Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 4343136" data-attributes="member: 30001">When I was 9 years old and DMing *all my players did* was blow stuff up.  They would also kill random NPCs, steal stuff, act rude to the king, etc.    Well, whether or not you play WH or Guitar Hero or whatever is your business and somewhat beyond the scope.  To some extent regulatory issues is about rule interpretation, and that, unfortunately is the DMs job.  Now if someone walks into the game with a character wielding two bastard swords and you think there is a reason why that's not cool, why not just say so?  It's not a confrontation that you have to particularly dread. On the other hand, players who are vandalizing the dungeon - blasting statues, or writing "Gandalf was here" on the walls, etc. is another issue.  That's a question of how tightly you expect PCs to stick to your plot and expectations.  The one thing that I would not recommend though is to adopt  passive-aggressive techniques involving showing the players how powerful of a DM you are.  Oftentimes if you just let the players do what they want, and enforce reasonable consequences, they get bored and start acting normally.  If, however, blasting stuff is a really effective technique for dealing with your dungeons then you should consider varying your designs, because the PCs wouldn't have been the only ones to think of this technique.  I've DMed plenty of players whose idea of fun was blowing stuff up, and whose character's personality was "guy who likes to blow things up".  Because do you really think the player is acting this way because he has no intention of having fun?   I can understand not wanting to have confrontations all of the time about rules issues and stuff.  I can understand that such a thing would make the game hard to enjoy.  But trying to be too controlling about how the players act and what they do isn't fun for the DM either IMO.  Respecting your players as creative (albeit weird, sometimes) people can do a lot to diffuse an adversarial DM-Player relationship.  Say "I think bastard swords are too heavy for effective two-weapon use, so I'll apply a -2 on the attack rolls if you want to try it out" and leave it at that - no need to be killing off characters.</blockquote>

Verification