Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8240534" data-attributes="member: 18">This is showing great DMing. If you're not sensitive to the groups you're playing with, then it's like a director who doesn't bother to get to know his actors and what they're good at. He may still end up with a good result, or he may have big problems a result, but he's certainly not going to end up with as good as result as the one who does understand his actors is going to have.I blame D&D and its multifarious definitions of neutral, frankly!The completely demented "true neutral" of early editions, where you have bizarre concept of someone trying to prevent "Good" being too successful (itself a senselessly symmetrical extrapolation from the Law-Chaos struggle of Moorcock) has sort of permanently warped the concept of a "neutral arbiter" for a lot of players, I think.That plus the adversarial DMing of decades past. I mean, when I started, in 1989, adversarial DMing was almost seen as the default mode of D&D, well, maybe that and Monty Haul (which isn't even really the opposite, because I've seen adversarial Monty Haul before!). It's weird that in 2021, it's virtually a given that "be a fan of the characters" is the right way to do things, barely anyone would disagree. Because in the 1990s, they sure as hell would have disagreed (esp. in D&D - less so in other TT RPGs).And there are certainly some "neutral arbiters" who are going to find it extremely hard to be a "fan of the characters", even based on what some people say in this thread. But like, you can let the dice fall where they may whilst being a fan of the characters, say. It's harder to honestly say that writing adventures whilst ignoring that the players and characters even exist is really doing that. It's not hard-antithetical to it but it's at least mildly adverse. Also I'm not sure this is completely true:I don't think I quite agree. You can WANT to be a fan but sometimes you have to take an actively positive interpretation of things to genuinely be one. And I think 3.XE was really good for showing how this is the case. 3.XE, RAW, absolutely destroyed player attempts to so stunts and called shots and so on, by providing elaborate rules that amounted to calling for multiple rolls, often with high DCs, or serious penalties, if you wanted to "try anything clever". If you stuck to absolute RAW, and always gave the DC that seemed most correct (which was often pretty high), you would create a situation where it really didn't SEEM like you were actually a fan. Where it seemed, actually, like you were trying, by ruthlessly enforcing these "fair" (but let's be real - kinda crap for heroic adventuring) rules, to just really severely limit what players could do. And this exaggerated LFQW too, because magic didn't face the strictures, the same multiple tests, the same penalties to hit and so on. You cast a spell, it said what it does, so the imagination of the player was often the only limit, and very often there was no check at all (esp. out of combat).But equally you could often ignored a few rules, or lowered a DC, or not made the penalty as extreme as some poorly-drafted and clearly unplaytested table said, and had a better effect. Would that make you "neutral in terms of action adjudication and consequences", though? I'd say clearly not.Or look at 5E - you often have situations where you could potentially call for multiple rolls, when a stunt is being done (again this primarily impacts non-casters), or you could just make it, say, an Attack roll at Disadvantage, or one check and that (increasing failure chance of course but not as high as multiple rolls). And consequences are often in the DM's purview and pretending neutrality feels very fake. There's no rule as to what happens when the PCs try to con their way past the guards and totally fail. Someone who is genuinely a fan of the PCs and the players is likely to make something interesting happen, or re-direct the PCs, but not blow things up, whereas I've seen people trying to be neutral absolutely metaphorically crash the van into the wall there, because they felt it was "realistic". There's no rule to fail forwards, for example - but if you're really being "neutral in terms of action adjudication and consequences", without absolutely stellar design, you're fairly frequently going to hit places where, realistically, neutrally, the PCs would be somewhat  stuffed - they couldn't go any further - they'd be at a loss. But if your adjudication was a little more generous, perhaps a tiny bit less "neutral" or "realistic", you might be able to provide a direction for them to go in.So I really question this. I think you're kidding yourself if you think you can both be a fan, and completely neutral, esp. when it comes to action adjudication, where you control how difficult/easy something is, and consequences, which are often entirely DM fiat.</blockquote>

Verification