Distinct Perspectives

Advice to players from a foreverDM:

Have any cool ideas about where you want the plot to go? Character arcs you'd like to see? Just general concepts or themes you enjoy? Tell us! Seriously the #1 goal of any DM worth their salt is working with the players to make a story everyone finds interesting, but we don't always know what sort of stories you like.

This is an incredibly important thing, but it's also worth confronting why a lot of players, at least in my experience, hesitate to do this.

Asshole GMs, who will take what the player wants or cares about and use it to hurt them. They're the source of a lot of people who fall into the murderhobo archetype. A bad GM taught them that having anything in the setting they're invested in will only be used to hurt them and screw them over, so they respond by no longer being invested in anything.

It sucks, that players are forced to this and that some GMs indulge in that kind of petty power fantasy rather than focusing on making a fun game, and it's so damn harmful. Mutual trust between players and a GM, being able to communicate openly with the knowledge that you're all there to create an enjoyable experience is so damn important, and that a significant minority of GMs take actions to cripple that is a fucking travesty.

It's a double edged blade.
One of my favorite games and pcs ever had me doing exactly what said. I had imagined a fallen son of nobler fathers coming about in a redemption arc, rescuing his missing family and retrieving piecemeal his ancestral panapoly as his birthright.
It went... sorta like that. All my family that I was off to rescue were dead, and the only items I found was a sword and part of a breastplate. I loved the game because it was the first time I could go full GOOD GUY OF JUSTICE without the GM fighting me or throwing bullshit circumstances in my way, but simply had the situations as is and judged me based on how I approached them, but I thought the entire time, "why couldn't the bad guys have them locked in a dungeon to drive me forward to save them? Now they are dead, there is nothing NEW that can be done with them".

A lot of GMs rely too much on death as a way of building drama. It's a cheap and kinda lazy way to do it because, as you say, it doesn't really lead anywhere. I guess that's a bit of advice for GMs in itself.

Don't just kill off NPCs thoughtlessly. Every plot hook and element of player investment they represent will be completely lost and squandered. You have to weigh those long term losses against the short term drama it creates.

Can death be used effectively? Sure. But the less often you use it, the more impact each death will actually have.

To the Players:
Once you have an idea of where you want your character to go and how you want them to develop, share those plans with GM, but never plot exactly how you want things to happen, or the way things turn out may disappoint you.

To the GM:
Don't be afraid to take inspiration from unexpected sources.
If you plan on a boss fight going a certain way for the story, and the dice say something else happens, trust yourself to roll with the unexpected and make the new twist to the ongoing story.
Sometimes a miss can be as climactic as a critical hit, if you view it the right way.

To the Players:
Please, please, please don't be afraid to move off script. If you aren't having fun with what I plotted for you, then make me adapt to the direction you want to take.

To GM:
Please keep NPCs in the normal human choices square. If the PCs are acting like rampaging jerks, send retribution equal to their sins. If they act like good and decent questors, throw them a bone once and a while, maybe someone whose kid they saved gives them aid at an unexpected moment.

Players:
Change and growth (not just through XP and items) is part of the picture. Moral quandaries and challenging encounters are opportunities for your characters to breach their comfort zone and become more well-rounded and interesting as a result.

Poking holes in NPC plots/voices/stories/etc. is in fact useful for a GM, but do try to reserve your razzing for OOC after the fact. It really kills the GM's momentum when you try snarky comments in-character on the spot.

GMs:
Always reflect on how players respond to your session and tailor the next accordingly. Even if players started the campaign wanting something, their interests may shift (possibly from your handiwork!).

Measure how much you need from your players to incite interest and excitement. For example, if you really want something in a room to be noticed, don't force Perception from everyone at the table--just describe it casually to the characters likely to notice such things. Be subtractive in your design.

>It really kills the GM's momentum when you try snarky comments in-character on the spot.

Players, pay attention.
I've literally ended up killing PCs for this sort of shit. Not wholly on purpose, but not wholly by accident either.

If you're not taking an NPC seriously, that's usually my prompt to do something to make you take them seriously.

To Players: Dying is OK.

Dying is OK.

Dying is OK.

To DMs:

Don't bend over backwards to avoid kills. Bad dice rolls happen. Fights go south. The game has tools for dealing with this.

To GMs: Your jokes aren't funny if noone at the table is laughing.
To Players: Not everything has to be an opportunity for you explain, gold and items.

What if I'm DMing outside of my own home or place?

At the cost of butchering my work and the detail-richness of the story?

To GMs:
Many times, players will get more invested when the things they move are closer to what they can relate to... such as an innkeeper who is knee-deep in debt with the mob, the disgraced, blackmailed mayor of a small town. Not everything needs to be a nation-wide disaster.

To Players:
Don't nag to your GMs. You will only make them burn out faster. Instead, give them pointers to what you like about their story after the game or when they are most receptive to it- ergo: when they ask you what you want from the game!

What if you play a game where death is permanent?

I agree with this. One thing is the fun meme and another thing is being a shitfucker within what's a "hobby" that's still something everyone spent time and money (in case of having to travel from afar) for.

>What if I'm DMing outside of my own home or place?
You are still responsible for the fun of the table, user. That does not mean you need must become a tyrant, but it means you need to exercise the appropriate leadership skills to manage a diverse group harmoniously.
Now for the GM tyrant in me: NEVER EVER EVER allow a player to think they have "leverage" over you. You are the law, the first and last. A dickhead player who is willing to use threats against you MUST BE KICKED. It is the biggest sign of incorrigible behavior you can possibly see. It does not matter what the consequences are, figure it out, but realize the wholesomeness of the game and the group is imperiled.
>At the cost of butchering my work and the detail-richness of the story?
It's not a binary option. Know there is the time and place to paint a rich scene, and the time to speak less and allow for the imagination of the players to carry it.

To Players: Nobody cares that you wrote up three pages of wank and nobody is going to read through every bloody sentence. Keep it to three sentences and answer the following questions.

>where do you come from
>where do you get your abilities from
>what made you become an adventurer
>what makes you able to work with other adventurers
>what are your goals? short-, long-, and 'do the impossible' term

Also, don't mention friends and loved ones in your backstory either. Either they'll never be brought up during game because they're irrelavant or the DM will kill them off in the most "shocking" way possible just for cheap drama. If family/friends are that important, it'll come up during play.

Finally, if your character has a flaw, let that develop over the course of the campaign. Don't have them overcome that during their backstory because it's infinitely more interesting to see someone overcome an addiction rather than be told that they overcame an addiction.

To DM's: Stop making the players develop your setting for you. If you're going to develop an emerging world for your players to interact with, there should already be something there TO interact with before the players even develop their characters.

Also, stop having every other story arc include SOMEBODY from a PC's backstory, it becomes increasingly obvious that you're just coasting by off of our efforts as players to fill in the sandbox and it makes the world seem smaller than it actually should, simply because I can't even run into a dude who lives a few blocks away from me even though we shop at the same store or go to the same school but suddenly my character running into everyone that he knew while traveling to various spots across the setting?

Finally, if a player hands you a backstory and it doesn't seem personable enough, fucking talk to them and give them ideas based off the conventions of your setting. As long as there's something there, you have no excuse.

To Players: If you're going to sit down at the table to create a character that's a member of a group, don't make a character that cannot take care of himself unless someone else in the party gives them an OK.

Don't make a Monk in a party with a Cleric, Wizard, and Druid. Don't make a Fighter with low STR/DEX. Don't make a Bard with no ranks in performance. etc. etc.

It's assumed, regardless of the setting, that the party as a whole is doing something dangerous that requires everyone in the group to pull off their A-game to survive. If you show up with a worthless character, that means that everyone else around you has to pull your end of the slack and the DM has to balance encounters around how useless you are, which means less EXP, less loot, and it still needs to be divided between you and the rest of the players.

Make a character that fits with the group and doesn't need to be babysat just to do his job, everyone will thank you for that.

To DM's: Just because you can, doesn't mean that you should, especially in regards to the rules.

You're not a game designer, you're not a writer, you're not above criticism, and you're not the supreme god of everything that can possibly be, rule 0 be damned.

If you must create a houserule, give your players the heads up and accept that they're going to disagree with you. Make tweaks based off of their suggestions and playtest them for at least one solid month. If it works out fine, add it to the campaign but if it doesn't then wash, rinse, repeat until it does.

If that sounds like too much work, stop what you're doing and just ignore the issue with the system or play a different system entirely. It's bad enough when the rules themselves are shit but it's even worse when the DM makes house rules that make everything even worse.

A fumble can always be turned into an extremely efficient escape, especially if there are heights to fall from.

Death is, in fact, ok.

To players: don't act like you're doing me a favor by showing up. Don't get me wrong, I love GMing but I get no pleasure from having to schedule a bunch of flakes who won't give me the time of day. Also, stop telling me you want one thing and then act completely opposite. I tailor made the campaign to be based around what you supposedly wanted. I don't want you to be static or anything but think things through before deciding to go in a completely different direction on a whim. Especially if you change your mind again next week. Make your character internally consistent first and I'll be fine with any changes of heart.

To GMs:
Here's a song for you for every time you are considering injecting some social justice/faux-politics into the game.

youtu.be/30KBYSSts2c

To players: stop making your character into what the party needs. It's silly to see one person playing exactly who they want and everyone else accommodating them. Be what you want. If people die, they die. More conflict and more tension when not all bases are covered 24/7.

No, fuck you!

There are dozens of options available in-game that would allow you to, say, heal the party while dealing damage in melee. If your concept is so special that you would risk everyone else's character death just so you can play a special snowflake, you're not a team player, so you don't get the benefits of being in the group.

To players: hi.

To GMs: Hello

This very much depends on the style and tone of game. In some games it is an accepted part of things, in others it's very much not. The advice given above isn't really universalizable.

As a GM I completely disagree with this and have had the opposite experience. Getting people to write up fleshed out backstories with built in connections to the world is a key asset, and using those elements to give people personal engagement with the ongoing events of the game has never been received badly.

I find it bizarre to call it 'coasting'. You're taking direct feedback from your players to tailor the game to the themes and ideas they enjoy. How is that at all a bad thing?

This.

I am so put off by obsessing over "roles" in the party.
Meatshield, healer, damage dealer, etc.
No, you don't need an "x".
Just play a character, work with other characters, and if you encounter a need, find a solution to that need.

As long as your character can handle themselves, your fine.
Like this user pointed out

>don't use insetting politics to challenge the morals, ethics and coda of the pcs
Naw, son, fuck off.
If you are so incapable of confronting ideology that isn't your own, you can stay in your house.
>but but but I meant THOSE
Immaterial boogeymen hyped up by the people who follow the ideology you adhere to on the same level as Communism in the 60's.
The ONLY time this is actually a problem is if it has no underpinnings to be explored or if you are railroaded into confronting it.

To wit, do understand the reasons behind it is usually so that everyone has their thing they can contribute to feel and be valued.

In some systems this flatly isn't true, though.

Some games do rely on the player characters having a certain number of key skills and capabilities covered. If you're playing a system with those implicit assumptions, then cooperating with the other players in character generation to ensure those bases are covered is part of playing the game.

If you don't like it, there are systems which don't make those assumptions.

It's a bad thing the DM is obviously running the campaign by the seat of his pants and NEEDS these backstories in order to create a solid campaign, it basically becomes a game of mad libs except the players give answers that are wildly different from one another and the DM slots the answers into the right place and pretends that he's the one who came up with the narrative.

It's one thing if you've already developed a setting and backstory is used to figure out where a character's origins fit in but don't warp the setting around the PC's and then pat yourself on the back like you're doing us a favor.

What if that's what the group enjoys?

It's not the only way of doing things, but it's an entirely valid style of GMing that I've had a lot of success with.

If you don't like it, that's fine, these things are a matter of personal preference, but the most you can say coming from that is to be sure of what style you group enjoys before employing one technique or another, not disregarding one entirely because of your personal tastes.

Are you a politician?
Are you involved in political work?
Are you familiar with both sides of the argument and are capable of presenting both sides as being logical in one sense while illogical in another?

If the answer isn't yes to all three, don't fucking inject politics into your setting, especially if you're unsure of how everyone else feels about it.

To players:
Be more creative than "I swing my sword at it" for every solution. I'm open minded to any solution but this is why you keep dying to stuff like dungeon traps.

To DM's:
Not everything has to be combat, your rogues are gonna sneak around and your boards are gonna talk to NPC's. Don't completely discourage stealth, charisma, intelligence checks, etc. When players want to use them

>don't use insetting politics to challenge the morals, ethics and coda of the pcs

I think you meant to say
>don't soapbox and create a world where your political views are objectively right and anyone who disagrees with your personal morality and ethics gets cosmically penalized

Confronting ideologies is good, just not during a game with some idiot who thinks that that's the best arena for controversial discussions.

*Bards
(Fucking phone posting)

Eventually, your group is going to notice that in every campaign that you run, they'll always run into somebody that they mention in their backstory regardless of the nature of the campaign.

They'll also notice that within the context of the narrative, they have final say on where the campaign ultimately goes, because without their characters, there is no world to explore, no plot to follow, and no reason to do anything because any answer they choose will become the right one.

So now you'll end up faced with a choice, do you allow the world to become larger than the PC's at the possible cost of their agency or do you have the world only exist as far as they can see and end up becoming co-dependent on the party to actually get shit done and not take advantage of your narrative.

If the world is fleshed out, at the very least you'll avoid situations like the party deciding to legalize gay marriage as a lich devastates the country side with nobody else trying to stop him.

What is there to 'notice'? It's a completely open process. My group knows we share creative control of the setting and ongoing plot of the game. I'm lucky in that all my players are also competent GMs, so they know how to bring elements in with their backstories that are appropriate to the tone and premise of the game and easily used by me as the GM.

I don't feel obliged to use every element a PC provides, but if there's a room in events, long or short term, for something that seems similar enough, why not use the element linked to the PC? It might not be 'realistic', but we're a much more story focused group than world simulation. We're all okay with it playing out like a fantasy novel, where personal motivations and world changing events often line up in interesting and unexpected ways.

A game still exists outside of the PCs. A general setting pitch, campaign premise, statement of tone etc, but the PCs build their backstories around that, and then I use the PC backstories to flesh out and build up that plot until it's interesting and enjoyable for them to explore.

>do you have the world only exist as far as they can see and end up becoming co-dependent on the party to actually get shit done and not take advantage of your narrative.

I'm not even sure what you mean by this

Here we have two ends of a spectrum.
It is silly to sacrifice what you want to play because "the party balance" says so.
>I'm really excited to play a noble and stalwart paladin!
>Oh, we already have one of those, plus a cleric. Gotta warlock too, but we need a Dex build. You can play a dick-ass thief!

It's also pointless and detrimental to the party to play a character that cannot meaningfully contribute, no matter how much you want to play that character.
>Okay players, you're playing an elite squad of handpicked superheroes charged with taking out a supervillian in a volcano compound guarded by hordes of killer robots filled with bees.
>I am playing an anemic, half-blind accountant named Phil.

The middle ground is best.
Not every party needs to confirm to a standard, with each character in each role, but neither should the whole party bend over backwards to accommodate one special character.

To Players:
Make a useful character.

To GMs:
Work to be accommodating of the characters your players want to play.

>implying you need to be a poli-science major to use politics in a game
user, you are leveraging your personal dislike about politicking in games as something that applies to anyone else, and ignoring how "politics" is so fucking broad a term, and covers so much in a game, that it shows what kind of fool you are.
I use controversial discussions regularly to challenge players because it is not a problem that be neatly solved by swording it to death.
Example: a while back, a city the players were in had a back quarter populated by orcish women and children. When they asked about it, they were told they were the remainder of a orc horde that swept down from the west, were repulsed, and were kept in order for them to "repay their debt to civilization". One of the party was a half orc, and he noticed a number of half orc children among the quarter.
Yes, it was exactly what you figure it was, and the good guy cleric took issue with it. However, it was shown without doubt that the survival of the town depended on their labor because the town had been so depopulated, and the alternatives would be to let them go into the wilderness and either die or return to banditry, or execute all of them for the safety of the land.
Things got thornier when a force of various orc tribes descended on the town with an ultimatum: return our women, and their share of prize for their labors, or we take them, along with everything else.
The pc party did their damndest to negotiate, but the resentment and obstinacy of the town leaders (along with their faith that this group of heroes would save the day) meant it came to battle.
The pc party itself was very split on the affair, with some outraged that the town's leaders would put countenance something as odious as virtual slavery and rapine, with others believing it was the best end to an unpleasant situation that didn't require more bloodshed, and others still just wanting to walk away from the entire mess and leave.

To players: a locked door isn't a puzzle. Don't feel mad when you feel like you weren't properly rewarded for busting into someone's home.

To GMs: a little railroading isn't going to kill us if it seems like everyone is at a loss. I feel like the stigma against railroading is justified as you don't want people being forced into your novel but some GMs get so hung up about not doing it that we can be stuck at a complete stand still for hours. Don't run to our aid over everything but sometimes you might be thinking on a different wavelength.

>Work to be accommodating of the characters your players want to play.
What does this mean exactly?

Does this mean that you should do something like inventing a Cleric NPC to heal injuries or does this mean erasing every spell/ability in the game that forces the players to make a will save because they all decided to play characters with garbage Will saves?

Because if it's the former, I can agree to that. If it's the latter, you're just condoning their poor choices and refusing to challenge them because you know that they're a stack of cards and the slightest resistance will cause a TPK, almost trivially.

Okay then, just as long as you're actually making a campaign and only slotting NPC's in when they're appropriate, I have no problem with what you're doing.
>I'm not even sure what you mean by this
What I meant was, is your world a featureless void until the players interact with it and the only details that it has are dependent on your players giving a shit?

That doesn't seem like the case though.

Why are you, and others, insisting that something MUST be one thing, or another thing, with absolutely no overlap or middle ground?
You are shitposting, user, with this zero sum mindset. No one with sensible human faculties believes what you just said is what meant.
Hell, the word "Accommodate" infers reasonable effort, but not extraordinary measures. Even then, if the player had followed
>Make a useful character.
then your post has no weight or logic.

So I'm guessing that's a "no" to all three questions then? Oh well, good luck with that Seth MacFarlane.

see
You are assuming the GM is shit and can't run a game well.
>thus spake the shitposter

So I'm guessing that you're the type who warps the setting so that anything that targets Will no longer exists and/or never interacts with the party who has shit will saves across the board?

>It's next to impossible to make likable characters if you keep threatening to kill every NPC that disagrees with you.
Ahem

>In some systems this flatly isn't true, though.
Systems differ.
Most times, pvp should be discouraged because of the problems it causes in the group, but apparently it is heavily encouraged in Paranoia.

Some players might view their system as the kind you describe, simply because there are tactical combat elements, despite that not being the case.
Unless the system itself suggests adhering to standard roles, it shouldn't be assumed to be necessary.

>apparently it is heavily encouraged in Paranoia
Only in games of Zap!, not the regular games.

That sounds great, but I don't think that's what the usual politiking in tabletop means. You gave a fun sounding and interesting scenario bringing the party into an inner conflict that wasn't about loot. The usual is something along the lines of a horde of [50's era propaganda communism/ancap memes] lead by [controversial political figure I don't like with filled off serial number] in a strawman army that's retardedly evil attacking the kingdom of [Ancap memes / 50's era propaganda communism] lead by the holy hand of [controversial political figure I like with filled off serial number]. That's just annoying.

>You are assuming the GM is shit and can't run a game well.
Well yeah, isn't that usually the case? Most GM's out there are shit, don't understand the rules, and lack the social graces to communication with their party.

The dude showed me that I was mistaken, so I'm backing off and letting him do his thing since he seems like he's not just trying to coast off his player's input to design the campaign in its entirety.

I have no reason to fuck with him now, so I won't.

That honestly sounds pretty boring.
Nothing is duller than going into a battle to fight for a cause you're just sort of lukewarm towards because the DM is trying too hard to create gray scenarios.

>others still just wanting to walk away from the entire mess and leave.

It looks like there's some people who may agree with me.

>Well yeah, isn't that usually the case? Most GM's out there are shit, don't understand the rules, and lack the social graces to communication with their party.
This thought process is why most players on Veeky Forums are shit.

Just know that many, or most, players don't come to the game seeking political discourse or message fantasy.

Well the idea that GM's are worth dealing with by default due to nobody else wanting to sit in the chair is why most GM's on Veeky Forums are shit.

It has nothing to do with you specifically, it's just that when you take the population as a whole, 90% of the sample size will be garbage that's not worth dealing with while the other 10% are the nuggets of gold tucked deep inside a mountain of shit that makes the whole thing worthwhile.

I generally assume the worse because either I'm pleasantly surprised or I'm smugly satisfied at being proven right in my assumptions.

And guess what?
They could have. There was nothing saying they had to stay. Besides, you are missing the point, which was to engage different characters with different beliefs and backgrounds to engender different responses.
That the party was split over ideological and personal lines means the objective was achieved, from a GM's pov.
>I don't think that's what the usual politiking in tabletop means
That is exactly what it is, 80% of the time, user. Your viewpoint is skewed by internet bitching about "politics" which actually isn't politics, but bitching about something they don't like and using gaming as some manner of cathartics it should not be.

>Does this mean that you should do something like inventing a Cleric NPC to heal injuries or does this mean erasing every spell/ability in the game that forces the players to make a will save because they all decided to play characters with garbage Will saves?
Here we have two ends of a spectrum again.
There is not accommodating, there is accommodating, and there is accommodating too much.
Each group and scenario is different.

I was just saying that if you believe that you are being perfectly accommodating, you should every so often reexamine that belief.

Fortunately, I don't play with murderhobos, and my players WANT to be challenged not only in battle, to see their ethics put to the test. If your character is incapable of making a stand on something, what are they?
It would also help if you discovered the difference between bellyaching about something you don't like in a game and politics.

Ah.
Thanks for the clarification.
Never had a chance to play myself.

It's fine if your players like being politically challenged but realize that most people nowadays are fucking sick of politics as a whole, especially after the last election.

It's not your place to force someone into confronting political stances during a game of make-believe, especially you're lacking the political backing to actually present both sides in a way that doesn't favor one side over the other.

>I generally assume the worse because either I'm pleasantly surprised or I'm smugly satisfied at being proven right in my assumptions.
Off topic, but i just want to note that, while that is a fine internal policy, it is a terrible way to respond to people.
(Not that I actually know how you respond to people.)

I truly consider 99.9% of the human race to be completely useless to me.
I treat everyone I encounter as if they are the rare, beautiful exception, until they prove otherwise.
Party on.

>It's not your place to force someone into confronting political stances during a game of make-believe
I do believe I had mentioned how the only time it is bad is when you railroad the group into the confrontation.
So what you are saying is that I shouldn't run a game with different kingdoms at war, each for different valid reasons, and the players should not be drawn into the intrigue due to their power?
>especially you're lacking the political backing to actually present both sides in a way that doesn't favor one side over the other.
So then critique my scenario. At what point did I favor one side over the other? This has been something insisted on that unless you are a politician yourself, you are incapable of representing competing points of view with something approaching sensibility.
It seems more a sign of current times that it is assumed that everyone has some manner of "agenda" whenever they do anything *insert person* doesn't like.

>Off topic, but i just want to note that, while that is a fine internal policy, it is a terrible way to respond to people.
Even if I believe that everyone around me is probably a shitty person, it doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to go out of my way to be an ass to them unprovoked.

>There was nothing saying they had to stay
Except the whole business about being polite and not abandoning a plot the DM is clearly invested in.

They say you can boil a frog without it jumping out of pot just by raising the temperature gradually. People will endure a fair amount of discomfort, tedium, and boredom without complaint if it falls below a certain threshold, and part of what helps them endure is the hope that things will get better.

It sounds like the kind of game where I'd be able to stomache it, but I wouldn't be enjoying it.

There's no need to be hostile pal, it's like I said, if your players like being politically challenged then it's perfectly acceptable to do what you're doing, I just had a problem because it seemed as though you were saying "if you don't like politics then fuck you, stop being a bitch" or something to that effect.

>It would also help if you discovered the difference between bellyaching about something you don't like in a game and politics.
I know the difference you arrogant prick.
I am not that user.

Also?
Players who don't come to the game seeking political discourse or message fantasy =/= murderhobos.

That's not really faux-politics, that's just a moral quandary.

Faux-politics is like going into an Orc Village, and an Orc woman runs up to you shouting "I need to get an abortion but the church of Pelor won't let me!" while a gnome runs up to you and asks "What do you think of Emperor Obinton's health care reforms?" before two paladins just start screaming in the middle of the street "EQUAL WAGES EQUAL WAGES EQUAL WAGES."

>Except the whole business about being polite and not abandoning a plot the DM is clearly invested in.
Then that is an assumption you, the player, is making. And yes, I did have a player ask about leaving, and if you have so little faith that the GM can't deal with you not biting his plothook, then I point you to and the admonishment about assuming incompetence whenever you can.
The reason the party stuck around is because the cleric told them flatly he was staying, and the half orc and cleric were bros. The dragonman was looking for a good fight, and wagered he found one, regardless of the good or bad involved.
>It sounds like the kind of game where I'd be able to stomache it, but I wouldn't be enjoying it.
Then why would you be there? No reason to be at a game you don't enjoy. I've left games and had people leave my games, it's not a big deal.
I take issue with the blanket "hurr politics is shit" tone of the posts, when even dealing with merchants, or local leaders in any capacity is indeed politics. People do it all the time in games, they just don't realize it because a lot of people seem to think strawman nonsense is politics, when it patently isn't.
>Players who don't come to the game seeking political discourse or message fantasy = players unwilling to be challenged by things they can't resolve with violence or equally unwilling to leave their comfort zones and explore new directions for their characters.
What you are describing is nonsense. In many years of gaming, I have never seen what you are describing, so I wonder where this idea that it is common is coming from.
And yes, it was politics, as it entailed the party having to negotiate with different bodies of power, from the leaders of the town, to the matriarch of the orcish quarters, to the dwarves who had their own quarter in the town, and the orc force outside of it. They literally spent days going between each, organizing meetings and parlays.

>That is exactly what it is, 80% of the time, user. Your viewpoint is skewed by internet bitching about "politics" which
actually isn't politics, but bitching about something they don't like and using gaming as some manner of cathartics it should not be.

That's what I meant
In game political problems are nice, but the GM venting his flags all over the table. Just that a well placed political problem will more often than not be confused as a moral problem and most players will ignore the fact that politics isn't just voting.
Also, not a complaining user, that was my first post. A well thought/executed anything can be fun, is my mindset.

>Stop making the players develop your setting for you.
Make me.

>a well placed political problem will more often than not be confused as a moral problem
That has come up in the thread, and I think some of the players felt that way.
Certainly the cleric felt it was his duty to ensure justice was meted out (and this actually led to a very sad end for the poor cleric), but the party spent many days sitting with leaders and trying to hash out the demands and desires of the various towndwellers long before the orc army arrived at the gate.
Their presence just made things more fraught.

Players: It can be fun to fail, and respect how much time the GM puts into running the game.

GM: It gets really draining if you get bored with your own encounters. Also, players can't read your mind and know what you want them to do so don't get mad when you stab the NPC you wanted us to be friends with.

>What you are describing is nonsense.

It's also called comedic exaggeration. But, for a real example, I've had a DM try to use orcs as a proxy for black people, with corrupt city guards killing them basically for sport, and he went to great lengths to make sure that this was an Orc Lives Matter type scenario.

I was really tempted to say that we should be less focused on trying the find the few corrupt guards and more focused on convincing the orcs of the city to stop committing violent crimes, but by that point I didn't really care and ended up not coming back after the session ended.

>Players who don't come to the game seeking political discourse or message fantasy =/= players unwilling to be challenged by things they can't resolve with violence or equally unwilling to leave their comfort zones and explore new directions for their characters.
FTFY

Please stop trying to force all players into either:
>Category A:
>Players who want the kind of game I run
or
>Category B:
>Terrible or deeply limited players

If you can't see the inherent arrogance in insisting that anyone who doesn't want what have to give is flawed, you are not as smart as you think you are.

To Everyone: You're not nearly as clever as you think you are.

Last line of the collection right here.

Or maybe you could accept that you have been dealing with politics in games regularly since day 1, and that you don't see it because you think it's something that it is not, as has been brought up a fair few times in this thread?
I can see pretty clearly the point was that living beings have value that should not be cast aside due "X race is always Y" that is more often believed by players than they think. It's why in Dragon Age, they used elves instead for their downtrodden people because players were less likely to turn against them or believe they "deserved it".
>shitposting
Of course :^)

Nah, the point was that the DM wanted to soapbox and use a proxy scenario to vent out his frustrations.

I also don't like how you're trying to say any form of decision making is politics. It also largely just sounds like you're arguing for the sake of arguing.

>>shitposting
>Of course :^)

Ah! I get it now. You're just a weird troll doing it in the style of Virt. I think I'll stop giving you those (you)'s now.

If you think that was shit posting, you need that advice more than anyone.

It seems we understand word "politics" very differently.

>Or maybe you could accept that you have been dealing with politics in games regularly since day 1, and that you don't see it because you think it's something that it is not, as has been brought up a fair few times in this thread?
Oye.
"Political discourse or message fantasy" =/= politics
I made a point about it.
A fair point.
You could have acknowledged it and pointed out that your posts were focused on players that enjoy what you do.
Instead, you posted like an arrogant prick.

Hell, the initial point wasn't even talking about general politics or the kind you focus on, but you still had to chime in and say "Fuck off".

And deflecting from solid points raised against you by starting your reply with "Or" and then ignoring those points entirely is an obvious tactic.

To Players:
You should pay for your DM's food.

Is it okay if we bake/make snacks instead of ordering out?