Players that just don't *get* the genre

[Saeviomagy]

I can see where they are coming from but the other half of the group wants to investigate first, learn what they can and make an informed decision as to what the final move is. It can make it a tough game.

To be fair, there's multiple modules where careful investigation leads to "cultists complete ritual and doom the world", and the investigators would have been better off storming the place and killing everyone.

My "player that didn't fit in" story is a shadowrun game. One new, young player built up his cyber-samurai, picked all the right stuff, fitted in flavour wise, but then wouldn't accept the fact that bullets are dangerous. His character died twice on his first night. The first time was because, despite the GM saying to him "Your character stands out in the open in the middle of a firefight, right in front of the bad guys with machine guns. You realise that's incredibly dangerous, bordering on suicidal?", to which the response was "my guy's tough, he can take it!".

That I would probably have put down to just being unsure of the mechanics of the game. The thing is that after that, the character used his hand of god (a once-in-the-character's-lifetime paper-thin-excuse-that-saves-his-ass thing) to return to life. Insisted that he would immediately stand up (he was explicitly given the option of lying there apparently dead until a convenient time) and then finished his turn in exactly the same place and the same situation as the first time he died, despite prompting that this was likely to get him killed for good the second time around.

I'm not quite sure what he was thinking. IIRC, it took him another two characters ignoble deaths before he started being even slightly risk averse.

 

[Quickleaf]

Thankfully my gaming cohort consists of bright young professionals and grad students who are mature(ish) about these sorts of things.

Acutly I've encountered a different issue which is about cultural differences and genres, in particular Chinese fantasy novels/movies compared to American ones.

 

[Vegepygmy]

Have you had a Player who just doesn't *get* the genre for the game you're playing? What kind of mistakes did they make? Did they ever come around to getting the idea? Did the whole game/campaign suffer for the Player's misunderstanding?

I wasn't there for it, but this is my favorite example of that syndrome: http://www.enworld.org/forum/genera...hurch-dont-forget-your-sawed-off-shotgun.html

 

[Dantilla]

I just had an hour-long conversation about this just the other day about a long-term Ravenloft game I have been running.

Ravenloft is supposed to be a game of gothic horror. Emphasis on the horror part. In order for this to work, the characters must actually experience emotions like fear, horror, revulsion and the like. One of my players keeps running her character as trope The Jaded Professional, a la the original Van Helsing in Dracula. Nothing fazes her character, and when one character is utterly unconcerned, the other players/characters tend to relax, and then NO ONE is fazed and things run much like a normal DND game. This totally destroys the mood I am trying to create and turns my "horror" game into little more than monster bashing.

I have been struggling with this a lot lately and I'm not sure how to get things back on track.

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

EDIT: Resolv'd.

 

[sjmiller]

At first I was a bit reluctant to tell my tale of pain, but here goes.

In late 2009 I asked the D&D gaming group that I DM if we could take a brief break and have one of the players run a game of Classic Traveller for me. You see, back on Christmas day of 1979 I got a copy of Traveller. That was my start with RPGs, so I thought it would be great to play a Traveller game in honor of my 30th year of gaming.

My roommate wanted to run the game, and I gave him whatever help he needed to get the game going. We pre-rolled the characters, made a nice character sheet for everyone, and even prepared a briefing paper to get everyone into the feel of a classic 70s era space opera style game.

The problem was that three players just did not understand the style of game we were playing. One could not understand that the game was not a futuristic view of the universe viewed from 2009, but a view of the future from 1979. We tried telling her that she should look at the Buck Rogers series or the Flash Gordon movie (both of which she is old enough to have seen first run), but she just couldn't get it. She thought her comm unit should be as small and versatile as her cell phone, for example, instead of being more like an old Star Trek communicator. That is just one example.

A younger player also had tech issues. She could not grasp that there was no galaxy-spanning faster than light communications system. Instead, Traveller has a data transfer system more like the Pony Express and sailing ships. She kept expressing frustration when she was told she could not send an email from one star system to another and expect an answer within a day or less.

Finally we had one player who had been messed up by someone who ran a pseudo-MegaTraveller game in a very messed up fashion. The player came to our game with a strange and distorted vision of what is Traveller. We tried to explain that what happened in the other game was not what Traveller is about, and that he should listen to the background for this game. He really did not pay attention, did not read the info given to him, and just did not get the theme of the campaign. We told him that he could have equipment found in the Traveller books (all of the LBBs). He wanted a device that was available in his other game. When he was told that it was not available in the game he kept bugging the Ref to let him build and/or invent the device (an overpowered scanning/vision enhancement device). Both the Ref and I finally had to tell him that if he can find the device in the books we gave him to read he could get it, but if it is not there it is just not available in this universe. He still wanted to invent it, and that is when the Ref had to tell him no, it is not possible.

After we had several sessions, and people working hard to not revert to their usual D&D Hack & Slash style, the adventure came to a close. I then packed all my Traveller books into a box, dated it, and put a label on it to NEVER play it again with this group.

 

[Wik]

Ah, I love it when players ignore genre. Isn't it just.... awesome?

Luckily, I haven't seen it too often in the past few years, but mostly because my players are great. They scavenge and dig for crap in a post-apocalypse game, kill slaves in a gritty historical game without feeling the least bit remorseful (while still being lawful good!), get unnerved by wind and the environment in a low-magic game (and afraid of D&D skeletons!), and all that fun stuff. In that area, I'm truly blessed.

I do see them make non-genre appropriate characters, however. But these characters often fit into the genre surprisingly easy, after the group sort of figures out what we're going for. The ninja-like character in my shadowrun game that was an escapee from a mental asylum that only used throwing knives wound up fitting in just fine with his fellow runners... so did the redneck with a sawed off shotgun and a hovercar.

 

[Starfox]

Ravenloft is supposed to be a game of gothic horror. Emphasis on the horror part. In order for this to work, the characters must actually experience emotions like fear, horror, revulsion and the like. One of my players keeps running her character as trope The Jaded Professional, a la the original Van Helsing in Dracula. Nothing fazes her character, and when one character is utterly unconcerned, the other players/characters tend to relax, and then NO ONE is fazed and things run much like a normal DND game. This totally destroys the mood I am trying to create and turns my "horror" game into little more than monster bashing.

First, purple on black is not the clearest color ever. Had to select your text to read it.

Second, gothic horror is tricky. Especially if you're running published Ravenloft scenarios, which often contain too many combat encounters to really deserve the name. I can understand the player that "rebels" against this by playing super-cool. My guess is tat this is a carrot-and-stick problem. If you try to whip your players into expressing fear, they rebel. You should try to lure them into role-playing fear instead; make sure not to attack players who behave fearfully and lie low or run, make them encounter new clues and interesting NPCs instead. Introduce fearful but interesting/rewarding NPCs that encourage them to lie low etc.

 

[Starfox]

Its not just that the players do or don't get the genre, they have to make some kind of party too. I once ran a game in FASAs Crimson Skies setting. This is an air pirate pulp setting set in a USA that fractured into numerous small states. We had one Californian, one New Yorker, and a Dixie. Each proud of their origin in different ways - to the point that it was very hard to get them to take the same side.

 

[S'mon]

Tell me about it. My current CoC game is a bit like that. I have four players, and they are decent guys and a girl. They know the concept of 1920's Lovecraftian Horror, they've read some of the great man's stories and they know what is expected of such a game. But yet, two of them insist every time that rather than investigate it is safer to just find out where the cultists do their rites or where the monster may be imprisoned and just burn it down or destroy it.

But AIR that is exactly what the good guys do in most CoC stories where they survive! The Call of Cthulu and The Dunwich Horror both feature this.