DM fiat is the greatest tool the DM has, and unless it's in the hands of a bad DM(rare), it's good for the players, too. Too many try to use it as if it were a bad word.
I don’t disagree. I’m just saying that a lot of players will favor options with hard-coded mechanics because there’s no uncertainty on what they do.
I didn't say that they didn't exist. What I implied, and am saying straight out now, is that if I didn't encounter them given the sheer numbers of D&D players I encountered, the complainers were in a small minority.
You may think you encountered a lot of D&D players, but that’s still anecdotal. And at any rate, if we proceed under the assumption that they were in the minority, it’s still not a new problem in 5e.
Acknowledgement and suggestions ARE support, even if meager. And I will absolutely grant you that the 5e support on this is very meager.
Sure, if that’s how you prefer to phrase it.
Unless the players have explicitly agreed to ride the railroad, a railroad is always a problem.
I strongly disagree. I’ve run plenty of games that many would describe as “railroads” that all of my players thoroughly enjoyed. My players probably wouldn’t describe them as railroads, but that’s because they wanted to go where it was going. The reason railroads is a problem is because they remove player agency, but if the players don’t encounter a situation where they want to go a new direction that the railroad doesn’t allow, then their agency is never infringed upon. And a skilled DM can switch tracks (or create brand new routes) at a moment’s notice if their players do want to go in a different direction.
It's actually a lot of fun. You still get to build encounters and stories. They just pertain to what the players have originated as their goals.
Said as if you can’t do exactly that in a more preplanned adventure.
If the players suddenly decide to go to the Northern Barbarian Tribes and take them over, you prepare for that. If during that story they become fast friends with some of the barbarians and shift from take-over to ally, and then join them to fight the frost giants, you prepare for that. You're reactive, but still creating stories and encounters, and at the same time the PCs truly are the driving force of the story, rather than just being along for the ride.
I did say
purely reactive. Being able to react to players interests and input is an important skill for any DM, I just wouldn’t enjoy a game that was purely reactive.
If you were in my game, you'd probably quit. The "fun part of the game" is only about a third to half, depending on the situation, of my game. The rest is the "amazingly fun part of the game"
Unless you’re seriously saying that a half to two thirds of your game is taken up by resolving downtime activities, I think you may have misunderstood what I meant by “fun part of the game.” Uptime is simply time when you’re playing things out moment-to-moment. If that really only takes up a third to half of your table time, then yeah, I would get bored and quit pretty fast.
I actually did play in a game that was like that once. It was bizarre. One dude was just like doing a bunch of spreadsheets to figure out how much money he could make investing in cattle farming, and telling the GM how many cows he wanted to buy while I, with my monk-like character (this wasn’t D&D, but it had a similar martial artist class) was just like... “I don’t know, I guess I train in my dojo?” The whole session. Not only did we never pursue the obvious plot bait because the one guy didn’t want to take time away from his imaginary business, not only did I never get to throw a punch, I never got to roleplay my character because there were almost no moment to moment interactions. Everything was “what do you do over this four weeks while the other guy is raising his cows?” Never went back to that group (although there were other reasons for that).
I would encourage that sort of player to go find a more compatible game. Not out of any kind of malice, but because people should enjoy themselves when playing D&D. My game wouldn't be to that person's liking, but someone else's would be.
And that’s totally reasonable. But if you acknowledge that this is enough of a problem to some people that they would have more fun playing a different game, then how is it so hard to accept that “money is not useful” is a legitimate critique, at least for people with certain playstyle preferences, even if it isn’t a problem for you and your players?
I strongly disagree with this. When you codify that sort of thing, you are stifling creativity. People see that the book lays out A, B, and C as the ways to use aristocracy, which causes them to not even try to think up D-Z, which are also ways to use aristocracy. If the game is going to go into this at all, it should just be some sort of vague statement to the players and DM to be creative with how the uses for gold can impact the game in a positive manner for the PCs.
Encourage the creativity. Don't stifle it.
It’s a pretty well-known psychological phenomenon that too much creative freedom actually stifles creativity. When your options are “absolutely anything,” people become overwhelmed and can’t filter the unlimited options down enough to make a decision. Restrictions and guidelines actually foster creativity. Obviously there’s a limit to how far that can go before those limitations start getting in the way of the creativity they are meant to spark, which is why I did not suggest trying to codify every possible benefit of every single thing one might buy. But some simple advice, like “a character with a wealthy lifestyle may be able to persuade certain NPCs without a roll, or be able to attempt social actions that a character with a poor lifestyle might automatically fail” would go a long way. I still think a simple table of mishaps and windfalls that you roll on once a month with a modifier based on your lifestyle during that month would be a huge step towards making downtime more interesting (to me, if it needed to be said).
