GM gripes about players..

It has a set penalty on his stats and sanity; but it's temporary (ie: he can sleep it off); unlike the permanent damage done by seeing mythos shit first hand. One spell, unless he is trying to use a multi hit thing on an entire squad, isn't going to drive a fully rested PC with good Wisdom (and we all have good Wisdom) insane.

And every member of the party, minus the British insurance salesman who nearly went into a catatonic state when we had to fight cult commandos and Libyan rebels to get away (long story), is pretty much conditioned to "mundane" death. He has come very close to hitting 0 SAN through spells but has gotten lucky and rolls and knows when to stop.

His character also has 6 chemical addictions (alcoholism, heroin, aspern (eating and snorting) and other crap) that's is going to ruin his liver or his mind once we get out of range of a pharmacy to buy from/rob. I've suggested, in private, that the GM start enforcing CON damage for overdosing as a way to bring him in line.

edited 1st Jun '11 11:53:13 PM by Rationalinsanity

My players are generally pretty reasonable, but a few years ago, they went through a period of intense hatred of "railroading", either real or perceived. I once had an exchange that went almost exactly like this:

Me: So, was your character born in this town, or are you a traveler?

Player: STOP RAILROADING ME!!!

Me:...

To be fair, I guess he could have hatched from an egg, or maybe he could have moved to the town as a small child. Besides that, I'm not really sure what options I was limiting.

Ahhh anti-railroading mentality. Both as a player and as a DM, I prefer there to be plenty of rails. "Player Agency" strikes me as an excuse to avoid having an actually fun session, rather than something useful in and of itself. You know, the kinds of dungeons that have needless twists and turns that don't really do anything meaningful, and due to limited game time, you can't exactly explore the entire dungeon, so it just leads to a "Oh the path not taken" vibe. BLEH!

To be fair, railroading is quite common with G Ms...actually in my experience its the biggest mistake new G Ms make story-wise. That said, wow that person needs to loosen their sphincter a bit.

As I said, there's a reason people get sick of being railroaded. Because it happens so damn often. While I'll grant that accomplishing goals is an important part of gaming sessions...establishing said goals is a give-and-take between players and the GM in a successful game.

It really depends on what type of game you're trying to run/play in. As long as everyone is informed from the beginning and on the same page, Perma-Railroading actually isn't even a problem.

Naah, the problem isn't railroading in-and-of itself, it's bad railroading.

In essence, every DM railroads. He wants his players to play the adventure he's written up. Many players are willing to meet the DM halfway on this, as long as he provides a good reason. The easiest reason I've found is money. Stick a big sack of gold at the end, and your players will merrily be led around by the nose.

Outside of that, the trick is subtle railroading. Instead of burning every bridge out of town except the one that heads west, have them find clues that it'd be good to go west, and in their best interests. Or just stick a bit sack of gold at the end. Really, that's the universal motivation. Money.

Ka-CHING!

Hell, just give them a job/quest/rumor about something in X place, which is in the direction you want them to go. That works outstandingly well for my players.

I tend to find that that's the kind of thing players will complain about-the only incentives are the ones I want them to undergo.

I just stopped bothering a long time ago. The plot is this way, if you want a game with plot, you go that way. If you don't like "railroading" then find a different campaign.

Of course, I've stopped running campaigns since my father died-it's hard to get up the energy to roleplay these days.

The best DM I ever played with was very good at subtle railroading. As in, laying track just ahead of the party around in a circle to where he needed us to get to, if we weren't going there on our own.

The main adventure he had planned was a dungeon crawl west of town to find an artifact, but we were more interested in going east and killing the dragon? Fine, he let us go east, but everything we found out about the dragon indicated that we'd get blorched big time if we went in without stronger magical weapons and a particular trinket or two. And just coincidentally, there were always rumors of a cache of magical weapons and trinkets in that dungeon that's west of town.

We decide to go hire on with the lord of the next town north? Same deal, we'd get there and find something that indicated that going to the dungeon first would be a really, really good idea.

edited 22nd Jun '11 2:16:19 PM by Madrugada

Now I can finally say that my Dark Heresy campaign is over. Another person has started a DeathWatch game and I am playing. His first session was "meh", but hopefully he'll grow into it. He's a first time GM.

TL;DR version: one of my players is a stickler about historical accuracy to a point where it detracts from the game.

The insufferable jackass:

One of the guys in my group is especially annoying; I call him The History Buff(oon). He's a history teacher and a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism in real life, with a special love for the Medieval period. Gaming is largely an extension of this interest, but he's never quite gotten it through his head that the game doesn't take place in Europe in the year 1334, or that anything that isn't "period" is not, in fact, a mistake that needs to be rectified.

For example, say the party is fighting an NPC armoured with full plate and a tower shield, and armed with a scimitar. This guy sees this as wrong; he's compelled to bring the game to a halt, explaining to me that historical knights armored in such a fashion used arming swords, or flanged maces, or warhammers. It honestly does not occur to him that neither I nor anyone else gives a damn about how all the participants in "the Battle of Derp a Derp" were equipped; that I just gave the NPC a scimitar because I wanted him to have a high crit chance. It's a mistake, and it must be corrected.

Keep in mind, he has no problems with the anachronistic conventions inherent in vanilla fantasy. Armored knights and Shaolin(ish) monks coexisting in the same region? Lampshade! Elves having a vastly longer lifespan than humans and a stable culture that stretches back thousands of years, yet being stuck at the same technological level as humans? Handwave! Ancient temples containing purely mechanical traps that function after hundreds of years with no maintenance? Refuge in audacity! These anachronisms are fine with the guy, because they're Gary Gygax's anachronisms. But anytime I introduce something that threatens his expectations of Medieval Fantasy, he panics.

Last campaign I let him play in, the trigger was bicycles. I figured that in a digesis where the party occasionally fought golems made out of clockwork, it wasn't too farfetched that someone had come up with attaching an articulated chain to a wheel and axle, and bikes could exist. Not your modern day Huffy, mind; I figured without aluminum or fiberglass they'd be heavy bastards, and without vulcanized rubber to make the tires, they'd be a bumpy ride. But I decided that primitive bikes would exist, and that they'd become popular with the wealthy due to novelty value in certain regions.

My players found at about this via Knowledge local checks when they got to these regions, and saw a foppish guy cruise by on one. Most of them thought it was cool; one guy thought of buying one, pending further information regarding whether he'd be able to make the Ride checks. But my History Buff(oon) was livid. He launched into an 11 minute rant (I timed it) about all the technological breakthroughs that proceeded the bicycle, and how it made no sense that bikes existed without those also existing. Never mind that there's no correlation between the skills required to make gunpowder or bifocals, and those required to attach the aforementioned articulated chain to the wheel and axle. Never mind that the progress of technology on our planet was largely a matter of happenstance, and the game didn't take place there. No, he knew that history dictates that hypodermic needles proceed bicycles, and any digesis where they don't is a land of anarchy where all laws of reason and causality had broken down.

The real bitch of it was, in the campaign where this went down, his character was a Warforged. The guy who won't shut up about the shit that doesn't belong in the Medieval world... is playing a robot.

The single redeeming virtue:

Like I said, he is quite well versed in history, and while I'm not as... passionate about the subject as he is, our interests are not dissimilar. When I do include historical details to try to create a sense of authenticity, I like having one player who gets it. It's nice having one guy who doesn't need me to explain to him what exactly a seneshal does, or who understands what the bar sinister on the NPC mercenary's shield conveys. He'd be my favorite player, if he'd just loosen up a bit and stop second guessing me.

Knights favoured longswords over other swords for several centuries, actually.

Anyway, yeah, D&D or whatever isn't history. Despite being a passionate historian-in-training myself, I get aggravated by people that do that as well.

it's baton sinister.

Also, I'm getting pissed off at my players. Being suspicious of the employer in Shadowrun is understandable, but there are limits. Getting a hint about what the job is shouldn't really make you pointlessly drive across the city checking if ten self-storage warehouses are really self-storage warehouses and if there's something special about them.

edited 7th Mar '12 11:02:21 AM by NotSoBadassLongcoat

How many times has Mr. Johnson shafted this group, exactly?

If things are going right, every time.

ZERO. He just appears to know a lot about them (although they should notice that some things are off, like he doesn't know their real names with the exception of the hacker who has a legit SIN, or thought they haven't recruited the burglar yet only because he didn't turn his new commlink on nor checked his new ID).

edited 8th Mar '12 9:46:20 AM by NotSoBadassLongcoat

I didn't mean that specific Mr Johnson, just the generic string of Mr Johnsons that cyberpunk games are noted for. If their last three employers have shafted them, it makes sense to be suspicious of future employers.

@Longcoat: this is what players do, sir. I've specifically used an honest employer to fuck with player groups before...because they never believe that the employer doesn't intend to screw them.

In one case, they decided to "do unto him before he does unto us", which bought them a shitload of trouble they weren't prepared to deal with.

In ATP (my latest campaign that died horribly), every single employer-EVERY GODDAMNED ONE-was trustworthy... wait, that's totally a lie.

Rudolf tried to kill them, and Kain was eventually going to as well. Oh hey, Amadeus too come to think of it. Hmmm... so, of the six faction heads, three out of six of them were boss fights somewhere later on down the line. And Azall, while not betraying them, was basically an asshole who kept creating semi-apocalyptic scenarios and then saying "Well, you don't *have* to fix it but if you don't..."

Dougan and Elminker (yes, a blatant Forgotten Realms joke) were pretty upfront though.

Do you mean Asmodeus or is Amadeus a diffrent character.

edited 9th Mar '12 8:55:27 PM by Envyus

I assume the character is named after Mozart.

That he is.

It actually goes back to the GPF comic strip, where Amadeus was the name of Patrick Stewart's secret identity in some secret society. Since Amadeus, in the canon I use him in, has all of two character traits (He's bald and a telepath), Amadeus was just a reference to Patrick Stewart (it also turned out to be a not-terrible name).

edited 9th Mar '12 9:18:49 PM by TheyCallMeTomu

I have exactly one complaint about exactly one of my players, who will go unnamed for now. He's fine when he's there - hell, the guy wrote about 3 pages of backstory - but he hasn't contacted me for over two weeks and I have no idea what's going on. I think if he misses the next session I'll just deposit his character in a city somewhere while the party does its own thing.

The really annoying thing about all this is that he's the only remaining tank in a party full of extremely squishy people.

Can't Evii contact him. He said he was on skype the day before. I honestly want to know what happened to him as well.