Key Our Cars

I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts lately and thought I’d ramble on about players from the DM’s point of view, mostly in a bad way of course…

As a player you should remember that you’re part of a group.  You’re not going to be the sole focus of attention so when it’s not your turn let someone else have a bit of spotlight. It’s discourteous to the other players to not give them their chance at the mic.

As a player you should remember that you’re part of a group.  Step up and be heard, get involved.  Don’t just sit back observing or staring off into space. It’s really discourteous to your DM who’s gone to the trouble of creating something for you to ignore it.

I’ve had to deal with both types in my career as a DM/GM.  They’re both more than a bit of a pain after months and years.

Things I’ve found annoying from players in large quantities, and that based on the voice inflections and reactions from Dm’s in the podcasts might be fairly universal.

Constantly going “No he can’t/doesn’t/wouldn’t” to the DM in any form as a common reaction to the DM.

• DM: “Okay the fell necromancer shifts his gaze at you, Alofel and necrotic energies flare up and blast outwards at you.”
• Player: “No he doesn’t.  He doesn’t have that power any more.  It’s a typo.  Wouldn’t he hit Steve instead?  He misses.  I duck out of the way.  I’m immune.”

Once is okay, twice is within reason but constantly over and over ‘retorting’ with some variation on the above every time the DM announces a NPC’s attack gets old fast.

Immersion breaking ‘conversation’ or ‘dialogue’ between a character and an NPC.

• DM as Necromancer: “I shall have your soul chained in a everlasting fire for daring to interfere you pathetic mortal.”
• Player: “U r gay.”

Once in a while, sure it CAN be funny.  But constantly chanting how gay what is supposed to be some scary evil dark wizard is, gets very unfunny pretty quickly to most DM’s I’m betting, myself included.

Most DM’s do what they do to bring to life a cooperative story set in a ‘real life’ world where characters, pc and npc, act in realistic ways.  It takes interest and energy to do all the extra work involved.  Players who show up so they can be the asshole (or pschopath/klepto)  in the game they can’t be at the office tend to be a bit of a burden on the creative energies and interest required to be a DM.

What I call psuedo-cheating (don’t get me started on real cheating).

• DM: “Does a 22 hit you Barkil?”
• Player: “No.”  a minute goes by, “Yeah it hits.”

• Player: “I rolled a… 23.”
• DM: “Okay that hits.”
• Player: “No it was really a 3.”
• DM: “*sigh*”

Please remember during my little mini-rant, that I’m ranting about consistent, frequent, constant behaviour of this type. Like any decent DM I can overlook, ignore, or go along with a reasonable level of this kind of thing.  But constantly doing it gets old.

And no this isn’t some sly subtle jab at my players, due to RL, lack of interest, medical reasons, I don’t have enough consistent players to have a group of players that I can enjoy being with to have a RPG group going on.  At best I get to DM the occasional one-off or playtest or ‘delve’.

As a player remember the DM is supposed to be having fun too.  Try to gauge his or her reactions to your behaviour and adjust accordingly.

Because if the DM isn’t having fun, especially over the course of several sessions, then you’re going to be looking for a new DM.

Any gaming group whether it’s chess, bridge or rpg’s is a social group with the implied social contracts that are always the price of being in that group. You have to be social and sociable.  If you like roleplay then deal with there being rollplay going on.  If all you want to do is roll dice then deal with there being roleplay going on.  And as a DM I know this can change per player on a session basis.  Sometimes a player just wants to roll dice and loot the corpses of the bad guys.  And sometimes they just want to sit back and have an animated discourse on the qualities of the rope they’re purchasing.  But remember you’re one of a group and they also vary in what they want to do.

Know what your character can do.  I personally find myself questioning why players want to bother showing up when they show no interest in the mechanics of their characters much less the game system that’s being played.  Constantly having to wait for a player every session while they ‘re-learn’ their characters abilities or worse, just ’spam’ a single abilitiy over and over regardles of its effect or efficiency simply because they don’t want to be bothered to learn more can be annoying.

It’s not very enjoyable for DM’s who spend excess hours over and above the actual session hours coming up with the adventures, plots, hooks, bad guys, who have the not so easy task of juggling tens of ‘characters’ during every combat, of keeping things in balance for the players so it’s not a cakewalk as well as not instant death, of remembering what’s happened before, what they want to happen and steering a plausible path between those points to have players express a serious lack of interest in what’s going on at the table.  [Massive run on sentence of the day.]

I have a saying, “Looks like apathy has reared it’s head, we’re done for the night.” and it’s had to be brought into play more than once.  When computers started to intrude on gaming sessions, whether it was Doom when we first got PC’s or Ultima Online when we first got MMOG’s  or whatever.  Once the conversation’s saturation point became something other than the game at hand, I’d shut it down.  When I’m running something, I’m there to run it, not talk about the current hot topic.

So as a final wrap up, I think this can mostly be summed up with “As a player in a group game, be courteous.” or in layman’s terms: “Don’t be a dick.”

Or the odds are very good there won’t be a social group anymore.  At least for you.

I’ve noted several attempts, hell I may have linked some of them here or discussed them.  After some consideration I have to ask why?  Why are there DM’s that think the player’s don’t have a hard enough time as it is?  If the fights are too easy it’s sooo easy to toss in another squad of minions or go a step higher on the encounter budget or grant some arbitrary +2’s to the npc’s.

Why is there a perception of a need to penalize the players for taking damage? It’s kind of what they do, you know?  It’s their reason for being, taking damage, handing out damage, and in general doing what the common man cannot or will not.

Do things like “Each time you get bloodied you lose a healing surge and take -2 to your attack and damage rolls” or “If you fail a death saving throw all your healing surges only heal for half their normal value and you lose all action points.” make it more fun or enjoyable at all?  Isn’t the fact that you took enough damage to get bloodied that you’re going to need to use two healing surges to recover, isn’t that right there ‘penalty’ enough for the player?  What does stripping out the ability to heal do other than make it so that the players go back to a one fight a day syndrome?

Aren’t we, as DM’s, here to make the game fun for the players and ourselves?  And not just for ourselves as we watch the inevitable death spiral commence.  The players are penalized for taking damage and as a result their ability to recover and deal damage is reduced which means they take more damage… that cycle repeating until they’re dead, that’s the death spiral.  And where is the fun in that.

I believe that as their DM we can give them those tough fights they want and we want to see them beat without stacking penalties on them.  If for no other reason than it adds bookkeeping without any real gain that I can see.  I’d much rather ‘penalize’ the players with additional monsters, traps, tricky and clever situations, than tack on a -2 to their ability to have fun (cause missing sure as hell isn’t fun).

Or maybe that’s just me.

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