The GM is Not There to Entertain You

[Ovinomancer]

Lets put social contract aside for the sake of conversation.

The hit points listed in the MM are the average, therefore one could technically increase them.

I took you to be saying adding hitpoints during a combat. If you mean rolling hitpoints, or selecting a different value from the average (and including this choice in encounter design), then sure, that's within the set of choices the GM is allowed to make under the rules.

If you (as a player) had not read the MM, and fought a creature, and the DM played it differently (additional Legendary Action) and you would only discover this while reading the stats of the creature post game, would you then accuse the DM of cheating or breaking the rules?

Depends, were such changes included in encounter design? Did the GM follow the rules for making changes to or creating new monsters? The GM has many things they can do under the rules, but there's still rules for those.

Do you never amend monsters as DM?

You seem to be on a kick of pointing out things there are rules for as a defense for not following the rules.

To be clear I'm not talking about Adventure League games. In that constructed game format you play the rules down to the T.

There seems to be quite a lot of leeway in AL games as well. 5e is a poorly constructed ruleset for providing clear rules of play, even with AL guidelines, and quite often just plugs the GM in as the rules. To be clear, this is within the rules -- how stealth works is up to your GM, per the rules. The GM being a total jerk about stealth and denying it in most all cases is by the rules of the game. That's a different problem. Here we're talking about if the GM is actually beholden to the rules or if they're special with regard to not having any rules apply to them.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Apocalypse World is absolutely dependent on GM judgement in terms of framing the situation, resolving consequences, shifting the spotlight from player to player, what sort of GM move is appropriate to keep the situation moving forward that both follows the fiction and puts the appropriate level of pressure on the appropriate player's character. In general when running Apocalypse World I am making judgement calls approximately every minute of play. They're just different ones.

With different constraints from D&D.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The rules matter. Whether the GM obeys them or not doesn’t.

My experience tells me this is very much not true.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I believe the frequency with which the GM obeys the rules (whether RAW or Homebrewed) plays a major role.
Also we may have differing view on what disobeying rules is.

For me it would have to be a pretty big infraction and & which made no in-game sense.
Increasing a monster's health by 20hp or giving it an additional Legendary Action or advantage on an attack for something in game is not breaking the rules in my book.

Usually the most disruptive cases I've seen are GMs deciding a rule doesn't apply for reasons that are either only in his head or only matter to him.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think intent matters. If the Gm does those things to make the game more fun, it is a positive. If they do it because they are mad that the PCs are winning, it is bad. As someone who is CONSTANTLY out played (tactically) by my players (I'm just not a great tactician), I am always trying to do the former without doing it because of the latter.

The problem is there's a middle case; where the GM thinks it makes the game better but the players far from agree. Or as I put it "Failures of motivation are a reason to walk away from a GM; failures of judgment have to be extended more slack, however."

 

[Reynard]

The problem is there's a middle case; where the GM thinks it makes the game better but the players far from agree. Or as I put it "Failures of motivation are a reason to walk away from a GM; failures of judgment have to be extended more slack, however."

Yeah. it is easy, even for experienced GMs, to err in trying to make something cool or fun or whatever. Luckily, the game is a conversation, so we can talk about it when things don't go quite right.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Sure. But whether it's more satisfying from a play perspective to stop and play out each little step or to swish cut ahead past the smaller details to the next potential or actual crisis point is kind of a matter of taste.

Yup. Its one of the issues with conflict versus task resolution. People who prefer the latter often do want to sweat the details, but that doesn't make it intrinsically superior. The alternative is a case of removing things the people involved don't care about (which I can respect) and improving speed of resolution (which I'm intrinsically less sympathetic to, because its often used as an excuse to cut out parts of what I often consider the interesting parts of the play loop).

 

[Yora]

<disregard>

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah. it is easy, even for experienced GMs, to err in trying to make something cool or fun or whatever. Luckily, the game is a conversation, so we can talk about it when things don't go quite right.

Or, honestly, just be in a hurry or have a blindspot.

You're correct that talking about it can solve a lot of this--if people were only more consistently good about doing that (and of course it gets back to the thing that some people have such a fixation on speed that anything that slows the game is considered close to a cardinal sin).

 

[AnotherGuy]

Depends, were such changes included in encounter design? Did the GM follow the rules for making changes to or creating new monsters? The GM has many things they can do under the rules, but there's still rules for those.

Fair enough. To be honest, I do not bother with that given that encounter design is predominantly eye-balled based on my experience of the power level of the group which is significant given our house-rules and secondly I have dropped the xp and milestone awarding of XP for our current campaign favouring to level up at specific parts in the multi-AP.

EDIT: Not that I never use the encounter design rules, but likely for the most critical of fights - closing a chapter or module.

You seem to be on a kick of pointing out things there are rules for as a defense for not following the rules.

That wasn't done on purpose. It was just a misunderstanding on my part.

There seems to be quite a lot of leeway in AL games as well. 5e is a poorly constructed ruleset for providing clear rules of play, even with AL guidelines, and quite often just plugs the GM in as the rules. To be clear, this is within the rules -- how stealth works is up to your GM, per the rules. The GM being a total jerk about stealth and denying it in most all cases is by the rules of the game. That's a different problem. Here we're talking about if the GM is actually beholden to the rules or if they're special with regard to not having any rules apply to them.

As relevant as all that is and although I have never experienced AL play, I would consider myself as DM to be far more reserved during an AL game. Our own game has a lot of home-brewery, hence my questioning of breaking rules, given how fluid I design and run encounters.