D&D General The Monsters Know What They're Doing ... Are Unsure on 5e24

[Bae'zel]

My biases are absolutely towards light prep and more improv, for sure. Some of my arguments here are certainly derived from my general preference away from highly-developed prep for D&D and D&D-type games.

In this we are in total agreement. I have much more fun (and apparently so do my players) when I let loose and improvise, bouncing from player ideas without anything strictly planned beforehand.

 

[Thomas Shey]

You are forgetting that most DMs do not really want the power. They do it because they love TTRPGs and most players refuse to take a turn as the DM.

Though it gets weird after you've done it enough years. When I started I was probably equally interested in playing and GMing. These days I've GMed long enough that while I like to play sometimes, I find I'm much more likely to get distracted and bored as a player than a GM, and as such am a worse player than GM (I suspect my undiagnosed ADHD is a contributor here). So it becomes a bit self-reinforcing after long enough.

This is what happened to me and I do care about my players fun. I care too much at times; however, my experience is that most players never really think about the DM in terms of what they may be giving up or the work involved in providing that game. Let's not even discuss that I buy most of the material and even keep extra copies of the PHB on hand if needed. If I decide I want to run a certain theme or curate a setting so that it is not stock D&D, then I am doing it because it keeps me invested in running that game.

Final example: My parents had to die to get one of my friends to take over the game to give me time to grieve. That is what is took to allow me to step away from being the DM.

I've had the advantage I played with a lot of other GMs (probably one in three players on average) from the get-go. The problem was I was kind of a picky-butt and over time decided that while I thought they were mostly fine players, I didn't really like a number of them as GMs particularly.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Neither one of us can "prove" anything. But I have not nor will I ever tell you that my way is better, something you do on a regular basis.

Well, honestly, sometimes I think people just do think so about various elements of GMing. its just a question as to whether being honest about that judgment call is being inappropriate or not.

 

[Maxperson]

And that, precisely, is why GMs neither have nor should have "absolute power".

No one who is not willing to make personal sacrifices for the good of the group merits leadership. Full stop.

It's wrong to have absolute power because the situation might end up fairly treating everyone's fun as equal?

That's a hard sell man.

 

[Thomas Shey]

you might only find that there is no compromise possible once you had a bit of back and forth.

Which is why I said you need to get to the core of what people want before offering a compromise is practical. I realize people aren't always clear about that out the gate, but that should be the first thing you're doing before offering alternatives.

The DM does not want tortles and suggests something that they think might preserve enough of the concept while fitting the setting,

But that's it; they don't actually know what "the concept is" until they find out what part of "tortle" is of interest to the player. Otherwise they're just making assumptions.

the player thinks that suggestion misses something important and points that out. That is how you get to an understanding of what is important and whether a compromise that is acceptable to both sides exist. Not by stomping the floor and saying 'your proposal is an insult, and it has to be 100% tortle all the way'.

Or you could, you know, ask "What part of playing a tortle is it that interests you?" instead of just making assumptions.

 

[Scribe]

It's wrong to have absolute power because the situation might end up fairly treating everyone's fun as equal?

Yeah, that tracks with this thread.

 

[DinoInDisguise]

They have interest in character building, or narrative building, which is why they push back when their tools are restricted.

Some players likely do care, but looking at r/LFG and my own experience, I don’t think players reliably self-select away from games with restrictions. That makes it hard for me to see this as a dominant concern for most players.

If anything, D&D Beyond data suggests most characters cluster around a small number of races, which suggests that broad racial availability may not be a priority for many. In practice, players also seem to react much more strongly to class restrictions than racial ones. In my own r/LFG posts, restricting classes produces a noticeable drop in responses, while restricting races doesn’t.

Honestly, I’m increasingly thinking about restricting races as a way to filter out players who expect every official option to be available. In my experience, that expectation often correlates with friction in other areas, such as: magic item availability, objections to house rules, resistance to limits on spells like silvery barbs or counterspell, and sometimes push back against homebrew monsters. All of which, simply aren't worth my limited free time to resolve.

Maybe I’m wrong, but this thread has made me more pro-restriction. I don’t expect to have trouble finding players either way, and this helps filter out table dynamics I don't enjoy. I value players who are aligned from the start, not ones who want to debate every deviation from the baseline rules.

But I'm sure this will be an unpopular opinion around here.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I don't see anything passive or aggressive about telling people what the restrictions are before they accept the invitation.

That isn't what I'm talking about. I'm talking about various options that actually have no bearing on what they wanted to play a particular race for. You earlier assumed that it was about the culture or the mechanical benefits. That wasn't it.

(To back up a bit and be fair, it could have simply been an honest case of projecting your own expectations of what would be important rather than finding out what was. In which case it wasn't passive aggressive so much as jumping to conclusions).

I really don't know how you make that leap. Would it be passive aggressive to invite someone over to play D&D only to have them ask to play BitD?

Again, you're missing my point.

As far as the tortle example I explained what I might propose as a compromise. If the player doesn't accept my proposal then they can make a counter proposal. The only counter proposal I received was that it had to be a tortle. Sometimes compromise is not possible. That does not mean I was being aggressive, passively or otherwise. The player getting whatever they want is not compromise.

But it can be, if they originally came in with the physical properties, the cultural assumptions, and the mechanical benefits, but were ready to shed the latter two if necessary. It just may have been that the available compromises weren't useful at your end.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Lol maybe it's for the best that he didn't see it; it's pretty hard to follow after a while anyway, and I think it's gotten polarizing the way internet conversations tend to once they've gone on long enough.

Yeah, I'm not sure it's possible to explain why it's now a dozens of pages a day debate about who gets to decide what happens in a campaign, rather than being about, you know, monsters or 2024 D&D.

 

[Thomas Shey]

My biases are absolutely towards light prep and more improv, for sure. Some of my arguments here are certainly derived from my general preference away from highly-developed prep for D&D and D&D-type games.

Well, to be clear, I don't generally make that kind of distinction; occasionally I'll use a game that has a lot of baked in setting material anyway and then I'll do less, but my general tendency isn't toward games of that sort, even if the current one I'm running (13th Age) and the one I'm getting ready to run (Eclipse Phase) do.