It’s ok to say: No!

The emphasis on players and player advocacy has at times come at the expense of the ability of game masters to run the narrative. As much as possible game master should go along with their players’ ideas, but sometimes it is ok to say no!

Every now and then I run games at the local friendly game store. Most of the times its fun and a great experience and I embrace the opportunity of being able to meet young and enthusiastic players. For many of these players, getting into a roleplaying group is hard, since they are either new to the hobby or do not know many people who play roleplaying games. For other players, this is a chance to get to know other game masters and players.

The other night I was running a game for 7 teenage players. We were playing D&D 5e and the group had by accident freed a powerful evil entity and set it loose. After some investigation and finding the right spell components for a ritual, the group managed to track down the evil being and confronted it. I set up the encounter, brought forth miniatures and drew the battle map. The moment I placed the miniature which represented the entity, a part of the group started bombarding me with questions about the creature’s CR, immunities, vulnerabilities and so on.

Mind you, I have a sticker on my screen that states in capital letters: NO METAGAMING!

Information needed?

“What do you mean,” I asked, “why should you have information like that?”

After all, the entity in question was a very rare creature, in terms of the narrative and one that I had created myself. Not to mention, the characters had at no point investigated or gathered lore about the entity. Only about the ritual needed to imprison it. In some cases, I would allow an ability check or something similar to gain some information (e.g. type of monster, legends, myth and stories regarding the monster in question etc.), but since the characters hadn’t spent any time researching the entity and it was an obscure monster, known to few, I decided against it.

“So we know what we are fighting. Our Game Master always tells us these things,” one of the players answered. Of the seven players, four belonged to the same group.

“Yeah, I’m not telling you these things,” I said and smiled, “you just have to figure it out in the game.” I tapped my screen to remind the players to not metagame.

“But it’s only metagaming if we use the information while playing,” another player rebuffed.

“Why would you need this information before the encounter, if you do not plan on using it?” I rebuffed and made my decision clear, that they wouldn’t get this information at that moment.

Bonus actions

Later, in the final encounter, a player uses a move action and an action to attack the entity. The attack missed, much to the player’s disappointment.

“I use a bonus action to grapple the monster” the player declared. I raised an eyebrow and asked if the character had some special ability or feature that allows it to replace a bonus action attack with a grapple, knowing well that it didn’t.

“No, does that matter,” the player asked and added, “my other DM always allows this.”

“Yes, it matters. You must be allowed to do use a bonus action like this, and to my knowledge there’s no feature in the game that allows a character to replace a bonus action attack with a grapple.”

Saying: No!

The game ended once the characters had dealt with the entity. After the game the four players who belonged to the same group told me, that they were surprised that I repeatedly refused to allow them play as they are used to, to do what ever they liked. One of the players added, that their game masters says that game masters should never say no to their players. Instead the game masters should roll with the players, use: Yes, but… instead of no.

I nodded my head, shrugged and answered that each group must find their style of gaming and left it at that.