Comment by forapurpose | Hacker News Reader

Comment by forapurpose | Hacker News Reader

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A question for D&D players and dungeon masters: How can a dungeon master possibly do their job?

They have to write every character (besides the the players' own characters), including personality, knowledge, skills, intellect, emotional state, motivations, relationships, etc. They have to understand what a medieval blacksmith, farmer, soldier, barmaid, princess, etc. all understand. They are supposed to create whole towns, which requires some knowledge of politics, economics and a host of other issues. It's an effort worthy of a major novel or movie, and in fact it seems far more: Because it's non-linear, you never know which person your players will run into or which building they will walk into, so you would need to prepare, it seems, far more people and settings than are used.

On top of that, the dungeon master has to act all these characters, a one-person show that would overwhelm the greatest professional actors (and win every acting award if they pulled it off). Even more, because of the non-linear story and the chaos player decisions introduce, the dungeon master must improvise constantly and in a way that is consistent with the ongoing story and all the other characters they have portrayed and will portray.

Who has the time? It sounds like years of work. And even more incredibly, who has the skill (nobody who ever lived)? Yet it's done, and done well enough that millions enjoy it. How is this all done in reality?

Your expectations are way too high. Players are already primed to play along with whatever characters/story you impose; they aren't actively looking for flaws, so you can fudge a lot of it. It just needs to be acceptibly believable, not correct. And since you're the DM, you can usually coerce things to go towards the areas that are fleshed out, or the subjects you know/interested in. And when players go off rails, they tend to put a lot more effort into solving the logical inconsistencies, and relieve that burden from you. In fact, you usually have to start poking holes in their idea so you can punish them to a certain degree for gaming (so they don't get too arrogant about it)

Most npcs don't need to be fleshed out at all, since they're only there to drive setting/plot. If players interact with non-important npcs too much, you just think of a character from some other story/movie and steal their behavior/attitude. And in fact original dnd would have basically omitted them altogether (and roleplaying in general) since it was focused on the gameplay and dungeon crawling aspects themselves.

You need to tune things to the various player's tastes to a degree, but for the most part the players do half the work for you, and many components of the world no one cares about, and doesn't require expansion. You're just tying everything together, and maintaining sanity in the world.

Yeah i think there is too much focus on getting a coherent story and being in the directors chair with current crop of "games".

The story will as much form after the session as during, as the players look back and the events that unfolded and the actions taken.

Usually GMs put in a lot of time. In some cases, one or two hours of prep per hour of game time. In some cases, 20 or 100 hours of prep per hour of game time.

And then they usually do a very bad job of most or all of the things you mentioned, and it doesn't matter because playing Let's Pretend is just inherently fun.

Remember, of course, that they only have to have all that world knowledge to a degree that permits suspension of disbelief. Often the GM is more committed to learning how society works than most of the players, so the bar may be pretty low.

And with respect to the acting skill, remember that one or two crazy set-piece speeches are usually desired, but aside from that, most people are more interested in telling the story about their character that they want to tell, so in many play groups, the savvy GM just puts most of the acting burden back onto the players, who like it better that way anyway (though groups vary widely in this regard).

And with respect to improvising constantly... some GMs are good at this, but most are not, and so most play-groups have spoken or unspoken rules that they'll be good and behave in moderately predictable ways, to narrow down the chaos that is created.

Again, the main thing that makes it work is that sitting around the campfi^H^H^H^H^H^Hgaming table, telling brag stories, is inherently fun, and it's even more fun if there's suspense, and outcomes you've chosen to care about, riding on the roll of a die.

I highly recommend "The Lazy DM" by "Sly Flourish" (Michael Shea) [0] to give you a better idea of how this can be done with almost no effort. I used to be the kind of DM that quantified everything about my world. And indeed, before the internet, it was an excellent time-killer, and seeds many of my modern-day adventures. But I ain't got time for that, now. And so I follow a pattern much like that suggested in The Lazy DM, using index cards. It actually works out really well, since I've discovered that I am pretty creative on-the-fly.

[0] http://slyflourish.com/lazydm/

> A question for D&D players and dungeon masters: How can a dungeon master possibly do their job?

Smoke and mirrors. Improvisation. You define a lot less than you describe, both in terms of entities and details for each entity. And while consistency is an issue, TTRPGs are an ephemeral enough medium that people aren't going to analyze it the way they will a book or film. And there are lots of ways to rationalize apparent inconsistencies; working the rationalization into the background of later adventures so it is revealed as if it were a campaign secret that was foreshadowed by the seeming contradiction is a thin that happens.

The hardest part is often recognizing how much you don't need.

> people aren't going to analyze it the way they will a book or film

Maybe that's too bad; maybe we're missing a lot of potential there. I'm sure there are some essays out there looking at them as works of art - the games are old enough that I can't be the first who thought of it.

The published games, sure, and it's influenced modern game design. Actual campaigns as run by a particular GM, not so much.

This is the kind of comment that makes me wonder if you've ever seen a theatrical play, let alone non-professional improv.

Once you realise that pedantry isn't part of the gameplay it gets a lot easier. It merely has to be good enough for those sitting at the table - who themselves are also invested in their suspension of disbelief.

> effort worthy of a major novel or movie

That's the thing, RPGs do not exist in a vaccum, nor are they trying to portray a particular historical era realistically - they are based on fantasy novels. That means you don't have to ..

> understand what a medieval blacksmith understands

... you merely have to make up what the minor character of a blacksmith in a Jack Vance novel might say. If you want to do some common tasks there is probably a table for armour repair or weaponsmithing costs in AD&D 2nd edition somewhere.

There's usually a bit of tension between railroading the players into set-pieces versus dropping hints and relying on them to cooperate, but that can be all part of the fun.

> consistent

Consistency issues can usually be fixed with wizards.

(edit: the whole issue is addressed by Shakespeare at the start of Henry V, "can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France" etc)

> makes me wonder if you've ever seen a theatrical play

Interesting - after reading the comments I realized my love of the arts (as a reader/viewer, not as a practitioner), including theater, was the source of many unconscious assumption behind my question. I was (am) thinking that role-playing could be art by different means. I saw a couple of old modules by Gygax, and the stories and characters were really good, better than many movies I've seen. A good dungeon master could make quite a story - but perhaps the demands are just too high.

How would my question imply that I wasn't familiar with theater?

"Consistency issues can usually be fixed with wizards."

Yes, the old "well...a wizard did it" DeusExMagic-User. Sooo useful for the DM, especially if you are the sort who keeps tweaking the map, and have players puzzled by the appearance of new landforms not present on their earlier version of the document....

To see how a game works out I recommend checking out itemJP's YouTube channel (he posts a ton of roleplaying games played amongst twitch personalities).

To see a masterclass of it check out Critical Roll on geek and sundry (D&D played by a bunch of professional voice a actors).

A classic example of specialization, a genre of authors has sprung up who write adventure paths and modules of various sizes and complexity. You could think of it like using a modern framework to write a web app vs rolling the entire thing yourself from machine language.

The largest "best prepared" path I'm aware of is the Dark Obelisk Berrincorte system, which is about one linear foot on the bookshelf, seriously many thousands of pages. Something more normal size would be the Pathfinder adventure paths where you get dozens of pages of prep for GM and players, and a couple pages per hour of path.

You have to realize that historically DnD came from lord of the rings fans sitting around debating how many dwarven archers it would take to kill a balrog or what are the odds if a wizard had to fight it out with forest elves? These are not people intimidated by mere thousands of pages of fantasy fiction. I admit I've occasionally bought paths to read because I like the creativity.

That's the super high level answer. The super low level answer is RPG fan sites and subreddits and usenet are full of epic battles between the GM and the players when the players insist on running a campaign off the rails. To be a good player there has to be at least some surrender to the GM to play along. An annoyed GM can, at the cost of ridiculousness, push the players along the correct path, so if they insist on goofing off in town instead of exploring the scary cave, "a sinkhole opens up in the floor of the pub, underneath your feet, and you fall into the cave the sheriff had assigned to you to explore ..."

Well written, well prepared paths have a lot of problem solving, and the players big job is discerning when the purpose of a problem is to be creative vs it was imposed by the GM to keep on the path. For example, if there's a cliff are we supposed to risk our necks freeclimbing, or are we supposed to look around for rope or hidden steps, or use our limited magic resources to fly up there, or does the cliff exist because the GM "knows" we can't get up there and its just part of the scenery to keep us on the prepared path?

As a compare and contrast generally most players are used to computer RPGs which have zero character development and consider "bring me 9 wolf pelts" to be superior character development and writing style, at least for the genre. Thanks to computer RPGs, the bar is extraordinarily low, so its not hard to impress your players. There's more than a little meta similarity between real life human GMs and role playing class of "bard", so much as a bard wouldn't back down in-game, a GM is unlikely to back down and will put in a best effort.

> As a compare and contrast generally most players are used to computer RPGs which have zero character development

I tried Baldur's Gate, having read that it was among the best in that regard (I didn't care how old it was). It was pretty disappointing. Then I saw an old D&D module by Gygax, and was impressed - the module and the whole concept seemed to have incredible potential, but I couldn't see how the demands on the dungeon master could be met.

Watch the Swan Song play sessions or anything by Rollplay to see how really good DM's do it.

setr already outlined it but allow me to simplify; Suspension of disbelief, aka fake it til you make it.

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