Free Will and Story

[Majoru Oakheart]

We ended our campaign that's lasted about a year today with mixed reactions to our final session. This game took place in 4e, but the edition only matters slightly to my question here. There will be a TL;DR in my second post for those who don't care about the background.

Our DM made up his own campaign world that is fairly intricate. He is a storytelling DM for sure. He planned a long campaign out with a fairly grand story. I assume the story changed as we made decisions, but I can't really say for sure.

The basic idea of the story is that it takes place on "The Green Moon", which is overrun by plants that grow at super speeds. Except for mesas that have cities on them. The cities aren't overrun due to "seeds of Misha", artifacts given to the people by the goddess Misha...which is the dominant religion on the planet as a result. Legend has it that the people of the Green Moon originally came from a planet that the moon circles. They were brought here by Misha who had a disagreement with the other gods and took a bunch of people to start her own planet.

We also found out that a bunch of creatures that are called "demons" are members of the same race as the gods. They disagreed with what the gods were doing and were banished from their plane. One of which was called Illoopion. In the process of helping the church of Misha, they let us choose a reward from their vaults. One of the objects we took was a mysterious box. When we opened it, it sucked us all in to another dimension where we attempted to escape...and in the process found out that Illoopion was trapped in the box and the only way to escape was to free him with us. So, we did.

He vanished and we forgot about him. Later, we found on that an Elf known as the Heron King was marching across the continent and conquering cities. We didn't think much of it, as it didn't really affect us. Later, we were captured by the Heron King. We discovered that the general of his armies was actually Illoopion in disguise. The Heron King wouldn't believe us and we had to stage a huge escape to get out of his grasp.

We eventually discovered that Illoopion had tried to become a god many years ago, but he was stopped and trapped in the box. He wanted to put the plan into effect again, however the artifact he needed to do so was hidden in a place called the Golden City. The artifact was apparently capable of trapping a god and transferring its power to someone else. We happened to find a map that said where the 3 gems required to find the Golden City was. To make a long story short, we found all the gems and they led the way to the city. Though, they did so by creating a big magic beam that carved a path through a mountain to where it was hidden. This allowed Illoopion(and his pawn, the Heron King) to get to the city before us.

So, our last session was today. We got to the Golden City which was a battleground between 3 sides: The armies that opposed the Heron King, the Heron King's army(as he had finally realized the truth and tried to stop Illoopion), and the portion of the Heron King's army that stayed loyal to Illoopion. We found Illoopion performing a ritual with a large artifact with Misha trapped in it. We managed to take down the forcefield protecting the artifact and disrupted one of the many wizards who were performing the ritual. This, apparently, allowed the ritual to be weakened enough for Misha to escape.


Here's where the controversy comes in. Our DM isn't really one for rules. This is the first game he's every ran. He has only really been playing D&D for about a year and a half now. He hasn't even read through all the rules. He often relies on either me or my friend Jim to answer rules questions that he's too lazy to look up himself. As far as he's concerned, the rules of the game don't matter as much as the story. A number of the monsters we've fought have been custom made by him....and you can kind of tell if you've been playing 4e for a while. Powers that would make the most sense to target AC target Reflex in his game. Monsters have powers that seem kind of overpowered/out of whack for what you'd expect to see in 4e.

So, when Misha escapes this ritual, she apparently turns herself into energy and shoots herself at Illoopion. But our DM reasoned that she was weak and couldn't really aim it or control it. So, it did 150 points of radiant damage to everything in a line between her and Illoopion and going out past him for miles. No attack roll, no saving throw, no protection of any kind. Now, people who have played 4e know that 150 points of damage in an attack in an absurd amount of damage in that edition. There are level 36 solo monsters who can't do that much damage. We're level 13. My friend Jim, who is a bit of a rules lawyer points out to the DM that 150 damage is a stupid amount. Our DM points out that my character(an assassin) managed to combine poison, encounter powers, and daily powers to do 100 damage in an attack earlier in the battle and that a GOD should surely do more damage than some assassin. It is followed by a brief discussion, mostly by Jim, about the fact that in 4e, player damage is on a completely different scale than monster damage and that 150 damage kills everyone in the party immediately from full hitpoints and that even some ACTUAL GODS in the monster manual can't do that much damage(with the implication that our DM would know that if he'd actually bothered to read the rules). Meanwhile, it barely scratches Illoopion, who is a solo.

Our DM doesn't care, he says it's the last session of his campaign ever and he said 150 damage and he's sticking with it. It kills 2 party members. One of which is a cleric of Misha. He gets a little annoyed that his GOD would kill him like that. The other one is Jim. The DM re-explains that she couldn't control it because she was so weak(though, obviously, we didn't really know this in character).

A round later, our Warlock runs over to the device and picks up a glowing gem that is sitting on the same pedestal that Misha was hovering over. Our DM takes her into the next room. Then when they come back, he announces that the Warlock has vanished. Then her voice appears in the heads of the dead people's spirits and offers to bring them back to life now that she has the power to do so. Everyone at the table figures out pretty quickly what happened: The device was supposed to transfer a god's powers into someone else. It was almost done and she touched it, so she now had the powers of a god(the Warlock that is).

Apparently, the two dead people who had been sitting there getting a little annoyed out of character that their characters died in one hit with no chance to stop it, both said no. They didn't want to be brought back to life. They said that if she had the powers of Misha now, that she basically was Misha. And Misha just killed them. They weren't accepting any sort of Raise Dead from a god who would be petty enough to kill them. She tried to explain that she wasn't Misha, she was still Meva...our Warlock. They still said no. The reason wasn't exactly clear why they refused to come back to life. They just seemed a little bitter about dying.

The DM pointed out to Meva that she WAS a god and didn't have to respect their wishes if she didn't want to. She had the power to bring them back against their will. She said "Fine, I do that. They shouldn't have been killed and I'm going to right that wrong." So, they come back to life. They proceed to complain that they were brought back to life and say that they are going to start a cult to denounce her as a god and do everything in their power to make sure no one worships her. She offers to give us power to help us defeat Illoopion if we worship her. One of the other party members say yes. The two formerly dead people refuse. They said that obviously Illoopion was on the right side. He didn't callously kill them just to take a pot shot at his enemies like Misha did. Jim decides to start attacking ME to prevent me from killing Illoopion, who is still attacking us during this debate. I manage to kill Illoopion before he can stop me.

Meanwhile, Jim continues to complain about how he never wanted to be brought back in the first place. He says to me "This is a perfect ending to a perfect campaign"(with heavy sarcasm). He tells me quietly, "You NEVER give a player god like power. It's stupid. I didn't even want to come back. But I was forced to." The player of Meva finally says, "Fine, you don't want to come back to life, you don't have to. I revoke the gift of life and you die again."

The rest of us escape the Golden City and the campaign ends.

After the game was over, however, Jim continues to complain to me(even after the DM and everyone else went home) about how that was the stupidest game he had ever played in. That our DM didn't know any of the rules and it frustrated him so much. If you bring someone back to life, they have to agree, it says right there in the ritual description for Raise Dead. I pointed out to him that gods technically don't have to cast the ritual that's listed in the book, they can probably make up their own rituals and likely don't have to follow the precise rules in the book. He gets angry and says that's stupid. As a DM, you can't just make up rules as you see fit. You can't just say gods are all powerful. They follow rules as well. There is a monster entry for Bahamut. He doesn't have the ability to invent whatever ritual he wants at will. He has a limited set of powers and he forms the basis of how powerful gods should be. Which our DM would KNOW if he read the book.

I try to reason with him and say that our DM likes to use story over rules...and that I often agree with him. That many of the people at the table had fun and that I was sorry he didn't enjoy it but that his complaining for the entire last 2 hours of our session started ruining the fun for everyone else. He got super angry and said that we were ruining the fun for him so he didn't care if we enjoyed it or not. That having a DM who didn't follow the rules was the absolute worst thing to happen and the entire campaign was no fun for him. I told him that I wouldn't hesitate to bring people back to life as NPCs after the player refused to allow them to be raised. That, IMO, I can't force a player to continue playing a character they don't want to...but once they give up on that character that they become and NPC and I can do what I want with them. He told me that if I ever did that, he'd quit the campaign immediately and didn't want to discuss it anymore and stormed off(he lives with me) and went to his room.

Which finally leads me to my questions: Should the DM have the ability to bring people back to life without their permission? Should the DM be allowed to give infinite power to a player as a plot device for the last hour of a campaign? Should gods be all powerful or are they limited to a few interesting tricks?

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

TL;DR
Our DM made one of the players a god for the last hour of our campaign and then the player proceeded to bring 2 dead characters back to life against the will of their players. It made one player VERY angry as he believes the choice of whether his character can come back to life is his and his alone and the DM can never override that. He also believes no player should ever be given so much power, even if it is the last session of a campaign.

 

[pemerton]

Our DM made one of the players a god for the last hour of our campaign and then the player proceeded to bring 2 dead characters back to life against the will of their players. It made one player VERY angry as he believes the choice of whether his character can come back to life is his and his alone and the DM can never override that. He also believes no player should ever be given so much power, even if it is the last session of a campaign.

Should the DM have the ability to bring people back to life without their permission?

Doesn't this depend heavily on the group's expectations? For instance, you said in your OP that once a player "give up on that character that they become and NPC and I can do what I want with them." I imagine some groups would agree with this, but others would reject it, taking the view that the player has ownership over the PC's existence in the fiction whether or not they want to keep playing that PC.

But in your scenario, in any even, it is another player who has done this, not the GM (unless I misunderstood who did what). There are abilities in 4e that permit this - for instance, the 22nd paladin utility "Gift of Life", as written, doesn't have a "PC consent" clause to it. Again, this strikes me as a "social contract" issue: if the player doesn't want his/her PC resurrected, why is the other player nevertheless doing so?

Should the DM be allowed to give infinite power to a player as a plot device for the last hour of a campaign?

I'm personally not the biggest fan of this sort of "plot device" - what exactly is it meant to add to the play of the game?

I don't see it as an issue of the the GM being "allowed" or not - who is granting/withholding permission here? - but as what makes for a good play experience.

Should gods be all powerful or are they limited to a few interesting tricks?

Again, this depends on what the overall point of the game is. An all-powerful opponent, for instance, doesn't make for a very well-framed situation - it looks like a railroad (or something similar) to me, if the PCs can't succeed except via GM fiat. But obviously the gods, in the 4e world at least, are strong enough to snuff out the life of paragon heroes, given that - in most god statblocks - you have to be 20th or higher level to hurt them.

For instance, contrary to what your fellow player said, there is no implication in the rules system that Bahamut's abilities are confined to the published statblock plus published rituals. Apart from anything else, the DMG mentions his ability to be in two places at once, which is not mentioned in the statblock nor in the ritual rules.

It sounds to me like your GM mishandled the situation pretty badly, but your fellow players seem to have acted in ways that compounded rather than mitigated the damage.

 

[GX.Sigma]

As a DM, you can't just make up rules as you see fit.

Actually, that's a pretty good description of what a DM is.

 

[billd91]

Which finally leads me to my questions: Should the DM have the ability to bring people back to life without their permission? Should the DM be allowed to give infinite power to a player as a plot device for the last hour of a campaign? Should gods be all powerful or are they limited to a few interesting tricks?

1) Maybe. Particularly when the players who don't want to come back are essentially being whiney dicks because the DM broke the rules and some game event didn't break their way. I mean, for god's sake, the PC given the massive power was trying to fix Misha's reckless act. And they take it out on her? That's dick behavior. OK, I admit, doing it because they're being dicks is spiteful behavior, but then, they started it.

2) I'm not sure I'd allow it but then I'm not sure I'd create a campaign around that kind of story. But if it fit in with the story, I'd do it.

3) As far as comparing to a scale of anything on the D&D game table, gods are generally all powerful. If they can power a bunch of priests operating at maximum level across multiple material planes, they can pretty much do whatever they want including exceed that level of power. They're gods.

 

[delericho]

Honestly, it looks like your group's problem is that the DM just isn't very good. Both because he's never bothered to learn the rules of the game he's running and, probably more importantly, he's failed to communicate his gamestyle preferences to the players. I suspect if you fix that, the other issues your raise here would simply go away.

(Also, I'm not convinced that "Jim" isn't a problem player, too. But that would depend on how he acts when playing under other DMs.)

Regarding your specific questions:

Which finally leads me to my questions: Should the DM have the ability to bring people back to life without their permission?

Broadly speaking, no. The DM gets to control everything else - an effectively endless cast of NPCs, all the monsters, environmental conditions, and so on. The one thing that he doesn't get to control is the PCs.

So, if a player doesn't want his PC raised from the dead, the DM should respect that.

Should the DM be allowed to give infinite power to a player as a plot device for the last hour of a campaign?

Sure. It's not something I would do (for various reasons), but given that it's the last hour of the campaign, I don't see any reason it shouldn't be allowed.

Should gods be all powerful or are they limited to a few interesting tricks?

The normal D&D convention, and certainly in 4e, is that the deities are little more than extremely powerful monsters - they have great power but they're not all-powerful.

But there's no reason that the DM should stick with the standard conventions. Indeed, Eberron doesn't, and it's one of the official, published, settings!

 

[Lindeloef]

Good points from [MENTION=22424]delericho[/MENTION]
got the same vibe from Jim.

btw how long have you been playing with that DM? Long enough to get his gamestyle preferences from play, so you knew how he rolls?

Regarding your questions, only thing I have to add, that hasn't been already said:
I personally hate it, that Gods have stats in D&D (and other games too, like Call of Cthulhu). Especially if you have players, that think, the DM has to abide to the Monster Manual.
And in this case the Gods were even homebrew Gods, so everything ok in my book on that topic

 

[pemerton]

Actually, that's a pretty good description of what a DM is.

I think that's pretty contentious. I wouldn't want to play with a GM who took this view.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Good points from [MENTION=22424]delericho[/MENTION]
got the same vibe from Jim.

Yeah, he's my friend and lives with me...but he likes to rules lawyer a lot. He argues about strange thing. I've played with him in nearly every group I've played in for 20 years now. I remember one game I ran where I ruled that even if you could breathe water, it didn't let you speak underwater. So, I wouldn't let him use spells with verbal components while underwater. He argued that given the lack of rules saying you CAN'T cast spells underwater, you should be able to. He argued that the default should always be that you are allowed to do something unless the rules forbid it. I told him I understood his point of view, but I was the DM and I was ruling that it didn't work. He then proceeded to argue about it for the next hour or so. He then brought it up again for the next year or so every time he'd get angry at any of my rulings. He'd casually say "Oh, is this another situation like not being able to cast spells underwater where you just change the rules?"

btw how long have you been playing with that DM? Long enough to get his gamestyle preferences from play, so you knew how he rolls?

About a year and a half. With him as the DM. He joined our group around 6 months before that. He played for 6 months(weekly) then decided that he'd really like to DM, so we gave him the chance. But he's only DMing once a month and his sessions tend to only be about 4 hours long. So, the total time played with him as the DM isn't huge.

However, it's been abundantly clear how he DMs since the beginning. A lot of it we've chalked up to him being a new DM and not understanding the rules well. Jim has complained about it the WHOLE time, however. Basically every session he makes fun of our DM for each and every mistake he makes, no matter how small. If he forgets what bonus you get from flanking then Jim suddenly says "It's +2, which you'd know if you'd bothered to read the rules!"

This has kind of been an ongoing issue. Our DM pretty much telegraphs his intentions but Jim likes to ignore them. One example is when we tried to get some items out of a city that was completely overrun with undead. We ended up being trapped in a building. The enemy was almost completely surrounding us. Hoards and hoards of undead. We were attacked by 4 Elites at once who were a couple levels above us and well as a bunch of minions. Which we didn't know until we started attacking them. Jim grumbled that the guidelines for encounters say you shouldn't use that many powerful enemies at once unless you want to kill the party. The DM says out loud "Well, if it's that dangerous, then maybe you should run and find a better place to hide." Jim refuses and insists on making a stand there. We manage to kill 3 of the elites but we take a lot of damage. We all decide to run. However, Jim still refuses to follow us. The DM points out that there is one side of the building that appears to be free from undead now and therefore we have an escape route. He still refuses to go. He points that there is are hundreds of undead out there and he can't hope to survive if he stays. Jim asks if they are the same minions we've already fought. The DM says yes. He says that he has a power that lasts until the end of the encounter that does 3 points of damage to anything that becomes adjacent to him. They only have melee attacks, so it is impossible for any of them to hurt him. He insists on staying and taking on the whole army by himself.

It's obvious that the DM is looking at it from the story point of view: "Look, there are hundreds of zombies, you should be scared and run". While Jim looks at everything from a game mechanics point of view: "It's impossible for minions to get melee attacks against me, I can fight infinite of them." Also, Jim refuses to acknowledge that argument happened. Even to this day. He insists he figured running away from the building was suicide and the entire rest of the party was stupid for doing so. Incidentally, the DM allowed him to survive by climbing onto the roof and waiting until the morning.

The same thing happened with the DM decided to run a combat against illusions created from our own mind. There was this pollen that made us hallucinate. But it was so realistic that we took real damage from it. But he didn't make attack rolls or give us saves to determine if we saw the illusions or not. He insisted we were in a forest that was filled with the pollen, so it was guaranteed to work. Jim got really annoyed and insisted he couldn't take damage from things he KNEW weren't real and almost refused to write the damage on his character sheet. After all, if the DM wasn't going to try to hit his will defense to see if he was affected by this pollen then he could break the rules as well.

Our DM has done things like "A rock falls on you all, make acrobatic saves to get out of the way". We're all "There's no such thing as an acrobatic save in the 4e rules" and he says "Well, then a Dex save". We'd say "No, there's no Dex saves either. We just have Reflex defenses. Normally traps of this kind roll to hit our reflex defense." Then he'd say, "Oh, then just make an acrobatics check to get out of the way." Then you'd see a vein in Jim's neck pulse and he'd give me a look like "Why are we putting up with this?"

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

1) Maybe. Particularly when the players who don't want to come back are essentially being whiney dicks because the DM broke the rules and some game event didn't break their way. I mean, for god's sake, the PC given the massive power was trying to fix Misha's reckless act. And they take it out on her? That's dick behavior. OK, I admit, doing it because they're being dicks is spiteful behavior, but then, they started it.

Yeah, this is kind of where I was coming from. I couldn't understand why they were making such a big deal about it. I mean, yeah, it sucks that the DM appeared to have picked an arbitrarily large number off the top of his head and used it as damage without having any idea that it would kill anyone. He looked seriously surprised when they both said "150 damage? You know that kills us outright from full hitpoints right?"

My best guess is he had no idea how many hitpoints we had(during the time he actually PLAYED 4e, someone else made his character and he had difficulty keeping track of his powers and what they did). So, the first thing he did was tell the Warlock, now god, "You are allowed to bring them back to life, you have the power to do that now."

The Warlock was completed surprised when they said no. So were the rest of us. She didn't even know what to do. She was made a god and told(as I was told later) "The rest of the gods appear before you and tell you that they don't want you interfering in the world too much. You can't take any direct action to help the PCs fight unless they agree to worship you and even then you can only give them small buffs. However, you can take actions to correct the wrong caused by Misha and bring your friends back to life."

So, she tried to do the one thing she was allowed to do...and they said no. And complained about the offer being an insult to them. Plus, she's fairly new to D&D as well.