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

[zakael19]

He did the standard "that sounds like X" as well, but he explicitly called for specific actions - not just suggested - and I'm pretty sure it was at least once every session. There was also rolling twice for the same thing, without the fiction changing much. And requiring a roll without having a consequence established - the amount of times he sat there, chewing on his pen, umming. Sheesh.

Gotcha, I’m incapable of watching actual plays; I did a bit of his earlier one with Stras/Sean/Adam but it wasn’t very compelling.

Thankfully I don’t have those issue in the games I run .

 

[SableWyvern]

Yeah. A number of us sandbox DMs have said, or liked posts that said something to the effect of, "If there are multiple logical responses, it's perfectly fine to pick the one that's the most interesting."

And some of us, like me, have said they actively try to avoid doing that too much. And you know what? That's OK. The "sandbox DMs" are not a monoculture all marching in lockstep. We all have our own way of doing things, and anyone who assumes that any of us speak for all of us in everything would be greatly mistaken.

 

[zakael19]

Haven't looked at the player bad habits yet (must have missed the callout in the ToC) but here's my two bits on the GM ones....which pretty much vary from "qualified yes" to "100% total agreement".

Spoiler: GM bad habits analysis

GM Bad Habits

"Don't call for a specific action roll"
Analysis: Don't tell players "that's an X roll", ask players how they want to make their intent happen. The advice allows for a little negotiation/discussion, but is (primarily) about talking to the player about what the character does, not which rule they invoke, which is generally good advice (even if the title is a touch misleading.)

"Don't make the PCs look incompetent"
Analysis: Exactly what it says on the tin, and something I 100% agree with. Note: don't MAKE the PCs look incompetent. If they CHOOSE to do something incompetent, that's a whole other ballgame.

"Don't overcomplicate things"
Summary: Again, pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. Some consequences can be just obvious expected bad results, not necessarily "spicing up" things. Simply put, "spicing things up" has its place, but don't overdo it.

"Don't let planning get out of hand"
Analysis: I've seen this as a pretty major issue in a lot of games, of both old- and new-school varieties, though the former seems a bit more prone to it. It's not that planning is inherently bad, but...well. It's like when I watch a YouTube video analyzing a video game story, where the speaker pauses to spend 15 minutes on a lengthy theorized explanation of what's going on....only for the very next sentence to completely negate all of that stuff. Sometimes, planning does go too far and should be reined in. Not often, but occasionally. I'd call this not so much a "bad habit" as a "possible risk".

"Don't hold back on what they earn"
Analysis: Excellent advice that I have found some DMs (particularly, but not exclusively, of the old-school persuasion) really, really need to think on for a while.

"Don't say no"
Analysis: This is........complicated. On the one hand, I'm a HUGE proponent of basically any other alternative besides just flat saying "no": "yes, and", "yes, but", and "no, but" are almost always better choices, as in 99.99% of the time better choices. But there's that 0.01% of the time that does still need to be considered. Very rarely--as in, so rarely it might only happen once or twice a year in a game with weekly sessions--I find players really do truly want to do something completely unreasonable, unacceptable, and/or unjustifiable. In those contexts, saying "no" is appropriate. So I guess what I'd say with this is, if you say a flat no as a habit, then it is definitely a bad habit. Make your habit be some mixture of the above: "yes, and", "yes, but", and "no, but". (This is another topic upon which I have long wanted to make a "Snarfticle", the power and necessity of saying "yes" with complications.)

"Don't roll twice for the same thing"
Analysis: This is "let it ride" in a formal suit. Excellent advice, and this is a notorious bad habit MANY DMs, of all persuasions, fall into. No notes. If you have this as a habit, you SHOULD break it as soon as possible, for nearly any game you run, not just BitD.

"Don't get caught up in minutia"
Analysis: Another "complicated", though not as much as the previous one. Sometimes, the minutia really, truly are important enough to get caught up in them. Rarely, the players may legitimately have fun focusing on minutia, and if they are, don't brush past it just because YOU don't find it that interesting. But there is a bad habit for DMs of all stripes to spend way too much time on the nitty-gritty, the plodding step by step by step by step by step by step, with every...single...step...needing to be meticulously carried through. Having that as a habit is generally counterproductive.

Overall Analysis
None of these "bad habits" strike me as things people shouldn't try to avoid. Most of them have at least the teeniest, tiniest grain of "well akshully...", in that there CAN be times where following where the habit leads is better than rejecting it. But having them as your consistent pattern, deviated from only rarely? No, I think that is clearly less productive than trying to break these as habits, and instead turn them into "sometimes food" type things.

I'll check out the player bad habits later.

A couple system specific notes:

- Blades is designed for retroactive planning as a system, hence stressing minimizing it here. The idea is you grab the first reasonable sounding Target and push for an engagement roll to bring the interlocking systems into play as obstacles come up.

- Don’t Roll Twice is really about ensuring the conflict moves forward with each Action. Either they get something and the fiction changes, or they don’t; and the fiction changes. This interacts with the clock mechanics to ensure you aren’t accidentally keeping things static (Not unlike bad habits with DW Hack and Slash and low damage rolls on a 10+).

- don’t say no is a rule of thumb. The intent is that instead of saying a flat no to ideas you toss out ways they could make it happen. This spurs targets, Gather Info objectives, etc. and maybe you say “yeah you can do that but it’s starting at zero effect and she’ll rip your heart out.” (I think the book uses the “clearly if they want to jump to the moon this doesn’t apply”)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Part of the solution is to not let these things bother you any further than mild "how did that happen?" curiosity. It's all in fun, or so I thought.

Have you not, yourself, been one of the people to articulate that sometimes, for the fun to be fun, we must take it seriously? That there need to be times where we aren't, technically, having fun, in order for the fun to really be there at all?

Because that's where I'm at with this. I know I am a serious person (sort of. I'm often very silly in-person, but when I put on my serious pants I go full-bore serious, and I will turn on a dime between the two.) A good TTRPG requires both silliness and seriousness, "all in fun" and "deep story and pathos and [etc.]", in order for me to really get full enjoyment out of it. Stuff that is just unrelentingly silly is a major turn-off. Stuff that never lets anything unserious happen is equally bad but, at least for me, harder to spot.

If it bothers someone to that extent, I'd probably give an explanation sooner if asked - once. If it bothers someone to that extent every time something unexplained happens, my responses would get less explanatory in a hurry because that's not a me problem, that's a them problem and not mine to fix.

I mean, is it? According to the people in this thread, the alleged game-on-offer is one where things are supposed to make sense, where plausibility/probability/reasonableness/etc. etc. are supposed to be of the highest priority, higher even than "are the players having fun" (as was explicitly articulated upthread), functionally the single highest priority of the campaign.

If you find your players are repeatedly having a problem with what you've done, does that mean it's a them problem? Or does it mean you're failing to live up to the game you offered to run?

Perfect? No. Good enough for rock'n'roll, sure.

But that's not what people actually say when you bring up examples. In order for it to be "good enough", the players must trust for literal months on end--possibly half a year--without ANY evidence beyond "trust me". That sure as hell ain't what I would call "good enough". That's taking things on blind faith with the hope of maybe, possibly, someday, getting an explanation, all the while having to be blown about by what seems like the winds of change and chance, because things actually making sense is deferred for literal months at a time.

Thing is, I think - or at least this is how it comes across - your definition of "suspicious DM behavior" is far more all-encompassing than it is for most of us.

Things I would consider suspicious DM behavior:

• Zero-discussion refusal to permit what other participants see as a reasonable, warranted course of action, doubly so if coupled with refusal to explain beyond "it will make sense eventually, please wait 3-6 business months"
• Surprising players with obstacles or dangers that should have been knowable or foreseeable, but which somehow went unnoticed until the moment they actually blocked something or caused harm or led to an ambush etc.
• Failure to be consistent with past adjudication, especially if each issue is functionally adjudicated as though for the first time (which is, IMO, the almost-guaranteed result of nearly-but-not-quite-all "rulings, not rules" paradigms*)
• "Explaining" a situation in such a way that only one valid course of action is permitted, even though many others should have been possible but just aren't for some reason that the players aren't allowed to know
• Keeping essential information black-boxed, or (more irritatingly) locking it behind excessively over-detailed required questions, such that the DM can then say "well you never ASKED" as an excuse
• Dismissing player feedback and concerns as not being worthy of attention, or (MUCH worse) even being outright harmful to the campaign
• Arbitrary decision-making, especially when the decision in question unavoidably leads to negative consequences the player(s) would have avoided, or at least tried to avoid, if they knew about it in advance
• Expecting expansive, pervasive trust for anything short of an overt, quantifiably harmful action or behavior (in effect, you can only complain if you have the proverbial "receipts")
• Refusing to ever entertain any form of criticism or player concern while in session, regardless of the player's reason
• "My way or the highway"-ism, where player criticism or concern is met with a near-instant "if you don't like it, you can always leave" response

These vary from pale yellow to vivid, burning red flags for me (in no particular order). Yellow flag being "cause for concern but not necessarily much of anything", red flags being "this is a clear and major concern that needs to be addressed adequately".

I don't feel like any of these are particularly out of line or even unusual for the typical player.

*For context, Lanefan, I consider your approach to not even actually BE "rulings, not rules". Your approach, as far as I'm concerned, is actually "my rules, not those rules". They're still rules, and you expect yourself to abide by them. They just might not be 1:1 matching up with the rules the publisher wrote down in their book--but you still write them down in some book, somewhere, and the players are free to read and learn them just as they could any other written rules. You are, to the best of my knowledge, the only person who lays claim to the "rulings, not rules" mantle who does this to this extent. The vast majority of the time, "rulings, not rules" refers to continuously re-generated ad hoc judgments, never written down, and beholden only to the DM's memory (and very, VERY rarely player memory--if the DM decides to allow it).

"Rulings, not rules" has always meant, to me, that "rules" as such don't really exist. There are no rules. There's just what the DM says today. They might say something different next week. They might not. That's for next-week-DM to decide; right now you have today-DM saying what makes sense to today-DM. Though generally next-week-DM and today-DM agree pretty well. The bigger issue is today-DM vs six-months-from-now-DM. They might as well be completely different people, for all the good it'll do you knowing what today-DM has told you.

And so, a question: what would be your take had you been in my game 5 months ago when they encountered sea water that was inexplicably unable to pour down a shaft into a dry chamber?

I would have probably thought it was really weird and asked, "Hey, is there some kind of magic or supernatural power keeping the water out?" or the like. I can generally anticipate that such an obviously unphysical behavior has to have a supernatural source. But maybe it's just a quirk of air pressure in this world, or something like that. A lampshade would do for such a comparatively minor issue.

The kinds of issues I'm talking about relate to player decisions and PC-affecting consequences. Hence the examples I've given. In a campaign where "realism"(/plausibility/reasonability/etc. etc.) is meant to be THE deciding factor, THE prime motivator over and above all other things, I'm going to have pretty high requirements about being given enough details to make an informed decision. I had thought such a thing was inherent in the very premise: the details will matter, they will be consistent, they will adhere to what you as a player know (either from our Earth, or from what the players have learned or got ample, real, non-gotcha, no-BS opportunities to learn and just failed to put in even a modicum of effort)

 

[zakael19]

I'd assert that the bolded is almost always a good idea, and for someone's first campaign can be done by being friends or work/schoolmates outside the game before it starts.

I’ve literally never had that apart from playing 3.5e with friends as a teen. I think that’s
the minority of play these days, and the absolutely massive international contingents of enthusiastic players suggests that’s just not a reasonable thing to eexpect at all.

Hence the 2024 rules finally getting explicit about social contracts and stuff.

 

[zakael19]

Rulings, not rules" has always meant, to me, that "rules" as such don't really exist. There are no rules. There's just what the DM says today. They might say something different next week. They might not. That's for next-week-DM to decide; right now you have today-DM saying what makes sense to today-DM. Though generally next-week-DM and today-DM agree pretty well. The bigger issue is today-DM vs six-months-from-now-DM. They might as well be completely different people, for all the good knowing what today-DM has told you.

I don’t think this is true, honestly. In the OSR space that’s full of games that use this tagline they’re intended to be part and parcel of the adjudication as a neutral ref, and recorded if they’re going to come up again. This is stressed in all the well regarded blogs, advice books, and rule books I’ve read alike.

On the 5e side, maybe. Lists of houserules seem pretty common, but again the 2024 rules finally set some expectations and heuristics on how to apply them that I don’t think was there for 2014. (And 4e didn’t need being a far more enumerated system).

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I'd assert that the bolded is almost always a good idea, and for someone's first campaign can be done by being friends or work/schoolmates outside the game before it starts.

Sure, it's a good idea to have pervasive trust.

The vast majority of games will not have such a thing to start with. Definitely not all games, to be sure. But nearly every player of D&D is going to have to start playing with a group that isn't made up of their spouse, their best man, their high school best friend, and their college roommate as DM.

Very few people have the luxury of a TTRPG group they've played with for the 20+ years your group has. If I had had to have that before I even got started playing D&D, I would have never played D&D--and almost nobody else would have either.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I don’t think this is true, honestly. In the OSR space that’s full of games that use this tagline they’re intended to be part and parcel of the adjudication as a neutral ref, and recorded if they’re going to come up again. This is stressed in all the well regarded blogs, advice books, and rule books I’ve read alike.

On the 5e side, maybe. Lists of houserules seem pretty common, but again the 2024 rules finally set some expectations and heuristics on how to apply them that I don’t think was there for 2014. (And 4e didn’t need being a far more enumerated system).

I can only say what I've seen. The OSR space, in my experience, is actively hostile to the idea of actual rules. That's why they adore things like "invisible rulebooks"--which are nothing of the sort, but they like the idea because it makes "rulings, not rules" sound way more consistent and reliable than it actually is.

 

[JConstantine]

Gotcha, I’m incapable of watching actual plays; I did a bit of his earlier one with Stras/Sean/Adam but it wasn’t very compelling.

I watched both to try to get a handle on how to run it, especially since I had no familiarity with player-facing systems on the GM side, but I'd agree. Both APs were dry as the Sahara.
Haunted City was more entertaining thanks to the players, but Jared Logan is incapable of learning/remembering rules.

 

[zakael19]

I watched both to try to get a handle on how to run it, especially since I had no familiarity with player-facing systems on the GM side, but I'd agree. Both APs were dry as the Sahara.

His 2022 videos on the rhythm of play on the other hand are excellent!