Maybe I'm just doing it wrong ....

[wotmaniac]

So, I've got 2 players in my group that both have campaign ideas that they'd like to run.  I'm thinking "cool", because I've still got a bit of the ol' "DM burnout".

Both of them have set out their character creation guidelines -- normal stuff ... until I dug a little deeper.
Each of them (on separate occasions) have expressed that the reason for their respective moral/ethical restraints (neither of which I have a problem with, on its face) is so that a particular type of reaction/decision will be made during a particular set piece.

Let me illustrate:
#1:
Nobody is allowed to have a character of "good" alignment.  This has nothing to do with the general tone of the campaign, per se; but way down the road he plans on posing an Ethical Dilemma, and "if we're 'good', the decision will be easy".
#2:
Everyone has to be "good" (well, no "evil" and no CN); further, we are to be "community oriented".  This is so that all the party members have a specific particular reaction during the "big reveal".

In other words, the character creation guidelines are to predetermine a decision at a  bottle-necked point at some distant point in the campaign.

Am I out of line when I think: "WTF kinda railroad shit is this?"
Help me out guys, I'm beggin' ya. 
I want to be wrong on this, so that I can adjust myself.  I'm working off of the premise of "if everyone else is wrong, maybe I'm the one that's wrong"; but I'm just not seeing my fault in this.  I really hate the idea that I've simply surrounded myself with jackdaw fools.

This just may be enough to jump-start my ass to get back behind the GM screen.
In retrospect, this may be related to these guys not having 1 iota of initiative as players; i.e., they're wanting to run a game as they would expect it to be run as players.
The 2 guys in question are players "a" and "d" in THIS story from a while back. ("b" and "c" are gone; and I'm currently in the process of recruiting new players; but I must admit, I'm suffering from "once bitten, twice shy").

[linklord231]

I can kind of understand the first one.  To paraphrase the article in your sig, "Adventure design has no obligation to cater to people who don't buy into the premise of the adventure."  If the point of the adventure is to put the characters into situations where they have to make tough choices, that can be somewhat undermined by players making characters who refuse to make such choices.  That being said, D&D doesn't really do this kind of game very well, since there are items like the Phylactery of Faithfulness that can objectively tell you which action is the "Good" one, or you can just cast a spell to contact your deity and ask him yourself.  Regardless, it seems like his intention is good even if the execution leaves a bit to be desired.

The second one seems a bit  .  The DM doesn't get to dictate the players' reaction to anything, period.  That's kind of the point of the game. 

[bhu]

You aren't out of line, I've had similar problems.  Eventually I realized they were would-be story tellers who were interested in 'creating their masterpiece' as opposed to anyone actually enjoying the game.  Their need to straight jacket everyone into the role they needed them to perform blinded them to their own inadequacoes, and the harder the players pushed the harder the DM pushed back.  The campaigns always crumbled and left hard feelings.

[kitep]

The only way for these players to become good DMs is to practise, practise, practise.  So I'd say go along with their need for the players to follow that one particular plot point.  But along the way, there will be times when the party does things the DMs didn't plan for, and they'll learn to handle these things.  Let 'em start small and work their way up.  And enjoy the rest from DM burnout.

Good luck!

[wotmaniac]

To paraphrase the article in your sig, "Adventure design has no obligation to cater to people who don't buy into the premise of the adventure."

Touche`.
In response, I'd say this: when I set alignment restrictions (for example), it is to guide the general overall tone and mood of the campaign - end of list.  He's trying to rig a specific predetermined decision point, and explicitly doesn't care about anything else in regards to the tone and mood of the intervening time/space.  Am I being pedantic, or is there actually a real substantive difference?


Of course, I could also be accused of being a hypocrite (and I'll leave it to you guys to tell me if such an accusation is valid):
For my next game, I'm seriously toying with the idea of giving everyone VoP for free, and saying that you must adhere to it, as well as issuing them their party backstory (and letting them adjust their individual character backstories to fit), as well as their specific motivation for the specific situation, which will be started in medias res.
This is driven by a few things:
- their demonstrated track record of not having any initiative;
- repeated refusal to follow character creation guidelines -- e.g., refuse to have character in any way connected to setting or to other party members.  (1 example: no idea of what to play, until other player said paladin; at which point he decided to try to convince me on draegloth)
- previously-demonstrated obsession with gear -- it's like all dude wants is to play a "power fantasy through serial heists".  He seriously seems like he's literally afraid to interact with plot until he is comfortable with his gear load-out (which seems like it clocks in at about 2-3x normal WBL).  He has seriously gone out of his way to run away from any semblance of plot, because "not enough gear".


@ kitep:
yeah, I know.  It's just frustrating sometimes.

[SolEiji]

In response, I'd say this: when I set alignment restrictions (for example), it is to guide the general overall tone and mood of the campaign - end of list.  He's trying to rig a specific predetermined decision point, and explicitly doesn't care about anything else in regards to the tone and mood of the intervening time/space.  Am I being pedantic, or is there actually a real substantive difference?

That actually bugs me too, in that I don't know what he expects to happen by restricting alignment.  I've found alignment doesn't necessarily correlate into specific decisions like that.  I could easily see a CE person making the same choice as a LG one in the right light, cause alignment is a general thing.

[wotmaniac]

That actually bugs me too, in that I don't know what he expects to happen by restricting alignment.  I've found alignment doesn't necessarily correlate into specific decisions like that.  I could easily see a CE person making the same choice as a LG one in the right light, cause alignment is a general thing.

He basically said that the party will be faced with a particular moral dilemma (from the vibe I get from him, it will be a point close to the lead-up to the climax); and for "good" characters, it won't be much of a dilemma; but for "non-good" characters, there won't be that obvious "right" choice.
Which seems pretty asinine to me; but whatevs.  It feels like he's basically saying "I want to railroad you guys, but I don't want it to feel like a railroad".  And I'm just like "WTF?".

The other guy really is a noob of a DM; so I give him more leeway.

[ZhonLord]

That actually bugs me too, in that I don't know what he expects to happen by restricting alignment.  I've found alignment doesn't necessarily correlate into specific decisions like that.  I could easily see a CE person making the same choice as a LG one in the right light, cause alignment is a general thing.

He basically said that the party will be faced with a particular moral dilemma (from the vibe I get from him, it will be a point close to the lead-up to the climax); and for "good" characters, it won't be much of a dilemma; but for "non-good" characters, there won't be that obvious "right" choice.
Which seems pretty asinine to me; but whatevs.  It feels like he's basically saying "I want to railroad you guys, but I don't want it to feel like a railroad".  And I'm just like "WTF?".

The other guy really is a noob of a DM; so I give him more leeway.

He IS saying exactly that.  And unfortunately there are only three ways to turn that on him and show him that trying to set this up in a very specific way won't work, because his problem is just as much a lack of understanding about characters and alignment as it is actual railroading:

1.  Make a character who does the right thing for the wrong reason.  He wants to eliminate good guys, then make a bad guy who does good deeds to hide his real actions.  Case in point, I had a gnome dread necromancer, lawful evil, who saved lives and did good things to hide the fact that he was an evil gnome whose goal was to become a lich and slowly unite necromancers across the world into an unstoppable army.  He knew "What Would Good Guys Do - WWGGD" in any situation, so he did it too.  After all, if he manages to save lives or even the city, then he's got a reputation there that protects him from a LOT of accusations in the future.

2.  Make a character that does things to spite whoever is trying to force them into this situation.  Case in point, a Chaotic Evil character from one of my previous campaigns who was greatly inspired by Lad Russo from Bacccano.  He wore all white to show off the blood and gore, had a scythe with jagged edges and barbed wire (more crit range, x5 crit) + enchantments and poisons, and he was a complete asshole to anyone that he hadn't deemed one of his minions (aka anyone outside the party).  But when someone tried to compel him, or did something to annoy him, he did everything he could to ruin that person's plans, even if it resulted in saving the world, because he was THAT pissed at the guy.  Depending on the situation you may be able to use this spite to dodge the "dilemma" altogether.

3.  Find a way to take the party somewhere else completely.  This one's kind of a big middle finger to the DM, but on the other hand if the party has no roots in the place where this dilemma is supposed to happen and no one's a "good" guy, then what's stopping you from packing your bags and finding a different town/city/ect. that offers better payment for your services?

EDIT:  Also, if your DM can't set up a moral dilemma where good guys have two equally difficult options to choose from, then he's got an entirely different problem on top of his railroading attempt.

[Gazzien]

Pretty muchunrelated, but where are Jagged Edges and Barbed Wire from?

[Unbeliever]

Truth be told, I think the set-up is asinine.  But, that means the game isn't necessarily going to be a bad one.  The idea that the entire campaign, and everyone's characters, need to built around one particular moral dilemma, which will happen sometime someday definitely sets off some klaxons along the "what are these players doing messing up my story?!" that others have mentioned in this thread.

The other thing that jumps out at me is I don't really understand how alignment is being conceived by this prospective DM.  Nobody is allowed to write "good" down on their character sheet.  Yet, everyone has to be "good" in the sense of saving villagers from werewolves and whatever.  How is that supposed to actually work?  The character options are kind of very tightly constrained.  Your only option is characters who are forced to act "good" for some reason -- payment, particular attachment to this community, long con, etc.  But, then, are those characters really community-oriented?  Is Zhon Lord's gnome dread necro community-oriented? 

My suspicion is that it wouldn't be for these purposes that sort of example wouldn't work.  So, you're stuck with character who are kind of faux good, which begs the question as to what good alignment, and the attendant alignment character creation guidelines, is doing.


P.S.:  Wotmaniac, your group sounds a little pathological to me.  I'm not sure exactly how to approach it, but the obsession with gear (to the exclusion of actually playing the game) and the resistance to making characters that work together is really worrisome.  Though I am a fan of beginning games in media res.  And, the idea of saying "here's what you guys need to fit into, you figure out how you want to do that" is a good way to start. 

[bhu]

P.S.:  Wotmaniac, your group sounds a little pathological to me.  I'm not sure exactly how to approach it, but the obsession with gear (to the exclusion of actually playing the game) and the resistance to making characters that work together is really worrisome.  Though I am a fan of beginning games in media res.  And, the idea of saying "here's what you guys need to fit into, you figure out how you want to do that" is a good way to start.

It's entirely possible a former DM has scarred them.  The rl group I know now hates 'power gaming', which they basically define as making a PC who is competent.  I've been called a power gamer for just multiclassing.  It all stemmed from a horribly bad DM who ran a high-powered monty haul campaign that ended terribly.  They've never been able to let go since.  Similar issues with equipment come up as the DM either never gave them anything they could use, or took it away the moment it impeded his storyline. 

The not working together is common.  A lotof groups I've played with don't pay much attention to making a group or PC's, and they all head off separately to make something they've always wanted to play.  That something always ends up being some Mary Sue intended to steal the spotlight they've never had before then, and instead of fighting as a unit they fight as individuals.  Often times they make groups that are completely unworkable due to alignment or other issues.  "I'm playing a holier than thou Paladin that hates filthy Necromancers, and spends his life ridding the world of them.  What are you playing?"  If you guessed the answer was 'a Necromancer', kudos for you.

[Unbeliever]

^ this is part of why I'm committed to the PCs building a party rather than just a character.

Usually this isn't arduous at all:  everyone is building concepts that fit within the context of the campaign, etc., so fitting them together usually takes only a little effort.  Sometimes I've been a bit stymied about how I want to fit something conceptually into a setting, but that is kind of the fun of the game.

[bhu]

For us the problem is that the goober who usually wants to run the campaign refuses to reveal anything about it so we don't 'game the system'.  Which ends up backfiring.  For example our current Call of Cthulhu campaign is a trip to the deep Congo.  Our group is a truck driver, a professional wrestler, a rich dilletante, and a horribly scarred college professor from a former campaign.  Which of these options screams 'will survive a trip to the congo' let alone an adventure.  When he ran Champions he placed horribly arbitrary limits on powers, particularly defensive ones.  He said we could take as much resistance to killing damage as we wanted, but stun was strictly limited because he wanted to be able to knock us out anytime if the plot demanded it.

I have found reasons to be absent from his campaigns.  We switched to card/board games forever, and now they want to dabble with rpg's again despite two of them being unwilling to DM, one of them being spectacularly incompetent (and who admits his campaigns are purely for his enjoyment and no one else's), and one who is of decent imagination, but falls too heavily into grognard territory (and I use grognard in the pejorative sense here).

[wotmaniac]

tl;dr: I don't know that there is one -- I ended up just rambling ... maybe one of y'all can make heads or tails of it.  I think I was right 1.5 years ago: I need new players.

The other thing that jumps out at me is I don't really understand how alignment is being conceived by this prospective DM.  Nobody is allowed to write "good" down on their character sheet.  Yet, everyone has to be "good" in the sense of saving villagers from werewolves and whatever.  How is that supposed to actually work?

Um, I think I may have been unclear: these are 2 different guys in the group:
guy #1: wants to run a game where the players are not allowed to write "good" on their character sheet, because it'll make a single specific down-the-road decision too simple (whatever the hell that's supposed to mean) ;

guy #2: wants to run a game where the characters need to be communally good so that he can properly preach his social commentary (I guess he's wholesale ripping off a particular plot point from a season of Babylon 5 ... I think season 3 or season 4 ... something about nurturing -vs- darwinism ... don't know, never really got in to the show)

guy #2 is younger than the rest of us, and is also fairly noob to the whole DMing thing. 
guy #1 is quite experienced playing RPGs (in general); but has mostly run WW games.


So anyway ....
As a player, #2 is really good at taking direction; so at least that's something.

#1, on the other hand, seems to thrive off of being a contrarian.  Here's some of his "biggest hits":
- undead-creating necromancer, but only after another player decided to play a paladin,
- draegoloth, after someone else decided on a paladin ... after that got shot down, contrived a way to shoehorn in a rakshasa,
- after someone decided to play a mission-from-god undead hunter, #1 rolls up a Dread Necro,
*in the latter 2 cases, there was specific and explicit instructions that the party was to be cohesive and make sense on its face -- i.e., develop the party first, then start working out characters.
- after I worked-up a summoning-focused spirit shaman (read: minionmancer) for #2's game, he tosses up a dedicated construct crafter.  So I scrapped the concept to do something else that didn't have so much competing overlap.
- I've worked up 2 characters for #1's prospective game, and both of them have been shit on with some offensively-irrational b.s., and he keeps moving the goalposts every time I try to make adjustments to make the character(s) more appropriate to what he wants to do (though he has left that quite vague, and he tap-dances around probing questions)
I've tried the subtle approach when trying to address things.  I've also taken the direct-reasoning-yet-non-confrontational approach. 
Nothing.
All that is left is to be in-his-face confrontational about it; but there's one thing getting in my way -- he's otherwise a really nice and rather demure kinda guy.  Away from game, #1 is a really nice and accommodating guy, and not a total dick.  And we've become quite good friends over the last several years ... and I worry that the "hey m*therf*cker" approach may be a bit too hurtful for him (especially since he's been blindsided with a messy divorce process this year). 
I mean, I'm sure he'd get over it; and once he actually fully realized the full effect his behavior has on people, he'd probably feel real bad and go out of his way to change.   .... For a while; until he felt comfortable that the "issue" had died down enough for him to try to start backsliding.

Goddamned, this is infuriating.

As for guy #2's game, I'm going to broach the issue with his concept tonight .... take the roundabout way of making him think that he came to the proper realization on his own. 
I actually feel bad for him .... he realizes how shallow his games generally are, and I think that he's simply trying to make an honest (albeit misguided) effort to add some more conceptual "depth" so that he can "catch up" to the "sophistication" of the rest of the group.
Hell, I don't even know what ....

[Unbeliever]

Oh, yeah, that makes much more sense, I thought #1 and #2 were constraints for the same game.

Given your friendship with Guy #1, I'd give it another go either over a beer or via email, or something like that.  I'd go for blunt but not overly confrontational.  Something to the effect of "I'm trying to be a good player here, but I feel like you're moving the goalposts on me and not giving me some room to make my way in this game ... let's try and work something out logically." 

As a player, though, #1 sounds like the heights of dickery. 

With regards to #2, what do you mean by "shallow" here?  I am a big fan of simple = good, and then letting complexity, to the extent it is warranted or desired, emerge organically.  Such things just tend to happen during play with reasonably engaged people around the table.  They will glom onto an NPC or a conflict and so on.  I don't always go that way, but I find that front-loading a campaign often does more harm than good.

[wotmaniac]

Oh, yeah, that makes much more sense, I thought #1 and #2 were constraints for the same game.

Yeah, that might actually warrant somebody getting kicked in the junk.

With regards to #2, what do you mean by "shallow" here?

Well, by his own admission, he views D&D as simply the combat engine that serves as the platform for "an excuse a go kill something".  Plot is that thing which keeps his interest long enough to get him between killings; and if his killings are linked in a way that makes sense, bonus.
When he DMs, his games are VERY linear -- "here's the reason y'all are going to go kill things; and here is the first place y'all need to go to kill a thing".

I wish I were exaggerating.
In his defense, he's grown up playing video games, and has only started playing table-top in the last few years.  Top that off with the fact that his first couple of DMs seriously deserve to have WotC come to their houses and confiscate their books.  I asked him why he even kept playing, given some of the nightmare stories he's told me, and he's like "well, it seemed like it could be a really fun game if I could find a DM that happened to not be functionally retarded", followed up with "if it weren't for finding you, I would have given up on the hobby".

but I find that front-loading a campaign often does more harm than good.

you mean like with too much opening exposition?
I'm willing to concede that I may be guilty of that from time to time.

[Unbeliever]

re:  Front-Loading
I mostly meant world- and plot-building.  I am happily willing to read up to 50 pages before the start of the campaign.  This is my personal limit, which I feel is appallingly generous.  But, in most cases, I find that it detracts rather than helps.  The exceptions have been some people I know who are great GMs, and who also knew their players really really well.

For newer, less confident GMs especially, I aim for the one sheet of paper approach.  You should be able to convey the feel of the game, what's going on in it, what sorts of inspirations are behind it, in a paragraph or two.  So, yeah, maybe not much opening exposition, either I suppose. 


re:  Linear and Video Game Style
I'm actually not against a lot of this approach.  The trick is to invest the conflicts with some sort of emotion and motivation.  In my humble opinion, the trick is to realize that all the "gamist" rewards -- loot, XP, tactical combat, seeing your enemies driven before you by luck and wit -- are still there.  But, they just under the "skin" of the plot and character motivations. 

The preceding may be hopelessly abstract, but let me say this.  I would be extremely happy with a campaign set in and inspired by the games Diablo 1 & 2.  We've done this a couple of times among my buddies, though for practical reasons it's never really taken.  Diablo is easily one of the most video gamey of video game settings, and it's very straightforward:  you run around murdering obvious monsters and taking the stuff that falls down.  But, it has a distinctive feel, so you're not just cutting through cardboard sets of stats in an endless quest to scribble things down on a character sheet, and the world has a distinctive feel. 

And, on top of that, all the characters should have motivations for the beloved murder - loot - murder cycle.  I guess what I'm trying to say is that fairly linear "go here and kill these guys b/c they are bad" isn't really all that bad a thing.  Good players will, if given half a chance, come up with compelling interesting motivations to do just that (that's a big part of why they rolled characters in the first place), and good GMs will give them enough tools (world description, the occasional flavorful NPC, monsters that horrible and stabworthy) and enough space (not smothering them, and "ok, I hadn't thought of an ancient order of wizards hellbent on safeguarding forbidden knowledge, but it's a cool backstory so poof, here they are") to do so. 

That's based on my observations at least.  Sorry if that's a little rambly ...

[ZhonLord]

The other thing that jumps out at me is I don't really understand how alignment is being conceived by this prospective DM.  Nobody is allowed to write "good" down on their character sheet.  Yet, everyone has to be "good" in the sense of saving villagers from werewolves and whatever.  How is that supposed to actually work?  The character options are kind of very tightly constrained.  Your only option is characters who are forced to act "good" for some reason -- payment, particular attachment to this community, long con, etc.  But, then, are those characters really community-oriented?  Is Zhon Lord's gnome dread necro community-oriented?

Actually, he worked really well for party interaction and community stuff.  He just did things on the side when no one was looking (i.e. staying behind in the room with the Necromancer corpse and using a Resurrection scroll to bring him back, tell him to lay low for a while, and spread the word about joining forces with their brethren).  He worked with the party and interacted with them freely because they were his best chance at finding more necromancers (being a bunch of adventurers and all), so he had every reason to keep them alive.  And as I said before, saving towns and cities gives one a certain "protected" reputation should anything unpleasant come to light.

All that is left is to be in-his-face confrontational about it; but there's one thing getting in my way -- he's otherwise a really nice and rather demure kinda guy.  Away from game, #1 is a really nice and accommodating guy, and not a total dick.  And we've become quite good friends over the last several years ... and I worry that the "hey m*therf*cker" approach may be a bit too hurtful for him (especially since he's been blindsided with a messy divorce process this year). 
I mean, I'm sure he'd get over it; and once he actually fully realized the full effect his behavior has on people, he'd probably feel real bad and go out of his way to change.   .... For a while; until he felt comfortable that the "issue" had died down enough for him to try to start backsliding.

Have you considered simply talking to him away from the game?  If he's that nice a guy, catching him when he's BEING nice might make it easier to get across what the issue is without the "Hey ***hole" approach.

Pretty muchunrelated, but where are Jagged Edges and Barbed Wire from?

Honestly I don't remember which source he used, thought it was Savage Species but I didn't see it there.  I do know that it was 3.5 and our DM allowed it, outside of that... sorry.

[wotmaniac]

Have you considered simply talking to him away from the game?  If he's that nice a guy, catching him when he's BEING nice might make it easier to get across what the issue is without the "Hey ***hole" approach.

I've tried.  The last dread necro he made (which was in response to someone else playing a mission-from-god undead destroyer), I mentioned that was a dick move ... in a non-confrontational way.  When he wanted to play the draegoloth-then-rakshasa in response to someone else playing a paladin, I did kinda put him on the spot a little, asking him how he rationalizes that making sense as "cohesive party", as per character creation guidelines.  His response was "I don't know; I'll pull something out of my ass to make it work".  And when it came down to it, all he gave was "I got psychic chirurgery-ed or something ... good enough".  DAFUQ?!  I pulled him aside and asked him why he insists on being a dick like that, and he's like "well, I just like to have an interesting party dynamic".  Apparently, he doesn't understand the difference between "interesting" and "incoherent".  Apparently, to him, "interesting" also means "immersion-shattering".  Furthermore, after seeing it from him for 7 years, I can promise you that it is certainly no longer interesting.

But when he runs a game, he insists on ramming down the pregame guidelines with an iron fist (and worse).  The hypocrisy -just by itself- is infuriating.


So I scrapped my character and decided to give him a dose of his own medicine.  I've decided to play a pixie (he vehemently hates pixies, on general principle).  My pixie's driving life goal will be to teach his character "the magical power of friendship" (*note: he hates that kind of stuff even more than he hates pixies).

It was either that, or make a BFC-mobility caster who "inadvertently/accidentally" keeps his constructs from being able to contribute.  But I'm not that much of a dick. 

[bhu]

Uf you wanna be truly dickish go pixie/barbarian/frenzied berserker.  Cue up the greater invisibility before activating frenzy.