Dungeon Master: Precedent

When you are a Dungeon Master, you make rulings. However, one of the things that makes things difficult is that rulings often end up setting a precedent. You don't want to live with a bad decision for the entire game, but inconsistent decisions make can make things harder for the player. After all, how can they decide what they want to do when they aren't sure about how things work?

What Kind of Precedent?

Precedent is quite a broad concept encompassing everything from rules interpretation to campaign specific things. The most common ones are the rareness of magic items, death, and rules. Unlike consistency, which you want your campaign to usually be, precedent is often implicit (sometimes I've seen Dungeon Masters making an announcement that this is how things will be from now on) and as such allows for more accidents.

So You've Made a Big Mistake

If you realize you've made a serious mistake, I found that it's generally better not to stick to the precedent. It can be annoying in the short term, but a bad precedent is annoying in the long term. All that said, it's still worse than not needing to in the first place. Keeping in mind the idea of precedent when making a ruling helps catch some of the obvious issues ahead of time.

Recently I played a game where a player tried to push someone into a fireplace. This did a lot of damage and killed the enemy. However, from then on everyone tried to throw everyone into the fireplace. If you do the same thing for combining oil and fire, for example, expect that your players may make it a staple of their combat style. You could also make exceptions in special situations, but you'd need to have some way for your players to know. Otherwise they won't realize it was a one-time thing and try it again, or since it never worked before they won't try this time.

Death

The first death of your campaign tends to be a trend setter. Going forward, they are going to expect more of the same. However, if you go easier sometimes you might run into issues. You don't want to play favourites or look like you are playing favourites in most cases. It just goes over badly.

Magic Items

Magic items are the easiest to fool around with. Even in a low magic world, you could have some bad guys who have been hording magic items for centuries. This means that even though the world is low magic, your players might still run across and use many. It also means that as your players level up and face bigger threats, they can get into a position where magic items are no longer a rare sight for them. For the result of the world, it still is. Where issues tend to come up is with the usefulness of magic items and how they are allocated. If the only item the party comes across is a bow for the ranger, there may be problems. I say “may” because if you rolled stats and use the bow to even thing up, it could be fine. However, players tend to expect magic items if someone else in the party got one.

Changing Precedent

It can be perfectly fine to change the precedent of the game in the middle of a campaign. Magic items might have started out very rare but now that they are at a higher level, they might be more common. If you are starting out with new players you could start the first few levels being very merciful when it comes to death, but after they reach a certain threshold remove the training wheels (this can be a good way of helping players get used to the game but I'd advice to make sure the players know this will happen or it may blindside them).

A lot of this comes back to the idea of having some level of internal consistency. In order for your players to be able to make satisfying decisions, there needs to be some level of understanding and consistency. Precedent change in favour of players will probably go over better than something that comes out of nowhere and blindsides them. If there is a reason for it that they know ahead of time, it tends to go over better.