Players Have Say, DM Should Too

[Sinfire Titan]

Guys, if you didn't notice, Sinfire Titan was asking you to stop with your offtopic. Care to move your conversation to PMs?

Not so much asking them to stop so much as I was asking them to also provide something that's actually on-topic.


After all, half of us mods have derailed the living hell out of threads before. As long as the post addresses more than just the explosives subtopic, there won't be a problem.

[Tiltowait]

My contribution was to say this is a problem best solved by destroying the problem.

[Bloody Initiate]

While I have occasionally seen a GM pull of the "Grand Theft Auto" game, it isn't something anyone should be expected to do every night.

If I were presented with a group of players who just wanted to get their murder on, I'd point out "It looks like you guys just want to play GTA, which is fine except I don't think I'm up to the task. I don't think I can create things fast enough for you to continually destroy them. I'll run out of material too fast, you want someone with more on-the-spot creativity." It would be an honest admission of my own limitations. It's a hard game to run, and I'm just not that good.

I have handled it differently before. Through happenstance alone I happened to already have some extremely powerful NPCs written up. This was a different system (Marvel Universe Role Playing Game) where players have super powers from the start. They were enjoying their super powers (namely their ability to teleport anywhere they wanted, run anywhere they wanted, etc. on the entire globe) but I quickly figured out that shit wasn't going to work. Thankfully powerful people tend to get noticed, and that's what happened to this group. A particularly nasty NPC - whose power happened to be feeding on life energy - noticed some big sources of energy running amok, and went in for lunch. They skirmished with him a couple times, always being overpowered because they were always split from the group, until finally when they decided to cooperate with each other and stick together they managed to take him down. It all felt very natural and wholesome to me.

The lesson I learned is that bad behavior gets noticed, and powerful forces intervene, always for different reasons, but always. You can't play GTA in a world that you can respect and believe. A believable world stops you. So if players insisted on just going apeshit I'd let them, to a point, and then they'd meet whatever force that world possessed that prefers you don't do that. They've all got'm, and no matter how invincible people think they can get in D&D, a determined enemy can and will find you and kick the shit out of you unless you're prepared specifically for them and only them (which you won't be because you were playing in a sandbox). That's how real conflict works, and the game reflects reality.

The DM doesn't just have as much say as the players, the DM IS a player, just one with a different set of goals and responsibilities. You shouldn't be required to have a miserable evening any more than they should. It's a co-op game.

[Unbeliever]

Slightly off-topic, but what I'd say is: 

...
The lesson I learned is that bad behavior gets noticed, and powerful forces intervene, always for different reasons, but always. You can't play GTA in a world that you can respect and believe. A believable world REACTS TO you.
...
That's how real conflict works, and the game reflects reality.
...

And, that's what makes it possible for me to run a sandbox game.  If I have a pretty good idea of what the setting is, what the movers and shakers are, and a set of motivations for the PCs -- which is usually lacking in the players described in this thread b/c they are going apeshit and lobbing hand grenades at everything, including the plot -- then I can roll with it and have the world react to them in interesting ways. 

But, yeah, if you're just murdering random hordes of whatever then you're not even playing the level of plot and engagement in the world that Diablo II Pindleskin runs have ...

[Rejakor]

I have no problem with players intelligently playing GTA.

However, if they just start killing shit, even if they are the biggest baddies in the setting (I try to have at least a few Good types in the group if I go for that), I reserve the right to have random commoners go all Rambo on them.  Nothing as humiliating as being taken down by clever group tactics and people/factions being desperate enough to risk absolutely everything.

Favourite example was when a PC wiped out a town and they mobilized the army, the mages, extraplanar beings, militia, everything.. and the player went nuts complaining about why... he'd bragged to the survivors about being essentially the antichrist and destroying the world, and the world took him seriously.

[nijineko]

reminds of that quote from titan ae, "an intelligent guard. didn't see that one coming."