Saying "no" and equality

[Crazy Jerome]

[MENTION=58197]Dausuul[/MENTION], agreed. The "ought" part is give them every opportunity to be involved. Pushing it is counter-productive to that, as they'll spend more time shielding from the push than getting involved. I didn't say that very clearly.

 

[pemerton]

I've found that the approach that works for me is for my campaign development to center on a focus rather than on restrictions.

This has worked for me even with longer-running campaigns.

 

[Heathen72]

Raven Crowking put it best in the other thread: When you have a thousand options, and you pick and choose for each campaign, the variety is endless. But when you incorporate everything, you have the same thing over and over. (Not exactly how he expressed it, but you get the gist.)

It's the same in the theatre, where some actors feel that direction "limits their creativity" not realising that being directed can actually be very liberating, and it doesn't need to be seen as restrictive.

It can be very daunting when asked to come up with something without any sort of guidance. Despite being able to go any which way you like, you can feel lost. Once given direction, that changes - you may not be able to go in any direction you like any more, but you still have an infinite amount of ideas along a particular axis to explore, with infinite variations to study. Any improviser knows that it can be hard to just come up with "an idea" on the spot, but a little direction, such as "tell me why your character wants to know what is at the bottom of the well" makes things a lot easier!

I think part of the answer is to frame negatives in terms of positives. As an actor I had difficulty when told not to fidget, but was fine when I was told to find stillness. To put it another way: don't about the pink elephant in your pants. In short, it is not easy to not do something.

So, instead of telling your players that they can't play a certain class, tell them that they can only play certain other classes. Or play classes with certain qualities. Always focus on the universe that is there for them to explore, or they will always be tantalised by the forbidden fruit. Instead of telling them they can't play psionicists, tell them that you are running a game where everyone is playing a martial class because you want to run a version of the Seven Samurai. Challenge them to find a way to make a fighter interesting without recourse to multiclassing etc. You might be blessed to GM a party with a career soldier, a peasant hero, a surly bounty hunter, a swashbuckling dandy, and so on.

 

[Haltherrion]

In general, the referee invests a lot of time in the game. He or she is essentially tasked with executing a vision of a world and along those lines, restrictions on races, classes and gear are, to me, perfectly reasonable. Just because the game designers thought to include something in a ruleset doesn't mean it needs to be in your game. They are trying to create a flexible system that can accomodate a wide range of styles and settings, you are trying to execute a specific style and setting.

In particular, I have no trouble banning psionics, something with its own special flavor that often does not mesh with a setting. I have occasionally allowed it when a player has made a case for it (shades of your first player, i.e., diplomatically) and always regretted it. No one I game with would be put out by such a restriction themselves and they also understand that they can always ref the next campaign and set their own ground rules if they really want a particular element included.

As for your specific example, I'm as human as you are and would also respond to the diplomatic approach versus the irritating approach but in this case where they were asking for something very similar, it would be better to be consistant. That said, if the one you allowed happened to ask first, I also wouldn't feel too bad about saying, "I just want to try out one psion in the game at this time." If she asked second, it would be much harder to let her take a psion having refused the first player.

 

[francisca]

Just thinking aloud, but is the perceived "asymetry" not born of the simulationist approach some games take?

Um, sure, i guess. To be honest, I don't frame D&D in those terms. it just dice, graph paper, beer, and pretzels to me. Matter of fact, I don't bother thinking about where just about any RPG sits on the simulationist/abstract axis. I just don't care about that sort of stuff.

When everything in a game comes delivered with a for-players tag, with a sticker attached "Yes, you can use me, too!" (i.e. LA/ECL) than you could earn certain looks when you declare yourself the only user of that stuff.

Yep. I certainly appreciate the idea of symmetry in regard to "good for the DM, good for the players" as a design philosophy, and can see where some would find merit in it, I just don't find that train of thought to be needed in my games.

 

[kaomera]

Wow, thanx for all the advice and ideas.

I do want to say that while diplomacy was an issue (and I thought I'd be "cheating" if I didn;t mention it), I think the main issue in the example I game was / should have been capability. Now there where some other problems with this group (that I don;t really want to go into at length here) that I think pushed things along, but I really felt like the second player was over-reaching his capabilities. If he had found a psionic character that wasn't going to be so complex, I would definitely have been more willing to let him give it a try. Psionics where a part of the issue because I had previously banned them wholesale. And I guess the fact that it was a psionic class also brought it more to my attention - I might not have really thought about the fact that he was overstepping his abilities (until it was too late) if he had picked a similar, non-psionic class.

 

[Heathen72]

I ban stuff in games I run all the time, and there isn't any give and take - I'm devoting dozens of hours of my time to continuously developing a realistic (within the genre), evolving, vibrant, living world/setting.

One of the reasons I don't run D&D much anymore is that I am unable to run a game in a world that satisfies me, yet allows for the powers, power levels and equipment of the players in the ruleset. (Even when I do, I end up nixing a lot!) That said, one potential solution to what you have described, is to allow the class, but change the fluff. If a player is just after a set of abilities, and isn't that concerned by the concept of a psionicist (for instance) allow them to be a different sort of magician, and be done with it.

 

[Barastrondo]

I've found that the approach that works for me is for my campaign development to center on a focus rather than on restrictions. As an example, my current game is a Gothic Horror Fantasy game set in a fragmented Empire in the midst of civil war. I didn't even consider coming up with a list of stuff to ban. I just told the players, "This is my concept for the campaign setting. Do you think this sounds cool and ripe with lots of ideas for characters?" They replied in the affirmative.

Yeah, this is the approach I like to take. I even let them vote on a list of things I'm interested in running, so I can be all the more certain that I'm going to get characters in keeping with the game everyone wants to play.

I also find it interesting that there are actually two different considerations for banning -- there's banning a particular mechanic, and there's banning a particular skin for the mechanics. So for instance, although I might run one of those not-so-very-progressive worlds where psionics is a major source of power, that's just the skin: the mechanics of a psionic class may work out well. Want to use the mechanics of the psion class but the fluff of an aeromancer? Awesome. Let's talk about that.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

I have no problems with saying "no," I just think it's usually not the best choice.

 

[Mark CMG]

From what I am reading above the heart of the problem is what is being emphasized when inviting players to join a campaign. If you ask a group to play a particular edition of a particular ruelset, then they might expect everything from that ruleset to be available. If you ask a player to join a campaign focused on a particular setting and then mention that you are using such and such ruleset with only such and such supplements, then you are unlikely to disappoint based on rules expectations.