D&D General Respeckt Mah Authoritah: Understanding High Trust and the Division of Authority

[clearstream]

Not to get edition warry here but there’s a very good reason why the 5e DMG is not really a guide or instructional book. It’s loose collection of bits and bobs that presumes that the dm is experienced.

The 5e DMG contains the single most important rule in this edition of D&D. DMG 237, consequences resolution. Intentionally or not, they designed 5e to be playable as PHB-5e and DMG-5e, where the two are different games.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I see a difference between "I am engaged with some things and not others"--something which many games now address, thanks to the influence of Robin's Laws--and "I am engaged with the game at all." The former is business as usual. The latter is an absolute requirement for participation in the first place.

I doubt it'd look any different in the moment, though, and as I said, some people are just low-engagement generically. Its a stereotype, but there are a fair number of people in the hobby who don't want to think about it much, even in the moment.

 

[Scott Christian]

You have forgotten one of the other critical issues: if so much is placed on the shoulders of a single person, the game should thus go out of its way to help that person as much as can be done within budget and publication limits. That there should be...oh, I don't know, some kind of guide that would provide really good instruction, well-tested tools, and other forms of advice/aid/etc. to smooth the road as much as the designers can.

Unfortunately, 5e has its DMG instead. Which does basically none of those things.

I would argue that their help to the DMs fell not just under the DMG. Every adventure path written, all 15 or 20 of them, are there to provide good instruction on how to DM.

 

[Lanefan]

Comparing the role of a referee in a sport - where there are competing factions of players trying to win according to well-defined winning conditions - to an RPG where a group of people with the same goal work together to achieve it, is very silly.

You're assuming that the group of people a) all have the same goal and b) are working together (rather than individually or in factions) to achieve it.

Both assumptions are often incorrect. Oftentimes each character in the party has a different goal and-or reason for being there at the time, and chaotic players playing chaotic characters generally aren't going to work together unless they have no other choice.

 

[Lanefan]

A lot of my rulings are quite situational and made off the cuff just to keep the game moving. There's no way I'd use them as established precedent if I thought the ruling was at all controversial. There's no reason to continue to use metaphorical duct tape to hold something together that worked in the moment when you can actually fix the thing correctly.

My issue with that as a player is that changing the rule or ruling after the fact invalidates what happened in play at that moment. Put another way, anything that happens in play should, given the same circumstances and-or luck, be able to happen again in that same campaign.

And so as a DM I try not to let this happen within a campaign. Or, if I'm going to change something I'll make sure there's a valid in-fiction reason behind it, and if I can't then ideally that change gets put on hold until the next time I start a campaign.

Example: there's a particular spell in my current game I'd really like to get rid of, but a whole bunch of assorted PC casters over the years have already learned it and used it. I can't just take it away from them. All I can do is make sure it's not on the spell list if-when I ever start another campaign.

 

[Lanefan]

Or say later "I screwed up and need to change this."

Fine in theory but in practice, as noted just now, making that change invalidates what happened in play under the original (bad) ruling, and such an invalidation is unacceptable to me as a player. In effect, it's retconning something that was ruled possible at the time to being impossible now.

And so instead I'll say* something like "Yeah, I screwed that up but now we're stuck with it. Sorry.", and I expect the same as a player.

* - this happened far too often in my early days of DMing, not so much now as I've learned the hard way to get it right the first time but it still occurs now and then.

 

[overgeeked]

As far as I'm concerned 1 and 2 here are the same thing; as in my view a "quick ruling" should set a binding precedent for the remainder of that campaign. If it doesn't, and the ruling can change from week to week, that's where trust in the DM will very quickly go out the window.

Which is why even "quick rulings" should be thought through and got right the first time, even if it means stopping a session for ten minutes and thinking/talking it over.

I've been kitbashing and houseruling for decades. Some changes work, some don't, so what? Trial and error.

To me, this is a clear example of the perfect being the enemy of the good. I take basically the opposite approach and haven't seen it impact trust in the slightest.

Make a quick ruling for now, at least this game session, and then discuss it after the session. Give it a think and come up with a long-standing ruling if one's needed.

It's more important to keep the game moving and accept that a snap decision might not be perfect, but it will be good enough for now, then make any corrections between sessions.

 

[bloodtide]

I'm not so sure about all this "trust". I even call into question all this company corporate trust. I've been in the spot lots of times when a company says they "trust" the employees....but then gives them 100+ iron clad rules to follow.

And the big push for 3X was "All Hail the Rules". It's a game of pure mechanics, nothing else. The big idea was to make the DM powerless so "everyone would be equal playing the same game by the same rules.

"Trust" does not really come in here. Other then players "trust" the DM to follow the hollowed rules.

You do get these two types of "Trust":

Player Type A: sits back and enjoys the game, even if they see or encounter something they personally don't like. Yes, even if the DM has water run uphill. They accept "this is the DMs game, it is there call, and I am just a player". It does not matter who is "right", just drop it and move on.

Player type Z: is hostile from before they sit down. They know the DM, is out to get them and ruin the fun of THEIR game. THEIR game with THEIR special self insert character is perfect, in their mind....and they just know DMs want to ruin it. So anything the DM says or does they will whine, cry, and otherwise disrupt the game. They want THEIR game, that they "hire" the DM to run for them to be exactly the way THEY want things.

 

[Oligopsony]

You're assuming that the group of people a) all have the same goal and b) are working together (rather than individually or in factions) to achieve it.

Both assumptions are often incorrect. Oftentimes each character in the party has a different goal and-or reason for being there at the time, and chaotic players playing chaotic characters generally aren't going to work together unless they have no other choice.

I’m going to disagree here and say that the referee language is perfectly appropriate even in the simple case of a party that works together uniformly and a GM who enjoys seeing the characters succeed.

In the traditional division, the GM has two roles that should really be distinguished: world-spirit (she controls the rest of the world in the same way other players control PCs) and referee (she adjudicates what happens when results are ambiguous; players refer to her in such circumstances.) Sometimes this involves forces that are literally antagonistic to the PCs (such as an opposing faction) or figuratively so (such as a harsh cliff face) and sometimes not at all.

If a table were playing say Pandemic (a board game where everyone is unambiguously on the same side) this function would still exist even if it might be distributed; players could of course accomplish their in-game goal of winning the game by collectively declaring themselves the winner, it this would undermine their out-of-game goal of solving an interesting challenge together, so players at a Pandemic game largely work to impartially referee themselves.

Giving the world-spirit player the primary referee role has some downsides (increased cognitive load on the already most loaded player) and upsides (she already has to engage in doublethink, and the boundaries between these in practice can be very porous), and even the most trad table involves a lot of spot delegation, but IME the term doesn’t imply too close an analogy with professional team sports (though I can see why it would summon those associations for some - I’m allergic as many are to the term “Storyteller” even as I’ve enjoyed plenty a game of Vampire.)

 

[Lanefan]

To me, this is a clear example of the perfect being the enemy of the good.

I'm one of those people who, if I can't do something well enough that I only have to do it once, probably isn't going to do it at all.

Make a quick ruling for now, at least this game session, and then discuss it after the session. Give it a think and come up with a long-standing ruling if one's needed.

It's more important to keep the game moving and accept that a snap decision might not be perfect, but it will be good enough for now, then make any corrections between sessions.

Thing is, oftentimes the only time the players are all in the same place is at the session, so all you're doing there is delaying the in-session discussion from now until next week.