Adversarial GMing
Unpopular opinion alert, but I happen to enjoy adversarial GMing. Not in the full-on “I must defeat the players at all costs” kind of way though. That kind of power tripping ain’t my scene. I’m talking about the tongue in cheek “just bustin’ your balls” style.
“Shucks darn! Looks like I miss again.”
“Wow. Maybe your dude shouldn’t have multiclassed commoner. The goblins spend their next action feeling embarrassed for you.”
That kind of interaction goes both ways. Players get a kick out of steamrolling supposedly difficult encounters, and there’s nothing quite as satisfying as shouting, “Eat it!” at your local man behind the curtains when the dice fall in your favor. This is all personality-based though. It’s a style that works for close friends rather than randos on Roll20, and I certainly wouldn’t hit strangers with smack talk. What I’m saying is that, if you know your players and if it’s all in ironical good fun, you’re absolutely golden. The trouble comes creeping in when you start taking the adversarial approach seriously.
Recently, I met a friend of a friend who told me about his game. Dude was a new GM, and was stoked to talk about his first campaign. Unfortunately, he was having some trouble dealing with the resident that guy. Apparently this dude was guilty of quarterbacking, and actually failed to take the hint even after this GM told him “you’re why new players avoid D&D.” That sort of real talk is fine, even if it falls on the harsh side. The problem was the ultimate solution.
“Yeah. He got in a gladiator fight and attacked the humans instead of the monsters. It was one stupid thing too many. The gladiators focused him down, then they gave him the coup de grace.”
My first thought was that, if I were running that combat, I might have allowed the player to successfully team up with the ogres. It’s an unconventional move, but it could lead to some fun hijinks.
“You save Grunk and Runk! You honorary ogre now!”
When I remarked that death seemed like a harsh penalty for a fairly innocuous player choice, this GM explained his rationale. In short, it was a good way of getting the player to quit without asking him to leave.
We made this point way back in Personality Conflict, but it bears repeating: No amount of punishing bad behavior in-game will help. You’ve just got to talk it out like a human being. I mean sure, there’s a chance that your problem player will take the hint and bow out, but there’s a better chance that you’re going to have an argument anyway. Only it’s going to be over your in-game actions rather than his out-of-game obnoxiousness.
If the dude in question is a real friend, your relationship will survive the conversation. If he responds to, “We should see other gamers,” with, “I hate your face and am never talking to you again,” then you’re probably better off without him. You don’t owe anyone your precious free time, and there is no shame in uninviting a problem player from the group. Just be straight up about it, and solve out-of-game problems with out-of-game solutions.
Question of the day then. Have you ever encountered adversarial GMing out in the wild? Was it innocent bustin-your-balls fun, or did you feel like the GM was making a power play? Let’s hear all about it down in the comments!
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I bring a update for my campaign
I lost another player due to life rearings it’s ugly head and I am down to 1 veteran player left and 2 newbies that just joined a week ago. So back onto the interviewing note pad I have prepared and into the reddit and roll20 LFG I go!
Total players lost during 2018 drum roll please.
cue drum roll
20 players!!!!
My determination to continue this campaign will never die!!!!
Congrats, you lost more players in 2018 then I have running Tomb of Horrors, and I’ve ran it 3 times. Keep perservering man, that’s dedication!
Yo. That’s a helluva turnover rate! How do you structure a campaign with so many interchangeable protagonists? I mean, I’m guessing you have to do more episodic stuff than “fulfill your destiny” storylines…?
“Fulfilling your destiny?” more like like survive your current contract and try to make your checks versus being horrified and losing your sanity.
The take I have upon the player is that the world is much much bigger than they are what with the world having already ‘ended’. And if they solve one problem two, three will pop up.
So they end up being a band of mercenaries doing what they can to make the world a better place while pursuing their own goals.
The fighter wants to make a armor out of a lutonian beasts skeleton? He has to convince the party to go their and do it.
Research a artifact? Easily done while on the road.
It’s a very sandbox world so at least when players change out I can easily shove another player in.
:V
I have the firm belief that it enhances the players enjoyment if they think the DM is out to get them. If they know you will laugh and stick a skull sticker on the outside of your DM screen when their character gets turned into a fine mist, it makes the successes sweeter (and means they are free to gloat when they one-shot your boss on round one… again). I very much want to see my players characters survive and succeed, but I am also going to cheer when I land the critical on the mage, and laugh when they blunder foolishly into the gruesome death trap. That said, most of my players have been gaming with me for ~20 years now, so we know it is all in jest, and not deadly serious.
Exactly what I’m talking about! Having a villain to fight against is rewarding, both in-game and out-of-game.
That said, it’s so important to remember that you and your players are only playing along with the adversarial thing. They know you’re secretly rooting for them, you know they know it, but it’s fun to pretend as if it were otherwise.
I tend to be the opposite: I will groan and look at my players with sympathy when the bbeg lands a crit on them, or they all flub a perception check. I also try to play along if the players outsmarted me, whether actually or all as I planned. I prefer if the players remember who the true out of game enemies are: the dice!
I’ve got a class right now where, on the first day, a key question was “can dice be performers?” The jury is still out.
While i have had my old gm joke about killing me in some way for the shit my guy pulls in most sessions we played, except when elliot the unlucky, he never actually focused me to hard for anything but an occasional quick joke. This was in large part due to the fact that he would rather we just discuss ways to nerf my guys together. Honestly, the one campaign he really should have potentially done something like this, a d20 modern campaign in which my jetpack flying scientist skillmonkey guy was also our second best damage dealer, and was by far the tankiest guy, having maybe gone below half health once the entire campaign, despite often walking into the middle of enemy group to distract them from my allies, was probably the one where my dm was nicest to my guy, letting me do stuff like fly onto a rocket heading for our space ship to reprogram it to turn around, or hijacking a jet in flight by getting in front of it and going just fast enough that breaking through the cockpit windshield when i collided with it wouldnt kill me. Man that system was unbalanced as hell, but the the lack of info on some things definitey did help with a lot of fun adlibbing on everyones part
Your GM:
http://www.quickmeme.com/img/27/27546fe88bf0ec2fe82404d9e139c87e281fa54ebe683049177232cba5497877.jpg
Thats not untrue:).
I’ve been in a position where I felt the GM was specifically targetting my character with “misfortune”. It ranged from mild things, like NPCs constantly bullying me… to less mild things, like killing off a family member to an out-of-CR-bounds devil thing in front of me… to more upsetting things, like interpreting the rules against my favour and killing my character… twice.
I can go on and on with the list of things he annoyed me with, but the point is, the more the campaign went on, the more obvious it was that he didn’t like me. He had his reasons, which I respect – what I don’t respect, though, is his decision to drag me along, while I was unaware of how he felt.
He didn’t kick me out or even talk to me about it. He just sat there, arguing about random shit and keeping score. In the end, I had to go start a discussion myself, about how I felt he didn’t like me. And that’s bullshit. If a GM doesn’t want a player in their group, they stand up and talk to them about it. Any other way is just cowardly and disrespectful.
In this scenario, you are Fighter. And in this case, Fighter is not the jerk.
No passive aggressive malarkey hiding behind the rules. Treat you players fairly. These are rules every GM can live by!
It’s weird to read that sentence – “Fighter is not the jerk”. It seems completely unheard of!
In this one, very specific circumstance….
As a GM, I had sort of an inversion of this, where I unintentionally made a player feel like they were being targeted. (Actually two players, for different reasons.) What really happened was that the PC was bitten by a ghoul, who the PCs then captured and interrogated. When I realized that the players were very interested in the information the ghoul had to offer (they knew nothing about what was going on, and believed he knew where a ship to get them off the island they were stranded on was), I had the ghoul try to leverage this and offer to provide the information in exchange for his freedom and another bite of the PC. Both the PC and player freaked out, but negotiated it down to a few drops of her blood (she COULD have said no) and let the ghoul go. Off-screen, I gave him two levels of Ranger with that PC’s race as Favored Enemy, and generally made him her archnemesis, doing things like winking at her and licking his teeth when they next met, which tended to freak her out. This also lead to things like the Neutral Evil PC’s player suggesting that if they needed to, the party could bribe the gang of ghouls by feeding the other PC to them, since word of her taste had gotten around. (It also seemed reasonable that an elven aasimar would taste pretty good, if one was into humanoid flesh.) This also lead to this moment, between that NE character and an INT 8 PC: https://imgur.com/ydLD3ys
Eventually, though, I became concerned that I was overdoing this and it seemed like I was singling out this one player/PC, so I made sure to speak to the player and ensure that she understood that I was just doing this because it had led to a fun rivalry and memorable villain, and the player said that she was okay with it, and seemed to like freaking out about the ghoul in a sort of watching-a-horror-film sort of way. Plus, it made the moment when the PC hit that ghoul with a sneak attack charge and took him down with enough damage that I ruled she sliced his head off feel pretty great. (She then kicked that head at another enemy, doing 1d4 damage.)
At the same time, though, while all of this was going on, I ended up neglecting another player, who felt as though he was being ignored (his attempt to Intimidate the captured ghoul, for example, got nothing, yet the other player’s mild negotiation got a whole bunch of information). So we had to talk that out and patch that up as well.
So, the moral of the story is: Picking on a player (even if it is fun) can be bad both for that player if they aren’t liking it and for other players if they feel they are being ignored.
No harm no foul on your part. When you can justify it within fiction, you’re golden. It’s when rulings and mechanics start going against the player that people really begin to feel targeted.
I’m with ya on everything in this post… Friendly Adversarial GMing (and of course Players trying to perform out on the bleeding edge of awesome) and keeping it real with Real Talk. You let the crap Players know when they’re crap and the excellent Players know they are excellent, you reward Players when they pull out all the stops and out do you and of course let them taste wet dirt when you grind them back down into the mud.
Ya know, it’s that sense of good sportsmanship that I love most about GMing. 😛
So I have an instance of being the jerk and of being jerked.
First was being Jerked, I was playing a ranger on a pirate ship and all I was interested in was being able to shoot as far as possible, I wasn’t out for damage I just wanted to be able to snipe at a -10 I could shoot a target at 3000 feet away his normal range being a good 300 feet. I later wanted to get a flying mount as a ranger but I ran into a series of issues
* You can’t see that far away so you’re not allowed to shoot at them with your big negative to hit (Took Beastmaster and a falcon to see that far)
*You can’t shoot a target that way (Arc’d the shots like an actual archer and took more negatives)
*You can’t get a mount big enough to fly you around(went to the island of giant creatures he established that we had found and trained a fruit bat)
*You don’t have food to support such a creature(Used the giant fruit there we’d been harvesting and pointed out that we had bigger guys on the ship we fed)
*The fighter of the group is doing mounted combat and was given a giant crow that breathes lightning as per the spell Lightning Bolt and the ability would go up as the player leveled so essentially got a wizard for a mount and was told that by going for mounted combat I was stepping on the player’s toes (I argued the fighter was stepping on my toes because animals was my thing and had to jump through the aforementioned hoops to get where I was)
Throughout the entire game I was told no for pretty much every action. Every item had to be reviewed so as to not be overpowered all animal companions were closely reviewed (I wasn’t allowed to have a small monkey because in his words “I would do something crazy with it”)
Now for me being the jerk. One of my players around level 2 decided they wanted to go about doing one of their powerhouse builds, they had frequently bragged about how skilled they were with power gaming and loved book of the nine swords and such it was their bread and butter. They started building this new character despite me saying that I had no intention of writing their character out as the player tried to say their character could just die or ditch the group which was not in character. So they built this dragonborn (this being pathfinder they were 3rd party) barbarian with a whole host of third party feats each time saying that I didn’t want them to make this character.
I told them they’d be in an upcoming festival, the players elected the mage to fight in the hand to hand combat as magic was allowed . He’s stepped into the ring and I said to him “Across from you is this staggering seven foot tall Silver dragonborn”. The fight has yet to begin but I decided to make it teeny little wizard fight hand to hand against his overpowered dragon. If he makes the wizard win then the dragon looks like it sucks if the dragon wins then the whole party is hurting from the festival loss.
Call me a jerk but I had my limit.
In the case of your flying mount example, I think that some GMs are nervous about power gaming in general. Any time something weird comes up, they get this overwhelming fear that it’s going to derail and overpower their campaign. It’s a question of trust, where the guy behind the screen assumes that a player is purposefully trying to screw with his campaign for the sake of it. Of course, sometimes players really are doing that, so the question of trust goes both ways.
There are two GMs in my group, myself and someone else. We alternate, with one of us GM’ing and the other being a player, and the next week the other way around.
We both like to have some amount of “fun adversity” in our game.
In my case, I mostly like to scare my players by hinting at a ridiculously deadly encounter coming up, then having the encounter being actually manageable. Except sometimes where I make it actually hard. So when I tell them “muahahaha! You are going to all DIE in the next battle! Tremble in fear!”, they know I’m usually joking… but they can never be sure. It keeps them on their toes, and I get to giggle at how paranoid they then act.
The other DM does something similar. One of our player was notorious for dying early in all his campaign, so now it’s a running joke in our group that he’s this DM’s punching bag (he’s not really… but it’s fun to say it is). The other thing this DM has is that he’ll steadily increase the difficulty of his encounters because we’re steamrolling everything, and when he finally gives up, accept that we’re powerful, and gives us a relatively normal encounter, is when we’ll suffer the curse of the Dice Gods and nearly get a TPK.
This is all in good fun, and that’s only because we’re a group of people that know each others, not some randoms.
My favorite version of this is the dreaded Mundane Door encounter.
“I open the door.”
“OK, place your mini. That’s where you’re standing. OK, how exactly are you opening the door?”
*cue cold sweat*
Munchkinry will be met with opponents tailored to your character’s weaknesses.
And thus the cycle of munchkinry continues. *cue Lion King theme*
Did you dump Intelligence because it’s “Useless” in 5E? I hope you like fighting Illithids and Intellect Devourers. I hope you like your character not knowing to not use fire against devils even though you know that out of game because of their abysmal religion checks.
I heard this story from a GM about 8 years ago, but apparently this one guy playing a wizard in his group kept complaining that he wanted a ring of Magic Missile at will. The GM was fed up with hearing about it every time they were around each other.
So the GM gave out this ring of Magic Missile cast at the lowest level. The wizard proceeded to use the ring exclusively and basically ignored other more useful spells. However, what it turned out to be was a Ring of Illusory Magic Missile. When the command word was spoken, it shot out illusions of magic missile.
Basically, the GM placated the player with an item that actually made him more useless in the game, but did not let the player know that it did nothing. Thus I learned that in some games, the GM was playing against the players, rather than empowering them.
I’ve heard of GMs doing this as a softball way of dealing with cheating players, taking damage off the top so to speak. In all cases, the confrontation and out-of-game resolution is my preference.
What is that creature? It looks like it could be either a sasquach, a wookie, or Sweetums from The Muppets
I’ll refer you to today’s tweet: https://twitter.com/ColinStricklin/status/1088819830537490433
Oh man if the GM was arbitrarily increasing the AC of creatures when I was hitting them I would just pack up my stuff and leave.
That was kinda the idea though. Not going to wonder why they feel they need to do this kind of thing to you?
Right there with you. If it makes you feel any better though, Fighter probably deserves it.
The player made a ranger who hated humans. She explained to use during the character creation phase that she really hated humans, was taking favoured enemy humans, and was really glad none of the rest of us were playing humans. We were like ‘Okay, this could be interesting’. It was, after all, an evil campaign.
So, very first session. We walk up to the gates off some town. GM describes the scene. On top of the gate are a pair of guards. “Are they humans?” “Yeah” “Humans must die!” And she immediately began rolling attacks. We ran, and she got off one volley…
Before the guard dropped a caster level 7 fireball on her tiny little first level head.
On the one hand, I can kinda see why the GM did it. She was being a little unreasonable. But on the other, 7th level guards in an evil campaign is a bit much for first level characters to handle. And he missed his shot for a totally awesome prison break adventure.
Hey, the sheriff of my megadungeon’s small town is a 10th level fighter. This stuff happens, especially to low level players!
10 level warrior is simultaneously CR 5 (non-associated class level ruling) and CR 9 (npc class ruling).
When I get in situation like that, I try the challenge to be at least manageable.
Example: the party used a portal and teleported to unknown location, some dwarves’s cavern. Entered 8 dwarves. Normally the dwarves is a friendly race, but the party appeared out of nowhere in the middle of their home, so they demanded the party to surrender, disarm, and follow them for questioning. That would be the right choice, and if the party did this, the misunderstanding would be quickly cleared.
But I’m a fair man. Each dwarf was significantly weaker then any party member. If the party, all 4 of them, decided to fight, they had a good chance to win. But everyone but one of them decided to surrender.
So I draw the map, put his miniature on it, then put all 8 dwarves and say” roll for initiative”. And he rolls last. That makes him nervous. I say: “Each dwarf aims his rifle and shoots.” And the first one misses. Second one too. The guys becomes more nervous, expecting next one to hit. Another miss. They all miss one-by-one. Then I give him my best slasher smile and say: “Your turn.” He takes the dice, he puts the dice back, and he asks: “Can I surrender now?”
Yup. A player was being incredibly annoying both in and out of character and the end result was that he got cursed to have all of his bones turned to jelly. Which killed them in short order. They seemed to get the message as they never returned. Though it didn’t seem like they were upset about it, though I suppose I wouldn’t know as we never really interacted with them again after that.
Wow. Full on “rocks fall” situation. Don’t see that too often IRL!
Well there was technically speaking an enemy that did it, but it was pretty clear they weren’t supposed to have any such power. So yeah.
Just wanted to say that if I was the cleric, and heard that the reason why my lower attack roll hit, when my fellow fighter’s higher attack missed was because the GM thought that the fighter (a tier 5 class) was using an optimized build so that it could contribute in the singular thing they can (damage), I would leave the game.
Now if there was a legitimate reason for his attack to miss (a buff wore out, used an ability as an immediate action to grant itself +4 ac vs 1 attack, had a +4 racial AC bonus vs humans, etc), I would be fine. Of course, if I was told that such is the case, I would probably see about spending my next couple actions to buff the fighter (because tabletop RPG’s are supposed to be cooperative). Besides, everyone already knows that if a tier 1 class (such as a cleric or wizard) really wanted to, they could just solo the encounter, but that wouldn’t be fun, and that is definitely not why I am playing.
Also, as a pedantic power-gamer and rules-lawyer, if the GM or another player (if i am the GM), starts doing shady shit not only will I call them out on it, but I am more than willing to step up my game and escalate the situation if it doesn’t get resolved right there.
And give that dastardly Sasquatch the satisfaction!?
There ya go. Taking the high road!
I generally stick to the rules, since i work hard for consistancy in the world and strange penalties from on high breaks that immersion for my players, who are mostly powergaming monsters. The fighter is Good at fighting, that’s part of the world’s narrative. I start giving him penalties that aren’t backed up by actual events, it starts getting wonky. That being said, I have told a player to roll “Save versus Plot Device.” When he asked what die and modifier that was, I replied “roll 1d4, the DC is 5.” The fact that he actually reached for a d4 before he caught it was priceless. But I am more of a “collaborative storytelling” GM than an adversarial one.
More on topic, I have encountered it before in many times, many different systems, and many different people. It always looks the same though. If there is a weakness built into your character, expect it to turn up every session. If your character is unusually good at something, expect to either meet someone better or be nerfed early. It’s generally not fun and I’ve started actively vetoing people’s “right to GM” once patterns started emerging in my group. The fact that the others in the group agreed with me is evidence enough.
The one that stands out the most though, was Clover. Clover was a superhero in a “powers from from people who escaped this top secret government experiment” setting. Her powers revolved around Luck Manipulation in Mutants and Masterminds. She had the ability to give herself a few bonuses a few times a session, a static “lucky” bonus to defenses, the ability to spend a Hero point to consider any defense roll a natural 20, and a Jinx power that penalized people who failed the save. She also had a little variable called “Subtle” on her powers that said they were completely undetectable. The GM expressed a dislike of Clover from the get-go, cause he didn’t like her non-direct combat resolution. Mainly that she was designed to buff and debuff rather than directly conflict. Clover’s friends were a telekinetic with a full damage imbalance and a Toughness imbalanced regenerating lizard man.
Things kept showing up bad, in that Clover always found the enemies first, and generally away from everyone else. Enemies seemed to be able to detect her Jinx even though I repeatedly brought up the Subtle variable on it, and she drew a crazy amount of fire for someone with no direct combat powers hiding behind cover most of the fight. The worst one though, was when we had to sneak into a military base to rescue some NPCs.
The lizardman literally attacked the front gates, drawing attention away from my stealthy infiltration tactics. Clover is dressed in black, face paint, sneaking through the base with the high modifier that her Luck powers and Stealth skill could muster. The telekinetic had no stealth and refused to hide, instead choosing to walk through the base casually with his hands in his pockets. He encounters two male soldiers making out, who decide he must be the general’s son and in an effort to hide their tryst, lead him to the command post. I encountered the Cthulhu styled monsters with paralyzing tentacles that the military had been using to hunt us, who detected my power usage (which I will remind you was supposed to be undetectable) and beat my stealth check (Which was high, somewhere around 30.) While the resulting chase through the hangar using parkour and the Acrobatics skill to avoid tentacles was fun, the GM literally in the end forced me to be cornered and the telekinetic had to save me. When the telekinetic’s player, who was better friends with the GM than I was, asked him why it was so crazy, the GM replied with “I really didn’t like Kat’s character. It seemed weak.”
I don’t play with that GM anymore, and on the rare events that the guys want to get together with him to play, I typically don’t. I want to play my character. The GM’s job is not to judge whether my character is worthy or not and then decide to try his best to execute her if she is deemed unworthy. it’s to make the game fun.
I’ve repeatedly mentioned a player who I refer to as Galaxy-Brain, most for his dumb decisions. (He was also an unsubtle cheater e.g. most of the attacks he rolled away from the table were crits.) Perhaps the dumbest decision our group ever made was letting him DM.
At one point, our benevolent munchkin decided he would go all-out. I don’t remember what his character was; a cleric with a whip and a talking wasp (familiar?), whose self-buffs and combat maneuvers made her terrifying. GB just started saying she missed on attacks, even when she rolled ~10 higher than everyone else. The player voluntarily retired the character at the first opportunity and played something less disruptive… without GB. actually saying anything about it, of course, because he’s kinda bad at everything I’ve seen him try.
This year I banned a guy from my campaign with a reasoning: “You and another player don’t get along when it comes to tabletop. But you have another campaign, and she hasn’t. So I decided it’s going to be fair if you leaves and she stays.”
That’s a tough call to make. What was the nature of that “don’t get along” relationship?
To clarify, they were friends in real life, but their in-game characters caused a conflict.
They both were cross-playing, and the guy chose to play “anything that moves” lady. She only bothered male characters, but that was also what the girl was playing. Most people just ignored the guy and his lady character, but the girl was extremely annoyed by any attempt to woo her character. At some point she ran out of patience and they get into fight.
Which would be as bad, it the girl didn’t have a dragon, which I gave as a loot at some point of the campaign. Now, my idea of playing is everyone working toward the same goal, and the dragon was here to fight extremely dangerous monster, not for pvp. Obviously, the guy was rect by the dragon, and complained that the fight was not fair. On that I answered, that no one expected him to pick a fight with a person with a mofo dragon. And to rub it in, all players agreed that they are not going to raise his character.
Oof. Yeah man, this sounds like one of those classic “don’t use in-game solution for out-of-game problems” issues. Creative differences are a slightly different beast than character conflicts. Separating the players seems like a good idea at that point.
And if you are wondering why I was giving mofo dragons as a loot, there is a funny story about it.
When I started this campaign, I only had two players, with another one showing interest, but not sure if he gonna find a time to play. So I made a story about three epic artifacts of godly might: the hammer, the dragon, the magic amulet. The players were going to get one each, and if the last one couldn’t play, an NPC would get one artifact instead.
I didn’t expect this game to become that popular. People wanted to join, and at one point I had ten players (managing all of them was a nightmare). So I said: no offense, but I can’t possibly add an epic godly artefact for each of you to this story, it would prolong the game for forever, so let’s just finish the campaign the way I planned it from the start.
I was planning to give them another campaign after this (btw, already finished it last week), distantly connected to the first one, so I think it worked out.
Hmn, this is the first ‘after-comic’ section I’ve come through I feel strongly enough about to comment.
You’ve read the geek social fallacies, before; I know this because you’ve mentioned them. I tend to have strong opinions about categorising or attempting to have standard expectations for behaviour; but…
“We made this point way back in Personality Conflict, but it bears repeating: No amount of punishing bad behavior in-game will help. You’ve just got to talk it out like a human being.”
This is utter garbage.
One of the reasons I rarely game anymore is that most human beings don’t act like ‘human beings,’ do not respond to blunt comments, like:
“You are making player X feel uncomfortable. Stop hitting on them.”
“Don’t bring up plot threads that involve player Y having to get naked.”
“Stop spouting racial slurs at the gaming table.”
“Consider basic hygiene.”
Okay, the last one hasn’t actually been one I’ve had to ask players to respect, before. I’m one of the lucky ones, hardy har har.
The former, however? Happen over, and over, and over, and over again. Rarely directed towards me, but always towards other players. And no amount of ‘valued discussion’ convinces them to get the fuck out of my sessions, because they feel entitled to be present.
So, when I run into a problem player like that, they die repeatedly and without saves, until they get the message that way.
Is it ‘cruel,’ sure, is it against the spirit of geekly brotherhood or whatever – that’s one of those cherished myths that needs to be torched. Most gamers, like most people, are horrible and will find the weakest member of the group to be horrible to, if not stopped.
Sorry, this became a rant.
I’ll finish by saying that I /do/ get where you’re coming from…
And more importantly, I love the comic, the writing, the art.
But I guess I just needed to post an opposing view, here.
Hey sodang! Thanks for the kind words about the comic. Glad to have you along, and I hope to hear more from you in future. It’s always nice to have a counterpoint. 🙂
One of the tough things about writing on TRPGs is the diversity of the surrounding situation. I’ve met folks on here that do PBP, VTT-only, in-person only, in-store organized play events, and even a few large-scale LARP players. I don’t know what your games look like, but my guess that there’s some circumstance where the phrase “get out of my house” or “I’m not gaming with you anymore” won’t work. For my money, I think either one of those is better than trying to resolve bad out-of-game behavior with in-game sanctions.
“Talk it out” isn’t the end point. It’s the place to start. Quitting a bad game or flat-out telling a legit creep they’re no longer welcome are acceptable conclusions. And occasionally, I think they’re necessary.
Hoi again; thanks for bearing with me and understanding I’m not /just/ a grumpy, dour, misanthrope, ahaha! I hope it’s okay if I leave comments from time to time? I know engagement isn’t as nice as extra dosh, but I’d like to give something back.
As a counterpoint to my counterpoint, inspired by your counter-counterpoint, at which point we’ve built a functional tabletop (ideal for gaming!)…
One of the things I’ve been doing for about ten years is asking each and every player ‘how’s my driving?’ after every session. I know I was pretty harsh towards troublemakers up above, but I do believe the /best/ way to avoid scenarios where being harsh is necessary is – an ounce of prevention. Which is hard, when often That Guy doesn’t look or act like That Guy; they’re just a person who gravitates towards bullying or excluding other, more uncertain members.
Anyway!
I find that talking to /everyone/ after a session, and making the issue about me at first, so they’re comfy weighing in before I ask things like ‘is there anything in the session you’d like to change; are you enjoying the session; is anyone or any theme making you feel unwelcome or unsafe?’ Is a good way to get people in.
And one huge advantage of e-gaming I forgot to mention is that it’s a lot easier to make people feel like they aren’t being peer-pressured by bad (or even just unwary!) players by approaching them via e-mail or PM. I realise that just comes back down to what you said in the first place, aha, but – I was feeling sad when I wrote the above, mostly due to bad actors trying to mess with really decent people. As it goes.
Thanks for listening to my DMGM talk, bahaha! The next comment I leave’ll be more silly, promise.
Soliciting feedback is its own can of worms:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/constructive-criticism
Sounds like you’ve got a good system in place though. Another unexpected tally-mark in the “pro e-gaming” column.