Seeing someone else receive a benefit, it's simple human nature* to wonder why I and-or everyone else can't receive a similar benefit. And while sometimes a player's cool idea might not be proposed with the intent that it lead to any in-game advantage or "special-ness", most of the time this is exactly the motivation, even if unspoken or even unrealized by the player putting forward the idea.
Again, this assumes that you are guaranteed to get
nothing, and so the other player is being favored when you aren't.
I am
literally telling you, the player just needs to say what they want to do. If there is even a shred of reasonableness in that desire, I will do everything I can to find it and make it happen. I want
all of my players to be happy, to be
excited to come to a session. To feel that their ideas, whatever they might be, I will hear, examine, and support as much as humanly possible, even if I'm skeptical and need some give and take.
There is no favoritism here. I give literally actually every player cool items (some powerful or important, some minor or functional), work with them to build up their abilities, ask for and work with their proposals for world elements big and small. If I feel there's even a
chance I'm under-serving anyone, I seek them out and tell them I'm worried I might be doing a poor job, and want to work with them to fix that. I am always asking for feedback and looking for places where there is a gap between my goals and my actions. Sadly, my players often don't say much more than "that was great" or "I had fun" etc. which is very kind of them but not very useful as far as feedback goes.
* - and nature nature as well. Try feeding a seagull sometime - within seconds you'll have 50 seagulls around you, all wondering why they too aren't getting fed.
Which is why I don't run for 50 people. I run for 3-5 people. (Currently 3, I'm hoping at least one hiatus'd player will return in the next few months.) I can work with 3-5 people. I can level with them, be reasonably sure I have an idea of what they want, and when what I'm offering falls short in any way, I have enough cognitive and emotional space to properly address their concerns in the context of the whole group.
It's called giving back what you get. If someone's pleasant to me, I'll be pleasant in return. If someone's rude to me, that makes it open season for me to be rude in return - should I so desire.
So much for turning the other cheek. Only do good to those who do good to you. And sure as heck don't ever tell anyone their mistakes so they can get better!
Ages ago we had a DM like that in our crew, who either couldn't or wouldn't say a hard "No" when he really should have. His campaign collapsed after one adventure, in large part because there wasn't any challenge to it - as players we'd all lobbied our way into having stupendously powerful characters for 1st-level, and the DM-side pushback that should have come, didn't.
So, genuine question. Why did the players do that? Obviously, it would have been useful for the DM to say no. But why did the players
seek out ultra-powerful characters at first level? It seems to me that it took two to tango here. Why do things you KNOW will ruin your experience? Why grub for advantage in ridiculous and unjustified ways? Why break things when their unbroken state is both more useful
and more fun?
I told my players at the outset what my general expectations are. For example, if they want power, it must be earned. Sometimes earning power means slow, methodical build-up over many sessions (as when one flighty, impulsive char had to have the patience to learn how to shapeshift into animal forms, though only for non-combat purposes.) Sometimes it means earning through paying a cost: a resource, a relationship, a position of power, whatever makes sense as a sacrifice (as when one self-reliant char ended a dangerous battle via risking his soul in a way that required him to trust that his allies would save him.) Sometimes it means earning through burdens: a binding oath, a vicious hunger, a terrible temptation, an innocent dependent (as when one very straight-laced char gave in to dark powers that had touched his soul in order to save someone else, thus risking becoming the very monster he had once feared another char might become.) Sometimes it means starting out weakened or hobbled and slowly regaining one's true strength, as was the case at Gygax's tables when he allowed players to play a young (gold, IIRC?) dragon or a depowered balrog (haven't had a char like that at my table yet.)
I had a couple other things like that. E.g. "remember that mercy
does work, albeit not totally unconditionally, and if you behave without mercy, the world will respond in kind," or "peace isn't always an option, but you know me, I like happy endings, so don't be too quick to assume a situation is hopeless."
Session 0 is where you do this sort of thing. You lay out the boundaries of what is reasonable and confirm that all parties involved accept those boundaries. I listened to what requirements my players had for me, too. They were pretty minimal, more in the realm of
adding new things to the mix than hard no-no lines, but one was to keep any truly X-rated/sexual stuff to a minimum and off screen (ironically, from the party Bard!) I had (and continue to have) zero problems abiding by that. I made a couple of promises, including my promise that I would always give a fair hearing to any idea presented in good faith, and do my utmost to bring as much of it to life as I could. I also promised never to swindle them out of anything;
characters I portray absolutely will lie to the party, but I as the GM
never will. I may not specify absolutely every detail in advance (mostly because I often don't
know in advance!), but I will never intentionally speak falsely, and if I do so unintentionally I will correct that error.
I suspect you've lucked out in that by your posts your players seem enthusiastic while at the same time not being the type to push all that hard against the envelope.
I just don't consider this specially lucky. I consider it perfectly normal and ordinary. The only thing I consider lucky about my players is their nearly inexhaustible patience with my errors as a GM.
Seems like you actually have little reason to even be disagreeing with me then. What exactly are you disagreeing with my statements over if you agree requests can be exploitive, abusive, or coercive? If you agree that requests exploitive, abusive, or coercive, why do you even have to ask me why I might resent a GM giving into such requests. It's not so much a case of envy in as much as I want to get exploitive, abusive, or coercive requests validated as well, as it is when a player is getting requests that are bad for the game validated because they argued with the GM, to me sitting on the sidelines it tells me that the process of play here is no longer engaging with the fiction and trying by cleverness to overcome the fiction - which I find satisfying.
I'm disagreeing because you are painting it as though either (a)
every request is such, or (b) it is impossible for any DM to successfully identify and oppose such requests. That all groups
inevitably fall into it, and once they do they are tainted forever.
If you set clear and meaningful expectations at the start, and truly listen for what your players
actually want, not just the thing they initially requested, you can essentially always find a way to make their true desire happen. It may take time, or cost something, or be risky or imperfect, or only the first step on a long journey. But you can make it happen. As long as the player can accept those terms and recognize the limits of following the fiction and of propriety/decorum, and as long as the DM is willing to accept that there are ideas they might not
initially accept but which can be
made acceptable, there is (effectively) nothing the player and DM cannot achieve together. And doing this is not hard, it is not some special relationship that only Ezekiel has with the weird outliers in his group (tongue firmly in cheek.) We have at least two other posters who say they have achieved it, AIUI with multiple distinct groups in the past (Pemerton and, IIRC, Neonchameleon.)
Two other things, because I agree we have been talking past each other and addressing that first is a better use of our time...
Compared to potentially wrecking a friendship with an argument? Compared to getting in a heated debate with strangers? Compared to disrupting a session at a convention or a free session at a local gaming store? I'm trying by my behavior to be as polite and undisruptive as possible.
Compared to actually telling the GM what actions drove you to leave, and why those actions were such a serious breach. Obviously that conversation is not appropriate to have mid-session if this is something so heinous to you that you would feel the need to
immediately flee the table. Leaving and saying absolutely nothing about why, on the other hand? Yeah, I consider that pretty rude. To hold someone accountable for wrongs done and yet also absolutely refuse to
tell them how they have done wrong is pretty bad in my eyes. It's not the worst thing in the world, but it's pretty bad.
Leaving out the context seems to be a deliberate attempt to color the resentment as being general envy of a player succeeding.
I will say that a lot of times these table arguments are actually motivated by envy at the table where some player has done some that was cool and earned that player plaudits from the other players at the table, and one player or the other feels left out and generally dissatisfied because they haven't been able to come up with a move that has garnered them equal spotlight and satisfaction. And those players are frequently motivated to stop engaging with the rules and either start fudging their dice to get the success they want, or to start rules lawyering or wheedling the GM to try to get that success they feel they are missing out on. I've frequently gamed with players who struggle with tactics or problem solving or role playing or whatever who instead of trying to get better at playing the game, resort to cheating or browbeating the GM.
I mean, it is deliberate in the sense that I could not (and still struggle to) conceive of a reading of what you said, given the context of the example I gave, that did not come across as you saying, "if I [Celebrim] was present for those events, I would resent the Bard, and would specifically resent them because they got a chance to do a cool thing, and I did not." Your fluid switching between argument as a nasty and unpleasant thing (e.g. the guy at that convention game) and as just a person giving justifications for assertions makes it incredibly difficult to actually respond to this, because
sometimes an argument is just a thing humans do to discuss situations where they are not in perfect agreement and
sometimes an argument is an utterly inappropriate emotionally-charged screed to get one over against the DM and/or players, and there's no dividing line between the two. I cannot tell if "player A presents an argument for being able to do action X" means the nasty-thing definition or the perfectly-ordinary-thing one. This makes your opposition appear to arise
no matter what: whether the "argument" is legitimate or illegitimate, it is simply the fact that they made any petition at all. But
all actions players take are declarations that can (and usually should) be discussed between DM and player: it is in most cases impossible to avoid such discussion, because that is how the game is played. Hence, you seem envious
because they got to do something cool.
