Should this be fixed

[JamesonCourage]

Ahh, yup, that's the issue right there.

This is SO not the game for your tastes.

Apparently

Though I do like story-driven games when the mechanics call for it, like in M&M. And in those types of games, I'm expecting to run it with story put first, and my players expect it, too. It's not the only way to play at all, but the book and mechanics make it clear that the story is more important than anything else, and it fits the game well.

To be fair, this is not to my tastes all the time either. I enjoy this from time to time, but, certainly not as a regular diet - too heavy mang. It's simply a different form of gaming, not one that is meant to replace anything.

Oh yeah, it's just a playstyle thing. No objective right or wrong way to play, in my mind.

Yeah, if you're approaching the game with an individual level scope, and not a thematic one, then, ohh, this is going to be a train wreck. In a thematic game, your character isn't really the most important thing in the game. He's still important, because he's the vehicle through which you interact with the world, but, decisions and discussions aren't centered so much on the ideas of realistic interaction with the world (I hate that phrase, but, I'm drawing a blank on how to phrase it better).

Well, I think you can have a thematic game from the individual scope, though it's admittedly much harder. Is it as effective as changing scopes? Probably not for most people. To that end, if you want to explore that type of game, I might agree that more people might do better with a story-first type scope.

As for "realistic" being used... I think using the word verisimilitude is sort of unnecessary, as "realism" is often enough to get the point across. It's like "omnipotence" being used. Yes, it's non-sense in that you "can make a rock so big you can't lift it" and so on. But saying "omnipotent within the realm of logic" is basically what everyone means, so it's sort of annoying when people talk about semantics when it's just obstructing the conversation.

Thus in my way above example of the terrorist woman in the SF game, the possible results were - obey orders and the woman's bosses become aware that the PC's have entered into things and begin actively pursuing the PC's, possibly tipping information to the general public that the PC's organization has had a hand in the attack, or prevent the attack, meaning that the PC's own organization will be supremely angry, and forcing the woman's organization into higher security hiding, making them much, much more dangerous in the future.

Thus, equivalent but not equal reactions. Both choices carry serious consequences and will drive the campaign in very different directions.

It sounds like an interesting game. I'm not much into SF games, but maybe it's because I've had no luck running them, and no chance to play in one (I'm stuck GMing).

Or, take Supernatural. Let's be honest. From an individual first scope, it makes about as much sense as a cardboard hammer. The bad guys have the heroes by the short and curlies multiple times, but never just force the issue. But, that's not the point of the show. The point of the show is to carry on examining the theme of relationships of family and the sacrifices that families go through. It's repeated over and over again, particularly in the 5th season.

If Supernatural was an RPG (well, it is, but, I mean the TV show.), Dean and Sam would be dead, killed by one side or the other. But, while totally believable, doesn't really serve to answer the theme that the show has set up.

You know what's interesting about that? I've seen maybe four to five episodes of the show (season 2? It was a few years ago) because one of my close friends (who I game with) was pretty into it. I couldn't put my finger on it, but I was really put-off by it. I stopped watching it.

Then again, I love things like the Justice League show, and that's often littered with similar situations. All superhero material is. To that end, I guess I see it as a different genre, and accept it as story-oriented (maybe that's why I'm okay with M&M being played that way).

Anyways, I had a good discussion. Thanks

 

[pemerton]

I enjoy this from time to time, but, certainly not as a regular diet - too heavy mang.

<snip>

In a thematic game, your character isn't really the most important thing in the game. He's still important, because he's the vehicle through which you interact with the world, but, decisions and discussions aren't centered so much on the ideas of realistic interaction with the world

I don't agree that thematic play has to be heavy, because not all themes are heavy. One example - the dwarf PC in my game has the following backstory, which the player wrote up:

In Derrik's Dwarfholme, every young dwarf joins the military, but is not considered a non-probationer until s/he kills his/her first goblin. Unfortunately for Derik, in 10 years of service he never even saw a goblin - every time there was an attack on the Dwarfholme, or a retaliatory raid by the dwarf army, he was somewhere else - running errands, cleaning latrines, etc.

Eventually, it became too embarassing and Derrik's mother packed him a bundle of supplies and sent him out into the world to make his fortune outside the Dwarfholme. Thus, he found himself drinking in the Hammer and Anvil, a dwarven pub in the old Nerathi city of Kelven.​

(The instructions to players that generated this backstory were (i) your PC must have some sort of relationship to something s/he values, and (ii) your PC must have a reason to be ready to fight goblins.)

In a recent session, after the PC had reached paragon tier and become a Warpriest of Moradin, I wanted to introduce some dwarf NPCs into the ingame situation, for two reasons: (i) to deliver a holy symbol to the Warpriest PC (he didn't have one yet); (ii) to help with the tactical setup of the likely next encounter (hobgoblins and bugbears raiding a village). I decided that the dwarf NPCs would be a dwarf war party retreating from a skirmish with hobgoblins, who had been told by an angel of Moradin that they could get help from a warpriest if they headed south through the hills. And the angel left a holy symbol for them to give to the warpriest as a token of sincerity.

When it actually came time to run the dwarf thing, I decided that the leader of the dwarf warparty would be someone who had known Derrik when he was a runner of errands and cleaner of latrines. So he comes to where the PCs are staying, sees Derrik, and asks "Derrik! What are you doing here? And where's the Warpriest?- An angel said that we would find one here." The ensuing skill challenge, in which Derrik and his fellow PCs tried to explain that Derrik was the Warpriest, culminated in Derrik driving his point home by knock all the dwarves flat with a single sweep of his halberd (mechanically, he expended one of his close burst encounter powers and made a successful Intimidate check).

The doubting dwarves were then very apologetic, and saw Derrik in a new light. (And Derrik then proceeded to lead the bulk of them into death or serious injury under the feet of a hobgoblin-controlled Behemoth during the village raid - but that's a different episode, although the attitude of Derrik to his dwarven henchmen was certainly coloured by the circumstances in which they met.)

This is an example of theme guiding a player in setting up his PC, and guiding me as GM in setting up a situation, and then being played off by both of us (and the other players, though to a lesser extent) in the resolution of the situation. But it's not heavy at all. (As I posted upthread, I think Ron Edwards is wrong to "officially" identify narrativist play with heavy thematic material, and gets it right when he ignores his own "official" characterisation of narrativism when it comes to the classificaiton of particular games - and so classifies Dying Earth as supporting narrative play even though its themes are much more light and ironic - closer to the dwarf example I've just described, for instance.)

The DM is also involved in the fiction taking place.

The DM is responsible for how the NPCs of the world respond to the PCs actions. The only thing the DM has to go on is the mores and social norms and laws that have been laid down in game.

<snip>

If the player is just allowed to say hey I declare necromancy evil and all the NPCs will now agree with me you have just broken any consistency in the fiction being created.

I'm not sure exactly what is going on in the last of these quoted paragraphs. I don't think anyone here is talking about a player's ability to change the ingame situation purely be metagame stipulation. But I am talking about (i) a GM having regard to a player's metagame interests before setting up the ingame situation, and (ii) having regard to those interests in resolving the ingame situation.

The example above of the dwarf encounter shows the sort of thing I have in mind. I beleiev that it also shows that it is not true that all a GM has to go on is the mores and social norms and laws that have been laid down in the game. Even in the real world, there is no predictive social science comparable to physics or chemistry despite the richness of data available, and there is also no general agreement on the mores, social norms and laws that govern various societies. Contemporary anthropologists and historians disagree over the mores, social norms and laws that governed the Aztecs. And even members of the same society often can't agree on the mores, social norms and laws that govern them - hence political, legal and other cultural disputes break out.

In an imaginary world the amount of data is far less, and the scope for imaginative projections, retrofittings and ad hoc fudgings is even greater. So the idea that the imaginary mores, social norms and laws must settle the matter is one I reject. Given what had been established, to date, about the situation of dwarves and Warpriests of Moradin in my game, any number of ways of setting up and running a dwarf encounter were possible. I chose the one that I thought would amuse my player, and bring back into play some stuff that had been sitting in the background for the past four or five levels.

Likewise when a player decides to play an anti-necromancy PC in a world in which necromancy is widely accepted as permissible. How will the various NPCs react to this fantasy version of John Brown or the Sea Shepherds? The GM has a lot of flexibility, and if s/he wants to run a game that will support the players in generating and engaging with this sort of thematic stuff, then I would encourage him/her to use that flexibility to support, prod and energise the players - not to shut them down by (for example) always having the constabulary arrive, and by never having any of the constabulary be sympathetic, and by having the heavens turn as one on the PC for breaking divine law, etc, etc.

 

[pemerton]

Those examples demostrate that human beings are extremely expedient.

<snip>

There're are good reasons players think to try these things.Given that human beings choose inexpedient solutions based on their values in a world that favors expedience, I think too much emphasis on 'expressing other values' runs the risk of producing a game which is overly restrictive and contrived.

I can see why you see the risk.

I tend to see it as more interesting when characters pursue the inexpedient with the full knowledge there are more expedient solutions.

On our last game-night, one of the adventurers allowed himself to be fired upon by a pair of Cardinal's Guards with arquebuses in order to satisfy his personal honor. There was no mechanical benefit to be derived from this action - he did it because he feared the social consequences of not doing it, social consequences without mechanical limitations or advantages in the rules of the game.

I have got this sort of thing happening in games with the sort of mechanics you refer to here - the paladin story I mentioned upthread, which happened in RM, is an example.

In my experience some of the games which offer some kind of mechanical advantage for expressing character values very interesting - Pendragon and Dogs in the Vineyard come to mind. I don't find them better than games which lack these rules, however.

I'm a big fan of vanilla narrativism - I was a vanilla narrativist before I was a FoRE, and part of what made me a FoRE was finding someone who could coherently interpret my play experience to me - but I think I see more thematic play in a system that is a bit more forgiving of inexpedience.

A big consideration, in my view, is what happens to that player if his(?) PC is killed by the Cardinal's Guards? If he's staking "winning or losing" the game on the roll that's one thing; if by taking the challenge he "wins" whatever happens (even if winning here just means something like "earns group approval, so that if his PC dies he will be able to bring into play one of his PCs offsiders as his new PC") then there's a sense in which the informal table rules have supported his choice.

4e is more forgiving than RM even without such informal table rules, because the nexus between expedience and mechanical success is much looser than in a more purist-for-system game like RM. But as I said earlier, it pushes less hard in this sort of way than many other modern games.

I do find the idea that players may be responsible for introducing thematic concerns through their play very interesting. It fits with my approach, creating a game-world in which the adventurers are enmeshed in an environment filled with genre tropes off of which to play.

It's very hard to tell when you're comparing techniques and play experiences over the internet, but I think the main way that I GM differently from you is this: you have a rich backstory with random tables to generate coincidences that the players must then exploit; whereas I have a loose backstory and make self-conscious choices to create situations that the players must then exploit (and at the same time thereby firming up the backstory).

I don't know if you looked at Raven Crowking's blog where he talked about the importance of mundane animal encounters, but that is close to the opposite of my approach, which focuses only on the "relevant" details. I'm not sure whether or not my players experience immersion, but I don't think they could experience "I'm really in this fantasy world" immersion (unless they're doing all the heavy lifting themselves) - if they're relying on me, it would have to be some sort of "emotional investment" immersion.

I don't know how much you use fine points of detail to draw your players into the world - it would seem to me to fit with the idea of a detailed backstory and detailed random tables - but if you do a lot of that then that would be another difference between our approaches. From my impression of your game, I could see your players asking "What would my guy do?", whereas for my players I think it is more often "What should (I have) my guy do?".

Of course, in cases like your player whose PC took the fire from the Cardinal's Guards, or my player whose paladin took the punches from the demon, these two questions can merge into one.

 

[Raven Crowking]

I think that this right here is the point at which our perspectives diverge.

The players of an RPG aren't the characters in a story. They are the authors of a story. And the author of a story does have control over the consequences that befall the characters in that story. The way that the author exercises that control is what makes the story interesting - and it can be interesting even if the author takes a non-standard approach to consequences (cf Camus's Outsider).

Yup. Our persepectives definitely diverge here. If I want to write a story, I'll write a story. If I want to play a role-playing game, my goal (if a player) is to take on the role of a character within the fantasy milieu; it is never "to write a story". My goal as a GM is to enable the same.

There is nothing wrong with "writing a story" as a goal if that's what you like, obviously, but I personally differentiate between "story telling games" (Once Upon a Time?) and "role-playing games". That's a difference of kind, not a difference of value, mind you, and has to do fundamentally with how I view rpgs. So, obviously, YMMV and, equally obviously, it does.

I'm not sure I entirely follow all this, but there seems to be a disconnect here between Hussar and I, on the one hand (I hope, Hussar, that you don't mind me roping you in) and RC and you on the other (and likewise I hope that this creation of groupings is not out of line).

Sorry, I'm not at all certain what Hussar's opinions are, so you'll have to rely upon your own words!

However, I have always found rpgs to be "engaging, interesting, and thought-provoking - not just because of the ingenuity of their plots, but because of the cleverness of their insight" as a consequence of their being tied into believable context and consequences, because the characters in the work must deal with the fictional milieu as it is. If the characters "have the same sort of freedom as the author of a fiction has", the outcome seems artificial and contrived, to me. The weakest of weak sauce.

Not only do the PCs not get to decide that gravity no longer works today (as an author certainly can), or that a comet brings all the dead back to life, the NPCs don't, either. Once a persistant "fact" of the world is brought into play, it remains a persistant "fact". The actions of PC and NPC alike must take those "facts" into account.

In exploring how those "facts" are taken into account, PCs and NPCs offer many different belief systems and theories, many different ideas of what "the good life" is, or how best to deal with a persistent world.

I would feel cheated without this.

Again, YMMV and apparently does.


RC

 

[billd91]

The thing is Bill91, what you are outlining is the beginning of the campaign, not the end. That's the point where we're starting from, because, well, we're members of the IRA in the 1970's.

However, none of the issues you bring up, which are all certainly elements in the game, actually addresses the point of play - which is to engage in the examination of the morality of terrorism.

How about the morality of the PCs? Isn't that really what you're getting at?

 

[Aberzanzorax]

To extend this line further...

I see (at their extremes) two games being presented here:

One is a game of actions, randomness, and statistics representing the game world. The world is artificially "real" in the sense that things happen, and they effect other things...possibly reverberating throught the entire world.

Two/another is a game of story, a game in which the characters explore themselves and situations, and ultimately the world fits to the wills of the players (and to some degree/by extension to their characters).


Neither is wrong.

Only one is "standard" D&D.

*Is starting to wonder whose ignore lists I'm on.*

 

[pemerton]

Is starting to wonder whose ignore lists I'm on.

Not mine. I wasn't sure if you wanted a reply from me, but I'll have a go.

My preferred analytic and classificatory scheme for RPGing is the Forge one. The second approach to RPGing that you set out seems to equate (roughly, more-or-less) to Forge-ist narrativism.

Your first approach is underspecified, in my view. All RPGing depends upon there being a gameworld - a shared imaginative space - in which events occur and consequences reverberate. The question is, what constrains or determines those consequences? In simulationist play - which I think is what you are trying to capture in your first approach - it is the sort of stuff Elf Witch talks about above (the internal logic of the gameworld) to the exclusion of other concerns, like thematic concerns or the desire to pose challenges to the players.

It is not as if, in my game, events don't have consequences. But I determine those consequences having regard first to what would keep the thematic elements of the game moving along, and treat the logic of the gameworld as setting outer constraints of permissibility. But in simulationist play the logic of the gameworld is the alpha and the omega - be it causal logic (purist-for-system simulationism) or genre logic (high concept simulationism).

The other way I would want to add to your first approach is to build on the idea of the gameworld being "artificially real". The question is - who gets to determine this reality? Or, to put it another way, if there are different views or desires at the table, who gets to decide what the logic of the gameworld requires? This is where the issue of GM force comes in: if the mechanics run out, is the success of my PC's action resolution simply hostage to the GM? (Hussar is one poster on this thread who has talked about this issue in the past.) If a question arises as to what sort of behaviour is cosnsistent with divine laws ABC, or alignment XYZ, or the table's agreement to run a heroic/non-evil game, am I simply hostage to the GM? (I raised this issue upthread.)

My view is that by talking about the fiction in an abstract or impersonal fashion, this issue tends to be occluded. One thing I like about the Forge is that it is upfront about the need for the fiction to be constructed via some procedure or other, and focuses attention on the role of the various game participants in that process of construction.

When the players primarily want to explore a gameworld that they can take for granted as given, then GM primacy can be a reasonable procedure. But I think it is a procedure that is more vulnerable to breakdown than is sometimes acknowledged - as soon as a non-GM participant starts to value his/her own preference as to ingame logic over the smooth running of the game, conflict can break out. The heroic-enforcement railroading of scenarios like Dragonlance, Dead Gods etc is intended to preempt such conflict by rules fiat - but, of course, such rules fiat won't solve these conflicts anymore than an insistence on rule zero will - if a participant doesn't like what the GM is doing, no appeal to the rules text will settle what is essentially a social conflict.

Notice also that the sort of conflict I'm talking about here can arise even among players all sincerely committed to exploratory play. In classic D&D, the conflict might arise over (for example) how hard it is to surf doors over tetanus pits in White Plume Mountain. In 2nd ed D&D, the conflict might arise over (for example) what a hero would really do in situation XYZ, or how a hero would respond to Ravenloft horrific event ABC.

The potential for conflict is obviously much greater is you have players interested in gamist or narrativist play taking part in an ostensibly simulationist game - because they will be trying to shape the ingame situation (whether directly, or via pressure on the GM) to reflect their own metagame concerns. I have been guilty of this myself, to at least a modest degree, in a 2nd ed game, although the player group was large enough (7 players, I think) and the GM sufficiently focused on another player (the one with the prophecy-centric PC) that most of my thematic play was able to be had in RPing with the other players, treating the GM's situations as a backdrop to that rather than the real focus of play.

Just to conclude - the only reason I have for emphasising the potential conflicts that can arise in simulationist play is that some posts on this thread (eg Hussar's) have tended to suggest that it is a sort of safe-haven default, whereas narrativism requires a special degree of group consensus. For the reasons I've given, I don't agree that this is so as an a priori matter.

If, as a matter of practical fact, it is easier to get group consensus for simulationist play, this would tend to suggest either (i) that RPGers overlap heavily in their expecations about how ingame logic works - which might be plausible if they all read the same books and play the same computer games - or (ii) that RPGers are used to ceding authority to the GM even when the dictates of that authority are at odds with their own preferences - which I think is also plausible, at least for those schooled in RPGing in the same sort of way that I was (in the 80s and early 90s).

A final thought - if a lot of actual RPGing is viable only because (i) and/or (ii) holds, then this suggests a further reason why the hobby is only slow-growing. Because both of these are likely to be pretty unusual traits in the population as a whole.

 

[Elf Witch]

I don't agree that thematic play has to be heavy, because not all themes are heavy. One example - the dwarf PC in my game has the following backstory, which the player wrote up:

In Derrik's Dwarfholme, every young dwarf joins the military, but is not considered a non-probationer until s/he kills his/her first goblin. Unfortunately for Derik, in 10 years of service he never even saw a goblin - every time there was an attack on the Dwarfholme, or a retaliatory raid by the dwarf army, he was somewhere else - running errands, cleaning latrines, etc.

Eventually, it became too embarassing and Derrik's mother packed him a bundle of supplies and sent him out into the world to make his fortune outside the Dwarfholme. Thus, he found himself drinking in the Hammer and Anvil, a dwarven pub in the old Nerathi city of Kelven.​

(The instructions to players that generated this backstory were (i) your PC must have some sort of relationship to something s/he values, and (ii) your PC must have a reason to be ready to fight goblins.)

In a recent session, after the PC had reached paragon tier and become a Warpriest of Moradin, I wanted to introduce some dwarf NPCs into the ingame situation, for two reasons: (i) to deliver a holy symbol to the Warpriest PC (he didn't have one yet); (ii) to help with the tactical setup of the likely next encounter (hobgoblins and bugbears raiding a village). I decided that the dwarf NPCs would be a dwarf war party retreating from a skirmish with hobgoblins, who had been told by an angel of Moradin that they could get help from a warpriest if they headed south through the hills. And the angel left a holy symbol for them to give to the warpriest as a token of sincerity.

When it actually came time to run the dwarf thing, I decided that the leader of the dwarf warparty would be someone who had known Derrik when he was a runner of errands and cleaner of latrines. So he comes to where the PCs are staying, sees Derrik, and asks "Derrik! What are you doing here? And where's the Warpriest?- An angel said that we would find one here." The ensuing skill challenge, in which Derrik and his fellow PCs tried to explain that Derrik was the Warpriest, culminated in Derrik driving his point home by knock all the dwarves flat with a single sweep of his halberd (mechanically, he expended one of his close burst encounter powers and made a successful Intimidate check).

The doubting dwarves were then very apologetic, and saw Derrik in a new light. (And Derrik then proceeded to lead the bulk of them into death or serious injury under the feet of a hobgoblin-controlled Behemoth during the village raid - but that's a different episode, although the attitude of Derrik to his dwarven henchmen was certainly coloured by the circumstances in which they met.)

This is an example of theme guiding a player in setting up his PC, and guiding me as GM in setting up a situation, and then being played off by both of us (and the other players, though to a lesser extent) in the resolution of the situation. But it's not heavy at all. (As I posted upthread, I think Ron Edwards is wrong to "officially" identify narrativist play with heavy thematic material, and gets it right when he ignores his own "official" characterisation of narrativism when it comes to the classificaiton of particular games - and so classifies Dying Earth as supporting narrative play even though its themes are much more light and ironic - closer to the dwarf example I've just described, for instance.)


I'm not sure exactly what is going on in the last of these quoted paragraphs. I don't think anyone here is talking about a player's ability to change the ingame situation purely be metagame stipulation. But I am talking about (i) a GM having regard to a player's metagame interests before setting up the ingame situation, and (ii) having regard to those interests in resolving the ingame situation.

The example above of the dwarf encounter shows the sort of thing I have in mind. I beleiev that it also shows that it is not true that all a GM has to go on is the mores and social norms and laws that have been laid down in the game. Even in the real world, there is no predictive social science comparable to physics or chemistry despite the richness of data available, and there is also no general agreement on the mores, social norms and laws that govern various societies. Contemporary anthropologists and historians disagree over the mores, social norms and laws that governed the Aztecs. And even members of the same society often can't agree on the mores, social norms and laws that govern them - hence political, legal and other cultural disputes break out.

In an imaginary world the amount of data is far less, and the scope for imaginative projections, retrofittings and ad hoc fudgings is even greater. So the idea that the imaginary mores, social norms and laws must settle the matter is one I reject. Given what had been established, to date, about the situation of dwarves and Warpriests of Moradin in my game, any number of ways of setting up and running a dwarf encounter were possible. I chose the one that I thought would amuse my player, and bring back into play some stuff that had been sitting in the background for the past four or five levels.

Likewise when a player decides to play an anti-necromancy PC in a world in which necromancy is widely accepted as permissible. How will the various NPCs react to this fantasy version of John Brown or the Sea Shepherds? The GM has a lot of flexibility, and if s/he wants to run a game that will support the players in generating and engaging with this sort of thematic stuff, then I would encourage him/her to use that flexibility to support, prod and energise the players - not to shut them down by (for example) always having the constabulary arrive, and by never having any of the constabulary be sympathetic, and by having the heavens turn as one on the PC for breaking divine law, etc, etc.

I think we are talking at cross purposes. I never supported the type of play where the DM shuts down the goals or the play of the PCs. I feel a DM should encourage the PCs and help them realize their goals.

But the PCs need to play smart. Getting in trouble with the law and being chased by the local law is not necessarily shutting the PC down. It can be a reaction to actions of a PC. I am sorry but I don't buy the PCs are special BS and therefore nothing bad ever happens to them because they are the PCs. I would find playing in a game where no matter what actions the PC takes it never results in anything but positive outcomes to be boring and trite and would leave me feeling very unsatisified.

Just like in combat doing stupid things can get your PC killed doing stupid things in the social settings can get your PC in trouble.

Bringing back the PC actions in our game. Destroying the skeletons was the last straw for two of the PCs they no longer want to work with the dwarf. So they left the party. The DM didn't step on the PC or try and shut him down. But there was unpleasant in game consequences from his actions.

When he murdered the necromancer the DM was not shutting him down by putting him in jail. Two of the PCs reported the murder to the authorities. If they hadn't there is a good chance the PC would have gotten away with it. What was the DM supposed to do hand wave it away have no consequence for the dwarf? How is that fair to the other players? All that would do is say to the other players what your PCs chooses to do is not important.

If the DM was bringing holy hell raining down on the PC for murder then he would have found himself being executed for murder instead of just cooling his heels in jail while the rest of the party was being black mailed into taking care of a problem for the authorities. The reason he had to sit in jail while we did the mission was a purely metagame thing. The player was out of town for a month on business so it was a way to explain his absence and allow the rest of us to keep playing. The metagame solution fit the fiction of the story.

Putting this into a Shadowrun example during an extraction you choose to have your runners use lethal means and they kill the security forces and a few Lone Star officers along the way. You have just attracted the law and forced the corporation to try and hunt you down. The GM in this would not be playing the NPCs correctly if he just ignored what you did because hey you are the PCs you always get a get out of trouble card.

Now if the players played their PCs smart then the runners covered their tracks erased all security footage and left it almost impossible to track them. Then I would cry foul if the GM had them caught. That is railroading and what I consider a form of DM cheating.

But if the players went in guns blazing and made no effort to cover their tracks then they are playing in a stupid way and deserve to be caught or killed by the law or the hired runners that the corporation has hired to deal with the problem.

 

[haakon1]

Not only do the PCs not get to decide that gravity no longer works today (as an author certainly can), or that a comet brings all the dead back to life, the NPCs don't, either. Once a persistant "fact" of the world is brought into play, it remains a persistant "fact". The actions of PC and NPC alike must take those "facts" into account.

Nicely said. (I'm out of XP for you.)

 

[haakon1]

Bringing back the PC actions in our game. Destroying the skeletons was the last straw for two of the PCs they no longer want to work with the dwarf. So they left the party.

You know, IMC, retired PC's sometimes come back as NPC's. It might be fun to have them show up down the road as the core of a rival party.

Putting this into a Shadowrun example during an extraction you choose to have your runners use lethal means and they kill the security forces and a few Lone Star officers along the way. You have just attracted the law and forced the corporation to try and hunt you down. The GM in this would not be playing the NPCs correctly if he just ignored what you did because hey you are the PCs you always get a get out of trouble card.

Now if the players played their PCs smart then the runners covered their tracks erased all security footage and left it almost impossible to track them. Then I would cry foul if the GM had them caught. That is railroading and what I consider a form of DM cheating.

In D20 terms, I wouldn't give the NPC investigators a free pass to automatically determine who did it, but I'd give them:
Take 20 (they're there all week to find evidence)
+2 tool bonus (they've got everything needed)
+2 Aid Another Bonus (they have a large team)
+19 skill (9th level detective with max skill points, max ability, and a +3 from Skill Focus)

So that's a DC43 on the CSI investigation. The PC's need to beat that with a 1d20+skill role on Forensics, to see if they are better at destroying evidence than CSI is at finding it. Good luck with that! Opps, I guess you left behind a single hair with some DNA on the follicle, or missed the FOURTH secret hidden camera -- too bad, so sad!

My point, other than having fun with the example: don't nerf the NPC's. If you mess with the best, you die like the rest.