Waibel's Rule of Interpretation (aka "How to Interpret the Rules")

The only CORRECT interpretation is the one I say!

The sooner the rest of the world gets that, the sooner we can all sit down and have fun...and end all fantasy rpg forum arguments everywhere.

heheheh.

[Seliousry though, nice chart. ]

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Or, another time, I bombed the party with a manticore. I love manticores. One of my favourite critters. A player piped up and complained that I was using a manticore in a completely wrong terrain - manticores in 2e were desert monsters and we were in a temperate forest. Now, he was 100% right, but, I stuck to my guns. It wound up being a rather lengthy argument at the table, so it stuck in my mind. I often wonder if I had of just admitted that I screwed up and skipped the encounter, if it wouldn't have been a better solution.

And again, DM's good and bad are sometimes wrong. It happens. AFAIC, a good DM knows when to step back and relax.

so what I take from this:

DM put a monster in the game
then the player

A player piped up and complained that I was using a manticore in a completely wrong terrain - manticores in 2e were desert monsters and we were in a temperate forest.

piped up sounds like it is just ok... I mean it doesn't say he exploded or he was mad, it doesn't say it's rude... so piped up in my mind is something like this:
"Hey, that's weird... do you remember those things are from desserts not in the woods right?"

Now, he was 100% right, but, I stuck to my guns.

so this sounds like the argument is coming not from the player but the DM

It wound up being a rather lengthy argument at the table, so it stuck in my mind. I often wonder if I had of just admitted that I screwed up and skipped the encounter, if it wouldn't have been a better solution.

and here is a possible solution...

 

[Eric V]

"Folks like yourself might like to call people like me "unhealthy" or "dictatorial" DMs just because we don't give in to every player's every whims,"

That's not why I think that.
​

 

[pemerton]

Folks like yourself might like to call people like me "unhealthy" or "dictatorial" DMs just because we don't give in to every player's every whims, but the fact that folks with similar DM styles as myself (like Jester) always have a line of people wanting to be in our games, and the overwhelming response from fans in the surveys leads me to believe that we're doing a pretty damn good job DMing in that style and that's what people want.

Are you meaning to imply that people who take a different attitude towards the role of the GM, and/or the place of the rules, have trouble finding players for their games? Or aren't giving "people" what they want?

If not, I don't understand the point you are trying to make. Some people like the GM-first, GM-driven playstyle. That's not in dispute in this thread. But I don't see how it makes any difference to those who prefer different approaches.

As a player, I've had two significant "I quit" moments. One was very early in my university days. A group of us had met at the university RPG club and started a new campaign under a GM who turned out, after a session or two, to be very much "GM first". The scenario was some fairly simple thing involving kobolds infiltrating a city via its sewage system.

Through a combination of good luck and good play, we managed to capture a kobold alive so that we could interrogate it, learn about the kobolds' plans and disposition of forces, and move from a reactive to proactive mode (both in the fiction, and in the player of the game at the table). The GM totally blocked this by playing the kobold as unable to communicate any better than a 5 year old, unable to read a map, unable to describe the nature of its leadership and allies, etc. At the end of the session the GM indicated he would be absent the next week. I arranged with the other players that I would start a Rolemaster campaign, and the next week we did. The (ex-)GM was invited to join when he returned to the club meeting a fortnight later, but declined. As best I recall he found new players who didn't mind his style.

About 7 years later, I was in the second year of a 2nd ed AD&D campaign. The GM was so-so, but there was a large group of players (6 or 7) who mostly didn't know one another very well outside the context of the game. So there was quite a bit of game-focused and in-character banter and back-and-forth, which made the game fun. And over the course of the campaign we had built up, among ourselves, quite a degree of investment in and outlook around the core themes and NPCs of the campaign (there were gods, a prophecy, evil overlords etc).

After around 8 or 9 levels the GM - apparently so that he could retake control of the campaign story from his players - time-shifted us 100 years into the campaign's future. All the lore we had developed and come to know was made irrelevant. Our PCs had not connections to any NPCs, political factions etc. We were back at the pure mercy of the GM for gameplay, backstory, PC motivations etc. I left the game, and I don't think it lasted much longer after that.

I mention these anecdotes to show that there is no necessary connection between a tightly GM-driven game and player retention.

 

[pemerton]

if you know you're not a simulationist, you probably really are more concerned with balance than I am. I let a barbarian domesticate a captured wolf over a period of several weeks, not because I thought through the balance implications of a 2nd level barbarian having an extra attack with proning and a handful of extra HP, but because the goblins who had the wolf previously had obviously domesticated it and so it made sense that the barbarian could too.

Fairly recently in my game the invoker/wizard (+30-something Nature) took control of a tamed giant Frosthawk (like a roc, but able to breathe cold). But being 4e, it only gave him enhanced movement (ie a fly speed) but otherwise - per the mount rules - didn't give him any bonus actions.

I was also able to just deduct the value of a 24th level mount from the treasure allocation for that level.

In a sense, with a very tight rules system (say, 4e), there is no need for "collegiate" or "Never question the DM" debates...the rules are there, and that's it. "This is how stealth works. Period."

Parts of 4e are loose, though - such as taking control of the enemy's animals in battle, for instance, which has happened twice in my game (the frosthawk just mentioned, and at early paragon the ranger-cleric took control of the hobgoblins' dinosaur). And various other p 42/skill challenge-y stuff.

In my mental framing of 4e, adjudicating these sorts of things is a three-stage process. There is the fictional positioning component: is this action feasible for this PC? - in this situation, relative to global considerations of flavour, genre etc as well as more local considerations of capability, equipment, opposition, etc.

And then, if the player gets a tick at the first stage, there is the DC allocation stage. This is done via the DC-by-level charts.

The final stage happens if the player succeeds on the check: the GM has to narrate the results. If the first stage was handled well, this should be relatively automatic, because the consequence of success will have been determined as part of that original framing of what is happening in the fiction.

At that first stage, I think the GM is first among equals, as you suggested upthread. But the players also have an important role to play. While they have a standing temptation to push a bit too far in pursuit of advantage, each player should also should have a better handle on what his/her PC is capable of than anyone else at the table. And there is also the fun factor - if a player thinks it would be fun for his/her PC to take control of a giant frosthawk, and the rules of the game make it easy to accommodate this without breaking (which, in 4e, they do), then that tells strongly in favour of saying "yes" at the first stage and moving onto the second stage of setting a DC.

I hadn't foreseen that the PC would take control of the steed on either occasion. In both cases it took the encounter in a slightly different direction from what I had anticipated. That's a big part of what I enjoy about RPGing.

 

[DaveDash]

The DM "first among equals" - I like that.

 

[Mouseferatu]

The Excluded Middle in this discussion is large enough to choke a purple worm.

 

[pemerton]

The Excluded Middle in this discussion is large enough to choke a purple worm.

That might be true, but I imagine that you also agree that there are a variety of feasible but meaningfully different approaches to GMing, rules adjudication etc.

I've encountered GMs, both in the face-to-face world and online, whose first response to any player action declaration outside a fairly narrow comfort zone is to try and shut it down to stop the game breaking. And early in my career as a GM I was one of them!

I've also played systems which make it easier or harder to accommodate more diverse action declarations. If it's not clear how to incorporate something without the risk of breaking, that makes me more likely to say "no" rather than "yes".

 

[Mouseferatu]

Of course there's a variety of feasible styles that are meaningfully different. And said variety includes both reasonable and unreasonable styles.

But so far this conversation has (for the most part; obviously there are exceptions) treated the issue as though the only options are "DM as tyrant" or "DM has no more say than any other player," when the truth is that every reasonable, feasible DMing style must, by the definitions inherent in the game, fall somewhere between the two. It's a high-gradient continuum, not a binary equation.

And the cause célèbre of this thread, in particular--the manticore in the forest--is being used to represent something it's not. See, there are two facets to it--the question itself, and Hussar's reaction to his player--and they're being treated as one.

Facet 1: The question and answer themselves. Some people want to treat this as being a "dictatorial DM" thing, when it absolutely isn't. (Talk to me sometime about the campaign I played in where player backgrounds were changed by the DM mid-campaign, and the entire thing was a tightly scripted railroad.) As Celebrim pointed out, the "favored terrain" thing isn't a rule. Even if the DM is going strictly by the book (and the DM always, in every reasonable campaign style, has the right not to do so), it's only a suggestion. Regardless of how reasonable or unreasonable the player who brought it up might have been, that's exactly the sort of thing the DM is supposed to make decisions on.

Facet 2: How it was handled. This is the part that we weren't there for. This is the part that might have some bearing on what DM style Hussar was employing at the time. How he arrived at the "Sorry, I'm keeping the manticore in the forest" point in the discussion--whether it was polite and friendly, judgmental and rude, whatever--might influence whether this is an example of "dictatorial" or not. But the fact that he did reach that point? Meaningless, in the "dictatorial or not" context.

 

[DaveDash]

That's not what the argument is about. The DM does have final say, "first among equals", but it's not his game and his game alone. It's not even his story alone. There are x number of other participants who are also at the table that he rightly should consider before refereeing decisions, some of those participants may be making a larger commitment to be there than him, kids and other factors depending.

So again, in conclusion, he should be doing what make sense for the table, either the table can vest ultimate power in him, or a more distributed approach such as how I prefer.

 

[Mouseferatu]

[MENTION=6786202]DaveDash[/MENTION], I've read this entire thread, and I can't find anyone claiming that the DM should make decisions without ever even considering everyone else at the table, or claiming that it is only the DM's game.

I see people claiming that the DM should have X amount of authority vs. Y amount of authority, but in neither case do people seem to be arguing for "all" or "none." It does seem to me, however, that some people on each side of the discussion view the other side as arguing for all or none.

People are arguing a matter of degrees, and reacting as though they're absolutes.