Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9543116" data-attributes="member: 4937">We can generalize this in a way that doesn't presume dysfunctional DMing.  Both players and DMs are incentivized to protect their fun, because fun is the reason we are playing.  For players this almost always involves protecting their PC's from harm.  For DMs this is a bit more abstract and involves protecting the scenario from being derailed because the alternative is perceived as being less fun.  This can involve railroading because the DM is too inflexible or is too much in director stance trying to create the perfect story they've imagined, but it doesn't have to be.  For example, in the second or third session of a D&D campaign I was running my party encountered a farmer with an old nag on the road.  One of the players in the group - an inexperienced and young player - decided it would be fun to use his intimidate skill to rob the farmer of his horse.  And in fact, he did roll high enough that by my own standards the social skill check should have worked - the farmer should have relinquished his horse to the player.  But I ruled the attempt failed anyway.  I put my finger on the scale and railroaded the player.  I did this not to protect "my story" in some sense, but to protect the fun of the group.  Had I allowed this to happen, the game we had agreed to play wouldn't have happened.  The young and inexperienced PC would have successfully committed highway robbery, a crime punishable by death by hanging in the game universe.  His comrades would have been perceived as accessories to the crime, standing by and watching it happen.  The farmer, would have certainly reported the crime to the town watch, and they would have certainly formed a posse to detain the party for their crimes.  As first level characters, there was no way this was going to resolve itself in an interesting manner compared to ignoring the crime and letting the plot proceed.  Even if they had survived to escape, they'd be wanted as bandits and while that could be fun it wouldn't have been nearly as fun for the whole group as what I had planned.  The group of players was just too inexperienced with my style of realistic gritty play to understand that this lark wasn't a lark or a fun bit of roleplay, but campaign wrecking.  I had to both ignore my own rules and spend some time explaining things out of character to get everyone to understand how serious the action would be perceived.  It was rail-roading, but not based on my ego or inflexibility as a GM.</blockquote>

Verification