"Official" D&D vs "Folk"D&D and the pitfalls of playing with strangers

(this post may qualify as a rant. Take it with a grain of salt)

 I've recently been seeing a bit of this lately, the use of the term "Folk" over the usual "Old School" designation.

"Official" is of course the rules (more or less) as written, while "Folk" is a name for people who rely less on whatever the current editions and settings are, and "do what thou whilst" hodgepodge gaming. I like the word Folk for this. The term "Old School" is getting, well, a little old. 

As a D&D person myself, this is sort of hypocritical I guess, but I find gamers, D&D players especially to often be an odd lot. I suppose I always considered myself Old School, but maybe less so in recent years. When I got hipped to the OSR (sometimes derogatively referred to as the "blOwSR") around 2009 or so, I got involved a bit. I started this blog not long after starting a 10-year group where I ran a variety of genres, but mostly 1st edition. I'd say about 60% of that experience was great, and the rest, well, often when more or less unfulfilling, and often the drizzling shits. I feel this is because it was gaming mostly with strangers. Sometimes weird ones. And I found this to my experience with the modern crop of players, especially gained on Roll20 forums. Maybe chock full of more oddballs than Grognard places like Dragonsfoot. 

Most of my gaming life since I was a teen was about me running campaigns, of various genres, for friends I already had. People who often had no real D&D experience. They came in fresh, and just wanted to enjoy the play without a bunch of expectations. Open minded. In any genre I ran. And these were my most happy gaming years. Dungeons and Dragons, Champions, Call of Cthulhu, Runequest, Traveller. Kind of a bummer that this was 20 years and more ago. 

As a teen I knew that playing at game shops or cons was not for me. So many of the people turned me off. 

So as far as 1st ed D&D was concerned, there was no arguing over rules or rulings, whereas in the groups of strangers that I ran for years later that was often the order of the day. So much of 1st was open to interpretation, it was an easy in for power gamers and rules lawyers to work their shitty magic. People who if you gave in to, would, like classic bullies, feel they could do more of it until you were worn down. They were so proud of how they viewed how things should be run.  It was one reason I treasured doing games like Champions or Call of Cthulhu. The rules were fairly clear. But eventually it would be back to D&D and "D&D People" and their particular peccadillos. It was often hard to feel like these people were friends.

When I moved to a new state it was a chance to sort of renew. I adopted 5th edition and had a couple of decent face to face campaigns, the first one was me being tapped to DM by my current beloved besties B and L. I was happy to more or less be turning my back on my old school roots. But my experiences going mostly online with Roll20 the other year was also decidedly mixed. It was mostly with strangers. Because of this I decided to hew close to the rules, but still, no matter the experience or age range, D&D players still seemed to have particular expectations, rather than just going with the flow of whatever the DM had in mind. 

 So, call them old school or new school, call them official or folk. The only main difference to me is that one wants rules as written, and the other ones want something more creative and distinct. But they still often seem to be odd people (yes, I am very much generalizing) with particular expectations. Such as "I want to run a cyborg minotaur gunslinger!" People under 40 on Roll20 are full of this kind of "hey, look at my cool character!"

But even if I stick with 5th ed, it will soon be a "folk" edition. One DnD is going to change everything. WOTC recently and very blatantly announced that the players are an untapped resource to be monetized, so part of their plan is microtransactions that themselves are well known as the drizzling shits of the video game industry. To play it is no longer the DM's who will need written material. Players will need to create online minis for their characters, and I can see a couple of dozen microtransactions for every aspect of it. Face, hair, clothing, every weapon or piece of armor. The colors. What the cost of this stuff will be is what interests me the most. In the past you could buy some paints for about 10 bucks, and a mini for about 5. Will your online mini cost you 30 bucks? 50?

But that is going in a direction that I am not at all interested in otherwise. 

Mostly it turns me off as there will be a lot more work for DM's, and likely a lot more costly for them. They will need to invest a small fortune in DND Beyond, as will the players. And as usual, you will be dealing with fickle players you often do not know along with the cost and time investments. For me, based on my hit or miss Roll20 experiences with the community at large, will it be worth it?

Nah, I will stick with Roll20 and 5th ed for now. Or maybe just try to get a campaign of Call of Cthulhu or a Superhero thing going. A break from D&D people. I think I am maybe starting to head towards being done doing RPG's with non-friends. I have a campaign of infrequent games I run for my local besties B and L, and my old player Terry, which is just great because it is just like those games of old for my friends. No weird expectations. Just D&D. A D&D game once or twice a month with true friends, with my favorite video games in between (this was a super banner year for video game), is starting to seem just right to me. I'm really kind of fed up dealing with strangers in gaming. 

So yeah, this will now be old school or "folk" gameplay for me. Until WOTC buys up Roll20 and other platforms and it is no longer supported. The time is maybe coming when if you don't want to invest in the official stuff, it will have to go back to face to face tabletop. Somewhere you don't need WOTC or their bullshit. That will be the true Folk RPGing. 

Maybe unfortunate for me, as I still feel I want to be retired from face to face. I have boardgames for that.

YMMV

Cheers

 much of 

Fudging Dice Rolls

 

Fudging dice rolls is an issue that many old schoolers particularly take offense at. They tend to be all about "the purity of the dice" and "why bother rolling at all then?" Though I would not say I have never fudged a roll, I can't think of a time in recent years I did, though I can think of a few I wish I had in retrospect.

 In my last long time group, as opposed to previous long running groups made up of people I already knew who were often not that versed in RPG's, I had at least a couple of power gaming or min maxing players come along who tended to take advantage of my general good nature as a player friendly DM. As soon as they saw I had sympathy for players characters and that I almost always gave their situations the benefit of a doubt, if not a special save to give at least a small chance at avoiding perma-death, they took on the personas of jackals who sensed a wounded lamb (player character friendly DM). Yeah, give some an inch and they'll take a mile. 

These are often mooks who don't really care about anybody else's fun, especially the beleaguered DM. They just wanted strong players characters who were more powerful than anybody else. For whatever reason this is the fun they got out of the game. For whatever lacked in their real lives, power or whatever (now that I think of it the wives of these dudes seemed to call the shots in their lives), they had to be bullies in an elf game. But it wasn't just for the reasonable, "fun for all" players that I was a friendly GM. Whatever the case, I was fair to all. But yeah, a few times I wished I wasn't.

But OK, I'm not here to complain about former players I often wished I had dice-fudged to death. But on the issue of DM fudging, I think there is often a deeper issue at large here. Maybe more insidious, and it's something I've noticed since I was a kid in other people's game. 

You see, since I was a teen GM back in the day, I had a tendency to randomize the world in general. Most often in the case of NPC decisions. I called it my "yes no maybe" method. Kayhla the Hobbit speaks to an innkeeper and asks if they can get a free meal along with their room for the night because the party is low on funds. I think most DM's would just say yes or no depending on how they personally felt in that moment. But for me I would put that to a roll. If I had actually imagined a certain personality for this innkeeper, I would make a modifier. Is he cheap? Or is he generous? What is Kayhla's charisma? Then modify the roll. Easy enough. Well, OK, I'm sure plenty of DM's just did btb reaction rolls. But really, the rare times I sat as a player I pretty much never saw such rolls.  OK, that's a fairly petty example, but you can apply that to much more.

Many DM's in my experience, my entire life, just seem to run much of the game out of their head. Mostly in terms of NPC decisions. Players pose something to an NPC, and the DM just yeah or nay's it. He decides from whole cloth what the NPC will do, how they will react. Pretty much based on his own biases. Sure, he or she might have a personality in mind for the NPC that can sway that decision. But it is still a DM decision. No die roll. It comes out of his conscious or subconscious. Out of his head. An example of one of the times I did this was as a teen. One of my players girlfriends wanted to try and play, and long story short the characters had to go to the cities fireworks factory (every game city should have a fireworks factory, in whatever genre) and get some fireworks. They are very expensive, and money was an issue. The new player had her character, a good looking woman, try to flirt a major discount from the guy. Since he was quite old (and I was quite young) I just hand waved that the guy had no libido and would not be interested. OK, again, I was young. The guy may not have still had an active sex drive, but he still might be swayed by a flirtatious young lady. I really should have put it to a roll. But no, I just decided out of my head how he would act. Long story short, the gal player was very miffed, kind of embarrassed at the failure, and quit the game right there. Sure, she could have been a little more understanding and not have overreacted so much. But it stuck with me. I gipped her, and my session, out of a cute little interaction.  And that has stuck with me, and one of the reason's I believe in at least a chance of something happening. 

It is probably a minor issue for most. To be honest any player I have had that I told I like to randomize even minor things in my setting for the sake of getting close to a living breathing world that doesn't entirely come out of my brain, they never seem to care much.  But I think that outside of the rare times there is a 100% chance an NPC would or would not do something (somebody very against sexual assault will almost for sure not commit it. Somebody who is anti-violence will almost for sure not punch a child who tried to pickpocket them) there should be some chance at variances.  Almost nothing should be an absolute. One of the things I love about the concept of The Matrix, is that the simulated world has to seem real; it has verisimilitude outside of some of the crazy powers the strongest individuals (or programs) have. If you get in street fight and you are one of the "unenlightened" then basic rules of physics are happening. What is going on is actually just a bunch of computer code dictating everything.  But that code is aimed at giving a sense of a living world. I really like to think of a game world in those terms. And randomization is one of the big factors of that IMHO.

Fighting and other action pieces are in large part dictated by random rolls. Chances are modified by various factors (strength, skill, dexterity, weapon, etc). Why should the non-action stuff not be dictated by randomness to some degree or another? If not, then IMO its very similar to fudging those action dice.

Dungeon Master as Civil Servant

Am I too easy as a DM? Is this really a low paying (read: non-paying) job that forgoes my fun or frivolity for the service to others?

I started as much an adversarial DM as anybody from my time. That’s how D&D games were generally approached back then, especially by young boys. Characters were a bunch of Elmer Fudd’s with sub-par physical characteristics, walking unwittingly into the torture and humiliation chambers of the DM as Bugs Bunny. It was a very sadomasochistic relationship. You go into a dungeon, you press a button, and *kablooey* you were more often than not dead, as the DM laughed and snickered as if you are some dumbass he has gotten one over on.

The main thing that got me out of that mind set by the early 80’s was having girls at the game. Especially in the case of a girlfriend, it was hard to have them setting off traps and falling into pits. So it was girls that started my softening, I think. Had me go more in a high adventure frame of mind. Twas Beauty killed the Beast.

Then from the mid-80’s on I went through a certain phase of causing characters more emotional anguish than actually pain and death from traps or unbeatable monsters. Most of my players in the late 80’s and the 90’s were newbies to gaming, and lots of death and carnage heaped upon them can turn these new players off. But kill their family or pit them against the other players and you’ve lit a fire under their ass. They love the drama, and it has much more emotional weight than tricky dungeons and screwjob traps.

Death among characters has become a rare thing in my games, and even in my long Cthulhu campaigns of the 90’s, there was some insanity brought on but not much death (although more than in most genres I run). And in my Champions games, forget about it. You aren’t supposed to die there.

But I think my softening over all those years that worked pretty well with newbies in the 90’s is not serving me that well as DM in my latest group. For this new group I had one old player from the 90’s, Terry, along for the ride. Terry was always a good player. Although she internalized a lot of her characters stuff, she was consistent and not at all a power gamer, meta-gamer, or complainer. She just played.

But everybody else who started in this new group had experience with the game (one version or another of it), and at least a couple of them came in with power gaming backgrounds and desires. I especially think Andy and big Dan, like sharks, sensing my softness when it comes to characters, were a bit too obvious in their power-gamery at first. Andy pressed me a lot for things, and because he is our host I often cracked and gave him what he wanted early on. He sort of softened on that, but Dan still hits me with “player entitlement” attitudes that chap my ass. He wants more more more, and the more you give the more he wants. He is a good guy, but Dan more than anybody is getting me more in the mindset of my youth “Fuck the characters, I am God here. Bend to my will and die in my goddamn dungeon.” Dan even seems to want my rolls made out in the open (I think any time I have an NPC make a saving throw against his charm person or whatever, he assumes I’m fudging). I let this guy run a female drow, a race I am sure he is running just because it is so powerful in Unearthed Arcana, and he has made me (and some of the others players) regret it all the way.

What am I, a civil servant? This is my world! I call the shots! I don’t work for you, you are here to play in my game not be served.

I was especially hardened recently when I ran some sessions of Star Wars Saga: Knights of the Old Republic for a group of middle-age Star Wars fans who had played together for years, but were complete strangers to me. A couple of them were actually quite cool at first, but it was apparent by the second game or so that I was looked upon as somebody coming and serving them up a game like it was a job or something. When the session was over, they didn’t even want to socialize with me. They waited until I left (as it turned out) to talk about the game and how I was doing. Can you believe that shit? Especially the host, Joyce, seemed to have had an idea of how the game should be run (like one of the lame-o movies I guess). If things didn’t go her characters way, she would even get pissy and go sit in a corner (this lady is well into her 50’s, by the way, so she was no kid). She seemed to have paranoia about NPC’s, and the fact that I had a really interesting NPC be a catalyst for the adventure drove her nuts, even though he was very much in the background. The slag even had the balls to tell me “you can’t run the game like that, we are used to it like this and that…”. I went home that night after the fourth session and wrote them an email telling them I was done with the game probably as they were still standing around the table discussing my “Performance”. Didn’t even get a “thanks for trying.”

So the last year or so of experience has me starting to rethink my “player friendly DM” attitude of the 90’s. I’m kind of tired of being soft. I don’t want to be a dick DM, but I really think at least a couple of my players need a less kind hand and some hard truth that I am not from a soft DM background. Some hard lessons need to be learned. Some damn characters need to die!

I’m not your D&D civil servant or underling. I’m your damn Game master! The next few games…watch out!

“Hell is coming for breakfast!” – from The Outlaw Josie Wales