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

[Thomas Shey]

I've had far more problems with fellow players than DMs. It's simply a numbers thing, ther are typically 6 players to 1 DM.

I can accept that. What I won't accept is that the problems with players are of the same scale as the ones with GMs.

If I don't trust the DM to make decisions they won't be my DM for long.

As I've noted before, if I only played with GMs I never expected to make bad decisions, I'd never have played at all.

 

[Hussar]

When playing with friends who are forever-players, it can easily reach the point where you can fairly accurately predict what they're going to say if-when consulted with: almost invariably amounting to nerfs = no, boost = yes, neutral = who cares.

Those players who are also DMs will, IME, usually give a more balanced take; as they know to look at the long-term benefits/drawbacks/effects to the game as a whole rather than just through the lens of "How does this affect my character?".

Honestly, so much of this boils down to personal experience. I mean, I haven't played with "forever-players" in years. And, frankly, the worst players I've ever played with are all forever players and I pretty much don't want any at my table. When a new player shows up at my table who has played for several years but never run a game, that runs up a huge red flag for me and, again IME, it means that said player isn't long for my group. Forever players IME, are passive participants who expect me to roll up the plot wagon and spoon feed them things to do while they contribute little more than what a dice bot could do.

Did I mention I don't like forever players? Might be a personal bias there.

And, there's the whole "playing with friends" thing. I haven't played with players who are my friends outside of gaming since high school. Which is going to make for a very different experience. I get a strong feeling, although this is just a gut feeling, that a lot of people who insist on the whole "DM is the final arbiter" thing most strongly are those who have had very stable groups of friends for a very long time. Gamers like me, who have not had stable groups and have played extended campaigns with strangers for years, need to rely much more strongly on a shared language of the system itself to resolve issues. Bringing in a boat load of house rules doesn't work when you are changing your entire group every year or two. Other than a fairly extended run from the beginning of 5e in 2014 to about 2020, I've never had a group that has remained the same for more than a couple of years, ever.

Which means that I have a much different POV on this than others.

 

[Thomas Shey]

When playing with friends who are forever-players, it can easily reach the point where you can fairly accurately predict what they're going to say if-when consulted with: almost invariably amounting to nerfs = no, boost = yes, neutral = who cares.

As we've noted before, Lanefan, not all of us play with people who are incapable of understanding that sometimes things good for the game as a whole can impact them negatively.

Those players who are also DMs will, IME, usually give a more balanced take; as they know to look at the long-term benefits/drawbacks/effects to the game as a whole rather than just through the lens of "How does this affect my character?".

Admittedly, the majority of people I play with have at least GMed some of the time.

 

[Hussar]

One of the problems I have is this presumption of the pyramid structure of trad RPG's. There's no actual reason for doing it that way, other than tradition.

Imagine this system. ((Note, this is borrowed from John Wick's The Dirty Dungeon)) The group decides on a general theme - say a forgotton tomb. Say we have 5 players and 1 DM. Standard group. Each player goes away during the week and creates 5 "encounters" (all three pillars - social, combat, exploration) based on this theme. By encounter I mean an event of interest for the group - something they would play through. Each player then submits those 5 encounters to the DM who takes the 25 encounters and meshes them together into a dungeon. As the DM puts things together, the DM can change elements and each change is rated from 1 to 4. The DM tallies the changes and puts that number of jelly beans (or M&M's) into a bowl. During play, the players can eat M&M's and gain a d4 bonus on any die roll. The more changes the DM makes, the more die rolls.

Now, each player would know 1/5 of the dungeon but have no knowledge of the other 4/5's. And even the 1/5 that the player knows is unreliable because the DM has changed elements. 25 encounters is a meaty adventure in 5e. That's, for my group anyway, probably 5 or 6 sessions of play. So, after say 4 sessions, the DM asks for 5 more encounters, this time for a town. Now after you leave the dungeon, you go to this nice sandbox town with 25 encounters - again a very meaty adventure.

Wash, rinse, repeat. Now you have everyone working together to build the entire world and the entire campaign. Nobody is buried under a mountain of work trying to build material for the campaign and you have all the creative energy of the entire group.

Is this the better way to play? Absolutely not. No way. It's an ALTERNATIVE way to play a trad game. But, any alternatives are often completely shot down because the presumption that the way we do things is the best way of doing things. It's so incredibly conservative. We see this all the time in this thread. Any new ideas or methods are shot down, not because they are bad ideas but because they are new. Using failed skill checks to trigger events? Oh, hell no. That's not part of trad gaming. Allowing players to edit the game world? Oh, hell no. Players can't be trusted not to abuse the game. We must only trust the DM. On and on.

 

[Thomas Shey]

And, there's the whole "playing with friends" thing. I haven't played with players who are my friends outside of gaming since high school. Which is going to make for a very different experience. I get a strong feeling, although this is just a gut feeling, that a lot of people who insist on the whole "DM is the final arbiter" thing most strongly are those who have had very stable groups of friends for a very long time.

Doesn't work. I've played with people I knew at least for two decades for that period (including all of my current group three of whom I've known for approaching a half century now) and you'll note I've not exactly been a fan of top-down game adminstration without limits.

 

[Hussar]

Doesn't work. I've played with people I knew at least for two decades for that period (including all of my current group three of whom I've known for approaching a half century now) and you'll note I've not exactly been a fan of top-down game adminstration without limits.

Fair enough. Stupid gut. But, overall? Looking at the people in this thread and others in the past, of the people who most strongly advocated for top down game administration strongly correlate with people who have very stable groups who have gamed together for a long. Obviously there are exceptions, but, when people talk about gaming with strangers, we tend to see a much stronger push towards clear rules and less top down game administration.

Heck, one only needs to look at organized play to see this. Organized play heavily leans on every table playing "by the rules" and not house ruling. And the reason is, everyone needs to be on the same page. It's one of the main reasons 4e was designed the way it was - they were banking on organized play being the bed of growth for D&D. It's why virtually all playtesting for 4e came out of the RPGA. The more we presume that groups are playing with strangers, the more clear and clearly defined the rules need to be. It's why in 3e, the RPGA rules guidelines were dozens of pages long. I haven't paid that much attention to 5e's organized play rules, but, doing a quick google search turned up this page: Documents and (again, quick perusal) the player's guide alone is 9 pages long. This isn't a small amount.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So you're saying that, in a trad game, it's impossible for players and GMs to work together? Players and GMs must always be at odds?

Of course not, but the type of working together you seem to be referring to is a focus on collaborative storytelling that, as I mentioned, just isn't how my table plays.