ITT: Things shit DMs do and your answers to them

You seem to be a cunt.

You probably just shouldn't stick with a bad GM.

However, if you want to tease a good GM...

There's always the suicidal heroism method: Deliberately try to go out in a blaze of glory at the drop of a hat, and see how the GM will respond.

Someone's autistic here, but it's not the one who isn't throwing an metegaming tantrum over somebody not having fun the right way.

He seems to think the GM being a good sport is a sign of bad GMing. OP is a weirdo.

Nah, GM not understanding everything in his world is for players' amusement is him being a bad GM.

Being a "good sport" is just him being a beta.

Is it too late to post this?

Well, I might just outright say "So it seems you don't like my painstakingly created waifu fantasy race."
Followed by "d-do you not like m-me? senpai?"
Remember to cute your players to death at every appropriate opportunity.

> Beta

I refuse to believe someone could be this retarded. This is bait.

He hadn't thrown in any Veeky Forums memes, the word cuck, or pointed out how much of a SJW his DM is. I'm giving this one the benefit of the doubt. He might just be an actual shit player.

First, there was never actually the alpha-beta relationship in the animal kingdom. The biggest wolf ate first because, it was the biggest.

Two, there's no such thing as a beta male. You're either an asshole, or you're not. Guess which one you are.

He is, however, going whole hog on the "beta" shit which drops the doubt significantly.

Our newest GM sent us all a link to his "setting wiki" at the beginning of the game. Upwards of fifty fucking different pages of the autismal "lore of the realm" and minutiae about different cities and five hundred goddamn years of timeline with links to other pages embedded every other line. Dozens of paragraphs on his stupid elves and their stupid history, fucking treatises on why I should care about his stupid shitty halflings.

I've spent a month "accidentally" getting stuff egregiously wrong so he has to "WELL ACKSHUALLY" me at the table and making himself look like a hack in front of the rest of the players.

A word of advice to every aspiring GM out there: your players don't give a shit about anything that isn't the high concept in your world. Just say "in this world, the dwarves accidentally dug a hole to hell and now they hire mercenaries to kill the things inside." That's it. That's the pitch.

Even when they say otherwise, nobody actually gives a shit about the storied histories of your orc tribes. Nobody is going to remember the difference between a "Vallhark" gnome and a "Divengar" gnome. Nobody cares about the Wizard Wars 200 years ago, or how that's shaped the modern caliph state of Notarabia.

Nobody is ever going to read that shit and actually absorb it. Cut it out.

Also the big wolf was the dad in the nuclear family that wolf packs are outside of captivity. From what I understand, this alpha-beta-etcetera stuff comes exclusively from what are basically wolf prison gangs.

I would think that if a custom setting is sufficiently different I'd like to know about it ahead of time. My DM does a similar thing, but none of the players have access to any information beyond the various primers, and the DM updates sections of it as they become relevant. Seems to work out okay.

OP here.

This desu. I'm not saying GMs shouldn't worldbuild, but they should be aware that it's a purely masturbatory thing no players will actually pay attention to, except to get a rise out of him.

>no players will actually pay attention to, except to get a rise out of him.

That's a weirdly specific assumption.

Lold.
>JUST GIVE ME ORKS TO KILL OR UNDEAD TO CRUSH I CAME HERE TO PLAY A BOARDGAME KOREAN GRINDER NOT AN ACTUAL RPG!
Le topino le kekerino.

>t. triggered setting autist

Nobody cares, m8. If you can't craft a fun romp, your "worldbuilding" is a fart in the wind.

Dickish people don't understand having interest in anything if not to get the rise over someone else.

Oh boy, the internet oracle appeared!
Now laughing at someone having bad manners and actually acting like that is okay is being called "triggered"?
Not a mentioning of DM not crafting a fun romp in that post, but you probably did not even read it, right? Only came to post your beloved "TRIGGERED" word.
Well done, sire, you have trolled me. To the victor goes the spoils, i surrender you your fart in the wind.

>DM's custom race
I have no problem with this.

Unless they are shoehorned into literally everything, in a way that no other race is. Then they're just being silly. If all of the best ally NPCs and main antagonists are of this race, your GM needs to chill out and use them in balance with the rest of the setting.

>I've spent a month "accidentally" getting stuff egregiously wrong so he has to "WELL ACKSHUALLY" me at the table and making himself look like a hack in front of the rest of the players.

I'm guessing you're just shitposting but if not you're a trash player.

There's a difference between not giving a shit about a guy's setting and intentionally being a cunt about the effort he put into establishing a world. A GM can't make you care about his setting, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink, and I agree with that sentiment. That doesn't mean a GM can't expect you to at least have a bit of fucking courtesy instead of treating his game like Veeky Forums and trying to troll people like some autist. I'm willing to bet, despite your lack of self-awareness, you're making yourself look more like a jackass than he is looking like a hack for explaining something to you when you "accidentally" stir shit and disrupt the game.

>this fucking thread

>I'm willing to bet, despite your lack of self-awareness, you're making yourself look more like a jackass than he is looking like a hack for explaining something to you when you "accidentally" stir shit and disrupt the game.

>We should probably find this gnome's village
>WELL ACKSHUALLY, you know that this is a VALLHARK gnome by his shaved head and tribal markings, as opposed to the wild hairstyles of DIVENGAR gnomes. Since the VALLHARK gnomes are NOMADIC BY NATURE, you know that there wouldn't be a village he belonged to, and instead a roving TRIBE. That was in the SETTING PRIMER.
>Stare at him in silence
>"Uh, okay. My bad."

No, I assure you, he looks like the bigger asshole than me by degrees upon degrees buddy.

If you don't like the game then just don't play.

No cunt, you can't just change the narrative like that. You already said you were trying to get shit like that to happen by intentionally getting things wrong. Now you're you're trying to act all surprised and above it all?

Were you one of those kids that didn't like to be corrected, so you stubbornly kept getting things wrong out of spite?

That's some deep rooted authority/learning issues you have there, buddy.

Yeah, OP is for bundling and burning as usual.
Your DM may also be a tool, but you're at least half the tool he is, OP.

nah lad, he's right. As a GM I do fuck all world-building and I recognise that as a flaw not a point in my favor. I also recognise a shit player pretty quick when I see one and yiu're a shit player.

>mfw I've set up a codex in the style of Mass Effect for the setting's lore in the roll20 journal of the campaign
>mfw I've explicitly told the players that it is there just for fun and isn't mandatory reading
>most of the players still use it because every entry is short, to the point, and cross-linked to relevant entries
>the ones that don't care still know the general lore simply because the others keep including it

I don't know if it's just my party dealing with my shitty GM antics but either way everyone is having fun

>tfw when players act like little shits I give them a warning
>tfw if they don't listen I just tell them to leave
As a GM I am here to enjoy myself, and don't change my game and how I GM to appease people I pick up online because players are the larger resource. If people don't like how I GM they are welcome to leave. This is not to say I am not upfront about how I GM.

In this case if I found a player acting like a little shit to attempt to get a rise out of me, well they get one, I tell them off. They continue and I remove them from the campaign. Easy enough.

Heck I put in quite a bit more work to make this campaign work than the players do, and thus I don't even feel bad about doing this, that and I value my enjoyment far more than randos.

That being said I do change how I GM to friends, because they're friends. However I generally don't make friends with asshats.

>TL;DR
>OP shits on a well meaning autistic GM
>Acts smug and brags about 'how alpha' he is for intentionally being a shithead
>Gets told in the thread and changes his story and tries to act like a victim instead of the bully he claimed to be in the OP post
>Gets butthurt and cries like a little bitch.

Typical OP, Typical Thread.

seconded

nah, isn't me although i approve of him triggering his DM's autistic rage.

Autistic self-absorbed settingfag manbabbies deserve to suffer. is a settingfag too, but at least he has enough balls to boot people.

Player here, I like and am interested in this stuff.

Maybe your gm's are bad at making it interesting?

ITP: Things shit players do and my answers to them.

>a player brings a backstory longer than an 10 typesize A4 sheet
>I glance through it.
>Me: "So your character is [two-sentence summary of the backstory]?"
>Player: "Yeah, that's right/No, it's actually [two-sentence summary by the player]."
>Me: "Well, just write these two sentences, I don't need a fucking novel, I need a character concept. If you want to detail your character's backstory, you can do it via in-game interactions."
>player gets butthurt/doesn't get butthurt.
The degree of player's butthurt is directly related to his shittiness. At this point, it's a litmus test of how shit the player is.

>nobody actually gives a shit about the storied histories of your orc tribes. Nobody is going to remember the difference between a "Vallhark" gnome and a "Divengar" gnome. Nobody cares about the Wizard Wars 200 years ago, or how that's shaped the modern caliph state of Notarabia.

That's not just a problem with tabletop games, though. It's really a fundamental flaw in almost all fantasy fiction. It's incredibly focused on minutia, the majority of it entirely meaningless in the context of whatever story is being told.

There was a joke in the movie Wonder Boys, where this student tells her writing teacher that when he started including the character's dental histories in his book, he had stopped making "choices" as an author. You see that constantly in fantasy literature and gaming. the creators can't differentiate between what is interesting and relevant information about their setting, and what is not, so they try and give you everything.

Oh look, one of those threads that involve massively autistic shit DM and passive aggressive shit players thinking psychological breaking an autismo is the best thing to do about not liking things in a campaign.

At least these work as excellent "How not to be an asshole" guides.

In two sentences you can't even describe what the character looks like.

>Stocky burly bald old man, covered in scars and donning a rusty sword and a leather outfit.
>Cheerful plain young girl, dressed richly in the nomad clothing and long blond braids adorning her head.
>Withered pale young man, his hands covered in ink and his eyes bloodshot from all the time he spends studying.
????

>xkcd memery

And yet there's the Barsoom saga.
THE PIIIII ZAAAAAA

This is something I rarely say, but.
You guys are having fun wrong.

So... That Guy thread?

>No, I assure you, he looks like the bigger asshole than me by degrees upon degrees buddy.

If that's true, you're really great at making yourself look like a terrible person and a terrible player. Just fucking kill yourself.

If you can't describe a character in 1 sentence you're doing it wrong. Character descriptions should be brief and general, so everyone can quickly get a basic image in their head and then their own minds can fill in the gaps. If you go into detail describing someone's clothes for example, people are going to have a harder time listening and most of what you say won't stick. If you say a character is "dressed like a wealthy noble", everyone listening immediately forms their own idea of how that character is dressed.

Most of the time, all that's needed of a character description is something as simple as "a lean middle-aged man dressed in dark leather", or "a fat merchant in fine silk robes", or "a beatiful young woman in an elegant gown".

What a character looks like is infinitely less important than what their motives, goals and values are. That's the shit that you should be explaining, not what colour their eyes are or what they're wearing.

I would love a DM who out this much depth into their world.
Without depth the game is just hack-and-slash, and that's boring.

>XKCD said it therefore it's wrong

Also lol at bringing up Edgar Rice Burroughs in a discussion of modern fantasy. The man has been dead for over 65 years. He died before Lord of the Rings was even published. He has no bearing on the topic at hand whatsoever, and his work was lightweight pulp fiction in any case - hardly a good standard for quality literature.

>That doesn't mean a GM can't expect you to at least have a bit of fucking courtesy instead of treating his game like Veeky Forums and trying to troll people like some autist.
I think I'm beginning to realise that Veeky Forums has done a lot to ruin traditional games.

That's not shitty. You are a good GM and have good players

What is the most basic form of a story?

A conflict. A character wants something, but something else is in their way. Their struggles to overcome this obstacle and get what they want are the basis of all drama.

A conflict can be established without a setting. A conflict can be established without words, even. I have seen strong, compelling stories told with mute stick figures on a blank white background.

A setting does not matter to a story. It is an optional extra. The only time a setting matters is when it actually informs the story's central conflict.

A bog-standard dungeon crawl can be easily justified within the bounds of a conflict. The PCs are all looking for money and loot. The cave/ruin has money and loot. Therefore, they went into the cave/ruin to get the money and loot. But, the cave also has goblins/kobolds/orcs/giant spiders. If the PCs want the money and loot, they must overcome the spiders. Easy.

A story does not need to be ~deep~ or ~complex~ to be compelling. Just having a bunch of characters with solid, consistent goals, and obstacles to overcome, will suffice. And frankly, I'll take a simple story told well over a complicated one told badly, any day of the week.

This

I wish more people realised this

just because you can live on rice and vitamin supplements doesn't mean you shouldn't have a nice meal.

And just because you throw a dozen spices on a steak, doesn't change the fact that it's overcooked.

>the creators can't differentiate between what is interesting and relevant information about their setting, and what is not, so they try and give you everything.
While I am inclined to agree, it all seems rather subjective to me.
Some people are the kind who revel in reading the journal of a long-dead adventurer whose plight and death have no real impact on the plot. Others would be content with places called "Orc Village" or "Main Town", with nameless NPCs known only by their titles.

Minutiae draws some in while it pushes others away. It's a matter of knowing your audience, I guess.

>Even when they say otherwise, nobody actually gives a shit about the storied histories of your orc tribes. Nobody is going to remember the difference between a "Vallhark" gnome and a "Divengar" gnome. Nobody cares about the Wizard Wars 200 years ago, or how that's shaped the modern caliph state of Notarabia.

As a player, this is exactly the sort of stuff I care about. I like being able to come up with a backstory which fits in well with the GM's world, and working out how much she knows about the world and what she can refer to IC. The more detail and history I get in advance, the better.

>It's a matter of knowing your audience, I guess.
True.
Comparing minutiae-centric fantasy and sweeping plot fantasy is like comparing The Martian and Interstellar - both have their audience, which might even intersect at times.

>*common sense everyone agrees to
>*autistic screeching

Worst political meme, non even /pol/-tier

>I've spent a month being a cunt

FTFY

user, please. Ancap is just another spook.

>retard who thought the walking dead was awesome but the sopranos was boring tries to shit on people with brains.

my lord

dayum!

You set a set a very high threshold for asshattery mate.
I'm doubting your claim of any individual being a bigger asshole.

Word, backstory is nice to frame the conflict and story within the setting.
To lay a foundation of why, and why people even bother.

These threads always give me hope. I know I'm not the best GM, but I'm trying to learn to be better. And seeing how many people on Veeky Forums will call out shitty players and shitty GMs that try to start shit make me feel a little better.

...no, this is how it goes down.
>We should find where this gnome came from.
>Roll me Knowledge Local
>23
>By his shaved head and tribal markings, you ID him as a member of the Vallhark gnomes; he's nomadic. They usually rest their horses in areas that are X.

>probability book is good
>number of words made up by author

So i guess Lord of the Rings is the worst fantasy series ever then, since it had an entire fucking language invented by the author.

Yet refrains from using it too much in the actual story.

>five hundred goddamn years of timeline
Depends on how detailed it is but fuck, that is nothing.

I will say though, history is one of the dumbest things to include in detail about a world. Yeah, it's ok to have several paragraphs about how elves are different from humans, why they wear masks and what they look like underneath, but there's no point in knowing how this perception has changed over time and how other countries have interacted with them historically. We're playing in a single period of time, none of that is ever relevant except current political standings etc.

>an entire fucking language

The setting is needed to show the players what possibilities they have to interact with the world you asshat

>what is probability
LotR hit that 0.02 percent of probability of being good

I have this problem too, and I've been trying to fight it. Not so much in the 'hey look at this new word I invented', but glurging setting details.

Unless we're dealing with an ancient evil.

Show us the wiki or you're full of shit.

As always, first post is the best one

>Let's all be passive-aggressive rather than discuss things between players and GM
This is an adult-only board. What are you doing here?

That's actually really sweet, I'd love to have that in a game as a player.

Since when is creating a race in a fantasy world a bad thing? I don't understand being a passive aggressive shithead when your DM is actively invested in the world he's presenting to you.

5/10 - Mild Rustle

>he actually drank the meme koolaid
I bet you are le redpilled to!

>I have seen strong, compelling stories told with mute stick figures on a blank white background.
Which stories are you referring to because they wound like pretentious bullshit.

Sometimes you make me ill Veeky Forums.

I'm a professional author, and addicted to worldbuilding. Would you link you GM's wiki? Even if it's shit, it will further my skills.

Stop sperging out OP.

Because he's a self important ass who doesn't like other people to have fun.

You know, like most of Veeky Forums is nowadays.

> OP a shit

...

>Whenever the party stops progressing to talk amongst ourselves, either to formulate a plan or dick around and ignore main plot, some shitty DMPC walks up and starts espousing like a fucking walkthrough
>I had a character that would kill these people on sight if they seemed weak, or if it was some shitty Super-DMPC with every power under the sun i'd just push the rest of the team to walk the fuck away from them

Our DM also has a bad habit of having every NPC just know all about our team and why we're their, never batting an eye at the fact we're murder hobos with more then 1 undead member or minion.

Except when it is.

This isn't to say that you always need to get deep into history of everywhere, because that tends to just bog most things down. However, if it happens to matter then it's either a "well-known" fact that you should tell your players about, or it will be something that you explain whenever it happens to come up.