Daztur
Adventurer
Note: this post assumes that you’ve read some of my older thread (http://www.enworld.org/forum/new-ho...ombat-war-key-difference-d-d-play-styles.html).
A lot of people have been confused by what the devs mean by “giving power back to the DM.” Hasn’t the DM always had Rule Zero? How can the rules take away or give power to a DM? I think that a lot of this confusion comes from different people having very different ideas about what the DM’s job is and how the rules should support that, which has important implications for the development of 5ed.
Since dividing things into two simple categories provoked some interesting discussion last time, let’s do that again. There are two basic roles that a DM has: Judge and Storyteller.
The DM as Judge is in charge of refereeing the interaction of the PCs with the environment. This comes from D&D’s wargaming roots. As I understand it, in the old days wargaming rules were a lot less cut and dry and in addition to the two players there was a judge who would not only make sure that both sides followed the rules but who would make rulings when people did things that went outside the rules. This is the same thing that a DM as Judge does, make sure that the players follow the rules and make rulings when they do things that fall into the grey areas of the rules or completely outside them.
However, in RPGs there are many things that just don’t come up in wargames that require other DMing techniques. This is where the DM as Storyteller comes in. Armies in wargames can’t go off the edge of the map but PCs do so the DM has to summon towns, villages, people and monsters from nothing. The Storyteller also decides what the NPCs are doing when the PCs meet them, takes care of pacing, frames scenes, provides each PC with spotlight time, guides the PCs along the plot towards the planned encounters, adjusts the difficulty of the adventure on the fly and generally juggles a dozen balls to keep the game moving in a fun and dramatic way.
So what does this have to do with 5ed and the power of DMs? Well as soon as RPGs were invented people have tried to figure out ways to use rules to replace the role of the DM, with some games focusing more fire on the DM as Judge or on the DM as Storyteller. In the oldest RPG rules there’s a lot of effort to minimize the DM as Storyteller. This is what all of the random charts are for. This is why Old School D&D has treasure types, reaction rolls, morale rules and the like. What purpose does this serve? Well it allows the DM to be more impartial. If a bee-hating fighter kills an ogre and finds The Dread Blade of Instant Fumigation, if feels very different to the player if they know that the DM selected it by hand or if the DM generated it from a random table. The same applies to a first level party that’s walking back to base after a hard day’s adventuring and runs into two ogres and eight hobgoblins. It feels very different if they know it’s because the DM threw that encounter at them or if they just got really unlucky and rolled the worst possible result from the random encounter table. This kind of impartiality means that if the players want the spotlight they’ll have to grab it themselves and the DM won’t stand in the way between either a TPK or the players killing a dragon without even rolling for initiative. Without this kind of impartiality it’s hard for Combat as War to function. Story Games also take aim at the DM (GM) as Storyteller, but in a very different way (and this post is long enough already without discussing that).
This is why the dominant forms of adventures that cater to DM as Judge play are hexcrawls and dungeoncrawls. As those adventures lay out what’s out there before the players run into it and don’t try to impose any specific plotline on the game, the DM can just sit back and not worry about the whether the players will ruin the plot but just let the players do all of the worrying about what’s going to happen next.
This is a bit alien to some players, which is why we have people confused about the point of morale rules saying things like “what’s the point of having them, can’t the DM just decide when the monsters run away?” Also the role of DM as Storyteller is vital to some styles of play. Unless you have PCs that are vastly more predictable than any I’ve ever seen, a DM needs some Storyteller tricks up their sleeve to keep players on an Adventure Path if you’re playing on. Also, Combat as Sports needs a Storyteller DM in order to function. For a DM to plan out a series of balanced encounters and then run the party through them doesn’t mix too well with wandering monster rolls. In one post that I read, a DM talked about how his party had fought about 100 combats over the course of the campaign and none of them were too hard except for one that was due to DM error. That sounds great for many Combat as Sports players, but a more Combat as War player would recoil from that in horror as the only way to have a campaign like that is if what and how the PCs fight things is determined by the DM’s story more than by player decisions.
Similarly, since the dawn of gaming we’ve had designers trying to replace the DM as Judge with rules. One way of doing that is simply by adding adjudication crunch. This reached its apogee with 3.5ed, especially all of the rules for determining what the DC of everything should be. This allows the players to know what will happen in any situation since there are clear rules rather than DM fiat. In my experience this just didn’t work. In the games I played the DM could never be arsed to apply the DC-generation rules and just pulled unpredictable DCs out of their butts.
4ed tried to minimize the role of DM as Judge in another way. A big part of the role of the DM as Judge is figuring out the specific results that some player-generated effect has in some specific situation. 4ed cuts out the middleman here and just tells you what the result of a power (the results/effects terminology here is cribbed from hackslashmaster.blogspot.com). What I mean by this is that in older editions of D&D there would often be a long discussion of the effects of spells etc. that would depend greatly on how they’re used and the circumstances. My favorite example is the 3.0ed and earlier versions of the spell Command, which requires DM adjudication if the players give a command like “hug.” In 4ed (building on a move in that direction in 3.5ed) each power gives you a clear straightforward description of what it does that doesn’t require any DM guesswork or adjudication. 4ed’s less swingy combat also helps Storyteller DMs, as there’s less of a chance for unpredictable combat results to throw a monkey wrench into the plot (“sorry, you won’t even be there when the cultists try to sacrifice the princess to the demon lord, I didn’t realize that the giant bees in the cultists’ garden would chase you off screaming”).
This is great for Combat as Sports players since it gives clear predictable rules that govern the sport of combat. But all of this goes against Combat as War play since figuring out how to use various effects at your disposal to get cool new results is at the heart of Combat as War play. The wall that 4ed builds between crunch and fluff gives few handholds for Combat as War players to latch onto. For example when a Combat as War player hears that it’s possible to turn into a swarm of bugs (4ed swarm druid) their mind starts thinking over all of the ways to use that to their advantage (it’ll be hard to grapple me, I can slip through really small windows, no wait! I can have my hirelings wear beekeeper suits and carry around bunches of bee hives and I can turn into bees and hide among the bees!). That cuts against the way that 4ed is set up but it would work well with a DM as Judge play style (AFAIK being a swarm of bugs has no mechanical effect whatsoever aside from letting you use certain powers, although of course many DMs would fiat other effects in which would be an example of DM as Judge DMing).
To give a clear example of what I’m talking about, imagine that the players are trying to hire an ogre as a mercenary. In 1ed the DM would roll on the reaction table, take the result and then play out the reaction and then decide (fiat!) what the ogre will do. In 3.5ed the DM would choose the attitude of the ogre (fiat!) and then use the rules to decide what the ogre will do. In either case the same amount of fiat is being used, just in 1ed the DM uses it to adjudicate the success or failure of the PC’s action (DM as Judge) while in 3.5ed the DM uses it to frame the scene (DM as Storyteller). This is why I think that neither being a Judge or a Storyteller require more DMing effort, it’s just that the DMing effort pops up in different places.
Of course none of this means that any edition of D&D closes the door to any type of DMing. The 1ed Dragonlance modules cry out for a DM as Storyteller and there’s plenty of stuff in 4ed that can support DM as Judge play (the famous page 42) but some editions definitely support different types of DMing better than others. For example, one thing that I don’t like about how 2ed was often played is that it could be an exercise in trying to jam a DM as Storyteller DMing style into a set of core rules that were built around more DM as Judge assumptions.
Also, unlike Combat as War and Combat as Sport which are opposites, the DM as Judge and the DM as Storyteller are separate axes. You could have both (DM as God) or neither (DM as Cipher). Why this topic often gives rise to flame wars is that if you have too strong or too weak of a DM the game stops being an RPG and becomes either freeform RPing or a board game. This is why a lot of people who like the DM to be a Judge (wrongly) dismiss 4ed as a board game and why a lot of people who like the DM to be a Storyteller (wrongly) dismiss 1ed as mindless hack and slash.
So what implications does all of this have for 5ed? The goal of 5ed is to make everyone happy, but how the hell do you do that? The people who want DMs as Storytellers need balanced classes and clear CR guidelines. The people who want DMs as Judges want more flexible powers (effects not results) that are harder to balance. You can see the difficulty that the devs are having with this in comments like “how do you balance charm person?” However, it looks like the devs are trying to reach a compromise by balancing things on the adventure level rather than the encounter, which gives them more flexibility. Also the way they’re talking about damage types makes it look like they’re providing powers that have straightforward 4ed-style write-ups (X spell does Y acid damage) that still leave room for Old School-style interesting effects (does all of that acid eat a whole through the floor?) that require DM adjudication. I hope that this will work. At the very least I want treasure types and the rest brought back as an optional module.
TL
R
DM as Judge: makes rulings on the results of the actions of PCs.
DM as Storyteller: the other stuff.
DM as Judge:
DM as Storyteller:
DM as Judge: Darths & Droids
DM as Storyteller: DM of the Rings CXLIV:The Long-Expected Parting - Twenty Sided
DM as Judge: http://www.lulu.com/items/volume_63/3019000/3019374/1/print/3019374.pdf (look at what the author’s saying the DM’s role should be)
DM as Storyteller: Role-Playing Game Manifesto (DnD Other) - D&D Wiki
Shameless plug:
If you like any of my verbosity check out the open hexcrawl setting we're developing over here: http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/318447-let-s-make-hexcrawl-setting.html
A lot of people have been confused by what the devs mean by “giving power back to the DM.” Hasn’t the DM always had Rule Zero? How can the rules take away or give power to a DM? I think that a lot of this confusion comes from different people having very different ideas about what the DM’s job is and how the rules should support that, which has important implications for the development of 5ed.
Since dividing things into two simple categories provoked some interesting discussion last time, let’s do that again. There are two basic roles that a DM has: Judge and Storyteller.
The DM as Judge is in charge of refereeing the interaction of the PCs with the environment. This comes from D&D’s wargaming roots. As I understand it, in the old days wargaming rules were a lot less cut and dry and in addition to the two players there was a judge who would not only make sure that both sides followed the rules but who would make rulings when people did things that went outside the rules. This is the same thing that a DM as Judge does, make sure that the players follow the rules and make rulings when they do things that fall into the grey areas of the rules or completely outside them.
However, in RPGs there are many things that just don’t come up in wargames that require other DMing techniques. This is where the DM as Storyteller comes in. Armies in wargames can’t go off the edge of the map but PCs do so the DM has to summon towns, villages, people and monsters from nothing. The Storyteller also decides what the NPCs are doing when the PCs meet them, takes care of pacing, frames scenes, provides each PC with spotlight time, guides the PCs along the plot towards the planned encounters, adjusts the difficulty of the adventure on the fly and generally juggles a dozen balls to keep the game moving in a fun and dramatic way.
So what does this have to do with 5ed and the power of DMs? Well as soon as RPGs were invented people have tried to figure out ways to use rules to replace the role of the DM, with some games focusing more fire on the DM as Judge or on the DM as Storyteller. In the oldest RPG rules there’s a lot of effort to minimize the DM as Storyteller. This is what all of the random charts are for. This is why Old School D&D has treasure types, reaction rolls, morale rules and the like. What purpose does this serve? Well it allows the DM to be more impartial. If a bee-hating fighter kills an ogre and finds The Dread Blade of Instant Fumigation, if feels very different to the player if they know that the DM selected it by hand or if the DM generated it from a random table. The same applies to a first level party that’s walking back to base after a hard day’s adventuring and runs into two ogres and eight hobgoblins. It feels very different if they know it’s because the DM threw that encounter at them or if they just got really unlucky and rolled the worst possible result from the random encounter table. This kind of impartiality means that if the players want the spotlight they’ll have to grab it themselves and the DM won’t stand in the way between either a TPK or the players killing a dragon without even rolling for initiative. Without this kind of impartiality it’s hard for Combat as War to function. Story Games also take aim at the DM (GM) as Storyteller, but in a very different way (and this post is long enough already without discussing that).
This is why the dominant forms of adventures that cater to DM as Judge play are hexcrawls and dungeoncrawls. As those adventures lay out what’s out there before the players run into it and don’t try to impose any specific plotline on the game, the DM can just sit back and not worry about the whether the players will ruin the plot but just let the players do all of the worrying about what’s going to happen next.
This is a bit alien to some players, which is why we have people confused about the point of morale rules saying things like “what’s the point of having them, can’t the DM just decide when the monsters run away?” Also the role of DM as Storyteller is vital to some styles of play. Unless you have PCs that are vastly more predictable than any I’ve ever seen, a DM needs some Storyteller tricks up their sleeve to keep players on an Adventure Path if you’re playing on. Also, Combat as Sports needs a Storyteller DM in order to function. For a DM to plan out a series of balanced encounters and then run the party through them doesn’t mix too well with wandering monster rolls. In one post that I read, a DM talked about how his party had fought about 100 combats over the course of the campaign and none of them were too hard except for one that was due to DM error. That sounds great for many Combat as Sports players, but a more Combat as War player would recoil from that in horror as the only way to have a campaign like that is if what and how the PCs fight things is determined by the DM’s story more than by player decisions.
Similarly, since the dawn of gaming we’ve had designers trying to replace the DM as Judge with rules. One way of doing that is simply by adding adjudication crunch. This reached its apogee with 3.5ed, especially all of the rules for determining what the DC of everything should be. This allows the players to know what will happen in any situation since there are clear rules rather than DM fiat. In my experience this just didn’t work. In the games I played the DM could never be arsed to apply the DC-generation rules and just pulled unpredictable DCs out of their butts.
4ed tried to minimize the role of DM as Judge in another way. A big part of the role of the DM as Judge is figuring out the specific results that some player-generated effect has in some specific situation. 4ed cuts out the middleman here and just tells you what the result of a power (the results/effects terminology here is cribbed from hackslashmaster.blogspot.com). What I mean by this is that in older editions of D&D there would often be a long discussion of the effects of spells etc. that would depend greatly on how they’re used and the circumstances. My favorite example is the 3.0ed and earlier versions of the spell Command, which requires DM adjudication if the players give a command like “hug.” In 4ed (building on a move in that direction in 3.5ed) each power gives you a clear straightforward description of what it does that doesn’t require any DM guesswork or adjudication. 4ed’s less swingy combat also helps Storyteller DMs, as there’s less of a chance for unpredictable combat results to throw a monkey wrench into the plot (“sorry, you won’t even be there when the cultists try to sacrifice the princess to the demon lord, I didn’t realize that the giant bees in the cultists’ garden would chase you off screaming”).
This is great for Combat as Sports players since it gives clear predictable rules that govern the sport of combat. But all of this goes against Combat as War play since figuring out how to use various effects at your disposal to get cool new results is at the heart of Combat as War play. The wall that 4ed builds between crunch and fluff gives few handholds for Combat as War players to latch onto. For example when a Combat as War player hears that it’s possible to turn into a swarm of bugs (4ed swarm druid) their mind starts thinking over all of the ways to use that to their advantage (it’ll be hard to grapple me, I can slip through really small windows, no wait! I can have my hirelings wear beekeeper suits and carry around bunches of bee hives and I can turn into bees and hide among the bees!). That cuts against the way that 4ed is set up but it would work well with a DM as Judge play style (AFAIK being a swarm of bugs has no mechanical effect whatsoever aside from letting you use certain powers, although of course many DMs would fiat other effects in which would be an example of DM as Judge DMing).
To give a clear example of what I’m talking about, imagine that the players are trying to hire an ogre as a mercenary. In 1ed the DM would roll on the reaction table, take the result and then play out the reaction and then decide (fiat!) what the ogre will do. In 3.5ed the DM would choose the attitude of the ogre (fiat!) and then use the rules to decide what the ogre will do. In either case the same amount of fiat is being used, just in 1ed the DM uses it to adjudicate the success or failure of the PC’s action (DM as Judge) while in 3.5ed the DM uses it to frame the scene (DM as Storyteller). This is why I think that neither being a Judge or a Storyteller require more DMing effort, it’s just that the DMing effort pops up in different places.
Of course none of this means that any edition of D&D closes the door to any type of DMing. The 1ed Dragonlance modules cry out for a DM as Storyteller and there’s plenty of stuff in 4ed that can support DM as Judge play (the famous page 42) but some editions definitely support different types of DMing better than others. For example, one thing that I don’t like about how 2ed was often played is that it could be an exercise in trying to jam a DM as Storyteller DMing style into a set of core rules that were built around more DM as Judge assumptions.
Also, unlike Combat as War and Combat as Sport which are opposites, the DM as Judge and the DM as Storyteller are separate axes. You could have both (DM as God) or neither (DM as Cipher). Why this topic often gives rise to flame wars is that if you have too strong or too weak of a DM the game stops being an RPG and becomes either freeform RPing or a board game. This is why a lot of people who like the DM to be a Judge (wrongly) dismiss 4ed as a board game and why a lot of people who like the DM to be a Storyteller (wrongly) dismiss 1ed as mindless hack and slash.
So what implications does all of this have for 5ed? The goal of 5ed is to make everyone happy, but how the hell do you do that? The people who want DMs as Storytellers need balanced classes and clear CR guidelines. The people who want DMs as Judges want more flexible powers (effects not results) that are harder to balance. You can see the difficulty that the devs are having with this in comments like “how do you balance charm person?” However, it looks like the devs are trying to reach a compromise by balancing things on the adventure level rather than the encounter, which gives them more flexibility. Also the way they’re talking about damage types makes it look like they’re providing powers that have straightforward 4ed-style write-ups (X spell does Y acid damage) that still leave room for Old School-style interesting effects (does all of that acid eat a whole through the floor?) that require DM adjudication. I hope that this will work. At the very least I want treasure types and the rest brought back as an optional module.
TL
RDM as Judge: makes rulings on the results of the actions of PCs.
DM as Storyteller: the other stuff.
DM as Judge:
DM as Storyteller:
DM as Judge: Darths & Droids
DM as Storyteller: DM of the Rings CXLIV:The Long-Expected Parting - Twenty Sided
DM as Judge: http://www.lulu.com/items/volume_63/3019000/3019374/1/print/3019374.pdf (look at what the author’s saying the DM’s role should be)
DM as Storyteller: Role-Playing Game Manifesto (DnD Other) - D&D Wiki
Shameless plug:
If you like any of my verbosity check out the open hexcrawl setting we're developing over here: http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/318447-let-s-make-hexcrawl-setting.html
