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What are the biggest RPG crimes?
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7556442" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>- emphasis added</p><p></p><p>The point of the term is that the player's characters should fit that definition. Protagonizing the PC's is considered normal and good. The DMing crime is normally to deprotagonize the PC's, so that they are no longer the major characters of the story being told in the game.</p><p></p><p>I just started the 'Skull & Shackles' adventure path last night (as a player for a change!) and one of the other players struggled for the first hour or two with the fact that the narrative harshly deprotagonizes the players in the first few scenes, robbing from them the agency that players normally expect to have. I was on board with it, but I understand (to some extent) his confusion at finding his position to be basically helpless and at the mercy of NPCs who are initially holding all the cards. Presumably, at some point we'll have the resources to avenge ourselves, but the game would be in my opinion dysfunctional if the point of robbing the PC's of their normal advantages was simply so that we could watch the NPCs be awesome all the way through to the end of the game. While that might be 'realistic' and 'believable' even in a fantasy world, it doesn't make for a good game. I'll also likely object if the handwaving that got us on this railroad isn't just merely to jump start the game, but continues to be just as heavy handed to get us to jump through the hoops. As an adventure path, I'm OK with it being on rails to a large extent, and having a very constrained narrow-broad-narrow structure, with gates between scenarios, but one hopes for artful gates that don't feel quite like straight jackets, where you go through them because it's what you want to do at the time.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7556442, member: 4937"] - emphasis added The point of the term is that the player's characters should fit that definition. Protagonizing the PC's is considered normal and good. The DMing crime is normally to deprotagonize the PC's, so that they are no longer the major characters of the story being told in the game. I just started the 'Skull & Shackles' adventure path last night (as a player for a change!) and one of the other players struggled for the first hour or two with the fact that the narrative harshly deprotagonizes the players in the first few scenes, robbing from them the agency that players normally expect to have. I was on board with it, but I understand (to some extent) his confusion at finding his position to be basically helpless and at the mercy of NPCs who are initially holding all the cards. Presumably, at some point we'll have the resources to avenge ourselves, but the game would be in my opinion dysfunctional if the point of robbing the PC's of their normal advantages was simply so that we could watch the NPCs be awesome all the way through to the end of the game. While that might be 'realistic' and 'believable' even in a fantasy world, it doesn't make for a good game. I'll also likely object if the handwaving that got us on this railroad isn't just merely to jump start the game, but continues to be just as heavy handed to get us to jump through the hoops. As an adventure path, I'm OK with it being on rails to a large extent, and having a very constrained narrow-broad-narrow structure, with gates between scenarios, but one hopes for artful gates that don't feel quite like straight jackets, where you go through them because it's what you want to do at the time. [/QUOTE]
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