D&D General The DM Shortage

[Reynard]

I vaguely remember this. But it's funny, because that's not how we, or anyone I interacted with actually played.

This is pretty much how I remember B1 & B2. B1 had a map, and if I remember, a table for generating room contents. And nothing but what appeared to be combat encounters. B2 had a bunch of monsters to fight, and no direction on how to mislead or socially interact with them. And the NPCs in town were nothing but names and short stat blocks.

So maybe it wasn't set up as adversarial, but it seems like they were the only way to play them and hence was a natural development (or so it seemed to us).

There aren't really "combat encounters" in old school D&D. I mean, there can be, but the presumption is that for most encounters you are going to be rolling reaction. "Immediate attack" was a low probability event. Which is a good thing, because old D&D is a meat grinder if you go into every room looking for a fight.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Sure. A REALLY BAD, incomplete and boring kick down the door, kill the monster and take the treasure dungeon. With nothing about difficult stuff, like facilitating a satisfying narrative without limiting player freedom. It's a good example of how to teach someone how to be a bad DM. Sure, we have learned a lot since those days, so it can't be blamed, but it's also not a good example of how it should be done in 2022.

But that doesn't really matter, since not knowing how to do it isn't the problem. Having the time to do it its. After all, there is a shortage, so there is no pressure to be GOOD.

I generally leave narrative up to the players, and let it be emergent. It's my job to present the world and suggest things to do in it. It's their job to create the story of what happened.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Sure. A REALLY BAD, incomplete and boring kick down the door, kill the monster and take the treasure dungeon. With nothing about difficult stuff, like facilitating a satisfying narrative without limiting player freedom. It's a good example of how to teach someone how to be a bad DM. Sure, we have learned a lot since those days, so it can't be blamed, but it's also not a good example of how it should be done in 2022.

But that doesn't really matter, since not knowing how to do it isn't the problem. Having the time to do it its. After all, there is a shortage, so there is no pressure to be GOOD.

I'm also getting pretty tired of the idea, "This is how you should do it in 2022".

 

[overgeeked]

You keep repeating this like it is true when it is demonstrably not so.

Weirdly a lot of players who've never refereed think the nasty, evil referee is out to get them. The best way to overcome that is having that player referee for a time. They'll see just how laughably easy it is for the referee to simply wipe the party. The classic "rocks fall, everyone dies" is right there. The forum's favorite cliche, infinite dragons, is right there. Yet, mysteriously, referees don't actually use those because that's not what referees are trying to do. Some people simply cannot tell the difference between the referee presenting a challenge and the referee being adversarial.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Weirdly a lot of players who've never refereed think the nasty, evil referee is out to get them. The best way to overcome that is having that player referee for a time. They'll see just how laughably easy it is for the referee to simply wipe the party. The classic "rocks fall, everyone dies" is right there. The forum's favorite cliche, infinite dragons, is right there. Yet, mysteriously, referees don't actually use those because that's not what referees are trying to do. Some people simply cannot tell the difference between the referee presenting a challenge and the referee being adversarial.

Massive compilations complaining about how hard it is to kill PCs these days probably don't help this perception.

 

[Micah Sweet]

That isn't before we all remember that OSR cuts out half the stuff in 5e and adding them back would require more work than 5e DM prepping.

I mean isn't that the whole point why OSR DMs like it that the OSI doesn't do what 5e does.

If you add the stories and the settings and the pillars and races and the classes all back in... you are back to square one with less DM support.

I've always thought of the OSR more as a play philosophy than a lack of content.

 

[Oofta]

Weirdly a lot of players who've never refereed think the nasty, evil referee is out to get them. The best way to overcome that is having that player referee for a time. They'll see just how laughably easy it is for the referee to simply wipe the party. The classic "rocks fall, everyone dies" is right there. The forum's favorite cliche, infinite dragons, is right there. Yet, mysteriously, referees don't actually use those because that's not what referees are trying to do. Some people simply cannot tell the difference between the referee presenting a challenge and the referee being adversarial.

While I don't disagree there was at one time an emphasis on a certain type of killer dungeon. The entire dungeon was set up as one giant puzzle/trap where stepping on the wrong tile meant disintegration and the only way to get through was to have a horde of followers. Many an NPC died futile deaths in those game.

Just look at the old school Tomb of Annihilation as an example, there were many places where if you went right instead of left you were just dead. No save, no second chance. That doesn't mean everyone was like that, we certainly weren't. But my impression was that Gygax did write and run games that were supposed to be deadly death traps to challenge the players. They can even be fun now and then, I'm sure some people still run them and enjoy them to this day.

So it seems to me that that is where the adversarial DM ideas comes in. The DM was a neutral referee. For the death house that they created and ran the players through.

 

[Reynard]

While I don't disagree there was at one time an emphasis on a certain type of killer dungeon. The entire dungeon was set up as one giant puzzle/trap where stepping on the wrong tile meant disintegration and the only way to get through was to have a horde of followers. Many an NPC died futile deaths in those game.

Just look at the old school Tomb of Annihilation as an example, there were many places where if you went right instead of left you were just dead. No save, no second chance. That doesn't mean everyone was like that, we certainly weren't. But my impression was that Gygax did write and run games that were supposed to be deadly death traps to challenge the players. They can even be fun now and then, I'm sure some people still run them and enjoy them to this day.

So it seems to me that that is where the adversarial DM ideas comes in. The DM was a neutral referee. For the death house that they created and ran the players through.

Tomb of Horrors was a tournament module designed to take power players down a peg. It doesn't represent typical play at all.

 

[overgeeked]

While I don't disagree there was at one time an emphasis on a certain type of killer dungeon. The entire dungeon was set up as one giant puzzle/trap where stepping on the wrong tile meant disintegration and the only way to get through was to have a horde of followers. Many an NPC died futile deaths in those game.

Just look at the old school Tomb of Annihilation as an example

You mean Tomb of Horrors. A tournament module specifically designed to kill off PCs to see which player was smart and lucky enough to survive the longest. Written in 1975 and published in 1978. Do you have an example from this century that wasn't specifically written to be a murder fun house?

So it seems to me that that is where the adversarial DM ideas comes in. The DM was a neutral referee. For the death house that they created and ran the players through.

One module from 47 years ago. I'm guessing you weren't actually around back then. Did you play AD&D? Did you run AD&D? Because if you had, you'd have a slightly more recent and a much better example of adversarial refereeing at your fingertips. Oh, but you're also the poster saying that your AD&D games and 5E games are equally deadly. Right.

 

[Oofta]

Tomb of Horrors was a tournament module designed to take power players down a peg. It doesn't represent typical play at all.

Which is why I stated that it was not the only way to play, just one.