Realistic Consequences vs Gameplay

[Nagol]

This is a valid point you both make. I'm not trying to discount that. I'm just trying to not assume his intention was to deny the other players having fun.

We have been told that his decision was born "partially of boredom". So I'm assuming there was more to it. We're missing a lot of details since we weren't there. What was being negotiated? What class/alignment/beliefs does the PC hold that may flavor how he behaves toward a person such as the Burgomaster? And so on.

Let's look at this more generally.....if a situation comes up in your game, and two party members want to talk to a villain, and a third refuses and instead verbally confronts the villain.....how do you handle it?

Do you allow play to proceed?

Do you pause and let the players discuss as a group, and then proceed once they've come to some kind of consensus?

Do you shut down the one player in favor of the majority?

Something else?

This occurs not infrequently in campaigns I run. I never interfere in player decision-making unless an outside force is doing so in the world.

Should different PC sub-groups provide different stimulus, the environment will adjust its response. The environment responds to stimuli in priority order. If sub-group A wants to provide a diplomatic or covert action and sub-group B provides a direct aggressive action, the environment will respond to sub-group B's violence as that is a more pressing concern than talking or potentially noticing something sneaky happening. Sub-group A's endeavour may be tainted by their association with sub group B (assuming it is known) simply because being friends of enemies makes one less trustworthy.

The PCs will respond to each other as well. If one PC acts contrary to the group's considered plans enough times, it likely becomes a NPC. If the group splits into a couple of factions, then they can either hash their tactics out amongst themselves before moving ahead or deal with the fallout from acting at odds with one another. If one group wants to hold back and one group wants to forge ahead then the group that wants to forge ahead will do so unless the other groups can find a way to prevent them in-game.

I do not take sides other than telling the group whether or not I am willing to run a side campaign. If I'm not willing, then the players need to maintain PCs that will work together even if that means some of the current PCs leave.

 

[prabe]

Let's look at this more generally.....if a situation comes up in your game, and two party members want to talk to a villain, and a third refuses and instead verbally confronts the villain.....how do you handle it?

The exact situation hasn't come up in the games I'm running. Both campaigns, though, have split when they've spent time in cities--and urban environments seem to be the ones where a party is most likely to want to do different things. Both groups I'm DMing for have taken ... hours, at least, to decide on a course of action, but once the groups have decided they've stayed signed-on. I guess this means the players work it out among themselves--like @Nagol above, I don't interfere with the players'/characters' planning.

 

[Fanaelialae]

This is a valid point you both make. I'm not trying to discount that. I'm just trying to not assume his intention was to deny the other players having fun.

We have been told that his decision was born "partially of boredom". So I'm assuming there was more to it. We're missing a lot of details since we weren't there. What was being negotiated? What class/alignment/beliefs does the PC hold that may flavor how he behaves toward a person such as the Burgomaster? And so on.

Let's look at this more generally.....if a situation comes up in your game, and two party members want to talk to a villain, and a third refuses and instead verbally confronts the villain.....how do you handle it?

Do you allow play to proceed?

Do you pause and let the players discuss as a group, and then proceed once they've come to some kind of consensus?

Do you shut down the one player in favor of the majority?

Something else?

The players would agree beforehand as to what the approach would be. If they agreed to negotiate, they wouldn't torpedo the negotiations if the other players were still negotiating. If they wanted to raise objections, they would do so either before negotiations commenced or after they concluded (while the group discussed whether to agree to the deal).

 

[billd91]

Let's look at this more generally.....if a situation comes up in your game, and two party members want to talk to a villain, and a third refuses and instead verbally confronts the villain.....how do you handle it?

Do you allow play to proceed?

Do you pause and let the players discuss as a group, and then proceed once they've come to some kind of consensus?

Do you shut down the one player in favor of the majority?

Something else?

I think it depends on the table. Most of the time, the group is usually pretty cooperative. They will generally defer to at least giving the best supported plan an honest try without torpedoing it in its midst. But, in the past, I've also played with groups that aren't as... courteous? deferential? cooperative? united? In those cases, we've generally resorted to more personal punishments for the PC involved like disavowing their actions and leaving them to their just deserts.

As a GM, I generally don't interfere when a PC does something that undermines the rest. I leave that up to the rest of the players to decide how to deal with it. But if it's really egregious or seems kind of mean spirited, I might ask them if they're sure that's what they want to do. That usually serves as a signal to rethink. And if they decide to go through with it, then we'll see what happens from there.

 

[Lanefan]

That's a fair point. I suppose I should be clearer.

My primary goal of play is for everyone to have as much fun as possible. So anything that happens in play is always happening with that goal in mind. Beyond that, though, I'm not as concerned about consequences for the players as I am for the characters. So in this situation, the characters have attempted something very dangerous and with potentially serious consequences. I don't look at it as a way of teaching the players a lesson and so on. Things happen to the characters, not the players.

Yes, players will have feelings about what happens, but even if something negative like PC death were to happen, and that made the player sad, that's a response to the fiction, not the goal of the fiction. Hopefully, the player is engaged and is sad the same way a reader or viewer might get sad reading or watching a story where a character dies.

Yeah, I agree....or I agree that there should be. Sometimes a game dos fall apart....but as the blogpost that @Campbell shared, the fiction itself can't be ruined. I agree with that. There is always a way forward in the fiction, but the actual game can fall apart if participants are not engaged, or have otherwise lost interest, or if their goals of play are so radically different that there's no finding common ground. But none of that is specifically a problem with the fiction.

We're all good thus far.

I think it really depends on the comparative level of the PCs and the NPCs. We don't know what level the PCs in the OP were, so it's hard to say for sure. If they were 3rd or lower, maybe this would be something beyond them. At about 4th level, I think that stops being the case, and at 5th or above it's pretty much a moot point.

In the specific module, maybe; but I don't know the module. I'm trying to talk about a perhaps-hypothetical scene where one or more PCs attack a true King, hence my Joffree example.

I try to give them such cues in whatever way it makes sense in the fiction, but I lean more toward generous sharing. I tend to think PCs should be competent folks, and I think that my ability to fully portray the fictional world is limited when compared to a person's actual ability to perceive their world.....so I'll give them pretty clear cues so that they can make meaningful choices. I do agree that the less they try to learn or look into things, the less I'll give, but I am guessing I'm more generous on average than you would be in the same situation.

Fair enough.

Not really. A "glaring inconsistency" is only as much of an issue as you make it. You can literally hand wave the inconsistency away. You don't like to do that, and that's fine....it's your preference, and that's fine. Others won't care as much, even if their campaign is longer.

My 5e campaign is actually a continuation of the campaign my players and I had as kids, along with some other unfinished campaigns we've had over the years. So it's pretty long term in that regard. However, if I have a player who wants to do something cool that they're interested in, and it might conflict with some detail from back in the day, I'm not going to worry about it. The fiction can be changed, the conflict can be explained, and so on.

As far as possible, in the name of internal consistency I'm very big on precedent within a campaign: if thing X worked in manner Y once then that's how it will normally work for all time.

Which is why I'm loath to reboot old campaigns. I've no idea what specific rulings I made 20 years ago in my previous campaign, and if I used today's rulings it wouldn't be the same game at all. Even things as basic as the level-advance charts get re-done and tweaked each time out.

That said, if a character from an old campaign (or from someone else's game) finds a way in to the current one it gets converted to the current rules, as that's how things work on this world.

So a DM should be as neutral as dice.....but you don't think that dice would actually help him achieve that?

<as Jack Sparrow> If a DM's already as neutral as dice she doesn't need dice to be neutral, does she, mate?

 

[Lanefan]

Let's look at this more generally.....if a situation comes up in your game, and two party members want to talk to a villain, and a third refuses and instead verbally confronts the villain.....how do you handle it?

Do you allow play to proceed?

Yes.

 

[Lanefan]

This occurs not infrequently in campaigns I run. I never interfere in player decision-making unless an outside force is doing so in the world.

If I-as-DM have any NPC adventurers (i.e. full party members, not just henches) in the party they'll have a say just like anyone else, but will usually in the end do what they're told.

Should different PC sub-groups provide different stimulus, the environment will adjust its response. The environment responds to stimuli in priority order. If sub-group A wants to provide a diplomatic or covert action and sub-group B provides a direct aggressive action, the environment will respond to sub-group B's violence as that is a more pressing concern than talking or potentially noticing something sneaky happening. Sub-group A's endeavour may be tainted by their association with sub group B (assuming it is known) simply because being friends of enemies makes one less trustworthy.

Absolutely!

The PCs will respond to each other as well. If one PC acts contrary to the group's considered plans enough times, it likely becomes a NPC.

How can this happen? Players can't force another player to sign over a PC to the DM as an NPC.

They can boot the PC from the party, but by no means does that make it an NPC: a PC always belongs to its player unless that player declares otherwise, right?

If the group splits into a couple of factions, then they can either hash their tactics out amongst themselves before moving ahead or deal with the fallout from acting at odds with one another. If one group wants to hold back and one group wants to forge ahead then the group that wants to forge ahead will do so unless the other groups can find a way to prevent them in-game.

I do not take sides other than telling the group whether or not I am willing to run a side campaign. If I'm not willing, then the players need to maintain PCs that will work together even if that means some of the current PCs leave.

There's also some characters - and some players - to whom 'plan' is a four-letter word; and who are best left out of any planning process 'cause they're gonna do what they're gonna do no matter what, and what they do is either gonna help or it isn't. I don't mind this at all.

I'll happily run side campaigns; but sometimes it means we play one group one week and the other group the next (in these cases the players without PCs often roll up new ones, thus there's now two complete parties).

 

[hawkeyefan]

The players would agree beforehand as to what the approach would be. If they agreed to negotiate, they wouldn't torpedo the negotiations if the other players were still negotiating. If they wanted to raise objections, they would do so either before negotiations commenced or after they concluded (while the group discussed whether to agree to the deal).

So your players have never decided on an approach, and then had something happen in the midst of it that may change their minds? Or some of their minds?

 

[hawkeyefan]

We're all good thus far.

In the specific module, maybe; but I don't know the module. I'm trying to talk about a perhaps-hypothetical scene where one or more PCs attack a true King, hence my Joffree example.

Sure. I think we agree overall. I think if the power levels are that mismatched, you can just as easily play things out. In most cases PCs will quickly realize if they're in trouble when they see a roll of 5 and the NPC hits them.

There are circumstances where I wouldn't bother rolling it out, though, but they'd probably have to be pretty extreme, or there would have to be other compelling reasons for the decision.

Fair enough.

As far as possible, in the name of internal consistency I'm very big on precedent within a campaign: if thing X worked in manner Y once then that's how it will normally work for all time.

Which is why I'm loath to reboot old campaigns. I've no idea what specific rulings I made 20 years ago in my previous campaign, and if I used today's rulings it wouldn't be the same game at all. Even things as basic as the level-advance charts get re-done and tweaked each time out.

That said, if a character from an old campaign (or from someone else's game) finds a way in to the current one it gets converted to the current rules, as that's how things work on this world.

I find that consistency of that sort doesn't really matter. One group of PCs in my 5E campaign is actually made up of characters we originally played in the AD&D and 2E days, and a few from 3E. We just recreated them in the new rules according to the spirit of the characters, and they work quite fine. XP Totals and the like aren't fictionally relevant, so I don't see the hangup on that.

<as Jack Sparrow> If a DM's already as neutral as dice she doesn't need dice to be neutral, does she, mate?

I find the idea that a person could be that consistently neutral to be a bit unrealistic. Even if they thought they were being so, there is still a good chance for bias at a subconscious level.

But I also don't think a GM needs to be neutral. I think a GM should be a fan of the PCs, but should also be hard on them.

 

[Fanaelialae]

So your players have never decided on an approach, and then had something happen in the midst of it that may change their minds? Or some of their minds?

Yep, but if the change isn't unanimous, they allow the players who are still engaged with the scene to play it out to it's conclusion.