TTRPGs should punish people who play DMFs.

[Lago PARANOIA]

More broadly, I'm advocating that TTRPGs should punish people who consciously choose not to participate in the game except for when it suits them. And that Numerically Valid DMFs like Kenpachi and Doomsday (and the people who want to play them, like Dave from Knights of the Dinner Table) are the crown jewel on this crown of bullshit in action-adventure fiction and should get an extra helping of vehemence.

First of all, I'm aware that cooperative storytelling in a living story while simultaneously agreeing to a set of rules is difficult. So nothing in this rant should be applied to the grandmas and Little Trevors and DM girlfriends of the world. Nothing against you guys.

Second of all, before I hear anything about TTRPGs needing to avoid social engineering or that punishing different play styles is the sign of a Gygaxian grognard I'd just like to preempt you with a hearty fuck you. TTRPGs already do that. D&D for example punishes (or at least advocates punishment for) people for playing pacifists or pursuers of self-interest at the expense of the party both in and out of the rules. Like the Winstonian prostitute, you've already consented to some degree of arbitrary social engineering and now we're just quibbling on details.

Third of all, in the context of designing a game I see 'punish a person' and 'reward everyone except this person(s)' as identical processes since the outcome is the same. I'm aware that omission bias and loss aversion (to speak nothing of the emotional loading of the word 'punish') don't actually make this this so when you throw human cognitive biases in the mix, but while we're in the fuzzy world of numbers and theory I claim that and thus will act like they're the same.


There seems to be a mentality on gaming boards that TTRPGs should advocate a live-and-let-live approach to gaming. That is, as long as someone isn't harshing someone else's buzz (like someone playing a space ranger in Iron Ages Europe) they should be allowed to do what they want. That's... well, while it's not bullshit, it's still not totally right.

Cooperative storytelling isn't just people flailing with their individual stories and actions and then putting the vignettes together like they were in the Tales of Canterbury. What is also means is supporting or at least affecting other peoples' contributions. A wizard casting invisibility on another PC's rogue is, all other things being equal, simply a better impetus for a story and game than a wizard wearing a Ring of Stealth or a rogue activating an Invisibility Wand. Even if the net effect is the same. The story and game about how a bard was losing the attention of the noble court until the cleric broke the ice with a droll joke better than if the bard recovered from the blunder himself. This is why people have advocated throughout for things like role protection and equal shares of experience. Soup flat out tastes better when people put the ingredients together rather than one person nibbling tomatoes in one corner while another person gnaws on ham hocks.

Characters who insist on participating in the game and story only when it suits them asymmetrically harm the game and the experience of other people. They're no better than people who go off to play Smash Bros. when the combat music isn't playing. Not only should the game not encourage character concepts or behavior like Kenpachi but they should straight-out implement punishment for characters who only want to interact with the combat simulator or any subportion of the game.

Unless of course your game really is supposed to be a shallow combat simulator.

[Mistborn]

Unless of course your game really is supposed to be a shallow combat simulator.

Well people do play 4e. ^_^

[Lago PARANOIA]

Shallower than that. I'm talking Eye of the Beholder and Wizardry II shallow.

[Mistborn]

Shallower than that. I'm talking Eye of the Beholder and Wizardry II shallow.

So in the OP you're saying that



We need to go deeper

YEEEAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH

[erik]

Setting out to punish is completely wrong-headed. Instead, if you are concerned about the game not being compelling enough to keep someone at the table then perhaps you could offer incentives. Rewards gained through role play are an obvious ploy.

And whether the DMF wants non-combat abilities or not, he is going to have to have some. Give everyone out of combat schticks.

An aside about the wizard making the rogue invisible... I think that scenario would be vastly improved if a wizard was not required in that action. It's cool to have another character shore up one of your weaknesses, say a caster protecting you from elements or something, but it is crap to have them be your dealer who is necessary to make you excel at your specialty.


[edit:] I know you wished to equate punishment to rewarding behavior that the person does not wish to engage in... but meh, that doesn't make it so. Everyone will sensibly agree to that 'punishment' while not agreeing to punishment where you mete out additional penalties or punitive decisions.

So you are faced with the possible responses of 'duh' for creating incentives for players to participate in a role playing game, or the 'no that's stupid' if you want to extend it further.

[nockermensch]

No, they shouldn't, this is completely wrong on several levels.

You can't force cooperation like this, how can you "punish" this kind of character? By giving roleplaying rewards to the other characters? But don't we know the DMFs doesn't care about the roleplaying part?

So should we punish them by giving combat bonuses to the roleplayers? Give enough bonuses and the perceptive DMF will add "must half-ass roleplay up to X" in his optimization checklist, which solves nothing. And you'll still have to deal with the ones that don't get the memo and are now not only still DMFs, but relatively weaker DMFs. The only thing you'll achieve here is to alienate them. If this is what you want to do in the first place, then why not be sincere and tell them to stop playing with you?

In my own experience, the way to "deal" with this kind of character as a GM is to aggressively engage them with the world. Yachiru is not there by accident, it's what I mean. Throw non-combat encounters and NPCs at the DMF every now and then and watch the unintentional comedy ensue.

[ishy]

Why should I care how the DMF has fun, unless it annoys other people somehow?

[RadiantPhoenix]

Why should I care how the DMF has fun, unless it annoys other people somehow?

I believe the idea is that he's slowing down the game by being present, but generally not making the game more fun because he's mostly off in the corner playing videogames or w/e.

[Krusk]

generally not making the game more fun because he's mostly off in the corner playing videogames or w/e.

But him playing smash bros doesn't lessen my enjoyment. I just pretend he isn't there and its a net 0 effect. Maybe he even contributes positively.

If he slows down the game because he can't figure out how to "I attack again" thats one thing, but thats rarely the case.

My objection isn't to the DMF player who goes and plays smash bros for 95% of the session. Its the one who continually wants to play DND and tries to make sure everyone else is following logical consequence and realism. As in "Oh you shot a 4e fireball at the enemy in the barn lol, realistically it should catch fire" "Fuck you, 4e fireball doesn't catch things on fire, so thats why I did it".

I'd also argue my DMF Player is more common. (alternative variants are the guy who normally play a DMF, but is playing a magic missile wizard this game, and bitches that you want to do something interesting as some sort of buffing cleric, but he insists you heal or should have played a fighter)

[Username17]

Players wandering off to go play Smash Brothers slows the game down a lot. Descriptions have to be read out repeatedly, people have to wait whenever his turn comes up, it turns an evening of enjoyable gaming into a shitty game of disinterested gamer herding.

-Username17

[nockermensch]

Players wandering off to go play Smash Brothers slows the game down a lot. Descriptions have to be read out repeatedly, people have to wait whenever his turn comes up, it turns an evening of enjoyable gaming into a shitty game of disinterested gamer herding.

-Username17

Not paying attention to the game is bad, of course. Everything I said in defense of a DMF/Blood Knight character assumes their player is actually sitting there watching the game, only giving input when things need to be killed.

[K]

It's possible to punish players for making objectively bad choices if and only if objective success at the game is not necessary for fun or continued play.

So that rules out DnD because failing at DnD leads to the DM taking your character away from you and you wandering off to play Smash Bros. It's profoundly not fun to lose at DnD and most DMs nerf encounters and plots and stealth buff PCs in order to insure player success.

In a game like Paranoia where player failure is played for laughs and you have enough clones to survive all the deaths you'll get in the adventure, punishing people can be fun.

Personally, I'd love to play a DnD-like game that let you fail and still play the game. I think most RPGs have gotten too like cRPGs where beating the boss monster is the only way to get to the next level/adventure.

[virgil]

Personally, I'd love to play a DnD-like game that let you fail and still play the game. I think most RPGs have gotten too like cRPGs where beating the boss monster is the only way to get to the next level/adventure.

There's Mouse Guard, where winning is essentially assured, and your rolls determine how narrow/wide your margin of success is.

[K]

Personally, I'd love to play a DnD-like game that let you fail and still play the game. I think most RPGs have gotten too like cRPGs where beating the boss monster is the only way to get to the next level/adventure.

There's Mouse Guard, where winning is essentially assured, and your rolls determine how narrow/wide your margin of success is.

But that's not the same as letting you fail, is it?

There are already enough games where almost everyone wins. We call them "all the RPGs on the market."

[virgil]

There's Call of Cthulhu, at least in my games. From what I've been told, Don't Rest Your Head & Ninja Burger, are other RPGs based on failure like Paranoia is.

[nockermensch]

Personally, I'd love to play a DnD-like game that let you fail and still play the game. I think most RPGs have gotten too like cRPGs where beating the boss monster is the only way to get to the next level/adventure.

There's Mouse Guard, where winning is essentially assured, and your rolls determine how narrow/wide your margin of success is.

But that's not the same as letting you fail, is it?

There are already enough games where almost everyone wins. We call them "all the RPGs on the market."

That would call for a Touhou RPG. In Touhou the combats are non-lethal displays of fireworks and the loser has to obey the winner for a time. (the winner usually asks for "stop causing this incident"). Everybody gets drunk afterwards.

[Mistborn]

So that rules out DnD because failing at DnD leads to the DM taking your character away from you and you wandering off to play Smash Bros. It's profoundly not fun to lose at DnD and most DMs nerf encounters and plots and stealth buff PCs in order to insure player success.

The thing is that if you can't fvck up then wining has no meaning. In authored fiction characters have can have brushes with and win by the skin of their teeth all the time because the author controls all the "dice". In a TTRPG the characters fates are determined by the dice not an author. If there is a chance to die then people are going to die. More then any thing else I think 4e as such a failure because combat was so deterministic before int is rolled there was no illusion that players would win and the monsters would die.

I know at least when I DM I have a full-throttle pull-no-punches style that rarely lets a camping end without losing a few PCs. This started in my old gaming group who always wanted to me to DM even though I dislike DMing. I assumed that they wouldn't like it and someone else would volunteer to DM.

To my surprise the stepped the fvck up, and then they started having fun because when they beat one of my encounters they felt badass because at the beginning those same encounters brutalized them. Their victories felt meaningful because the knew that they could lose.

Heck my best experience in D&D came in the Red Hand of Doom where we ran through all our spells defending Brindol and almost died fighting Kharn.

[K]

So that rules out DnD because failing at DnD leads to the DM taking your character away from you and you wandering off to play Smash Bros. It's profoundly not fun to lose at DnD and most DMs nerf encounters and plots and stealth buff PCs in order to insure player success.

The thing is that if you can't fvck up then wining has no meaning. In authored fiction characters have can have brushes with and win by the skin of their teeth all the time because the author controls all the "dice". In a TTRPG the characters fates are determined by the dice not an author. If there is a chance to die then people are going to die. More then any thing else I think 4e as such a failure because combat was so deterministic before int is rolled there was no illusion that players would win and the monsters would die.

DMs stealth nerf combat for just this reason. Actually letting PCs find out that they can't lose the combat ruins the illusion that they've been winning by their skills.

You and your friends may have had fun killing off PCs who suck, but anyone who has been gaming for a while usually ends up either not investing in their characters after a few losses or just stops playing. This is because losing in DnD is often the end of the character and usually the end of playing for the night and people feel punished for things out of their control like bad die rolls.

Hell, even punishing them too hard for blatant objective failure means that next session they'll be asking people to play Dominion or Settlers instead of DnD.

Now, if failure was not an absolute and the game accounted for that, you could drop PCs and still have a fun game. A TPK against the Lich King has to mean that the next adventure is against the Lich King's zombie apocalypse and not the end of the campaign, but DnD is not set up for that kind of gaming at all.

This is why random encounters got taken out of 3.X and later editions. The cover story that the change was to prevent non-story battles from taking away from the story, but the truth is that few gaming tables even pretend to run an objectively hard game. Instead, the DM runs a subjectively hard game where monster loot just happens to have healing potions when the party is low on healing and they don't get attacked in the night after a major battle even if the BBEG could easily do that.

[Mistborn]

DMs stealth nerf combat for just this reason. Actually letting PCs find out that they can't lose the combat ruins the illusion that they've been winning by their skills.

Is that even possible I know I've gotten good at spotting when the DM is throwing softball, so is it even possible to mantain the illusion. Not only that but is this a heathy gaming enverionment if the players fun is predicated on the DMs deciving players. The concept bothers me the same way fudging dice bothers me.

Now, if failure was not an absolute and the game accounted for that, you could drop PCs and still have a fun game. A TPK against the Lich King has to mean that the next adventure is against the Lich King's zombie apocalypse and not the end of the campaign, but DnD is not set up for that kind of gaming at all.

How exactly is D&D not set up for that exactly.

[K]

DMs stealth nerf combat for just this reason. Actually letting PCs find out that they can't lose the combat ruins the illusion that they've been winning by their skills.

Is that even possible I know I've gotten good at spotting when the DM is throwing softball, so is it even possible to mantain the illusion. Not only that but is this a heathy gaming enverionment if the players fun is predicated on the DMs deciving players. The concept bothers me the same way fudging dice bothers me.

It's stupid easy. The intelligent monster claws the armored guy and not the mage in robes who is also a move action away. The mind-control spell gets cast on the mage and not the fighter. The fast healing monster doesn't teleport out at half HPs and come back in a few turns back at full.

There is literally no limit to ways to plausibly sandbag an encounter. (On a hilarious side-note, this is why so many DnD players think that Fighters "tank" and actually have the ability to draw monster attacks.)

Most of the time, the DM can convince players that the monster is doing something suboptimal because it's "bloodthirsty" or "enraged" or "hates dwarves" or some other RP reason for suboptimal tactics.

Now, if failure was not an absolute and the game accounted for that, you could drop PCs and still have a fun game. A TPK against the Lich King has to mean that the next adventure is against the Lich King's zombie apocalypse and not the end of the campaign, but DnD is not set up for that kind of gaming at all.

How exactly is D&D not set up for that exactly.

The "DnD answer" to this problem is that some penis NPC would come by and raise the PCs and suddenly everyone feels like the game has no objective challenges because the DM is fudging for them.

Bringing back the PCs from a loss like that also feels like the DM is railroading them instead of the event being part of the continuing story. They are also out of their hard-earned equipment and some XP because they lost the fight and probably more for the resurrection, thus being worse off than they started.

DnD can't handle failure with any elegance and still maintain the illusion of objectivity, thus DMs stealth nerf the game to make sure that they succeed.

[nockermensch]

Now, if failure was not an absolute and the game accounted for that, you could drop PCs and still have a fun game. A TPK against the Lich King has to mean that the next adventure is against the Lich King's zombie apocalypse and not the end of the campaign, but DnD is not set up for that kind of gaming at all.

How exactly is D&D not set up for that exactly.

A TPK against the Lich King means you're now part of the zombie apocalypse.

[Avoraciopoctules]

So that rules out DnD because failing at DnD leads to the DM taking your character away from you and you wandering off to play Smash Bros. It's profoundly not fun to lose at DnD and most DMs nerf encounters and plots and stealth buff PCs in order to insure player success.

The thing is that if you can't fvck up then wining has no meaning. In authored fiction characters have can have brushes with and win by the skin of their teeth all the time because the author controls all the "dice". In a TTRPG the characters fates are determined by the dice not an author. If there is a chance to die then people are going to die. More then any thing else I think 4e as such a failure because combat was so deterministic before int is rolled there was no illusion that players would win and the monsters would die.

DMs stealth nerf combat for just this reason. Actually letting PCs find out that they can't lose the combat ruins the illusion that they've been winning by their skills.

You and your friends may have had fun killing off PCs who suck, but anyone who has been gaming for a while usually ends up either not investing in their characters after a few losses or just stops playing. This is because losing in DnD is often the end of the character and usually the end of playing for the night and people feel punished for things out of their control like bad die rolls.

Hell, even punishing them too hard for blatant objective failure means that next session they'll be asking people to play Dominion or Settlers instead of DnD.

Now, if failure was not an absolute and the game accounted for that, you could drop PCs and still have a fun game. A TPK against the Lich King has to mean that the next adventure is against the Lich King's zombie apocalypse and not the end of the campaign, but DnD is not set up for that kind of gaming at all.

This is why random encounters got taken out of 3.X and later editions. The cover story that the change was to prevent non-story battles from taking away from the story, but the truth is that few gaming tables even pretend to run an objectively hard game. Instead, the DM runs a subjectively hard game where monster loot just happens to have healing potions when the party is low on healing and they don't get attacked in the night after a major battle even if the BBEG could easily do that.

Interesting. Hey K, what do you think about the idea of a D&D game where dead PCs have the option of coming back as ghosts? Say, just after the combat's over, the character activates haunt mode. Reviving costs something, but the character can still contribute about as well as before.

In regular D&D, equipment loss would still be a big deal, but in something like the Wish economy, a total party wipe might be more recoverable. You're still on the RNG with low-tier stuff, and can probably make a credible attempt to get it back if it has been lost.

[Whipstitch]

A TPK against the Lich King means you're now part of the zombie apocalypse.

This. The typical focus on combat, a lack of well-supported chase/retreat rules and the contortions D&D has to go through to make the murder hobo thing justifiable are two big issues. Surrendering is worth trying if you're fighting basically normal dudes and you figure you have even odds that they'll adhere to the Geneva convention protocols or if you're facing Dr. Evil and have a good saving throw vs. unnecessarily slow dipping mechanisms. But if your opponents are uncontrolled ghasts or a gelatinous cube you may as well go ahead and leave the hankie in your handy haversack because you're stuck retreating. Which, incidentally, is another area where DMFs fail hard. The Wizard might have a rope trick, expeditious retreat or teleportation effect up his sleeve but the fighter in heavy armor? If his mount bites it the poor dopey fuck is stuck running around at golem speeds. It's part of why people call DMFs a drag on party resources--they're super gear dependent and they can't even opt out of a confrontation without spending a grip of cash on that capability.

[NineInchNall]

I think the idea that a character's being a "DMF" (whatever the fuck Lago means by that) is like, formally incompatible with the player's being an active participant in the cooperative storytelling endeavor is groundless.

But considering I haven't seen a definition for DMF that is actually useful ...

All that aside, however, assuming that the DMF (for some possible interpretation of DMF) is inherently incompatible with good gaming, then the substance of the OP is utterly noncontroversial, trivially true stuff that everyone here already assents to. Should we incentivize the behavior that we want and disincentivize that which we don't? Yes, of course.

I just don't think the assumption is warranted.

[hyzmarca]

Now, if failure was not an absolute and the game accounted for that, you could drop PCs and still have a fun game. A TPK against the Lich King has to mean that the next adventure is against the Lich King's zombie apocalypse and not the end of the campaign, but DnD is not set up for that kind of gaming at all.

How exactly is D&D not set up for that exactly.

A TPK against the Lich King means you're now part of the zombie apocalypse.

It's not like that's a bad thing. Just slap an undead template on the PCs. They get a powerup and have a fun new adventure fighting other heroic adventurers.