D&D General Why Editions Don't Matter

[Oofta]

I gotta ask. Is this whole "D&D is hard to pick up" really a significant issue? We all goof, especially when we first start to play. I'm sure I've gotten rules wrong many a time. But it never stopped us from playing.

I've had truly bad, horrendous, DMs but it had nothing to do with them or their players not understanding how to play the game.

 

[pemerton]

I've had truly bad, horrendous, DMs but it had nothing to do with them or their players not understanding how to play the game.

I've had bad GMs who were bad because they didn't know how to handle action declarations from players that didn't conform to their script. Part of the problem was that they were running a scenario set in a town, and that involved intelligence gathering and the like, but they had no idea of how to handle that sort of scope of play.

It's possible to have techniques and principles that would enable that bad GM to be a good one. But the rulebooks he was using - AD&D 2nd ed - didn't provide them.

 

[Garthanos]

A lot of advice on DMing D&D 5e on Twitter and elsewhere, ironically, points to the 4e DMG 1 & 2 as opposed to the 5e one.

Is that perhaps an argument in favor of the editions matter less side.

 

[gorice]

1. You can’t just selectively quote parts of the text to support your point of view.
I mean … you can, but it will probably not be looked on favorably.

2. There is something unnerving about being told the DMG contains no advice, but then told it contains bad advice, while realizing the DMG contains lots of good advice.

3. Finally, what you call waffling and contradictory is what other people would call attempting to support multiple common approaches. I feel,like this has been covered ….

We're really going to do this? OK.

The first bit I quoted, from the start of the book (which I note you did not feel a need to nit-pick) looks an awful lot like what one of my old professors would have called a 'programmatic statement.' That is, it's laying out the broader outline of what we should expect in the book. Here's another bit, right from the beginning:

The Dungeon Master (DM) is the creative force behind a D&D game. The DM creates a world for the other players to explore, and also creates and runs Adventures that drive the story.

And then:

Every DM is the creator of his or her own campaign world. Whether you invent a world, adapt a world from a favorite movie or novel, or use a published setting for the D&D game, you make that world your own over the course of a campaign.

And then the previously quoted:

Whether you write your own Adventures or use published ones, expect to invest preparation time beyond the hours you spend at the gaming table. You’ll need to carve out some free time to exercise your creativity as you invent compelling plots, create new NPCs, craft encounters, and think of clever ways to foreshadow story events yet to come.

This is a clear statement that the job of the DM is to create the world and steer the plot, as the main storyteller. Then, we get all the caveats about letting players' actions matter, and, yes, a whole menu of ways to roll, including outright lying and cheating (whose downside amounts to 'the players might see through the illusion'!). I don't want to say 'impossible thing before breakfast', but it seems you've made me do it.

Within this context, the caveats and alternate approaches are

(1) bad, vague, and contradictory, and

(2) not truly supportive of multiple styles of play.

All of this is, once again, before we get to the lack of actual procedures other than fiat for doing pretty much anything at all.

 

[chaochou]

Yes, this was my point. People agreed that the GM can abuse their authority... but they also seem to need for the GM to have absolute authority.

I don't know why that is.

i) A culture of GM as storyteller needing ways to prevent player input from derailing the passive experience
ii) A culture of GM as genre police, with the mistrust that player will depart from genre norms at any opportunity
iii) A loop of plot curation plus genre policing prompting (pro-active) players to look for opportunities to actually impact the game leading to the need for plot curation and genre policing.

It's a self-reinforcing cycle, which is why so many posters are so wedded to it and instantly propose bad faith play as the only possible result the moment alternatives are suggested.

 

[John Lloyd1]

@John Lloyd1

The first RPG I owned was Classic Traveller, but I couldn't work out how to play it because the rulebooks don't tell you: they have hints here and there, and in retrospect I can now see what work those hints are doing. But as someone who at the time had no experience with or knowledge of RPGing or wargaming I just couldn't make sense of it.

Not long after I got Moldvay Basic, and it was completely different. I was able to work out how to play. Among versions of D&D, I think Moldvay Basic remains the gold standard for the clarity of the way it sets out the procedures both for GM prep - how to prepare a scenario - and for actually managing play - the turn sequence, action resolution, etc.

I think providing adventures are a really important traditional RPGs. They show you what the gameplay is meant to look like. This relies heavily on GM authority though.

I had the traveller book which included two adventures. That was much better.

 

[Thomas Shey]

You say that but expectations are set and it becomes much harder to do your own thing because well it's not what is "expected". I just don't see this massive problem of confusion and people struggling to learn the game... regardless of how or why it's being solved, it just doesn't seem like it's a problem in need of this solution.

I'm not speaking of 5e specifically here, as (as I've indicated before) I don't know it well enough to have an informed judgment. But I stand my opinion in the general case; a game system should give you guidance about how its designed to be used, and third parties or figuring it out yourself are no substitute.

 

[Thomas Shey]

...but why? Who is the target market? I mean that seriously. I see a lot (A LOT) of people here talking about how D&D should have better on-boarding procedures, but ... why? You came from 4e. Thomas Shey, IIRC, says he started playing in the TSR era.

Neither of you is going to need a lengthy introduction, right?

We're not the majority of people who will be learning 5e. Or necessarily any RPG.

I don't think most of the young people, the ones who use twitch and youtube and tiktok ... I don't think they'd prefer walls of text.

People may or may not prefer a lot of things, but if they do need text to work with, it not being there is no help (and unless the authors are doing other methods, they're no substitute).

I am genuinely curious as to where this complaint comes from. We have two people (you and Thomas Shey) who don't play 5e and (AFAICT) don't want to complaining that a game- with starter sets, the AL, twitch streams, TikTok, youtube, the ability to jump on to multiple platforms and play, and so on ... that this is the game that has trouble onboarding new players?

I have trouble understanding your criticism ... in practice.

Again, you're confused that I'm talking about 5e specifically here. I'm not. I'm talking about RPGs as a whole.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think the idea that wanting binding mechanics and principals is intrinsically linked to a lack of trust is fundamentally flawed.

It also, as usual, conflates lack of trust in intentions and lack of trust in judgment. As I mention repeatedly, they're not the same thing, at least for most people.

 

[Thomas Shey]

All I can say is that we figured it out back in the dark ages before personal computers and internet. I find it difficult to believe that anyone that wants to DM can't spend an hour watching videos to get an idea of how to do it. They've probably spent years playing video games. None of the concepts for DMing are rocket science.

I also saw people screw it up substantially back then. So the fact some people can work their way through it is not an argument against having guidance. It just privledges people who happen to work it out themselves.

(Even back then I'd argue most people who didn't make a complete dog's breakfast of it did so because of oral tradition through other GMs rather than that could work out how to do it right completely on their own).