Yeah, definitely a DM problem. Not in that the DM should prevent him from doing it, but some situations require the DM to simply stop and communicate OOC. Players do something unexpectedly campaign-shifting, there are a few possible responses, and all of them involve some amount of talking:
The DM can tell the players, ‘Okay, if you do this, it’s going to significantly and irrevocably shift the campaign, its tone, and its goals a lot. I can work it out, but I want to give you fair warning that this is going to have major consequences that can’t just be moved past in a session or two.’
Or, the DM can tell the players the same thing to start with, then instead of ‘I can work it out’ say, ‘And I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can figure out where to go after this, so it might mean the end of the campaign.’ or even ‘And I’m sorry, but that would take the campaign in a direction I’m not really interested in playing out; it might be fun for you, but I wouldn’t be having fun DMing that.’
The ones that end in the DM not being able to continue are sort of like telling the player ‘you can’t do that’, but completely different in tone, which is important. As a player I would be furious at a DM telling me I can’t do something, but understanding of a DM not being able to work out the appropriate consequences, or not being interested in continuing in the direction those consequences would inevitably go.
Edit: Also, if the problem is the DM can’t figure out where to go, the players can actually help with that. If the DM is willing but can’t figure it out, there’s no reason not to take input and advice from the players as to how to react to those consequences and continue the campaign.
Players want agency, yes, but they also want to take part in a good, exciting and fulfilling adventure. It’s a balancing act. A good DM has to know how to thread that needle, and good players know that sometimes the DM has to save them from themselves.
I think that it’s also an age thing. I’m generalizing here, but I think it’s something like this: kids don’t have freedom IRL, so for them, agency is the most important thing. Adults, OTOH, do have freedom, but they don’t have excitement, so they’re willing to sacrifice some of the former for more of the latter. Thus, young players tend to want a sandbox where they can do whatever they want, while adults want a more structured story where they can experience something new. At least, that’s how I see my own evolution in terms of roleplaying games, from age 10 to age 46.
This is partially mitigated these days by set rewards. You play for three hours, you get X gold and Y advancement points (based on level tier) so a group isn’t trying to steal gold from one another or penalized for getting stuck on a puzzle and missing an encounter. There’s good and bad to be said for it but, in my personal experience, I feels like it makes the evening about having fun and rolling dice than needing to grind to advance. I suppose some would say “But we get the same rewards as a lazy party” (and some do, I’ve heard them) but, again in my experience, everyone is there to play D&D and that’s what they do. Still, though, no time to go through your gnome’s troubled past and personal redemption.
We would go through arcs of 3-5 adventures and end each one by giving that week’s players preference for our table next time. So a table that started a story usually finished it together, plus or minus a scheduling conflict here and there.
It’s not for everyone, certainly not if you want a strong tactical wargame or Critical Role-esque RP experience but it was a nice way to hang out with gamers and roll dice for a night without any pressure.
I think a part of this is time, as well. When I was 13, I could spend twelve hours in someone’s basement rolling dice. Now I have a spouse and kids and work in the morning and a lack of teenage energy. I get to the comic store or on Discord at 7:30pm and by 10:30pm we’re wrapping up for the week. I still like playing but I want the night to lead us somewhere and offer some advancement – be it in story, xp, equipment or something else to show for it. I get the whole “we spent all night roleplaying haggling with a kobold and it was wonderful” thing but, a session or two of that, and a month has gone by in real time and we haven’t even left town yet. So I’d rather play in a campaign with a little bit of guide rails these days than the old days of “Here’s a hex map of the continent, whatcha gonna do?”
I’m in almost exactly this situation in my game. Forgive me a brief description:
Set in coastal Saltmarsh, a bunch of low-level smugglers got arrested and sentenced to a year’s hard labor in a nearby mine.
Most players were all, "This sucks, but one player was all, “FUCK THIS PRISON SLAVERY I WILL DESTROY YOU,” which, fair enough, lean into it.
I set up a story with a murder mystery up at the mines, leading to a strike by the prisoners, leading to a gang of thuggish soldiers heading up to the mines to put down the strike with brutal force. How will the PCs handle this? So many options.
Including ambushing the soldiers and killing them, to take their uniforms. Okay, we’re talking high treason at this point, but that’s cool, you can get away with it, just hide the bodies.
Except they kept one of the soldiers alive, and are taking him, as a captive, with them, and they’ve gone up to the mines not in disguise.
That was this week’s session, and I’m honestly not sure how to give them an out. All signs point to their soldier-murder plan being discovered sooner rather than later: there are dozens of witnesses to them going to the mines in the uniforms of the dead soldiers.
It’s definitely gonna take the game in a different direction. Trying to figure out how to make it a fun direction.
I suppose my attitude is colored by my luck in having a great group to play with, but I hate the idea of DM as service provider and players as consumers.
The way I see it, every single person at the table has the same job: to contribute to everyone else’s good time. And the players should try to safeguard the DM’s fun just as much as the DM tries to safeguard the players’.
So in the video above, when Ross says he’s going to derail the campaign, everyone gets really uncomfortable. Everyone at the table knows that a Bad Thing is going to happen. The DM knows it, the players know it, Ross knows it. “Their heads swivel in unison to look back at Ross who is suddenly very alone in the room. And to his credit, he pauses.”
Everyone fucked up at that point, because the Bad Thing wasn’t just happening to the NPC mage. A Bad Thing was happening to the game itself, and everyone is responsible for the game. Somebody, anybody, was free to say, “That’s stupid. You’re a paladin. Don’t be an ass because you’re bored.”
It’s fair to point out that the DM was absolutely free to use handwavium to help the party out Ross created. But I understand not wanting to continue when your plotline has been kicked in the proverbial junk by an asshole player.
This is where some of the metagaming tools from the past few years can be helpful: the pause button, for example. Players in a case like this–the DM in a case like this–should be free to say, “Hey, can we pause? Ross, what’s going on?” The DM can say, “Ross, your character’s action is likely to end the campaign, is that what you’re going for? You seem pretty frustrated, would you like some ideas on things you can do?”
It also comes across, in that video, as though the rest of the group held Ross in contempt, and it’s possible the poor schmuck realized it and was fed up with being treated that way. Not an excuse for being a jerk player, but maybe explains his frustration.
In-game, I think I’d handle something like this with, “You raise your sword to cut the thread, and yhour stomach lurches. If there’s any chance that the person on the other end of this is innocent, you’ll be murdering them as surely as if you held the sword to their throat. That’d go against the vows you’ve sworn to live by, the vows that have shaped who you are.” Then hit the pause button: “Out-of-character, maybe let’s take a break and talk about the game, I’m sensing some frustration…”
I would consider it absolutely mandatory for a D.M. to have a minimal list of things that E simply would not allow, for example rape or attempted rape or gratuitous cruelty.
And although it’s of a different category I would also expect the D.M. to protect the campaign against rogue players taking actions that clearly no other player would support, especially if the player has no good reason to do so other than “I’m bored and I can’t think of anything else.”
As a D.M. myself I would not allow this kind of unjustified fucking around with the game or cases in which the player emself is being stupider than ēs character reasonably would be. I’m done with having a “No, that’s just stupid, you have no good reason to do so, and I’m not going to allow you to ruin everyone’s fun” line in the sand.
But that would be for extreme cases in which the player is clearly being a problem. More often I’d come up with an in game way of saying that the attempted action failed or was prevented.
But as a bottom line I would expect a D.M. to protect the game and other players from a maliciously stupid player’s attempted actions.
Totally. I haven’t read any Card in a couple decades, but I adored him as a teenager for his complex and morally ambiguous worlds. One of my campaigns had elves modeled heavily on Speaker for the Dead’s piggie life-cycle, because it was awesome.
This is the second time this week I’ve run into a bunch of people talking up Speaker for the Dead.Sr. Weasel has always said I would love it. Message received, universe.
You halfling need to go through diversity training and the elves have to fight their internalized racism. I think you get a Saving throw for 1/2 damage.
I assume the OP was referring to two main changes:
(1) No humanoid race (orcs, dark elves, goblins, basically anything from the physical world – not angels, demons, etc) was actually “evil” as an entire species any longer. And a promise to spend more time making rich and nuanced humanoid cultures rather than “orcs are semi-savage jerks who hit you with axes”. The stated rationale being that an entire race of sentient beings shouldn’t be typecast as Evil (or Good) but everyone is a rich tapestry. Plus the issues with DMs/campaigns that use a humanoid race as their cultural stand-ins so the Evil Orcs are playing the role of South Pacific Island Natives.
-and-
(2) Moving away from racial stats. In every previous edition and in 5e, picking a race gave you a few set stats bonuses. So being a high elf would give you +2 Dexterity and +1 Intelligence to reflect the idea that elves were, as a race, more nimble and high elves were smarter than the average being. Now you just say “I’m an elf!” and pick whatever +2/+1 bonus you want so if you want an elf with +2 Strength and +1 Constitution then go for it. Supposedly, this is because races shouldn’t be typecast as the Smart Ones or the Strong Ones, etc although I suspect that people seeking favorable mechanics played heavily into it. In any case, it’s an optional rule so DMs are free to say “Nope, you get these stats” without breaking from the rules as written.
Most of it’s generally sensible stuff like this. Having the evil dark elves have dark skin was problematic back in 1977, too. I’ve seen dumber opinions, though, like people objecting to the word “Barbarian” because it’s a prejudicial term that the Romans used to call foreigners… you know. Things like that.
(Of course, not all of it is political. I suspect some people object to the standard D&D depiction of orcs because they want their orcs to be more like the Skyrim/WoW orcs. More power to them.)
I’m not so sure that drow are actually all that problematic… Yes, they have dark skin, but they also have white hair, and they don’t in any particular way other than skin pigmentation resemble either Africans nor any common stereotype of Africans. There might be a point there if it were the norm for “evil version of X race” to be darker than the default mostly-good version, but elves are the only example I can think of.
Half of the PHB races have a “dark skinned underground and evil” variant. Dueregar for Dwarfs, Svirfneblin for Gnomes, and Deep Halflings (they don’t have a name apparently but they’re in the 3.5 Monster Manual). And of course Drow.