Piracy And Other Malfeasance

[Thomas Shey]

It's dark and gritty and plays in to characters having vices, gaining turf and being on the wrong side of the law. That's balanced by the City itself being dark and largely corrupt, so PCs can take a vigilante stance if they don't want to be outright gangsters - still not really a place for heroic pcs

That's entirely compatible with a shades-of-grey campaign.

 

[Reynard]

I wish.

Sadly it is more like:
DM: "So When I say Pirates I'm saying the absolute pure dark evil horror, something close to the TV show "Black Sails".
Player(s) "ok" Spills some Mt. Dew.... (not listening and have never seen the TV show and will never watch it)

No, that is still a Session 0 problem. And, frankly, GM problem -- it is the GM's job to communicate what the campaign is about effectively. Effective communication includes ensuring that the person you are talking to receives and understands the message.

 

[MGibster]

No, that is still a Session 0 problem. And, frankly, GM problem -- it is the GM's job to communicate what the campaign is about effectively. Effective communication includes ensuring that the person you are talking to receives and understands the message.

I've gone over stuff with player characters in session zero and on few occasions had someone who just didn't seem to get it. I told my players to make "normal" characters for a 1930s Trail of Cthulhu campaign and got two police detectives, a newspaper reporter on the crime beat, a medical doctor, and a time traveling fighter pilot. You're astute, so I have no doubt you've noticed one of those isn't like the others. Communication is a two way street. If a player didn't know what Black Sails was they should have asked what the GM meant.

 

[Reynard]

I've gone over stuff with player characters in session zero and on few occasions had someone who just didn't seem to get it. I told my players to make "normal" characters for a 1930s Trail of Cthulhu campaign and got two police detectives, a newspaper reporter on the crime beat, a medical doctor, and a time traveling fighter pilot. You're astute, so I have no doubt you've noticed one of those isn't like the others. Communication is a two way street. If a player didn't know what Black Sails was they should have asked what the GM meant.

Sure. That player needs to go back to the drawing board.

If the whole group fails to create appropriate characters, chances are it is the GM's fault.

 

[Thomas Shey]

No, that is still a Session 0 problem. And, frankly, GM problem -- it is the GM's job to communicate what the campaign is about effectively. Effective communication includes ensuring that the person you are talking to receives and understands the message.

Yeah, at some point if you can't get people on the same page with you, you either get on the same page with them, or look for other players. Trying to brute force your GMing idea into people not into it is a waste of everyone's time--or an excuse to complain about players.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I've gone over stuff with player characters in session zero and on few occasions had someone who just didn't seem to get it. I told my players to make "normal" characters for a 1930s Trail of Cthulhu campaign and got two police detectives, a newspaper reporter on the crime beat, a medical doctor, and a time traveling fighter pilot. You're astute, so I have no doubt you've noticed one of those isn't like the others. Communication is a two way street. If a player didn't know what Black Sails was they should have asked what the GM meant.

Its still a case when the odd-out character pops up you go "Okay, back up. I said normal characters for the time period. A time traveler is not that." (And knowing you, you probably did). You don't just continue along, wait for it to slam into the wall, and then complain.

 

[MGibster]

Its still a case when the odd-out character pops up you go "Okay, back up. I said normal characters for the time period. A time traveler is not that." (And knowing you, you probably did). You don't just continue along, wait for it to slam into the wall, and then complain.

Oh my, no. He didn't start out as a time traveler in session zero but he tried to go there. He said he wanted his character to be a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, but the campaign took place a few years before it even started, and it was at that point he suggested a time traveling fighter pilot. He ended up playing a psychologist named Osirus Thoth Van Roth but after a few sessions I kicked him out of the campaign because of his habitual no shows and tardiness. This particular player was an individual who had a hard time with genre conventions in many other games as well.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I've gone over stuff with player characters in session zero and on few occasions had someone who just didn't seem to get it.

Absolutely!

I dusted off a supers campaign I ran in the 1990s for a group in Austin using HERO for a different group in D/FW in M&M 2Ed in the 20-teens.

The core setting was yoinked and modified from Space:1889. I mentioned what that meant in an email campaign intro to guide character creation. I told the players they could ask me anything AND/OR peek at any of the 4 Space:1889 core rulebooks I own or any of the supplemental products for guidance and inspiration.

After several months of play, the campaign imploded for a variety of reasons. And after it did, one guy was surprised to find out that there was intelligent life on the moon, Mars, and Venus, and that the terrestrial empires ruled those worlds.

 

[kenada]

Blades in the Dark looks like it is mostly about fantasy heists and not assassinations or necessarily full on brutal villains. It looks like it could accommodate either non-villainous or villainous play.

Assassin is one of the crew types¹. There’s also a cult crew type. We played an assassin crew that eventually started leaning into the occult. Note that a “score” is more than just a heist. It’s closer in scope to “adventure”. We did steal a few things, but most of our 60+ scores were about other things (killing people or factions, negotiations, kidnappings, etc). We also caused a few plagues (though I think those were accidental or a product of circumstances).

Were we “bad guys”? Perhaps to some. We generally treated our friends and allies pretty well. The game was about struggling to survive and fighting for power. Sometimes, that’s not going to be pretty. If you want to be “good”, then you have to do things that would be considered good. It’s not a given. The basic structure of the game is to put that to the test, so you can see who the characters really are.

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[1]: There are six crew types (plus myriads of third party ones): assassins, bravos (mercenaries and thugs), cult, hawkers (vice dealers), shadows (thieves and spies), and smugglers.

 

[kenada]

WotC (and before them, later-era TSR) market the game as "people playing heroes" because they have to, in order to avoid backlash from the ignorant public (cf Satanic panic, 1980s).

This is an interesting observation. I came into the hobby with 3e, but we mostly did our own thing. We didn’t really do any published adventures for quite a while (other than stuff like Forge of Fury). Consequently, I never got inculcated into thinking of my character as heroic by default. I wonder if there are others who share my experience, but more importantly to what extent a survey of play over the years would reflect the adoption of TSR’s code of ethics and the seeming internalization of the code as the default orientation of play in fantasy campaigns.