Is the DM the most important person at the table

[GameOgre]

I mean, seriously, game elitism in the service of supporting your preferred style of play? Don't forget that TSR ran into trouble and sold to WotC because they lost market share against White Wolf, which didn't feature a game like D&D. 5e is a very good game -- bland enough to not rankle and just spicy enough to be enjoyable. It's an absolute marketing success, although a good bit of that is serendipity rather than a comment of the quality of 5e. 5e is, undoubtedly, the current king of the market for RPGs, no close competitor. I don't think saying that a very popular indie game without all of the benefits the current edition of 5e has is somehow lesser because it doesn't have as large a market share. And I don't think that you, as someone who likes 5e, inherits any legitimacy from this. Nor does 5e inherit any more legitimacy because people like it.

What I meant by that is the D&D playstyle is far more popular. I like dungeon world, my players do not. That is often the case with games outside of D&D. I like them and talk people into playing for a short time but everyone wants to go back to D&D pretty quickly.

From my experiences most players do not like other games all that much unless they keep to what D&D does.

I find this good"I do like D&D a lot" and bad"I would like to play other games and other play styles far more than I get to.

I think I got four or five sessions in with Dungeon World and actually only just started to understand the system when the guys came to me with"we want to go back to D&D".

Same thing happened with Fate,Savage Worlds and 13th Age.

A lot of it was the players seem really comfortable with me doing all the work. When I asked for player input for Dungeon World for example and said"You come from a Elven village? What was its name and what was it like there ....it didn't go over well, that player got slightly hostile as if I was trying to put something on him".

 

[GameOgre]

I love the OSR games as well. Mostly because for whatever reason I do not have to spend as much time making "encounters". I would love to play Swords and Wizardry or AD&D or even Castles and Crusades but my players have no interest in those. They pretty much just want to play whatever D&D is the latest. Back in 4E it was the same way.

One of the games i'm really wanting to give a go is the Cypher system. I have heard it's very low prep as far as making mechanical encounters and game mechanic prep.

I don't mind imaginative game prep. That is fun to me. Creating fun and unique npc's and monsters,traps and stories ....its the mechanical boring turning that stuff into crunch that gets me down.

 

[Hussar]

A player could come up with the name, position, relationships, and general skillset of an NPC without actually writing the NPC's character rules. That, for me, reflects pretty well what the player's character would know about the NPC, without knowing precisely what the NPCs stats are. The point isn't just to have the players do this btw, it's to sit around a table and build setting together, expanding on each other's ideas, connecting things, playing yes and... - there's more in play there than just transferring paperwork from the DMs pile to the player's. Something like this:

Krom Stonehand - leader of the local Bashers - big, bald, and unsavory, a reputation for savagery and strangely cute tattoos (just don't mention them), likes knives

trusted lieutenant in the thieves guild, runs a tight crew thru fear not smarts, gets along well with NPC A, hated by NPC B.

Crew based out of a warehouse in the docks, sign out front says "Trishorn Imports", hangs out at the Crown and Anchor on most nights.

Speaking as a DM, that's a lot of useful information. I can build that NPC stat block in a heartbeat. Plus, now that player already knows the above info, so when Krom comes up in play I won't have to spoon feed information about him.

Does anyone actually care if the players know a given NPC's statblock? Seriously?

 

[Hussar]

Exactly.

And seeing as any campaign I ever run or play in will, I hope, feature a great many DM-side secrets that the players will learn only through play, this whole concept of player-side setting construction becomes kinda moot; with the exception of minor pieces that won't and can't impact the main plot.

Not just Conspiracy-X; your take here would rule out just about any game - regardless of system - that involves the PCs solving mysteries and learning as they go.

Does a secret become less of a secret if one player knows it but the rest of the table doesn't? If one player comes up with a secret, can't we trust the player to simply share that with the DM and not the rest of the group? Well, I suppose that depends on group. Obviously, some here figure that there is no way to trust the players that much (players will game the system I believe was one comment).

Meh, again, if we make it clear at the outset that "gaming the system" is rather pointless, I find that most players are mature enough to actually step up to the challenge. But, yeah, that does rather fly in the face of traditional gaming wisdom.

 

[Lanefan]

Does a secret become less of a secret if one player knows it but the rest of the table doesn't? If one player comes up with a secret, can't we trust the player to simply share that with the DM and not the rest of the group? Well, I suppose that depends on group. Obviously, some here figure that there is no way to trust the players that much (players will game the system I believe was one comment).

You're either forgetting or conveniently ignoring that trying to gain an advantage is part of a player's duty, as it were.

More to the point, if I-as-player come up with a secret and share it with the DM, I still know the secret - which while fine if only other players run through that bit, largely kills my enjoyment of playing through it. And sure, I could play as if I didn't know the secret, but then I'm forced to separate player knowledge from character knowledge which ideally is something I should never have to do and in practice is something I should have to do as little as possible.

 

[Sadras]

WoD was an attempt to feature character focused play. It didn't provide a robust toolkit to do so, so people familiar with GM directed play just kept playing it that way, because you could. And, there are absolutely better toolkits for the goal of WoD out there. Burning Wheel gets pretty darned close to the character-focused promise of WoD. As does Dogs in the Vineyard. The Powered by the Apocalypse games also do a much better job of it.

I've never thought about WoD this way, but what you say here makes sense. I never ran a WoD game, but I did do some prep for one (which game never came to pass) and coming from a D&D background I was initially skeptical if I could run it properly because the format of the game (I felt) was so very different.

My inexperience had led me to believe it required much more pre-planning INITIALLY than a D&D game but I see now it doesn't have to be. Having read enough of these types of threads, I can definitely see this being played with some of the toolkits provided in the indie game market or some modern games, where prep work is like 5 lines jotted down - which is how our Storyteller prepped for it during our games then.

Old games, made new.

Man I still want to run one of these set in Constantinople during the times of the Crusades.

 

[Sadras]

What I meant by that is the D&D playstyle is far more popular. I like dungeon world, my players do not. That is often the case with games outside of D&D. I like them and talk people into playing for a short time but everyone wants to go back to D&D pretty quickly.

From my experiences most players do not like other games all that much unless they keep to what D&D does.

I find this good"I do like D&D a lot" and bad"I would like to play other games and other play styles far more than I get to.

I think I got four or five sessions in with Dungeon World and actually only just started to understand the system when the guys came to me with"we want to go back to D&D".

Same thing happened with Fate,Savage Worlds and 13th Age.

A lot of it was the players seem really comfortable with me doing all the work. When I asked for player input for Dungeon World for example and said"You come from a Elven village? What was its name and what was it like there ....it didn't go over well, that player got slightly hostile as if I was trying to put something on him".

This post! +1

Many of the posters who ONLY advocate for the so-called player-driven games (@Manbearcat and @Ovinomancer have their feet planted firmly in both camps so not them) do not seem to understand this desire by players.

I feel they're always entering threads with their singular axiom 'GM Force = negative = bad DM' but are not willing to accept that many players out there are actually reluctant/resistant to games where the driving force of the game becomes the players' responsibility with much less overhead expected by the GM.

And I'm willing to take responsibilty that perhaps not everyone is a great GM for these new toolkits (certainly not initially), but I mean that takes practise, but if the players are not willing to give you that opportunity then...

 

[macd21]

This post! +1

Many of the posters who ONLY advocate for the so-called player-driven games (@Manbearcat and @Ovinomancer have their feet planted firmly in both camps so not them) do not seem to understand this desire by players.

I feel they're always entering threads with their singular axiom 'GM Force = negative = bad DM' but are not willing to accept that many players out there are actually reluctant/resistant to games where the driving force of the game becomes the players' responsibility with much less overhead expected by the GM.

And I'm willing to take responsibilty that perhaps not everyone is a great GM for these new toolkits (certainly not initially), but I mean that takes practise, but if the players are not willing to give you that opportunity then...

Yeah, I feel like they’re starting from a fundamentally flawed position: that there’s something wrong with the GM being the most important person at the table.

The GM is generally the most important person at the table because they put in the most work at the game usually collapses without them. “But it doesn’t need to be that way,” critics contend - and it doesn’t. But it is, because it works, and people are usually happy with the way things are. “But you could implement X, Y or Z to reduce the GM’s burden,” they say - and you could, except that X, Y and Z reduce the fun of many GM’s and players, or in some cases make it harder, not easier, to run a game. Many people are already implementing X, Y or Z in their games to the extent they are comfortable with them, but still leaving the GM with the most critical role at the table.

Yes, you can probably come up with a system and a social contract that results in a collaborative story telling experience that results in everyone at the table as equal participants, and the find a group of gamers who would love it. And meanwhile everyone else goes back to playing DnD, because they enjoyed it more. The GM being the most important person at the table isn’t a problem. It’s resulted in enjoyable gameplay for decades.

 

[pemerton]

It's less than ideal if you're trying to build long term story lines but might not remember an important detail in the moment. For example, in one of my groups two of the players went on their honeymoon recently, so we didn't play. There had been some scheduling issues prior to that as well (Superbowl, etc.) so last weekend was the first time we gamed in over a month and I was really shakey on the details.

Thankfully, I was able to skim over my session notes and remind myself of everything that had transpired that I consider relevant to the campaign. If a player had taken the notes, they might not even have been available to me between sessions, and even had they been it would have been totally up to fate whether they'd grok'd all of the relevant details or skipped something that seemed trivial then but would bear fruit down the road (I like to use foreshadowing).

I still incline to the view that, if no one can remember it, it doesn't matter. Conversely, a necessary condition of something being relevant is that it can be remembered by those at the table. If the players don't remember something, they're not going to leverage it (which is the case that I was responding to in my post that you quoted).

I'm not saying that GMing doesn't require any note-taking - it may or it may not, depending on context and circumstances, how much of what matters is recorded on various sheets (eg do we need to note that so-and-so suffered a broken shoulder if broken shoulder is a condition recorded on the appropriate character sheet?), etc. But I think the degree of note-taking required can be exaggerated, and that the idea that it is necessary to so for the players to leverage some detail doesn't seem right for me.

Nor do I think the degree of prep really helps here. The main thing that needs to be noted is stuff that matters and stuff that changes. And that is likely to have to be done even if there is prep. In my personal experience, doing prep doesn't change the amount of session notes I need to take.

For example, in the session before last they met an old miner 49er NPC who I made up on the spot. The party paladin took a liking to him, and after a brief conversation, gave him a 50 gp gem to fund his next expedition. They're only 3rd level, so that's a lot of money to him (he's still saving for plate mail). A month of two down the line though, he's going to find that the miner has hit it rich, and is quite grateful to the paladin. I'd never remember such a minor detail without my notes. The paladin player might note it down, but if another player were taking notes they could easily think a minor NPC like that were merely set dressing.

I already posted upthread that (in my view) the main challenge in GMing is juggling the fiction. The scenario you have set out is an example of that. But it doesn't seem to bear upon the prep issue or whether extensive notes are particularly necessary in a low-prep game (which is what I was discussing with @Imaro): given what I've bolded, I don't see how this shows that preparation is necessary or makes things easier. Even if the existence of the miner was recorded in some pre-authored notes, you would have to record the interaction with the paladin and it's significance.

To me this example does seem to relate to a different aspect of this conversation, namely,who is responsible for driving play. There are systems in which the paladin's treatment of the NPC would be something that the player is responsible for recording on the PC sheet in some form. Even if that's not the case (eg D&D PC sheets tend not to have a "relationships" box), if the player does hope to leverage this relationship down the track then I would expect him/her to make a note of it. But as you present it this doesn't seem to be an instance of extensive notes being required; it doesn't seem that prep would have made any difference; and your reason for making the notes is not that the players are going to leverage something later on.

It just seems to be an example of a GM keeping track of material to use for subsequent framing and consequences, which are some of the aspects of "fiction juggling" that I identified upthread.

 

[Hussar]

You're either forgetting or conveniently ignoring that trying to gain an advantage is part of a player's duty, as it were.

More to the point, if I-as-player come up with a secret and share it with the DM, I still know the secret - which while fine if only other players run through that bit, largely kills my enjoyment of playing through it. And sure, I could play as if I didn't know the secret, but then I'm forced to separate player knowledge from character knowledge which ideally is something I should never have to do and in practice is something I should have to do as little as possible.

Does it kill your enjoyment if you are the DM?

And, is the price worth the DM no longer having to spend 99% of the effort to keep the campaign going? IOW, is your separation of character and player knowledge so valuable that it's more important than the DM's time?

And, "trying to gain an advantage" is most certainly NOT part of a player's duty. At least, not at my table.

Look, it's like @Ovinomancer has stated. You folks have taken an impossible position. If there is 100% unwillingness on the parts of the participants to compromise on anything, then, sure, it's going to be the status quo and the DM has to do 99% of the away from the table work. The problem is, you are starting from that position. If we're willing to compromise, yes, the game will be a bit different, but, it will also mean that DMing becomes significantly easier and the barrier to entry for DM's lowers significantly.

How much is that worth? Is it worth you knowing one of the four (or more) secrets at the table? I would say it's a pretty small price to pay. Obviously though, there are differing opinions.