But what about the stupid PCs?

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Post originally by Jeffrey Moore at 2003-03-07 10:05:45
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I'm always happy to have villains who panic, surrender, or fight llike cornered dogs when they have no other choice. It makes for deeper, better gameplay.

The problem is my PCs. With the exception of one of my players, who I treasure like no other, my players never panic, they never surrender. I've had a PC charge a villain after two other PCs were knocked down without a scratch on the villain, using Sandy's example. And the 2 PCs were the best fighters in the group. I have to outnumber them 10 to 1 before they'll surrender. And even then I know some of them are thinking about fighting.

Part of the problem is there are few real consequences to the player. They don't want to lose their characters, of course, so that'd suck. But they want to "win" more. And winning to some players means never surrendering, never fleeing, and never getting captured. Sure, the characters are heores, but they're people too, and often players lose sight of that.

So it's a tricky biscuit. Realistic NPCs vs unrealistic PCs. Maybe it's best that way, mimicking schlocky action movies. But I say *pttlllblt* to that.

Solution? Heh, if I knew a solution to this, I'd be writing articles here cause I'm sure I'm not the only one with this problem.

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Post originally by Jason Doremus at 2003-03-07 16:09:39
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This reminds me of a situation in a roleplaying game I ran. More along the lines of a GM vs. PC adversary thing then anything else

It was in the Earthdawn campaign world, which for those not in the know, is a high-fantasy world populated by beings called Horrors. Generally speaking these Horrors are nasty creatures, often insubstantial.

Well, the PC's found an underground city that had been taken over by the Horror. The Horror had killed everyone in the city and resurrected them as zombies. The zombies acted per normal zombie behavior, incessant unthinking attacks.

Well, the PC's get into the town, see the situation and immediately follow one PC who runs as deeply as he can into this underground city, finally getting the entire PC party along with the small mercenary squad of NPC's who were with them stuck in a room as deep as you could go with the entire town of zombies behind a closed door. The door was thick enough to stop the zombies, but there was no immediate way out. Basically it was like this:

Long hallway filled zombies
Door
PCs

They tried to kill every last zombie in the city, and mowed through about half of them before everyone was too badly injured to believe they'd live if they kept trying.

So essentially the PC's had trapped themselves. Well, I ended the session there, trying to come up with a way I could let the PC's out of this one and feel good about myself.

The next week I had come up with the following options:

Horror's can mark people, essentially giving the horror a long distance connection to whoever was marked, allowing things like mind control. The horror was going to mark all the PCs and then, if the pc agreed to do some semi-heinous act (kill a person, poke out an eyeball of a person, or even just leave for the more morally upright people) the horror would let that pc go. The pcs were not aware IC of the consequences of a Horror-marking.

Or they could lure the horror to their room and kill it. Possible, but difficult. I honestly didn't expect the pc's to figure out how, but left that option in case they were clever enough.

Well, long story short, none of the pc's agreed to do the act offered by the horror and constantly kept trying to push the horrors patience through trying to sneak out or similar activities. not even the pc who was an assassin was willing to kill an npc mercenary to get out. The horror would warn them through mind-numbing pain and then I killed one pc as a warning to let the group knew I meant business. Finally, as the night wore on and the pc's just kept fiddling around I wiped out the entire band.

Well, the PCs were understandably peeved.

However, I felt that the PCs were sure above all that I would give them some sort of escape hatch. I tried to make as clear as i could that I wasn't, and then finally i got angry at the pc's for not being willing to (in my opinion) honestly evaluate their characters moral grey areas. They were all heroes, and pc's.

So...stupid PCs or stupid GM?

I realize that I could have done something liek just knock them out and have them wake up outside the dungeon all with a horror-mark, but I had become angry at the PCs total unwillingness to admit defeat and accept the conditions. I could have understood if one super-moral pc had said no, but every pc in this group was certaintly not a paladin.

This event is still a source of conversation amongst our group as to PC responsibility to a story and such issues.

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Post originally by Mant at 2003-03-07 16:22:33
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Hey, getting caught by the villain is pretty standard fare in schlocky action movies :)

Mant

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Post originally by Jesse King at 2003-03-09 15:49:56
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I get nailed with this one a lot when I GM.

I like to create situations that on the face of things look un-beatable, but give the players the warning and initiative to devise a plan before they take it on, or just plain avoid it.

Exp. A first lvl group's ranger spies a band of several ogres in the forest. They haven't seen him.

Now, any player even remotely familiar with 3rd Ed ogres knows that a first level group would be well advised to avoid anything more than ONE without a good situational advantage, and a squad of them should just be avoided at all costs unless some kind of really good trap can be devised to defeat them (lure them into a huge rockslide or something).

But almost without fail, I find that the players assume they should charge into such a situation head first, assuming that luck, providence, or the GM will bail them out should something go wrong. I find this terribly annoying.

Now, to be honest, this is my bad habit. Note that I said 'First lvl group'. This means a brand new group that probably has no declared leader and little experience with the style of campaign I'm running. In other words, they have no idea what to expect, and are likely to react with the group intelligence of ameoba, even if they are otherwise experienced players.

If I were smarter, I'd 'ease' my players into it. Starting them off with the obligatory bandit/kobold runs, and then moving them into progressively more complex and deadly situations as they learn to work as a team and begin to understand the rather gritty and dangerous campaign style that I prefer to run.

I just can't START OUT that way. Gotta ease them into it. :)

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Post originally by Jesse King at 2003-03-09 16:03:32
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Oh, one other thing I'd suggest when running a 'realistic' campaign, or one in which you want to make it clear that situations can and will be leathal if the players make poor decisions...

Make ALL your combat rolls WITHOUT a GM's screen. This makes it starkly clear to the players that you will NOT slight rolls to give them an advantage.

You need to scale your fights carefully, and be very nimble (plot-wise) to do this well however. Sometimes the dice will simply go so badly against your PC's that even their best strategems will fail them during a difficult fight. At that point it'll be up to you to come up with a plausible 'save' for the group - assuming of course you are interested in maintaining the campaign and storyline intact.

Another thing I'd suggest if you do this, is to make sure you are comfortable with the 'Death' rules in your system, and house them if you aren't. It is rarely if ever fun for a player to be instantly killed by a single very deadly critical attack - but there may be no way to avoid it if you roll without a screen. Tweaking the death rules may help you avoid this if you're uncomfortable with that idea.

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Post originally by Tadeusz at 2003-03-11 11:55:42
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Good points, but it just does not work(well rarely it might)all that well. Maybe if I really trusted a GM I might find a capture scenario not a prelude to a really horrible time, but those GM's who are most likely to try to capture a pc party are the ones I am most unlikely to trust. Dictatorial instincts should be curbed by a gm. Emulate the British in Hong Kong. Vast gov't powers subtly used with restraint.

Player Freedom. Say that phrase ten times or longer until it sinks in. Some people may not care as much for it with their characters, but the default position should be player freedom. If you do something different, then be aware that you are swimming against the current IMO. If you have a collection of people from the ten percent area of the Bell Curve of RPG Player Types then have fun because it will never happen again.

Examples: We went up against a Really Tough Dragon that we could have beaten if we had all banded together instead of half of us wimping out and cowering. The GM let us live, and get the magic item we needed in exchange for our servitude. Only one player fled.
But this was a convention game, and the GM was very good, and he did it quickly. It is possible to do, but not for most GM's.

If you are going to capture your players, get it over and done with.

I sent a player through torture for one game night as I stripped his powers, and did all sorts of other nasty things to him. He stood for it(for that one night), but he is the best roleplayer I know, bar none. He was a real roleplayer; so much better than almost everyone else as to not be in the same category as ordinary mortals. And I doubt he would have stood for it much longer.

I had a convention game where I tried to follow White Wolf's advice for a vampire game. My players respected me, but they did not enjoy it. This is a radical change from most of my games in which the players enjoy it quite a bit.

"Storyteller" ways have their place in a game as spice does on a hamburger, but the real meat is player freedom. People want to be empowered as a general rule of thumb, and when they enter a game where they are not this makes them cranky.

I know this sounds like 'my way is the one true way to roleplay', but what I mean is that 'my way is the mainstream' and if you do not do it this way you may find that a change is more fun for one and all with big smiles breaking out at your tables, and with more involved players, and with less work for the poor overstressed GM who lets the players provide the center of the story, and the NPC's serve as opponents and backdrops and logical consequences.

Finally, logical consequences early on are the curb to that bane of GM's which is the pc opening fire on the king who is surrounded by forty expert swordsmen who are all better than the pc, and then the pc wonders why we struggle to not shout at him, and sulks as we inevitably kill him(almost always a him, btw).
Smack the players on the wrist early on. He mouths off to the town guard, well they take him aside and pound him unconscious and leave him on the street. No lasting harm is done, and so the player is not as likely to get t.o-ed about the beating. But he is likely to take note and start to behave more reasonably.

Make it quick and simple.

"I tell him he looks like a big dork." PC says.
He stares at you in astonishment.
"I laugh"
He backfists you in the face with his metal gauntlet knocking you down, and the rest of the guards come over and beat you unconscious with their fists.
The rest of the party is likely to disassociate themselves if done early in a game, and just stand there. The pc may want to draw a sword or launch a fireball.
Its hard to do either when you are being mobbed. Also, the gm should remind with slight emphases that they are using their fists, and not their swords.
Unless the pc is incorrigible this should work. Usually PC's test the waters first before doing something truly unsalvageable. But some have acquired bad habits, and do something insane right off.

I play Multiverser where such a pc gets killed and dumped into a new world. Its very educational for the problem player. For others with different games, you have my sympathy, but I think you may be able to slowly pound reason into their heads by gradually increasing steps(every time they step out of line swat them, be fair but merciless), or if you can, just kill the pc, and let him start over.

Tadeusz

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Post originally by Kyle Schuant at 2003-03-13 06:34:52
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Tadeusz had excellent suggestions with his "pound some sense into them in a non-fatal way" comments.

I would add, though, that in the "you meet a group of ogres" or "there's this big dragon, he seems to be sleeping..." scenarios, it's well to remember that players are brainwashed.
"I am a hero. Heroes kill ogres. Heroes kill dragons. Heroes do not rush up and simply die. GM puts in monsters that we can kill, so we can show our heroism. GM would not have introduced me to monsters if I could not kill them. I am a hero." etc.
For many players, the entire point of the existence of monsters, or villains, is that they get to smack them over. I mean, it's even systemised in some cases - beasties sit around in dungeons for years on end, just waiting for you to show up, smack them over, and take their stuff. Players can understand that.
You tell them, "oh, no, this isa monster you _can't_ kill..." They just don't understand it. They respond, "well if we can't kill it, why is it here? For us to look at? What is it, an oil painting?"
It's the system. It's the genre. What you need to do is combination of Tadeusz's "pounding education education system" and, well, explain to them that this is a different type of campaign. There's not just hitting and killing. There's, you know, talking to people and stuff... maybe taking their stuff _without_ killing them... maybe befriending them... who knows...
But you've got to tell them. Otherwise, they'll assume it's just like all the other games they played. Bear in mind a lot of player's "roleplaying" experience comes from computer roleplaying games. Because of the lack of real brains in a computer, for most games all you can do is walk around, smack beasties over, and take their stuff, and get better at walking around smacking things over...
When they've had that kind of training, you surprised they act that way?

Also, this may explain why the GM in the orginal article was like that. Maybe he played these computer games and he thought that's what the players wanted...

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Post originally by eddie at 2003-04-10 15:14:19
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Ok, player freedom is one thing, but I see a lot of what I call the 'Freedom to be an Arsehole', the desire to derail the session in favour of personal aggrandisment. This usually applies to the more experienced gamer rather than the newbie, and it really pisses me off as a GM. In my experience there ain't no way to deal with this, try talking to them out-of-game and they see it as validating their behaviour ('Look, I'm getting attention'), slap 'em down and they get passive-aggressive ('Why you be mean to me.').

I'm not talking about people being wrapped too tight here, these wankers know exactly what they're doing, they're doing it deliberately, and they think that by doing this that they're 'winning' the role-playing somehow. The absolute worst is when two or more of them get at it, it's just foul. I've been GMing for a long time, and I don't have an answer to this kind of behaviour. In fact, I'll fold the campaign rather than put up with this.

Don't get me wrong these are intelligent people, many have gamed for over a decade, they just put their ego-massaging above any other consideration. It's got to the stage where I won't even play (rather than GM) with them, as each character is exactly like the last, a self-centered moron, wanting to take center stage just so that no-one else can have it. Each session is like the last, nothing happens; no risk, no reward, no role-play, no characterisation.

Like I said before, I don't have an answer to this. All I can do is tell them that they are no longer welcome at my sessions, even as a spectator (don't even ask). This is a real hassle as I don't have a big pool of players to chose from, and the arseholes drive any new players off real quick.

If anyone has a solution, let me know. I've tried killing them and taking their stuff, but they won't stay dead!

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Post originally by ImperiumRPG at 2003-08-13 03:47:45
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Kill stupid PCs. Kill them good. Kill them permanently.

I know, the GM isn't supposed to go out specifically to kill PCs, but that's not what I'm suggesting.

Hit them with the genuine consequences of their actions. They mouth of to the guards, the guards beat him up, as someone suggested. Nice. Appropriate to the situation.

However, giving a PC a warning for doing something more dangerous, like attacking an ogre, but only leaving him unconscious in a ditch, is saying, "Look, I won't kill you, PC, so keep going."

Kill him. Kill him mercilessly. He deserves it. Roleplaying is about simulating a world. Whether it's a heroic or gritty world, suicide is always fatal.

So if someone attempts to commit suicide by cop, or whatever, let them. Show no mercy, and then hand them the rulebook, open on the page for character generation.

Then they gen up a new character.

If the plan's worked, this new character is looked after a lot better. If it hasn't, this character dies as well, and good for you for killing him. Pass the character generation rules across.

Repeat adinfinitum, or until the player starts roleplaying.