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

[Lanefan]

Sure. "Maybe", IMO, usually cashes out as one of those things I mentioned above: "yes, and", "yes, but", or "no, but", just with dice as a filter. Having the dice decide whether something succeeds is distinct from whether you say yes or no.

The big thing is whether the dice are actually offering a meaningful chance of success, or are functionally being used as "no, but with more steps". E.g. if you require that a player score three back-to-back natural 20s to succeed, you're functionally saying a flat "no" even though there's a slim (1/8000, 0.0125%) chance that it could still happen. IMO, if you aren't going to give it more than at least a 10% chance to succeed, just say no--it will be functionally no different in most situations, and substantially more forthright than the pretense of success.

I prefer that the outer ends of the bell curve get a chance to rear their ugly heads now and then. The simple d20 isn't nearly granular enough for this; so oftentimes when something has a very low chance of success I'll say "roll a d20 and on a 20* I'll think about it". That tells the player the odds of success are very low but not zero, and 19 times out of 20 I don't have to think any more on it.

Also, most of the time the roll doesn't just say whether you binary succeed or fail; I incorporate an informal sliding scale on it such that if you're looking to roll under Dexterity to cross a very narrow bridge, if your Dex is 12 and you roll a 10 you barely make it while if you roll a 2 you dance across no problem. Flip side, if you roll a 14 you don't make it across but nothing else happens while if you roll a 19 you probably plummet.

* - or 1, if it's a roll-under situation.

 

[SableWyvern]

Yes, I was more interested in what what you think the particular way is that works well for your favoured sandboxing.

Having given this more thought, I'm really not sure what you're looking for here. We were talking about constraints, so I presume you are asking in what particular way is the GM constrained when running a sandbox in my favoured style, but I've already covered that to the extent that I can.

Ultimately, the GM is constrained by the need to to offer something that satisfies the players.

As mentioned previously, as far as I can tell, that is the only real constraint that any GM operates under, other than self-restraint.

Luke Crane opted to layer additional, formal constraints underneath that top level constraint, when he wrote Burning Wheel but I, in general do not.. This does not mean I act unconstrained, because that top level constraint does always and must always exist.

I tell my players what sort of game I plan to run and I am then constrained by agreement to run that. Should I feel the players are not operating within the agreed constraints, I raise it with them. Should the players feel I am not operating within the agreed constraints, they raise it with me. If I feel I am not able, in practice, to provide the game I originally offered for some reason, I raise this.

In any of these situations, we come to an understanding and move forward. One or any of us may need to adjust our actions or our expectations, and we do so. But there's no deep, mysterious process at play here, it's fundamentally just normal social interaction not unlike in any other group activity.


If you're talking about my processes more generally, as opposed to constraints specifically, my general preference is to develop as much of the world as possible in advance. I will sometimes work on a game for years before I run it. I am currently working on my Rolemaster Savage Frontier game in my spare time, while running something completely different. I am in the process of adapting material from the 1e Savage Frontier book, working out details of adventure sites, towns, weather etc. I will create encounter tables for various locations based on the things to be found there. I will most likely develop some key fixed events likely to occur over a number of years if nothing the PCs do interferes with those things. I will also aim to have a number of random event and random rumour tables to lean on in play as required. I will probably pre-generate a number of rumours/events to occur at random intervals, and weave them into whatever else is already going on.

I will ensure the players are provided with plenty of information about the region so they can think about their plans. I will most likely suggest a number of possible starting courses of action based on opportunities for work/adventure in the region and allow them to work out what it is they wish to do (whether it's to take up one of those opportunities or something else of their own devising). The plan is for the PCs to be running a small mercenary group, so they will most likely need to make some decisions about outfitting. Their initial plan will most likely need to account for the fact that the ability to campaign over long distances and with large numbers of troops will be difficult over the colder months -- they will need to plan ahead and have somewhere for the troops to winter.

Then, the players will confirm what it is they intend to do, and away we go. As much as possible, I want to be able to refer to existing material whenever the players decide they want to go somewhere or do something.

Unlike Rob, I'm not up for the players deciding to pack up and head off somewhere completely different. I will expect them to actually go adventuring in the Savage Frontier region, not run a cake stall in Waterdeep or immediately board ship for Calimshar (sp?) but, within that fairly broad scope, they're welcome to do as they wish. I have not the faintest clue what they'll end up getting up to, how the world will change, or all that jazz, and finding out is where I will have a lot of my fun.

Again, a lot of that is probably pretty vague. I'm not interested in a deep analysis of my processes and I'm unlikely to elucidate much beyond what I've already written. Just writing up this much was something I've done as a gesture of goodwill. If you find it useful, great, if not, sorry I was unable to give you whatever it is you're after.

I will note that I am uninterested in any line of followup questioning that compares my process to any other and asks me to consider which is better in any kind of objective sense or questions why I don't do use some other method. My process works for me. If someone else's process works for them, great. I'm not interested in being asked to offer further defence of what I do or of attacking any other method.

 

[SableWyvern]

When I read the GM in a RPG should not be subject any rules or constraints, what I take that to mean, literally, is that the GM should be able to introduce whatever fiction they like at any point, based on what they think best responds to whatever moves other participants have made. I don't know if that is what is actually intended, but as I said that seems to me to be the literal meaning. That might be fun for some RPGers, but is not what I am looking for in RPGing.

I have just reread this. As I mentioned earlier, I had a lot going on at the time and I think that in my distracted state I've misread you and jumped to the incorrect conclusions about what you were saying.

What you have said above is not as unreasonable as I first took it to be.

the GM should be able to introduce whatever fiction they like at any point, based on what they think best responds to whatever moves other participants have made

This is not actually all that far from something I would pretty much agree with. The only thing I would add to this is a little nuance that there needs to be a shared vision and understanding which means that things the GM introduces need to aligned with group's expectations.

As an extreme example, I do have the power to run a complete bait-and-switch game. But I also know that if I pitched and got buy in on a gritty modern day espionage game, got everyone excited for it, and then three sessions everyone is teleported to a mad wizards dungeon and it's a fantasy dungeoncrawler escape game, I'd have a mutiny on my hands and things are likely to go poorly from there. So I don't do that. Now, if there's some other group where that kind of thing is cool with everyone, then so be it, it's cool. But at all times, what the group is on board with matters, and tempers this supposedly complete authority.

On a less extreme level, as I have been saying, my players expect to be able to feel as if they're making informed decisions. They have to feel as if they have access to the information their character would have. They need to feel as if something that is expected to make sense to their character makes sense to them. My absolute power to introduce anything I feel is appropriate comes to a halt the moment the players no longer feel those things. If that happens, we sort out the discrepancy, do what is needed to restore that feeling, and we move forward.

I also feel the need to note here that you specifically closed with a "live and let live" statement that I completely overlooked. If I'd picked up on that, I may have made more of an effort to reread the rest of what you'd written and not decided to fire of an unnecessarily antagonistic response. I apologise for that; whatever disagreements we may have had, my ire was definitely not justified in this instance. Also, kudos for you to not rising to the bait and instead replying quite calmly and reasonably, thus ensuring I had no reason to double-down and make an even more complete fool of myself.

 

[pemerton]

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.

What is the GM's traditional role? Do you mean the sort of role found in classic D&D? In Classic Traveller? In the DL modules? In Prince Valiant (1989, so contemporaneous with AD&D 2nd ed)? Or something else.

 

[AlViking]

"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.

Whim: an odd or capricious notion or desire; a sudden or freakish fancy

Do people really not understand how inflammatory and insulting the frequent use of the word is? When I make decisions as a GM I take full responsibility but my decisions are not a whim.

 

[Bedrockgames]

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!)

I don't think anyone is advocating that players be punished passive aggressively for playing non-human characters. The 1E DMG has a tone, and that is one of the reasons why people like going back to it for pleasure reading, but the reason people go back to that earlier material, is because a lot of us jettisoned traditional elements of the system, even had a mocking view of them by the 90s and early 2000s, but when we went back and looked at them again, we realized there was a lot of useful material there, that something being old, didn't make it bad for gaming. I've told this story before, but when I went back to the 1E DMG it was mostly because I thought it would be funny. I don't know if people recall but in those early days of 3E, it wasn't uncommon to view D&D as a steadily evolving system, and to see earlier iterations as clunky machines with ungainly features. I thought I was just going to go back to the 1E DMG and have a laugh at attack matrices. And then I got the idea of running 2E again, and it was honestly mostly because I thought it would be funny to run players using THAC0. In both cases, I saw pretty quickly that the baby had been thrown out with the bath water. With reading 1E, I realized there was a lot there that had been missing in my gaming both in the 90s but especially in the 2000s. And a lot of it had to do with how much more open to exploration the game was. When I ran 2E, this time for Ravenloft, so I wasnt' running it for a sandbox or anything, just a moody horror sessions, I instantly realized that 3E, which I liked and still like, had been holding back the atmosphere for me. The game felt completely different. I had never been able to capture the feel of Ravenloft with 3E and I chalked it up to nostalgia. But once I ran it with 2E again, I realized it was the system, because suddenly the feeling came flooding back. It was due to a number of things, but one of the major reasons was you didn't have skills like Bluff, Gather Information, etc. The existing NWPs (which were optional anyways) didn't trod on roleplaying or interaction with the setting. So my monster hunts once again felt like the players were really interacting with scenario in a deep way. I also found features of the system we used to make fun of (like the fact that it has all these subsystems and no real central mechanic like d20), actually made different parts of the game feel different (in a good way). I needed up vastly preferring things like how initiative worked, the roll under for attribute and NWP rolls, etc).

 

[AlViking]

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

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

Assuming "they" refers to players I base it on what I think is common knowledge in the world which doesn't change much from one character to another or even one campaign to another if it's in the same world. Everyone knows the common symbols for the various gods, people know you need to use fire to burn a troll and so on. After that it's based on background, both the literal background from the book and their story background we discussed in session 0. If it's more obscure knowledge training in a skill or tool will often automatically give them knowledge or a chance to know. Occasionally it's a secret.

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.

I have established NPCs and factions, a history of the world. So I have a general knowledge of the NPCs goals, morality, approach. When it's an NPC made up on the fly I consider if they're aligned to a specific faction and what their role is such as gopher flunky, enforcer, bureaucrat, high ranking member. If they aren't aligned to a faction then what role they are in the scenario, bartender, random thief or so on.

It's up to the GM to breath life into these individuals so I try to make what I consider likely decisions from their point of view, including rolling the dice if I'm unsure. I'm probably not as organized as some people but improvising NPCs and their reactions is a skill you learn by doing. Main thing is to represent them in a way that is consistent with who they represent.

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".

For a region I have general high level ideas of factions, their conflicting goals and methodology. There's also potential goals for the characters, those change depending on what the players are interested in, what impact the characters have had on the world. The players can have major impact on how events play out based on what they do. Cities have fallen, enemies turned into allies, emperors installed because of player decisions.

Whim means that it's random and capricious. I'm not just making decisions based on some generic table that has nothing to do with what has been established in the fiction of the world, tone of the game, what the characters have said or done. I do not make decisions based on a whim, if I thought a GM was I wouldn't stick with the group.

 

[Umbran]

I don't think the author of the table matters so much as your commitment to following it.

Well, part of the thing there is that the results of tables, specifically, are obvious, but "table" is really just an example of mechanics, and the results of mechanics, in general, are sometimes hard to predict.

And I can be a bit more forgiving if a more opaque mechanic has unexpected unsatisfactory results - so I was keeping the example clear and tidy.

But you are correct in that, broadly, the GM has "The buck stops here" on their screen.

 

[Maxperson]

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".

Have you played D&D(rhetorical question)? What is known of the setting, the PCs, and the circumstances around the decision have a near infinite amount of variables. There's no way to answer this, because it's always going to be different.

You're asking for specifics to something that in a real game is many, many times more complex than any RPG write up ever given here, including the ones that @pemerton writes up.

What it's not, though, is a decision on a whim. The DMs are generally not Two Face.

 

[Umbran]

"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.

Perhaps. Note that I wasn't the one to first use that word.

On the internet, there's a tendency to describe the other guy with uncomplimentary terms, and describe our own actions with complimentary terms. One way to combat that is to use the same terms for everyone - and if that makes someone bristle, then the use of that term ought to be interrogated.

To wit: the fact that one makes a table (or other mechanic) that we refer to later doesn't actually imply that creation was thought out and well-reasoned. One can do a slapdash job on a table.

And similarly, the fact that one makes a choice in the moment doesn't mean that choice wasn't thought out, well-reasoned, or otherwise sensible. That's the implication that came with the word "whim", but it was not a well-supported implication.

Good, sensible thinking is orthogonal to implementation.