ccs
41st lv DM
I'd think the crime here has been committed by the DM. Clearly the players are indicating that they aren't interested in the plot you've cooked up.
What are the biggest RPG crimes?
I'd think the crime here has been committed by the DM. Clearly the players are indicating that they aren't interested in the plot you've cooked up.
I
Immortal Sun
Guest
The DM isn't here to present an infinite number of sufficiently satisfying plot hooks, and there are plenty of tales of players who simply refuse to bite. No matter how well, how interesting, how many hook you create, you can't make everyone happy.
We all know that guy. The guy who, no matter what, has to go left. The party could be in the middle of a quest, in the depths of a dungeon, but nope, this guy decides it's time for a new, completely irrelevant direction!
If we've all sat down and agreed to play a published module, this is totally inexcusable. If we've all sat down to play the DMs homebrew, then it is doubly inexcusable to not at least take a nibble.
Imaculata
Hero
I don't think that's entirely fair. This sort of issue can also come up when running a published adventure. If you and your players all agree to sit down and play a published adventure, then you expect your players to not run away from it. If you decide to play a campaign revolving around killing a dragon, the players shouldn't be running off in the opposite direction.
Plus, she didn't even dress up in evil cult robes, like a normal D&D player does. Put some effort in!
(It's kind of bad that I actually get this reference.)
dragoner
KosmicRPG.com
Everyone can get it now:
https://www.chick.com/products/tract?stk=0046
Though interestingly enough, if one searches for it, it is listed as:
Dark Dungeons is possibly the most widely distributed piece of anti-game propaganda in the history of gaming.
By the Escapist.
Ralif Redhammer
Legend
Definitely. I will work with my players to come up with stuff they want to do. I will account for PC agency and just outright ask them “what do your characters want to do next?”
But there used to be this guy, who, even after all that, in mid-adventure, would decide his character wanted to go do something else. Harass people in a tavern, investigate the local cemetery, interrogate the local officials about their legal system. Why, one time, he even tried to walk away from the main quest of the entire campaign when there weren’t as many other players around to countermand him.
It’s all about grinding the game to a halt to focus on their character. The whole game has to stop while they go off and do their thing, or while the rest of the group has to convince them to go along with what everyone else already decided to do.
That particular player, for a number of reasons, is no longer someone I game with.
But there used to be this guy, who, even after all that, in mid-adventure, would decide his character wanted to go do something else. Harass people in a tavern, investigate the local cemetery, interrogate the local officials about their legal system. Why, one time, he even tried to walk away from the main quest of the entire campaign when there weren’t as many other players around to countermand him.
It’s all about grinding the game to a halt to focus on their character. The whole game has to stop while they go off and do their thing, or while the rest of the group has to convince them to go along with what everyone else already decided to do.
That particular player, for a number of reasons, is no longer someone I game with.
Ratskinner
Adventurer
I don't know if I'd call these crimes....more like sins, but man they annoy me.
1) Failure to pay enough attention to the plot to even vaguely know what's going on.
2) Not having the faintest clue how to mechanically play your character.
3) Not being honest with yourself about your play priorities.
4) As GM, failing to adopt mechanics to support the type of play your trying to evoke.
1) Failure to pay enough attention to the plot to even vaguely know what's going on.
2) Not having the faintest clue how to mechanically play your character.
3) Not being honest with yourself about your play priorities.
4) As GM, failing to adopt mechanics to support the type of play your trying to evoke.
Celebrim
Legend
I don't think I understand this one. I think you mean to relate this back to your second point, "enforcing preferred outcomes", but there has never been a time in the history of D&D where the PCs weren't protagonized, and deprotagonizing the PC's as I understand the term is a terrible sin.
PC's are protagonized when they are given advantages relative to ordinary persons in the world and placed in situations where there are adventurous or even heroic possibilities near at hand which they have the resources to overcome the difficulties inherent there of and are allowed to do so.
This is the normal narrative of D&D and always has been.
Breaking that down into components, 1st level PC's have always been uniquely and unusually capable individuals. They are not ordinary, but rather have potential, abilities, combat skill and even gear far in excess of what a randomly selected individual in the fantasy world is likely to have. It is as if we've rather deliberately selected a non-random individual within the fantasy world who is likely to have an adventurous story. This is protagonizing the PC.
Secondly, those same characters are 'coincidently' placed in a time and place where adventures are at hand. We don't start the story in an ordinary time in a place of peace and plenty where heroic conflicts are non-existent or unlikely. Rather, we begin the story with the non-randomly chosen individuals of heroic potential are near at hand to some sort of place or event which provides for them the opportunity to reveal and unlock their heroic potential. It is as if we've of all the persons of the world whom we might focus on, chosen the ones which are most likely to find themselves involved in an adventurous story. This is again protagonizing the PCs.
Finally, of all the 'interesting times' that a person could be involved in or involve themselves in, we've chosen ones where the PC's have at least some chance of success. There are definitely people, even ones with the PC's advantages as PC's, in the believable fantasy world that find themselves suddenly beset by a rampaging ancient red dragon, or a horde of elite hobgoblin cavalry marauders who have no choices in front of them except to die in a futile manner, but we haven't selected those believable persons to be the one whose story we are telling. We might not prevent the PC's from putting themselves into that situation if they insist on foolishness, but we have certainly chosen characters who are in a situation to succeed if they choose to do so. And that is also protagonizing the PCs.
Technically, you could protagonize PCs even if they were 0th level commoners in a placid setting facing only ordinary non-heroic challenges with their ordinary skills. But not only does D&D not do that by its standard rules, but instead has ideas like hit points and PC classes and roll 4d6 take the best three and starting wealth and so forth, but D&D doesn't traditionally do that even with its established procedures of play. Rarely in D&D's history have we seen suggested procedures of play that don't protagonize the PCs - the only exception to D&D specifically protagonizing the PC's I can think of is the infamous period in the early 1990's where TSR for the Forgotten Realms setting came out with a series of heavily story driven adventures where the PCs were not the protagonists, but only henchmen of the protagonists and largely helpless observers of the great deeds of the adventure's true protagonists - all of which were NPCs - and had no ability to actually effect or choose the outcome of the story. That is what it looks like when you deprotagonize the PCs, and ironically that very much was intended to support the game world as cheap novel, and not the game world as a believable fantasy world.
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Celebrim
Legend
It is a minor but hardly mortal sin for the DM to provide only one interesting thing for the players to do. It is a mortal sin for the DM to provide nothing to do.
It is not a sin for a player to be uninterested in the story or opportunities the DM has provided to avail himself of, though perhaps the player and the DM ought to have talked about this a bit more before hand. It is not a sin for a DM and a player to not to be able to come together and agree on a campaign style that they both enjoy. It might be a minor tragedy that they can't come to an agreement, but it's not anyone's fault they have different preferred aesthetics of play.
I fully agree with you though that there is point were a player is fully abusing his agency as player to draw spot light on himself to the detriment of the fun of the group. There is always a player it seems that simply doesn't play well with others and seems to be playing a non-social game all by himself, metaphorically off in his own corner, and often as not seeming to be mostly motivated with disrupting the game everyone else is playing. There is one in just about every group and I have never understood this player at all nor what motivates them. It always seems to me that they consistently make choices that go against even their own presume preferred aesthetic of play, which is presumably something like self-expression and self-validation. I think that they are always trying to create a shining moment of awesome for themselves, but objectively, they act like their motivation, the thing that gives them joy, is having other players upset with them and they end up creating fewer moments where they shine than players with more patience.
Invariably, they go through more characters than the rest of the party combined, because they are always going off alone and poking the bear. They are that guy that wants to solo the killer bunny. They are that guy that charges into the next room all alone, and either pulls the lever or picks up the foozle. Literally, they will lose several characters over the course of the campaign where the rest of the party in character doesn't even know how they died, because they do such a good job of doing their own thing that no one ever finds the body. Invariably, they are the guy that manages to lose their character in a way that they can't even be raised from the dead, because they are just too dead. Their character is the one that always ends up incinerated, dissolved, disintegrated, or shunted through a portal to some far and unhappy dimension because they had to leap before they looked and no one was around to help prevent the catastrophe. I simply don't get it. They are like kids addicted to bitter rather than sweet. It's not even like they ate the Tide Pod and killed themself because it looked like candy. These are people who will ignore the candy to go munch on the contents of the box labelled rat poison even after someone in the group uses Detect Poison to prove that it is poisonous.
If anyone can give me insight into what is going on in these people's minds, I'd appreciate it, because its one of the few great unsolved mysteries I still face as a DM. Generally speaking, you aren't dealing with an unintelligent person. It's not like they are people who simply vastly overestimate how clever they are, because they aren't actually clever. Quite often they are reasonably clever persons, but like the Chimpanzee that can't do math when it involves food, because "Food!", there is something in their personality that repeatedly makes them act stupid when they are RPing.
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Gradine
The Elephant in the Room (she/her)
This. Easily the worst player sin. Literally everything else that has been mentioned in this thread I can deal with, work with, isn't actually a problem for me at all, or is an example of general social dysfunction and not particularly RPG-specific. There are situations or games where a health amount of distrust and antipathy can be a part of the fun (I'm thinking Paranoia here) but in most team-based RPGs this kind of player vs player antagonism is the opposite of fun.
I kind of lump in the "players won't go along with the established plot thread" into this category usually because this tends to only be one player in particular and it's the same type of player as the one mentioned above. They're there to antagonize, to throw a wrench in any and all plans for their own amusement. If the entire party is balking then something has gone very wrong in the setup for the campaign/adventure and both the GM and the players need to take a step back and figure out where the disconnect is and resolve it.
The Crimson Binome
Hero
We're probably not using the term in the same way. If you look at old modules, where everything in the dungeon is written on the map before the PCs are even created, then that's a good example of a protagonism-neutral environment. The challenges exist, as they are, regardless of who faces them. Whether you're level 1 or level 50, those goblins still have 4hp. Whether you're a noble or a mercenary, the NPCs are all individuals with their own agendas and no personal ties to you.
PCs are powerful, but only for what they actually are within the game world. Your fighter might be very strong and very skilled, but the outcome of anything they do is a result of their strength and skill, and not "because they're the protagonist".
PCs are special, because they find themselves in a situation where they can do something interesting. (Granted, it's easier for them to find themselves in that position, because they're more powerful than most people.) That's an entirely-out-of-game framing mechanism, though. It's the premise, from which events flow; and no matter how contrived the premise is, that doesn't affect how the narrative moves from that point.
Protagonism, as I use the term, refers to a specific form of meta-gaming where the GM treats PCs differently in-game because they're PCs. If you're playing as The Chosen One, and you get involved in crazy shenanigans because everyone knows you're The Chosen One, then that's one thing. If you're playing as Just Some Guy, and you get involved in crazy shenanigans because you coincidentally look exactly like The Chosen One with a slightly different haircut, then that's protagonism. If you make it to the end of the dungeon, and it turns out the Darth Vader knock-off who was trying to take over the world was secretly your brother, then that's protagonism.
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