Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="swrushing" data-source="post: 1891315" data-attributes="member: 14140">"Actions" as in the mechanical imp,ementation of the rules: They would have been legal then, which is a wholly different thing from "right" or "wrong"."Actions" as in his choice for this script, well, based on his own assessments of the aftermath, I would still judge it as wrong. i cannot say whether he had foreknowledge of the current players opinions (and if so ought to have seen this reaction coming) or if he was clueless as to how they felt about the game/plot so far (and if so that is a much bigger problem than this flare up), but either way, if I ended a session with players in the mood and even one player who had been gaming with me for a long time, who i knew well, leaving with that much ill feelings about not only my game but specifically me running it... I would feel i had done something wrong.and, of course, my first move would have been to go to a net board and seek support for my case... uhh.. no wait... As stated before, when you control the world its easy to fool the players. You can equip the face gnome with the right potions to beat their good-at-it-traits and thus use their own skills against them. You can even, amazingly, try and buffalo the notion that doing "too well" on their skills ends up costing them by preventing them from gaining info that would alert them, as you suggested. When you have all the numbers and unlimited creation ability and serve as the total conduit for info to the players and characters, its no great deal for them to come out of it surprised.had he equipped the gnomes with glibness potions so that his answer would have been "they were better than you because they all used glibness potions and other magics so they could fool you" then he would have been taking credit for the betrayal as a planned, deliberate thing. That would have produced possibly different, though not perhaps better reactions, from the players.the "i make it up as i go along and these gnomes expressed their true intentions but were too starstruck to admit they were making promises they could not keep" probably did not make it better.When i pull major reversals of fortune like this in my games, and i do, i tend to do several things, and take several precautions in my setup.Imagine the difference had this scene stopped at the "you get crated up" stage, then next week it starts with the "something is wrong" and the pcs break out to find they have been had... but then hear the sounds of tied up gnomes nearby, find out the gnomes had been duped, and when the gnomes describe this stranger who did the duping, its some skulduggerous past-foe the PCs have been at odds with, who, yes, even back then had had a few gnome lackies.Suddenly this turns into a chase to grab the known bad guy before he can get away with it. You drop a clue or two or remain consistent with previous knowledge and now you have fired up PCs and players with a FACE for their pain (other than you the GM) and you probably have one of the most fired up sessions in your game. One potential and IMO somewhat ideal script would have them spend that session FURIOUSLY pursuing the guy and mowing thru obstacles and the session ends with the face off... break scene and resolve it next week on a climactic finish.Everyone left the first session with the sense of accomplishment.everyone leaves the second session with the "we want his carcass NOW" sensepresumably they win in the third session and leave with a sense of accomplishment renewed.they never leave ticked at YOU at all.These are the types of things a deliberate, planned, well thought out reversal story arc done by a Gm who is aware of how his players feelings are (and cares about that) can be better than one mishandled on the fly.As i said in my first post, these things aren't just things which come up, if you want them to work well in your game.</blockquote>

Verification