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

[Bedrockgames]

In comparison to the TSR editions, the WotC editions have very limited space for kitbashing without affecting the foundational core, thanks (no thanks) to the WotC designers having gone the unified design route rather than discrete subsystems.

In 1e I can rip out entire subsystems and replace them with something different without (usually) too many knock-on effects to the rest of the game. I know this because I've done it.

Not possible with any of the WotC editions, as a major change to the design here is inevitably going to cause knock-on effects everywhere else; it's more work than it's worth to go and find them all and stamp them out, and doing so can simply cause the knock-ons to cascade in any case.

I do think TSR era stuff was very easy to kit bash, partly because so much of the system was not integrated into a core mechanic (so it just made it easier). I will say one feature of 3E I liked, was how much you could kludge using the multi class system. Unbound, it it was an optimizer's dream, but if you cobbled them together from different books selectively, you could really make some interesting setting options.

 

[Enrahim]

It’s not bad at all. It’s an essential part of play.

I brought it up because @Micah Sweet asked why place constraints on GMs. And the answer is basically the same… it’s an essential part of play.

I think I see where you might come from. Do you consider the GM a player of the game? In that case there is a case to be made that without constraints there are no play.

However the traditional way is not treating the GM as a player. Rather one of their main roles is as a designer. And making a claim that constraints is an essential part of design seem like a tougher point to argue? (Let us not enter the tangent that constraints tend to lead to better designs quite yet, before the essentiality question is settled at least)

 

[Campbell]

I think I see where you might come from. Do you consider the GM a player of the game? In that case there is a case to be made that without constraints there are no play.

However the traditional way is not treating the GM as a player. Rather one of their main roles is as a designer. And making a claim that constraints is an essential part of design seem like a tougher point to argue? (Let us not enter the tangent that constraints tend to lead to better designs quite yet, before the essentiality question is settled at least)

In games like Apocalypse World the closest equivalent of the GM (Master of Ceremonies) is a player of the game. The chapter on how to facilitate the game is even called the playbook for the Master of Ceremonies. The way I see is that the referee role cuts against the scene framer role in a couple ways:

• A scene framer needs to be actively invested in the characters. They need to be fans. Need to be curious about them. Need to want to know what adversity looks like for them and need to apply that adversary, especially when it hurts to do so.
• Part of the fun of these games is that we are all experiencing them together, that when we go to the dice the tension is palpable, because no one can overrule what is about to happen.
• Pure mental bandwidth. A Master of Ceremonies has enough on their plate. Adding more just increases the mental load on them and decreases quality of play as a result with no good reason.
• It's hard to go against the grain of how we have trained ourselves to play. It's all too easy to fall into routines, techniques and methods that cut against our creative goals. Don't rely on discipline for more than we need to.
• Authority and responsibility tend to go hand in hand. A game where so much of the creative impetus comes from the other players benefits from a sense of ownership. That the GM cannot save them from themselves or the unwelcome elements introduced by the rules.
• There are good reasons for referees and storytellers to sit above the game. There really isn't a good reason for someone who is facilitating the game to sit above it. If we are trying to avoid the GM being a referee or a storyteller this arrangement of them as a player with specific responsibilities and authorities really helps maintain those creative goals.

 

[JConstantine]

However the traditional way is not treating the GM as a player.

I've always thought the notion that the GM isn't a player to be patently ridiculous. A referee is an impartial non-participant. While many GMs strive to be as impartial as possible (i.e. referee is one role they try to fill), if they're setting scenes, deciding consequences for actions, playing NPCs, etc, they're a participant and, thus, a player. They have an asymmetric role, but they're still a player. You could separate out the impartial adjudicator role into a secondary GM and that could be considered a referee, but as long as it's all falling to one person, they're a player with an asymmetrical role. Like various 1vX games.

 

[AlViking]

Just discussing D&D here but it applies to other "traditional" games as well, and I'm also not saying that AW is doing anything wrong but there's just so much implied "this is the way" in the following whether it's intentional or not.

In games like Apocalypse World the closest equivalent of the GM (Master of Ceremonies) is a player of the game. The chapter on how to facilitate the game is even called the playbook for the Master of Ceremonies. The way I see is that the referee role cuts against the scene framer role in a couple ways:

• A scene framer needs to be actively invested in the characters. They need to be fans. Need to be curious about them. Need to want to know what adversity looks like for them and need to apply that adversary, especially when it hurts to do so.

As DM I want to run a fun and engaging story for my players. I'm just as invested in making the game work for my players as a Master of Ceremonies. The focus of the game is different, but the players are more important than my world building because my world is only there to act as a playground for the players.

• Part of the fun of these games is that we are all experiencing them together, that when we go to the dice the tension is palpable, because no one can overrule what is about to happen.

I do my best to be neutral on rulings and adjudicating results of actions. I don't overrule anyone because things are not going the way I "want" them to go because I don't want any specific outcome.

• Pure mental bandwidth. A Master of Ceremonies has enough on their plate. Adding more just increases the mental load on them and decreases quality of play as a result with no good reason.
• It's hard to go against the grain of how we have trained ourselves to play. It's all too easy to fall into routines, techniques and methods that cut against our creative goals. Don't rely on discipline for more than we need to.

Not sure what those means one way or another. But I encourage and reward creativity in my games.

• Authority and responsibility tend to go hand in hand. A game where so much of the creative impetus comes from the other players benefits from a sense of ownership. That the GM cannot save them from themselves or the unwelcome elements introduced by the rules.

So AW is better because it weeds out "unwelcome elements"? Sounds like self-referential justification and elevation to me.

• There are good reasons for referees and storytellers to sit above the game. There really isn't a good reason for someone who is facilitating the game to sit above it. If we are trying to avoid the GM being a referee or a storyteller this arrangement of them as a player with specific responsibilities and authorities really helps maintain those creative goals.

A DM doesn't "sit above" the games. We provide the setting, but the players are full and equal participants in my games. more self-referential-self-praise tacked on at the end.

Listen, I don't have any issue whatsoever with other approaches to the game. It's fine. If you enjoy a different approach go for it. But this whole thing comes off as holier-than-thou with not real justification or explanation. Just declaring that the role of the Master of Ceremonies somehow improves quality or avoids issues doesn't make it so.

 

[Maxperson]

Not at all. Before you make any decisions about what is in the world, there is not and cannot be any context. You have to be choosing what goes in, before you can start working within constraints that you defined yourself. How do you define those constraints?

So this question is entirely about setting creation:? And not about setting logic combined with circumstances informing outcomes like we've been saying in this thread?

But how do we tell the difference? As I just said above, what is the visible-to-the-player difference between someone who chooses on whim and is just very good at improv--doubly so when complaints cannot occur during session, and thus between-session fix-'em-up time is freely available--and someone who has notes and follows them pretty well but not perfectly? Both will produce occasional inconsistencies. Both will produce situations that don't make sense at first and require "trust" from the player that they'll make sense eventually (which, again, could be "there is already info, it's just not available to you yet because it's locked in the black box", or it could be "there is no info yet, I'm still making it up, by the time you find out I'll have made up an answer").

99.99% of DMs aren't two-face and aren't deciding on whims and random chance. The rest of the time you'll see them flipping the coins and saying stuff that has nothing to do with what is going on, since that's what random decision making results in.

This is not something you need to be worrying about, since it will pretty much never happen to people playing the game.

 

[zakael19]

As DM I want to run a fun and engaging story for my players. I'm just as invested in making the game work for my players as a Master of Ceremonies. The focus of the game is different, but the players are more important than my world building because my world is only there to act as a playground for the players.

Are you hard scene framing to challenge the player’s goals/beliefs/etc as noted? @Campbell ‘s post was about how a MC with that responsibility needs to be a player with constraints because of the expectation the game is placing on their role.

So AW is better because it weeds out "unwelcome elements"? Sounds like self-referential justification and elevation to me.

no, it doesn’t weed them out - it forces them upon all participants. A GM must make some sort of direct move on a 6-, one that’s unwanted by the character who rolled it.

It’s not a question of better, he’s pointing out how an AW MC has to be included as and bound as such as a player because they’re playing a prescribed role in the game.

 

[AlViking]

Are you hard scene framing to challenge the player’s goals/beliefs/etc as noted? @Campbell ‘s post was about how a MC with that responsibility needs to be a player with constraints because of the expectation the game is placing on their role.

D&D has a different focus. Most players don't really care one way or another about goals/beliefs/etc., but because I run a sandbox style campaign the group as a whole is always deciding the direction of the campaign.

no, it doesn’t weed them out - it forces them upon all participants. A GM must make some sort of direct move on a 6-, one that’s unwanted by the character who rolled it.

It’s not a question of better, he’s pointing out how an AW MC has to be included as and bound as such as a player because they’re playing a prescribed role in the game.

So again that misses the point. AW has a different approach but that doesn't mean it's solving anything because it's said nothing about what needs to be solved. As DM I am "bound" by running a game my players find rewarding, if I don't I won't have any players.

It's fine that they take a different approach even if it's not for me for a variety of reasons. It just makes it sound like "Look at all the stuff we fixed!" without proving any evidence that a fix was necessary. Talk about how it provides a platform that examines alternative challenges? Fine. But that's not how it comes off. It certainly doesn't prove anything about why the restrictions are essential.

 

[Campbell]

Apocalypse World is not trying to solve anything. It's a game where the players take on roles of people in a post-apocalyptic community that is under siege by from outside threats, internal strife and scarcity. We play to find out if the community can hold together or if the player characters will turn on each other in the end. In order to do so the game assigns one player the role of providing adversity, to make moves that represent the Apocalypse World closing in on the hardhold.

It has a game that has a structure meant to reinforce a sort of play that is focused on the hard choices these characters will have to make and the relationships they have with one another. The Master of Ceremony role was designed to fit the needs of the game. Just like the DM role is defined to fit the needs of Dungeons and Dragons. There are repercussions on play because of these decisions, but each was meant to serve the creative goals of the game.

I am more than happy to dig into if the structure of Apocalypse World fits its creative goals. But I am not going to justify why its design decisions do not match how Gygax and Arneson structured their game because that is not a standard that Vincent Baker should have justify his decisions against. Because Apocalypse World has no structure, no roles before Vincent defines them. And the structures he defines should be weighed against the game he designed.

This is what I mean by having to justify our place. Other roleplaying games are not patches for Dungeons and Dragons, not playsets. They are games that happen to be categorized as roleplaying games.

The structure of the MC role is defined the way it is because it is there to provide honest adversity for the player characters so that players get that chance to experience the personal stakes involved in holding a community together and the forces that bring tension in their relationships with one another. The game is not structured need a referee because it's not a game about free exploration of an environment. That's why the GM is not one. It also does not need a storyteller because we are meant to experience the unfolding of the community together.

Not every game is for everybody and that's a good thing. It's what makes the hobby so rich and diverse. The constraints Apocalypse World relies on for the MC are essential for Apocalypse World. Just like the constraints on players talked about upthread are essential for Majestic Wilderlands.

 

[Enrahim]

I've always thought the notion that the GM isn't a player to be patently ridiculous. A referee is an impartial non-participant. While many GMs strive to be as impartial as possible (i.e. referee is one role they try to fill), if they're setting scenes, deciding consequences for actions, playing NPCs, etc, they're a participant and, thus, a player. They have an asymmetric role, but they're still a player. You could separate out the impartial adjudicator role into a secondary GM and that could be considered a referee, but as long as it's all falling to one person, they're a player with an asymmetrical role. Like various 1vX games.

Thank you. That confirmed my suspicion. You talk about referee and player. I agree that a referee role is a non participant. However I do not see that you have adressed the perspective that the role you here frame as player isn't better understood as something else in a trad game. My claim was that it could be a participant that is not a player.

To illustrate: In a quiz game show, the quizmaster is actively part of the activity as they are posing the questions - often even interacting with banter with the other participants. But I would find a claim that they were a player in a similar though asymmetric fashion as those answering questions a bit weird. For one thing in that context those answering question has a clear goal/win condition, while I fail to see how that can be said for the quizmaster.

In traditional play the players tend to have very clear well defined goals their characters strive toward, and victory is in achieving these. The GM cannot be said to have any similar victory condition they are actively striving toward. Rather like the quizmaster, they prepare (design) entertaining content, and their joy in the activity lies in presenting this and see how the players respond.

It is easy to see how you could take a GM less story game, and make one of the players special with regard to responsibilities - making it asymmetric. This could on the surface look quite similar in play to a traditional RPG with a GM. But I think my and many other's point is that it would still be missing an essential element of what makes traditional games work as they do, and ultimately provide a qualitatively different experience. (Not superior or inferior. Different)