Have you ever guested in somebody else's long-running campaign? If so you might have come across a referee who indulges one player over the rest of the table. It doesn't occur in every gaming group, and if it happens in your own regular sessions you probably haven't noticed it. But here are some warning signs...
When you were setting up your campaign, did a player come to you with a shopping list of special off-the-book character buffs? "Can I have immunity to everything? 5 points would be a reasonable cost, wouldn't it?" If you granted those, then face it: that player is your teacher's pet.
There's also the case of the player who is aware of the kind of thing his or her referee likes and so plays up to it. "I swing on the chandelier, soar nimbly across the shoulders of the guards and somersault to land in a crouch before the princess." If the referee applauds ("Oh, beautifully done!") when they'd ask anyone else for a dice roll then the player is probably a favourite who knows the referee's fondness for swashbucklers. A newcomer to the group, unaware of the codes that unlock referee approval, would have to work that much harder.
I don't think the solution is to bake everyone's fifteen minutes into the rules. That just forces the game to follow the patterns of a bad TV show: "So I can't shoot this guy, despite being MI6's top assassin, because I already had a couple of highlight moments earlier in the session..?" But you do need to monitor who is demanding the lion's share of your attention, and whether the quieter players are happy about that. If they're not, make sure there are opportunities for them to shine too. Otherwise the first sign of that gathering resentment might be when they stop turning up to the game.
Your point are well made Dave and I agree it’s incumbent upon the GM to try to be aware of and avoid conscious and unconscious bias. Particularly difficult in the case of not giving too
ReplyDeletemuch airplay to people playing well. On the other hand it’s probably easier to let the dice fall where they may for old friends as the relationship of trust is already established. I do believe though that the GM can be a fan of the players AS A TEAM and be rooting for them to succeed albeit that may not in any way resemble the GM’s anticipated sequence of events or even the PCs surviving. If a glorious (or monumentally dumb) last stand is what they choose then so be it! I do think though killing them all in some random unavoidable trap is pretty arbitrary even if the rules say that’s what should happen. Real life can be cruel, arbitrary and unfair - should our games simulate that perfectly? I don’t think so.
If a TPK results from a random, unavoidable trap then I'd say that's pretty obviously bad refereeing, Nigel. But it shouldn't be impossible to suffer a TPK if the characters choose to do something risky and make a hash of their planning. I can't remember the last time a PC died in a game I was in. Actually, yes I can. It was while robbing a tomb in Egypt and a stone block fell on him. And the circumstances made sense -- we'd had warnings, we'd been careless. We accepted it as a case of good (ie disinterested) GMing and moved on.
DeleteThe operative point there is that I think a good referee is disinterested. Just like the universe, which doesn't care if we live or die, which makes us responsible for our own survival rather than having an invisible fan to nudge dice rolls in our favour. Tastes will vary, of course, and partiality towards the whole party is not what the post is about, but once the referee is intervening to make it a safe & pleasing story, it's a short step from there to making it a better story for one particular player.
DeleteDave, do you think a GM should intervene to assist a set of players growing frustrated/to avoid a TPK?
DeleteI think everyone faces this at some point: the players screw up, perhaps by missing a key plot point or item, and it means they cannot best the scenario the GM has planned out. So what does the GM do: let events play out or throw the players a bone?
My personal bias (I'm most often a player) is to give the players a chance/throw them another hint. After all, maybe you as the GM didn't relay needed information as well as you could have done. Alternatively, maybe you need to throw out your planned scenario and run with whatever hare-brained scheme the players cook up?
But I can see the argument that Hand of God intervening undercuts the fidelity of a campaign, and that players may just miss important things and due the consequences.
Of course, this is a also good reason why 'it's up to you to save the world!' campaigns have issues, beyond their inherent cliche).
I don't offer "omniscient narrator" hints, Richard. After all, where would that voice be coming from? Is it supposed to be a booming deity speaking invisibly to the characters through the roof, or what? I'll have NPC companions comment on what the PCs are doing, naturally, but they all have their own agenda. If a PC's uncle says, "You're an idiot for not making a plan," it might just be because he's a fussy old curmudgeon.
DeleteIn any case, if the players do get things wrong or miss a clue, I don't know what the consequences are going to be. In the "Murder Your Darlings" scenario I mentioned how they got it all completely wrong, which led to an outcome I didn't expect -- but so what? The goal of the game isn't to get the players to conform to my expectations.
I agree the idea of GM godspeak is a bad one. I was thinking more about a GM being helpful if players ask sensible questions/request information.
DeleteI think that your latter point is where some such issues come from. I believe you've written about this, but in my experience some GMs prioritise their clever adventure plans over player enjoyment.
I wouldn't go with either option tbh. Planning is overrated, as we've discussed here before, while if I tried to steer events towards what I think is enjoyable then the players would always get the same formulaic outcomes. Trust to the mess of randomness, character interaction and player choices to deliver something surprising and enjoyable, that would be my message.
DeleteInteresting. Thanks for the reply. So, how much plotting/background do you have ready? A set of very loose ideas/encounters/objectives? Or do you run it on the fly, inventing story and plans as the players discuss/argue about what to do?
DeleteMy preferred method is to decide what all the main NPCs are trying to achieve, which in effect tells me what will happen if not for the player-characters' involvement. Then I throw the PCs into that and we see what happens.
DeleteAlso I prefer to have several strands of activity involving different groups of NPCs, so that the players can pick up on whatever interests them.
It's not going to suit all tastes. Some players prefer to have missions handed to them by the equivalent of the old guy met in the pub. Personally I abhor that kind of spoon-feeding, but a lot of players expect the story to come to them.
Which reminds me, Ralph Lovegrove discusses Ron Edwards' taxonomy of playing styles from 11 minutes into this recent Fictoplasm podcast. (Dungeon, Squad, Dumb and Hard, apparently.)
Deletehttp://www.fictoplasm.net/podcast/88-the-oa/
Your approach is eminently sensible. I think I've either largely participated in (or, on occasion, run) very linearly plotted campaigns. Having multiple plans seems an obvious solution, especially in non-epic scenarios.
DeleteI will be sure to listen to the podcast episode; thanks for the tip!
More germane to the original topic: how have you dealt with players who begin to dominate proceedings?
I'm not conscious (perhaps I wouldn't be) of ever having shown favouritism to one player. Some players do tend to take the star roles: Jamie Thomson and Oliver Johnson, for example. But that's from their own personalities, not because I'm indulging them. Sometimes I'm tempted to throw in some cues to a forceful character, because I want to see them run with them, but I learnt my lesson there when I came up with an interesting story thread for a character played by Aaron Fortune and then Aaron wasn't able to come along for several sessions, so the thread went nowhere. I broke my own rule about not planning and paid the price.
DeleteI have been in the spotlight on the other side of the table. I played a character who worked his way up from nothing to be a Tsolyani clan-father and led the other characters on an expedition to conquer a kingdom on the far side of the globe. One player constantly grumbled that the referee (Steve Foster) had his thumb on the scales, which is nonsense; we're very old friends, but like me Steve runs his games without fear or favour. And all our dice rolls were there on the table, so everyone could see I wasn't getting special treatment, but this one player resented it. Anyway, at the continual carping Steve decided to put in something that would prove he wasn't biassed: a suit of legendary armour that the new ruler of the kingdom was to wear at the coronation. But who would it fit? That was a random roll. So we went around the table -- a sword in the stone moment; whoever turned out to have the precise measurements for the High King's armour would rule. And it got to me, I rolled the dice (we'd already been told the target numbers; all above board) and got the perfect fit. Destiny, in the form of a set of dice rolls, not referee bias. There was no arguing with that -- though as I recall the disgruntled player took even that with poor grace. There was just no pleasing him!
Disinterested in the outcome but hopefully highly engaged in the process. Yes perhaps that’s the ideal but not easy to always achieve.
ReplyDeleteDisinterested, like a courtroom judge. Not uninterested.
DeleteOf course, some courtroom judges might not just be uninterested but actually asleep. It's hard to tell...
DeleteWell maybe sometimes, but usually they appear to be asleep until you say something that interests or annoys them and then show they weren’t in fact asleep, just bored!
DeleteThat is how I feel in some roleplaying games, I must admit. Not when I'm running them, hopefully!
DeleteSomebody on Facebook raised a flipside to the indulged character, namely when you take a character whose attitude or skills don't fit with the game the referee has planned. For example, I had a Jesuit priest character who got possessed (as he saw it) by a Cthulhu entity. Naturally he wanted to get off to the Vatican asap but the referee's plans involved him trusting the other PCs more than the Church to deal with something like that. My mistake in taking such a character in that kind of campaign, but it shows the pitfalls.
ReplyDeleteSurely the GM could have improvised something involving the Secret Vatican Archives, grand conspiracies and secret societies, the Black Pope and flagellants??? :-) or heaven forbid split the party?
ReplyDeleteI'd have enjoyed that. He'd written a very specific plot that involved my character getting possessed. I had no choice in any of it and after a couple of sessions I told him it'd be better if he just took the character over as an NPC and I'd create a new one. So it was kind of an object lesson in why over-planning is bad.
DeleteHmmm. Okay that’s the clearest example of GM railroading I’ve seen for a long time! Bad form GM! How would you have implemented that possession? Secret note, sidebar discussion? Which opens a whole other can of worms... how to best get the level of disclosure right as a GM? I suspect that’s part of my aversion to running investigative games as I have found that no matter what I say the players deem it important...or some sort of clue or nudge...when it might just be a bit of improvised colour or description or dialogue. Case in point the “Doorbusters” are having conniptions about noises from downstairs in the keep they’re staying at having pulled a swifty and lied to say they were not in fact successful at retrieving the Maguffin from the bad guy’s fortress on his absence. It was just a bit of suspense and tension I thought to end the session with as they are beat up and out of spells and thought they were safe... but they’re now convinced a whole army of competing factions and baddies must be creeping around downstairs about to massacre them when they fall asleep... and steal the Maguffin when in reality it’s just the normal noises from a keep preparing for a potential attack after they stole the siege preparation notes (why do baddies always leave that incriminating stuff just lying around :-) )
ReplyDeleteRailroading? It's a diametrically different style of roleplaying from mine, certainly. On the one hand we've got games that are designed to emulate action movies or TV shows, in which the characters are a team on an adventure designed by the GM (a more appropriate term than referee here). So the GM is content to hand out hints or even scripts, in effect, so that the players play their part as the stars in that story.
DeleteOn the other hand you've got my approach, which is that we're not trying to replicate a genre story arc, we're trying to create a "second life". The player-characters are not specially marked out by destiny to be heroes. They, like everybody else, are the heroes only in their own estimation; that's what Prof Barker meant when he said, "There are no NPCs on Tekumel." As the referee, my job is to keep the wheels of the world turning. The player-characters can get involved, and I should do enough work to ensure that they understand the risks and rewards of their choices just as well as they would if it were areal world. God doesn't appear at my bedroom window and tell me to buy Tesla shares or to be careful of fatty foods, and likewise I don't nanny the players by talking to them non-diegetically, nor do I expect them to play out roles that I've designed around them.
Some players like one way, some like the other. I don't claim my way is right, only that it's the reason I roleplay. If I wanted to do it the other way I'd have become an actor.
5 minutes back 1 of my cousins texted me with a problem she has
ReplyDeleteHer problem is that her 4 players have been lucky though to fairly acquire the kind of power that will make them powerful enough that the campaign will be too easy
What's worse is that the campaign will be so easy that it'll soon get boring that none of them will have any fun. What would you suggest?
Her problem is that she is doing A 1st edition Dragon Warrior, she foolishly let all of her players bathe in Waters, they all choose to get cover 63% of their bodies in Styian Waters
Covering 63% of their bodies in Stygian Waters give them A 63% chance to ignore almost damage, but it had A 88% of killing them and if it does kill them then they can't be resurrected
The problem is that even though all 4 Pcs would only survive on A 12 or less on 1D100 her players were lucky enough for the 4, each, rolls they made came up were A 11, A 8, A 6 and A 2nd 11
This means that all 4 Pcs have survived A Ritual that had A 88% chance of killing them in A way that if it had killed them they could never be resurrected and their immunities are as follows
They have A 63% immunity to Death, Petrification, Mind Control and Magic Items that have A Ranged Attack
They also have A 63% immunity to all attacks by foes of below 13th Rank or the equivalent
My example of A Monster that isn't 13th Rank or higher but is the Equivalent of 13th Rank is A Vampire who is A 6th Rank Knight that has The Spellcasting Abilities of A Warlock of at least 3rd Rank
It also means that all 4 Pcs have A 63% immunity to all Spells of below 6th level
They also have A 63% immunity to 7th level Spells that aren't cast by A Spellcaster, of any type, that isn't 13th level or higher
They also have A 63% Immunity to any Magic Weapons that weren't made by A Sorcerer of 13th level or higher
They would never find that much Stygian water any place other than the River Styx itself, and in any case it only confers invulnerability to nonmagical weapons, not to spells or enchanted weapons. But clearly your friend is favouritizing the players because no way did they all roll 12 or under. The actual chance of that is about 1 in 5000. What to do about players cheating their rolls? That's a subject for another post...
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