DM - Adversarial or Permissive?

[pemerton]

Well, the first clue would be when you tried to run away and the DM says, "If you run away, your character gets ejected from the campaign."

Sure! But at that point the wheels have already fallen off.

 

[Hussar]

Sure! But at that point the wheels have already fallen off.

Meh, not a huge problem really. Should be a five minute, "Huh? Oh, ok." kind of thing and move on. It only becomes a major issue if both sides stick to their guns and refuse to compromise.

 

[haakon1]

Which [MENTION=25619]haakon1[/MENTION] reminds me of how "Three Days to Kill" totally screwed our campaign and was a screw job we saw coming but bit the hook anyway. The GM at the time normally rolls his own adventures, but he tried that flaming piece of poo. Unless he deviated from the supplied materials, that adventure is to blame for bringing down the apocalypse onto the campaign world (that we hence never played again).

It wasn't like that for our campaign. It's a screw job, sure, but it's just bandits getting you to kill other bandits (and keep their stuff).

Not a huge bummer for the right party. At the time, we had an CN elf thief, an LN dwarf wizard (the thief's friend), and an NG elf ranger, all with a swaggering mercenary attitude. They took at as "huh, you have to watch out who you agree to work for", and other than the arrest, it didn't have more consequences than that. Bandits killed bandits is no big deal.

Mostly, they were just learning the rules and how the game worked -- it's an introductory module for 3e (the first one released, I believe), but only works for certain types of parties.

Of course, my modifications of the scenario might well have differed from your DM's modifications. I had it start at a Burning Man type secret festival run by cultists -- they knew the people there were not exactly on the up-and-up, but neither were they!

 

[Janx]

Of course, my modifications of the scenario might well have differed from your DM's modifications. I had it start at a Burning Man type secret festival run by cultists -- they knew the people there were not exactly on the up-and-up, but neither were they!

Spoiler alert!!!


I assume my GM ran it stock. The rough recap (as this was years ago now) is as follows:

We were low level (2nd or 3rd) with 4 PCs total.

We got to the festival checked it out for about half an hour and bit the hook to kill a bandit cultist guy in a villa in the hills.

We get there, and the info we have says the bad guys has guards, and has this thing to open a gate and let demons out. It's like the first thing the bad guy will do if the villa is attacked. So, we figure it's getting dark, disguises as servants won't work, so the party agrees to send in my halfling rogue to sneak in and kill the leader while he sleeps. The sneak job goes PERFECT. I climb the cliff, sneak into the house, get upstairs, the bandit is asleep.

I then remember that the coup de grace rules really suck for a halfling. Confirming with the DM that I am screwed, I make the attack, roll a 1 for damage and wake up the bad guy. I forget if we scuffled for a round, but otherwise I bolted out the room, through the adjacent room and its window onto its porch awning and down the road. Meanwhile, cultists are culting, the gate is opening, and a horde of orcs are charging up the front road to the house. We all ran like hell, end of session.

The DM informed us that the demons poured out the gate, there wasn't a force strong enough to stop them, and that pretty much threw the world into chaos. End of campaign.

I saw it as, I ran a flawless infiltration, was woefully useless for that actual hit, and my fellow players had to sit for 2 hours while I did all the stealthy crap because it was the most viable means to deal with the problem with the resources we had. If there was another solution to the problem, we didn't see it and we had plotted the attack before we entered, and post-mortemed it afterwards. Even the GM did not see that we had done anything wrong in particular (nothing in the vein of "why didn't you guys do XYZ? Duh!"

 

[pemerton]

Spoiler alert!!!

<snip>

The DM informed us that the demons poured out the gate, there wasn't a force strong enough to stop them, and that pretty much threw the world into chaos. End of campaign.

This is the bit where you GM broke from the module. The module, as written, assumes (i) that the gate will most likely be opened, and (ii) that opening the gate will not be the end of the world (or the campaign).

But thanks for the post - I have the module but haven't run it. I started converting it to HARP but then 4e came out and it didn't seem as well suited to 4e (so I converted Night's Dark Terror to 4e instead), and am now gradually working on converting it to Burning Wheel, for if/when I start a BW game.

It's interesting to hear what went wrong with your group, so that if I do run it I can avoid those problems.

 

[catsclaw227]

Were there repercussions afterward? Not really. I absolutely refuse to try to force anyone to roleplay. He obviously was not interested in the scenario I presented. Why should I brow beat him for his preferences? So, from that point on, whenever those style of situations came up, I made sure that his PC had something to do - kibitz with guards, get into trouble somewhere, something - and I never bothered trying to include him in those scenarios. If he wanted to join in, he was more than welcome, but, I also made it pretty clear that it was his choice. He respected that and I respected his choice.

And everyone was happy.

To each his own. This is how I handle this sort of thing.

Well done Hussar. Gotta spread XP around, blah, blah blah.

 

[catsclaw227]

But it's also about in-game stance. The kind of woman who is going to seduce a newcomer to town is not bashful or shy and has likely given up her virtue before. She may have just as much reason to get back at her dad for outing her fling and go to the police. This will reduce the seriousness of the situation (the cops may need to talk to him, NOT arrest him as a felon).

The fleeing PC is going to get a couple more encounters. One to escape, one to evade as he exits, and one more to run into a PC or NPC that may shelter/help him (and thus give him a chance to stay in the area and session).

I agree. If the brigand PC had said "I try to escape by horseback." I might say that it's going to be tough considering, X, Y, Z. But then I would ask how he would go about doing it. After he responds, we play it out. Yes, there would be more encounters for him, yes others would sit and watch for a bit, but the roles will reverse in a little while and then the brigand player would sit and the other players would get to play. But during the brigand's escape, I would ask the other players what they are doing. If they say nothing, go back to the tavern, I move back to the brigand. These juggling acts kinda suck, but they DO come up in a regular game. I may try to nudge the players' PCs back together with some circumstantial situations, but if they don't bite, they don't bite. It is what it is.

If the session ends with the players split, I would take some of the RP offline and into email for each group and see if they join back up. I would also have a meta conversation with both groups asking what we should do from here. It's their game too, so I want their feedback.

 

[catsclaw227]

I'm going to jump over to the other side of the fence for a second here.

Look, as a player, when your DM waves a nice big, juicy sign at the table that says, "Hey, the adventure is over here", maybe, just maybe, give the DM a break and roll with it once in a while?

OMG, yes. Sometimes it isn't obvious, but for the most part... a decent player can tell. And if they feel a bit railroaded, then take quick break from the action, get a drink or snack and talk about it respectfully as a group. I mean, we're all supposed to be having fun at the table.

With regards to an adventure getting modified by the DM, I've always found that I need to really understand the module well before I make changes. I recall winging a module, having really read only a third of it, and I made a tweak to an encounter having the consequences of an action more severe than should have been (much like the OPs scenario). It went belly up on my when I got into the second half of the game and I had to majorly tweak and do a pseudo-meta-retro on one of the things that happened.

 

[Janx]

It's interesting to hear what went wrong with your group, so that if I do run it I can avoid those problems.

It was definitely a wierd thing. The whole carnival setup made it seem like we'd be doing stuff mixed in with that. Instead, we get there, poke around for a few minutes and we're leaving town without even getting to ride on a ferris wheel.

Plus as presented to us, the problem was out of our league. While sandbox folks might argue that a PC is free to encounter and run from as much trouble as he likes, for a purchased adventure, I expect it to introduce trouble we can handle (assuming luck and smart play).

I'm half tempted to borrow it so I can review it myself....

 

[pemerton]

The whole carnival setup made it seem like we'd be doing stuff mixed in with that. Instead, we get there, poke around for a few minutes and we're leaving town without even getting to ride on a ferris wheel.

I gather it didn't come out, when you played it, that the same people who organise the carnival are the ones who opened the gate.

As I understand it, the idea of the carnival is to act as a type of foreshadowing for the gate-opening to come - which can have a somewhat sharp ironic twist if the PCs indulge themselves in the carnival on the grounds that it's all harmless fun, and then find themselves having to deal with the demons coming out of the gate.