Here’s a great article that captures the essence of D&D for me.
I’m a players’ DM, for crying out loud. I’m on your side, guys. I want to tell a deep and thrilling story together, and instead, we’re wasting time with stupid arguments about auto-failures in skill checks.
And thus came my epiphany, when the clouds broke and the sun shone down. As a DM, it is my responsibility to exterminate all traces of competition. It is on me to ensure it doesn’t creep into the game.
via Critical Hits » Winners and Losers in D&D.
Amen and Amen! D&D is a game of cooperation not competition. After all, the dice are stacked in the DM’s favor. If the DM wants a TPK, he can make it so: He creates the encounters, designs the environment, stocks the monsters, rolls behind the screen (if he chooses) and finally adjudicates all disputes. He’s the Legislative, Executive and Judicial branches all rolled into one. I think that’s called a Tyranny, and rarely does anyone but the Tyrant come out on top… unless the Tyrant wants another outcome to occur.
If the DM wants to “win,” there is nothing the players can do to stop him… short of not playing. And if that happens, where does that leave us? Rather, a good DM ought to have another goal in mind. D&D is about a shared experience, so the good DM ought to define “winning” this way: Did everyone enjoy him or herself? Did my players share in the emotional highs and lows that are inherent to a good story? Did they experience the tension that comes with the threat of failure and the elation that comes from successfully overcoming failure. These are the things that make for a good night of D&D, and these are the things that good DMs deliver.
For this reason, I’m a very relaxed DM. The guys I normally play with are tacticians and puzzlers. They generally like to utilize their min-max combos, and strategize their way through encounters. Because of that, I normally level up enounters, not so that I can “win” in the traditional sense, but rather so that my players get to experience the challenge of a well-executed strategy.
My preferred method of dealing with rules disputes or improvised actions is to turn the question back to the players: “How do you think it should work?” If players take advantage of me, I don’t care. I have no vested interest in “winning,” because that’s not what it’s about.
There is much of this that I agree with. There is no winning or losing except, did you successfully complete your campain. What gets me is when the rules get in the way of the game. Take this newest version of D&D. It is all rules and no creativity. Sure some might say it can get creative in the way that you apply those rules, but that is more like lawyering to me (No offense to any lawyers who may read this). I’m old school. I started playing back with first edition and so when I wanted to whirlwind I had to explain to the DM what I wanted to do and how I would accomplish it. I had to make up a story about how I’d practiced this technique many times in the backcave as a young dwarf of 200 years. There was no card to play which explained how that was +5 damage and -10 to hit. The DM was then challanged to make that up along with me. Sure, there was some bickering and bartering, “What, +30 damage you must be mad. I’ll give you +3 and that’s final!”, but we were creating the story together. This allowed the other players to dip there Doretoes back into the Velveta while we were figuring it out. It seems that each new edition has added more and more rules making it less of a creation of a charater and story and more of a card game with add ons. It seems like one of the stories I read with my son. The barbarian comes charging down the road waving his axe. . Now the guy who normally DMs is good at allowing some freedom in what we do, but othertimes when there is a guest DM, they don’t allow that freedom. It is freedom I want when I play. I follow rules all day. When I play I want to be able to go a little wild.
Anyway, thank you for giving me your space to get that off my chest. Here’s hoping I can get out to a game sometime in the future!
I see that part of my comment was read by the program as bad HTML. In that space with the two periods following “waving his axe” I had put in a comment [please play your attack card now]. Hopefully this bracket system will show up better.
Rantz,
We’d love to see you out one night. I, too, have been playing for many years, but I think it’s got less to do with the rules and more to do with the group dynamic. I was reading another article by one of the lead designers behind D&D 4E, Mike Mearls. He noted out that groups have a choice. Paraphrasing and riffing on his thought: Either you can play a glorified version of chess, or you can allow the rules to give structure and boundaries to your story. Neither is necessarily better than the other, but each is very different. Personally, I think the competitive drive of the group will go a long way to determines which choice is made.