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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Beginning of the End" data-source="post: 5388571" data-attributes="member: 55271">I've had gamers like Malenkirk at my table before. I refer to them as "damaged goods" since, IME, they tend to be created by poor GMing at other tables. (I've never seen a player new to RPGs suffer from this problem.) My GM has a <a href="http://www.thealexandrian.net/creations/talesfromthetable/tale02-bumbling.html" target="_blank">pretty funny story</a> about the time he ran into a whole table of them without realizing what was happening.Malenkirk seems to be a pretty bad case, though. He can apparently look at someone saying, "I don't want to tell my players what to do." And his only response is, "<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />! It's a trap! When he says he doesn't want to tell me what to do, what is he secretly trying to make me do?"The examples I've encountered in real life tend to respond well to simply explaining the disconnect. Once they realize that Admiral Ackbar isn't going to leap out of the closet, they generally respond enthusiastically.Your position of "GM as Ultimate Tyrant" is, IMO, a rather flat and boring one.The truth is that both the GM and the players have control over pacing. If the player decide that their PCs take a knitting class instead of chasing the guy who just tried to assassinate them, that decision has an effect on the pacing of the campaign. And while theoretically the GM could turn their knitting class into a fast-paced thriller or the rooftop chase into a serene art film, the reality is that the responsibility for how a campaign is paced belongs to both the action chosen (which the players largely control unless the GM is railroading them) and the presentation of that action (which the GM largely controls).All other things being even, you're probably right: If everyone has a 50% chance of being wrong, then the GM has a 50% chance of being wrong while there's only a 3% chance of 5 players all being wrong at the same time.But if the players have been taught through experience that the way to play an RPG is to "wait for the GM to tell us what to do", then all other things aren't even. That prior experience on the part of the players will skew your hypothetically perfect conditions and make it quite likely that when they're presented with the situation "the GM wants us to make decisions for ourselves" they'll screw it up.I suppose one can argue that the GM should just suck it up and run another "I'll tell you what to do" campaign for these players. But since I'm (a) not a big fan of the "GM is a slave" meme and (b) I think railroading is generally a broken model for tabletop play, I'm generally going to try to make these players explore a better way of playing before giving up on them and finding new players. (I have zero interest in running a railroad.)</blockquote>

Verification