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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tar Markvar" data-source="post: 212486" data-attributes="member: 2859">Well, I admit to railroading. I get very nervous when I'm improvising a story for anything other than the deeply-homebrewed parody version of Champions/Aberrant I ran a couple years ago. A fateful session of Sorcerer turned ugly when I overestimated my abilities to improvise a non-comedy situation, and since then, I've been a bit gunshy. To be honest, I don't have a lot of wiggle room in GMing style. One player just wants to kill, that much is obvious. One player claims to want story and interaction, but when it happens he dismisses it as flavor text and asks if things could move along. Personally, I love playing a character, or many characters as a GM, but the delicate balance between enough description/dialogue and too much description/dialogue is tricky when you're balancing between a railroading summary and being denounced as flavor text.I wasn't prepared for the problem, and that's my fault. I told this guy what level the captain was, and that's my fault, too. I did play out the scene of them "negotiating" with the captain, and I RPed the dwarven resistance people they wanted to contact to make further deals. My crime was not being open-minded enough, I suppose. But GMing with this guy around makes me nervous. If he's having fun (generally when we're hacking dungeons, counter to his mocking tone whenever he talks about hacking dungeons), it's good for everyone. When he's not having fun, he taunts, metagames, and tunes out completely. The game is as shallow as it is because it's hard to go beyond "the magic sword gives you plusses", since anything more than that is mocked as flowery prose. When he GMs, he's very tight against the very things he does to others when he plays their games. And when he plays something like Vampire, his character is usually so min/maxed that he's capable of overpowering everyone and making it into his group.It seems more and more that the answer is to simply stop GMing D&D for a while, but I enjoy running the game for everyone else, and everyone but him seems to enjoy playing it. I can't very well kick him out, since we're at his house. It's sticky.Meanwhile, I'll work on being a better GM for non-linear situations. Or keep running modules.</blockquote>

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