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Feb 5, 2012 -- 2:39AM, jonathan_sicari wrote:

And I'm normally the DM. Having just finished typing everything below, I feel the need to say it is somewhat of a rant, but as such, it is heart felt.

I've been seeing some posts concerning 'player entitlement' and 'we need to reempower the DM' recently and it makes me ill. These posts usually reek with an elitist attitude, a promotion of favoritism (do things the way I like and you'll get bennies, play the game the way its written and I'll punish you).

I started playing with the basic box sometime around 1982. My friends and I moved on to 1st Edition and when I joined the army and went to Germany that's what I played D&D wise until 2nd came out (I also played TSR's Marvel Superheroes (basic and advanced), Top Secret and Top Secret S.I., Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, D.C. Heroes, James Bond from Avalon Hill, and Cyberpunk 2020, various Palladium Games, Rolemaster, Chivalry and Sorcery, and Aftermath came after I returned to the states, White Wolf and other games after Desert Storm). The groups I played with generally tried to make the game work out of the box so to speak (somethings were dropped as too time consuming, weapon vs. armor type chart for example) so instead of complex plans involveing spiked open doors and 10' poles, we actually tried to get by with a thief using his find/remove traps, Open Locks, etc. (perhaps backed by certain magic items, these are some hazy memories at this point).

The biggest source of arguements for us was always a DM(GM/ST/Narrator) saying "because I said so." Yes, that is printed in the books but I honestly believe that was one of the biggest errors that was ever made in the history of our hobby.

I forsee one arguement already, "somebody has to be in charge". Well, yes, but to paraphrase an important historical document, "governments are instituted among nations deriving their powers from the consent of the governed". There is already a movement amongst gamers for more player driven narrative in many games (I think John Wick's Houses of the Blooded is an excellent example, I'd love the game if it were not for John's primary premise, that your character will ultimately always fail, its about Tragedy and I guess I just don't get it, just like I don't get behind the personal horror aspect of White Wolf's games).

I actually like that Dnd finally succeeded in becoming a truly cooperative game between all the players (ultimately, the DM is just another player, no more, no less) and for it to backslide into encouraging petty tyranny and arbitrary 'because I said so' causes me to be concerned with the new edition.

I am hoping that there will be sufficient outcry during the playtest against this approach that it will be reconsidered once open playtest starts but what I fear will happen is people who oppose this form of gaming will just drop out of the playtest, WoTC will recieve the type of feedback that they hope to, and then we will end up with the New Coke of RPGs (I worked for a short time in Market Data Research, one of the horror stories told to us as new employees to emphasize the importance of following the testing protocols was that the firm that Coke retained to test the New Coke formula failed to do so and the result was that Coca-Cola expected New Coke to be a hit, not the bomb it was).

My ultimate point is the myth of the ultimate power of the DM needs to be taken out behind the chemical shed by a detail of five men and shot.

Thank you for reading.

Wait...  What does DM empowerment mean?

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DM Control over Players' Characters:

1st edition:  The spells the wizard knows at character creation are the DM's choice.  Other spells are found as the game progresses.

2nd-4th edition:  The spells the wizard knows are the Player's choice.

Does 1st edition empower the DM more because the DM determines what a Wizard character can do? 

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DM Control over Magic Items:

3rd edition:  Magic items can be crafted by PCs, using a very complicated system that many players liked because they could do all kinds of creative things.

4th edition, Original:  Magic items in the books can be crafted by PCs

4th edition, Essentials:  Common magic items can be crafted by PCs; Uncommon with DM permission; Rare by major story device / not at all.

Does Essentials empower the DM more?  Does 4th empower the DM more than 3rd?  Just comparing within 4e, does item rarity actually empower the DM more? 

If that's what empowering the DM means, that implies DM empowerment means "preventing players from going overboard with the power creep that we published" and the best way to empower DMs then is to publish less junk (this applies to every edition).

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Character Class choices:
1st Edition:  Name level special classes (e.g. Paladin, Druid) were entered with DM permission and by completing a story objective.  Base classes depended on the 3d6 rolls for your stats.

3rd Edition:  Prestige classes.  Players can just take them.  Take several of them in fact.  You could take any base class any time.

Does 1st edition empower the DM more?  Becoming a druid in old D&D, for instance, certainly was a mommy may I game.  Your character's future career was in the DM's hands.  But it also created a story, when done right.  But that kind of DM was never adversarial, never felt the need for "empowerment" anyway.

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Ease of Writing vs. Customization:

3rd edition:  Monsters are built out of hit dice which work like character levels, so custom monsters and NPC villains took a lot of work to write.

4th edition:  Monsters are built out of pre-determined attack bonuses, damage, defenses, hp, etc. based on role and level; and powers could be custom made or pulled from other similar-level monsters.  NPC villains are built like monsters.

Is 4th edition more empowering for the DM because it's easier to make custom monsters and villains?

Or is 3rd edition more empowering because you can use the layered levels/HD system to build all kinds of bizarre versions of the same monster or villain at the same level?

Or is 1st edition more empowering because XP value was just based on Hit Dice plus a bonus to the XP value based on the monster's powers?

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To me, DM empowerment is "I can whip up an evil high priest in ten minutes" (the things 4e did to make it easier for DMs to design encounters) not "I get to say no to players" (my other examples above).

To me DM empowerment is shipping Reavers of Harkenwold with almost all the maps I need for the encounters, and tokens for all the monsters and villains.  To me DM empowerment is giving me modules that tell stories and arrange encounters in a variety of ways that demonstrate all aspects of the roleplaying game.

Feb 17, 2012 -- 8:31AM, daVALESian wrote:

Feb 17, 2012 -- 3:59AM, Kalnaur wrote:

Feb 17, 2012 -- 12:23AM, SleepsInTraffic wrote:

I have done this and will continue to do so.  If I have a player who's character is dropping everything that comes at the party I will in fact curtail their damage without telling them, usually by a fixed ammount and not a large one.  Sometimes as the DM you should change the flow of the game itself to give people other than the best power gamer in the room the kill shot and the spotlight.  This can also be done by upping the monster's hit points.  I have for at least one encounter I was running had a preferred end of the encounter.  Namely that a certain member of the party kill the big bad guy that had been the main villain for a short arc.  This was to wrap up one of that character's tie in stories and the big bad guy was her nemesis.  I invented a mechanic in the middle of the fight whereby the big bad guy started killing off his own followers in order to gain their vitality.  I invented this because one of the other players on the table managed to drop it to within about 100 hit points of dead...four turns in a row.  Once from under bloodied, twice from full health, and once from bloodied.  That was an elite brute 3 levels over the party's level.  I told all of my players about this after the game session and they all agreed that it was an awesome addition to the fight.  Sometimes a DM should have the right and ability to bend or even break the rules of the game to provide an awesome scene for his players.  Even if that scene is a loss for them to make the win your going to basically hand to them later even better.

I would not specifically reduce a player's damage output mid fight because they were killing "another person's nemesis".  If they are all fighting that nemesis, they have taken that nemesis on as their own.  The probability of the party wizard or cleric dealing enough damage to take down their mortal foe is great in theory, but unlikely in practice.

That said, I do think that the "kill my followers, take their life" mechanic you invented was less about lessening damage and more about finding a way to extend the life of the monster to apreciable levels.  Hell, there's quite a few monster powers with exactly that mechanical impact.  One that springs to mind is a one two punch of a power to gain Temp HP from "eating" minions, and minions that gain extra defenses when close to the one who will eat them, effectively making both targets more important, and neither one is able to be ignored. 

Instead of lessening damage, you invented a more horrible monster, one willing to sacrifice the lives of its minions to live. 

Basically, willfully gimping a player because it's not going "how you planned" = bad.  Changing up a fight that was supposed to be epic but is starting to either drag or be way too fast = good.  I'd personally say you "did good", but what you suggest, gimping a person's damage . . . if I ever found out a DM was doing that, I'd never trust them again, and I can't game with people I don't trust.

Then again, I expect the DM to cheat on their side, not mine.  Not reducing the damage I do without telling me, but changing the HP of the monster.  The monster is their province, but if I roll 18 damage total and they reduce it to 13, that's cheating me.  If instead they let me know that the monster has damage resistance, or adds HP to the monster, that's OK with me.  The DR might even be something the monster gained whn it first hit bloodied (regardless of if it actually had that power before or not). It might be a matter of semantics to some, but to me, it's OK for the DM to fudge their dice, their rolls, but never fudging the player's dice and results.  The DM has more than enough tools, but applying Character specific DR should never be one of them.  At least from the philosophy I come from.

I know I'm going to push someone's button but so long as the reduction in damage by the DM is never revealed and you already said you're okay with the monster's HP being increased at will by the DM, what, is the mathematical difference if the 18 damage was only recorded as 8, versus simply adding 10 health to the monster? Functionally, the 18 damage went in, but really only knocked off the new health that was spontaneously added.

I know it's a terrible tactic for the DM to make on the fly changes to a stat block like this. It's fickle and immediate punishment for the player based on the whimsy of the DM and how crisp his beer might be that day, and that's not fair to the players at all. And I'm totally, 100% guilty of doing it as well.

As Sleeps and I game together, I remember the fight in question, I remember having to temporarily take over the Changleing Assassin and end up ghosting and replacing one of those minions - it was a great fight, and I didn't notice or care that the BBEG in the fight seemed to be regenerating all that much. Frankly, it made the final blow when it came from the Player and her NPC companion that much more built up and incredible. There are so many little pieces of that fight that I still remember, and I think that's more important than the fact that rules were fudged to ensure the cinematics weren't destroyed.

That said, I think that's a matter of the party. If your players are more mechanical and love the number crunch and have no care for the feel of the fight more than simply "mmm, delicious XP and loot packages" then doing something like what Sleeps and I have done is going to upset the players. (Thankfully) we play in a group that loves to ramp up into the cinematic combat, so sometimes things seem to last a bit longer. If I as the DM ever ask a player to go into detail about their strike during a combat, it's my first big clue to the players that this fight is not about the dice, it's about the roleplaying. They love it. I've run entire D&D sessions without the dice hitting the table save for wanting to hear dice. I did it so my players thought there was some random chance factor involved, and not some pre-ordained story elements being triggered. I had a player last night recant to me a game I ran almost a year ago, a one-shot arena style game with my core group, where the only sound of dice hitting the table was from behind my DM screen and I never even looked at the numbers. That game was incredible, and I didn't need to worry about hit points, armor class, non-armor defenses, damage roles - they were all out the window.

They won, because they figured out how to win. They worked together with cinematic re-telling of their attacks, and I reacted to each with my own.

I have no problem with the modification of the monster stat block on the fly.  What I would always have a problem with is, "I don't like that that specific character is dealing to much damage, in my mind, so I'm going to gimp them", which is what the poster before sleep was alluding to.  Now, with regard to what sleep appears to have done, it's different because they did it within the purview of DM tools.  They changed the monster.  They could have also introduced dangerous new terrain, brought in a second wave of monsters that made the big bad immune to attack until they were killed, sprung traps, etc.  What a DM should never do is targeted damage resistance because the (whatever class) is dealing too much damage.