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Message: <blockquote data-quote="teitan" data-source="post: 8431241" data-attributes="member: 3457">MY thoughts, the DM's role is that of an impartial judge or referee. The story is actually in what the players do. The idea of the DM as a storyteller is wonderful and all but it leads to some bad adventure design and interpretations of rule 0 undermining the intent. The DM is there to set and interpret the rules and present the scenario, laying out situations that players find themselves in and reacting to the players, that is his role as a storyteller. His role as a judge/referee is to determine how the rules impact the players and his scenario. He needs to be impartial so the scenario that has been designed can't be this elaborately detailed plot because in almost every case, unless the PCs are skyrimming it, the PCs will find ways to circumvent that elaborate story. Rule 0 gets down to speed and ease of play, interpreting rules on the fly or implementing rulings, the players don't interpret and implement the rulings, the DM does. A good DM will do this based on consensus. My own table rule is that we will agree very quickly on a fast ruling for something in question and then look it up or argue about it after the session in order to keep the game going and everyone has agreed to this and we have nearly always come to a satisfactory compromise and even when it was unsatisfactory it was acceptable (I even wound up being correct in the end actually). This even gets down to what optional rules are implemented in the game and laid out in session 0 by the DM. I try to make sure people understand what is an optional rule in the 3 books and what is an actual core rule and use the handy dandy list available here:[MEDIA=gist]krmaxwell/23a97192c8ce5073a49b[/MEDIA]Some of which actually surprise people that they are optional rules such as multiclassing and feats. We will discuss what will be part of the game, what races, classes etc. and themes that will be explored. I am not someone who ascribes to the "a good DM's job is to say 'yes' to his players" in that regard. Yes a good DM's job is to say yes, but it's also to provide a solid foundation and set expectations which includes atmosphere and tone and some options are not good for the tone a DM may be going for in a given campaign. That said, 99 times out of 100 I will do my best to figure out how to bring a player's character idea into a world IF I am given time to figure out how to do that. I am a firm believer that more people really need to read the DMG and more people need to quit saying "you don't need to read this book to play D&D" because if we did quit saying that so much there would be a lot less entitled players trying to tell DM's what to do because they would have a much better understanding of what the DM's job really is...</blockquote>

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