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

[EzekielRaiden]

This is a D&D forum so unless you're clear that you're discussing a different game I'm going to assume D&D.

I was responding to:


I was making a joke (and a point) based on what I thought was a very common meme that there might be some situations why a GM wouldn't allow for a roll. There are very few cases where I would say no to a persuasion check, that's one of those situations where even it's not possible to succeed because the person you're trying to persuade is corrupted, dominated or an evil doppelganger I'd still allow for a roll. On the other hand if I know it's not goin to work, that kind of feels like I'm giving the player unfair expectation of possible success.

Meanwhile if the character should know for some reason that there's no way for the persuasion attempt to work then no I would tell them that they know full well it's not going to work. The character and player should know that in a typical FR campaign trying to convince Orcus to give up that whole Prince of Undeath gig is never going to happen.

If the characters are in the middle of a life-and-death fight with an evil dragon and the bard tries to seduce it would just be so out of context of the game that I would not take it seriously because it would be silly. I don't want silly in the middle of an epic fight in my game. Oh, and yes, I'm talking about my D&D game.

And I'm saying there are things between the extremes of "GM is all-powerful, players solely participate by their sufferance" and "players are all-powerful, GM is their personal whipping-post".

 

[Enrahim]

Not really, no. Even if it were 100% purely diegetically presented--e.g. the guard puts up a perfect front and the player tries every plausible method and consistently fails no matter how high they roll--I would still have a problem with it, because it reads plainly as a violation of clear and established fiction. This is a priesthood all about defending faux-Egypt from external threats. The party has good evidence that an extreme external threat is imminent, and a person whose established backstory warrants some minimal degree of respect, even if that respect earns very, very little.

If I may, an alternative I would accept would be something like (summarizing, rather than presenting in "narration" as it were): The party speaks to a few different guards, several of whom are very standoffish or refuse to interact with the party in any meaningful way. Eventually, they find one who is very skeptical, but not so totally against any discussion--perhaps a pragmatic "if we let them think they had their say, they'll go away" kind of thing. So this guard arranges a purely informal, "this never happened" type meeting with a low-level functionary in the priesthood. That priest listens to what the party has to say, and then (without rolling) basically just stonewalls them, or maybe asks for conclusive proof, or something of the sort. In other words, the PCs were given a legitimate shot, they even got to kinda-sorta-ish speak with the priesthood proper, but they were still shut down. That would be good reason to think "hey, there's something really weird going on, these guys are supposed to be ALL ABOUT slapping down the enemies of Kemet with extreme prejudice, why are they suddenly demanding incontrovertible proof before they'll even look into it??" That would then, quite naturally, lead to an adventure to find out what the hells is going on with the Sutekh-Garyx priesthood--rather than a lead simply shut down with no explanation beyond "you have to trust me", it would actually show that even the priesthood itself is, or at least seems to be, behaving VERY weirdly and should probably be investigated.


Presume it makes no difference. The GM is narrating that their loyalty is absolute, so the characters know there's no point. How precisely they might have this knowledge is not, to my mind, particularly relevant.


I don't see how "not played out but fully carried out" doesn't still qualify as being vetoed. That's like saying a character can present all of their descriptions of how they attack an enemy in a combat, use up their resources etc., and then the GM says, "All of that fails. Next?" That's still a veto in my book.


The point was precisely that it was something potentially (not guaranteed, but potentially) coming from an acceptable motive, but was (again, by construction) something that LOOKS really, really hinky. Like, in many other contexts, that exact action would be seen as pretty blatant railroading. Here, the player is giving the GM the benefit of the doubt, but (more or less) saying "it simply isn't acceptable to do this and then tell me 'you just have to trust me', that's ignoring my legitimate concerns and asserting that, simply because you're the GM, I have to go along with whatever you say no matter what."


I disagree--quite strongly, actually, because there the player is making a declaration while in ignorance, while here, the player was making a declaration specifically on the back of both GM-approved character backstory, and GM-established context and lore. That's a pretty significant gap, since your argument here is specifically deriving its force from the fact that the player is making a declaration of which the character is ignorant. Ranakht is not ignorant of the doctrines of the various priesthoods. He is not ignorant of his (extremely minor but nonzero) position in society. He is not ignorant of the desires and interests of the Hyksos to retain their authority and their influence in society. His proposal is confident because it is built on the back of substantial knowledge, not on a lack of information about alternatives.


Well, the point wasn't "GM knows this can't work and tells the player so". The point was that the GM knowing this can't work looks a hell of a lot like railroading. It's a plausible plan, supported by good evidence, and by other things the GM has explicitly approved and perhaps even allowed the use of in the past. A sudden reversal on something like that, without any explanation beyond "you just have to trust me", is a party foul.

Oh. I agree it is almost certanly railroading. I agree it seemingly breaks with preestablished lore. If this had happened to me I would probably have been hell bent on investigating what sort of loyalty the guards had - as it certanly wouldn't seem to be towards the tennets of Sutekh-Garyx (Unless one of their strong tenets was regarding requirements for gaining access to the priesthood. Good luck getting access to the oracle at Delphi with just words and assurances). I however find it more likely that the other players would talk me out of it than the GM having to bring out their power of explicit veto (which they do have as a potential tool to deal with that kind of problematic player behavior I would have exemplified if I indeed had been ignoring my fellow players pleas to let it rest)

Further more I still maintain that there wasn't a veto of anything confined to the character. The matter of dispute was regarding how something outside the scope of the character would react to a character action. In this case how guards would react to bribes and reasoning.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Experience tells me I have to disagree on this one.

I became a DM because I was in a game, saw how it was done, and decided to try my hand. Another player from that same game, ditto., a year later; and both of us are still DMing today. Two other players also from that same game tried DMing and found it wasn't for them; while yet another tried it and while he thought he was doing OK the players quickly lost interest - he just couldn't say "no" to us and, us not exactly being the self-limiting types, we broke the game (though I got a great character out of it!).

It's almost a tree pattern, where one branch grows from another.

No. Experience tells you that it is POSSIBLE for people who were your players to later become GMs.

It does not tell you that, solely by playing, you are GUARANTEED to not only make GMs, plural, but that you are going to make GMs who will specifically share all or almost all of your preferences and thus run games you'd be ecstatic to play.

You have reasoned from valid data to an invalid conclusion.

Every player is a potential DM. The odds of any one player being exactly the DM you want to play under, however, are quite low indeed.

No. Some players are potential GMs. Some players will never want to be GMs, no matter what else happens. However, then, as you say, the chance that any given player becomes exactly the GM you would want to play.

I'm not sure why this would be the least bit morally objectionable, though. The idea of people learning by example from mentors is as old as time.

But that's not what was proposed.

What was proposed was enticing people to play solely for the purpose of turning them into GMs to run for you. That is coercion. I refuse to behave that way.

 

[Don Durito]

There is a school of thought that says that as long as the GM just sticks to what is predetermined all's fair in love and war.

To which I always think, no sometimes the GM has to be able to read the room.

 

[FrogReaver]

There is a school of thought that says that as long as the GM just sticks to what is predetermined all's fair in love and war.

To which I always think, no sometimes the GM has to be able to read the room.

What does reading the room entail?

And I’d suggest to the extent the group wants the dm ‘reading the room’ is group dependent. Unless reading the room encompasses even those rooms that would prefer the GM to always stick with what was predetermined. But that would seem to undermine your point above so by context that possible meaning would seem excluded.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Oh. I agree it is almost certanly railroading. I agree it seemingly breaks with preestablished lore. If this had happened to me I would probably have been hell bent on investigating what sort of loyalty the guards had - as it certanly wouldn't seem to be towards the tennets of Sutekh-Garyx (Unless one of their strong tenets was regarding requirements for gaining access to the priesthood. Good luck getting access to the oracle at Delphi with just words and assurances). I however find it more likely that the other players would talk me out of it than the GM having to bring out their power of explicit veto (which they do have as a potential tool to deal with that kind of problematic player behavior I would have exemplified if I indeed had been ignoring my fellow players pleas to let it rest)

Further more I still maintain that there wasn't a veto of anything confined to the character. The matter of dispute was regarding how something outside the scope of the character would react to a character action. In this case how guards would react to bribes and reasoning.

I don't see the difference between those things. I genuinely don't understand the distinction you're drawing here. It's like saying "I'm not forbidding you from harvesting your wheat, I'm simply forbidding you from harvesting any of the chaff along with it." To forbid the latter necessarily forbids the former; you can't harvest wheat without also getting chaff. (I'm reminded of a lovely myth from India I recently heard of, from TED Ed, where a brilliant princess, Savitri, tricks Yama, the god of death, into restoring her husband to her, because he grants her third and final wish that she will have many children. See, she had already long before sworn a sacred oath to never marry anyone but her now-dead husband, so her wish cannot come true unless her husband is restored to life. Impressed by her tenacity, devotion, and cleverness, Yama relents and restores her husband to life.)

 

[Enrahim]

I do not understand why the other children would care about the first child presenting their special, personal-to-them toy. (Call the first child Sam for convenience.) If everyone already has their own comparable toy, why are they seeking out this one specific toy for interaction?

More importantly, how can this be an analogy for what is going on with GMing a game? That was part of my analysis here--that you were using this as a demonstration of what is going on with GMing, where it is patently not true that every participant has a more-or-less equivalent toy. More or less, you clearly constructed this to be an analogy in order to fold back conclusions from it to the original case. But now you are introducing elements which make a sharp disanalogy; so while I might potentially grant some of these conclusions (I haven't thought about them much), such granting would be not very productive, because they're situations utterly distinct from the situation we were discussing previously.

If you invent a situation where Sam isn't in any way special from any other participant, where every person has a comparable toy and thus is genuinely an equal within the space, I don't understand why the children would have any desire (let alone need) to use Sam's toy specifically, nor how they would not automatically be entered into a relationship of complete equals, because friend Alex (to invent another rnadom child's name) also has a toy, which Sam is obliged to completely respect in every fashion and neither can nor will take any action which Alex thinks would harm that toy. Such a reciprocal relationship of equals certainly isn't going to involve absolute power. It's also not going to have any bearing on the "traditional GM" concept.

If you want to bring the analogy back to RPGing. You have a world you have worked on for 30 years. You could have kept it for yourself. If you had been a better writer you might perhaps been able to get a novel or two out of it. There is nothing special about the world. Fully generic fantasy with some faux historical places here and there. But it is your world. You could have keept it all in a drawer, Tolkien style. Instead you take the leap to invite some of your friends into it. The friend ask if they can play thiefling. You politely inform them that there are no thiefling in your world. They then go on to play a human fighter. This fighter go out and gather huge treasures, establishes a town and dies fighting the most fearsome dragon in the world.

Your world now has a new town. And a new legend. It is still your world. You have worked on it for 31 years.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

There is a school of thought that says that as long as the GM just sticks to what is predetermined all's fair in love and war.

To which I always think, no sometimes the GM has to be able to read the room.

Sure.

But in ascending to this higher tier of understanding, a different set of rules now applies, ones that were irrelevant or inapplicable before--a new rendering of the highest-tier abstractions. In any tier, the GM must play fair. That doesn't mean they need to play kindly or coddlingly or positively--but there needs to be restraint of some kind, or it simply collapses into arbitrary action. You can quite easily have a bloody PC-abattoir of a campaign, a grimdark "meditation" on how everyone always sucks all the time forever, a one-mistake-and-you-die two-mistakes-and-you-suffer-fates-worse-than-death, or whatever else in your campaign. But if you as GM don't have some kind of limitation under the maximally-abstract umbrella of "playing fair", you've broken something terribly important.

When one ascends from "play only what is predetermined" to "break from what is predetermined when needed", the new restraint that applies is some variation of, "But only do so when you make it legitimately possible for the players to know." That doesn't mean you have to tell them right away. It doesn't mean you have to "tell" them at all. But they need to have a true, legitimate, fair shot at actually discovering how/why/what/etc. Without that limitation, you just have the GM doing whatever, whenever, because you've created an exception without closure.

And I really do mean "ascending" here. One lays down a basis of thought and explores its space, and then ascends past the bad parts of the old limitations by understanding that there may be a more nuanced, better-fitting limitation which evades places where the old limitation went astray. But there are some limitations induced purely by the medium--and the fact that the GM is the sole source of information is why many of those limitations apply.

 

[Don Durito]

What does reading the room entail?

Reading the room.

And I’d suggest to the extent the group wants the dm ‘reading the room’ is group dependent. Unless reading the room encompasses even those rooms that would prefer the GM to always stick with what was predetermined.

And how do you know if the group want's that or not. By reading the room!

(Also why do people always treat the players as one mind with several bodies. It's not group dependant it's player dependent - which is why you really need to read the room).

But that would seem to undermine your point above so by context that possible meaning would seem excluded.

I can't think why you would think that.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

If you want to bring the analogy back to RPGing. You have a world you have worked on for 30 years. You could have kept it for yourself. If you had been a better writer you might perhaps been able to get a novel or two out of it. There is nothing special about the world. Fully generic fantasy with some faux historical places here and there. But it is your world. You could have keept it all in a drawer, Tolkien style. Instead you take the leap to invite some of your friends into it. The friend ask if they can play thiefling. You politely inform them that there are no thiefling in your world. They then go on to play a human fighter. This fighter go out and gather huge treasures, establishes a town and dies fighting the most fearsome dragon in the world.

Your world now has a new town. And a new legend. It is still your world. You have worked on it for 31 years.

This is an aspiring author trying to force people into playing out their novel by only doing the correct things. They should focus on publishing a novel, which they can absolutely do, rather than trying to squeeze a game out of it when that isn't what it's built for.