D&D 5E [Rather Long] DM as Judge vs. DM as Storyteller in 5ed

[pemerton]

There are two things wrong with this view, imo. Firstly, a lot of people do enjoy railroads, or games with strong railroad elements, as evidenced by the success of Paizo's adventure paths. Secondly, it's quite possible to produce a satisfying story while avoiding the railroad.

Yep.

I think the AP style is an example of the approach we were talking about earlier - requires strong and skilled GMing to inject colour. My tentative view about the relationship between that sort of play, and 3E, is that the rather intricate and (at least quasi-) simulationist mechanics of 3E carry a fair bit of the burden of injecting colour - taking it off the shoulders of the GM. (Just a hypothesis, because I'm not personally an AP person.)

For these players, 4e probably doesn't do the same sort of work.

 

[haakon1]

I believe you that you once had a crappy GM who gave you a crappy game.

It wasn't a "crappy" game, BTW, just not what I wanted out of it. Still better than no game.

 

[haakon1]

There are two things wrong with this view, imo. Firstly, a lot of people do enjoy railroads, or games with strong railroad elements, as evidenced by the success of Paizo's adventure paths. Secondly, it's quite possible to produce a satisfying story while avoiding the railroad.

Sometimes I think we're all actually agreeing but just talking about it in different ways.

I use modules, some from Paizo. I'm a fan of SCAP (Shackled City Adventure Path), though I've only player/run a little of it.

I like to string modules together, so elements, NPCs, and monster goals from one reappear in another.

But I think I'm a "judge" because:

1) I'm not very interested in balance. I build the world. You explore it. If you do something crazy dumb, like charging off into the Underdark at 1st level, I'm not going to nerf it for you.

2) I believe in "Combat as War" from both sides of the table. Not wacky stuff like "Let's all dress up like Owlbears", but, when I'm the DM, playing the monsters like they actually want to win and kill you all, and, when I'm a player, trying to use ambushes and allies and other "non-wacky" ways to even the odds.

The best thing I ever did as a DM was to have the inhabitants of the Caves of Chaos reply to the repeated pinprick sorties by adventurers from the Keep on the Borderlands by trying to overrun it, played out in detail in a 150 round fight involving all the NPC's, with the PC's in the staring role. It was crazy, but it changes how everyone in my game thinks about the NPC's/monsters and the nature of the game.

As a player, an example of CoW recently was in "Keep on the Shadowfell". My paladin talked the ruler (Padraig) into letting him talk to the gate guards for the village about keeping a log of comings and goings, with the idea of trying to figure out who the bad guy's spy was. The DM said, "Good idea, but it doesn't work", which was fine with me. CoW isn't cheating or goofy, but it doesn't care about balance or whether there's a specific rule saying you can do it.

3) I let the PC's generally do what they want within an adventure (there's more than one way to beat a BBEG) and outside of combat, in "down time mode", I pretty much let them do what they want. So that's a little sandboxy.

4) I endeavour to always have motivations for NPC's and monsters. I never want a monster to be there because the module says so -- I need to know WHY. Whether the PC's ever find out or not.

For example, in "Forge of Fury", there's a level with orcs, a level with trogs and a level with Duergar. There was backstory on the orcs (they conquered the dwarves and didn't like the other monsters), but there wasn't a lot on the trogs and Duergar -- why are they there, and what's their relationship?

So I did lots of Greyhawk research and came up with a plausible answer. In Wolfgang Baur's "Kingdom of the Ghouls" adventure in Dungeon, he mentions the True Ghouls defeating the trogs and the duergar, and now fighting the Illithids and others. So there was my answer -- they're refugees, and allied, and the duergar are using the Forge to make weapons for the Illithid war effort against the Ghouls.

Which, not coincidentally, tied together with elements in other adventures, making it, if not an adventure path, at least a consistent world.

--> Bottom Line: I'm sure other people have very different ideas about what this playstyle is, and whether or not it's judge.

All I'm really going for is: a logical, consistent world in which the PC's are important, but the NPC's and monsters are more than just set dressing -- they are rational actors pursuing their own goals, that don't conflict or help the PC's because "I say so", but because it fits with whatever their backstory is, or failing that, random determination.

Maybe DM as improv method actor? But I'm not quite sure if that's accurate about what method acting is.

 

[pemerton]

I like to string modules together, so elements, NPCs, and monster goals from one reappear in another.

<snip>

I'm sure other people have very different ideas about what this playstyle is, and whether or not it's judge.

All I'm really going for is: a logical, consistent world in which the PC's are important, but the NPC's and monsters are more than just set dressing

As far as it goes, this is similar enough to my game. I don't like modules as "adventure paths" or pre-packaged stories at all, but I do use them for story elements: places, people, history etc. And I bundle them together. My current 4e game (15th level) is taking place in the setting of, and involving the NPCs from, the Heathen module in the first (& free) 4e Dungeon. But it is also the setting of the B/X Module Night's Dark Terror, and NPCs from that module are also relevant. (The game started with Night's Dark Terror at 1st level, and still hasn't exhausted all the material in that module.) Night's Dark Terror details a city, and the PCs are currently based in that city. In my game, that city merges elements from Night's Dark Terror with the city described in Heathen, and also the city in the 3E module Speaker in Dreams.

I've attached the most current version of the players' relationship map (that they use to keep track of the different factions, personalities etc), although it's now nearly 2 years old and so a bit out of date.

But whether our styles are the same or not overall, I can't tell from your post. The most distinctive thing about how I run the game, in addition to what I've describe above, is that I very self-consciously metagame my design and adjudication of encounters, NPC personalities etc so as to maximise the way these grip onto the hooks the players have provided in their PCs. Simple examples: one PC is a chaos sorcerer Demonskin Adept, another a paladin of the Raven Queen. So if I need a dark god, it is almost always Orcus; and when an imp turned up, he didn't attack - he offered to teach the sorcerer techniques for mastering the chaos.

How the players respond to my very obvious and deliberate pokings at their PCs is up to them.