D&D General Railroading - A Different Take

[payn]

It will forever be weird to me, how many times I hear or read requests for "don't be a jerk" rules to be written out. Since a jerk likely doesn't care about the rules, or they would follow unspoken social etiquette, maybe the rule should be:
"Stop playing with jerks"
Since the non-jerks are much more likely to actually read and follow such a rule. Maybe we should also add the rule "Do the math correctly" because if people need a rule about being a decent human, they might need a reminder that calculating your HP wrong is frowned upon.

I think the rise of "dont be a jerk" has been more about creating a culture than reinforcing a rule. A lot of folks really do need that clue.

 

[Maxperson]

does DnD have a mousefolk?

3e had the Nezumi, which were ratfolk.

 

[billd91]

It will forever be weird to me, how many times I hear or read requests for "don't be a jerk" rules to be written out. Since a jerk likely doesn't care about the rules, or they would follow unspoken social etiquette, maybe the rule should be:
"Stop playing with jerks"
Since the non-jerks are much more likely to actually read and follow such a rule. Maybe we should also add the rule "Do the math correctly" because if people need a rule about being a decent human, they might need a reminder that calculating your HP wrong is frowned upon.

Well everybody knows that murderers don't generally respect rules not to murder. That said, it still gives the collective society the justification it need to redress the problem. For example, most conventions have a number of rules of appropriate behavior, including something to the effect of "don't be a jerk" (for various definitions of jerkdom). Break those rules and you could be ejected from the con with no refund.

 

[tetrasodium]

I mean, could you imagine if AL tried to regulate what players or DMs could do? It would be bedlam! WotC would be accused of heinous crimes against player autonomy and DM sovereignty! Most game stores barely can convince their participants to bathe properly, I don't think WotC getting hardcore on player behavior (DM included) would ever get taken seriously (except as a bludgeon against WotC).

It does tell DMs what to do, then it goes for lunch instead of saying anything to players beyond when to give themselves a selection of magic items while leaning on the PHB's story/camradarie/etc & removing soft pressures that previously incentivized other players to speak up when someone is operating under the partially (in)compatible social contract from some other activity like videogames & freeform roleplay.

It will forever be weird to me, how many times I hear or read requests for "don't be a jerk" rules to be written out. Since a jerk likely doesn't care about the rules, or they would follow unspoken social etiquette, maybe the rule should be:
"Stop playing with jerks"
Since the non-jerks are much more likely to actually read and follow such a rule. Maybe we should also add the rule "Do the math correctly" because if people need a rule about being a decent human, they might need a reminder that calculating your HP wrong is frowned upon.

"don't be a jerk is pretty far from no longer accurately setting expectations about the game itself. d&d wouldn't have needed rules beyond the lightest of lightweight wargaming & freeform roleplay etiquette if "don't be a jerk" alone was enough. Mary sue along with that extreme roleplaying predates d&d (1973) & I'm sure todays video gamer mindset/social contract was more likely to be found in wargamers, but the old editions still set expectations for when someone missed them by a step too much while being socially developed enough to not raise immediate red flags.

TL;DR. Maybe focus your quotes next time.

Fair enough. I included the relevant phb/chapter introduction equivalent because they nicely cover the point of what's missing& once you start snipping out a stray sentence or two stripped of their context in such a simple blurb it starts becoming easy to grab any isolated snippet & claim it says things it doesn't really say That's the problem with the 5e approach. without a section like the ad&d2e the basics:The goal where in a couple fingers of pagespace there is a section that immediately tells players how d&d is different from other games where beginning/end are a thing along with the goal not being to win & what kinds of things their adventurer PCs might expect to do in what timeframes.

the 3.5 PHB said much of the same but elaborated on some of it with more 3.5 style specificity & added some mechanical weight that gave all of the players at the table some extra incentivize to push back against bob when his PC's maybe kinda sorta justified reasons to not be an adventurer today endanger the rewards their PCs expect & need..

I didn't include 4e & don't know where it falls because I don't have the book so nothing to say about that

Once you get to the 5e equivalents though the mechanical need & lost the expectation setting specificity of 3.5 along with the 3 short paragraph clarity of the 2e section being totally lost in favor of a long talk of tradition friendship & story telling. the 5e sections mention adventure/adventuring yes, but they no longer set player expectations on those things in any way.

If you honestly feel a book saying it is equivalent to an organization enforcing it, there's not much for us to discuss here.

But this is about the fact that d&d no longer does not do either & while actively creating a cloud of plausible uncertainty for a player with somewhat misaligned expectations about what d&d is. The various introduction/equivalents from the past very much show the omission from present day as a starkly contrasting omission.

The ALPG & ALDMG are honestly so god awful on that matter that I was not even going to include or mention them until your post raised organized play. Take the ad&d2e phb example where 3 short paragraphs succinctly set expectations across a wide range of the game's expectations. Meanwhile it's not like the ALPG PDF didn't have room to even mention the kinds of expectation setting stuff past editions previously included front & center in the PHB when it has a section about Critical Roll on the ~80%(?)☆ whitespace page5.

☆ eyeball measurement, it's way more than 3/4

 

[AlViking]

AL is a weird anomaly anyway. I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole. The standard way to play D&D is with a regular group of friends.

There is no one true way and AL can be a good alternative for some people.

 

[AlViking]

...

@AlViking that laugh is because"cheese weasels" is funny and made me laugh.

I assumed that's what you were laughing at. I can't claim any responsibility to calling the folks cheese weasels, it was a well known label for the group in gaming circles both at game days and local conventions at the time.

 

[Umbran]

Fair enough. I included the relevant phb/chapter introduction equivalent because they nicely cover the point of what's missing& once you start snipping out a stray sentence or two stripped of their context in such a simple blurb it starts becoming easy to grab any isolated snippet & claim it says things it doesn't really say

The flip side - if you need that much context to prove it says what it says, it probably doesn't say it as strongly as you think it does.

Especially when we note that those sections are probably, as a practical matter, the least frequently read portions of the book, as everyone jumps off into the rules.. and always has, in every edition....

That's the problem with the 5e approach. without a section like the ad&d2e the basics...

Or, perhaps they found that section never really saved much of anyone from much of anything. I think there's a lot of rose-colored-glasses out there about the early days, and how people played. I mean, really - the condescending term "munchkin" dates back to the 70s as it is.

I think we are pretending if we take the position that the behaviors we are talking about weren't already well-established early in the game's history. They get expressed slightly differently from ruleset to ruleset, but the underlying impulses are much the same.

 

[Remathilis]

It does tell DMs what to do, then it goes for lunch instead of saying anything to players beyond when to give themselves a selection of magic items while leaning on the PHB's story/camradarie/etc & removing soft pressures that previously incentivized other players to speak up when someone is operating under the partially (in)compatible social contract from some other activity like videogames & freeform roleplay.

Amazingly, you reminded me of not one, but two Simpsons memes:


Congratulations.

I don't have any response for your argument because it's so far removed from any experience in D&D I've ever had that you could be describing Scrabble for all I know. And I've been subject to bad DMs (notoriously) and had bad players. And I've played for 30 years in multiple groups. I don't see anything in the books that support this tyranny of the player argument you keep making and the scant evidence I see comes down to "how DARE the players play in a way I don't agree with".

 

[tetrasodium]

The flip side - if you need that much context to prove it says what it says, it probably doesn't say it as strongly as you think it does.

Especially when we note that those sections are probably, as a practical matter, the least frequently read portions of the book, as everyone jumps off into the rules.. and always has, in every edition....



Or, perhaps they found that section never really saved much of anyone from much of anything. I think there's a lot of rose-colored-glasses out there about the early days, and how people played. I mean, really - the condescending term "munchkin" dates back to the 70s as it is.

As to the early days, I quoted the ad&d2e PHB because that & redbox were the edition I started with (got both about the same time & don't recall which came days or weeks first). Plus I'm pretty sure ad&d2e came out in the late 80's/early 90's, you're off by a decade or so at least.

I'm not sure how to respond to anything else in that when you don't address any of the reasons I explained as making it an important thing for the system to be explicit about when your last comment on it was.

TL;DR.

Heck as far as I can tell that's still the case with the tiny ad&d2e one that I might have written more about its value and use when a player comes to the table expecting a different social contract pulled from a different recreational activity than it's actual wordcount

Spoiler

When that social contract disconnect happens, both the player & the GM enter a discussion absolutely certain that they have the social contract and the system supporting them except the GM no longer has mechanics pressuring against the player's misalignment. Previously those mechanics would encourage other players to proactively speak up out of self interest for their PC before the GM : Player discussion might be needed & there is no longer a quick page or less clearing things up because it's been replaced by a pea soup of fog about storytelling friendship tradition & camaraderie that either kinda sorta supports the player's misinterpretation or says nothing of particular use beyond vague feel-good vibes.

I think we are pretending if we take the position that the behaviors we are talking about weren't already well-established early in the game's history. They get expressed slightly differently from ruleset to ruleset, but the underlying impulses are much the same.

Actually no need to pretend anything of the sort. We can point to why the landscape has changed in ways that make those clarifications even more important today than they were in past editions. I linked to a different part of the video on that 44 rules ragequit GM from a couple years ago that highlighted it earlier in this tangent. Professordm:" the players clearly believe that what is written in the books and what Matt Mercer and and people do on the internet are the authority of dungeon dragons they don't accept the idea that the game master is the ultimate Authority". Critical roll could not have existed at any point before fairly recent in computer history, the tech simply was not there even when we were spending multiple minutes if not an hour+ downloading badgerbadgerbadger strongbad & similar quicktime files decades ago in the pre world of warcraft world & there was a whole edition that tried to compete with that before 5e came along.

Even beyond the asteroid sized impact that critical roll & online video games had on how nerd gaming culture has evolved since "early in the game's history," The history of that 44 rules post PDM was talking about there shows why it's even more important for d&d to be clear about it than it was then. That 44 rules was obviously the last straw for a burned out GM & the linked/quoted dungeoncraft video goes into good detail on why it's safe to assume such a thing. Relevant to the PHB omission in question though is the fact that the internet's reaction to that 44 rule post was immediately trashed the GM in question, I'll quote bob worldbuilder's description of that reaction though to avoid judgement about my rose colored glasses & similar

A couple weeks ago everyone on Reddit, and then on Twitter, all lost their minds over one angry game master’s “44 rules for dnd.” Just burying this guy, ‘haha what a horrible game master.’

Spoiler: video

Back in the old editions the kneejerk reaction to a GM : player disagreement was pretty much to defer to the GM if possible & obviously the internet wasn't really in the picture as anything recognizable. Today that needle swung so far in the other direction though where any sorta "wait is it possible the players of this 44 rules GM are awful teenagers?" was completely drowned by the urge to bury the guy while merely noting in post 666 the impact of losing a mechanical incentive that made other players push back if another player tries to drag the game in a seemingly unproductive lets be pirates direction led to a post explaining how the GM could "easily" make it work. When it was clarified out that the ease of doing so had nothing to do with the point there was a third tangent spawned about how they had never seen someone complain because they couldn't be pirates on the same night. Then the most players are reasonable tangent grew legs & evolved. The default assumption to a GM : Player disagreement is now that the GM is a combination of reference book epic Storyteller event coordinator and life coach who should be doing everything they can to delight the players per both PHB & DMG.

Or since there's some talking past going on & you showed a preference for the TL;DR version It's much more important to have the book explicitly set a baseline expectation for players today even if your unsupported claim of the section being of limited use historically because doing so makes it very difficult for a player with off target expectations to stare at the gm with an unstated brick wall of "I read it and dismissed it as irrelevant" as multiple posts in this it's not always only undeveloped social skills that create problems benefitting from setting expectations set have demonstrated

 

[tetrasodium]

I don't have any response for your argument because it's so far removed from any experience in D&D I've ever had that you could be describing Scrabble for all I know. And I've been subject to bad DMs (notoriously) and had bad players. And I've played for 30 years in multiple groups. I don't see anything in the books that support this tyranny of the player argument you keep making and the scant evidence I see comes down to "how DARE the players play in a way I don't agree with".

I could see how extending perspective-taking that far could be difficult if you've never really been exposed to much/any competitive online fps/mmo raiding/moba /etc often PvP videogaming where the ttrpg equivalent of PvDM general hostility towards other players win at any cost & so on is both normal encouraged & healthy within the community. It's quite common within those recreational activities though & I can't be bothered finding a video or a blog post talking about those online gaming subcultures. A player with social skills who is carrying habits & the social contract from such a gaming background could easily dial it back to avoid raising red flags too often too high & too fast for their fellow players in the role of teammate to involve themselves.