But the bit that amazes me is that I have a thread full of posters saying the GM has absolute power, but the player is free to leave and then, when a player tells a story of leaving, nearly all of those posters say the player ought not to have left!
You do realize the difference between saying we don't think you ought to have left and saying you had no right to leave?
We disagree
with the reason why you left (the DM was being difficult--which we don't agree with) and therefore don't see why you choose to leave. No one is saying
you should not have left if you weren't having fun.
Some might think you left prematurely, it seems without any attempt to inform the DM of how his narrative doesn't fit yours.
Anyway, in fact, I actually said "Good for you" for leaving, and good for that DM for DMing how we wants.
So you seem to subscribe to the view that PCs are aliens who know nothing about the world that they (notionally) inhabit.
Not at all. Your player knowledge of the MM influenced how you felt the game world should be. I have no idea how much interaction your group had with those kobolds before the incident.
And THAT interaction should have been what drove your understanding of how smart kobolds typically are, not some player knowledge of the MM.
You made the assumption interrogating a kobold would be the same as a normal person. With average (low) intelligence I explained how that encompasses a wide range of score from 5-10 (as a guideline only). An INT 5 is really low, barely above semi-intelligent, and such a creature could have responded as the DM had them do.
And frankly, even a normal person can have low intelligence, crack under interrogation, panic and speak nonsense.
Whereas I think we were assuming that our PCs, as intelligent people some of whom spoke the language of Kobolds, and who had already been dealing with Kobolds who behaved more-or-less as one would expect if one was familiar with Kobolds from years of playing D&D, that if Kobolds were in fact wildly different from our expectations than (i) the GM might mention that as soon as we began planning to capture and interrogate one, and (ii) that the GM might have manifested that difference in the way the Kobolds had been presented up to that point.
But of course the GM didn't do (i) or (ii) because the GM didn't actually have a creative vision of Kobolds in "his" world. Rather, he didn't know how to adjudicate an interrogation, probably as a special case of a more general inability to run a non-railroad scenario.
Like I said, you never specified any level of interaction with kobold prior to the capture, so I have no idea of the specifics, which at this point you are providing. A bit more detail on the onset might have avoided a lot of this back and forth.
Regardless, the point remains there is option (iii), you captured a stupid kobold, or one that paniced to the point of gibberish, or was just being difficult. Option (iii) is entirely plausible.
Or you could be right, he handled it badly--some DMs do. Should that have resulted in you leaving? It seems a bit harsh IMO, but more likely this was the final straw that resulted in mutiny, not the instigating factor.
For more specifics, do you recall if you or any player in the group commented on how dumb or nonsensicle the kobold as acting under the interrogation? Did the DM provide any justification? How did your group respond to that, if given? Did you (players) voice your dissapproval of the situation in how the DM is directing the narrative? What was his response if you did?
Your post:
Here's one example: I was playing in a game run by someone I'd only recently met in the context of a university RPG club. He was running an adventure that may have been of his own design, or may have been a module - if I ever knew which, I no longer remember. What I do remember is that we - the PCs - were in a town, that was under some sort of assault from Kobolds. So we - the players - decided, as our PCs, to capture a Kobold and interrogate it. Which we did.
Our view of what one might learn from interrogating a Kobold was informed by our knowledge of the Monster Manual, which states that Kobolds have Average (low) intelligence. In other words, interrogating a Kobold is not that different from interrogating a normal person.
The GM had the Kobold respond to every question we asked it in any utterly hopeless and incomprehending fashion - we got the same sorts of responses from it as one might get from a 2 or 3 year old child. It could not tell us anything about how it had got into the city, how many other Kobolds there were, where they were coming from, what their disposition of forces was, etc.
We politely let the GM tell us all this. And then we (the players) all agreed that we would pull out of the game and start a new game ourselves.
Do you see how your post is in summary:
- I joined an RPG club game with a DM I'd "only recently" met.
- Might have been a module or his own design.
- PCs were in a town being attacked by kobolds. (This could have been how the adventure began for all we know...)
- We (PCs) decided to capture a kobold for info.
- Our view of what we might get was informed by our player knowledge of the MM.
- We assumed the kobold we would capture should be just like interrogating someone of normal intelligence.
- GM had kobold respond in "non-helpful ways". It could not tell us anything.
- We felt the kobold should have been able to provide some information given our knowledge of them from the MM.
- After the GM finished, we agree to leave the game and start our own.
That's all. No information of 3-4 sessions prior to this. No mention of how the DM ran the kobolds up to that point. No challenge to how the DM ran the interrogation is mentioned, why this kobold seemed to deviate from what you (players) expected.
Taken at face-value, the DM seemed entirely apporpriate in how they ran things and you seem to come of as whiny "but the MM says!" players who left in a huff feeling the DM wasted your time.
I believe you that wasn't the precise case, but given that summary I don't see anything the DM did wrong. You might not have liked it, certainly, but without more information or actually being there, I don't see anything bad about the way the DM was running this adventure, personally.
As a DM, what I do see wrong is you using player info from the MM as character knowledge (an assumption at best) and then no mention of the players challenging the DM's narrative in good faith--you pulled out of the game.
You've provided some more information here and there since this original post, and so I've been able to piece together a better narrative (so you don't come off as badly IMO), but nothing to the point that makes me feel this DM was acting in an inappropriate fashion.
