D&D 5E Styles of play

[GMforPowergamers]

so in another thread there are two people butting heads (in real life) about how they play. Something [MENTION=15142]Maj[/MENTION]or Oakheart quoted made me think back to when I met my brother in law (at the time the guy dating my older sister).

the quote was:

"Really? You think you know better than the ruler of a country? You think you can just go around murdering world leaders because you disagree with them and you think murdering them makes you GOOD? Why would murder ever be good? That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."

well rewinding to 3.0, and the game that tom (bro in law) came into and was confused by. We were already 7th or 8th level when he came in, and the game had started using the "Sunless Citadel" adventure. The PCs had become friends with the Kobolds in that adventure. They also had made friends with 3 tribes of orcs, and where helping them at war with 5 other trides of orcs. The game he walked into (having only played 1e and 2e at the time) confused him because the PCs were trying to make an alliance with hobgoblins to work with there orc kobold freecity alliance.

I will never forget his quote... "They're Orcs... we kill god damn orcs..."

now he did get with the idea after a while, and all the way up until my nephew was 2 and my niece was born he played with us (end of 3.5). he melded in with our mindset... but his wasn't really wrong.

See in our games we put WAY too much thought into 'how, and why' so we can't have really evil races... "Hey orc sacked the town" is likely to have the PCs ask "Why, do they not have enough food, or do they have an evil leader?"

When kings are evil in my games, a lot of the time my PCs find ways to work with them... after all, it is in there kingdom's best intrest, and as such theres....


SO have you ever run into a style of play that was so far off yours you couldn't make it work?

I did in the early 5e eara found a group that plays like it is table top WOW (not a dis... I mean literally) so if an adventure has a cool item in it, they go through it over and over again until everyone has the item they want...
example: if Adventure X has 1 ring of protection in it, they might run the adventure 5 times so all 5 of them have rings of protections...

 

[MG.0]

I did in the early 5e eara found a group that plays like it is table top WOW (not a dis... I mean literally) so if an adventure has a cool item in it, they go through it over and over again until everyone has the item they want...
example: if Adventure X has 1 ring of protection in it, they might run the adventure 5 times so all 5 of them have rings of protections...

*facepalm*

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

SO have you ever run into a style of play that was so far off yours you couldn't make it work?

This isn't exactly the same as your example, but I did play for a while with a group whose DM was mostly into trying to tell epic stories. He had no problem doing things like subverting the destination of Teleport spells to make his story better, or describing epic historical cutscenes where the lich we're up against cut down armies but then when we actually fight the thousand-year-old lich it turns out to be weak (bog-standard lich) and played stupidly (doesn't change tactics even when it is losing; dies in a fist fight to a PC with Globe of Invulnerability IX up). He had an NPC he was trying to get us to hate, who was unkillable because he would always get away even when he lost the fight, just like a video game cutscene villain[1]. I value TTRPGs to get away from linear, videogame-like gameplay, and while I'm sure that DM would have characterized his own game as anything but videogamey, to me as a player that's how it felt like: I felt disempowered and prisoner to his vision of how things would play out. I felt like no matter what choices I made, what reconaissance I did or what dirty tricks I arranged for emergencies, there would always turn out to be an "appropriate challenge" with level-appropriate villains in a fair fight scenario[2], and there would be no way of avoiding the fight and going off to do my own thing if I felt like it--something would have dragged me back into the fight, but still without giving me an actual non-metagaming reason to be involved in the fight. In short, that DM and I had incompatible styles, and I eventually left. I felt bad about it because he and I are friends in real life, and it hurt his feelings so badly that he unfriended me on Facebook for a while... but it was still the right decision.

[1] One time we killed him and I methodically dismembered his corpse in case he was playing dead, but it eventually turned out that he had switched places with a PC via psionic illusion and the corpse I dismembered was "really" the paralyzed PC while the bad guy was secretly a member of our party. The switcheroo was not at all plausible given how he "died"--pulling it off would have required cooperation amongst groups of bad guys who had no plausible reason to be in cooperation, and who could have killed us much more easily via direct action.

[2] Or something intended to be a fair fight, anyway. The one valuable thing I learned from this DM--my first exposure to 5E--was that you can throw ridiculously deadly fights at the PCs by DMG standards and they will usually win, even if the players don't know what they're doing, because the threat baseline is so low. Even a double-Deadly is usually still mechanically tilted in the PCs' favor. I believe this is a deliberate choice on 5E's designers' parts.

 

[Greg K]

Yes, I have.
The first time was when an AD&D 1e player of mine decided to DM. On the first adventure, everyone received enough experience to be around 10th level. In addition, we received a bunch of powerful magic items and a million gold. We all agreed

The second time occurred several years later, A former boss invited me to his AD&D campaign. The characters were high level and modeled after DC and Marvel character. They also traveled between planets. It was not my thing and I didn't return to the AD&D sessions. However, I joined them on evenings when they played Talisman.

The third time was a player whom was to the far end of the axis on butt-kicker (he only wanted to kill things), powergamer (played for the accumulation of power), and mini-maxing. He was brought into the group by one of my players when I had to take a semester hiatus from the group I started. He was the most whiny player and that led the player (his best friend at the time) to cater to his preferred gaming style while taking over GM chores in my absence. Upon my return, he went off that my rogue was not maxed out for combat (the GM was running Rolemaster).
I found both the player in question and the campaign's focus on combat encounters to the exclusion of everything else to be boring. After two sessions. I told both the GM and my roommate that I would not be continuing or resuming GMing duties (which I was supposed to do after a few sessions). The GM and i talked and he was relieved that I was disappointed. He was not having fun either, but he didn't want to upset his friend and nobody else had spoken up. Long story short, he talked to the other players whom were tolerating the game. As a result, he changed the style of the game which led to his friend becoming the problem player as expected and, eventually, getting kicked out when my roommate was DMng and had enough of the player's disruptive antics (which nearly collapsed the campaign).