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

[Maxperson]

The problem with that assertion is that the GM's "whim" is present, regardless. I am pointing out that whether that whim is exerted at the time of making up a table of outcomes, or in the moment, is not relevant. It is still "whim".

That you externalize the model onto paper, or run it realtime in your head, it is still just your own, personal thoughts on how people behave. It is not "the setting's internal logic". It is the GM's reasoning, either way.

Let me make a really simple analogy...

It is Valentine's Day. You create a table - Roll a D4. On a 1-3, your loved one gets a box of their favorite candy treat. On a 4, you give them a bag of poo.

You are not going to get away with disclaiming that somehow the "internal logic of the universe" is responsible for the result when you hand them a bag of poo... You made the table. It is your logic. You own it.

You'd have a stronger position if the published game mechanic handed you the answer, and as a GM you are merely the mechanical processor, making no decisions of your own.

"Whim" implies an impulsive DM decision, rather than one that is thought out and reasoned based on what is known of the setting, the players and the circumstances around whatever it is that is instigating the DM's decision.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Ok. It's not my position. I like rules and I like the OSR. I just don't like rules that impinge on the GM's traditional role.

At risk of potentially "interrogating" again--what would you define that role to be?

Because that would be a pretty big sticking point...depending on what "the GM's traditional role" means. A lot of tradition, especially when it comes to GMs, is....maybe not something we want to do today? Ear seekers and the infamous passage about passive-aggressively punishing players who choose not to play human characters, for example, are explicitly written into the 1e AD&D DMG. (Even dug up an image reference for the latter, if you desire it, though I'm sure you've read it yourself already.) I am not saying this to smear all tradition as bad, because that would be pointlessly foolish. I'm just noting that sometimes we might want to "impinge on the GM's traditional role" because some traditions maybe shouldn't be carried forward, or should at least get some really careful review. (I am a big believer in Chesterton's Fence, but a portion of these traditions are cases where the person who built the fence has explicitly laid out the reason why they built it, and that reason seems pretty bad!)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

"Whim" implies an impulsive DM decision, rather than one that is thought out and reasoned based on what is known of the setting, the players and the circumstances around whatever it is that is instigating the DM's decision.

But then this gets into what I've asked for, many times:

How does the DM do things like deciding what they already know?

How does the DM "think out and reason" in this context? It has to be more than just mechanistic thinking, because that's what folks have said repeatedly, they explicitly don't want a "machine" world, they want a living human making decisions.

What things are "instigating" the DM's decision? Are those things even distinct from the DM in the first place? If they aren't, can it truly be said that the decision was instigated, or is it...just...whatever vibes the DM felt like following? And that last thing is what looks, from the outside, completely indistinguishable from "whim".

 

[clearstream]

That you externalize the model onto paper, or run it realtime in your head, it is still just your own, personal thoughts on how people behave. It is not "the setting's internal logic". It is the GM's reasoning, either way.

Let me make a really simple analogy...

It is Valentine's Day. You create a table - Roll a D4. On a 1-3, your loved one gets a box of their favorite candy treat. On a 4, you give them a bag of poo.

You are not going to get away with disclaiming that somehow the "internal logic of the universe" is responsible for the result when you hand them a bag of poo... You made the table. It is your logic. You own it.

You'd have a stronger position if the published game mechanic handed you the answer, and as a GM you are merely the mechanical processor, making no decisions of your own.

I don't think the author of the table matters so much as your commitment to following it. You have a table and a rule - On Valentine's Day roll to determine what you get your loved one. Supposing you follow that rule every Valentine's Day and adhere to the results of the table; that sort of systematic or consistent behaviour seems distinct from whim.

Playful behaviour that is not whimsical is possibly just that which adheres to sets of norms / rules. A strong way to produce that result is to externalize them such as by committing them to tables. Using that table one time and then discarding it probably works out as you say, so its the commitment to using it every time that matters.*

When it comes to setting, it could mean consistently tying back decisions to what has already been said for setting. Efforts to say a lot about setting could then cover more cases.


*I suspect that addresses the regress @EzekielRaiden alludes to. The arrangement probably withstands adding a row to the table, but it doesn't withstand abandoning the commitment.

 

[AnotherGuy]

If it’s in the middle of a campaign, no, I wouldn’t reveal in-game secrets as a rule. But I also wouldn’t be coy about it. I’d just say, “If I talk about this, it’ll be a spoiler for things I think you’d rather discover in play.” Then we’d have a conversation from there. But honestly, that’s extremely rare, maybe once a decade—that we even reach that point.

I was fortunate enough to reveal a 10+ year secret to our current table a few sessions ago through the fiction.
It did not have any real ramifications on decision-making but it did surprise and excite some of the players who were there 10+ years ago. It is fun when that happens.

 

[Lanefan]

I don't want my game to explicitly put any attention to making a good story. That's all there is to it.

I just find that games which shove important components under the rug and pretend they don't exist, frequently run into problems by failing to actually do the stuff that component covers.

Thing is, the moment "making a good story" is assumed to be an important component - even worse, as the most important component - it becomes far too easy for a well-meaning DM to slip into trying to force that good story at the expense of player agency, integrity of play, and various other things that IMO really should take precedence over story.

And I'll freely cop to being guilty of this myself on far too many occasions in my DMing career.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I was fortunate enough to reveal a 10+ year secret to our current table a few sessions ago through the fiction.
It did not have any real ramifications on decision-making but it did surprise and excite some of the players who were there 10+ years ago. It is fun when that happens.

Yeah, I had an important reveal earlier this year which...didn't land as hard as I had hoped, because it was something that connected together things from multiple years ago, and the longest-running player I currently have in the group had arrived slightly after the initial stuff for that. So for a lot of them it was like "oh, that's neat, these things we thought were totally separate are in fact strongly connected".

It didn't help that we had needed to take some time off because players had medical stuff to attend to (which, to be clear, is 110% the correct choice--never let gaming get in the way of your health for goodness' sake!), but that kinda amped up the hype a little and meant the "I'm not entirely sure what all of that means" effect was more pronounced.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Thing is, the moment "making a good story" is assumed to be an important component - even worse, as the most important component - it becomes far too easy for a well-meaning DM to slip into trying to force that good story at the expense of player agency, integrity of play, and various other things that IMO really should take precedence over story.

And I'll freely cop to being guilty of this myself on far too many occasions in my DMing career.

That would be why Dungeon World (and indeed all PbtA and FitD games, as I understand it) explicitly tell you to "play to find out what happens". You should prep, prep is extremely important (IMO, the books don't do the best job of explaining this, but that might be a me thing? I dunno). But you don't prep story. You prep events, which act as calls to action--and then story results from responding to that call to action. Some of those calls to action will, most likely, be related to the party's interests. Not because the world pretzels around them to make them the most super ultra special guys, but because it's not really a call to action if you couldn't care less what happens.

 

[Lanefan]

Certainly, from my read of this, the goals/priorities (or, as JConstantine put it, "passive 'considerations'") here put several things ahead of whether or not the players are having fun, and thus implicitly indicate that there are going to be a lot of situations where, even if a GMing direction would be a substantial gain in the fun department, it won't be taken simply because it is a very small loss in the plausibility department. Or, to phrase that differently, slightly uninteresting but extremely plausible situations will, almost universally, win out over extremely interesting but slightly implausible situations. That's...a tough position for me to swallow with any DMing style, because it...implies that the players having fun isn't a particularly significant goal.

A matter of degree or scale, perhaps.

If maintaining plausibility and setting consistency means only hitting 85% on the fun-o-meter rather than 95% that's a trade I'm happy to make in the long-term interests of the campaign.

That the players keep coming back for more every week leads me to assume enough fun is being had in general.

 

[Lanefan]

Two DMGs. The second is optional and focused on higher-level play (e.g. Paragon tier, levels 11-20). Three PHBs.

Two-and-three, then. I stand corrected. (though will likely have forgetten this by the next time it comes up)

Note what "core" means in 4e: because in 4e, everything 1st party is core. Literally every WotC-published thing is.

That doesn't mean you have to USE it,

For these purposes I would take "core" to be the opposite of "optional". If it's core, the game expects you to use it.

1e sort of tried the same idea with Unearthed Arcana but many (most?) tables took it to be little more than a collection of reworked Dragon articles which had been previously presented as options and ideas, and htus took UA to be optional as well.

though I would certainly recommend using the original books, with some of the more-important errata (like to Stealth stuff and skill challenge math...and it's worth noting that people ripped into 4e for needing errata to the Stealth rules.....only for 5e to then need errata to its Stealth rules, and getting even more such errata in 5.5e!)

Yeah, WotC do keep butchering stealth and hiding. I think this is one case where trying to use keywords for specific conditions (and then shoehorn everything so it fits one of those conditions) really backfires on them when those same words have more or less different meanings in common usage.

"Everything is core", in 4e, means that everything is held to the same balance standards. Everything. Supplements? Expected to remain within the approximate balance range of the first three books. Magazines? Same deal. Miniatures tie-in products? Same deal. "Everything is core" means the creators legitimately committed to making it so EVERYTHING published for 4e could be trusted to stay pretty much fine, so you didn't need to review everything with a fine-toothed comb for possible crappy exploits.

I would expect this as a baseline in any case, that things were being checked for crazy exploits etc. before hitting the open market.

This doesn't mean NOTHING unbalanced snuck through! A few things did. (As an example, the "Windrise Ports" background was initially OP, within the bounds of 4e balance, but it was later redesigned to be, if anything, on the weak-ish side. Compared to 3e, of course, nothing 4e ever produced was even remotely overpowered, but that's a separate concern.)

Balance in and of itself isn't nearly as big a deal to me as it seemed to be to the 4e designers.

When 4e was still getting the finishing touches before going to the printers, WotC did an early reveal where they showed off some actual mechanics, not just high-level ideas or setting materials (which they also did with other stuff). One of the things they previewed was a feat called "Golden Wyvern Adept", which included both some mechanical effects I can't recall, and a little bit of relatively mild story/RP context (you have been initiated into a group called the Golden Wyverns, who were a group of spellcasters, possibly Wizards specifically[?], that had certain goals and expectations).

The community response at the time was VEHEMENT OUTRAGE. Fans absolutely skewered the 4e devs for having the unmitigated GALL to presume the story for anyone's character, for forcing in-character actions or affiliations in order to do a particular thing. This taught the devs an early lesson: Don't force anything in RP. Let RP exist completely on its own, so mechanics can be used for whatever flavor and story the player wishes.

And guess what 4e was then pilloried over? (Something I, personally, mocked 4e for because an ex-friend poisoned the well!) Flavorless mechanics that didn't include any story or roleplay elements!!!

Yes. It was very literally the playerbase being completely unpleasable. The very same people who brought out the proverbial torches and pitchforks because of the Golden Wyvern Adept feat "enforced" setting elements or whatever...who then slammed the 4e we eventually got for NOT containing those very elements.

It's one of the most obviously infuriating examples of how 4e literally could not win, an encapsulation of how 4e was subjected to "heads I win, tails you lose" expectations.

One question: was the Golden Wyvern Adept presented as just an example of how a DM could make such a feat (i.e. the DM was explicitly free to rename it the Harper's Adept or the Wizards of Thay Adept or the Praetos Guild Adept), or was the Golden Wyvern group supposed to be locked in by this as part of the game's lore?

If the former, the outrage holds no water at all. If the latter, I can see a lot of DMs who wanted to use pre-existing settings that didn't have such a group getting a bit hacked off.