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[Dutchling]

Hilary Clinton is actually a Mexican Midget Hulk.

[Frumple]

The future of education beckons.

Yes, please.

Huh. Looks like that's... actually a thing. And may or may not have been functionally shut down in 2012? Or did the move go through?

[Orange Wizard]

For some reason I lost my ability to hear after watching that video.

[SquatchHammer]

This... this broke my wtf meter....

[TamerVirus]

The future of education beckons.

Weed U. Sounds pretty dank

[Neonivek]

I just kind of realized something.

One of the major reasons why all the perspective on what makes a "Great DM" and what Dms should do are always so "You please your players at behest of everything else. What was that? You have a vision for this game? BAH your players don't want to do that!"

Is because they are written almost always from the player's perspective or from an indentured GMs perspective... With guides that are not about that, made from a strictly GM perspective.

I've never seen a real compromise in this case. I've seen guides that are "My way or the highway" or ones that are "How to make your players the happiest people they can be" (and don't get me wrong there are a lot of guides on problem players).

Yet there are so few guides that are just about how to have a vision in the game while still allowing players to have some sort of malleability. Methods to compromise on your vision as well as when and how to enforce it.

Why is this combined approach between having a game with a strong focused vision and malleable player driven gameplay so under utilized? I'd love to read a guide on doing just that.

It all reminds me of a few parenting books that were so about how to make your child happy and cared for and attended to at ALL POSSIBLE TIMES GET ON IT PARENTS!!! that would easily burn out the parents and make them overbearing.

---

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Mind you I am just saying this because I am still frustrated with how my current pathfinder game is going...

It is actually going great... (I need to shorten a dungeon because this group cannot do dungeons and have fun... AND I need to give the rogue more fun stuff to do)

But I had to ask one of the players to leave and it just killed me >_<... I didn't even want to play anymore for weeks... and I always wondered to myself if there was a way to please everyone.

Because the issue is that this player was quite the power gamer and even storywise he made sure to make sure he was the most important SOB ever... and anytime something didn't go his way, even bumps on the road, he would complain... and sometimes he was right and sometimes he was wrong and sometimes we just disagreed and we don't know who was right. Yet he was constantly in my case and always made sure he would tell me (sometimes during a game or before starting it) problems he had with my DMing. As well he even power games for the other players, specifically building TWO people's character sheet specifically to midmax them creating a power gap.

As well two of the other players REALLY strongly asked me to kick this player out because they dominated the gameplay.

Yet in the end what made me do it is I just couldn't handle the pressure... he was constantly riding my back and whenever I was placing monsters I looked at their stat blocks and went "Ohh crud they have poison... he will complain if they poison him..." constantly building situations and trying to see if I could construct them in a way that would be justified in his own mind because he kind of thinks differently from everyone else. His long speeches on why my game sucked every week just ate away at my self-confidence...

I really just couldn't take him being in the game. Still hurt to do it anyway.

[Flying Dice]

Because it takes a superb DM to simultaneously tell the story they want to tell as well as all of the different stories their players want to experience. If they're lucky, the different players' ideas of the story they want are roughly similar and all the cats are willing to be herded in the same general direction. It's ultimately simpler for a DM to lock to one of the extremes because either letting the players do whatever they want and hope that everyone has fun with them mucking about OR railroading them into a plot and hoping that it's good enough for them to enjoy it anyways is better than trying and failing to have it both ways.


It's like a round-robin story, except that one guy has all the pens and paper and each person thinks that they're writing in a different genre.

[itisnotlogical]

I was counting up loose change to decide whether or not it was time to visit the CoinStar when I realized that I really enjoy money. Not just having or spending it, I actually really like the way money looks and feels, especially playing with coins in my hands. I might literally be Scrooge McDuck.

[Furtuka]

Are you a duck?

[itisnotlogical]

Are you a duck?

yes

[Lord Shonus]

Because it takes a superb DM to simultaneously tell the story they want to tell as well as all of the different stories their players want to experience. If they're lucky, the different players' ideas of the story they want are roughly similar and all the cats are willing to be herded in the same general direction. It's ultimately simpler for a DM to lock to one of the extremes because either letting the players do whatever they want and hope that everyone has fun with them mucking about OR railroading them into a plot and hoping that it's good enough for them to enjoy it anyways is better than trying and failing to have it both ways.


It's like a round-robin story, except that one guy has all the pens and paper and each person thinks that they're writing in a different genre.

You know, for all the talk about "player entitlement" and the attitudes I've seen people have in other fora, I've never actually run into the problem. Hell, in my previous bay12 game, I threw out a character's backstory by fiat and he praised me for it, because he was already suspecting that the race he was using shouldn't exist.

[Neonivek]

Players are not all that entitled as a whole.

They just want to have fun and that is really it.

Some players want to have fun by fulfilled their character's story, by being awesome, or both... MAYBE they don't care and they just want to hang out... or perhaps they care about the game as a whole. Players have their own prerogatives.

But that is fine, why else would a player join a game?

I almost think what hurts games the most is just all these conventions. I would love to have conferences with my players and go "Ok, so the next part of the adventure is about to start. Do you have an idea of what you guys would like to do?" and come up with the next part of the game. It actually would be incredibly stress relieving for me and some of my players THANK GAWD have been more forthcoming on what they want to see.

Yet it just isn't done most of the time. The GM needs to stay in their tower isolated from the players.

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, it's not about entitlement on any side, just simple conflict of interest. In most reasonable groups, everyone will be relatively close to center and willing to compromise.

But what happens if you've got a DM with a grand high-fantasy story plotted out, one player who wants to play his grimderp Mary Sue low-fantasy character with long emotional rants, another who's a massive munchkin and just wants to see how much he can kill, one who wants to play her Chaotic Evil backstabber to the hilt, and two who want to both RP and optimize a little bit with the end goal of 'kill things, grab loot'?

Or even something where the DM has a ton of material written out that orients around one specific area of the world with a fantastic overarching plot, but the party wants to go off to the opposite corner of the world and raid dungeons?


Obviously a good DM and good players would work together to make it as fun as possible for everyone (in that second example, it'd be pretty trivial for the DM -- if they're actually a good writer -- to let the players do what they want and link it back in to the plot, or for the players to figure out that the DM has something planned and try to loosely follow the tracks), but sadly not everyone is that willing to compromise; it's less noticeable online, I think, because there are plenty of greener pastures, which in and of itself discourages asshats from being as bad as they might otherwise be, since nobody is stuck with them as the only game in town.

[Xantalos]

Battle Royale 2 is literally KND if it were live action. I just realized.

[Gentlefish]

Battle Royale 2 is literally KND if it were live action. I just realized.

Also if it were rated "R".