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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5826323" data-attributes="member: 42582">Of course things work best when, as per your preferred approach, everyone is in agreement.But the question is - what happens when agreement breaks down? And what can be done, both in campaign set up and in the course of play, to help maximise the likelihood of enduring agreement, and minimise the likelihood of agreement breaking down.In my experience, at least, aggressive deployment of mechanical alignment is basically the opposite of a sound approach in these situations.And it need have nothing to do with bait-and-switch. Not everyone really appreciates what they're getting into. Suppose we sit down to watch a movie. You suggest Hardboiled. I ask what it is. You explain that it's an ultra-violent action thriller with a strong thematic focus on loyalty and duty. I say, OK. Then we start watching, and I find that the ultraviolence is more than I can take. Am I obliged to sit mutely for the next two hours and suck it up? Or can I ask you to turn it off? And what difference does it make if we up the time to 4 hours a week/fortnight for some indefinite number of weeks?Why wouldn't I blame the GM? The GM decides what the  NPCs do, after all. They have no independent life.The question is, is this bad GMing? That depends a lot on the point of the game, and mutual understandings about such things. If I'm playing John Brown in the USA 1850 setting, and the very first NPC I meet and speak to turns out to be a proto-Klansman who rounds up all his friends to ambush and kill me, I'm going to be a bit pissed off. If I get at least to make it to Harpers Ferry, that's a different thing altogether.Furthermore, your example doesn't require me, as the player of John Brown, to agree that slavery is morally permissible. At least as you've presented it, you're just describing the setting. You're not evaluating it, and imposing that evaluation upon me as a player. Whereas, as best I understand it, in the campaign described by the OP, at least one player is objecting to the claim that a person (maybe more than one person - a king and a cleric) is simultaneously good and tolerant/supportive of extrajudicial killing. I don't think that's an unreasonable objection to put forward. One way for the GM to respond is just to keep running the setting, but (i) refrain from expressing any evaluation of it, and (ii) not rub the dissenting player's nose in it. A GM who insists on sticking to the evaluation, and/or on rubbing the dissenting player's nose in the situation, is in my view simply asking for further conflict.</blockquote>

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