Quasqueton said:
I so often see comments about how the latest edition of D&D has "taken power away from the DM." This usually seems to be considered a sad thing (and sometimes a bad thing).
I don't understand this concept. Please explain this idea of "DM power", and explain how DMs have lost it.
Quasqueton
Several aspects to the concept:
1) In older versions of the game, no one understood the rules very well (as the rules often didn't make sense). Especially in corner cases, the DM would say "this is how we'll handle that". Players could (and did) argue, but it was just them against the DM.
Nowadays, the rules are clearer and better understood, although there are always corner cases, poorly-written rules, outright errors, etc. Players often know the rules as well as DMs, especially for "niche" areas. (For instance, far too many times I hear about DMs being "victimized" by psion players because while the DM knows the core rules really well, their knowledge of the psionic rules is inferior to that of their one psion player.)
This makes it easy for a player to argue (in rules terms) against a DM's corner case ruling. Now, since DMs still have "ultimate power" they can just tell the player "this is how it is" but it promotes bad feelings because the player "knows" they're in the right (and by "know" I mean they have a leg to stand on that they wouldn't have had in 2e).
2) NPC power! It's been my experience that when players choose a dodgy interpretation of the rules (and the DM ends up agreeing with them), it works better for them than when a DM does the same thing. For instance, let's suppose an argument sparks between a DM and a player whose character uses a spiked chain. The DM just wants to say "it works this way" but the player knows the rules and convincingly argues that it should work "that way"; the DM ends up going with the player's way, even though they're afraid that interpretation may cause problems with challenging the party.
So later on the PC ends up "overpowered" (subjective, of course) in the DM's mind. What is the DM to do? He can use the same interpretation with spiked chain wielding NPCs but they can't do that all the time; that would be boring (overusing same archetype of NPCs), obvious, and would probably end up knocking down PCs who
aren't using spiked chains anyway. They find it hard to impose their way of seeing things now because they've already agreed with the player, in large part due to a rules discussion.
3) DM fiat. As stated above, a "bogeyman". It's not bad by itself, as long as it makes sense. But just as there are bad players who always argue with the DM, there are bad DMs who always impose fiat in a negative way. Since players "feel empowered" to discuss rules in a way they couldn't before, they might try not to accept fiat. Short of throwing a player out (which might be a good idea in some cases) or causing bad feelings, the DM cannot literally impose the fiat; they have to make the player accept the ruling (even if the player does not agree with the ruling).
4) There's nothing preventing a DM from making up a new rule, but players will know this, and if it somehow "messes" with them, they can get angry. The pool of DnD players is, unfortunately, small. I'd love to get a set of players who "won't argue excessively about rules, like adventuring rather than player-driven, like 3.x, and are serious at a game" but finding four other people like that is basically impossible.
Some of this is just based on my experiences. I've never been in a group with a single DM; there has always been rotating DMs (even if the rotation might be one DM runs their adventure for five weeks before we switch). As a result, it's impossible for a DM to be authoritarian; they can't issue orders to the players when it comes to following game rules.
