters were almost like name-level D&D characters, lol. Anything that wasn't pretty strong, Skewth could eat it, or Takeo could divide it into many small pieces, or Beaker could blow it up, or Tal Rajan could make an alliance with its worst enemy and have it murderated. lol.

An arcane ritual to ingest the living essence of a leviathan will do that to a person! Also, it's fun to grow tentacles at will.

 

[clearstream]

Are we living on the same boards? Lots of people, even in this thread, have posited that it is not possible to resolve problems in play practically without an authoritarian GM who can assert control. I agree that I don't see a recent thread in a very quick search that illustrates a hard denial, its still a very prevalent attitude IME. I mean, basically you can just search for any post made by 'Bloodtide' and I'm 99% sure it will say the equivalent of "The GM must be GOD!!!!" I realize he's a bit outside the realm of most posters, so I was a little hesitant to invoke that example, but it is out there! He seems to have a lot of agreements too!

Hmm, you wrote

And these boards are RIFE with people who flat out state that it is impossible to run a game, or that some vast swath of the typical RPG fare is unachievable, without a central authoritative GM.

So I read that as a number of claims

1. It is impossible to run a game without a central authoritative GM
2. Some vast swathe of the typical RPG fair is unachievalbe without a central authoritative GM

I've never read a post on these boards claiming the first. Would you say that's exaggeration for effect (which is fine of course, I just mean that taken literally, I've never experienced it.)

The second depends on what you mean by vast swathe. It seems like I might understand vaster by "vast" than you intend. In my own words I would put it that some folk have said that for them it is easier to resolve some problems in play given empowerment as a GM. IIRC some posts have said or implied that a certain problem won't yield otherwise... but I haven't noticed those amounting to a "vast swathe".

If your meaning is that that there are many ways to skin the RPG cat, then sure, I wouldn't rule out finding solutions other than GM-empowerment for any problem in RPG play.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

D&D is also designed with a very specific goal - characters built with multiple bespoke abilities work as a team to defeat encounters of an appropriate level through a tactical combat minigame and thus gain experience, wealth, and more powers.

That is not a natural fit for a wide variety of different genres. A person who can drift D&D to play (say) a game of courtly intrigue could have drifted any number of other games just as easily, if not more easily.

So I am going to address this, because this, again, is an example of why I think people often fail to communicate effectively on these threads.

When we start with the statement, "D&D is also designed with a very specific goal ...." is where I think you will immediately get the pushback.

Start with the basic premise in that statement that D&D is designed for a very specific goal. Right there ... that's kind of the issue. As I've mentioned before, a big issue in TTRPGs ("RPGs") is second-order design- in other words, the variance between the game as intended (designed) to be played and the actual play when used by the group.

This problem can be approached in many ways- for example, extensive playtesting will often see how group will use the RPG. But given the lack of resources in RPGs (as compared to, say AAA videogames), this isn't foolproof. To use the Everway example, if every playtest group has a Tweet-level GM, then no one is going to notice that the game might not work so well with other groups.

Another way is to tightly integrate the rules and the game- for example, while there are a lot of different PbTA games using similar rules (they are .... powered by a similar system), each game is modified to fit a particular genre and game paradigm, and, further, the rules themselves are heavy-handed in terms of codifying what we would call "best practices" in other RPGs. In other words, by explicitly narrowing the scope of play and by telling you, in essence, this is how you play the game and other ways are wrong ... those games ensure that the game is more likely to be played as the designer intended.

For various reasons going back to the origin of the D&D as more of a toolkit than an actual complete game, and because of the reticence of the various editions to specify how to play, and because of the culture and community that allows "mix and match," however, this has never been the way with D&D. Other than, to some extent, 4e, there has always been room for a number of different approaches to D&D.

So while it is correct to some extent to say that you could drift other games around, you run into the issue that (1) some games are designed to be "tighter" and therefore shouldn't be drifted around, and (2) some games just don't have the history of being drifted.

 

[Lanefan]

No, because nobody cares whether NPCs get a chance to act or not. From narrative perspective PCs are more important, and from the gameplay perspective, GM's ability to participate in the process isn't predicated on NPCs, so they are significantly less valueable.

So the PCs are the only people in the setting who can proactively do anything, and NPCs/the setting can only react to what the PCs (try to) do?

So much for the idea of a living world.