That’s one way to play. Personally, if I knew the GM was secretly adjusting the game much I’d feel dissatisfied. Why not just give me a sticker that says “You win!” if I’m always going to win anyway?

Though this does tie into a separate bugbear of mine: D&D makes it hard to reason about encounters because the stats are unbound and all over the place. You see four bandits rummaging through the wagon they stole. Do each of them have 8 hp, 16 hp, 32 hp, 64 hp? Who knows! Do they attack once or twice? Could go either way! That is not an innate property of RPGs, but it’s very common in D&D, and I think leads to a lot of “oh this is going badly - let me fudge the stats”. Both because the GM got the math wrong, and because the players assumed these were 8 HP bandits and they’re actually “well you’re 5th level the bandits should be tougher” level scaling bandits.

Sure, sometimes. It should be used incredibly rarely. However, not in this way. The GM has plenty of levers to pull without messing with the one thing you have players for. If the GM is just going to tell a story then they should write a book. If they want to do cooperative storytelling then they need to cooperate.

If the rolls don’t matter then the story gets incredibly boring, as it just goes whatever direction the GM wants. Without failure, success is boring. Without success, failure sucks. When they’re perfectly balanced by the GM, it’s predictable and not surprising or fun.

You can, it just seemed like a lot of info to dump in my first post. Shadowrun is a classless, level less system. Your xp is called Karma, and you can spend Karma to increase your skills and attributes.

so the jerk ratio is higher? genuine query, only played with friends irl

Personally, if I knew the GM was secretly adjusting the game much I’d feel dissatisfied

the point is to make your death a fun and meaningful one, or at least a good punchline to a run. it’s not ‘to let you win’ - I’ve had characters of my own survive encounters but regret the outcome - I think you’re reducing the dm/gm role to a combat calculator, and there’s so much more going on with a talented one. storytelling is my favorite part of DM’ing and I’ll be fucked if I let a kobold derail the overall plan… but there’s a lot of room for kobold fuckery within that envelope.

I don’t think the GM’s job is merely damage calculator. But this:

I’ll be fucked if I let a kobold derail the overall plan

I rather disagree with. If there’s a plan then why are we rolling dice? I don’t want to play to fulfill whatever the GM’s plan is. They should just write a book. I’ve had many great, memorable, scenes that came about because the players had a challenge and they overcame it. Sometimes after running away and trying again. If I just decided “oh I guess the dragon’s breath rolled really low” then, again, we should just write a story together. Or play a game that doesn’t have such a big random factor.

Like, I also don’t really enjoy a nameless kobold killing Finnigan the Fighter with a fluke natural 20 in what wasn’t supposed to be high stakes. But the solution for me isn’t to fudge rolls, but play a different game. I don’t really like stupid deaths like that, so I don’t play games that facilitate it. I know that’s kind of “baby with the bathwater” for some people, but I really do think some people are fighting against what D&D trends towards, when there are better tools. It’s a hammer. Sometimes you want a screwdriver or a pen.

Much more so. Because the people that aren’t shitlords wind up finding and staying in a stable group, while the people who can’t maintain human relationships get perpetually booted back into the rando pool, so it becomes more and more concentrated awfulness all the time.

ew. ty for the deets

with randos off Discord or Roll20 and not actually in person with people they know.

I know online rpg changed a lot in 20 years, but when I was playing online around 2010, playing on teamspeak, also meant be part of community, and ask others GM about new players before having them joining your table (No show, cheating and other bad behaviour would quickly be known by everyone) . Moreover, because you don’t know them, it’s easy to kick them out.

Main issue is the extra GM workload, which is why I like the GM never roll trend, one less stuff to do means more time to focus on GMing

D&D is like sex, in the sense that “no D&D is better than bad D&D”

I find that the people who play in groups like this are people who haven’t been able to find a better group, but haven’t realised how antagonistic groups kill the joy of the game

Every TTRPG are just mechanics to tell a story.

D&D’ rules may be 80% about combat, but they are all still there to facilitate the story. You aren’t wargaming.

You roll dice to see how the story enfolds. Having it cut off abruptly because of a mistake calculation on the DM’s part while prepping the session goes against the story.

Also, having a player sit around twiddling their thumbs for the rest of the session because their character died is not fun and goes against the reason why we play games in the first place.

Fuck realism, it is a fantasy game we play to have fun. So getting rid of unfun aspects isn’t just recommended, it is a necessity.

I’ll be going to my first dnd session next weekend. Can someone explain why metagaming bob doesn’t like this regulation?

Edit: Thank you everyone! Great explainations.

So first off, Meta-gaming in DnD is a bit weird. It’s both acceptable and not acceptable, depending on the limitations therein. Like it is technically metagaming to have one PC trust another after just meeting in the game for the first time but this is not just acceptable but actively encouraged in some games because you don’t want to draw out being untrustworthy of your party in the first session when the whole goal is to play together.

But the flipside is bad metagaming like if you read a module ahead of time, have information about that and then use that to take actions like fetching a bad guys bugout bag and investigating a specific wall to see through the illusion (Fuck you, you giant turtle asshole… sorry. Bad experience) then that is just you being shitty because you’re not really playing the game. This is taken a step further with dice rolls. You may or may not notice that some DMs will ask for a specific DC and other ones will just ask for a roll and then tell you if you succeeded/failed after the fact. The ones who ask for it after the fact have typically dealt with a lot of Metagaming Bobs. People who, when they hear a specific DC, will roll just barely that DC or roll to beat it. Especially if it is a big and important roll. They don’t want the dice to tell the story, they just want to win. They don’t understand the game. To them it’s being the hero or succeeding everytime so they’ll lie about the dice rolls.

Metagaming bob is upset in this instance because the DM has elected to have all players roll in a specific thing so that only the DM can see the roll. That way only the DM knows whether they succeeded or failed. Bob feels like his agency has been taken away and he doesn’t trust the DM. He thinks the DM will just lie about the rolls because Bob can’t understand playing the game in any way other than how he sees it. He is mentally accusing the DM of doing what he does. So when he says that there is a problem, the DM knows that he has caught Bob.

From this point, Bob will typically flame out of the party. He will get upset about something and either be pushed out by all other players and the DM or just leave himself. Less often, Bob starts to learn the error of his ways and accepts the dice as the true storytellers and all of us just along for the ride.

I hope that helps and I hope that you have a fantastic session next weekend! May you always roll with advantage and the dice be forever in your favor

TTRPGs are games where you create stories, and sometimes those stories are “we did something we shouldn’ta, and someone got ganked”. What you’re describing is someone reading you a story book.

I would agree with that. I’d rather not play than play in a bad group (or a group that doesn’t play the style I enjoy)

…individual game systems vary, but fifth-edition D+D was designed with many mechanics which depend upon open rolls with secret modifiers: if your players’ characters can perceive an action taking place, roll openly; if they can’t, invert the roll (DC-12 modifier) and roll secretly against their passive scores…

My DM last week decided to have this weird fucky thing in the area that we were at. Some fucky wucky magic that was making it so after every roll (except for attacks) the DM made another roll to determine odds or evens. If it was evens, your roll worked as normal. If it was odds, your roll was reversed so that your nat 20 would become a nat 1. But that also meant if you ended up with a nat 1 and he rolled an odd, you’d get a nat 20. This happened twice. We were all laughing nonstop because like… none of us could have metagamed it if we wanted to. And some of us roll physically and others on dnd beyond. DM just trusts us. So when I said a Nat 1 at one point with a pained sigh, I had forgotten about his odds/evens thing. He rolled and started laughing and then we all started laughing as the roll went through stupendously well.

Not exactly the same as what you’re describing but I thought it was fun and wanted to share

The confusion here is there are a few different ways of playing D&D and many different types of DMs out there. The number one rule that matters, imo, is that everyone is having fun and enjoying the game at your table.

Some players don’t want their characters to die, at least non-meaningfully, in a campaign that’s meant to be long-running. D&D is as much about the story as it is about having fun and setting expectations with your players.

If you market the campaign as mostly storytelling and light combat, but then the party rolls up geared for the former but not the later - then people will likely leave feeling frustrated instead of feeling like they had fun when they die to a random encounter. If you don’t set expectations well or prepare people well, then some people will quit playing right there instead of creating a new character.

If I want a high-stakes, combat-geared campaign where people will be expected to create new characters at some point then I feel it’s important to lay that out from session zero.

If I want some middle of road campaign geared towards storytelling and medium combat, even then I’d be letting players know from the start that their characters can die from any encounter if they push their luck too much.

I feel like your post and my post are tangential to each other.

Having it cut off abruptly because of a mistake calculation on the DM’s part while prepping the session goes against the story.

As I said, if you don’t want situations where a character meets an abrupt end anticlimactically, don’t play games that do that. That’s a pretty big property of DND and close relatives, but that’s not how ttrpgs have to be. Or, if you don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, have some sort of table rule to handle it. I guess “hey GM can you fudge it if we’re going to die stupidly?” would be a rule you could adopt, even. Informed consent is important.

I think it’s because DND is so old. It’s like a black and white tv, and people have all these tips and solutions to solve problems like “I can’t tell if that’s red or purple”, and ignoring people saying “if that’s important to you, get a color tv”. Black and white is definitely a valid choice for media, but it probably shouldn’t be the default.

Also, having a player sit around twiddling their thumbs for the rest of the session because their character died is not fun and goes against the reason why we play games in the first place.

This is also kind of a dnd-ism that can be solved in various ways. Fate’s consequence system, for one example.

Fuck realism, it is a fantasy game we play to have fun. So getting rid of unfun aspects isn’t just recommended, it is a necessity.

I mean, I don’t particularly disagree with this but my point wasn’t really about “realism”. It’s about the social contract. I don’t want a game where the GM is telling a fixed story, and will move the pieces around to keep it on track.

Like, in one game the party was trying to deal with a wyvern that was making trouble in the region. The players had several misfortunes that I could have fudged, but it wouldn’t have been better

They wanted to use some spell or other to keep it from flying away. I rolled the save in the open. It saved, and flew away. Yeah, I could’ve just lied and said it failed, but why even have a saving throw system if you want that? Other games have meta game currency to force issues one way or another. Play that. Or port that into DND.

They tried to poison the wyvern. Rolled in the open to see if the wyvern ate the bait, or spotted the players hiding nearby. It rolled well, and took off before eating a full dose. Could’ve just fudged it, but they knew the odds.

So they followed it to its lair, dealt with the kobold cult (they made friends because this group was great), and had a climactic fight with the wyvern on top of the plateau, by the lake. Including a dramatic “wait if I dive into the water I take less fire damage, raw? I’m a warlock of the deep I’m diving in!” moment.

Or the time they challenged an NPC group to a battle of the bands to see who would claim ownership of the macguffin. The players lost. The NPCs took the macguffin back to the university. But they negotiated a compromise to borrow a similar, weaker, tool, and went on with that. The story was different, but it wasn’t worse. Fudging the rolls to be like “oh wow guys they really borked it up” would’ve felt cheesy as hell.

So yeah, I could’ve fudged it, but I didn’t have to. I’m not writing a book with a fixed plot.