When you're the odd man out

[I'm A Banana]

Yeah, that's a bit freaked out. Adding that much randomness to a game where the atmosphere is "these characters have been with us forever" is a very distressing situation.

There are ways, if you were DM, to work around it.

You could, of course, keep the randomness, and give them ways to counter-act it that are frequent and interesting. Like, if someone summons a meteor, you have X days before it hits, and you need to consult an AstroMage to teleport it elsewhere. Or if someone grows spikes, a remove curse will heal them. Or whatever.

You could also come up with a meta-plot reason to do away with the backlash. A powerful wizard has discovered a way to remove the chance of backlash from magic, and needs the PC's help to set the world right with regards to spellcasting.

But you were a player. So all you could do is be subject to it.

Question: are the rest of the players that scared of having their characters erased? Or are you just being nervous because you're the new guy? It might not be that big of a deal to them to have their hard-won characters obliterated (for now) by a random dice roll.

If it is, still, then, yeah, you did the right thing. Your styles obviously don't mesh, and that's okay. Offer to run your own game or just don't game with them, you can hang out with them in other ways.

 

[el-remmen]

So your character was the only one who was casting spells that could "backlash"? No other PCs? What about your opponents?

While I find it admirable to bow out of a game when you feel like your play style or expectations do not match up with the groups's (rather than stick around and be miserable and make everyone the same way) - is your dropping out really going to lessen the likelihood of some bad stuff happening to the characters?

 

[RainOfSteel]

Anyone else ever realize that you were the odd man out in a game?

Not in a RPG.

I have seen plenty of people in that position, but none were ever as polite as you to step out of the game for the benefit of the other players.

Most continue to play, destroying the game for everyone else.

I've got to say, though, that I would never play in any game where magic was as screwed as it was in your DM's game.

 

[Jubilee]

I once made a fairly high-minded character in a game where everyone else was being fairly mercenary. My character wanted to fight the "good" fight and cleanse the land of the undead blight, or whatever other kind of evil creatures were blighting the land, and everyone else wanted to loot tombs and ancient vaults. I almost quit the game, but decided to make a new character instead. I probably could have made it work, but I didn't want the stress - it's not what I game for.

 

[Asmor]

Every spell in the system has a chance of backlashing... The major difference is that AFAIK all the spells in the game, except the one I was using, only roll one die. In addition, the chance of backlashing depends on the level of the spell... A level 1 spell backlashes on a 20, a level 2 on a 19-20, etc. Spirit Claw, the one I used that rolls 6 times, is level 4, which is the highest level spell that can be used in combat. When you backlash, you roll a d% and he looks up on a chart what happens, so it's fairly unlikely that any given backlash is going to be game-wrecking, but I usually backlash 3-5 times per fight. In addition, he usually metagames a little and says that something bad's about to happen, so he gives people a chance to force a reroll with a fate cup, which is a limited resource akin to action points. So the rare meteor strike or volcano opening up undernear the party isn't going to screw anything up. As I say, though, fate cups are a limited resource which people have plenty of other reasons to spend in other cases, so there's not usually an abundance of them. Best case scenario is that I'm wasting the party's resources.

Just to give you some idea of this situation, at this last game the GM said "I'll let you play an epic ranger if you retire that character. They don't cast spells but you'll be more powerful than the rest of the party." and I flat replied, "But the backlashes are my favorite thing in this system!"

Yeah, there are compromises which could have been reached, but as I said there's literally nothing else in the system which I enjoy, so I'd basically be sitting there bored through every fight phoning it in. The battles are the most important part of a game for me, so that's a big problem.

 

[Treebore]

Yeah, its a good thng you quit.

No, I never have. I've been fortunate to be able to have fun playing anything. Whenever I have found I joined a game where I couldn't have fun I simply apologized and quit the group. Usually after I found another group I thought I could have fun with.

The only groups I have had to quit were ones where I found that most of the players, and their characters, were supporting cast for the DM's "buddies" character; or the DM played favorites. Either way, not the kind of game I like playing in.

I have never played in a system that I hated. I've always been able to find something good about every system I found myself playing in. Whether it was RIFTS, Shadowrun, Synnibar, Rolemaster, etc...

Now what I will DM is a different story.

 

[Set]

Man, I *loathe* randomness. If there was a Magic Missile variant that did exactly 3 pts of damage with each Missile, I'd be all over it. I hate rolling dice, since I *always* roll crappy.

My personal record was an AD&D game where the randomness loving GM (who always rolled awesome. Using 3d6 six times, I watched him roll a character with two 18s and a 17) required me to roll 3d6 six times and take the stats. My character was deemed a 'mulligan' since he didn't have a single stat of 9 or higher, meaning that he wasn't able to qualify for *any* class.

Given a character who could kill the party on a bad roll, I'd leave the game before that happened, too.

 

[Lanefan]

I don't mind randomness at all; it's what makes the game fun...but I do have one question:

If this game has had Backlash all along, at the kind of odds you quote, and the party has had the usual number of spellcasters during its career, how have those characters survived 5 years without being Backlashed into oblivion?

I ran a game for a long time where there was always a 1% chance of any spell going wrong due to a generic instability in magic (insert long story here), and even that low a chance ended up causing headaches for the party on various occasions. This Backlash sounds like a jumped-up version of the same thing.

Lanefan

 

[GSHamster]

I don't mind randomness at all; it's what makes the game fun...but I do have one question:

If this game has had Backlash all along, at the kind of odds you quote, and the party has had the usual number of spellcasters during its career, how have those characters survived 5 years without being Backlashed into oblivion?

I imagine they used magic rarely and treated it as a dangerous thing that was not reliable. Which is generally the attitude that these types of rules are meant to evoke.

 

[Asmor]

I imagine they used magic rarely and treated it as a dangerous thing that was not reliable. Which is generally the attitude that these types of rules are meant to evoke.

Actually, this is a high-magic world. Pretty much everyone can use some magic.