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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Meridian" data-source="post: 232430" data-attributes="member: 1603">From the other side of the screen, left of center...I was invited by Kestrel to post my own comments here, especially since (or perhaps in spite of the fact that) two weeks prior to his post to our gaming troupe's board, I dropped out of his Temple campaign for my own reasons.  I'm hoping that my comments will assist others in providing Kestrel with the advice he's asked of this community.To paint a more detailed picture of the environment in which this is taking place:  this specific troupe of players is a subset of the larger gamers' pool currently running within the metro area.  This larger pool has existed for at least two years in its present roster, and consists of approximately ten to fifteen people who consistently play weekly or biweekly.  We've met through mutual acquaintances in realtime and off of gamers' personals here and other places.  There have been social OOC conflicts that have caused the subsets of gamers to gravitate around one or two GMs and/or move around in certain groups because of the battle lines drawn.All this to say that with this type of situation, players start to expect a certain style of gamemastering from particular GMs.  Each GM is known for favoring certain systems and settings.  Common opinion of Kestrel as a game master for at least the subset of gamers of which I am a part tends to lean toward the favorable but specific:  "Kestrel runs really good modules."  Granted, I haven't known Kestrel as long as some of the others, but my perception is that his most successful campaigns were rooted in existing DnD modules and settings.  The Temple has lasted for almost a year, and before that (before my time), it was the Underdark series.Ironically, one of the Kestrel campaigns I enjoyed the most did not begin in a module, but something he created on the fly.  The irony lies in that eventually he turned to a module to provide an adventure for the character party, which in the end proved to be the end of the campaign.  He later confessed that games run off the cuff made him nervous sometimes, because he was never sure if he was entertaining enough.Now, though I'm not the one who originated the comment, I would agree that Kestrel is in fact a "softy" when it comes to trying to please his group of players.  His primary objective is for everyone to have fun.  His main strength is his ability to admit mistakes in rulings and then correct them to be fair yet be sensitive to someone's entertainment level.  He approaches running a campaign as an evolutionary process for his skill as a GM as much as development of the setting.That's a very noble aspiration, but as he found out, players will accept only so many changes made retroactively to their expectations of their characters abilities or the capabilities of their party before they blow up.  As an example unrelated to Kestrel, the group became stressed when after my paladin died, I decided to play a bard instead (don't ask).  They freaked out about not having a fighter ("We're gonna get killed without a fighter!"), but moved on albeit grumbling back into the Temple.  When I left the game proper, I'm pretty sure that while it wasn't visible, they were stressed again by having only three PCs and several NPCs to increase the party's chances for survival.  When Kestrel posted his post, it seemed to them that he was intentionally finding ways to weaken the party enough so that he had more of a chance of killing them, which was an unfair though not unexpected reaction on their part.  They didn't think he was trying to improve the game, they thought that he was backpedaling. Here's the puzzling thing for me.  While I haven't dared to run a game in 3rd edition since it came out, I have run DnD games for the individuals in question that are giving Kestrel his headaches, and I really haven't had any issues that I can remember regarding powergaming.  What's really interesting is that these two players are capable of or are in fact role-playing in other campaigns, under different GMs, myself included.  I for one don't mind powerful characters as long as they have the personalities to deserve being powerful, if that makes any sense.My perception of the problem is that not only did these players agree to join this campaign knowing it would be a module, but they expected Kestrel *not* to emphasize role-playing while running.  I don't know if it's true that in the past Kestrel might have foregone role-playing in favor of massive amounts of combat in all of the campaigns that he's run before, but I'm thinking that while Kestrel has evolved over the years of gaming to a point where he would like more role-playing in his campaigns, these players are fixed in their perceptions of him being an adversarial GM running a killer module.I think the challenges Kestrel faces right now if he chooses to continue is overcoming their habits of thinking, and his own history as a GM.  I will emphasize that this reference to Kestrel's style of gaming or his career history is not perjorative.  Human nature is to react badly to change.I also happen to think that the present popularity of online gaming in our crowd might be helping to cloud the issue in that it further enhances the powergamer's mentality ("Kill monsters, get gold, find treasure, trade magic items, form guilds, post on boards"). It's another tool of inertia, not to mention tainting people's perceptions just by association through enthusiasm of discussion.My suggestion is for Kestrel to wrap up the module, just for closure's sake, and attempt something new and experimental with different characters and a different mix of players.  Delivery-wise, for his next attempt, I would also suggest to him that using the Central Casting tool this group uses for initial character creation only triggers the powergamer mentality if someone gains something tangible from the lifecycle flowchart contained within, so he should avoid it, and encourage organic background development, whether before the campaign starts, or between sessions.  When a book presents you with a series of events for character history, it requires no investment in creating a character, just a willingness to roll dice.Finally, some advice regarding preparation.  I've played characters in DnD adventures that I had no idea were modules, simply because the GM ran it so many times before that she was completely familiar with encounters and descriptions to the point where it felt improvised.  Reading out from passages in the module only further cements the idea that the GM is a computer running the campaign, and creates separation to actions directly affecting the flow of the adventure and "the superfluous stuff" that is peripheral to the adventure but critical in the role-playing development of the characters.My Two Cents.Meridian</blockquote>

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