Legends and Lore : The Fine Art of Dungeon Mastering

[JamesonCourage]

The point is that there are issues, such as bad DMing, which you cannot solve with mechanics, and worse, that such attempts to "fix" bad DMing with rules actually have an impact on the game that makes it poorer for it.

And I agree.

I wish people would realize that the rules are a tool. They are not the game. They cannot fix people. It's people who make or break the game. It's people who are pouring their imaginations into it that create the game itself. The rules books are just tools. Numbers. Dead equations on paper.

The rules are not the game. The game is not the rules.

What the manual should do in that regard is provide sound advice to prospective players and DMs that lays out what skills will serve to make for a great game, and how to develop these particular skills from there. After, if players and DM decide instead to just use the tables in the book and discard the actual advice around them, the fault's on them, not on the rules book.

I hope that's the case. I recently finished my 353 page RPG. 50 pages pf it is an example setting, to help show mechanics in use (as well about 5 pages of that deals directly with mechanics, while the rest deals with guiding potential GMs towards other, more useful areas (in my mind). Though I spent a lot of time trying to come up with a very balanced game mechanically, I don't think it's the most important aspect of play, and my Running a Game chapter is definitely colored by that perspective.

If his point is that in the future, he thinks it would be more useful to include rules to help everyone have a good time, and more advice on how to have a fun game, that seems like a good idea. He is going to run into the problem of different ideas of fun, but if he keeps things pretty broad it'll be useful enough. Just touch on different preferences, and strongly highlight communication within the group. Then when the group comes to a compromise, have a blast with the advice given, and the rules crafted for fun. Just my thoughts, though, if that's the direction he's going.

As always, play what you like

 

[Balesir]

Player: "We've been trying to figure this riddle out for two hours. The heck with it, I'm going to kick the door in."
DM: "What, are you just going to give up? Why don't you try roleplaying to solve the riddle?"
Player: "I don't know the answer and you won't allow me to make any sort of check to see if my character does. I want to do something else today besides stare at the miniatures clustered around this door. I'll kick it in."
DM: "You try to kick the door in and your foot bounces off. It's banded with adamantine and you can tell that it's reinforced from the other side. You know that you won't be able to kick it in."
Player: "Fine. What are the walls made of?"
DM: "Uh, stone, I guess."
Player: "I take out my pickaxe and sledgehammer and chop through the stone wall."
DM: "You chip away about an inch of stone and find a thick sheet of adamantine in the wall. You can't make a hole around the door. You have to guess the riddle and open the door to get in."

(Yes, this is paraphrased from an early 3E game that I played.)

Ooh - I have played that scenario, too! The thing to do with the rest of the session is to quest for the nearest dwarven citadel and negotiate to split the adamantium/mithril/what have you with them if you guide them to it. That much adamatium must be worth a fortune!

 

[Dykstrav]

Ooh - I have played that scenario, too! The thing to do with the rest of the session is to quest for the nearest dwarven citadel and negotiate to split the adamantium/mithril/what have you with them if you guide them to it. That much adamatium must be worth a fortune!

Yeah, we sort of did that.

Basically, we were playing a band of thieves in Greyhawk, the DM specifically asked us to make our characters a bit pragmatic or self-interested because he was (allegedly) tired of the default everyone-is-a-hero sort of thing, he said that he wanted shades of gray. Cool... So we're all neutral except for our chaotic good cleric and we did whatever was expedient to get through adventures.

The setup was that the Thieves' Guild of Greyhawk had stolen a staff of life from the temple of Pelor and (for whatever reason) decided to stash it in a vault out in the Cairn Hills. Naturally, we jumped at the chance to get our hands on a magic item like that at 3rd level. After we retrieved the staff from the vault, we smashed the door off its hinges (which we could now do, now that the riddle was solved) and pried off every single bit of adamantine we could from the doors. The DM was a bit surprised that we wanted the adamantine and made an ad-hoc ruling that we were able to get approximately 20 pounds of it from the door.

With this fortune, we high-tailed it to Hardby and cut a deal with a smith: if he would forge us adamantine weapons, we'd tell him where we got the stash and leave town. Then we went to the Despotrix to open bidding for the staff of life that we had retrieved. At this point, the Despotrix wouldn't see us (the DM seemed a bit flustered that we had taken the game off the rails). So we ended up selling the staff in exchange for a ship laden with trade goods and struck out across the Wooly Bay.

I missed the next session because I had to work. From what I was told, the DM tried to retcon the previous session to where we never really went to Hardby at all, and instead had returned to Greyhawk to give the staff of life back to the temple of Pelor. The group pointed out that we weren't good and weren't necessarily heroes, per his desires for the campaign when we made characters, and felt no obligation to return an item that we expended considerable resources in obtaining and that they clearly weren't able to protect. At that point, the temple of Pelor sent a DM-revenge party of uber-paladins and clerics to get the staff back--the group walked out on the DM.