D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[EzekielRaiden]

Strange that I can not remember that ever happening though. Are we talking about "will be broken" as in Murphy's law?

More or less.

(As a minor side note - one of the things I like with being player in a TTRPG is to feel like I am not bound by hard explicit rules in the way I am when playing a board game. But I assume that was meant as a rethorical stroke, rather than as a central claim)

Not at all. Several OSR-adjacent folks on this forum (some of them participating in this thread!) have made very clear just how horrendous an affront it is for a player to put even a single toe out of line.

 

[AlViking]

Ok, it sound actually to me like your experiences might not e contradicting, merely that you talk about somewhat different phenomena.

First off - I have actually met the mythic GM Tyrant. I was my friend. I think we were about 13 at the time, and he was running his first game ever. He ran the first part of a module fine. Then he put us in a ship to ship combat with the opposing ship having an endless stream of enemies, and a conspicuously increasing number of balistas as we managed to fight trough the horde he was sure would TPK us. He later admitted doing so anticipating the arrival of a module he rather wanted to run/play. Rather prematurely though, as said module never arrived.

With this out of my system, it appear @Thomas Shey has a lower threshold for the phenomenom observed. It appear we are rather talking about games where the GM has a more authoritative style than the players would prefer.

I am as such curious what @Thomas Shey makes of the following anecdote. When I was peak integrated in the local RPG community the best known and revered GM in the city (possibly in the country) was an individual that provided incredibly imaginative experiences delivered in an extremely professional and engaging maner. He made Matt Mercer look like an amateur in terms of delivey, and I am serious about that. He was also by far the most overtly top down authoritative GM I have ever experienced, and he would not be shy about promoting this as a central part of his "method".

Here we have an extremely well liked GM who's popularity is in part because of not despite a very strong top down approach. How does that fit into the model? My take is that there are certain role models that actually manage to make such an approach work, but that there is a underforest of imitators that try to acheive the same thing, but just don't have what it takes to make it work.

I am in absolutely no doubt that there are lots of groups out there with a GM that is overdoing the authority thing compared with their own skill and player preference. I think this is valuable to increase consciousness about. But I do not think it is correct or constructive to look at the authoritative style of play in itself as a problem. I think it is a hard style of play to master, with many pitfalls. But I have been privileged enough to get to experience first hand what magic it can produce when actually competently wielded.

I'm not too concerned about a 13 year old's first time running a game, I'm sure we all screwed up pretty badly at one point or another. But what people have never been able to explain and I stopped asking - what stops a GM in other games from other games not just introducing a horde of monster guaranteed to kill the party or something similar? Because most of the moves I've seen explained are quite nebulous (when I've been able to find an explanation at all since I'm only looking at SRDs). The answer always seems to come back to social contract. But when we mention the exact same social contract for D&D, it doesn't count.

Simple answer for me is that the only thing that really matters is the social contract between GM and players. There are different methods and approaches, different styles of play. I just don't see how rules are going to make a bad GM into a good one. Whether that's the sudden appearance of a dozen dragons or just the tone and style of the game not matching mine, what really matters is mutual respect and trust until proven otherwise and matching goals for play.

 

[AlViking]

I had a DM who provided us with “NPCs” that he “suggested” we play in favor of the PCs we had. None of us went with it… it seemed an odd request. Then as we played and we saw that everything that was happening was related to the NPCs and our PCs were simply along for the ride, it became really obvious that we were just meant to play through his novel.

Did you continue to play those characters in that DM's campaign? I assume the answer is no - either you confronted them and they changed or you stopped having them as DM. In either case it's an example of a self-correcting issue.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Ideally, the bolded is the case.

More and more, however, it is a game amongst some random people online or at a game store, who were complete strangers before the game began and may or may not ever become friends.

And even when it is among good, close friends, rules are not some horrible affront. I mean, obviously a crappy rule could be such. Bur rules in general are tools. Even among close friends, they can be useful tools.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Agree with @Thomas Shey on this one. They may be poor quality data compared to some other types, but often that is all we have to work with.

Still doesn't make them data. They're self-selected, which means you can't separate them from their prompting.

Or, if you prefer, statistics require us to divide by (N-1), one less than the sample population. If your sample size is 1, that means dividing by zero. I think you can see why that might cause a few problems. Just a smidge.

 

[AlViking]

More or less.


Not at all. Several OSR-adjacent folks on this forum (some of them participating in this thread!) have made very clear just how horrendous an affront it is for a player to put even a single toe out of line.

I've never seen that. I may have stated that I don't want extended arguments during the game, we'll discuss it for a minute or two before I make a ruling so we don't interrupt the game and we'll discuss it afterwards. But I'm always willing to discuss any ruling I make with whoever wants to spend time discussing it after the game or offline.

If that puts me in your category of tyrannical overlord I'm not sure what to say. I don't want to be in a game where people argue for several minutes hashing things out when I just want to play.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Sometimes, in cases like this, deferring to the player who knows stuff can be a good approach.

Horses are a common sight in fantasy games, yet as DM I know nothing about them beyond that they have 4 legs, they eat hay, some people ride them, and sometimes they run really fast. And so, when I had a player in my game who had decades of experience with horses, whenever something horse-related came up I'd just turn to her and ask how it worked.

My current DM doesn't really know a boat from a bazooka; I'm no maritime expert but I do know a bit more than he, thus sometimes when boating questions come up he'll ask me for advice.

So you sometimes defer to your players, or expect the GM to defer to you as a player?

How do you avoid abuse? How do you ensure only acceptable outcomes? You've just made the GM not the single central and final authority. Something you've insisted is required, many many many times. Now you're saying they aren't, and in fact that it is better that in some cases, they shouldn't be, that sometimes they should yield control over the world to someone who can speak authoritatively on things the GM is poorly-informed about.

And note, these are your own questions that you have asked me when I talk about building true group consensus rather than having an autocrat GM who lays down the law. My answer to the above is already well known: we talk it out like adults and show respect to each other.

 

[Enrahim]

More or less.

Ok, then that is a risk I have accepted as quite simply impossible to fully eliminate as an engineer. It make sense to limit it up to a certain point, but sooner or later you have to just push the product and hope the thing that can go wrong isn't turning out horribly bad.

Not at all. Several OSR-adjacent folks on this forum (some of them participating in this thread!) have made very clear just how horrendous an affront it is for a player to put even a single toe out of line.

Interesting. Both games advertised as OSR I have played in cheered me on when I was making moves outside the standard box. Indeed I thought being open for creative player solutions to open ended problems was one of the core tenets of the movement?

 

[The Firebird]

Still doesn't make them data. They're self-selected, which means you can't separate them from their prompting.

Or, if you prefer, statistics require us to divide by (N-1), one less than the sample population. If your sample size is 1, that means dividing by zero. I think you can see why that might cause a few problems. Just a smidge.

If you're going to be pedantic...then 1) multiple versions of the anecdote were referred to and 2) you don't need to do statistics on something to make it data (or a datum, for the pedants). Any information is data. The whole 'anecdotes aren't data' idea is just placing an artificial bound on what counts.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Ok, then that is a risk I have accepted as quite simply impossible to fully eliminate as an engineer. It make sense to limit it up to a certain point, but sooner or later you have to just push the product and hope the thing that can go wrong isn't turning out horribly bad.

Whereas I see the extremely simple and obvious fix of "there are rules we agree to abide by" plus "if we choose not to abide by them, we make that clear and talk it out openly" (which is, itself, another rule we agree to abide by, explicitly).

Interesting. Both games advertised as OSR I have played in cheered me on when I was making moves outside the standard box. Indeed I thought being open for creative player solutions to open ended problems was one of the core tenets of the movement?

Well, in my experience only certain kinds of creativity are acceptable. Anything else is heavily frowned upon. And definitely if you actually break a rule, e.g. a player fudging dice? Ohh boy, there's gonna be hell to pay. Numerous conversations with OSR folks, plus reading the manifestos and blogposts they hold up as standard-bearer things, have made very clear that OSR is utterly riddled with "rules for thee, not for me."