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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Agback" data-source="post: 269496" data-attributes="member: 5328">There you are right in the middle of one of my longest-running obsessions.A few times, just a few times, I have persuaded character-players to take a part in steering the adventure by making plot offers to me as a GM-player usually does. Just a few times I have persuaded them to take responsibility for designing the PC party and maintaining the links that hold it together. My best and most memorable campaigns have resulted from the character-players taking a more-than-usually proactive role, taking over part of the traditional responsibility of the GM-player. But when I start a new campaign, will they get together and discuss what the party might be and how their characters might fit together? No. They sit like logs until I acknowledge failure at getting the discussion started. Then if I leave them alone they go off by themselves and design a set of characters that no GM could weld into a party with an oxy torch, which means that I have to work constantly through the whole campaign at keeping the party together. Or if I lay down the party concept, they either all try to build characters with very similar concepts, or design characters that only technically fit into the specs I have laid down.Take for example my latest new campaign. The players agreed that it should be set in or connected with some fresh, unfamiliar part or aspect of my setting, so that it would have the interest of novelty. After a discussion that was, from my point of view, like trying to push rope we settled on the idea that it would be set in House Azure, which is a sort of huge informal university in Thekla, the great city. The character players all said they had no character ideas and couldn't discuss character concepts at that time. And when we met again a week later they had all designed the characters they wanted to play: independently. I didn't end up with a single student, researcher, or teacher. I got:1) A gangster who is in hiding at House Azure, pretending to be a scribe.2) A healer.3) A sensitive and shaman who never sticks at anything.4) "A toff".If they didn't want to play academics, why didn't they say so and let me run something they did want to play? If they didn't want to collaborate on making a party, couldn't each of them have given me some sort of grommet on his or her character that I could attach them by? It isn't like they didn't know that that's what I want: I've been droning on about this for fifteen years.This time I am leaving it to them. I serve up plot offers, they are going to have to do the work of roping one another's characters in. It'll probably be a miserable campaign with at least one charcter left out of most adventures, but with any luck that will serve as a object lesson to those pig-headed character-players!Grrr!Agback</blockquote>

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