Not to mention the names of brands that his friends have told him the Right People favour, and which he therefore believes are the best.
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A problem with one of my games is not an Adversarial GM as such, but his close cousin the Everything Must Be A Lengthy Arduous Challenge GM. Unlike the Adversarial GM he doesn’t aim for a TPK. He doesn’t steal all your treasure/armour/weapons or go out of his way to crash your spaceship/truck.
But what he DOES [insert swearword of you choice here] DO is utterly and completely refuse to let you be CLEVER in any way which will shorten a fight. Or make a break-in easier.
Examples:
- Planting a ton of explosives direct underneath the floor of the room where the Big Bad was using the Space-Guns Of Navarone to shoot our side’s warships. What happened? The guns didn’t stop firing. The Big Bad fell through the hole into our midst and we had a long boring grindy combat.
- A derelict spaceship is plummeting through the atmosphere towards the bit of a planet where people/things we care about are. We come up with a clever plan to fly our ship close and use our slipstream to divert it. The GM makes us do a ton of piloting rolls and shooting rolls (at other debris) to get into position for the slipstream thing. Only THEN does he tell us the other ship is too big for the plan to work. Important note: we spent the previous session exploring said derelict. We can see it out the windscreen of our ship. We’ve been scanning it as part of the plan. We should KNOW it was too big before we even set off!
- WH40K. I’m the psyker and I pay xp to buy the ability to roll to hypnotize an animal and make it my friend (about 40% chance), so it will fight on our side. I used this once to stampede a dinosaur, so it chased off half the NPCs we were about to fight. A session or so later there’s a Komnodo Dragon-like beast. I say I’ll hyponotise it, so it stops attacking us and starts attacking its handler. GM says I can’t. Oh, I say, is it some special creature that’s immune to psi powers? No, replies the GM, but if I let you use the power now, you’ll use it every time there’s a dangerous animal… We then had a long boring grindy combat.
- We need to steal a dangerous artifact from an auction house. We spend a whole fekking session trying to find a way in. Are there gaps in security cameras? No. Is there a pattern to the guard rota? No. Is the security less on upper storeys or the roof, so we can zip wire to that spot? No. Can we find out anything useful by peering in the window? Yes - there’s a forcefield we have no way of disabling. Eventually we gave up trying and instead hijack the van that was delivering the dangerous atrefact. So the GM had to come up with that encounter on the fly…
- Assassins are out to get us. We need to sneak out of the city. We all pile in a landspeeder. I’m driving. GM asks for sneak rolls. I get a 29 (it’s D&D 5e, so that’s a Very Hard result). The GM makes everyone else roll and averages the sneak results. The says the bad guys have spotted us. Then has one of them shoot me, the driver, so we crash. We then had a long boring grindy combat.
There are more.
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In my mind this is tied into the pacing that is a necessary part of linear fiction¹ (aka my Anti Robin Laws Manifesto, because in Hamlet’s Hit Points he argues for putting this sort of pacing into RPGs). You can do foreshadowing, you can have the slow bits and the fast bits in a careful arrangement, it can all work. You can elide the planning meeting, you can quick cut the bits where everyone looks cool as the plan works, and skip forwards to the bit where the plan doesn’t work.
In an RPG the bit where the plan works is IMO the reward to the players for coming up with the plan. If you say “OK, you did that, but then X happens” it doesn’t feel satisfying. In a book you can sneak sneak sneak and then Something Goes Wrong; in a game you can sneak sneak sneak, plant the charges, sneak out again, and that moment when the charges go off while you’re sitting in the pub is a reward.
But I have found that the more I try to force a standard narrative structure the more the game feels like a second-rate copy of a linear story, because it’s not getting to do its own intrinsic pacing and structure.
¹ books, films, things with a single start-to-end narrative that can be edited after the fact.
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I agree.
I often feel that the pacing of my sessions and campaigns is imperfect, but all the ways I’ve considered to improve it involve removing the autonomy of the PCs. I generally want players to drive the narrative, and, in fact, decide what the goals of their PCs are, what that means in terms of objectives, long and short term, and whom they might be able to ally with or at least agree on a non-aggression pact.
If the GM insists upon a climactic confrontation with The Villain as the dramatic ending of a narrative arc, that means that the PCs who found a safer, more sensible way to let the problem be handled by a faction inside the villainous organization, unhappy with recent unwise decisions, are doomed to fail. As is the PC who shoots the villain at long distance, even though the villain has no plausible way to know that the ghillie-suited sniper is out there, 800 meters from them, in a hide they made the night before.
All in all, I’d rather have the anti-climactic ending where the PCs didn’t play along with the villain and just did the sensible thing. I’ve experienced it as a player and I really did enjoy it a great deal, whereas I absolutely hated the ham-handed interventions of a GM determined that no PC should die ‘this early in the adventure’ and equally determined that the whole party of PCs should fence with his unnaturally skilled elven swordsman Prince.
I didn’t mind the skill, I did mind the obvious retcon of him having 360° Vision, never used before or since, after the NPC should not have gotten an Active Defence against a rear attack which would have crippled his leg, unprotected from behind, after the NPC allowed a foe to start and end a turn in a rear hex, as Run-Around Attacks assumes either party moves, so the facing is momentary and not fixed.
GURPS is brutal for one skilled character facing numerous opponents of lesser skill, but the cinematic, climactic ending envisioned by the GM involved the PCs being crippled one by one and the final one then winning a duel by using an artifact or something. First crippled PC refusing to stay down and managing a hit, despite being wounded and down, which would have been crippling based on the armour shown on the Elven Prince’s picture, did not fit into the plan, so it could not happen. Therefore the Elf Prince could suddenly Parry and Dodge unpenalized in all directions.
Even anti-climactic failure as a plausible result of PC actions and decisions is preferable to success designed and directed by the hand of the GM, to match the movie in their head.
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Wow. There is a lot of bad GMing in there.
- Ok, I can see that the Big Bad getting up out of the rubble to have a bit of a boss fight could be a dramatic conclusion, but you gotta let the main part of the plan work if the players worked hard at it
- Yeah, that’s just plain dumb - as players, you cannot know everything your character can see, hear, smell, etc. so if you’re planning based on an assumption that your character WOULD know was nonsense, that is for the GM to say something. Or at least make some secret rolls to determine whether you’d realise that it wouldn’t work (maybe they did, to give them the benefit of the doubt) if it could reasonably be in doubt
- Yeah as a GM, it can be a bit annoying when they get some overpowered item or power and they just use it all the time. But you a) can’t just say, no, this monster is immune (not to say you couldn’t have immune monsters, but you’d probably have to come up with some reason) and b) there are ways to deal with this. Only have animals present sometimes (so the player feels they spent their XP on something useful), have more than one animal present and the power only works on one of them, and so on.
- That is a GM who can only envision one way to play this situation and will make you do it, so they can tell the story THEY want to tell. I have done it and it ends making you all feel shit
- If YOU’RE driving (presumably the sneak roll is for you choosing quiet roads, cut throughs etc), what are the others rolling for? What are they doing, hanging out the window making hooting noises??
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Just on this, I did read a great campaign write up where one of the players kept using the same item to defeat the bad guys , again and again… So at the conclusion, the GM quite reasonably said that the Hed Honcho had heard how he’d defeated his minions and had taken secret steps to stop that item being useful. Because the player had become so dependant on this one item, it really took the wind out of their sails.
You could say this was baf GMing and that that player was hard done by - I think it showed realistic learning from the bad guy and the player had to face the consequences of their actions.
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I analogize this to improv theatre and think that a heavier early influence on the TTRPG cultural milieu from improv rather than from edited fiction would have been providential
Particular concepts from improv I see in these are “be in the moment”, “commit fully”, and “take risks”
If the GM is already ahead at the climax then they aren’t in the moment of the planning and the action
If there’s verisimilitude to the setting and a clever application of environment, physics, spells, whatever presents itself; don’t back away from the commitment to what’s happened at the table leading to that application
Everyone at the table should be able to be comfortable with the risks to characters and plans. Seems to me that reacting to the unexpected will always have the feel of a risk somewhere in it
I think campaign based TTRPG is hamstrung when it has a known beginning and end and is only about the tracks taken in the middle. One-shot play doesn’t suffer as much from this but campaign play needs the risks of an unknown and potentially unsatisfying conclusion in a critical evaluation sense to keep the moments at the table engaging
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Many years ago I saw an alternate history of RPGs in which they grew up more out of the improv community than the wargame community. (And I think the Big Success game was a much more improv-y version of Traveller.)
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No, these were pretty much Adversarial GM behavior. Part of being an adversarial GM is to never make it easy on the players and to counter any tactic or stratagem that might give the PCs an advantage.
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If the GM is already ahead at the climax then they aren’t in the moment of the planning and the action
I
I think it is impossible for the the GM to be completely in the moment as they are always going to have to be tracking multiple things. But I would say that they have to interpret the resolution based on the success (or otherwise!) of the players. The Big Bad has X objective. They are currently going out obtaining that adjective in this way. A bad GM will try and bend the players around to that narrative regardless of what they do. A good GM will think “Does the players’ actions prevent BB achieving their objective in the current manner? If not, the BB carries on and the narrative continues in the anticipated manner. If it DOES, can the BB still achieve the objective in a different manner? If so, plan changes but the narrative still continues towards thwarting that objectice. If NOT, what is the BB going to do about that? New narrative…” (Of course, it might be that the BB is simply dead early because of those players’ actions in which case, is there anyone else that might want to take up that mantle and what difference would that make?)
Of course, this is a lot of work and sometimes a GM may determine they can’t be bothered to do all the legwork (pesky players just turning up with a character sheet and munching pizza while I do all the work!! Grrrrr!) and ultimately find an easy way just to carry on with the adventure as written/envisaged. And who can blame them? 
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“Simulationist gaming” is a bad phrase these days but I’ve always felt it’s an important part of the GM’s job: here are all these interlocking moving parts, over there the PCs are poking at things that they barely understand, how does that change how these things mesh and move together?
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I wouldn’t call that simulationist? Simulation gaming (to me) is the kind of gaming that Icelander seems to be describing a lot - recreating (or possibly creating) a world (whether than be Cold War or whatever) in such detail that you’re then playing in, as if you were actually there.
What you’re describing just seems good GMing
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I see these as two nearby points on the same scale (which accepting that there are lots of other ways to see it too). A knife to the neck does this, getting the attention of the local police does that, rescuing the intended sacrifice prevents that, and none of these is affected by whether anyone involved is a PC.
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Okay, so my weekly group has started playing Starfinder 2E, which is a game I am sorta familiar with. I’m learning, they’re learning, it’s got a curve.
Last session the group (a Prismeni Solarian, a Prismeni Warpwitcher, an Android Operative, and a Vesk Soldier) went off to a warehouse in an occupied town. The town had a cadre of Azlanti cadets occupy it about a week back, and La Resistance is working to throw off the shackles.
Lovely. The head of La Resistance tells them that a Azlanti cadet was seen going into the town’s warehouse, but hasn’t come back out, and the town keeps almost all of its food supplies (as well as fuel, batteries, and other commonly needed frontier items) in the warehouse. The resistance doesn’t have a lot of weapons, since the colony is a frontier town that doesn’t need a lot of weapons, but they do need food.
Cool. The group goes to the warehouse, and through the open window, they see the Azlanti cadet, standing at a weird at-attention pose, staring at a wall, with his rifle on the ground beside him. The two Prismeni (who run a cult) knock on the office door, and the Azlanti jumps, startled, fumbles for his rifle a few times while calling out in Common that he’s coming, please wait, uhh, just a moment, shucks, I’ll be right there…
Meanwhile, the Operative sneaks up on him and stabs him in the neck with an acid blade, killing the cadet instantly.
“Huh, that was really easy!” says the Vesk player.
Me: “As you walk into the warehouse and look around for the first time, you see a jumble of boxes with, what appears to be a socked foot sticking out.”
Solarian: “Oh dang. I think we killed a civilian.”
Me: “I did mention earlier that the Azlanti cadets all speak Azlanti, and you haven’t heard any of them speak common.”
Operative: “Oh, I think you’re right. We should burn the building down to cover it up.”
The talk goes on for a few minutes (“Is there fuel in here? There is! What about explosive chemicals? Those too! We definitely can burn it down…”) before I feel obliged to remind the PCs that this is the only warehouse in town and has almost all of the citizens’ food.
Operative: “Oh, but then the Azlanti will starve too, right?”
Me: “No, they have a garrison in the middle of town that probably has all their supplies.”
The operative then proceeds to get annoyed that his idea is being ignored, and that the town has no weapons or ammunition for his sniper rifle.
I’m rubbing my face at this point, trying to figure out how to adjust if they decide to burn down the warehouse, but in the end they decide to just drag the two bodies into the jungle and toss them, thereby “solving” the problem.
Now, they have a few chemicals to make explosives (I know fertilizer can be very explosive, so it doesn’t seem unreasonable). But at the same time, a makeshift explosive that they are almost certainly going to turn against the military structure in the middle of town… I don’t know how to explain that armoured walls and doors probably don’t care about IEDs? But at the same time, I don’t know if I should bother, and just let them A-Team a bomb to get into the garrison because it’s an okay thought (even if it’s a little unrealistic), as long as they don’t think they can IED their way into starships or military structures in the future?
And the whole killing the warehouse clerk (in the campaign, the clerk accidentally killed the Azlanti and panicked, putting on the armour to hide until he sees a non-Azlanti, but I didn’t expect the whole sneak-attack-instant-murder thing, so I kinda had to let them kill him… I think?). I think there will be ramifications from that, for sure, but I want to let it sit for a while, see what the group ends up doing.
Anyway. Yeah. Violence. Always the answer, regardless of the question.
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Ok, I don’t know what all Starfinder-specific terms in this mean, but if Azlanti are at war against the side the PCs support, what did you think would happen?
Change out the sides and uniforms for something else. Say the PCs were SOE working with the French Resistance and hear about an SS man going into their only supply store, so if he radios his SD buddies, this Resistance cell is combat-ineffective at best, compromised if any stores in there lead to even one person in the cell. No one knows if he has radioed yet, for some reason everyone just waited for their fate until the PCs got there.
Switch the French Resistance out for Viet Cong and the SS uniform for US Army or insert Afghan Mujahideen in place of the resistance and a Soviet VDV uniform for the regular forces. It doesn’t make much of a difference. Sure, in an ideal world, they would like to capture a prisoner, for intelligence and PR purposes. But the most likely end is that the first person who sees the guy in the enemy uniform will shoot them and hope like Hell that he didn’t have time to make the radio transmission that probably means death for everyone.
It’s actually impressive that someone had the patience to sneak up on him, knowing that at any time, he could be calling for reinforcements, or, if all he needed was confirmation there was Resistance activity in the village, calling just to confirm the coordinates where everything should be napalmed once he was out.
Killing a guy in uniform of the enemy army won’t lead to a punishment in any sane military force. They didn’t kill a civilian, they killed a spy. If the spy was on their side, it’s extremely regrettable, but it’s on the intelligence service to inform liaison officers so they have enough information to ensure deconfliction on the ground.
It’s hard to imagine this scenario ending with a live prisoner or a friendly talk, once the importance of the warehouse and, therefore, the urgency of preventing any further communications, had been established.
I think the critical thing here is the language and the obviously fumbling (at least, it was obvious to me). The French Resistance is sent to find out why a member of the SS is in their storehouse: when they arrive, the SS officer speaks in perfect French, his uniform is dirty and worn incorrectly, and it looks like he has never touched a rifle before.
The speaks in perfect French should be a moment of “Huh.” The fact that he didn’t know how to hold a rifle and was doing a very silly thing (standing at attention staring at an office door) should’ve been flags. A moment of hesitation. But nope.
It should also be mentioned that because of “Reasons” (the electrified mists that cover the planet of Nakondis), comms are very, very limited on the planet. Scanners are useless, and the fog means that line of sight is about 30m, and comms are about twice that, no more. The PCs know this, and to go meta for a moment, they also know that 1 Azlanti cadet provides a very minimal threat directly (they’ve fought and killed 8 of them so far: two groups of 3 and a pair).
Sure, I could’ve been more obvious (although the way the module is written, I was already more obvious than it). And it’s not a plot-critical thing that they killed the warehouse clerk who was panicking and made a bad decision (technically two, one to wear the uniform and two to hide the Azlanti body rather than to immedaitely run for the Resistance or the hills).
But the group doesn’t tend to do RPG-normative things. They don’t look in a room before they leap in. They don’t search for traps or loot their enemies. I think they might just be looking for the next fight… which, to be clear, is fine, and I’m happy to provide that for them now that I know. But the immediate switch to violence caught me off-guard here.
I should say that I shouldn’t have been surprised, despite all the obvious clues. The PCs seemed to be wired to expect everyone is out to get them… and I honestly don’t know why. I tend to play lower-combat systems (and tend towards less combat in high combat systems like DnD because I find the roleplaying part of roleplaying to be slightly more interesting and keeps everyone engaged, where combat people often just stop listening until it’s their turn).
In a world with firearms or more advanced ranged weapons, it seems lucky for the faux-Azlanti that they had a chance to speak at all. Someone given time to talk also has time to shoot… or finish giving a status update on the radio. I would expect someone to shoot immediately they had a view of the head or torso. Once they had established he did not seem to be on the radio, as long as someone keeps him in their sights to prevent any contact, sneaking up on him was sensible.
Taking him captive to find out what he has already told his side would have been ideal, but difficult and it’s not like they could trust his answers.
The limitations of communications range is only a relief if the PCs know for a fact no Azlanti communications relay stations or military units are within 60 km.
I haven’t played Starfinder, but what I’ve read suggests that it’s combat-heavy in much the same way Pathfinder is, Having spent a lot of time in a WWII special operations mode my first reaction would be “can we knock him out and drag him off to interrogate him, get tonight’s passwords etc.” I think as GM I would probably play up the inconsistencies, especially if these are people who ought to notice things like that, but if that’s still what they want to do…
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What the title of the thread doesn’t capture, but the initial discussion did, is that there is a distinction between the amount of casual violence the PC ‘adventurers’ inflict and how armed, dangerous and violent they allow themselves to be perceived by other people in their society.
In my experience, PCs who understand public opinion, social milieus and appropriate dress for different events have more success. When they want to interact socially with people, they should not wear visible weapons and armour, unless their social class both allows specific weaponry and comes with an implicit expectation that such people will wear it as a mark of their status.
Whether the PCs have hidden arms or armour depends on the legal and social implications of someone spotting those, weighed against the risks the PCs’ expect to face, and whether a concealed weapon or armour would make enough difference to justify carrying them.
In my experience, PCs in fantasy or historical settings don’t hesitate to conceal knives or derringers, as there are rarely laws specifically against concealing weapons, so discovery by a lawman would likely mean being disarmed, not necessarily arrested.
Modern-ish day or anyway back the latter half of the 20th century, rules about concealed weapons, and the attitudes of law enforcement to concealed weapons, mean that PCs who do carry concealed weapons tend to have legal licenses for CCW, like the Texas CHL. Even in states where permits are not required, PCs tend to have them anyway, both for backstory reasons (e.g. they’ve carried concealed weapons for a while and obeyed the law while so doing) and because of reciprocity agreements with states still requiring licenses.
None of which should negate that there are times when PCs can and should show people their impressive arms and armour. Like when PCs who have LEO badges as Reserve Deputies of the local Sheriff’s Office open the trunk of their car to reveal full tactical SWAT entry suits, black carbines brimming with accessories and a tactical shotgun, dramatically putting it all on and locking and loading before entering a building to rescue a fellow PC.
Or when a PC who was ranked as a Major General of the entire Marine Corps of the Purple Reign Trading Group had them assembled for inspection a few days after a major victory, which changed the strategic picture and was largely attributed to the discipline and fighting skills of the Marines. He wore his red dragonscale armour, but omitted the helm which cleverly looks like a snarling dragon’s head, so all the men could see his face when he spoke with as many as he could, praising those whom he’d seen perform well in the battle and those he’d heard about from officers of all ranks.
He had his sheathed longsword, the one he had used charging with the first Marines ashore, prominently displayed, as well as his hammer, mace, axe and throwing axes in ergonomic locations on his load-carrying harness. The personal touch, visible face, easy smile and charm, willingness to fight beside them and talk to them afterward without any thought of a class distinction are why that PC is popular with his men.
Another PC has a face half-ruined by the acid in a dragon’s breath and wears an alabaster mask to hide his disfigurement. He grew up as the youngest son of a ruling emir with multiple wives, not even close to the throne unless he massacred kinfolk by the dozen. Through his mother’s family, he knows the ways of the desert and people free of artificial spectacle and the trappings of authority. This has convinced him that spectacle and the trappings of authority actually work.
That PC never smiles or shows regular human emotions and his stern facade inspires an almost supernatural fear and reverance at the same time. The culture has always been ruled by God-Kings, a father killed in the war against Gods of the Grey Horde orcs three millennia ago, and his son, whose rule grew increasingly capricious and dissipated over the centuries, as absolute power corrupted the formerly youthful, heroic God-on-Earth absolutely.
The way this (now also former) PC views it, the people don’t want a total reset of their culture. They want a strong ruler who will actually rule, not arbitrarily, but with predictable competence. They want a stern, unapproachable authority, who will not terrify them by joining their banquets, turning palaces into eternal frat houses, and then treat women and beautiful boys as their personal playthings, whether they were slave or free.
Essentially, according to the last plan the player had in place before quitting RPGs (due to other life stuff), and I see no reason to change, the PC set out to become the next God-King. Not through the murder of other claimants (including the Council championed by the other PCs and publicly backed by this PC as well), but by popular demand. Every time that PC appears in public, he is remote and regal, with his appearance carefully calculated to remind the people of his heroic victories in prior battles, but not wearing full armour or carrying his weapons at the ready, in order to appear as a statesman, not just a warlord.
Appearances matter, and in any RPG with strong social elements, I think it improves the experience if any Reaction or Influence rolls reflect that, with appropriate bonuses or penalties for choosing the right outfit, arms, or lack thereof.
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While it’s not a thing that many systems reflect, it may be worth considering the distinction between happy and unhappy cooperation.
If you come up to my farmstead looking all warry and hinting that you’ll shoot my cat if you don’t get what you want (classic Intimidation), I will comply, but I won’t be happy about it and maybe there’ll be some special mushrooms in your stew. If you convince me that helping you is going to be good for me, it’ll go differently.
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