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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 6335254" data-attributes="member: 18">THIS TIMES A MILLION. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />We are not the narrators. We are not dictating the story.We are the DMs. Even with White Wolf, whilst they used the term Storyteller (which was, perhaps, in some ways ill-advised but did get people thinking about story more and treasure/XP/kill-counts a bit less), they went to great lengths in most 2E and later Storyteller guides/sections to explain that you weren't supposed to dictating to the players what happened.*Rolling with really surprising player actions is absolutely one of my favourite things about DMing and has lead to many of the best sessions I've run.Indeed. I usually prep the enemies/NPCs who are in a given area where an encounter is likely, and have an eye towards encounter budgets and so on, but I very often tailor the specific encounter to the specific circumstances at the time, just as in any edition - but because 4E's monsters are quick and easy to pre-prepare, and can be understood within seconds of reading them (and I have each one printed out on a bit of a paper, no bloody page-flipping or the like!), it seems to work particularly well (night and day from 3.XE, where to properly run a lot of NPCs and enemies you could require hours of prep, especially if you wanted to understand how they actually worked).It absolutely is. I don't think a lot of the people who know they are doing it realize that they are griefing, but they are generally making life harder for everyone else for entirely selfish reasons, in a social/group game (especially a class/role-based one like D&D or Shadowrun), and that's griefing. I've recently come to realize that intentionally useless characters, intentionally plotblocking/setting-screwing characters, and true munchkin-type "wreck the game" (rather than just "be awesome") characters are all basically different species of the same genus, and all stem from the same root problem - that the player doesn't actually enjoy/engage the game/setting/plot you've chosen to play.I noticed this behaviour in myself many years ago with Castle Falkenstien (a game many people liked). As someone who actually knew UK aristocrats and had a lot of exposure to etiquette-based social situations (this is not a matter of "authority", note, merely my personal experience - I imagine others might have very similar feelings about games set in certain other subcultures they've experienced in a negative way), I found it's fawning on aristos, "honor" (of the second-worst kind, imho!) and etiquette as if they were wonderful, exciting, positive things absolutely loathsome, particularly given the strong setting/game expectation that the PCs as a group would want to engage with aristos, sword-duelling and court life in a positive fashion, rather than by going all English Civil War/French Revolution/Russian Revolution on them.The right thing to do would have been to say: "Sorry, I hate this game/setting on a really basic level, and I can't play it.", but that didn't even occur to me - the person who ran most of our games had said he wanted to run it and that was that (let's be clear, 99% of his DMing was great - his system/setting choices, in retrospect, less so). So I made an angry, snarling US cowboy who hated aristos and etiquette and who was certainly ready to duel - with his two six-shooters! All he managed to do was cause big problems and headaches.In retrospect, that was juvenile, but in my defence, I was about 16. Now I would just say no.I feel like the vast majority of intentionally-useless characters and munchkins and the like come from a similar place. Many munchkin-types fundamentally don't enjoy RPGs, they just want the validation of "winning" (which is part of why we see them less nowdays - computer games really do offer that more easily). Many ineffective characters stem from people wanting to play an entirely different kind of RPG or setting, or because the player would rather be writing a novel or something.* = There were a couple of terrible ones out there, which did pretty much amount to "If your players ruin your pretty story, use the officials of [insert supernatural court here] to put them into line (probably by flashily killing all the naughty PCs)", but it was a learning process, and they got over it.</blockquote>

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