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What DM flaw has caused you to actually leave a game?
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7505181" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>I'm not 100% sure I'm understanding you right (not because you've been unclear, but just because words like "plot" and "story" get used in different ways by different posters); but I think my answers are "no" and "yes".</p><p></p><p>If you look at any of my actual play posts (I've got a lot, mostly on the 4e and General boards) you'll see that I generally favour protagonist-oriented, conflict-driven RPGing. The stories this generates aren't going to win me or my group any Nobel prizes, but they're fun to play in.</p><p></p><p>What I don't like is GM pre-authored story, where the main contribution of the players is either to follow along the GM's narration (if the story is overt, like in many 80s and 90s TSR modules), or to puzzle their way through a series of mysteries to work out what it is the GM (or module writer) had in mind (this is the standard structure of a CoC module, and a D&D example is the 3E module Speaker in Dreams and also some elements of the generally excellent B/X module Night's Dark Terror).</p><p></p><p>In the BW game, there was a fight with orcs (which was the GM's thing - there's nothing about my PC that makes orcs a particularly salient opponent), an encounter with a hermit ex-knight of my order (triggered by me making a successful Circles roll when my PC was hoping to meet some such person), an encounter with a dead knight of my order whose skeleton was still animated by a restless spirit (the GM coming up with an idea that spoke to my PC's concerns but in a way I hadn't expected), an old priory of my order destroyed by magical flame (ditto), the tower of Evard the Black (which was introduced into play following a successful Great Masters-wise check for Aramina the wizard PC - so not GM-driven at all in initiation, but it became the GM's job to actually bring the tower into the play in a concrete fashion), a demon in the form of Evard (or maybe Evard was really a demon all along?) who also seemed to be the source of the fire (this was the GM, and I'm not sure whether he had it in mind all along when he introuced the burned priory or whether he introduced it to link that bit into the Evard bit), and also a seeming revelation that Evard was my PC's father (which I guess means the demon was just impersonating him; the revelation took the form of letters between Evard and my mother, found in his tower, which my PC cast into a fire!); and a few other bits and pieces that I'm not recalling properly.</p><p></p><p>This is the back-and-forth of play - player and GM riffing of one another's ideas, with the GM having primary responsibility for managing all the backstory, setting coherence etc while the player has the primary responsibility for providng the drive and thematic context for the PC. Out of this we'll get a plot/story, but we won't know what it is until we play it. (Suppose that Great Masters-wise check had failed: maybe Evard is just a rumour, which would mean he could hardly be my PC's dad! Etc.)</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 7505181, member: 42582"] I'm not 100% sure I'm understanding you right (not because you've been unclear, but just because words like "plot" and "story" get used in different ways by different posters); but I think my answers are "no" and "yes". If you look at any of my actual play posts (I've got a lot, mostly on the 4e and General boards) you'll see that I generally favour protagonist-oriented, conflict-driven RPGing. The stories this generates aren't going to win me or my group any Nobel prizes, but they're fun to play in. What I don't like is GM pre-authored story, where the main contribution of the players is either to follow along the GM's narration (if the story is overt, like in many 80s and 90s TSR modules), or to puzzle their way through a series of mysteries to work out what it is the GM (or module writer) had in mind (this is the standard structure of a CoC module, and a D&D example is the 3E module Speaker in Dreams and also some elements of the generally excellent B/X module Night's Dark Terror). In the BW game, there was a fight with orcs (which was the GM's thing - there's nothing about my PC that makes orcs a particularly salient opponent), an encounter with a hermit ex-knight of my order (triggered by me making a successful Circles roll when my PC was hoping to meet some such person), an encounter with a dead knight of my order whose skeleton was still animated by a restless spirit (the GM coming up with an idea that spoke to my PC's concerns but in a way I hadn't expected), an old priory of my order destroyed by magical flame (ditto), the tower of Evard the Black (which was introduced into play following a successful Great Masters-wise check for Aramina the wizard PC - so not GM-driven at all in initiation, but it became the GM's job to actually bring the tower into the play in a concrete fashion), a demon in the form of Evard (or maybe Evard was really a demon all along?) who also seemed to be the source of the fire (this was the GM, and I'm not sure whether he had it in mind all along when he introuced the burned priory or whether he introduced it to link that bit into the Evard bit), and also a seeming revelation that Evard was my PC's father (which I guess means the demon was just impersonating him; the revelation took the form of letters between Evard and my mother, found in his tower, which my PC cast into a fire!); and a few other bits and pieces that I'm not recalling properly. This is the back-and-forth of play - player and GM riffing of one another's ideas, with the GM having primary responsibility for managing all the backstory, setting coherence etc while the player has the primary responsibility for providng the drive and thematic context for the PC. Out of this we'll get a plot/story, but we won't know what it is until we play it. (Suppose that Great Masters-wise check had failed: maybe Evard is just a rumour, which would mean he could hardly be my PC's dad! Etc.) [/QUOTE]
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