Sammael
Adventurer
Thanks for all the compliments! I'll post stuff for the other nine planes tonight when I get home from work.
As for the party problems, I think there are several reasons.
First, one of the players pretty much can't stand another player (the girl whose birthday it was, let's call her Player A) and he was absent that night. Usually, his characters display a great deal of intolerance towards her characters, but he wraps it all up in good role-play and it never comes to actual aggression, just a lot of bickering.
Play styles of the four regular players in that campaign are wildly different.
System knowledge is likewise very different.
A lot of it stems from the fact that Player A usually plays very similar characters who resemble her in real life - loud, full of crazy ideas, fairly chaotic, no respect for authority, doesn't listen much to what others have to say (because she likes to push her own ideas).
Now, I, as the DM, know how to handle this sort of player (don't let her hog the spotlight, but give her enough time so that she doesn't feel left out; allow one or two of her crazy ideas to work; etc).
However, other players are still quite irritated by her general behavior, and simply can't resist being argumentative with her (even though they know it will accomplish nothing).
The game flows better when I limit the options and steer them in certain directions, but I don't like railroading that much and it can sometimes be counterproductive (e.g. the players start feeling that NPCs are pushing them around, and so on).
As for the party problems, I think there are several reasons.
First, one of the players pretty much can't stand another player (the girl whose birthday it was, let's call her Player A) and he was absent that night. Usually, his characters display a great deal of intolerance towards her characters, but he wraps it all up in good role-play and it never comes to actual aggression, just a lot of bickering.
Play styles of the four regular players in that campaign are wildly different.
System knowledge is likewise very different.
A lot of it stems from the fact that Player A usually plays very similar characters who resemble her in real life - loud, full of crazy ideas, fairly chaotic, no respect for authority, doesn't listen much to what others have to say (because she likes to push her own ideas).
Now, I, as the DM, know how to handle this sort of player (don't let her hog the spotlight, but give her enough time so that she doesn't feel left out; allow one or two of her crazy ideas to work; etc).
However, other players are still quite irritated by her general behavior, and simply can't resist being argumentative with her (even though they know it will accomplish nothing).
The game flows better when I limit the options and steer them in certain directions, but I don't like railroading that much and it can sometimes be counterproductive (e.g. the players start feeling that NPCs are pushing them around, and so on).