The Walking Dead
My reaction probably stemmed from the simple point that the OP killed a person. As Danny noted, if the party is not also "bad", it's a pretty horrible thing.
I'm wary of bagging on the GM. He's not here. We don't have details. Were the NPCs doing all the suggesting and guiding? Or was he just using an NPC to consolidate group consensus (as in the players argued for an hour, so an NPC calls for a vote).
The nature of a ZA event is such that a railroad and a sandbox may share very similar traits. Wherever you go, things will get worse. Whether forced or by random encounter tables, zombies will find you.
So, we can speculate about the GM's actions based on comments by a player who probably doesn't know how the Gm assemebled the adventure.
Or we can talk about the player's specific behavior. Which I think that horse was dead a few miles back.
My heavily shot down advice to RR was to go with the flow in the current game, rather than going against the party. He seemed to think his past experience with the players trumps what was effectively a new genre and reset on expectations.
I didn't see the need to ruin everyone else's fun, just because I disagreed. It's less disruptive to the game and players to sit through it and not return for a second session than it is to churn them up.
I agree - we only have the point of view of one disgruntled player here and not the DM or any of the other players. I think I've brought that point up a few times as well in this thread. He says the people had no reason to drop their guns, but the GM may have had a perfectly good explanation for it.
Understood. As I suggested above, I think people in discussions tend to latch or focus on to different things. When this happens, we end up talking over one another and seemingly disagreeing. But closer examination reveals that we are often talking about different things.
Well, we only have one side of it. Whether we are missing material facts is up for debate. It's possible everything is exactly as RR has suggested. It's also possible RR left out salient facts that would completely change my perception. The extent that one fills in the gaps or interprets the events beyond the literal is undoubtedly going to make a difference in how one views what transpired.
I think all of these issues are what make the discussion particularly compelling. It's always of interest for me to see other people process information and how people respond to controversial topics. It says a lot about who we are, our values, our mindset, etc.
To make a simplified observation, I tend to be anti-conformist when I feel pressure to conform. Some people in this thread seem to be threatened by those who do not conform. So while many may appreciate this advice and would quickly parrot it, for me it feels like someone putting shackles on me and turns the game into some sort of exercise. Now, I am not the type of person who enjoys or wants PvP in a PnP RPG, but for me, the difference between killing an NPC and a PC is about a galaxy's diameter in distance. I don't equate killing of the former as having any relationship to killing of the latter. Clearly others disagree, and that's completely acceptable.
I think RR would completely agree with you. In fact, I believe he said that he was going to tell the GM he was not going to return. RR watched the DVD and realized that if he's expected to act stupid like the written characters, it's not going to be a positive experience. I think the point of contention is whether the other PC's were actually having their fun ruined. The pivot point for this question is what actually happened when everyone at the table was "up in arms." I gave an example of how a character of mine may be up in arms "at the table" about someone's IC behavior, but away from the table I am loving it.
What if the truth were that all the other PC's loved what RR did (or had no OOC issue with it), have no fear that he's going to initiate PvP within the campaign, and would be disappointed if he quit playing? Such a reality is not precluded from what RR posted, imho.
In any event, I think it's a great topic for all the things that it brings out in discussion.
Well, in his OP, he said everyone at the table was up in arms. He then went on to say that he was told that is not how the game was going to be played and that he should watch The Walking Dead to get a better feel for it. Nowhere in there did it say it was the GM dictating to him that was how the game was to be played. It could very well have been his fellow players saying that to him so they wouldn't have to kill his PC in game.
It was only after when he said that he borrowed the DVD from the GM that the reference switched from the group as a whole to the specific person of the DM.
Everyone at the table is up in arms that i cant do that. I said i had and that i was going to use the unconscious person as a meat shield literally. So i popped the door and threw the guy over the counter. The zombies go after the snack and i get everyone else out the back door. Thats were the session ended.
After the game i was told thats now how the game is going to be played and that i need to watch The walking dead to get a feel of what the game is going to be about. So i borrowed the GM's dvd of the first season.
As I have said, a lot of the perspective on this rant is dependent on who said what and how they said it. Many of us here are debating the acceptability of what happened, but in truth, I think it is because we are not all subscribing to the same set of assumptions about what did happen.
If we all agreed on what did happen, then we'd probably have more consensus on other aspects.
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