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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5569770" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm sorry to hear about disagreements in any RPG group, and wish you good luck on sorting them out. I don't want to give any gratuitous advice on how you and your roommate should go about doing this.The rest of this post is only picking up on some of the comments on this thread that indicate various approaches to playing an RPG.This way of approaching the game is all fairly foreign to me. I'm used to the GM having the primary responsibility for presenting the gameworld, but the players having the primary responsibility for interpreting it in moral/political terms - so, for example, if the GM establishes a group of wizards who are both necromancers and (ostensibly) lawful good I assume that it is up to the players to decide whether they morally approve of those wizards or regard them as wicked defilers of corpses.This sort of judgement by the players is where the energy and direction of the game then come from.Likewise, I think it's up to the players rather than the GM to decide what counts as loot (ie not just stuff that someone in the world might conceivably value, but stuff that their PCs are prepared to value). So if the GM places (for example) a Sphere of Annihilation or a life-draining intelligent sword or a Talisman of (forgotten adjective?) Evil I think it is up to the players to decide whether the PCs keep, sell or destroy.How the GM should respond to these decisions - in terms of maintaining some notional "balance of treasure gained" - turns on the details of the rules system and campaign in question. As far as 4e is concerned, I agree with what Blue said upthread.These comments resonate strongly with me. Particularly if individual players decide to present their PCs as engaging in some sort of moral or political disagreement, then there is an obligation - in order to preserve peace at the table, and in D&D also to preserve the viability of party play - that those conflicts be played out in a way that doesn't completely disrupt the party, and the other players, and thereby ruin the game. Given the degree of emotional investment that an RPG can generate (in my experience, at least), I think reciprocation, generosity and forbearance by all players should be the starting point here.Part of the difficulty in conventional D&D play is that stuff that is really important to the basic play of the game - like getting treasure - is often very much at odds with conventional real-world evaluative judgements (which tend to frown upon killing and looting, and might also find trading in necromantic teaching tools somewhat distasteful). In my experience, this can tend to increase the likelihood of intraparty evaluative conflict if even one player has decided to play a character with strong and non-mercenary values. As a GM, my approach is therefore to downplay the signficance of looting by having treasure come from other sources (patrons, gifts from the gods, etc).So like I said at the start of this post, I don't want to stick my nose into another group's intragroup disagreements. But considered in the abstract, I don't find the situation described in the OP to be an outrageous one. And I've had similar situations occur in my game, in which evaluative disagreements between PCs, which in part reflect differing evalauative (moral and/or aesthetic) responses by the players, have caused problems in working out what is an item of loot and what an evil artefact to be destroyed. In my view, that such a situation occurs does not, in and of itself, show that a player is being unreasonable. And I personally don't feel it's the job of the GM to "resolve" the situation by telling one of the players how to play his/her PC (whether via a Wisdom check mechanic or some other device). It's primarily up to the players to resolve, whether ingame (ie by roleplaying) or at the metagame level.</blockquote>

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