Something humorously unhappy in last night's game.

[RangerWickett]

I think ya'll give Ted too much credit. As for railroading, it was anything but. I don't want to spoil much in case I ever get around to writing up the full storyhour, but for a while, since Ted's character briefly out of commission, I let him play an NPC who was trying to get the PCs to go to a specific location. The manner in which he chose to do this was to get the PCs captured by the army, and convince the army that the PCs' allies were hiding in the specified location. It was a fun session, and everyone enjoyed themselves, even in the attempt to avenge their fallen comrade.

I've since talked to Ted, and he knew exactly what he was doing. I can't quite wrap my head around why he would want to walk his character through a crowd of bodyguards when he knew they'd kill him, but apparently he thought his actions were justified because they were "passive aggressive," and thus he thinks it wasn't his fault that the NPCs attacked him.

Anywho, Ted says that he enjoyed playing a character whose beliefs got him killed, so I guess it's no real problem. I just figured that he would've wanted to die in a more important way. *shrug*

 

[Darius101]

I like this thread.

Interesting ideas but I think you missed a few points and a very simple solution to getting Ted out of the situation.

If Ted knew this NPC was now evil ...and he ws intelligent then just blindly attacking would not have been what his character would do unless forced into it somehow.
Once he was down to half HP I would have either secretly or in the open made an intelligence roll to see if he would have pretended to be knocked out.
you don't get to be an old adventurer by acting stupid when your character is not.
I can see Ted's character getting a group of gnomes together and then attacking this General later or possibly using the other gnomes as a distraction for the troops while Ted's character attacks the General one on one.

You also stated that this is 150yrs in the future...maybe you could explain it was a vision or that a seer had seen that vividly as something for Ted's character to think about. This is something like what happened to Marty Mcfly in the Back the the Future movie. (the third one where he is called a chicken) He makes his intelligence roll and doesn't race the guy who calls him a chicken.

Sounds like a fun game ...keep up the good work man. Sometimes the fun is in the unexpected things our players do.
Darius

 

[tonym]

I play one of the characters in Wicketts. What I think is funny about all this is that Ted, constantly views the DM as trying to kill his character, and he has to find a way to stay alive.

So....the NPC that annoys the heck out of Ted in Campaign 1 reappears in Campaign 2 and immediately singles out Ted's character for torture?

:-O

Poor Ted!

Sounds like a really fun follow-up campaign, though.



Tony M

 

[evildm]

But . . . okay, to all you GMs out there, have you ever really, really tried not to kill a PC, because you think the player is just confused and doesn't realize that he's making a huge mistake?

Yes, and as another person mentioned, the player is still bitter about it. Like Ted, he had the grudge, not his character. The player often has trouble seperating character from player when it comes to emotions (but not knowledge).

In this particular case, he was playing a werebear do gooder who had a special hatred for a werewolf and his band of cronies (which would be expected anyway), but his hatred ran so deep that he foolishly took them all on at once, despite signals I was giving to get him to back off and fight another day. Didn't happen. One dead character.

Thankfully, this hasn't happened since.

 

[Stahn Li]

Poor Ted!

I think me and Wickett have not explain this situation well enough. Ted disliked the general guy in campaign 1. In campaign 2 his current character is determined to kell this general guy out of the players prejiduce. The general guy wants us dead because our faction directly opposes him, and because we killed about 20+ of his troops, including some elite personel.

Ted set himself out for torture.

1- Ted started casting spells while imprisioned, which led to one of his fingers being cut off.

2- Ted taunted the guards, which led to yet another finger gone and he was gaged and placed in a barell.

3- Ted attempted to escape, which led to an order for his immediate execution. Fortunately a still and silent charm spell was enough for my PC to talk the guards inot letting him live

4- Ted tries to kill the big general guy and is knocked out

5- Ted uses one of his special abilities to revive his character, and resume his assualt. Resulting in his death.

Ted should have been killed 5 times, instead he died only once. Wickett kept trying to give him an avenue to survive. There really is nothing in his background that would lead to such an obvious sucide attempt.

 

[Leopold]

I say don't pull any punches and slaughter ted time and time again until he either gets it or you tell him to stop being stupid. If all he wants to do is play suicidal PC's that die every other session then just use a random PC generator and have at it. That way he doesn't have to keep coming up with PC's...

 

[Leopold]

Ted should have been killed 5 times, instead he died only once. Wickett kept trying to give him an avenue to survive. There really is nothing in his background that would lead to such an obvious sucide attempt.

ted is stupid. He deserved death. I woulda beat him into unconciousness after the first time he messed up.Wake him up repeat. You get 2 chances then death. there's always "Speak with dead" spell to get the answers you want...

 

[tonym]

Oh, I think I get the it now.

Poor gnome! :-O
It's tough for a PC to survive when his player seems determined to get him killed.

Hmm. Here's an idea for the DM...

Instead of giving Ted/Ted's PC more reasons to hate the NPC, maybe give Ted/Ted's PC some excellent reasons to like the NPC! Like maybe the NPC Raises the gnome and apologizes and gives him some magic.

Oh, the irony--if Ted becomes the only one to LIKE that NPC in the new campaign!


Tony M

 

[Greatwyrm]

As a DM, you always run the risk of PCs doing the dumbest thing possible. Sometimes the best adventures come from the PCs trying to dig themselves out. There's even an adventure hook here; the rest of the PCs set out to recover his body to try to get him raised.

As for Ted, I think we've all DM'd for Ted at one time or another. My "Ted" decided to get rid of some swords that slowly turned the weilders undead by distributing them to neighborhood children. Then he acted surprised when 20 town guardsmen with crossbows showed up to escort him to the duke's house. He somehow managed to talk his way down to being executed in a nasty fashion, but released to his friends to be resurrected. Of course, he was still banished from the city after that...

 

[Brown Jenkin]

Players HATE having their characters captured.

I will second this. I don't know Ted and he may be an idiot, but if my character was captured and treated that way I would lash out too. This is just me and the types of games I enjoy playing and this is not one of them.

RangerWickett
Now, Ted, one of my players was frustrated in the last game that the rest of the party ended up working for an NPC he really didn't like. The NPC, an Elf general named Shaaladel, was very arrogant and condescending to the party, and my friend Ted really hated the guy. At the end of the campaign, the group defeated the main villain, and that was the end. At the time, there was no real reason for the group to harm Shaaladel, even though Ted really hated the guy. Imagine that annoying boss guy from Office Space, give him a sword, and make it so that everyone other than you thinks the guy's the best thing since sliced bread, and that's Shaaladel. I helped foster the frustration to provide some fun roleplaying moments.

The frustration was so great that Ted's character even came up with a cute song about a mean and nasty Elf named Shaaladel, and he taught it to a bunch of Gnomes, assuring that "I'm Going to Kill Shaaladel" would be sung in Gnomish villages for generations to come.

Now, to reward Ted a bit, in this campaign, I moved forward about 150 years to a bleaker future (the storyhour's link is in my sig),where Shaaladel has eventually risen to one of the 8 sub-rulers of the world. The cruel emperor who was the primary ruler of the world was killed, and the PC group is trying to thwart attempts by his second in commands to restore the oppressive regime of the empire. I basically wanted to make Shaaladel out to be one of the bad guys, and give Ted to defeat him.

RangerWickett
Okay, so here, I planned to have it be revealed what an ass Shaaladel is, so the group will realize that he's duplicitous and can't be trusted. I had planned out a way for the PCs to eventually escape, and I would've had a nice set up for the PCs to know who they need to stop, which would give the rest of the campaign a solid direction. Shaaladel was going to have his men torture the Gnome in an attempt to get information out of him, since he saw the Gnome as less useful of a pawn than the other PCs. After being tortured, I had a few ideas for how Ted's Gnome could escape, or free himself, or be rescued, or alert the rest of the PCs so they could rescue him and escape.

So let me rephrase this to see if I understand correctly. In campaign 1 you set up an NPC that no-one likes but the party is forced to work for, and unable to do anything about it. By your own words you then set up Campaign 2 to allow the characters to fight the NPC from campaign 1. So far so good, not a bad idea.

Here's where I start getting a little confused. You then set up a situation that involves capture and torture to inform the characters what type of person Shaaladel is despite his position as sub-ruler to a cruel emperor and for Ted's character a lifetime of growing up listening to nursery rhymes about killing this person.

As you said you set up this champaign to allow Ted to get back at this NPC, but then you put Ted in a position that he was in before and hated in champaign 1 where his character was at the mercy of Shaaladel and couldn't do anything about it. moreover you singled Ted's character out for extra torture. You say you had a plan for them to escape but as players we don't know what the DM has instore for us. Ted might not have understood what you were planning. and as Erithtotl said "Players HATE having their characters captured".

Without knowing that the DM had a plan to free the characters I can see Ted being exceeding frustrated in this situation since it is a rehash of the part of champaign 1 that he hated. I can easily see why Ted might react the way he did, and I am not sure if I might not have done something similar.

I would additionally add "Players HATE having thier characters railroaded" and this is what it seemed that you were doing. Even though you may think it is ok for the sake of character development, players still won't like it. In this case I also think it was entirely unneccecary since the players were already "hooked" for the champaign. All that was realy needed was a requirement for character backgrounds to include a little something as to why there characters have an issue with Shaaladel.

Now maybe I am wrong here, and if I am could you please clarify why the characters were captured, and if they had a resonable possibility of not being captured. Also how long was captivity supposed to last before you gave them oppertunities to escape and did they know some sort of opportunities would be arising.