D&D 5E Supplemental books: Why the compulsion to buy and use, but complain about it?

[KarinsDad]

If there's a number one rule of DMing, it's this: it's the DM's job to make sure all the players are having fun. That's like the Prime Directive of DMing. So when we talk about the DM restricting player options, or designing the game world, he/she has to bear this in mind at all times. It's often a fine line.

I have a nephew who rates movies low all of the time. He rarely likes a movie. He's a nice guy, popular, and has a ton of friends. He just happens to not like most of the movies that come out. He's just critical in that area.

The fact remains, you cannot please everyone all of the time. Nor should a DM try too hard to do so. Present a reasonable game, try to make it fun, but it's not a DM's job to please everyone at all times. Some people are just impossible to please. Don't try. Do your best, but don't sacrifice the fun of the other players in order to appease one player.

Most players are adults, but not all players act like adults. It's actually NOT the DM's job to make sure ALL the players are having fun. It's his job to present the world, adjudicate the rules, run the NPCs, present the encounters, and work with the players to have a good game. But it's not his job to please every single player. People either enjoy his movie (i.e. game), or they do not. A fair portion of the time when someone does not enjoy a game, the other players are having a good time.

 

[Hussar]

I don't buy the premise of this statement.
First of all, I think you are really selling short the value of "campaign setting rules" when taken in the context of this conversation. If you just grab some campaign guidance out of a WotC book, then yeah, I'd agree with you 100%. But if the DM is engaged and making rules to fit the campaign concepts (which the players may very well be better off not knowing) then it is an entirely different matter. And to play up the value of an engaged player makes sense. But to play that up with one breath while blowing off the value of a DM investing time and thought into the campaign is absurd. Invested players are great and they add to the game. If you have a highly invested DM and 4 "show up and honestly play" players (not "invested", but not dragging anything down either), 9 times out of 10 you will have a better game than if there are 4 "invested" players and a "show up and play" DM. Again, not downplaying the players, but context and relative contribution are important here.

I certainly would never say "no evil characters" without a reason. You gloss that over. If I'm saying that then no matter how good the sell, the answer is going to be "that is awesome, lets do that next time."

Lastly, I've never encountered a Boolean "fully engaged player". I've found players who are creative and "engaged". I've found good players who are much more passive. But the "fully engaged players" are just that. If one of them comes to me with an idea that doesn't fit (and this has, rarely, happened), they don't pout and go away, costing the game their invested value. They ask for feedback and come up with another idea that does fit and become fully invested in that. This construct of a fully invested player who will just abandon the game over a single character concept is a fiction designed to prop up an argument. (If you are personally seeing this problem then I'm rather certain that there is more to the story. And with the complaints you have offered in the past, that would not seem unlikely).

Whereas I disagree. I want the players as engaged as they can be. If they come up with multiple concepts, then great. No problems. But, if they really are jonesing for this particular concept, I'd much, much rather cater to them than try to force my preferences.

The best case scenario is an invested DM with 4 invested players. If adding a single race to your campaign will cause you to become a "show up and play" DM, then all sorts of alarm bells are going off in my head. A DM who is that in love with his or her own ideas isn't going to be a DM that I will enjoy playing with because I know, or at least strongly suspect, that this will not stop at character generation. If my choosing something odd ball at chargen breaks the DM, what happens when I do something the DM doesn't like during play?

IMO, and IME, DM's who are this fixated on the details of their campaign worlds become very strong-arm DM's which I am certainly not going to enjoy. It's going to be a series of scenarios with the DM very much in the foreground of every event. After all, it's the DM's world and the DM's campaign and we're just passive consumers of the DM's content.

Not my cup of tea unfortunately. I prefer much, much more pro-active players who are going to take fairly strong authorial roles in the campaign. Again, that's not everyone's cup of tea, obviously. But, again, the presumption that anyone who doesn't run the way you do is somehow an inferior DM makes it very difficult to have a conversation.

 

[Hussar]

I have a nephew who rates movies low all of the time. He rarely likes a movie. He's a nice guy, popular, and has a ton of friends. He just happens to not like most of the movies that come out. He's just critical in that area.

The fact remains, you cannot please everyone all of the time. Nor should a DM try too hard to do so. Present a reasonable game, try to make it fun, but it's not a DM's job to please everyone at all times. Some people are just impossible to please. Don't try. Do your best, but don't sacrifice the fun of the other players in order to appease one player.

Most players are adults, but not all players act like adults. It's actually NOT the DM's job to make sure ALL the players are having fun. It's his job to present the world, adjudicate the rules, run the NPCs, present the encounters, and work with the players to have a good game. But it's not his job to please every single player. People either enjoy his movie (i.e. game), or they do not. A fair portion of the time when someone does not enjoy a game, the other players are having a good time.

Wow, do I competely and totally reject this bolded part. That's among some of the absolute worst DM'ing advice I've ever seen. I cannot believe that a good DM will be having fun knowing that one of his players is not. That would ruin my fun far more than adding some different kind of pretend elf into my fanfic Tolkien setting.

Are you honestly saying that you would still enjoy a game knowing that one of your players isn't?

 

[Hussar]

When it's all said and done, you do what's best for your group. I know what my group likes and they know what I like to run and how I run it so it's a win win for all of us. They enjoy my games and always come back for more.

I must be doing something right eh?

Are you the only DM in the group?

 

[pemerton]

If your group plays with the DM is only there to make rulings then done of this is relevant to your group. But if the group plays with the DM having the responsibility to make the world and and run the NPCs as well adjudicate the rules then it is a different matter.

The DM isnt a novelist. The campaign should be something collaborative between you and the players. It also shouldn't be 100% up to the DM to come up with the ideas anyway. The players should be putting forth ideas on what they want to play and how they want to play.

As between these two posts, my outlook is much closer to Khaalis. The referee's job is to run the game, which includes running antagonist, or potential antagonist, NPCs. In practice, the GM will probably have the bulk of responsibility for backstory.

But the players get to shoulder the backstory load too.

If I asked friends to play a game of D&D, and then wanted a game with no dwarves or no elves, I might make the pitch, but I can't in any meaningful way enforce it. If they want me to GM D&D, but playing dwarves and elves, that sounds more fun to me than having the gaming group break up!

This is why I think compromise is the relevant notion. Taking it as a given that this group of people are going to play an RPG together, what background fiction are they going to take as their starting point?

A few weeks ago, when we didn't have enough players for our regular D&D game, I GMed three of my players through a Burning Wheel session. It was our first time playing BW together, and so when they were making their PCs I made some requests to avoid certain pathways that were, per the PC build rules, available, on the grounds that I didn't think they woud make for an easy entry into the system. The players were happy to accept my advice, because they could see the logic behind it.

I think reasons for restrictions along the lines of "as a mechanical element in play, I think this will cause problems" are more compelling than "as a story element in play, I don't like this" - the first sort of reason is connected to the practicalities of game play, whereas the second looks more like an attempt to dominate the creation of what should be a shared fiction.

The whole entire reason DM's are given the final say so is when the two sides can't agree on something.

This takes as a premise what is under discussion, namely, wheher or not GMs get the final say.

When a group of friends are looking for a resaurant together, there is no rule as to who gets the final say, yet in my life, on the many occasions when I've been walking around with a group of friends looking for somewhere to eat, we haven't ended up hungry. In small groups of people who know one another moderately well and are willing to compromise, decisions can be made without the need to give one person the final say.

 

[Grainger]

I have a nephew who rates movies low all of the time. He rarely likes a movie. He's a nice guy, popular, and has a ton of friends. He just happens to not like most of the movies that come out. He's just critical in that area.

I'm like that (except for popular ). I can't stand 80% of movies!

The fact remains, you cannot please everyone all of the time. Nor should a DM try too hard to do so. Present a reasonable game, try to make it fun, but it's not a DM's job to please everyone at all times. Some people are just impossible to please. Don't try. Do your best, but don't sacrifice the fun of the other players in order to appease one player.

Most players are adults, but not all players act like adults. It's actually NOT the DM's job to make sure ALL the players are having fun. It's his job to present the world, adjudicate the rules, run the NPCs, present the encounters, and work with the players to have a good game. But it's not his job to please every single player. People either enjoy his movie (i.e. game), or they do not. A fair portion of the time when someone does not enjoy a game, the other players are having a good time.

I agree with all of that. What I meant, really, was that the DM should try his/her best to run a game that the players enjoy. That's the ideal. And part of that is designing a setting that he/she thinks the players will enjoy (even if they might not realise this at first!).

Of course, one or more players might not have fun because they are impossible to please, because their playing style is incompatible with the group, or because the DM has an off-day. It happens. But the DM should provide a good game that doesn't have a setting or rules that needlessly antagonise the players. On the other side of the equation, the players should give the DM a fair chance, too, and accept that they might like his/her way of running a campaign (unless it's an extreme case where the DM has come up with something truly and very obviously objectionable).

Players can be jerks, too!

 

[Grainger]

After all, it's the DM's world and the DM's campaign and we're just passive consumers of the DM's content.

I wouldn't necessarily call it passive; the DM might provide situations which the players then work out how to solve - and there isn't a single "correct" way of doing it. You'd probably consider me the type of DM you're talking about (I will often say "in the game-world this is how it works"; the players don't get to tell me, for example, what's over the next hill), but I often devise situations which I don't know how to get out of; the players always seem to come up with something.

 

[Grainger]

Wow, do I competely and totally reject this bolded part. That's among some of the absolute worst DM'ing advice I've ever seen. I cannot believe that a good DM will be having fun knowing that one of his players is not. That would ruin my fun far more than adding some different kind of pretend elf into my fanfic Tolkien setting.

Are you honestly saying that you would still enjoy a game knowing that one of your players isn't?

I think the point was that you would want every player to have fun, but sometimes a player doesn't, and it's not necessarily the DM's fault. A DM should try their best to provide an enjoyable game, but sometimes it's never going to work no matter how good they are, or how much effort they put in.

With regard to the Elf comment; if a player can only have fun if they get to play a Drow (for example), then they're not being very reasonable IMO.

 

[Hussar]

Again, I have to say I love my group.

Give you an example. Recently, one of the DM's ran a short term Planescape campaign. Now, I was not the most enthusiastic participant, but, I honestly wanted to see what other people see in the setting and the DM is fantastic and the other players are very into the concept. Ok, fine. I gave it my best effort and it was a great adventure. Lots of fun.

But, then the DM pitched a longer term Planescape campaign. I honestly did give it a good try, but, Planescape is just not for me. So, I hemmed and hawed and then I said that I was going to bow out of the campaign. No fuss, no foul and certainly no hard feelings. Note, the campaign hadn't started yet, it was still in the discussion stage. I was really busy at work (well, I'm STILL really busy at work) and taking a break was perfectly fine.

The entire group, including the DM, said, no, we do this together or we don't do it at all. One of the other DM's stepped up with a pitch for a Dragonlance campaign and we're now playing Dragonlance.

To me, THAT'S how a group works. All for one and one for all. This "Tyranny of the Majority" style where it's okay to tell one player, "No, sorry your fun just isn't that important so long as everyone else is having a good time and your good time certainly is never more important than the DM's" needs to die in a fire. It's just such a toxic way of playing.

 

[prosfilaes]

If that was the case, I have no sympathy for the players. They should get a life and find something else to do until the next campaign started or start a game they would enjoy.

So not wanting to offend one of your friends means you don't have a life? If they had said we quit, the campaign would have been over, and the DM would have been grumpy about it for some time. Maybe they should have quit, but that would have been a lot more like playing by consensus then playing by DM.

And many DMs here don't feel sympathy for players that cannot accept that a given campaign is not for them and move on to find another group.

And many presidents don't feel sympathy for citizens who can not accept that his plan for a nation is not for them and move on to find another nation. The group is sometimes bigger then any one person. For the group that comes to mind, they started meeting before some of the newer members who have DMed for them were out of diapers.