Forcing rules to accomodate character concepts

[fusangite]

So, why run something you know your players think, suck when you can run something that they might think is awesome?

You seem to believe that incoherent kitchen-sink settings are going to be deemed awesome and that coherent, rational settings are going to be deemed to suck. All I can say is that I'm glad I have my players and not yours.

If saying "no, I don't think this character concept will work with this setting," is going to make a player decide the setting sucks, I don't want that player. Such a player sounds more socially and intellectually childish than I have time for.

 

[mmu1]

So, why run something you know your players think, suck when you can run something that they might think is awesome?

Uh... Because I'm pretty sure I don't want to play with anyone who thinks the setup you just described is actually cool? (unless, perhaps, it's intended as a one-shot adventure, to be played when really drunk, or something)

Thanks for posting, though, you provided a real-life example of exactly what I was talking about in my initial post.

 

[Dykstrav]

So, why run something you know your players think, suck when you can run something that they might think is awesome?

Quite bluntly, you tell your players up front what the game is, what genre/style you're going for, and what the acceptable character options are. If the players think it sucks, they don't have to play. I'm an adult and won't cry if someone doesn't like my imaginary friends.

A game such as you just described holds no interest for me whatsoever. Playing just about any type of character you want? To me, that's a polite way of saying that the campaign has no direction or structure. A good DM (or for that matter, any good storyteller) works within the limits of his material, not against them.

I'm not trying to come across as some sort of iron-fisted creative tyrant- giving the players what they want keeps them coming back, so any good DM does it. But at the same time, I'm not going to dump a 2-year campaign model to run a side adventure involving a heroic stand against an invading Persian-style army, or suddenly run off and do a pirate adventure, or start bringing in Tome of Battle when the players start watching anime. If the players have lost interest in the story I'm telling, there's deeper issues than crossing genres going on.

 

[Dykstrav]

If the player considered Presence a unique element of their character's identity, then they have a valid complaint.

IF however they consider Presence to be a mechanical edge which they can potentially use to abuse and marginalize the other player characters, then they shouldn't even be allowed to play.

Knowing why the player considers it unfair is important here, and sometimes you have to be a bit of a mind reader, as asking directly rarely yields a useful or truthful answer.

Vampire has always been a tricky game, both in giving players what they want and not letting the vast supernatural powers-that-be squash them like bugs. It's sort of Cthulhu-esque like that. It does have a tendency to draw out some very weird people, and people with issues beyond my expertise or desire to deal with.

Just a little more information to contextualize... Presence is an extremely common discipline. Three of the seven "core" clans have it as a clan discipline, and even those without it often learn at least the first two levels. It's an emotion-influencing power and has tons of neat applications. So expecting other vampires to not have presence is roughly equivalent to, say, choosing a battleaxe instead of a sword to try to make your D&D paladin unique.

I've never really had to worry about players trying to use disciplines on each other's characters though. In this particular player's case, it was an attention issue. She wanted her Lestat-clone to be the center of attention in every scene, and after she skulked about other vampires having Presence, she went for shock value. She began playing her character as a shock-rocker instead of a rock star, had the character turn into a blatant homosexual, and wanted to go into lurid detail about his feeding habits (which the game deliberately abstracts since it's distasteful to most players, a controversial element of the game, and not really the focus of the game).

I reacted by being neutral about her behavior, I glossed over the blatantly sensational acts. When she started describing how she selected some teenager at the club and wanted to go into detail about the disgusting things she wanted her character to do, I'd say, "Fine, you commit heinous acts of perversion and get rid of the body. What do you do with the rest of the night?"

When it became obvious that the group was focusing on the characters, their tragic circumstances, the politics between different vampire factions in the city... She stopped coming. Sorry to turn this into a bad player rant.

 

[I'm A Banana]

You seem to believe that incoherent kitchen-sink settings are going to be deemed awesome and that coherent, rational settings are going to be deemed to suck

Melding together characters like that doesn't necessarily imply in incoherent kitchen-sink setting. It merely implies that the setting is robust enough to encompass all those ideas. It doesn't have to encompass *every* idea, but it can certainly hang together well and encompass the ideas that the players want.

Quite bluntly, you tell your players up front what the game is, what genre/style you're going for, and what the acceptable character options are. If the players think it sucks, they don't have to play. I'm an adult and won't cry if someone doesn't like my imaginary friends.

For me, it works the other way around. People want to play the game, and I ask them to make characters, and then I build an adventure out of the characters they give me and the ideas bumping around my head.

It's a lot of fun, and it ends up only excluding what no one is really that interested in including anyway.

 

[SteveC]

I think that a lot of this depends on how the character you're trying to emmulate matches up with the system you're running in. Okay that was a no-brainer, I suppose, but to take it beyond that, I'd say that a lot of it is based on the campaign style and expectations.

I'll give you an example of a character that I had a heck of a time playing in D&D. He was designed very loosly to be like D'Artagnan from the Three Musketeers. The idea was that he was a young man who wanted to be the greatest swordsman that ever lived. Now we were starting the game at low levels, so I wasn't going to be that at the start of the game. What I told the GM was that this character wanted to study, train, and live his life to be the very best at something. He knew he wasn't yet, but he was going to be walking that as a path. He was going to be cocky as all get out, but he was smart enough to know that he didn't know all that much as of yet.

So my GM decided he liked that idea and rolled with it. A few sessions into the campaign, I was pretty unhappy, because the GM was running the game like most campaigns: based on level appropriate challenges. It was at that point where I figured out what you need to do in D&D to give players who are looking to emmulate a particular style of character from another source: you have to run encounters that are outside of the "challenging" level.

What my GM did after we talked about it was put me in situations where I would often fight other duelists that were simply of lesser skill than I was. He still had challenging encounters (this was a VERY tough campaign) but he'd also run people against me who just weren't as good as I was. More than that, after a while, my character started to develop a reputation for being a great swordsman, and NPCs would comment on it. What's more, I had a strong skill at Knowledge: Nobility, which my GM used to reflect the duelist culture, so I was able to show proper respect to those people that he simply told me had the reputation for being better than I was.

The most important thing was: if all I ever ran into were people who were as good or better than I was, and who treated me as some no-named curr, I was never going to have that feeling of my character's dream coming true.

You can fill in the blank with similar character concepts for other classes: how is a rogue ever going to feel like the Mouser if he can't ever sneak up on someone or pick a lock or disarm a trap without it being the hardest thing in the world?

For my money, the biggest culprit in creating this issue is the module. How many modules, even good ones, only have encounters that are at the party's EL or above it? That's where the problem starts.

I'm not saying make your games easy by any means, I guess I'd just say that you can make characters feel more heroic and like the movies and books people have going through their heads by letting them be the tough guy heroes now and then before hitting them with the EL+4 challenge battles.

Whew!

--Steve

 

[Warren Okuma]

A game such as you just described holds no interest for me whatsoever. Playing just about any type of character you want? To me, that's a polite way of saying that the campaign has no direction or structure. A good DM (or for that matter, any good storyteller) works within the limits of his material, not against them.

I'm not trying to come across as some sort of iron-fisted creative tyrant- giving the players what they want keeps them coming back, so any good DM does it. But at the same time, I'm not going to dump a 2-year campaign model to run a side adventure involving a heroic stand against an invading Persian-style army, or suddenly run off and do a pirate adventure, or start bringing in Tome of Battle when the players start watching anime. If the players have lost interest in the story I'm telling, there's deeper issues than crossing genres going on.

So what are you planning to do with a complaining Boba Bett, Aragorn, and Conan? Let them be miserable?

My point, is that you should run something like this to burn it out of their system. Sometimes players just want to play that character once for real. If you not, well, deal with it. Some players still get stuck, some move on.

 

[Warren Okuma]

Uh... Because I'm pretty sure I don't want to play with anyone who thinks the setup you just described is actually cool? (unless, perhaps, it's intended as a one-shot adventure, to be played when really drunk, or something)

Thanks for posting, though, you provided a real-life example of exactly what I was talking about in my initial post.

All right, I challenge you to come up with a campaign that uses Aragorn, Conan, and Boba Fett that is cool.

 

[Warren Okuma]

You seem to believe that incoherent kitchen-sink settings are going to be deemed awesome and that coherent, rational settings are going to be deemed to suck. All I can say is that I'm glad I have my players and not yours.

If saying "no, I don't think this character concept will work with this setting," is going to make a player decide the setting sucks, I don't want that player. Such a player sounds more socially and intellectually childish than I have time for.

I don't have players who are like this. But if I had players like this I would make a game that would accommodate them.

How would you handle a group that only made up of Aragorn, Boba Fett, and Conan besides dumping them? Obviously you can't handle a group like this... That's why gaming is dying. Only people like me is actively recruiting.

 

[KrazyHades]

First: As DM, I agree totally...they're making NEW heroes, not replicating old ones, and the old ones inevitably "should" be around 27th level, with their insane skills.

Second: I bet that rant felt nice Very stress relieving.