To understand the concept of “Mother, May I?” in RPG design, start by looking at the D&D combat system: This system is based on a complete game structure with predefined actions sorted into an initiative system. The players don’t have to ask the DM if they can attack with their sword or even how the attack with the sword will be resolved — that’s all baked into the system.

Compare that to, say, a PC running a tavern. The player says something like, “I want to get some new types of ale on tap to attract new customers.” Everything about that interaction requires the DM to make rulings: How do they find new types of ale? What types? Does this actually let them attract new customers? How many? What effect do these customers have on their business? The player is effectively going to the DM, hat in hand, and asking them to let them do the thing they want to do.

If we wanted to eliminate Mother, May I?, there are a couple ways we could do that:

1. Try to bake everything into the rules so that every interaction works like combat (with predefined actions, etc.).
2. Create a storytelling game instead, codifying a distribution of narrative control so that a player can, for example, declare the existence of certain brands of ale.

Once broken down like this, we can really begin interrogating the idea that Mother, May I? is an inherently bad thing. Storytelling games are great fun, but they’re not the totality of narrative tabletop games. And the first option is actually impossible without stringently limiting the scope of the game. What makes an RPG special (and distinct from board games like Descent or Gloomhaven) is, in fact, the player’s ability to have their character do anything they can imagine, and it’s the GM’s ability to make flexible and responsive rulings that make that possible.

On the other hand, it can still be valuable to think about the effect that Mother, May I? can have on play. Because, in my experience, players do have a predilection towards structure.

For example, consider running away from a fight. One of the reasons players tend not to do that is because it means exiting a structure of play (combat) where they feel like they have control over their actions and, therefore, the outcome, instead entering a Mother, May I? mode of play in which they’re basically just asking the GM to make a ruling that they won’t be killed.

By contrast, the original 1974 edition of D&D had an explicit Escape/Pursuit structure you can use to resolve fleeing from combat. When I tell players this system exists (and how it works), suddenly they start running away from fights. I put these same players back into a D&D 3E or 5E game and the running away disappears again.

So even though Mother, May I? is the secret sauce that makes it possible for a player to do literally anything they can imagine, it turns out that, paradoxically, selectively adding structure in the right places can actually expand the scope of play.

Even more importantly, it turns out, in my experience, that flexible structures designed to empower GM rulings rather than trying to box the GM completely out of the process are usually the best, reducing unnecessary crunch while simultaneously creating richer play driven by player creativity.

THE GM’S ROLE

If you’re a GM, though, what can you learn from the principles of Mother, May I?

First, it’s always useful to remember that when players propose an action, they are almost always doing so because, if the action is successful, they think the outcome will be fun. So it’s almost always a good idea to Default to Yes:

With that being said, the players are not always right about this. And players also want the thrill of risk and the sweet taste of victory. Plus, the consequences of failure are interesting and vital to a well-rounded and entertaining experience. So don’t fall into the trap of always saying yes. Your judgment is of vital importance at the gaming table.

More advanced GMs can also keep an eye out for complex actions, particularly those that have become or might become a common part of play. When these situations arise, rather thank just making a one-off ruling (e.g., “make a check at Challenging difficulty”), think about how you could instead create a structure that could consistently handle these situations. Even better if you can make the structure player-facing, so that they can make meaningful decisions within the structure.

Remember that these structures don’t have to be terribly complex, and it’s more than all right if they’re a little loose and flexible. For example, consider our earlier example of the PCs running a tavern. A simple structure might look something like this:

• Rate the business in terms of its weekly income.
• Create additional tiers of income (both above and below the current income) – e.g., 10 gp, 25 gp, 50 gp, 100 gp, 250 gp, 500 gp, etc.
• Players who make an investment or improvement to the business can make a skill check to advance the income tier.

When trying to figure out a structure like this, there are a couple of useful rules of thumb:

• Can the players use this structure to proactively take action? (e.g., creating a cool new feature of the tavern to spend investment cash or trying to track down new types of ale to feature on tap)
• Can you hang scenario hooks off of it? (e.g., the PCs learn that the lost recipe for dwarven moon mead might be found within the ruins of Khunbaral).

If one or both of these are true, then your structure will have the capacity to spark creativity and integrate itself into the wider experience of play. (As opposed to mindless dice-rolling in a disconnected minigame.)

Not all such structures need to be player-known, but, as noted above, it’s often the case that making a structure player-known can be the quickest way to get players to engage with it and begin exploring its possibilities.

Over time, you may find one of these structures becoming an increasingly central or frequent part of play. If so, you’ll likely want to add additional details or features in response to what’s happening at the table. Or you might find flaws or shortcomings that need to be fixed. For example, maybe each tier becomes a progress clock instead of a single skill check. Or we could add the concept of a crisis (competition, larceny, natural disaster, recession, supplier shortages, etc.) that could either impose a one-time cost or even reduce the income tier of the business.

Question: “How do you prep Tier 3 and Tier 4 D&D adventures? I’ve read a lot about how the game changes, but I haven’t seen a lot of guidance on what I should actually be doing. What am I missing?”

To understand how to prep high-level adventures, I think it’s important to first understand why the adventures you were prepping in Tier 1 and Tier 2 stop working as the PCs level up. What this largely boils down to is that if you have a group standing at Point A who wants to go to Point C, it becomes increasingly difficult to “force” them to visit Point B.

If you’re running a dungeon, the natural geography of the world creates pathing. Even in heavily xandered dungeons, you generally can’t just skip from Level 1 to Level 5. You have to, by one path or another, work your way through the intermediary content.

The same is true of an overland journey. You’re in Waterdeep and want to take the road to Baldur’s Gate? Then stuff can happen as you travel down the road. You’re in the Shire and want to go to Mordor? I can’t be certain what path you’ll take, but there’ll still be a sequence of procedural content from A to B to C that can form the spine of the adventure.

But as the PCs level up, they gain access to abilities like teleportation and passwall and scrying. They can nuke sites from orbit and plane shift and do all kinds of crazy stuff. Now they can go directly from Level 1 to Level 5.

Even if you’re running a railroad, you need to be able to force the players into predetermined actions and outcomes. But the abilities the PCs are gaining similarly make it more and more difficult to force them to do what you prepped.

This implies a couple of things.

First, structure is going to come from information. If the PCs know something, then they’ll probably be able to take very direct action based on that information. This is what node-based scenario design is good for, but these high-tier PCs also have access to abilities that can just proactively give them the information that they want. So you’re generally going to be better off thinking more in terms of clouds of nodes rather than specific sequences like funnels, because the PCs will sequence break.

In this sense, high-tier adventures become paradoxically smaller and shorter than low-tier ones, even as their stakes and scope are likely expanding to epic proportions. Because you can’t just, for example, stick multiple levels of a dungeon or a long overland journey between the PCs and what they want.

Second, if the opposition is going to meaningfully oppose the PCs, then they need to be similarly mobile and responsive.

You can’t just key some bad guys to a static location, have them wait for the PCs to show up, and hope it works out. You’ll want them to be set up to actively respond to what the PCs are doing, because you won’t know what it is until the PCs do it.

This means:

• Prepping proactive nodes that can be responsively or opportunistically deployed. (See Running Mysteries: Proactive Nodes.)
• Using faction turns to keep the bad guys in motion. (See p. 342 of So You Want to Be a Game Master or Blades in the Dark.)
• Thinking about what the bad guys are doing and how intelligence (i.e., things the PCs learn about) and blowback (i.e., the bad guys target the PCs for retaliation) from that can vector back to the PCs. (Check out mechanics like Heat and the Vampyramid from Night’s Black Agents to give you some interesting options here.)
• And, vice versa, figuring out what the bad guys know about the PCs and their activities, so that you can determine and actively play their responses. (You may want to create a simple system for checking counterintelligence if you don’t feel comfortable making fiat judgment calls about this. Also check out Campaign Status Module: Event Fallout.)

More than ever, in other words, this is about prepping situations that can be actively played.

Something to avoid, however, is an over-zealous and all-encompassing response, where every adventure rapidly turns into “…and then all the bad guys teleport to the PCs and A HUGE FIGHT HAPPENS!”

You can avoid that partly be playing fair, partly by creating impartial resolution mechanics where necessary (e.g., that counterintelligence check I mentioned to determine what the bad guys know), and partly by scaling up into these higher power levels so that both you and the players can figure out how to control information and protect themselves.

But it’s also, importantly, about setting goals — for both the PCs and the bad guys — that can’t be trivially solved through a giant melee. In much the same way that you should try to find more varied goals for your dungeons than simply clearing the dungeon, so here you set goals that don’t just boil down to Wipe Them Out… All of Them.

FURTHER READING
High Level Characters Are (Literally) Awesome
Soloing Smaug – The Struggle for the Soul of D&D

If you’re a geek older than forty, one of the tough/weird adjustments you’ve had to make in your life is that there was a point where you could reasonably expect to at least sample every significant geek media release…

… and then you couldn’t.

In the ‘90s, for example, I could reasonably expect to watch every science fiction TV show and play every geeky board game.

Today you could dedicate every waking moment of your life and you still wouldn’t be able to do either of those things.

And this extends to movies, roleplaying games, video games… All of it.

At first you think, “I’m just getting old. If I was still young, I could stay on top of all this.”

But that ain’t it.

I lived through the transitions from “there are three channels on your dial” to cable television to the modern fire hydrant of content. Having a local channel become a Fox affiliate — a fourth network! whoa! — was a significant event in my life.

We talk about the “last Renaissance man” — the point at which it was no longer possible for a single person to meaningfully master all fields of human study. In the last forty years, we’ve passed a similar threshold in media.

Looking back across that watershed, an important thing to understand is that, because it was possible, there was a cultural pressure to actually do it. To be part of the geek scene, you needed to know — wanted to know! — the shibboleths.

Pre-1970ish, SF fans could read every major SF novel.

Pre-2005ish, SF fans could watch every major SF TV series.

But, like the proverbial lobster, we have been imperceptibly transitioned into a reality where that’s NOT possible. And, just like the lobster, this creates a lot of stress.

Some of it is self-imposed.

Some of it is external.

“You haven’t watched [insert show here]? I guess you’re not a real fan!”

The scene then fractures.

I can’t learn all of those shibboleths, so I’m going to focus on one specific slice of geek media and learn THOSE shibboleths: So anime becomes its own, increasingly separate fandom. And then there’s so much anime that it, too, fractures into sub-fandoms.

When this fracturing takes the form of excluding rather than focusing, it can turn toxic. This is usually draped in conspiracy rhetoric and/or bigotry: Women or black people or story gamers are trying to steal our fandom!

Now we’re starting to see the emergence of mega-franchises producing so much content that it’s not just a matter of not having time to read every science fiction novel; it’s that you only really have time to engage with this ONE, all-consuming media tentpole. (And maybe squeeze a few other things in around the edges.)

This creates a bizarre paradox: We have a prolificacy of media vast beyond the bounds of comprehension; a cornucopia that would stagger the imagination of, say, an SF fan in the ‘50s.

But, simultaneously, the consumption of any single individual person is increasingly homogenous.

In the late 2010’s, how many people had 50% or 80% or 100% of their trips to the cinema be exclusively MCU films?

There are antecedents to this. From 1990-ish, for example, Star Trek and Star Wars both produced enough tie-in fiction that if you fully engaged with it you would probably read little or nothing else. There was a time when you could casually read every Marvel comic… and then you couldn’t.

It’s just becoming more common.

And this creates an interesting challenge for the megacorps driving these mega-franchises. You can push more and more of the all-in-one, all-consuming fandom… but only up to a certain point.

Once you exceed a fan’s capacity to consume everything — to learn every shibboleth — then the fandom will either radically schism (possibly toxically so) or, worse yet (for the megacorp, anyway), abandon the franchise entirely.

Dungeons & Dragons is an interesting case study here.

Pre-1984, or thereabouts, you could buy and read every single official release for the game. Starting in 1984, the number of modules being published each year was becoming onerous, but pre-1989 even a moderately devoted fan could still easily engage the major releases.

After 1989, on the other hand, AD&D 2^nd Edition’s release schedule became a firehose of content. (Even ignoring the 300+ tie-in novels and video games and comic books.) No one could keep up with it, so the fanbase schismed along natural fault lines (“I’m only going to buy Dark Sun books!”) or dropped out.

D&D 3^rd Edition and 4^th Edition tried to maintain a more sustainable pace of releases so that fans could at least afford to purchase the books, but the TYPE of material they primarily released (PC options) couldn’t be brought to the table fast enough, so fans would, once again, become saturated and then drop out. (This is the fatal flaw to using a supplement treadmill to support an RPG line.)

D&D 5^th Edition, on the other hand, initially dialed back the pace of releases and focused more heavily on adventure material (which is more consumable; you play the adventure and then you need a new adventure). The result is that even casual fans didn’t feel disconnected from the shibboleths or incapable of consuming the content: “Strahd” and “Dragon Heist” and “Auril” and “Baldur’s Gate” were all recognizable references to the vast majority of the fandom.

In the last couple of years, however, the pace of D&D 5^th Edition releases has increased, the shibboleths are beginning to slip, and there are clear signs that the fanbase is fracturing. (Which is probably not great news going into a new edition.)

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is having a similar problem: Yes, the slip in quality (precipitated by a brain drain of all the major creators) is a contributing factor, but the more fundamental systemic problem is that the amount of material being released increased to a point where even people who wanted to keep up with it all couldn’t. The result? Fans, particularly casual fans, started checking out.

And, as the MCU demonstrates, the more you create the impression that “everything is important” and that a fan needs to “watch everything” in order to keep up, the more dramatic your crash will be the instant you pass the threshold at which fans can no longer do that: They won’t just dramatically scale back their engagement. They’ll drop out completely.

So if you’re running a mega-franchise, what’s the solution?

It basically boils down to releasing material at a pace that your audience can consume it.

That sounds simple, but it’s shockingly easier to succumb to temptation, ramp up your release schedule, and break the whole thing. Partly because modern capitalism / greed demands perpetual growth. Partly because your loudest and most hardcore fans will happily consumer FAR MORE than the majority of your audience, and if you heed their call they’ll be all that’s left in the burnt out husk of a once vibrant community. And partly because creating stuff is fun, and as your resources grow the allure of creating even more stuff — stuff you couldn’t have dreamed of creating just a few years ago! — can prove overwhelming. There’s also likely more and more people involved in the mega-franchise as it grows, and it will become increasingly difficult for that not to fuel an exponential pattern of growth.

Now, let’s flip it around: You’re a fan of a mega-franchise and it’s growing past your capacity to “keep up.” What can you do?

Broadly speaking, you’ll either need to let the franchise go or you’ll have to figure out how to change the way you engage with the franchise so that the “consume all” credo of collectorism doesn’t rob your joy.

That might be identifying some subset of the franchise (creators, characters, specific settings, etc.) that you’re most interested in. (Although be warned that the worst mega-franchises will make this difficult by constantly disrupting every segment of the fandom with “events.”) It might be withdrawing from new releases and just enjoying the stuff you love. (Were you really enjoying everything the mega-franchise was offering? Or were you buying some of that stuff just out of a sense of obligation?) Or it might be finding some new way of engaging with your fandom, perhaps by creating fan art or fan-fiction or Youtube videos, in a way that makes you more than just a passive consumer and gives you greater power to make your fandom what you want it to be.

And, of course, the best time to start figuring this out is BEFORE the franchise has become all-consuming in your life and knocked out all of your other interests and hobbies.

Q: What do you think about prepping and running Swords & Sorcery adventures?

Unlike “science fiction” or “fantasy” or “alternate history,” for which you can make pretty solid definitions, “sword & sorcery” is kind of an ill-defined term. If we go with the original definition  (“fantasy fiction that feels like the stuff Robert E. Howard wrote” — no, seriously, that’s literally how Michael Moorcock and Fritz Leiber coined it), the first thing on my list would be:

Don’t use Dungeons & Dragons.

Or, if you do, ban all the spellcasting classes. Or maybe only allow PCs to have two or three levels in a spellcasting class.

Because if you look at Howardian fantasy — Conan, Solomon Kane, Kull, and so forth — the sword is the good guy and the sorcery is almost invariably the bad guy: It’s the strange unknown lurking just beyond the eye line of civilization. (Or, alternatively, crushing civilization under a sanity-rending tyranny.)

(Moorcock’s Elric and Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane are both sorcerers, but they’re also deconstructing the genre by making the bad guy the protagonist.)

THE WORLD OF SWORD & SORCERY

But how do you make a story or adventure feel like sword & sorcery, as opposed to epic fantasy or paranormal romance or whatever genre you want to assign a typical D&D campaign to?

Ultimately, my advice — and I think all advice when it comes to sword & sorcery — will be tempered by my own idiosyncratic and imprecise “feel” for what “sword & sorcery” means. But here’s a few thoughts:

• The “civilized” portion of the world is, on some fundamental level, barbaric. There is no glittering, chivalric ideal; no ethics-enforcing Empire (except possibly far, far, away). If city-life seems sophisticated, it’s merely a veil behind which the “sophisticates” indulge heinous pleasures.
• “Civilization” is pressed right up against uncivilized enigmas, which are heightened through the fantastical and the magical. This happens as soon as you walk out of the city gates. It also happens when you journey into the black abyss of the wilderness beyond civilization’s borders. But it can even happen inside the city: “Tower of the Elephant” and “Rogues in the House,” for example, are both Conan stories in which a single building within “civilization” is revealed to contain barbaric horrors.

Civilization is, thus, the dark mirror of barbarity. It attempts to seal that darkness outside its cities, but its cities nonetheless give birth to it.

To perhaps get a clearer sense of this, consider Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Obviously neither of these are sword & sorcery fiction, but they view civilization and high society through a similar lens: As a veneer covering a festering boil of sublime cruelty and murderous amorality.

On the flipside, the things that civilization describes as “barbarian” — Conan’s Cimmerians, Fafhrd’s Snow Clans, Belit’s pirates, Tarzan — are where nobility and chivalry are actually found. The mythic root of these stories is Robin Hood, whose idyllic society of Merry Men living in the barbarism of Sherwood Forest achieves the ideals of chivalry and nobility which are falsely claimed by the corrupt powers of “civilization.”

ADVENTURE & CHARACTER

We now know both the heroes of swords & sorcery and the source of conflict for our stories and adventures, but I think there’s a final component missing that truly gives a good swords & sorcery tale its unique “feel.”

This is sometimes described as sword & sorcery stories having “low stakes,” but I don’t think that’s quite right. A lot of the archetypal S&S heroes — Conan, Elric, Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser, etc. — all end up in reality-defining conflicts. So it’s not as simple as “Frodo saves the world and Conan doesn’t.”

I think what it boils down to is the primary motivation for a swords & sorcery hero: Survival.

This may be very literal (any number of S&S stories begin with the main character marooned or abandoned or left for dead), but often also manifests at one step removed: The desire for treasure and coin.

(And this, of course, ties into the broader themes of the world: The corruption of civilization strips the common people of wealth and power, creating a permanent lower class desperate just to survive. And the dark enigmas of the world are a constant source of deadly danger.)

Importantly, however, this base need for survival is always displaced by a selfless heroism: When given the choice between securing his treasure and rescuing the maiden, Conan will always rescue the maiden. Robin Hood doesn’t simply steal from the rich, he gives to the poor. (Which is, of course, why both we and Maid Marian love him.)

Where civilization fails to protect the innocent (and is, in fact, often the ones victimizing them), it is the “outsider” that civilization teaches you to fear that will ultimately sacrifice to help those in need.

For similar heroes in other genres, consider Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark or the vampire hunters in John Steakley’s Vampire$.

There are plenty of RPG tips that look great on paper, but not at all when you bring them to the table. The really tricky ones, though, will work just fine… and then suddenly explode in a fiery ball of chaos and destruction.

The problem, of course, is that players, groups, and games are all unique. Something that works for one group may not work for another. It may not even work with the same group when they’re playing a different game. Or it may work for some players in the group, but not others.

For example, back around 2000 there was a brief fad for character flags: The clever insight was that if players put something on their character sheet or in their background, that was a signal — or “flag” — that it was something they wanted to be featured in the game!

In practice, unfortunately, this didn’t hold up. Turns out that just because you included “escaped from an abusive father” in your character’s back story, it didn’t necessarily mean you wanted the abusive father to show up in the game. Often quite the opposite.

Similarly, it turns out that many players will buy up a skill in character creation because they DON’T want that skill to be a significant part of the game: They invested a bunch of character creation resources to specifically NOT be challenged by it, wanting to quickly and trivially dispose of any such content if it does happen to show up.

Conversely, someone creating a character with a high Lockpicking skill might absolutely want lots and lots of locked doors to show up in the campaign… but only so that they can show off how awesome their character is by getting their LockpickingLawyer on and casually gaining access to every egress, treasure chest, and safe. If you were to instead respond to their lockpicking flag by creating lots of ultra-difficult locks that will challenge their high level of prowess, you’ll still end up with a frustrated player.

(And the point, of course, is that other players who have created a character with a high Lockpicking skill will want to be challenged by lots of very difficult locks.)

Recently I’ve seen a similar “GM trick” doing the rounds that I’m going to call Schrodinger’s secret door. The basic idea is that if the PCs are in a dungeon (or a gothic manor or whatever) and they look for a secret door, the GM should respond by adding a secret door to the room and letting them find it!

The idea, of course, is that when the players say, “Let’s see if there’s a secret door!” what they’re really saying is, “It would be cool if there was a secret door here!”

Which might be true.

But it can just as easily be, “I hope there isn’t, but let’s make sure before we use this room to take a rest.” Or simply, “Let’s test this hypothesis and see if it’s true.” (See The Null Result for more on that.)

It doesn’t have to be a secret door, of course. Maybe the players decide to run surveillance on their new patron to make sure they don’t have any secret agendas. Or they check their room for bugs. Or they post a watch at night to make sure they aren’t ambushed while they’re asleep. None of that necessarily means that they — as either players or characters — want to betrayed, bugged, or battled.

EXPLICIT FLAGS

None of which is to say, of course, that it wouldn’t be useful to know if the players want a confrontation with their abusive father or more challenges of a specific type.

But if you want to empower the players to signal that they want something included,  it’s usually better to include specific mechanism for them to directly signal that, rather than trying to intuit signal from proximate cause.

In character creation, for example, you can have players make a specific wants list for the campaign.

The stars and wishes technique (created by The Gauntlet) can provide a simple structure for feedback at the end of sessions: Each player awards a star (indicating something they really liked about the session) and makes a wish (for something they’d like to see happen in a future session).

Along similar lines, I’ve used a technique I call gold starring, in which each player gets a “gold star” that they can at any time “stick” to an element of the campaign (even an element that hasn’t been established yet) to signal its importance to them. (They can also move their gold stars at any time.)

For stuff like, “I think it would be cool if there was a secret door here!”, storytelling games are designed entirely around narrative control mechanics and it’s not unusual to see similar narrative control mechanics lightly spicing roleplaying games, too.

The common denominator in all of these techniques, of course, is that you’re explicitly asking the players for specific information and, in response, the players are clearly signaling what they want. The resulting clarity means you can have confidence and focus in how you respond to your players’ semaphoring.