D&D 5E Respect Mah Authoritah: Thoughts on DM and Player Authority in 5e

[pemerton]

When we are talking D&D-like RPG's there's a particular tenet that the players control their character and they the GM controls the world. If that premise is accepted as a requirement for the desired style of game then there's not much (any?) room left for anything other than linear or sandbox style play.

I think your posited tenet is contentious.

Rolemaster is a D&D-like RPG. I quoted extensively from its 1984 Campaign Law upthread. That envisages important degrees of player authority over backstory at the point of PC building.

AD&D OA is a D&D-like RPG. It is not as clear in its wording as RM, but it also envisages players getting involved in backstory authorship as part of the process of establishing their family, its relationships, who their PC's master is (if a martial artist), etc. Yakuza's in that game also have a "contact" ability which lets them establish, during play, that their PC knows someone useful.

Gygax, in his DMG, only provides one example of a player attempting exercise authority over backstory - in the context of a PC establishing a stronghold - and says that the GM should say "yes" given that what the player suggests is generally consistent with the established fiction concerning that particular bit of the setting.

But in any event, your conclusion wouldn't follow.

A sandbox is a game in which backstory is prior to, and yields, situation. The "bridge" from backstory to situation is player action declarations that "activate" latent situations (eg I go down the street to the temple. Who's there?). (I've explained this in more detail upthread so won't repeat myself here, but am happy to explain again if you would like.)

A "linear" adventure is a game in which backstory and situation are both pre-authored, and the "bridge" is simply GM fiat. Thus player action declarations make no difference to which situations are narrated.

"Node-based" design is a variation on linear design - backstory and situation are preauthored, but the players' choices affect the sequence of activation. Unlike a sandbox, though, there is an expectation that all the "nodes" will be "activated", and each "node" is designed (eg via the "3 clue rule") so as to lead the players to declare an action that will "activate" another node.

But in my view (I think @Ovinomancer disagrees at least a bit, and maybe a lot) there is nothing intrinsic to D&D that requires establishing backstory upfront like this. It is possible to GM D&D in a way that puts situation first. This does not require the GM relinquishing any significant control over backstory. It does require having ways to resolve action declarations without needing established backstory as "inputs" - that's easy most of the time but can be trickier for Perception and Knowledge-type checks. But as I already posted upthread, I don't think that's an insuperable problem. (Maybe Investigation skill really does get cast to the four winds on this approach, but that seems like a small sacrifice to make.)

And just to reiterate: this is not theorycraft. This is speaking from the experience of having run AD&D and RM in this way.

I've run AD&D quite successfully using shared backstory authority (especially in PC build, but also the GM taking suggestions from players on the way through) and GM authority over situation/scene-framing.

I don't see why 5e D&D couldn't be run the same way if a group wanted to do so.

I only have the vaguest notion of what you mean here. Care to elaborate?

There's the elaboration above.

The AD&D play I'm thinking of is mostly 30-odd years ago, so my memory is not perfect. But the sorts of situations I used included opportunities for hijinks in the Keep on the Borderlands (an all-thieves game) that turned into a crusade against evil cultists - I established backstory as necessary to support framing and resolution (eg that the wife of the mayor of Critwall was a member of the cult).

In the OA game I remember encountering an Ogre castle high in the mountains, and having social interaction with them - to what ultimate end I can't remember anymore.

I also remember a game with characters doing stuff in the Gnarley forest - maybe dealing with bandits?

D&D makes improvising situation fairly easy, because it has many many books full of monsters, NPCs, maps, etc.

(I've also used the approach I describe playing 4e D&D, but because some people think it's not a D&D-like game I'm using AD&D and RM as my examples.)

 

[pemerton]

there are games where the player controls some of the world and the GM might control a characters reaction to some particular fail result. There certainly are such games

Which ones do you have in mind?

I've put this in a separate post because I'm not sure there are many such RPGs, except in posts explaining that they are not relevant to discussing D&D.

I'm talking about RPGing where the GM controls the backstory, but approaches the relationship between backstory and situation differently from either a sandbox or a linear or node-based design. This can be done in D&D.

 

[pemerton]

So during play, as players are trying to achieve the goals of their characters (however those may have been determined), what do you guys think about rules/resources players can use to essentially declare success at a stated task?

What's the relationship between the task at hand, and the goal? And also, how long does it take for the player to deploy their resource?

Eg if the goal is rob a bank, and the task is break into the safe from underneath without being detected, and the resources are an extensive equipment list that includes shaped charges of all sorts, sonic dampeners, diamond-tipped drills, etc, and the deployment of those resources is two hours of planning and discussion about how the job can be pulled off, then maybe I've just described a successful session of play in a slightly futuristic (eg cyberpunkish) RPG.

If the goal is overthrow Lolth and the task is make Lolth cease to exist with a word and the resource is a Wish spell, then that probably seems like pretty boring play! (Hence why high level D&D has such a countermeasures/rock-paper-scissors feel to it.)

I hope that's the beginning of an answer to your question.

 

[Xetheral]

Well, here we disagree.

There is no continuum. There is on continuous sequence. There is no "ordered arrangement" by reference to a particular characteristic (eg the quality, such as colour, that I mentioned).

Suppose the question is: should we erect a statue of the Pied Piper in our town park? On that there can be a spectrum of opinion, from very strong yes through the dunno, don't cares to the ardent opposition.

Suppose the question is: who should be on the statue to be erected in our town park? If most people think either it should be the Pied Piper or it should be Little Bo Peep, then in a colloquial sense we might have a spectrum of opinion - and in characterising it as such we ignore the small minority who want Robin Hood.

But if there are significant blocs of opinion who want, respectively, the Pied Piper, Little Bo Peep, Robin Hood, and Daffy Duck, then what is the spectrum? All we have is variation. But there is no continuum on which all the relevant instances can be located.

As I've said, I don't regard this as a merely pedantic point because it occurs in nearly all discussions of the distribution of authority and is used as a premise in arguments that reach false conclusions, such as that the best or indeed only way to reduce GM authority over outcomes is to move to a sandbox: without considering that authority over outcomes is related to (i) authority over backstory and (ii) the role of backstory in adjudication and in framing, in ways that are different in various sorts of non-railroaded play - with a sandbox only being one of those ways.

I specified (multiple times) that the spectrum I'm referring to is measured in percentages, from 0 percent to 100 percent. Since we're dealing with rational numbers, that's a continuous, well-ordered domain. The particular characteristic used to place a campaign along this spectrum was specified as the percentage of strategic decisions made free of any table expectation to choose from among a DM-presented list of options.

From where I'm sitting, it looks like I have properly defined a spectrum for the campaigns that fit on it. I see no comparison between the spectrum I've specified and the histogram of statue preferences you discuss.

I don't mind if we disagree on the utility of that spectrum, but I object to your claim that the spectrum I've specified doesn't exist, and your implication that I'm misusing the word "spectrum".

 

[Ovinomancer]

I specified (multiple times) that the spectrum I'm referring to is measured in percentages, from 0 percent to 100 percent. Since we're dealing with rational numbers, that's a continuous, well-ordered domain. The particular characteristic used to place a campaign along this spectrum was specified as the percentage of strategic decisions made free of any table expectation to choose from among a DM-presented list of options.

From where I'm sitting, it looks like I have properly defined a spectrum for the campaigns that fit on it. I see no comparison between the spectrum I've specified and the histogram of statue preferences you discuss.

I don't mind if we disagree on the utility of that spectrum, but I object to your claim that the spectrum I've specified doesn't exist, and your implication that I'm misusing the word "spectrum".

Except, a sandbox game is still choosing from GM-presented lists of options, yes? I can't pick places off of the offered map, or locations that the GM hasn't created or offered to create, yes? Sandboxes are still explorations of the GM's prep, unless I'm badly mistaken in which case how does a sandbox work without the GM prep?

 

[Ovinomancer]

I think if we want to talk about how play actually works we need to either be extremely precise that we are talking about the game's objectives or goals or use language which cannot be easily used to elide the real world causes for the fictional things.

What I like about win condition is that there is zero doubt we are talking about the player trying to achieve the game's objectives. I'm not entirely happy with it, but not sure what I would use in its place.

Aside : It would bring me immense pleasure if instead of PC people would start using player's character when they are talking about the character and player when talking about the player. This is another case where eliding happens for the purpose of getting players in the right mindset for play, but fails to do a good job of communicating what is actually going on when we sit down to play a roleplaying game.

Oh, wait, are you making a distinction between "player character" and "player's character"? I think I see your point, here, as the latter is more precise, but it never occurred to me that the former might be ambiguous.

 

[Malmuria]

Except, a sandbox game is still choosing from GM-presented lists of options, yes? I can't pick places off of the offered map, or locations that the GM hasn't created or offered to create, yes? Sandboxes are still explorations of the GM's prep, unless I'm badly mistaken in which case how does a sandbox work without the GM prep?

Random tables, or randomness in general? Does this town have a blacksmith, roll d6 to find out

 

[Ovinomancer]

Random tables, or randomness in general? Does this town have a blacksmith, roll d6 to find out

I don't see how that's specifically unique to sandboxes -- I can see that being used as prep filler for a highly detailed plot-game as well as for a sandbox game.

I suppose, though, that you could procedurally generate all content on demand. Does something like this actually exist, though, or is it holding a place as pure sandbox in hypothetical sense only? And, then, wouldn't this spectrum be more accurately termed the use of random tables for content generate rather than sandbox? Because, there's still a difference to be noted between a plotted game and a sandbox game where plot points are not usually connected and up to the players to discover through action declaration.

 

[Xetheral]

Except, a sandbox game is still choosing from GM-presented lists of options, yes? I can't pick places off of the offered map, or locations that the GM hasn't created or offered to create, yes? Sandboxes are still explorations of the GM's prep, unless I'm badly mistaken in which case how does a sandbox work without the GM prep?

I addressed that earlier when I said:

In my original post where I specifically defined the spectrum, I'm using the phrase "options presented by the GM" to mean options laid out for the PCs at the time of the players' decision. The spectrum runs from campaigns where players are always expected to always choose from among the options laid out by the GM when making strategic choices, to campaigns where players are never expected to always choose from among those options and instead always face open-ended decisions.

I'm not using the phrase "options presented by the GM" to refer to who gets to author content about the game world. Sure, even the open-ended strategic decisions are constrained to be within the sandbox, and the sandbox is usually of finite size. But since strategic choices don't consist solely of where to go within the setting or what setting element to interact with, but also consist of how to interact with setting elements, even a finite sandbox can offer infinite strategic options all without the players authoring anything new about the setting.

To rephrase to more directly address your question: a strategic decision that would count as constrained by options presented by the DM would be one where the DM has laid out specific options for the players to select among for this particular decision, and the social contract of the table creates the expectation that the players choose one of those options rather than choosing to go elsewhere in the sandbox to do something else (of which there can be countless combinations, even in a bounded sandbox).

An analogy would be the difference between answering a multiple choice question vs a fill-in-the-blank question. In this analogy the particular characteristic that defines where a campaign is placed on the spectrum (if it can be at all) would be the percentage of questions that are fill-in-the-blank.

 

[Lanefan]

Here's a different take. Once you've hit the win condition, that challenge is over. In a sports game, a win condition might be, "tackle the guy with the ball." You do that, and the down is over. Then it might be, "make sure the opposing team cannot progress the ball 10 yards or more in 4 downs." Do this, and the possession is over. Then there's the "have more points than the opposing team when time expires." That ends the game. Then it might be, "have more winning games than other members of the conference when the season is complete." That gets you to the league finals. Then it might be, "do not lose during the league final tournament." That gets you to the Superbowl. Then we have the same win condition as a regular game, "have more points than the opposing team when time expires." That wins your the championship. Then things can go on.

All of those are temporary, or in-process, win conditions that reset for the next play or down or game or season. None of them say a team has "won football" outright.

Further, every one of them comes at the expense of a directly-offsetting loss by someone else - the running back, the defensive team, the opposing team, etc. depending on scale.

Win conditions aren't limited to how you win a game overall. They are rather independent packets where when complete you can say you achieved an objective or not. Did we rescue the princess? Yup! Win condition met. That there can be multiple win conditions active at the same time or that they can rotate or that you can keep adding more doesn't alter that they exist.

In D&D the biggest difference is that while you might have a temporary win condition that applies both in the fiction and at the table, the offsetting loss only occurs in the fiction unless a DM is very adversarial.

Another difference is - unlike gridiron football where a win for one member or part of a team is almost always a win for the whole team - while PC parties tend to co-operate most of the time there's no baked-in requirement that they must: they can and sometimes do operate toward conflicting goals, meaning a given event might represent a win condition for some players/PCs and a loss for others.

Conclusion: it's just as valid to say you can't "win football" as it is to say you can't "win D&D" in an overall sense; with the difference being that while D&D looks at the overall game and says you can't win it, football focuses on those more-granular situations in which a team actually does win or lose while ignoring the overall or "forever" picture.