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

[Lanefan]

So I think there’s something interesting in here other than the semantic debate about winning RPGs.

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?

How do you feel about abilities that let the player essentially say “I succeed” rather than just giving like higher chances or a bonus or something?

I'm generally not much of a fan of such things, but I suspect you already knew that.

 

[Lanefan]

It just occured to me why "win condition" grates on me as a term for an in-fiction success where "goal achievement" and other terms don't: maybe it's just me but "win condition" carries a strong air of finality to it due to the unspoken but very persistent idea that says when someone wins, the game is over. Finished. Completed. Everything is reset.

In an RPG this reset would be represented by rolling up an entirely new party for each discrete adventure; which I'm sure a few groups do but IME it ain't common practice.

Instead, most of the time in RPGs achieving a goal (e.g. finding the Soul Gem, or getting the three weapons out of White Plume) doesn't end the game. The characters go back to town, train up, divide their treasure, and head back into the field: the same game continues.

This makes achieving an in-fiction goal more akin to scoring a goal in hockey. The puck goes in the net, the players celebrate, the ref takes the puck to centre ice for a faceoff, and the same game continues.

The difference, of course, is that hockey has a clock that counts down (or up, in Europe) to the end of the period, and then the game; at which point a winner is declared. RPGs generally have no such clock, no such end point, and thus no opportunity to declare a winner.

 

[Malmuria]

this is from p5 of the call of Cthulhu QuickStart :

Winners and Losers
In Call of Cthulhu there are no winners and losers in the standard competitive sense. Play is usually cooperative. The participants work together to attain a common goal—usually to discover and foil a nefarious plot being perpetrated by the minions of some dark cult or secret society. The opposition that the investigators face will often be an alien or hostile situation controlled by an impartial Keeper, not another player.
Winning in such a situation depends on whether the investigators succeed in their goal, and losing is what happens if they fail to achieve it (they may be able to try again later). During the game investigators may become injured, suer sanity-shattering experiences, or even die! However, someone has to make a stand against the cosmic horrors of the universe, and the death of a single investigator matters little if it means repulsing Cthulhu’s master plan to enslave the Earth!

I find it notable in the context of this discussion that the authors here chose to include a section entitled "winning and losing" right after the section on playing an RPG for the first time. The term winning carries with it a lot of connotations and baggage. it gives new players the wrong expectations, even it, technically not all winning is zero-sum.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I addressed that earlier when I said:


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.

I must not be understanding the difference, except that one is explicitly laid out -- the GM tells you these things are available -- and the latter is just left unsaid -- you pick something, whatever.

Except, I've seen GMs claim even in plotted games that the players could just ignore the list and do whatever, and I don't know how that would be scored. There was a poster in this thread arguing that the WotC APs aren't railroads for precisely this reason -- the players could just abandon things and do something off script entirely. It would seem that this might be a hole in the conception?

Overall, I don't really see this construction as having a lot of merit outside of the endpoints -- the "spread" part of the spectrum seems very, very messy. The endpoints seems like not great fun either -- either CYOA book style play or complete lack of prompts at all. Most games I'm familiar with that are sandboxes still have hooks.

 

[Maxperson]

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.

Football as a category isn't a game, so win conditions are irrelevant. Football games and Football Seasons are competitions. Those are won and lost.

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.

D&D is a competition, but not a traditional one so it doesn't have traditional win conditions like football games and seasons do.

 

[Ovinomancer]

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.

Okay. I don't disagree.

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.

Yes, this is true for football, but it's not a requirement. I could do Pandemic the boardgame in a similar level of breakdown.

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.

I don't think an offsetting loss is at all necessary to begin with, as I just said, so...? I do think that win conditions can be failed in D&D.

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.

Again, you seem to be on a kick I didn't intend, nor that I think is particularly useful. Non-zero-sum win conditions also exist.

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.

No, it's because both of these are abstract concepts that describe a game to be played, and not an actual game player. I can't win football, but I can win a game of football. I can't win D&D, but I can win a game of D&D (see Curse of Strahd, or one shots, or tournament modules, or even normal play games). The argument for an infinite series that never completes is one I've already addressed -- every game concludes at some point, and that's either be reaching the end of an agreed set of win conditions or because all currently active win conditions are abandoned.

 

[Ovinomancer]

this is from p5 of the call of Cthulhu QuickStart :


I find it notable in the context of this discussion that the authors here chose to include a section entitled "winning and losing" right after the section on playing an RPG for the first time. The term winning carries with it a lot of connotations and baggage. it gives new players the wrong expectations, even it, technically not all winning is zero-sum.

Oh, so the point of playing a CoC game is not to thwart a nefarious plot or achieve some other goal? I don't follow your argument that this confuses people -- what are they supposed to understand? This, again, seems like a dogmatic argument and not one that's standing on principles. Plenty of people do just fine with CoC with this in the rulebook and I haven't heard of a single person "doing it wrong" because they think the point of playing CoC is to foil nefarious plots by alien and sinister beings.

 

[Malmuria]

Oh, so the point of playing a CoC game is not to thwart a nefarious plot or achieve some other goal? I don't follow your argument that this confuses people -- what are they supposed to understand? This, again, seems like a dogmatic argument and not one that's standing on principles. Plenty of people do just fine with CoC with this in the rulebook and I haven't heard of a single person "doing it wrong" because they think the point of playing CoC is to foil nefarious plots by alien and sinister beings.

My point is that the authors find it meaningful for to say to their audience of new rpgers that it is about having particular goals, but not about winning and losing
. It helps them orient new players to the specificity of playing an RPG as opposed to another kind of game

 

[Lanefan]

I don't think an offsetting loss is at all necessary to begin with, as I just said, so...? I do think that win conditions can be failed in D&D.

Again, you seem to be on a kick I didn't intend, nor that I think is particularly useful. Non-zero-sum win conditions also exist.

I disagree. Non-zero-sum goal achievements certainly exist, but to call them "win conditions" runs aground on the concept (which IMO is true) that there cannot by definition be a winner without at least one loser.

If everybody wins, nobody does: it's a tie. Ditto if everybody loses.

No, it's because both of these are abstract concepts that describe a game to be played, and not an actual game player. I can't win football, but I can win a game of football. I can't win D&D, but I can win a game of D&D (see Curse of Strahd, or one shots, or tournament modules, or even normal play games).

You can't win - or lose - a game that has no definable end point, mostly because it's only at or after that end point when winners and-or losers can be declared.

The argument for an infinite series that never completes is one I've already addressed -- every game concludes at some point, and that's either be reaching the end of an agreed set of win conditions or because all currently active win conditions are abandoned.

Or because all active win conditions have been failed e.g. a game-ending TPK.

And if all active win conditions are abandoned e.g. the game simply runs out of steam or 3/4 of the players suddenly move out of town then that game has neither winners nor losers. An analogy here would be a baseball game that gets through 4 innings and then gets rained out - play occurred but no winner or loser could be declared because the game didn't reach a rules-definable end point.

 

[S'mon]

I feel that the 5e Backgrounds are set up to give PCs some mild narrative authority. My son plays an Acolyte Monk of St Sollars in Damara, and is always very insistent about the free food & shelter he's entitled to from all the local churches! Likewise the Noble Fighter PC, the player created three useful followers for him.

In the 4e game I'm playing, my PC is the son of a noble from SE of the Harkenwold, background approved by GM, and I occasionally 'assert narrative authority'. Eg on Tuesday playing Reavers of Harkenwold:

NPC: "Go to the Woodsinger Elves and ask for help."
Me: "Ah yes - it is time to renew the Old Alliance!"

I then explained to the GM that in the time of Nerath my family the Alturs fought alongside the Woodsinger Elves against the Goblins, and he told me I get +1 on interaction checks with the Elves.