D&D General The Player's Quantum Ogre: Warlock Pacts

[Remathilis]

Your 'payment' is participating in the game lol

Your game is not so special that I must submit to your every dictatorial whim.

I want to know where you all live that you have such a pool of available players that you can kick them out over refusing to be bullied by their God/patron?

 

[Scribe]

Your game is not so special that I must submit to your every dictatorial whim.

I want to know where you all live that you have such a pool of available players that you can kick them out over refusing to be bullied by their God/patron?

Nobody I have seen is demanding either.

 

[TiQuinn]

This whole “I have the power to kick people from the table” thing sounds very boastful. Hopefully that’s not how people handle such situations in real life.

 

[TorgoTheWhite]

This is a good, extensive debate. Thank you mod for allowing it. Mark of a good mod, knowing that things can be heated, but without name-calling, requesting personal information, etc...

Please, do not bring personal information requests into this, it is off-point and pertains to nothing... it just gets conversation shut down

 

[TorgoTheWhite]

I enjoy all this and the fun thing about it is what someone noted buried up in the post further: often enough the GM is reluctant to involve the patron much and the player is pushing for it. This is more likely than the doom and gloom stuff that the OP never mentioned when the discussion took a long, interesting, sidebar.

This happened to me in my campaign. A player wanted to explore their patron relationship... I have an entire book of world-building, so I really didn't want to shoehorn this personalized NPC into the game essentially. But, I had to shift my view a bit and "learn to love" the inconvenience, and I have. I was also told to ignore the core class feature: some patron dynamics... of which I say, "ok, what happens if the player uses their base-class level 9 ability to directly communicate with their patron?" - just be a poopy GM and have nothing prepared? The whole discussion that the patron doesn't need to matter, irked me.

Though I have seen some very thoughtful suggestions on here of great ideas for more hands-off patron relationships... but even those often have a few details of importance

 

[TorgoTheWhite]

As far as "GM agency", if you have hours tons of tabulated info sunk into a campaign with well-written dialogue-points. And you want to call it "my story" you should be able to. Now, if the players are equally loving about their characters the GM should be somewhat obligated to recognize solid effort and find a solid place for this PC within the campaign framework. And (dammit) if this player wasn't the warlock, where the player wanted to discuss the foundational component of his warlock, but at the same time he wanted to explore (mystery solver playstyle) that patron.

I don't love bosses in real life, I could not understand having one in my fantasy. Or choosing a subordinate character. But, some of my views on it have slightly changed, as creative people have posted more pacts formed under duress, etc.. Though, I feel-like if you want completely open-ended characters, without any pre-existing contracts, then choose one of the ones who doesn't involve a pact, or vows. I personally love the sorceror's open-ended abuse of power, beholden to no-one approach . Just choose a class with no baked-in contractual obligations if you chafe at the idea of authority and higher powers

 

[TwoSix]

I mean not really, its always been like this.

If a player doesnt like how the DM runs it? Leave.
If ALL the players dont like how the DM runs it? Leave.
If the DM doesnt like how a player behaves? Remove them.
If the DM doesnt like how all the players behave? Form a new group.

I mean.... this seems to assume a social contract where the DM is the one doing all the invites and hosting the social gathering, such that they have the authority to withdraw invitations.

It definitely seems to not describe groups where the group cohesion comes first, and if one game doesn't work, a different GM will just take their turn playing.

Are that many groups really oriented around desperate players trying to find one GM to run something?

 

[TwoSix]

I don't love bosses in real life, I could not understand having one in my fantasy. Or choosing a subordinate character. But, some of my views on it have slightly changed, as creative people have posted more pacts formed under duress, etc.. Though, I feel-like if you want completely open-ended characters, without any pre-existing contracts, then choose one of the ones who doesn't involve a pact, or vows. I personally love the sorceror's open-ended abuse of power, beholden to no-one approach . Just choose a class with no baked-in contractual obligations if you chafe at the idea of authority and higher powers

For me, I like the mechanical aspects of warlocks much more than I like their baseline narrative. As such, when I've run warlocks, I've reskinned the character's narrative away from the "pact-patron" concept.

To my mind, reskinning class narratives to make a character your own is just a natural part of playing the game; the flavor provided is simply meant to be a springboard or starting point for that development. But experience on these boards has shown me many D&D players are (weirdly) hostile to reskinning.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I mean.... this seems to assume a social contract where the DM is the one doing all the invites and hosting the social gathering, such that they have the authority to withdraw invitations.

It definitely seems to not describe groups where the group cohesion comes first, and if one game doesn't work, a different GM will just take their turn playing.

Are that many groups really oriented around desperate players trying to find one GM to run something?

I mean, having gone deep into the Game Application Mines, hoping to find even one game that could be a long-term home (prior to Hussar's very kind invitation)...yeah, there really is something of a "I just want to find a game...I'm really really really hoping I can someday find the game I'm looking for..." out there. The never-ending GM shortage ensures that anyone who hasn't developed an objective and sustained reputation of serious misbehavior will be able to keep finding players any time they offer a slightly other-than-bog-standard campaign premise (or, better yet, agreeing to run a campaign concept the players have proposed--any GM willing to do that will have almost anyone accept them unless, again, the players know very certainly that that GM is really bad news.)

 

[TwoSix]

I mean, having gone deep into the Game Application Mines, hoping to find even one game that could be a long-term home (prior to Hussar's very kind invitation)...yeah, there really is something of a "I just want to find a game...I'm really really really hoping I can someday find the game I'm looking for..." out there. The never-ending GM shortage ensures that anyone who hasn't developed an objective and sustained reputation of serious misbehavior will be able to keep finding players any time they offer a slightly other-than-bog-standard campaign premise (or, better yet, agreeing to run a campaign concept the players have proposed--any GM willing to do that will have almost anyone accept them unless, again, the players know very certainly that that GM is really bad news.)

Yikes. I'll be honest, if I didn't have several RL friend circles to play with, I would have been out of the hobby a long time ago. I enjoy RPing a lot, but not enough to hunt down games like a Tinder date.