D&D General Why Editions Don't Matter

[FrogReaver]

So it's been a long time since I picked up the DMG and just started reading through it. Honestly, it's pretty dang well written and absolutely full of great advice. A few excerpts are below.

Inventing, writing, storytelling, improvising, acting, refereeing—every DM handles these roles differently, and you’ll probably enjoy some more than others. It helps to remember that Dungeons & Dragons is a hobby, and being the DM should be fun. Focus on the aspects you enjoy and downplay the rest. For example, if you don't like creating your own adventures, you can use published ones. You can also lean on the other players to help you with rules mastery and world-building.

The rules don’t account for every possible situation that might arise during a typical D&D session. For example, a player might want his or her character to hurl a brazier full of hot coals into a monster s face. How you determine the outcome of this action is up to you. You might tell the player to make a Strength check, while mentally setting the Difficulty Class (DC) at 15. If the Strength check is successful, you then determine how a face full of hot coals affects the monster. You might decide that it deals ld4 fire damage and imposes disadvantage on the monster's attack rolls until the end of its next turn. You roll the damage die (or let the player do it), and the game continues.

This book is organized in three parts. The first part helps you decide what kind of campaign you'd like to run. The second part helps you create the adventures— the stories—that will compose the campaign and keep the players entertained from one game session to the next. The last part helps you adjudicate the rules of the game and modify them to suit the style of your campaign.

Your world is more than just a backdrop for adventures. Like Middle Earth. Westeros, and countless other fantasy worlds out there, it’s a place to which you can escape and witness fantastic stories unfold. A well- designed and well-run world seems to flow around the adventurers, so that they feel part of something, instead of apart from it.

All of this is just from the first 2 pages.

 

[Oofta]

Alright. Players temper their expectations. Sounds like a useful thing.

I don't see how that, in any way, leads to...


...this. Because you are conflating player expectations and responses with designer guidance. The two are completely unrelated things. The game can give useful, productive, focused advice that can quite easily forewarn prospective DMs against common problems. Problems like "having a mistaken idea of what good DMing is," or "having a mistaken idea of how to pursue good DMing goals," or even "having a mismatch between what you want as DM and what some or all of your group wants as players."

No one is asking for "professional" DMs here. We're asking that we get advice to short-circuit the (many, many) common problems that a lot of first-time DMs are likely to encounter. That is, exactly the purpose of education: to teach new generations the lessons learned by prior generations' efforts, mistaken and successful, so they don't have to repeat those mistakes themselves.

Sometimes it won't work. That's okay. The fact that teaching doesn't always work is not a reason not to teach!


Genuine question: Why is it, whenever people ask for things to get better, their critics project a desire for perfection and miracles onto them? That's clearly not a charitable reading. There is no world where treating "why can't the DMG actually have guidance and teaching elements?" as asking for miracles is a useful contribution to the discussion. You have to know that no one will do that. Why even say it?

Not sure what you're getting at. I mentioned some improvements to the DMG above. But even if they make drastic improvements I simply don't think it will change much. First, very few people actually read the advice in the DMG. But even if they do, it takes practice and experience.

I've had DMs that ran the gamut from awful to awesome. Years of experience DMing didn't really move the needle up the scale all that far. I've had newbie DMs that were enthusiastic that made mistakes but ran a fun game. I've had experienced DMs that insisted on reading every bit of box text and taking 5 minutes or more drawing maps that had to match the module's maps exactly.

The worst experiences I've had were with experienced DMs. One only ran super deadly killer dungeons. Another had a d6 with body parts on it that he rolled if enemies crit. Roll the "head"? Gee, too bad another PC got beheaded!

The new DMs? They needed a few pointers and feedback but most were decent, sometimes even good. A good DM has more to do with attitude and being able to read the players than anything in my experience.

 

[FrogReaver]

Genuine question: Why is it, whenever people ask for things to get better, their critics project a desire for perfection and miracles onto them? That's clearly not a charitable reading. There is no world where treating "why can't the DMG actually have guidance and teaching elements?" as asking for miracles is a useful contribution to the discussion. You have to know that no one will do that. Why even say it?

I believe it's because the 'critics' have suggested some degree of change or improvement is perfectly fine, but people asking for things to get better keep pushing for better and better without any clear end in sight.

 

[Micah Sweet]

That isn't relevant to the example given by Oofta. Oofta was explicitly granting that the DM was, in fact, actually bad, horrendously so, not that they were a perfectly 100% fine and just a bad fit for this player/group. I was working within the example given, where it is a given that the DM is in fact horrendously bad, not just contextually inappropriate.


And yet, at the same time, most of us do not want engineers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, pharmacists, architects, veterinarians, and educators who have no pre-training and instead learn everything they do purely through experience, right? At this point in the thread, I honestly can't be sure anymore. Do you want your lawyer to have attended law school and passed their bar exam? Do you want your child's pediatrician to have attended med school and gotten a medical license? Do you want to know that the architect who designed the office building you worked in actually got a decent degree and a licensed to practice? Do you want the civil engineers who work on replacing a major bridge to have a solid educational background in civil engineering, rather than just picking up anyone who can answer physics questions?

Because if you're saying yes to most of those questions, you don't seem to actually believe that experience is the best teacher ever, no question. There's certainly a critical place for it. Medical doctors complete residency, after all, and lawyers should generally have internships or other work at a law firm relevant to their legal expertise, etc. But it very much seems to be that experience shouldn't be the foundation of knowledge, but rather the house we build on top of the foundation--a foundation coming from theory, explanation, and analysis, stuff that can in fact be taught.

Now, this is a leisure-time activity. It's not something that we should expect a whole friggin' degree for. But that isn't a reason to throw people to the wolves and whoever survives can successfully DM thereafter. DMing is hard; almost everyone recognizes this. And DMs are in incredibly short supply; everyone recognizes that. If we can do things that make it easier to get into DMing, if we can reduce the rate of errors--or hell, even your non-sequitur example of DM/player mismatch, if we can reduce rates of that too, which good instructions CAN mitigate!--isn't that worth doing? Shouldn't a thing purporting to guide dungeon masters help address that sort of stuff?

The 4e DMG spends a significant section of the first chapter--four and a half pages--just talking about how a group forms, what its dynamics are (and how they can become dysfunctional), and player psychology and how to address those things, both dealing with destructive stuff (distractions and players acting out) and promoting constructive stuff (how to give various player types what they want: that is, how to ensure they have fun.) There's a whole further section that talks about your role and behaviors and preferences as DM (two pages), as well as "table rules," social etiquette and effective ways to deal with problematic behaviors. The entire first chapter is information meant to forestall problems, equip DMs with tools to address them, AND inform them about playstyle/approach/preference differences that COULD lead to problems so you can try to work through them or recognize that they simply can't be resolved well in advance.

Like...how is this hard? How is this a bad thing to include? The 5e DMG gives all of this--this entire concept--less than two pages of discussion! In separate parts!

Maybe DMs should be licensed, like in Knights of the Dinner Table. You could refuse to play with a DM who has passed a rigorous examination and paid his annual dues. I bet WotC could make a mint from that.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Alright. Players temper their expectations. Sounds like a useful thing.

I don't see how that, in any way, leads to...


...this. Because you are conflating player expectations and responses with designer guidance. The two are completely unrelated things. The game can give useful, productive, focused advice that can quite easily forewarn prospective DMs against common problems. Problems like "having a mistaken idea of what good DMing is," or "having a mistaken idea of how to pursue good DMing goals," or even "having a mismatch between what you want as DM and what some or all of your group wants as players."

No one is asking for "professional" DMs here. We're asking that we get advice to short-circuit the (many, many) common problems that a lot of first-time DMs are likely to encounter. That is, exactly the purpose of education: to teach new generations the lessons learned by prior generations' efforts, mistaken and successful, so they don't have to repeat those mistakes themselves.

Sometimes it won't work. That's okay. The fact that teaching doesn't always work is not a reason not to teach!


Genuine question: Why is it, whenever people ask for things to get better, their critics project a desire for perfection and miracles onto them? That's clearly not a charitable reading. There is no world where treating "why can't the DMG actually have guidance and teaching elements?" as asking for miracles is a useful contribution to the discussion. You have to know that no one will do that. Why even say it?

Because those critics are happy with things the way they are, more or less.

 

[FrogReaver]

Because those critics are happy with things the way they are, more or less.

And just maybe IMO, because the changes being proposed are mostly abstract and not concrete, it's really easy to picture an abstract change yucking on your yum.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Haphazardly scrolling back to look at the posts of a few people I thought you might be referring to, it looks like there are several people who don't think making the PHB/DMG tutorials is the way, but that having either starter sets or videos or some other help like that would be a thing.

Do you have particular posts where they want decades of trial and error?

Nope, didn't mean to imply that was happening specifically in this thread. But I've encountered that sentiment often online, and in person.

I think decades is a bit of hyperbole, but I also think 'there is no greater teacher than experience' is just as true in RPGs as it is for most of life.

Sure, experience is great! Asking for better guidance doesn't impact that at all!

I brought this same point up earlier in the thread. While the discussion is being framed as guidance for running and playing D&D... there is an undertone of... because I believe that playstyle X is the right way to do it.

Where X is their preferred way of practices/resolution/whatever.

I addressed it when you brought it up earlier, and I'll do so now. They can offer advice and guidance about multiple playstyles. There's no need to eliminate anyone's style.

I get that there's a new edition coming, and so people are on guard about what may be changed... but I don't think calling for more clarity and better guidance are the kinds of changes you have to worry about.

 

[Vaalingrade]

So it's been a long time since I picked up the DMG and just started reading through it. Honestly, it's pretty dang well written and absolutely full of great advice. A few excerpts are below.





All of this is just from the first 2 pages.

So here's where my issue comes in. These are perfectly decent overviews and they're great for DMS who already know what it's talking about. If you just want confirmation (and a nice lobbed sales pitch for the adventures), sure.

But just step back and imagine you're the crafty person / storyteller of the friend group and your friends just told you to buy this book after showing you a highlight real of their favorite moments from Dimension 20 and all you know is the PH rules and that there's some kind of storytelling involved.

Which I think is the other issue at hand when discussing this: most of us started DMing after playing for a while. But not everyone gets that advantage. Every disease needs a patient zero in the community, and with the hobby growing, there are more people out there in the wild who are coming to the game from a more passive introduction point.

The list of suggestions are... enough to get confused while running that first sloppy game we all ran because we didn't get a lot of guidance.

IMO, there should be some discussion of the pros and cons of things like different means of adjudicating those hot coals to the face. Don't just say 'you can do it however your want, give some basis for making an educated choice to do so rather than trial and error.

 

[FrogReaver]

Sure, experience is great! Asking for better guidance doesn't impact that at all!

Okay. So why is better guidance so important to you? And why are the same people that seem to have major problems with many popular 5e playstyles the same ones that want better guidance, while the ones that like those popular playstyles don't see much of a need? Is there maybe a correlation or causation there? If so, why do you think that is?

I addressed it when you brought it up earlier, and I'll do so now. They can offer advice and guidance about multiple playstyles. There's no need to eliminate anyone's style.

Let's talk specifics. How many pages do you expect such content to be? What content should be removed from the current DMG to accommodate those extra pages - I mean there is a pagecount they need to adhere to right?

I get that there's a new edition coming, and so people are on guard about what may be changed... but I don't think calling for more clarity and better guidance are the kinds of changes you have to worry about.

IMO, the devil's in the details.

 

[FrogReaver]

So here's where my issue comes in. These are perfectly decent overviews and they're great for DMS who already know what it's talking about. If you just want confirmation (and a nice lobbed sales pitch for the adventures), sure.

But just step back and imagine you're the crafty person / storyteller of the friend group and your friends just told you to buy this book after showing you a highlight real of their favorite moments from Dimension 20 and all you know is the PH rules and that there's some kind of storytelling involved.

Which I think is the other issue at hand when discussing this: most of us started DMing after playing for a while. But not everyone gets that advantage. Every disease needs a patient zero in the community, and with the hobby growing, there are more people out there in the wild who are coming to the game from a more passive introduction point.

The list of suggestions are... enough to get confused while running that first sloppy game we all ran because we didn't get a lot of guidance.

IMO, there should be some discussion of the pros and cons of things like different means of adjudicating those hot coals to the face. Don't just say 'you can do it however your want, give some basis for making an educated choice to do so rather than trial and error.

When I recently wanted to learn how to play (GM) Blades in the Dark I read the book, but I don't think I could have started DMing it without watching a video of actual gameplay (I didn't have the luxury of having any play experience with it prior or being in a group where someone did). I'm sure I still get tons of stuff wrong in the game and it's really not that complicated of a game. But while I still get things wrong I have enough to play the game and my group seems to enjoy it and so I can keep at it and get better (experience).

I don't think D&D is all that different to learn (maybe more DM prep and time investment) but it also has adventure modules, which while imperfect are a godsend to newer DM's, even if it's just reading through them for ideas and to get a sense of how it can be ran.

**One thing I find very helpful in Blades in the Dark book is the 'play examples'. But it also has explicit principles which makes providing such examples much more concise and focused. So I'm not sure that D&D DMG could really mimic that either, unless they addressed different styles separately which might confuse more than help, along with taking up a huge page count.