What the ...

The image shown is from p. 12 of 4th Edition's DMG, How to be a DM.

I'd like to say there are no words, but this is a blog with too many words, so ...

The starting question screams trouble.  It gets worse as we realize the "right way" refers not to practical considerations of person and information management, but upon the feelings of the participants.  For specifically my game, and my relationship with my players, the "feel" of the game is intrinsically important to how we communicate and enjoy each other's company.  But any idea that the feelings of hundreds of thousands of potential participants can be addressed in a few paragraphs, in an attempt to be inclusive, is the sort of mindless propaganda that pretends to speak for, say, the LGBT community, while automatically lumping them into a single entity that all wants the same things.  Living in this age, we accept this as rote.  We've gotten used to it.  But a close inspection of the practice is enough to make one shudder.

No matter how many adjectives we stack together in a table predicting "style considerations," it will never be enough to account for all the possible styles of all the possible DMs participating in the game.  Moreover, with regards to the 16 adjectives listed here, my style includes every one of them.  My game is gritty but the participants DO accomplish heroic things—even though I, and they, do not consider themselves "heroic" by default.  My game is often silly; often intense; sometimes preplanned, with invariably large parts that are improvised.  "Heroic" and "morally ambiguous" are not opposites.  Any sort of concept can be "thematic"—it helps if the writer understands the meaning of the term.  "General" is entirely non-descriptive in any way.  How is a campaign "general"?  It's generally what?

It's bad enough that we've decided to take this graceless approach, we haven't remotely done it well.

Sigh.

And now, it's time to answer the questions.

1. "Are you big on realism and gritty consequences, or are you more focused on making the game seem like an action movie?"

Typical North American bias here regarding action movies, which presupposes that every film that's action oriented is a two-dimensional romp with bad marksmanship, speeding cars, beefy guys who endure through pluck and courage and stock villains.  No Country for Old Men, Seven, La Balance, the original Swedish Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Harry Brown, Hanna, Straw Dogs (the 1972 film), The Wild Bunch, Greyhound, 1917, We Were Soldiers, Blood Diamond, Haywire ... these are realistic action films, full of gritty consequences, so obviously the question is trying to assume the distinction between "serious" and "not serious."  Which, incidentally, is the distinction between every comparison being made on the list.  So why not just say that?

Because we want to believe we're being helpfully descriptive here.  We're not.  The terms are so general that they're non-exclusionary.  Some elements of Armageddon are quite believable.  Some elements of Atomic Blonde are scarcely credible.  It makes no difference, because both are "cinematic" and both are technically "gritty"  Hey, people die in Armageddon—all of Paris, ffs.  It doesn't get more gritty than that, although the film's science is jerkily ludicrous.

The larger argument to be made is that REAL LIFE incorporates every adjective on this list.  We can hang in a bar with our friends, laughing so hard that we fall off the stool, like being in a beer commercial, and then be crippled for life in a car wreck on the way home.  Does that mean every moment in life is "gritty" and has "consequences"?  Or is it that life is way more complex that we can tag with adjectives?  We have 4,800 adjectives in the English language because we have a lot of different situations to cover.  Why would we assume that players, being human and using their brains, and speaking language, would be able to describe something as complicated as a role-playing game with 7 adjectives?

2. "Do you want the game to maintain a sense of medieval fantasy, or can you tolerate some incursions of the modern world and modern thinking (anachronism)?" 

There's no possibility of keeping anachronisms out of the game.  We don't live in a fantasy universe, we live in a real one, and our natural experiences will cause us to use metaphors and examples from the world we know.  It's reasonable to explain to players that in a setting without flush toilets, there are other habits and processes that must take place in order to shift the gong (medieval term) out of our bodies and put elsewhere.  But it's impractical to keep players from using a tactic they picked up in a movie or a book, or to actively train their hired soldiers like a 19th century military unit.  If a mage figures out how to cast a spell that will produce images on a flat surface, is it acceptable for the mage to then build a theatre and charge for a show every night?  Are you telling me the customers wouldn't pay?

Whose to say that if magic didn't exist, "wall plays" wouldn't exist, hm?  Perhaps they could be found in every medium-to-large sized town.  Ask yourself: does your game world have street lamps?  Those came into existence because there were many more workers at night with the start of the Industrial Revolution, but there's nothing intrinsically hyper-technical about them.  It's an oil lamp on a pole behind glass.  The Romans could have built them.  How about baseball?  Are your players allowed to teach people baseball?  That's what the character Hank Morgan does in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, along with a great many other things.  Are these "allowed"?  And if they're not, precisely why not?  What is there about baseball that couldn't have existed in the 11th century.  Or in Ancient Egypt, for that matter.  How do you know for certain that it didn't exist, in some form.  We have staggeringly few records of that time.

And whose to say that the gods, being gods and not necessarily subject to time, haven't already taught other cultures on other worlds, how to play baseball?  They got it from Earth and now they've inspired my player character to reinvent it.  That seems believable and not a bit anachronistic.

I'm kidding, of course, but if you take the anachronistic thing too far, it must be noted how many things have come about since the 1200s that shouldn't be in your early medieval world—quite a lot of things.  No matter how you try to guard that gate, there will be anachronistic things in your world; you might just allow for their existence, realizing that it's not such a big deal anyway, whatever kind of fantasy world you're running.

 3. "Do you want to maintain a serious tone, or is humour your goal?"

I have very little to say on this.  I have an excellent sense for comedy, as anyone who has read this blog for a time can realize.  I'm a wit in real life.  My marriage is like living in a 1940s screwball comedy, with zingers crossing back and forth between my partner and I; we're both very sarcastic and half the time she will best me.  We don't unleash these gifts on anyone but my daughter who, obviously, learned from a young age.

Trying to force comedy into a campaign might work for the groundlings, but not being a stinkard, I refuse to pay only a penny for my entertainment.  The humour I see presented on Critical Role, for example, is infantile acting out ... and these are experts at the "humoured campaign."  No, thank you.  Why don't these people just hit each other with pies?

You get better humour when you don't try so hard. 

That's all I'm going to say about comedy.  Others have written much more than me, and I bow to their wisdom.

4. "Even if you are serious, is the action lighthearted or intense?"

It depends on what's happening, doesn't it?  I'll say both.

5. "Is bold action key, or do the players need to be thoughtful and be cautious?"

Again, it depends on what's happening.  There's a reason why we have the two adages, "Look before you leap" and "He who hesitates is lost."  It's because sometimes, it is the best idea to rush in and seize the moment, and sometimes, it's necessary to be cautious.  That's really the players' problem, isn't it?

Yes, my world is threatening, in that it has monsters in it and the dice will kill you.  Judging by the amount of caution my online players seem to possess, I'm guessing my world is a LOT more dangerous than most worlds.

6. "Do you have a hard time improvising, or are you great at winging it?"

This is getting awfully specific.  The passage doesn't give me any information as to how either affects the game.  I know how it does, but this is supposed to be a how-to and these two questions are asking the same thing twice.  "Is it tails or is it not heads?"  Instead of asking me why I do it, why don't they take some time and teach instead?  Hm?

Okay, you need to improvise because there's no real way you can prepare for the game ahead of time sufficiently, that you won't also need to come up with something on the fly when the players act unexpectedly.  Mind you, this fact is in no way a "DM style"—every DM has to do this, constantly, regardless of their style.  True, some are not good at it.  But even in a railroaded campaign, players will go left when you expect them to go right, they will randomly set the place on fire, they will decide this is a good time to shout stupidly at the top of their lungs.  You've got to be ready for that shit.

7. "Is the game full of varied D&D elements, or does it center on a specific theme such as a horror?"

Again, this isn't "style."  This is genre.  Do these writers have a dictionary?

8. "Is it for all ages, or does it involve mature themes?"

Well, it's not for 2 year olds.  How mature are we talking about here?  You mean "mature" like the 16 y.o.'s who are buying drugs from the dealer and holding each other's hair when they puke?  Or do you mean "mature" in that the themes are related to 1950s standards of sexism and racism?  Please define mature.

Again, I can't help thinking this is genre-related, or political maybe.  The game is about killing monsters.  That's why we have monsters.  So we can kill them.  As it happens, all the weapons and spells are pretty good for killing men, women and children also, not to mention dogs, cats and cute lil' bunny rabbits.  So, if we're saying the game doesn't have "mature" content, then what the hell are all these weapons for?  Do you get just how horrific a fireball would feel like if you experienced one?  That doesn't seem pretty fucking mature?  Where the hell are these goal posts?

9.  "Are you comfortable with a moral ambiguity, such as allowing the characters to explore if the end justifies the means, or are you happier with straightforward heroic principles, such as justice, sacrifice, and helping the downtrodden?"

Please point to the person who's comfortable with moral ambiguity.  I'll wait.

If the players want to explore "the end justifies the means," how do you propose that I stop them?  Is that the style you're talking about?  How much we quantifiably deny the players' rights to take actions with their character unilaterally, if it steps outside a boundary?

I really like how "justice," "sacrifice" and "helping the downtrodden" are described as OPPOSITE to moral ambiguity.  Will someone please explain how the "heroic" versions of these things are lacking in ambiguity?  Again.  Happy to wait.

Well.  I know a lot more about DM Style than I did before I read this passage.  How 'bout you? 

This series continues with Turned Off