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Message: <blockquote data-quote="N'raac" data-source="post: 6108570" data-attributes="member: 6681948">Hussar is going to tell us “not for me”; “don’t care”; “don’t care”.  So his playstyle differs.  However, I doubt the GM decided that the hirelings would have personalities and the hiring should be played out in a vacuum.  I suspect, rather, that this is the kind of thing other players at the table enjoyed, and GM projected that on Hussar, just as Hussar projects the “do it my way or get screwed over” attitude on every GM. It does not escape me, however, that making those contacts should make it much easier to locate and recruit mercenaries in future.  However, Hussar will never try to recruit again because he was not assumed to get those benefits from the outset. An issue that seems to permeate the discussion, I agree.  Often, the bad things ad more to the game then the good things.  Death of a PC is pretty high up on the “bad things” chart in my books, and that is what moved the Grell from “just another encounter” to “target of Holy Revenge”. Agreed.  And this is the case whether the GM does so by crushing or facilitating the players’ creativity. As expected, and that’s your choice.   But we have already noted that you have options.  “Screw this – those six are hired.”  There is a basic disconnect in that you do not want this particular aspect of the world to have any depth.  The only solution is to find a group that wants the same, right?   But you have also suggested that including those personalities was bad Gming.  Here I disagree.  If all the other players wanted the same cardboard mercenaries, then it is bad GMing for that group, and the GM may need to find a group whose style is a better fit.  But if the group as a whole wants that depth and personality, and it’s just you who wants to skip past it, then including this is not bad GMing for the group, even if you are unhappy. In his case, you are the bad player, not in general but for that group.  In exactly the same way that, if everyone but me is happy with vending machine mercenaries and I whine and moan about how the NPC’s should have personalities and we should interact with them, then I am the bad player for that group. But, IME (YEMV), groups are rarely that homogenous.  They include players with different tastes, and ensuring everyone gets their favourites on occasion means others must tolerate their “not so favourites” on occasion as well. By the same token, what gives you the right to force the rest of the table into play they don’t want – which can, IMO, include NOT playing out scenes they find entertaining and enjoyable (and which, IMO again, MAKES THOSE SCENES RELEVANT to the players, even if not to the PC’s).   Forcing a player to skip scenes he wants to play out is not moral high ground over forcing a player to play out scenes he wants to skip.  To be clear, forcing a player to play out scenes he wants to skip is not moral high ground over forcing a player to skip scenes he wants to play out either.  But you classify the former as “bad GM’ing”.  Despite all your protests of style differences and “live and let live” and “play what you like”, you keep coming back to “the GM who does not play my way is a bad GM”. FLASHBACK:  Over a long enough span of time, “sometimes” becomes always when you are criticizing the GM’s actions, but not when you are supporting your “sometimes” the player should be allowed to skip a scene.  Why?  How is it that you will use any narrative power wisely, but others will not? And the GM must ensure that the game can survive, easily, the loss of each and every scene, since he has to treat every scene as the one a single player may decide to skip "this" time. Because, if he doesn't, then the sometimes will come up and bite them on the ass. Again, I do not see how your judgment is automatically so superior to everyone else’s judgment  Kind of like real life.  Most people hire house painters, movers, etc. and nothing bad happens.  So they don’t take every paranoid problem.  And then they unpack at their new home and can’t find a watch, or jewelry, or some other possession that disappeared in transit. So the realistic answer is likely “we don’t interview the hirelings in depth, and sometimes that blows up in our faces”.  But the players don’t like it when things go wrong, so they insist that the PC’s take every paranoid precaution to avoid any such risk.  This leaves the GM’s choices as “nothing ever goes wrong – you get exactly what you expect each and every single time” or “paranoid players have a 685 page “standard operating procedures manual” to apply on every occasion.  “OK, Step 7623 of NPC Encounter Protocol – sprinkle him with Holy Water in case he is Undead.  Nothing?  OK, Step 7624, shackle him in silver in case he is a lycanthrope.”  Or players accept that sometimes things will go wrong, and plugging every possibility is neither practical nor enjoyable.  Now, if the GM is adversarial and springs every “goes wrong” issue as “a HA-GOTCHA – you forgot Step 7437 – touch him with cold iron” moment, and things pretty much ALWAYS go wrong, that, to me, is bad GMing.  But if the players insist on such paranoid precautions to eliminate the slightest possibility things may go wrong, because hey, once in 10 years of gaming, we were ambushed by a creature that is allergic to parmesan cheese, so now all of my characters sprinkle everyone they meet with parmesan cheese as Item 9735 on the Standard NPC Encounter Protocol, then the player is the problem, not the GM. And if any failure of the PC’s to detect, by the most extreme and exhaustive tests, anything that could possibly go wrong spells death for the PC’s then we are back to bad GMing. Agreed.  However, I suspect most players would not just accept “and you camp, and in the night your hireling slits all your throats.  Make new characters” with “ok, you got us, nice one – pass me a character sheet”.  I’d be looking for a new table.  Maybe someone would enjoy that.  Not me. But if, on occasion, a hireling turns out to be less than 100% loyal, and that adds complexity without being unfairly lethal?  I can accept that as just part of the game.  Take reasonable precautions – maybe we don’t go to sleep with new hirelings on watch with no PC supervision.  But we also don’t shackle the hirelings to a tree very night so they can’t do anything we would be unhappy with. A bad GM can certainly make the game suck.  So can bad players.  So what?  That doesn’t mean I assume every GM will be looking for any excuse to screw the PC’s and players over, nor do I assume every player will be a paranoid idiot.  I’ll deal with the rare exceptions when they arise.  If every other horse is lame, I think that’s a problem.  If there is a slight possibility, and I insist on playing like a paranoid lunatic to eliminate that slight possibility, I think the problem isn’t the GM any more.  Sometimes, bad things will happen to my character.  I trust the GM to make those into entertaining challenges, not death sentences for any PC who doesn’t make Howard Hughes look like a naïve trusting extrovert.</blockquote>

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