Starfox
Hero
Probably by quoting a message with nested quotes in it. My mistake.
Players that just don't *get* the genre
- Thread starter Bullgrit
- Start date
Probably by quoting a message with nested quotes in it. My mistake.
In the first campaign I ran for my new group, I told them my inspirations for the game were A Song of Ice and Fire, Warhammer Fantasy, and Dragon Age. I told them low-magic, gritty, bleak, and quasi-realistic. There was no alignment for goodness sakes!
However, none of my players seemed to 'get' it. Even the one who got it the most kept wanting to make a banjo for his druid/bard (I finally relented). For the others, they wondered why they couldn't buy wands of cure light on every street corner, why they couldn't directly insult the petty and cruel baron in his keep surrounded by his guards, why the village cleric didn't simply cure the plague with magic, etc.
The real show-stopper was the half-orc monk. I allowed it on the condition that he have high Charisma to appear human and because I thought he would be exploring the bestial aspect of his nature and his role as an outcast in society. Also, he was a devoutly religious character in a religion-dominated setting. However, despite having an INT of 10, his character voice was the Warcraft Orc voice, including the "zug zug" and "me am wondering why..." Furthermore, he refused to budge on being lawful good, peaceful and expressed extreme disappointment that the local Half-Orc street gang didn't want to peacefully resolve their conflict with a rival gang. He eventually quit my campaign, citing "a lack of flying cities and other cool stuff."
However, none of my players seemed to 'get' it. Even the one who got it the most kept wanting to make a banjo for his druid/bard (I finally relented). For the others, they wondered why they couldn't buy wands of cure light on every street corner, why they couldn't directly insult the petty and cruel baron in his keep surrounded by his guards, why the village cleric didn't simply cure the plague with magic, etc.
The real show-stopper was the half-orc monk. I allowed it on the condition that he have high Charisma to appear human and because I thought he would be exploring the bestial aspect of his nature and his role as an outcast in society. Also, he was a devoutly religious character in a religion-dominated setting. However, despite having an INT of 10, his character voice was the Warcraft Orc voice, including the "zug zug" and "me am wondering why..." Furthermore, he refused to budge on being lawful good, peaceful and expressed extreme disappointment that the local Half-Orc street gang didn't want to peacefully resolve their conflict with a rival gang. He eventually quit my campaign, citing "a lack of flying cities and other cool stuff."
cignus_pfaccari
First Post
What I think prompts the "you can't make money shadowrunning" meme is the published adventures have fairly low payments.
That's easy to fix by the GM, but the adventures I've seen published seem to put you through a lot for very little reward.
Brad
Bullgrit
Adventurer
I never knew this was a meme. I played Shadowrun for a year or two, (15 years ago), and our group never had any complaints about making money. Our groups never made any fortunes, but runs were profitable. We played a mix of published scenarios and homebrews.
Mention of Shadowrun brings up another instance of a Player not getting the genre: When we first started SR, a couple of Players, (myself included), just didn't get how deadly a firefight could be. We were thinking of D&D play, and how you don't worry until your hit points get low. Well, after a couple of times going from "I'm perfectly fine" to "I'm unconscious and bleeding out on the street" we learned how this genre worked.
But in our defense, we saw just how many dice we could roll to soak damage, and we thought we were tough. We had to see a couple times how many dice the shooter got to roll to appreciate the situation.
Bullgrit
WayneLigon
Adventurer
To get off track a bit... I pretty much learned to read by reading comics, and my last job was in a comic/gaming/sf shop. So I definitely 'get' superheroes. I just think they're frikkin' stupid! "Oh look, the Joker has escaped from Arkum for the 2,873rd time and killed another dozen people. Here, lock him up again. Until next time."
See, I'd take that as evidence that you don't, in fact, 'get it'. 'Getting it' means accepting and embracing the genre's tropes as normal and natural without any ironic analysis.
That being the other side to the entire 'getting it' problem: the player that, even as they can intellectually understand the genre conventions, are unable to embrace and accept them. Their heart is just never into it and they can never come to really accept the genre.
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pawsplay
Hero
It's like Einstein and quantum physics. He understood what they were saying. He just didn't get it for a long time. He even proposed a series of experiments that he thought would disprove some of the predictions of quantum physics. They were brilliant proposals, of course. Unfortunately for Einstein, though, the experiments, when performed, fulfilled the predictions of quantum physics. He was, when dealing with the quantum physics layer of reality, intuitively wrong. He was awesome at relativity, of course.
wingsandsword
Legend
I had a burst of this last weekend.
I was running a d6 Star Wars game, using a conversion of the Dawn of Defiance adventure path.
One player kept wanting to make a darksider. I had pre-gens for a wide variety of character backgrounds and races. He wanted to play a Zabrak former Sith Lord that had returned to the Light Side. . .as a starting character circa 17 BBY. No.
I showed him the two force-using pre-gens I had: A young padawan who had barely begun his training when his master was cut down at Order 66, and a mystic from a backwater world. He begrudgingly took the padawan, but kept wanting to know why he couldn't shoot Force Lightning or telekinetically choke people, and seemed shocked when I said using those powers is Dark Side and he will become an NPC if he goes Dark, and besides his character didn't even know the powers and didn't have enough dice in Alter to reliably perform them if he did.
I even quoted Yoda with "A Jedi uses the Force for Knowledge and Defense, never for Attack". He responded by saying he always did that in the Jedi Knight video games, over the course of the game it became clear he only dimly remembered the actual movies and all his Star Wars experience came from playing various SW video games, and typically taking the Dark Side path in those games. I also found out he seldom played RPG's, and mostly played M:tG, when he did play RPG's it was D&D for simple dungeon crawls.
So when he plays, he insists on looting everything that isn't nailed down. He's hauling around a backpack with looted stormtrooper blaster rifles and utility belts, and was trying to find a duffle to shove all the medpacs and drugs he could loot from the Imperial infirmary, and acted more mercenary than Han Solo did when we first met him, trying to extort Bail Organa for more money for him to go off and fight the Empire.
When it was over, he was tallying up how much stuff he stole and how much money he had looted/extorted and wanting to compare it with other PC's like it was their score of how well they did.
He's not getting invited back since that one-shot at the FLGS is turning into a regular campaign.
I was running a d6 Star Wars game, using a conversion of the Dawn of Defiance adventure path.
One player kept wanting to make a darksider. I had pre-gens for a wide variety of character backgrounds and races. He wanted to play a Zabrak former Sith Lord that had returned to the Light Side. . .as a starting character circa 17 BBY. No.
I showed him the two force-using pre-gens I had: A young padawan who had barely begun his training when his master was cut down at Order 66, and a mystic from a backwater world. He begrudgingly took the padawan, but kept wanting to know why he couldn't shoot Force Lightning or telekinetically choke people, and seemed shocked when I said using those powers is Dark Side and he will become an NPC if he goes Dark, and besides his character didn't even know the powers and didn't have enough dice in Alter to reliably perform them if he did.
I even quoted Yoda with "A Jedi uses the Force for Knowledge and Defense, never for Attack". He responded by saying he always did that in the Jedi Knight video games, over the course of the game it became clear he only dimly remembered the actual movies and all his Star Wars experience came from playing various SW video games, and typically taking the Dark Side path in those games. I also found out he seldom played RPG's, and mostly played M:tG, when he did play RPG's it was D&D for simple dungeon crawls.
So when he plays, he insists on looting everything that isn't nailed down. He's hauling around a backpack with looted stormtrooper blaster rifles and utility belts, and was trying to find a duffle to shove all the medpacs and drugs he could loot from the Imperial infirmary, and acted more mercenary than Han Solo did when we first met him, trying to extort Bail Organa for more money for him to go off and fight the Empire.
When it was over, he was tallying up how much stuff he stole and how much money he had looted/extorted and wanting to compare it with other PC's like it was their score of how well they did.
He's not getting invited back since that one-shot at the FLGS is turning into a regular campaign.
cignus_pfaccari
First Post
It's mentioned further upthread, but it apparently comes from Dumpshock. I do note that the introductory adventure for SR4 has a relatively low payout, especially after the big fight at the end. It's about two months' low lifestyle/person, not counting expenses.
Though, my favorite part of that was the mage, trying to negotiate with the other team leader, massively under-cutting their position:
Risa: "So, we could offer you..." (cut off)
Mage: "Another 5000!"
Risa: "...um, sure, yeah." (makes Composure test to not laugh in the mage's face)
I learned that freshman year of college, where Friday nights were spent dying in "Skippyrun," as we called it, given that the GM resembled Skippy from Family Ties. I got to where I could make a passable street sam in about 20 minutes.
So, in the game about 10 years ago, my fomori ex-Secret Service agent worked much, MUCH better. Not only was I able to soak damage a lot better, and was able to put stuff down quickly, but that let me develop his personality and background much more.
Brad
Here's one of my favorite stories from a friend of mine.
His brand new girlfriend at the time wanted to learn how to play the game, so, after he spent a lot of time explaining it to her, she decided to play a Cleric. She asked what the Cleric could use as weapons. He told her a mace. So she bought some mace.
So along the way they encountered a bear. When it came to her turn, when the DM asked her wanted she wanted to do, she replied:
"I'll spray the bear with my mace!"
His brand new girlfriend at the time wanted to learn how to play the game, so, after he spent a lot of time explaining it to her, she decided to play a Cleric. She asked what the Cleric could use as weapons. He told her a mace. So she bought some mace.
So along the way they encountered a bear. When it came to her turn, when the DM asked her wanted she wanted to do, she replied:
"I'll spray the bear with my mace!"
Funny!
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