Should the DM accommodate characters, or characters accommodate DMs?

[Papa-DRB]

Vehemently disagree with this. When I start a new campaign, the invites include my 8 house rules of which 1 and 3 are appropriate to this thread.

House rule #1 is: I run "adventure paths". You must be willing to follow the campaign premise and plot.

House rule #3 is: I will provide guidelines on what kind of characters would be best suited and will provide a generic plot/outline of what to expect.

Well, then. You have a problem. You have created it for yourself by choosing to railroad your players.

Long story short:

(1) If you, as the GM, don't want the responsibility of catering to your players, then don't run a railroad. This allows the players to cater to themselves and you don't have to worry about it.

(2) If you, as the GM, want to railroad your players, then you have a responsibility to cater to them.

The third option is that you're railroading your players in order to prevent them from doing things they find fun and/or force them to do things they don't want to do. Why the hell would you want to do that?

So it is your opinion that if a DM runs adventure paths, he is railroading the players? That assumption on your part is so invalid that it is not worth my effort to attempt to change your mind, nor correct your 3 options that follow from the invalid assumption.

-- david
Papa.DRB

 

[Rel]

Something I haven't seen mentioned is how one caters to different types of players. For some this is more easily accommodated than others.

I've got one guy in my group who is all about concept and the "coolness" plays out largely in how he visualizes the character and in scenes where the character matches that image without having to really do anything. So if he's Mounted Knight in that campaign, I could describe them traveling across the countryside with his armor gleaming in the sun, describe how the villagers are in awe of him sitting high in the saddle and how the stable boy has never even imagined a horse as huge and impressive as his. He'd be THRILLED. He'd tell me about how he purchased only the finest oats, hand picked by virgins, for his mighty mount to sup upon. Once in a while I could let him fight some bandits from horseback or participate in a jousting tournament and he'd be on Cloud 9.*

I'm a more tactical guy. I enjoy the roleplaying aspects of such a character as described above but I particularly love when I get to help the party by skewering the BBEG on my lance that did a big pile of damage because I took the Shishkabob feat. So I'd be harder to please than the other player I mentioned. Therefore I rarely play characters whose abilities are highly situational.


*One final note about this player mentality and how it dovetails with mechanics: The player in question is not a Rules Mastery type of guy and that's totally fine with me. Supposing that I wasn't planning for him to bring his mount into most encounters (because he doesn't need that to feel like a badass mounted knight), I would discourage him from spending a lot of feats or other metagame resources on making his character great at mounted combat. On the other hand, since he's been faithfully roleplaying the PC as being the sort of person who would be good at those types of things, when we played out the Jousting Tournament scene, I'd let him spend an Action Point to emulate having such feats (or just assign him a big bonus as I saw fit) to give him a chance to win. This method continues to allow the player to feel cool without handicapping him for the majority of the game.

 

[Jhaelen]

Either the guy with the mount has the choice to go where his mount will be useful or he doesn't. If he doesn't have that choice, the GM is railroading.

LOL. Those bad railroading DMs!

I'll say this: When I meet with my players we have a certain common assumption what the campaign will be about. If one of the players suddenly decides he wants to do something that isn't compatible with the campaign and the rest of the players, he's free to leave the table and play in a different group.

Because, you know, as a DM I won't let myself be railroaded by a thick-headed player!

 

[Mark Chance]

Sorry, that's just not true. For one, you've completely ignored the other people at the table. Two, you've ignored the fact that mounts are very difficult to cater to.

You keep saying that despite the number of people, myself included, you point out that it isn't.

Just saying.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Mounts are hard to cater to in some limited settings. The World's Largest Dungeon, the Savage Tide Adventure Path, etc. Any DM following an adventure path which does not take travel between sites into account will offer little to the mounted character, unless that DM creates material to do so.

(The overwhelming majority of DMs, IME, find this obvious solution to be easy enough to implement that mounts cause them little or no anxiety!)

Of course, any type of character is hard to cater to in settings which are limited in ways that make it hard to cater to that character type. A druid is hard to cater to in a game setting which has no wilderness (or wilderness-like areas). A dungeon-bashing fighter is hard to cater to aboard a ship (all that metal armour = glub glub glub) or a city-based political game.

Whether or not an AP is a railroad is, IMHO, besides the point. If the players agreed to play Savage Tide, they have an obligation to make appropriate characters (or at least not whine about it when their inappropriate characters turn out to be...surprise surprise...inappropriate).

But an AP by definition is a limiting scenario, for both the DM and the players. And the more limitations on the scenario, the more limited the choices for "appropriate characters" will be. If that's what you want to run/play, there's nothing wrong with accepting those limitations. Not recognizing that those limitations exist, however, (and some limitations always exist!) might cause you some problems.

 

[arscott]

Because most campaigns don't feature a single terrain. If the campaign features a single terrain, then no problem. You can work in a mount easily. But, most campaigns don't. They move through any number of terrains, many of which are mount unfriendly.

So, what do you do when you have a standard D&D campaign where 50% of the terrain is mount unfriendly? (Note, I'm picking 50% as an entirely arbitrary number, and is not meant to be indicative of anyone's campaign specifically - pick a number that works for you if you don't like 50)

That mounted character gets off his god damned horse and walks for a bit. It's that simple, and I've yet to meet anyone who actually plays a mounted character who has any problems with doing so.

See, even unmounted, that character can still stab orcs with a pointy stick just fine. Sure, the stick isn't quite as long, and it doesn't have the momentum of a ton-and-a-half of charging quadruped behind it, but it's still pretty good at making the orcs dead.

The only real consideration the GM needs to be making is to ensure that the character has access to his horse when the party is in that 50% of the terrain that is mount friendly.

 

[Hussar]

You keep saying that despite the number of people, myself included, you point out that it isn't.

Just saying.

You can point it out all you like, but, without any actually, y'know examples, it's pretty much just you saying, "nuh uh."

That mounted character gets off his god damned horse and walks for a bit. It's that simple, and I've yet to meet anyone who actually plays a mounted character who has any problems with doing so.

See, even unmounted, that character can still stab orcs with a pointy stick just fine. Sure, the stick isn't quite as long, and it doesn't have the momentum of a ton-and-a-half of charging quadruped behind it, but it's still pretty good at making the orcs dead.

The only real consideration the GM needs to be making is to ensure that the character has access to his horse when the party is in that 50% of the terrain that is mount friendly.

But, that's the problem. If my concept is guy on a horse, and 90% of the time I'm NOT on a horse, then how is my concept actually "guy on a horse"?

No one's saying that the guy on the horse has to be mounted 100% of the time. But, a majority would be nice. It would be nice if, say, at least more than half the sessions feature me on a horse kicking ass, if that's my concept.

It's kinda like saying that it's perfectly fine that the wizard only casts five spells in the entire campaign. After all, he got to cast spells, therefore he's a wizard. He can use a dagger or a staff more than half the time.

If that's fine for you, then, hey great. But, I think most people who play a wizard want to use magic most of the time. So, the mounted guy probably would like to use his mount most of the time.

 

[Mark Chance]

You can point it out all you like, but, without any actually, y'know examples, it's pretty much just you saying, "nuh uh."

So, then, your contention is that when I say I've run a game where mounts weren't a problem -- but I don't provide "y'know examples" -- then I'm what? Lying? Or is it that your specific experience somehow enjoys status of Universal RPG Truth, and thus folks with differing experiences are to be discounted?

I distinctly recall running a 1st through 15th (or so) level 3.0/3.5 campaign that included a paladin with mount. Started with just a warhorse, then a paladin's warhorse (and not a pokemount), and then later a dragon. The campaign included dungeons, wilderness, town, island hopping via sailing ship, and a little planar travel. One encounter with demon knights included all-out mounted battle including the opening charges by the opposing sides.

There: Examples.

 

[Hussar]

Sigh.

Was the paladin's focus on the idea of mounted knight? Or was he just a guy who happened to have a horse? In other words, is your example actually tied to the subject at hand? Was the player's character concept focused on the mount?

And, if it was, how did he feel about the fact that he didn't get to actually use the mount the majority of the time? Or did you ensure that most of the situations were mount friendly? Did it impair your freedom to create scenarios? Did you feel constrained by the presence of mounts? Or did the mount have no impact since your campaign was already mount friendly?

 

[Mark Chance]

Was ... friendly?

Wouldn't it be easier to just admit that maybe -- just maybe -- you could be wrong about the how "very difficult" it is to include a mount-focused character in a game?