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LurkerOutThere
post Dec 3 2010, 06:23 PM
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QUOTE (Critias @ Dec 2 2010, 11:23 PM) *
Life's too short to dislike what you do in your leisure time.


Some folks need to get this tattooed on the back of their hands.
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Doc Chase
post Dec 3 2010, 06:40 PM
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QUOTE (LurkerOutThere @ Dec 3 2010, 06:23 PM) *
Some folks need to get this tattooed on the back of their hands.


On their foreheads. Right under 'Poor Impulse Control.'
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sabs
post Dec 3 2010, 06:56 PM
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QUOTE (Doc Chase @ Dec 3 2010, 07:40 PM) *
On their foreheads. Right under 'Poor Impulse Control.'


i (IMG:style_emoticons/default/love.gif) Snow Crash
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Doc Chase
post Dec 3 2010, 06:59 PM
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QUOTE (sabs @ Dec 3 2010, 07:56 PM) *


I just don't get tired of referencing it.

I'm sure that'll bite me in the ass someday.
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nezumi
post Dec 3 2010, 07:08 PM
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Don't worry, I'm sure one day you'll see reason.
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Doc Chase
post Dec 3 2010, 07:13 PM
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I doubt it. I'll be too busy waiting for my pizza.
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Fauxknight
post Dec 3 2010, 07:18 PM
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QUOTE (Saint Sithney @ Dec 3 2010, 04:16 AM) *
Meh.. the worst qualities a GM can have is reluctance to communicate and petty vindictiveness when people don't do as he hasn't bothered to tell them to. Example GM does display both traits..


Any game with as open a character creation and advancement system as SR requires particular GM communication. If the GM expects a street level game and streem sam .01 (essence that is) of the heavy military armor clan shows up then either the GM or the other players are probably going to have issues.

I think from the example given there isn't enough information to truly understand what went on. It could have been anything from a simple misunderstanding on exactly what was occuring up to a Killer GM vs Muchkin power struggle.
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Doc Chase
post Dec 3 2010, 08:11 PM
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QUOTE (Fauxknight @ Dec 3 2010, 08:18 PM) *
Any game with as open a character creation and advancement system as SR requires particular GM communication. If the GM expects a street level game and streem sam .01 (essence that is) of the heavy military armor clan shows up then either the GM or the other players are probably going to have issues.

I think from the example given there isn't enough information to truly understand what went on. It could have been anything from a simple misunderstanding on exactly what was occuring up to a Killer GM vs Muchkin power struggle.


Neither side was innocent in the exchange. Subsequent comments showed that the GM, as a player in other games, did enjoy trying to destroy the party dynamic, and the GM seemed more irate that the player in question TPK'd before he could.

Add in that there were several instances of this, culminating in 'I'm making a throwaway for this' and we see that the entire group dynamic is so much manure.
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Fauxknight
post Dec 3 2010, 08:32 PM
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QUOTE (Doc Chase @ Dec 3 2010, 03:11 PM) *
Neither side was innocent in the exchange. Subsequent comments showed that the GM...


I didn't read that far, my attention span is only soo long and I wasn't sure if any of the comments were actually related to the GM and player in question.
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tete
post Dec 3 2010, 08:57 PM
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I dont need to kill the players, they kill themselves. The one my group still laughs about I was running Vampire the Dark Ages and one of my PC had a band of gypsies. Theres a old ancient hungry vampire locked up in the city somewhere trying to escape and they are tasked with preventing it from happening. Eventually an army attacks the city so the PC in question looks for a safe place for his gypsies to hide. He looks around this ruined keep they have been investigating and finds a part still in good shape that I specifically say "it looks well enforced like no one would get OUT" he asks if he thinks he can break in to which I reply "yes, but it looks really reinforced to keep anything from getting out" so of course he breaks in and leads his gypsies to safety... ie a nice snack for the ancient vampire who then woke up etc etc.
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Doc Chase
post Dec 3 2010, 09:10 PM
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QUOTE (Fauxknight @ Dec 3 2010, 09:32 PM) *
I didn't read that far, my attention span is only soo long and I wasn't sure if any of the comments were actually related to the GM and player in question.


Heheh. I don't like that they brought their prime runners into the game, but I also don't like the methods used to remove them - or subsequent tactics on the GM's part. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)
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Maelstrome
post Dec 3 2010, 10:48 PM
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warning wall of rant.

my group had a bad gm that we tolerated just because we used his tool shed for our games in high school.
it started off well enough he had his character run along ours as a decker. he started getting very competitive where his decker had to be useful in about all situations and he became upset if anyone outsmarted him or defeated a challenge of his easier than he expected.eventually he started changing various rules on the fly without asking for the thoughts of the players. he even went as far as to change the stats and gear of npcs during the scenarios or combat. he got very upset when any of us killed the opposition but stressed how the opposition wanted to kill us. he would blame us or the book for the rewards that he gave us that made us better.(biggest example was 2.5 kilos of orichalcum) in the end he made an attempt to kill all of us in the last session.he split us up, he killed the mundane demo expert with an invisible mage, i didnt fall into the trap, the gun adept was captured and blew himself and his captors up but hand of god his way out,the sword adept escaped. after we finished our mission he tells us all our contacts have been killed. and some kind of god came down to fight us casting force 20 slay spells, the sword adepts described his hog as his goddess coming to smite the enemy. it all may sound epic but it was nothing more than railroading. one player left early because he was tired of the gms bs the rest of us stayed until the gm was pissed and told us to leave.

a few years later he decides that he wants to run d20 modern. doesnt want the players to have copies of the rules. gets quite pissed when he finds out we had them. tells us that atleast one character will die per session doesnt let us choose how to build our characters imposes several artificial limits and removes all our equipment at the begining of play without warning us and to top it all off he payed off another player to try to pick a fight with me at the table so he could claim i was to violent to play or some such. in the end teamwork and outsmarting the gm had us survive the first session then we decided to never play with him as a gm again. which apparently extended into playing anything with him at all.
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Saint Sithney
post Dec 4 2010, 09:12 AM
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QUOTE (Doc Chase @ Dec 3 2010, 12:11 PM) *
Neither side was innocent in the exchange. Subsequent comments showed that the GM, as a player in other games, did enjoy trying to destroy the party dynamic, and the GM seemed more irate that the player in question TPK'd before he could.

Add in that there were several instances of this, culminating in 'I'm making a throwaway for this' and we see that the entire group dynamic is so much manure.


The thing is, there weren't several instances, only that one first game where his custom magic tradition (MUNCHKIN ALERT) Prime got the "rocks fall" treatment. He claims that there were several instances, but so far that was the only play session. He's still talking about making his 2nd character, so there hasn't been a 2nd game yet. Because of that, I don't trust reddit's opinion regarding "he was upset that he didn't get to kill the whole team." Maybe he was upset because Old Super-munch killed all the other players in a tantrum.

Like I said, the only indication provided that this is a pattern of behavior is with the sniper's death in addition to the two Primes.

Even the "he ruled that Fireballs are essentially FAE bombs" statement is suspect. Both fireballs and FAEs have a consistent damage value everywhere inside their AoE. The only difference is that FAEs have blast effects which continue outside of their primary uniform AoE. I wouldn't see how that would come into play with killing the sniper. Did someone detonate a fireball high in the air above him and have the resultant DV at -2/m kill the guy outside of the AoE? That seems like a really stupid way to insta-kill someone by fiat, which is how Reddit describes the action..

QUOTE (Maelstrome @ Dec 3 2010, 02:48 PM) *
warning wall of rant.


Eww. Control freak. Invite that kid over for a game of Therapy: the Reckoning...

Just schedule a game time, and instead pull an intervention. Dude needs to recognize his issues.
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binarywraith
post Dec 4 2010, 09:46 AM
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I really try hard not to be That GM, but at the same time, how do you deal with it when your players make terrible decisions and expect the run to go off without a hitch?
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SpellBinder
post Dec 4 2010, 10:12 AM
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Honestly I'd have the players pay the consequences for their terrible decisions. Maybe take it a little easy on them the first time, and hope they're quick learners.

Had a player keep bragging about the "Robo Cop" style gun holster in his fake leg, and it did not matter where the party was; the leg got hacked and the holster with a heavily tricked out heavy pistol within it was pretty much permanently sealed in.
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crash2029
post Dec 4 2010, 11:32 AM
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I built an interpretation of Robocop as a starting character once. I even had a backstory that made sense. For the most part.

My Dad was a hell of a GM. In both good ways and bad. His worlds were very much alive. He was able to craft story elements on the fly that seemed like they had been prepared in advance. And he never retconned. Several times we caused massive havoc that should have completely derailed any campaign. Yet every time it seemed as if he had already anticipated that and planned for it. In his D&D world, during the course of one campaign we managed to create a magmic lake in the middle of a glacier, destroy a wizards tower creating another magmic lake, destroy the legendary (in his world) tower of the Mad Mathmetician, literally set the upper atmosphere on fire, destroy a temple to a god of time, create a new diety, cause temporal anomalies to randomly float about (fallout of the temple), cause an interdimensional explosion, and cause a paradox that led to us having two of the amulet we were collecting parts for. I feel the need to state that almost all of that destruction was accidental. Mostly. The really cool thing about all that stuff was that later, with other characters, or in later stories, those events had repercussions. We had to deal with the fallout of our semi-apocalyptic actions. Almost all his games were like that. With story and scope and consequences. However he did have a bad side. He had a habit of using opponents that were way, way outside our weight class. He could also be stingy as hell at times. Then other times he was Monty Haul. He had a habit of sending NPC's that were also way better than us along. That could get old. Except that even with those NPC's it was hard to hate them because of how well played they were. My Dad could role-play a conversation between three people without missing a beat and it made sense. He ran some of the worst, and most of the best games I have ever played. The only game he sucked at running was SR. He was a decent player in SR but his plots made no sense within the idiom. I would still trade almost all by books just to play one more session with him, even Shadowrun.
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jaellot
post Dec 4 2010, 01:27 PM
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The biggest dick GM thing I've ever done was one game of WtA, and I couldn't remember if said power took a Gnosis roll, or cost a point of Gnosis. And I said this, to see if any of the other players did (who have played and ran WtA for several years now).

Except the player who was using the power. A player who typically sat back in the group, reading her book of the week or playing her PSP. Or sighing heavily, for no other reason than because we were playing some silly game, instead of, I don't know, paying attention to her. So when she snapped off with "If you had the book maybe you'd know."

Granted, I did forget the book that night. But, as mentioned, there was a great collective knowledge of WtA sitting right there, and we are talking a 3 second pause to ponder on the mechanic. Needless to say she got even more pissy (and stopped coming after the session, too) when I said "You know what? Lose the Action." turned to the next in Initiative without missing a beat.

Dick? Hell yeah. Do it again? Double Hell yeah.
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Kagetenshi
post Dec 4 2010, 03:27 PM
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Jaellot, you are hereby promoted from "dick" to "unrepentant dick".

~J
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Laodicea
post Dec 4 2010, 05:15 PM
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QUOTE (binarywraith @ Dec 4 2010, 03:46 AM) *
I really try hard not to be That GM, but at the same time, how do you deal with it when your players make terrible decisions and expect the run to go off without a hitch?


You openly laugh at their plans. This should clue them in before they execute said plan.
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Squiddy Attack
post Dec 4 2010, 05:18 PM
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QUOTE (Laodicea @ Dec 4 2010, 09:15 AM) *
You openly laugh at their plans. This should clue them in before they execute said plan.


I have a GM who calls for an intelligence roll whenever someone gets a really bad idea.
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Aku
post Dec 4 2010, 05:23 PM
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Do they let anyone who is in on the discussion do it as well?
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J. Packer
post Dec 4 2010, 05:31 PM
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QUOTE (Squiddy Attack @ Dec 4 2010, 10:18 AM) *
I have a GM who calls for an intelligence roll whenever someone gets a really bad idea.

That's perfect for those situations where the PC is brilliant and the Player is a sock full of rocks. What do you do when the dim barbarian comes up with a plan worthy of Rube Goldberg? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)
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Squiddy Attack
post Dec 4 2010, 05:38 PM
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QUOTE (J. Packer @ Dec 4 2010, 09:31 AM) *
What do you do when the dim barbarian comes up with a plan worthy of Rube Goldberg? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)


Everybody looks at him funny. ;P
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Draco18s
post Dec 4 2010, 06:17 PM
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QUOTE (Squiddy Attack @ Dec 4 2010, 12:18 PM) *
I have a GM who calls for an intelligence roll whenever someone gets a really bad idea.


Oh man. Reminds me of when (D&D game, custom world) I suggested to an (insane) king that. I need to start in a different place.

The king imprisoned the army because he considered them to be a burden on society and we, the heroes, were trying to get his army to go attack someplace. Face was having no luck.

So I decided to fight crazy with crazy and suggested that if he thought that all the "bums" were a problem that he should just have them killed. The king loved that idea.

Man, best moment of that game. Everyone was like "holy shit" and I said, "What? He doesn't want them, we do, 'fighting a war' tends to kill a few people, right? Fight crazy with crazy."
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Ascalaphus
post Dec 6 2010, 10:59 AM
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My players aren't terribly stupid, most of the time. Of course the guy who plays the mage is the one who knows how to play a face, and the face-player understands how to play a mage. And the sniper tends to be the only one exposed to enemy attack.

I don't really have to punish players when they're being stupid. I have an idea of what's in the world and what's happening. What kind of gear the enemy has. In advance I tune it so that the party has a reasonable chance of success, and after that I just make the NPCs do what seems to make sense. Sometimes that means they kick a PC when he's down, but often enough it means the NPCs do something suboptimal because they're panicking.

If the players are doing something stupid, they'll reap the consequences of that. I know how my world works, and I don't have to invent any additional punishments; the results of their stupid plan is fair punishment already.

Also, my players can usually tell by my evil grin or overly innocent wide-eyed smile that they're setting themselves up.
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