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Old 12-03-2017, 03:29 PM   #41
Prince Charon
 
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Default Re: What will you not allow?

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Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl View Post
Wait, people actually expect PC immunity? I mean, I know that you cannot tell players how their characters will react, that it part of their RP, but their characters are supposed to benefit and suffer according to their actions. If a player steps in with their character to punish the character of another player, it just means that I do not have to do it as GM.
I've encountered it, but fairly rarely (and as a player observing another player, not as the GM). It would have been less of a problem if our GM at the time had been less permissive. Sometimes, younger players (and some older players, though this guy was a few years younger than me) have difficulty telling the difference between 'logical consequences' and 'railroading.' He also sometimes had trouble with other people's agency or suspension of disbelief, like playing a guy in a CWoD game who had Truth of the Rom (which is supposed to make people more likely to believe your lies, but is not an automatic win at all), lying in ways that should have broken the effect, and then getting annoyed when our characters did not believe him (maybe he didn't read the whole thing, but he did this multiple times!).


As for the 'reluctant hero' thing, I could be convinced to allow it, but only on the condition that they take a disadvantage or two that makes their character willing to join the party without adding more work for me as a GM: maybe the campaign's Big Bad or a servant thereof also happens to be your Enemy, or you have a Sense of Duty to one or more of the other PCs, or you're a Weirdness Magnet and happen to stumble across whatever the party is investigating, and help them for your own safety (particularly appropriate for characters played by someone who knows in advance that they won't make it to every session). Don't make me have to make you play your character, but you can play a reluctant hero if you make it easy for me bring your character in.
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Old 12-03-2017, 04:33 PM   #42
Kromm
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Default Re: What will you not allow?

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Originally Posted by malloyd View Post

Sure, but the problem with those is they slide into Cursed - doing much more harm to the PC than the disadvantage is worth. The arbitrarily messes up one important die roll per session approach tends to set a natural limit on how horrible the disadvantage can get.
No, I mean this person would not take the initiative, period. Even in combat. I literally had to have people trying to murder his character to get a response.
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Old 12-03-2017, 06:32 PM   #43
Bicorn
 
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Default Re: What will you not allow?

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Originally Posted by malloyd View Post
Sure, but the problem with those is they slide into Cursed - doing much more harm to the PC than the disadvantage is worth. The arbitrarily messes up one important die roll per session approach tends to set a natural limit on how horrible the disadvantage can get.
Unluckiness still allows just one mishap per session, it's the main thing that separates it from Cursed. I'm just saying it doesn't have to be a die roll-related event.
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Old 12-03-2017, 07:21 PM   #44
AlexanderHowl
 
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Default Re: What will you not allow?

I agree, it could also be a form of reverse Serendipity (the Captain of the Guard decides to come by on a snap inspection, a German Fighter mistakes your campfire for an Allied armory, the spy you are trying to seduce like women instead of men, etc). As long as you do not kill their characters, anything is on the table for Unluckiness.
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Old 12-03-2017, 11:26 PM   #45
Tomsdad
 
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Default Re: What will you not allow?

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Originally Posted by Kromm View Post
No, I mean this person would not take the initiative, period. Even in combat. I literally had to have people trying to murder his character to get a response.
One of those so worried about making a wrong choice would make no choice things, maybe?

(either way still disruptive in its own way, and hard to work with)
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Old 12-03-2017, 11:39 PM   #46
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Default Re: What will you not allow?

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As a rule, I don’t allow players to play not-their-sex. For some reason, that just takes me out it.
Interesting. Is it because of the voices? Or do you play in person and not manage to separate visuals from imagination?

I play online, and we've had plenty of people play the opposite gender, with and without accents. Hell, we've had people sleep together (in the classy, fade to black way of course) and/or marry as the opposite gender in our campaigns before.
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Old 12-04-2017, 12:11 AM   #47
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Default Re: What will you not allow?

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I play online, and we've had plenty of people play the opposite gender, with and without accents. Hell, we've had people sleep together (in the classy, fade to black way of course) and/or marry as the opposite gender in our campaigns before.
I don't see it as "of course." My campaigns have been everywhere from G to X.

My experience has been that the degree of explicitness does affect the emotional tone of the game. Explicit scenes make for humor, horror, or a cold, clinical or legalistic tone. "Fade to black" makes for a sense of romance. But in between, where there are rolls for how well things went, but the anatomical specifics are in soft focus, seems to work well for getting a sense of the emotional complexity of relationships. On the other hand, I consider all of those to be artistically legitimate styles.

(When I ran a campaign set in Middle-Earth, I told the players that everything between the first kiss and the birth of the first child would take place off camera. Anything else would not have been Tolkienian.)
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Old 12-04-2017, 04:06 AM   #48
a humble lich
 
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Default Re: What will you not allow?

I ask players to limit disadvantages which make my life as a GM more difficult. In particular Enemies and Dependents, but also to a lesser extent Duty, Weirdness Magnet, and Secret. Those are all fine disadvantages, but in practice with my style of running games, the effect the generally have is that they lead to sessions where the plot is to thwart one characters Enemy (for example). On the one hand, it gives more buy in for the players; on the other, I generally have plot ideas of my own for a champaign and I don't want the PCs to spend all their time rescuing their grandmother and escaping their evil twins.

As far as evil characters go, I generally think evil characters are fine (depending on the campaign of course), unfortunately there are many players who use evil characters as an excuse to be evil players.
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Old 12-04-2017, 07:14 AM   #49
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Default Re: What will you not allow?

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Originally Posted by Captain Joy View Post
As a rule, I don’t allow players to play not-their-sex. For some reason, that just takes me out it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lup3rcal View Post
Interesting. Is it because of the voices? Or do you play in person and not manage to separate visuals from imagination?

I play online, and we've had plenty of people play the opposite gender, with and without accents. Hell, we've had people sleep together (in the classy, fade to black way of course) and/or marry as the opposite gender in our campaigns before.
Dunno about the Captain, but in my experience the main "crossplaying" issue is immature male players using it as excuse to act like a tool. Women playing male characters - especially in high stringency or historical campaigns - has never struck me as a problem, but a man who wants to play a female character needs a good RP'ing pedigree to avoid the veto.

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Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl View Post
Wait, people actually expect PC immunity? I mean, I know that you cannot tell players how their characters will react, that it part of their RP, but their characters are supposed to benefit and suffer according to their actions. If a player steps in with their character to punish the character of another player, it just means that I do not have to do it as GM.
Never really supported "PC immunity" myself - no-PvP seems far to prone to enable annoying players, although I grant it's also not much fun when the party massacre each other in mid adventure. If your players like that sort of thing, either find a new group or play Munchkin.
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Old 12-04-2017, 07:26 AM   #50
ericthered
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Default Re: What will you not allow?

I ban common sense, but in many ways that's because I give to it all players for free: a player doing something obviously stupid is a good sign I haven't explained the situation properly.

light PvP is allowed and even encouraged, but it must stay in character and the characters and group need to be able to survive such behavior. The Merchant can extract an unfavorable trade from the Quartermaster, and the Quartermaster is allowed to undermine the Praetor and twist his orders, but if they end up on opposite sides of a civil war they have "Lost" the game.

I run "fade to black" on sex scenes.
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