So my current game is in its fifth or sixth session now -- we lost one former player to night-school but gained another player, so it's mostly the same group, a bunch of geeks in their late 20's -- and I'm feeling weird about stuff. Not exactly bad per se, but I'm not sure where to go with things, and I'm trying to figure out how to modify my gaming style to fit whatever new dynamic is going on.
The Background
The group has been going since August of 2000, starting up a campaign to celebrate D&D 3E. We played a three-year D&D campaign that took party members from about levels 1-20 (some guys got killed and raised and weren't quite there, and some guys came in later, but at least one person started at 1 and ended at 20). After messing around with some one-shots for a bit, we tried to pick up a d20 Modern campaign, but I accidentally killed the party.*
Then we picked up a different d20 Modern campaign, and it ran fairly smoothly, but people were more interested in something historical. So we suspended that one (an X-Files-like paranormal mystery campaign) and began a new game. After some rules tweaks to D&D and then d20 Modern, we actually decided to go with Mutants & Masterminds with a fantasy flavor. We're almost done with the introductory adventure (about 6 sessions), and that's where I'm feeling weird now. Not bad, exactly. Just weird, and not sure about how my gaming style is jiving with the group. I've brought this up with folks, but the responses have been less than helpful (they're geeks, and... they're geeks).
The Game
Renaissance-era fantasy set in a floating city. I told the players to go for swashbuckling. I said "Three Musketeers". Swashes. Buckling. Cutting ropes, swinging from chandeliers, all of that, using low-power versions of M&M powers to do it -- Leaping, Swinging, etc.
Players and Characters
Tank: A former bodyguard who leaps liberally and can give and take a lot of pounding. He's probably the most physically swashbuckling person. He's played by a guy who seems right now to be enjoying the game -- no problems there.
Tinker: A scientist who uses gizmos and gadgets to accomplish the unlikely. His character is more or less than antithesis of swashbuckling -- he doesn't do anything in a "wow, cool!" cinematic style, but instead does it awkwardly with his gadgets -- but I sorta took a step back and went "Okay, this is the character the guy wants to play, and he doesn't inhibit the fun of others, so I'll shut up." He's played by a guy who is very technically creative and tends to make people a lot like this guy in any game we play -- he's played a utility sorcerer who specialized in tricks rather than damage (but could still do damage), a smart hero who built gizmos and had a lot of knowledge skills, and so on.
Assassin: A super-fast sneaky person who is almost impossible to spot if she's hiding (enormous Hide bonus, plus an ability to hide in plain sight unless viewers make a Will save) and who is also nearly impossible to hit (highest defense in the game at the moment). She's played by a new player, and she's one of the ones I'm having trouble with. She's not cheating or breaking things or being bad... but I don't think she's enjoying herself, and I think it's affecting others.
Noble: A charismatic young nobleman who can make minions shake in their shoes and hold his own in a duel. While I was initially concerned, this guy's player has just taken the ball and run with it, establishing his character's noble prowess and political power in no uncertain terms. While I was initially concerned, this guy is doing fantastic in the game.
Misc: A character with a whip and, theoretically, a lot of street smarts... only he hasn't used them. Or done anything, really. He's played by the player who has always pretty much been like this. In another thread, I talked about my nightmare DM, the guy who potentially has Aspergers** -- he doesn't take social cues properly, his character doesn't ever really do anything, and... well, he was best in the original D&D game as a straight-class dwarven fighter, because then, he could just hit stuff. Only he didn't. He'd win initiative and then say, "Gryff quick-draws his ax, and you get the feeling that if the twenty-foot-fall acid-demon does something threatening next to Gryff, that acid-demon is going to be introduced to Gryff's ax." And then I would shrug and use Acid Fog, and everyone would glare at the player for wasting his round.
The situation:
Initially, I pretty much made the game up on the fly, since I had some real-life fun going on then. Since then, I've started planning and plotting, but I'm feeling like the players are missing many of my plot-cues.
For example, they scout out a merchant's shop. The merchant is an azurite, a race of blue-skinned wizards who are known to be powerful. They find wards around the shop's walls, and are told (after making Kn:Arcane checks) that they might be defensive wards of some sort. So what do they do?
One guy goes in the front door and tries to distract the merchant, and the sneaky assassin chick breaks into the back room. She's immediately set upon by guards, who use a magical device to spot her despite her hiding abilities (which I'd done in a previous encounter quite obviously, showing her that she couldn't hide from the azurites -- they have peoplefinding magic). She beats up the guards. The azurite merchant is coming back for her. So what does she do? She uses a trick that everyone at the table thought was a bad idea to try to trick the location device. (Her footprints were appearing in glowing silhouettes behind her. She hopped around the room a bunch of times to try to throw off the azurite -- who already demonstrably saw her even without the glowing-footprint magic in a previous encounter.)
The azurite comes into the room, glowing with magical energy, sees her, and says, "What are you doing in my shop?" The assassin chick decides that what I meant to say was, "I challenge you to a duel to the death, and nothing shall save you from my wrath," and charges him, despite the fact that she's essentially a high-defense rogue -- good if she can take someone by surprise, lousy in a straight-up fight against a warrior of comparable level.
Moments later, she's spasming on the ground as an area-effect electricity attack whacks her. (In M&M, area attacks are the bane of fast, high-defense people, since most high-defense people are using Evasion. The M&M version of Evasion lets you use your Reflex save instead of your Damage save to avoid damage from attacks -- but it doesn't work against Area-Effect abilities, since you already use a Reflex save to halve the incoming effect already. Yes, they should have named it something else, since its use is almost exactly opposite the D&D version.) She keeps getting damaged and stunned, and as the GM, I'm feeling bad, because, well, she can't beat this guy -- but I was really hoping that it wouldn't end up coming to a fight.
Eventually, the other party members arrive, and one of them thinks to TALK with the azurite... whereupon they realize that they've got the wrong guy. They want a different azurite merchant. They find out where his shop is...
...and do almost exactly the same thing.
To be fair, instead of breaking in, this time, they send the assassin chick in to try to get information out of the guy. She is good with disguises, so that goes well... but she has a Cha of 10, and no ranks in Bluff... so her attempts to trick information out of him (who has a Sense Motive of +18) do not go well. He activates defenses, slams the door telekinetically, and again, it's assasin-chick versus azurite-merchant-she-can't-possibly-defeat. I could have had him not have area-effect magic, but, well, that would be pretty stupid of him. I could have had him try something else, but... he's got Super-Wis and Super-Int. He has a +10 on Int and Wis checks. He's not a stupid guy. He's a wizard-type guy who specializes in magical devices that protect and damage.
The party actually sort-of succeeds in their goal by getting a particular item from this guy's room, but assassin-chick is disabled at the end of the fight, and will be in bed for a week. Her player is complaining that she was useless... which is undeniably true, since there was no way she could have taken that guy, and she never figured out a way to use her stealth abilities against him.
Above and beyond that, the only person doing anything with their character concept is the noble, who split off from the party and was doing some political intrigue on his own while everyone else got pasted by the azurite.
What I think the problems are:
With the tinker: He wants a different game from the one I'm envisioning. He's not actually interested in swashbuckling. It's not insurmountable, and I think, as problems go, that's low on the list.
With the noble: He confessed to me after last night's game that he wasn't having fun until he split off from the group. I don't know where to go with that, other than to note that yeah, his character really bloomed when he was off on his own, doing political stuff instead of breaking into the house of the guy no one in the party could take in a fight and then getting into a fight with that guy. On one hand, it's possible that he had fun because he got some personal spotlight time, but on the other hand, it's possible that he had fun because he alone was playing in a way that was conducive to the swashbuckling stuff I'd imagined.
With the Asberger's Guy: Business as usual. I'd like to come up with plots that cater to this guy's character concept, but... he never does anything. Less of a solveable problem than a general sigh.
With the assassin-chick and her player: I'm really worried about this one. From a character perspective, she's immensely powerful, with exactly two weaknesses. 1) If I take away her stealth, things get ugly, and 2) If I hit her in such a way that she can't use her Reflex save to avoid damage (which, in M&M means hitting her while she's denied her Dodge bonus or hitting her with an Area Attack spell, which uses a Reflex save to halve incoming damage, but then forces a normal Damage save against the damage once it's halved), she's toast.
I felt like I'd shown the group that stealth wasn't currently an option against the azurites -- that was part of my design for them. And they just kinda charged in there anyway, which was bad, and set things up so that stealth-gal was stuck alone with that guy for a few rounds while everyone else went, "Hm, bolts of lightning coming from inside... we should probably go help her." This sorta tossed teamwork out the door until the assassin-chick was already twitching on the ground with smoke wafting from her hair.
In future adventures, the obvious solution is to do more planning and have a range of bad guys that are less powerful but more balanced against the party. There should be somebody who will likely see the assassin-chick, somebody who can hit hard enough to give the tank a challenge, somebody who can do area-effect stuff to hinder or hurt people, and someone who is hard to hit. Given that right now, I'm hearing "Man, my character is useless, nothing I do works," though, I'm worried that designing encounters that accomodate the strengths and weaknesses of the team isn't really going to work.
With the overall feel of things: I'm feeling profoundly that I missed the target in terms of setting up a Musketeers-like game. I offered plot-hooks that made sense in Musketeers-type games, and people reacted to them about as non-Musketeerically as possible. It's like all the years I spent playing D&D with them and showing them how to be careful and stay on their toes and not fall for obvious tricks and traps have blown up in my face, and in a swashbuckling game, it's not about taking the safest course... it's about the drama and the excitement and such.
Example: Evil cardinal asks you to work for him.
Swashbuckler 1: (double agent) I would be honored. Let me know what I can do to serve you. (Starts rolling Bluff checks)
Swashbuckler 2: (honorable) I'd never serve a venomous dog like you, Evil Cardinal! Mark my words -- I'll be waiting for you to slip up, and when you do, I'll be there!
My Players: Wait, what kind of work? Can you be more specific? There are some things we'd rather not do, but I'm sure we'd be happy to do some other things. Also, your speeches show that your political ideals are based on some stuff we don't entirely agree with. If you'd just be reasonable about this, you'd see that there's no reason we can't all work together cooperatively and honestly.
Last session, I had to threaten the party with ninjas to get them to do something. "Okay, guys, I'm bored. If the plot doesn't advance in some way in the next five minutes, I'm going to attack you with ninjas." This wasn't just me being cruel and shoehorn-y. This was them spending the entirety of my side-plot with the Noble PC talking about their strategy and their plan and what to do and how it wouldn't work and how one person wasn't going to do anything and... so on. Maybe I should've let them spend the whole night doing that, but... that's dull. That's boring. And based on results, it didn't end up turning their losing plan into a winning plan.
This is the problem I don't know how to solve. Heck, I rewarded the guy who turned himself in when he discovered he was wanted by the authorities, because he was confident that he could work from within and buck the system. It turned out that he was right -- this was the Noble guy -- and he's learned as much while confined to his apartments as the party has while traipsing around the city getting into pitched battles with wizard-merchants.
I just don't know where to go with this one. If I want a musketeer-type game, then either the players have to agree to make dramatic choices rather than careful ones, or I have to force the drama on them despite their best attempts to avoid it -- which leaves me feeling like the Hand of Plot. I could flick it in and try to play an ordinary game, not a cinematic one, but frankly, I have no interest in a "we act carefully at all times so as to minimize conflicts and problems" game anymore. I don't want to run a game like that.
So... fundamentally, not end-of-the-world stuff, and no need for me to kick anyone to the curb or anything -- or get kicked myself, I believe -- but I'm feeling like I'm getting some kind of resistance to the gaming style I wanted, and that'd be fine if people had said that wasn't what they wanted to play, but people were happy and jazzed about this. So I don't get the disconnect -- whether they try to swashbuckle but then go into "Safe Mode" as soon as they perceive a threat, or whether they don't actually know what swashbuckling is and need to watch some musketeer movies or... what.
Thoughts?
* I'd envisioned a persistent setting, and I'd tried for realism by creating grunts that I'd planned to keep at their existing level for the rest of the game -- so that initially, grunts would be hard, but eventually, grunts would be easy. The grunts were magically-created monsters that appeared in certain situations. The party thought they had figured out where the grunts were coming from (a spot in the middle of the island) and decided that the best thing to do would be go to that place and blow up that device. They got swarmed by grunts. It wasn't a TPK, but only 2 of the 5 escaped, and we started a new campaign.
** Can I just note that taking a condition for people that lack social skills and naming it something that sounds like "assburger" is really not helping the situation?
The Background
The group has been going since August of 2000, starting up a campaign to celebrate D&D 3E. We played a three-year D&D campaign that took party members from about levels 1-20 (some guys got killed and raised and weren't quite there, and some guys came in later, but at least one person started at 1 and ended at 20). After messing around with some one-shots for a bit, we tried to pick up a d20 Modern campaign, but I accidentally killed the party.*
Then we picked up a different d20 Modern campaign, and it ran fairly smoothly, but people were more interested in something historical. So we suspended that one (an X-Files-like paranormal mystery campaign) and began a new game. After some rules tweaks to D&D and then d20 Modern, we actually decided to go with Mutants & Masterminds with a fantasy flavor. We're almost done with the introductory adventure (about 6 sessions), and that's where I'm feeling weird now. Not bad, exactly. Just weird, and not sure about how my gaming style is jiving with the group. I've brought this up with folks, but the responses have been less than helpful (they're geeks, and... they're geeks).
The Game
Renaissance-era fantasy set in a floating city. I told the players to go for swashbuckling. I said "Three Musketeers". Swashes. Buckling. Cutting ropes, swinging from chandeliers, all of that, using low-power versions of M&M powers to do it -- Leaping, Swinging, etc.
Players and Characters
Tank: A former bodyguard who leaps liberally and can give and take a lot of pounding. He's probably the most physically swashbuckling person. He's played by a guy who seems right now to be enjoying the game -- no problems there.
Tinker: A scientist who uses gizmos and gadgets to accomplish the unlikely. His character is more or less than antithesis of swashbuckling -- he doesn't do anything in a "wow, cool!" cinematic style, but instead does it awkwardly with his gadgets -- but I sorta took a step back and went "Okay, this is the character the guy wants to play, and he doesn't inhibit the fun of others, so I'll shut up." He's played by a guy who is very technically creative and tends to make people a lot like this guy in any game we play -- he's played a utility sorcerer who specialized in tricks rather than damage (but could still do damage), a smart hero who built gizmos and had a lot of knowledge skills, and so on.
Assassin: A super-fast sneaky person who is almost impossible to spot if she's hiding (enormous Hide bonus, plus an ability to hide in plain sight unless viewers make a Will save) and who is also nearly impossible to hit (highest defense in the game at the moment). She's played by a new player, and she's one of the ones I'm having trouble with. She's not cheating or breaking things or being bad... but I don't think she's enjoying herself, and I think it's affecting others.
Noble: A charismatic young nobleman who can make minions shake in their shoes and hold his own in a duel. While I was initially concerned, this guy's player has just taken the ball and run with it, establishing his character's noble prowess and political power in no uncertain terms. While I was initially concerned, this guy is doing fantastic in the game.
Misc: A character with a whip and, theoretically, a lot of street smarts... only he hasn't used them. Or done anything, really. He's played by the player who has always pretty much been like this. In another thread, I talked about my nightmare DM, the guy who potentially has Aspergers** -- he doesn't take social cues properly, his character doesn't ever really do anything, and... well, he was best in the original D&D game as a straight-class dwarven fighter, because then, he could just hit stuff. Only he didn't. He'd win initiative and then say, "Gryff quick-draws his ax, and you get the feeling that if the twenty-foot-fall acid-demon does something threatening next to Gryff, that acid-demon is going to be introduced to Gryff's ax." And then I would shrug and use Acid Fog, and everyone would glare at the player for wasting his round.
The situation:
Initially, I pretty much made the game up on the fly, since I had some real-life fun going on then. Since then, I've started planning and plotting, but I'm feeling like the players are missing many of my plot-cues.
For example, they scout out a merchant's shop. The merchant is an azurite, a race of blue-skinned wizards who are known to be powerful. They find wards around the shop's walls, and are told (after making Kn:Arcane checks) that they might be defensive wards of some sort. So what do they do?
One guy goes in the front door and tries to distract the merchant, and the sneaky assassin chick breaks into the back room. She's immediately set upon by guards, who use a magical device to spot her despite her hiding abilities (which I'd done in a previous encounter quite obviously, showing her that she couldn't hide from the azurites -- they have peoplefinding magic). She beats up the guards. The azurite merchant is coming back for her. So what does she do? She uses a trick that everyone at the table thought was a bad idea to try to trick the location device. (Her footprints were appearing in glowing silhouettes behind her. She hopped around the room a bunch of times to try to throw off the azurite -- who already demonstrably saw her even without the glowing-footprint magic in a previous encounter.)
The azurite comes into the room, glowing with magical energy, sees her, and says, "What are you doing in my shop?" The assassin chick decides that what I meant to say was, "I challenge you to a duel to the death, and nothing shall save you from my wrath," and charges him, despite the fact that she's essentially a high-defense rogue -- good if she can take someone by surprise, lousy in a straight-up fight against a warrior of comparable level.
Moments later, she's spasming on the ground as an area-effect electricity attack whacks her. (In M&M, area attacks are the bane of fast, high-defense people, since most high-defense people are using Evasion. The M&M version of Evasion lets you use your Reflex save instead of your Damage save to avoid damage from attacks -- but it doesn't work against Area-Effect abilities, since you already use a Reflex save to halve the incoming effect already. Yes, they should have named it something else, since its use is almost exactly opposite the D&D version.) She keeps getting damaged and stunned, and as the GM, I'm feeling bad, because, well, she can't beat this guy -- but I was really hoping that it wouldn't end up coming to a fight.
Eventually, the other party members arrive, and one of them thinks to TALK with the azurite... whereupon they realize that they've got the wrong guy. They want a different azurite merchant. They find out where his shop is...
...and do almost exactly the same thing.
To be fair, instead of breaking in, this time, they send the assassin chick in to try to get information out of the guy. She is good with disguises, so that goes well... but she has a Cha of 10, and no ranks in Bluff... so her attempts to trick information out of him (who has a Sense Motive of +18) do not go well. He activates defenses, slams the door telekinetically, and again, it's assasin-chick versus azurite-merchant-she-can't-possibly-defeat. I could have had him not have area-effect magic, but, well, that would be pretty stupid of him. I could have had him try something else, but... he's got Super-Wis and Super-Int. He has a +10 on Int and Wis checks. He's not a stupid guy. He's a wizard-type guy who specializes in magical devices that protect and damage.
The party actually sort-of succeeds in their goal by getting a particular item from this guy's room, but assassin-chick is disabled at the end of the fight, and will be in bed for a week. Her player is complaining that she was useless... which is undeniably true, since there was no way she could have taken that guy, and she never figured out a way to use her stealth abilities against him.
Above and beyond that, the only person doing anything with their character concept is the noble, who split off from the party and was doing some political intrigue on his own while everyone else got pasted by the azurite.
What I think the problems are:
With the tinker: He wants a different game from the one I'm envisioning. He's not actually interested in swashbuckling. It's not insurmountable, and I think, as problems go, that's low on the list.
With the noble: He confessed to me after last night's game that he wasn't having fun until he split off from the group. I don't know where to go with that, other than to note that yeah, his character really bloomed when he was off on his own, doing political stuff instead of breaking into the house of the guy no one in the party could take in a fight and then getting into a fight with that guy. On one hand, it's possible that he had fun because he got some personal spotlight time, but on the other hand, it's possible that he had fun because he alone was playing in a way that was conducive to the swashbuckling stuff I'd imagined.
With the Asberger's Guy: Business as usual. I'd like to come up with plots that cater to this guy's character concept, but... he never does anything. Less of a solveable problem than a general sigh.
With the assassin-chick and her player: I'm really worried about this one. From a character perspective, she's immensely powerful, with exactly two weaknesses. 1) If I take away her stealth, things get ugly, and 2) If I hit her in such a way that she can't use her Reflex save to avoid damage (which, in M&M means hitting her while she's denied her Dodge bonus or hitting her with an Area Attack spell, which uses a Reflex save to halve incoming damage, but then forces a normal Damage save against the damage once it's halved), she's toast.
I felt like I'd shown the group that stealth wasn't currently an option against the azurites -- that was part of my design for them. And they just kinda charged in there anyway, which was bad, and set things up so that stealth-gal was stuck alone with that guy for a few rounds while everyone else went, "Hm, bolts of lightning coming from inside... we should probably go help her." This sorta tossed teamwork out the door until the assassin-chick was already twitching on the ground with smoke wafting from her hair.
In future adventures, the obvious solution is to do more planning and have a range of bad guys that are less powerful but more balanced against the party. There should be somebody who will likely see the assassin-chick, somebody who can hit hard enough to give the tank a challenge, somebody who can do area-effect stuff to hinder or hurt people, and someone who is hard to hit. Given that right now, I'm hearing "Man, my character is useless, nothing I do works," though, I'm worried that designing encounters that accomodate the strengths and weaknesses of the team isn't really going to work.
With the overall feel of things: I'm feeling profoundly that I missed the target in terms of setting up a Musketeers-like game. I offered plot-hooks that made sense in Musketeers-type games, and people reacted to them about as non-Musketeerically as possible. It's like all the years I spent playing D&D with them and showing them how to be careful and stay on their toes and not fall for obvious tricks and traps have blown up in my face, and in a swashbuckling game, it's not about taking the safest course... it's about the drama and the excitement and such.
Example: Evil cardinal asks you to work for him.
Swashbuckler 1: (double agent) I would be honored. Let me know what I can do to serve you. (Starts rolling Bluff checks)
Swashbuckler 2: (honorable) I'd never serve a venomous dog like you, Evil Cardinal! Mark my words -- I'll be waiting for you to slip up, and when you do, I'll be there!
My Players: Wait, what kind of work? Can you be more specific? There are some things we'd rather not do, but I'm sure we'd be happy to do some other things. Also, your speeches show that your political ideals are based on some stuff we don't entirely agree with. If you'd just be reasonable about this, you'd see that there's no reason we can't all work together cooperatively and honestly.
Last session, I had to threaten the party with ninjas to get them to do something. "Okay, guys, I'm bored. If the plot doesn't advance in some way in the next five minutes, I'm going to attack you with ninjas." This wasn't just me being cruel and shoehorn-y. This was them spending the entirety of my side-plot with the Noble PC talking about their strategy and their plan and what to do and how it wouldn't work and how one person wasn't going to do anything and... so on. Maybe I should've let them spend the whole night doing that, but... that's dull. That's boring. And based on results, it didn't end up turning their losing plan into a winning plan.
This is the problem I don't know how to solve. Heck, I rewarded the guy who turned himself in when he discovered he was wanted by the authorities, because he was confident that he could work from within and buck the system. It turned out that he was right -- this was the Noble guy -- and he's learned as much while confined to his apartments as the party has while traipsing around the city getting into pitched battles with wizard-merchants.
I just don't know where to go with this one. If I want a musketeer-type game, then either the players have to agree to make dramatic choices rather than careful ones, or I have to force the drama on them despite their best attempts to avoid it -- which leaves me feeling like the Hand of Plot. I could flick it in and try to play an ordinary game, not a cinematic one, but frankly, I have no interest in a "we act carefully at all times so as to minimize conflicts and problems" game anymore. I don't want to run a game like that.
So... fundamentally, not end-of-the-world stuff, and no need for me to kick anyone to the curb or anything -- or get kicked myself, I believe -- but I'm feeling like I'm getting some kind of resistance to the gaming style I wanted, and that'd be fine if people had said that wasn't what they wanted to play, but people were happy and jazzed about this. So I don't get the disconnect -- whether they try to swashbuckle but then go into "Safe Mode" as soon as they perceive a threat, or whether they don't actually know what swashbuckling is and need to watch some musketeer movies or... what.
Thoughts?
* I'd envisioned a persistent setting, and I'd tried for realism by creating grunts that I'd planned to keep at their existing level for the rest of the game -- so that initially, grunts would be hard, but eventually, grunts would be easy. The grunts were magically-created monsters that appeared in certain situations. The party thought they had figured out where the grunts were coming from (a spot in the middle of the island) and decided that the best thing to do would be go to that place and blow up that device. They got swarmed by grunts. It wasn't a TPK, but only 2 of the 5 escaped, and we started a new campaign.
** Can I just note that taking a condition for people that lack social skills and naming it something that sounds like "assburger" is really not helping the situation?
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