Treat Your Players Like Peers, Not Students
I have had this happen months ago in a game in which I was playing a cleric in a D&D 4th Edition game. The GM had arranged a story where two good goddesses were at odds with each other, and my character being a cleric of one of the two good goddesses had to deal with the tricky situation of hostile negotiations with the other side.
Of course my character was of significantly lower level than the opposing side’s cleric, so a direct confrontation was out of the question such as setting stakes for both sides and then having a duel to see who wins. Say what you want about “roleplaying vs. roll playing”, but a non-lethal combat to solve a social conflict is a legitimate tactic that puts the game first and not the GM’s opinion.
Now to set the stage for what the conflict was all about. The goddesses involved were Erathis and Melora. Erathis, my character’s deity, is the goddess of civilization. Melora, the opposing side’s deity, is the goddess of nature and the wilderness. Apparently a temple of Erathis had been built on territory claimed by Melora. Erathis did not request this temple, her followers simply showed up and built it.
If we were keeping score, we could say that Erathis had wronged Melora at this point in the story, but it does not end there. The city erupts in civil war for reasons unrelated to the conflict between the goddesses, and through a comedy of errors a magical dome encapsulates the entire city trapping everyone inside. From the outside you can enter the dome, but if you try to leave it will kill you. The city is now being used as a prison by a tyrant, and my PC’s party was sent in order to find out if rumors of a way to escape the city were true or not.
In case you missed those railroad tracks read the last sentence of the previous paragraph again.
But that is not all! As several hundred years pass the city comes to be ruled by gangs, one of which is the follower’s of Melora. Their base is the former temple of Erathis which is now overgrown, and the giant holy symbol of Erathis (the cog) has been broken, allowed to rust, and desecrated. Furthermore the only way to escape the city is to repair the cog and remove it from the old temple.
Were the NPCs reasonable in that after explaining that by working together all of them could be free? No, of course not. That would make an already outrageously complex plot workable to some degree.
The GM had been a player in a previous campaign in which I had played my character. He knew that I played a character who was a zealot, but who was also tortured by his faith. He had at one point been completely cut off from his goddess as a formal punishment for his zealotry. I am a very intense role player, so I was really trying to play this outwardly fierce but internally fragile character. What can be more dramatic than a cleric who is having a crisis of faith? When the GM asked what were we hoping to achieve in the campaign before it began I clearly stated that I wanted my character to have a chance to confront his goddess and show her how she was also in the wrong (there was an event in the character’s story to justify this).
Did that confrontation take place? No. Instead it was later revealed that the GM decided to set all of these various elements up in order to teach my character a lesson: Sometimes civilization is messy.
That ruined the story, the game, and the character for me. This GM wanted to teach me a lesson about how he had interpreted the deities of the game world. The verisimilitude of the game world is of no interest to me whatsoever if it is at the expense of the hard work that I had been putting into the development of my character. The obvious stacking of the deck against my character in order to prove a point which I did not need to learn, and which the GM foolishly assumed he was authorized to teach me, just punched a hole right through the game out of which all of the fun gushed out.
Why was this so bad? Because the GM decided to manipulate me. Not the character. He decided to manipulate me as a person. He took the role of GM more than a step too far. He took it an entire marathon too far.
If you want to explain a concept, or communicate your beliefs to one of your players do it by having a conversation with your friend! Do not do it by manipulating your player through one of your games! What this GM did not only ruined the game for me, but it also soured our friendship.
So never use your game as a way to teach a player a lesson. That is not what people joined your game for. They joined your game in order to explore what it is like to be another person and to have fun. A GM who has another agenda for them is going to risk a lot more than just a bad game.
Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment below and we will take it from there.
So,
I’m going to say, I obviously don’t know the whole story — just the parts you’ve written here — and this stuff has some disconnect to it… (I’m not really sure where/how the “hundreds of years pass” part fits in as the rest of the events seem more immediate) so I don’t want to be too judge-y, but…
I can’t really see where the DM went wrong here, or why the initial set-up is a railroad. In fact, I’m not sure how the DM set out to “teach you a lesson” at all. I see a lesson for your character — and I agree that the DM is probably guilty of not communicating well enough with you about his perceptions about how the D&D standard pantheon works in his campaign if that differs from the “norm” but simply reading what you wrote here, I’d be fine with most of it — and I’m an intense Role-Player type myself.
Now, again, I don’t know the whole story, but just from what you’ve written here, I don’t see anything abusive here. I’d say, if anything, you guys had a case of clashing expectations that maybe could have been softened with some discussion about the game outside of game time.
If I were your DM, I’d probably be wondering why, if you are such an intense roleplayer, you didn’t respond to my careful attempt to challenge and test your PC a little and see how you hold up under the strain of having your faith challenged in this way… and I might be a little offended that you are so angry about it. So I’d talk to each other and try to work it out…
@Rhetorical Gamer: I should be more precise. When I said “I’m having difficulty understanding where this campaign is going.” and the GM responds with “I wanted to show you that civilization can be messy.” that is the GM overstepping their bounds IMO.
As for not seeing the railroad, well he was going to have all of our PCs thrown into a prison city that no one had ever escaped from. There was no choice in the matter. That is railroading, again IMO.
Well, it’s your game, and you were there — I wasn’t. So everything I can infer is only that… but I still see a cause of conflicted expectations behind this more than railroading or snobbery…
I guess when I read the part where you said, “the PCs were sent to find out if escape was possible” I assumed that meant, you know, that you were given a mission, not beaten and thrown into the dome prison. Or otherwise forced into it. Why couldn’t you refuse the mission? Why couldn’t you have simply talked to the GM and said, “hey, this isn’t really something we’re having fun with.” Cause then if the GM says, “Too bad, like it or leave” then he’s really being a jerk — but until then — I see a frustrated player who is upset at the GM but the GM doesn’t seem to understand why…
Again — I’m not trying to get on your case. I know it could sound that way… I just wonder if there is not a friendly resolution to this situation that is lurking just behind the anger?
@Rhetorical Gamer: The GM made it very clear to us that if the PCs were not put in the prison city that there would be no adventure. Holding the adventure hostage is railroading. It is not good GMing, and it can be avoided by better adventure design.
I was very clear in more than one email sent in private that I was not enjoying the game and felt that I was not being allowed to play my character as I wanted to. At one point I wanted my character to receive a magical tattoo of his deity’s holy symbol. The character being a zealot wanted the tattoo to be on his face. The GM’s response was “No.” then he said that he would allow it if I took a -2 modifier to the character’s charisma score.
Is that reasonable? No, it is not. This is a fantasy setting where people with horns, tails, pointy ears, bodies made of stone, dragon people, shape shifters, and a plethora of other odd attributes are all visible. There are even pictures of characters in the book with tattoos on their faces. Why impose a -2 modifier to my character for something that fits so well with the character? Why not at least offer some kind of trade? Take 2 off of the character’s charisma and add 2 points elsewhere. In 4e Charisma is not a dump stat, so why force a penalty on my character for behaving like a fanatically devoted champion of the deity that he has pledged his life too?
Enough problems will arise from that tattoo without punishing the character. He would be easily identifiable. Any enemy of Erathis would see his devotion immediately. There would also be benefits. Temples of Erathis would know whose side he was on, and perhaps the goddess herself would be pleased with him.
Are these details starting to fill in the situation more completely for you? I’m not suggesting that you must agree with me, but as I said this all took place months ago. It is not like I have not had time to analyze what went wrong. One reason why I waited so long to write about this was to try and isolate what made the situation unpleasant for me.
And in the end it was always a lack of true freedom to play my character as I wanted to complicated by the GM manipulating me as a player.
Let me put it like this: You ask for player input and then ignore it to do what you want to do as a GM then you are manipulating the players. You are putting hope in their minds that they will have a part in the telling of a collective story, but in truth you have no intention of delivering on that implied promise.
Heh. Well, with that information, that’s a different picture. If the DM is basically telling the PCs that they have ONE option for an adventure or they might as well go home, that’s definitely railroading and bad GMing. No doubt about that.
Also, if the GM asks for input and then ignores it? Also really bad.
That’s a much different picture than you painted in your original post, or at least, more clear.
I think that’s a game I’d just walk away from.