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JMAP94
2018-07-22, 06:57 PM
Hey everyone,

So I just rejoined this session of pathfidner that my friends have been playing for some time. I told the dm, who is a good friend of mine, that I would be playing a teiastasu/night terror. If you're on the pathfinder forums, you've probably seen one of my posts there regarding this character.

I wrote a really long backstory in(we really usually write a long backstory) that I did not expect him to read write away (also gave a half page bulleted spark notes version), and I even wrote a backstory for the country my character came from that in it of itself was like ten pages long. I told him weeks in advance that this was my favorite character I've ever made, and the one I'd ever invested the most time in creating. He also tells me, since I was coming in at 5th level I had 10,500 gold to spend. So I spent time gearing up this ninja/vigilante. I even, since I sometimes have trouble describing things, made a page full of inspirational images that i could pull from to describe how my character looked. I went all out. And I get that's all on me, but i told everyone in group chat about how excited i was to play this character and I told him "this is my favorite character I've ever made as a pc" and I told him thus weeks in advance.

Then, we come to the session and immediately it turns out that the campaign that they were all in was actually in a simulation, and that none of our backstories ever happened. Furthermore, none of us ever get out gear (I expected at least to get the gear later on tithe session). He gives on the characters two rapiers (one of which is a +1), he gives another character a gun, and he gives out alchemist bombs, and to me he gives a dagger which I cannot use because I have Diasho expertise instead of weapon finesse, and when I refuse to just lie and say I can use it, he condicdingly says "fine we can treat it as a d4 wakisashi, are you happy now?"

I played through the rest of the session, and I made it clear I was pretty pissed off. I understand he worked on the session and all that, and It was full of references to old campaigns, but I couldn't enjoy it because it felt like he just took a look at everything I had made and actively said "screw you". I get that a session should never ever just be wish fulfilment time for a player, but I feel like if everyone is making a character for your world, you should let them play the character they made for your world and not screw with that part of the formula.

So we get back to the real world, and there's a jeep and now it's steampunk, and I don't want to come back to another session, and now there's now also survival elements because the how doesn't have enough gas, and now my favorite character that ive spent weeks was dead to me within the span of 5 hours.

Its just a game, and I have a life, but I kind of now understand why some people can get so angry at the TV during sports.

Chad Hooper
2018-07-22, 07:09 PM
That sucks, badly. As a GM myself, it seems to me like he should have told you up front that what he had worked up wasn't going to be appropriate for the character you've made, at your first mention of it. He could have told you to hold onto that character and later we'll play something he fits, "but for this game a character of X class/style/whatever is far more appropriate."

That said, could some of it be on you, as well? Did you ask anything about what the GM had planned? If not, that is a way you could have saved yourself from a lot of(what is now, at least to you) wasted effort, or pointed you in a more appropriate direction to apply the same amount of effort to.

Any role-playing game is an act of cooperative creation between GM and players, and an important aspect of that is communication, both directions. If nothing else, learn from that aspect of this incident and you can make sure it never happens to you again, whether with the same group or another.

JMAP94
2018-07-22, 07:19 PM
Thanks for answering.

I get the reason why he didn't want to tell us is that he wanted it to be a surprise

The thing was we did talk about some ideas of how my character would be introduced, and I had explained to him my characacter origin/who he was multiple times. I actually met with him 30 minutes before the session started to talk about how my character would be introduced. I made sure to get specific permission to play the character from him because the archerype I was playing wasnt on d20, and I had even pulled up the pdf for him when we were hanging out so he could see the class.

MeimuHakurei
2018-07-22, 07:43 PM
Reminds me of my storytelling maxim when planning as a DM: Nobody cares about your plot.

The idea behind this maxim is that DMs always think how clever and exciting their twists are and that they bank on wowing their players with something they didn't see coming. Problem is is that players are never as invested into that story or twist as the DM and never will be - not to mention how those surprise elements completely implode when any player has the information the DM wants to keep secret.

This situation just occured with the DM - they thought it would be an amazing turn of events and that the utter surprise factor is more entertaining than facing a known story the players agreed on. Protip: That's never going to happen.

Mr Beer
2018-07-22, 07:57 PM
I mean...I have pulled this on my players once but I made sure that they did not invest a lot of time developing their characters because, duh, obviously that would be annoying. I forget how I did it exactly, I think I told them it would be a meatgrinder so expect to go through a few faces or that we would develop them in play.

Tanarii
2018-07-22, 08:41 PM
Reminds me of my storytelling maxim when planning as a DM: Nobody cares about your plot.Good general maxim. That's why entering trpgs with a mindset of storytelling is generally not beneficial in the first place. There are apparently ways to do good narrative gaming, but storytelling almost always isn't one of them.

Conversely, the maxim that should probably apply in this case is the PC-making one: Nobody cares about your backstory. Not even the DM.

Chad Hooper
2018-07-22, 09:23 PM
Actually, Tanarii, I do care about a PC's backstory.

As DM, if a PC has a good backstory, I can mine it for story seeds, old grudges/crushes/loves that can provide roleplaying grist during play, maybe more. A really good backstory has a fear or phobia or maybe two the DM can use in play, to both create drama and help the player portray more depth in their character.

Yes, please, make a good backstory. Your DM may love you for it. Just make sure it's appropriate to the game it's created for and/or that the DM has agreed to work it into the story line as planned, somehow.

JMAP,

Sounds like you made your intent clear. I'd say the foul is definitely on your DM's part this time. Have you let him know how it made you feel or asked for a "reboot" of any sort?

WindStruck
2018-07-22, 09:47 PM
That's pretty lame.

I'd save that character. Save it for a special game you know you won't be ****ed over.

mgshamster
2018-07-22, 09:49 PM
Reminds me of my storytelling maxim when planning as a DM: Nobody cares about your plot.

I've always loved a good plot by the DM, and my (IRL) players have had given me quite a few Wow!s when I reveal something major or link connecting events. It's a moment I live for as a DM.

Perhaps if you played more to the story and the character rather than the mechanics of the game, you'd see more players enjoying the story.

The idea that "nobody cares about the plot" just seems like it's saying "nobody cares about anything beyond the character sheet buttons of the game mechanics." Which sounds like a bunch of crappy players, to me.

mgshamster
2018-07-22, 09:57 PM
To the OP:

I'm sorry to hear that you have lost your favorite character. I feel like there's a couple of options for you:

1) Save the character for another game. (this is a good option regardless of any other option you may choose)

2) Pick a new character

3) Quit the game

4) Run with it. Pretend the character is you, literally, in this new strange steampunk world, who's always wanted to be your favorite character, and you're pissed to discover that it isn't true. You work hard to become the person you were in the old world.

4a) Variant: Similar to the above, but be your old character. Insist the memories are real, and that this steampunk world is the fake one. You work to get back to your old world where it all makes sense and your character background is true!

A lot of times, DMs will alter the game based on how players react, and if you role-play pretty strongly that this world is fake and the previous world is real, the DM may alter the game (or perhaps it was his intent all along!) and have you discover that the old world was real and you're in a magical VR!

TheStranger
2018-07-22, 10:44 PM
Re: "nobody cares about your plot" and "nobody cares about your backstory," both of those are probably oversimplifications. IMO, it's more accurate to say "nobody is here for your plot/backstory." The group is here to have fun. If your plot/backstory contributes to that, great. If it doesn't, that's when nobody cares. It's the DMs and players who insist that their plot/backstory is more important than everybody else's fun that cause problems and lead to pithy sayings.

In this case, I agree that your DM has probably crossed that line. Given that he knew how much time you had invested in your character, he had to know that negating your work wasn't going to be fun for you. Especially knowing that he was going to be pulling his plot twist in your first session, he should have given you a heads up not to put too much time into it, even if that put his surprise at risk.

I agree with the options mgshamster gave. You're in a better position than us to know whether this DM is likely to run a good game from here on out. If you're inclined to stick with it, I'd add the suggestion of talking to your DM out of character and letting him know you put a lot of time into this character and want to get a chance to play him in a traditional fantasy setting. He may have plans to go back and forth between the two settings, and you might get a chance to use your character after all. Or he might agree that you're better off rolling a new character and saving the other one for a different game.

Psikerlord
2018-07-23, 12:49 AM
Just as the GM shouldnt plan ahead more than a session or two, neither should players. At least if it's a genuinely dangerous game.

TheStranger
2018-07-23, 12:54 AM
Just as the GM shouldnt plan ahead more than a session or two, neither should players. At least if it's a genuinely dangerous game.

There's a difference between losing a character in the normal course of play and just having your whole character concept negated by DM fiat, though.

Tanarii
2018-07-23, 01:00 AM
There's a difference between losing a character in the normal course of play and just having your whole character concept negated by DM fiat, though.
Especially when you've discussed a character concept, including long and detailed background, at length with the DM in advance.

Satinavian
2018-07-23, 01:46 AM
I've always loved a good plot by the DM, and my (IRL) players have had given me quite a few Wow!s when I reveal something major or link connecting events. It's a moment I live for as a DM.

Perhaps if you played more to the story and the character rather than the mechanics of the game, you'd see more players enjoying the story.

The idea that "nobody cares about the plot" just seems like it's saying "nobody cares about anything beyond the character sheet buttons of the game mechanics." Which sounds like a bunch of crappy players, to me.
It is obviously hyperbole. It probably should read :

"Players care for a lot of different things. You should never assume that they care more about your plot than any other of this thing and that you can simply elements of the game the players interact with just to better move your plot forward. Even worse, at the start of a campaign, players don't care about the plot (because they don't know it) at all but already care about their characters, their backgrounds and the setting. It is difficult to make the plot overshadowing any of those."

It is overall a good advice. It keeps GMs retconning backstory elements if they forgot them and now they are inconvenient. It keeps GMs from modifying character powers that are plot breaking. It keeps GMs from dictating actions for PCs to keep them on track. It keeps GMs from killing families/destroy hometowns just to build drama and at the same time cut the PCs lose.

It is just a friendly reminder that players tend to find the plot not that important and that you can really piss them off by doing things for the sake of plot.

Psyren
2018-07-23, 03:37 AM
You expected a normal PF game. instead, your DM pulled the rug out from under you and threw you into some weird kind of steampunk survival thing that (a) it sounds like you have very little interest in as a player and (b) even if you were interested, the character you sunk time into developing has no place in, wasting all your effort. Is that an accurate summary?

If so, you did the right thing by "making it clear you were pissed off." The ball is in their court - do they care about your feelings and are they willing to make restitution, or not and not? And how does the rest of the group feel? Your next course of action depends on that response.

No gaming is better than bad gaming, so if everyone else is on board for this weird campaign, maybe you let them know it's not what you signed up for and you're going to sit it out. Or maybe if you're not the only person who's dissatisfied, you all sit down as a group and hash it out.

Pleh
2018-07-23, 04:27 AM
Good general maxim. That's why entering trpgs with a mindset of storytelling is generally not beneficial in the first place. There are apparently ways to do good narrative gaming, but storytelling almost always isn't one of them.

Meh. You're just projecting your own bias and experience.

Storytelling in TTRPGs can be the best way to play, but the whole table has to both be invested in that story together (which requires some knowledge of the story) and be flexible enough in their interpretation of the story to let dice mess things up from time to time.

People DO care about backstory and plot. A lot of D&D can get pretty tired and derivative if you can't find unique ways of expressing it. After you cleave a few dozen goblins in a half dozen campaigns, you start to hope there's a little more at stake than whiffing or not. The place where people typically trip up is acting unilaterally on a story element that drags everyone else along for the ride

So an alteration of the maxim: let the table tell the story. Plans are fine, but don't expect them to survive the initial encounter.

MeimuHakurei
2018-07-23, 04:51 AM
Good general maxim. That's why entering trpgs with a mindset of storytelling is generally not beneficial in the first place. There are apparently ways to do good narrative gaming, but storytelling almost always isn't one of them.

Conversely, the maxim that should probably apply in this case is the PC-making one: Nobody cares about your backstory. Not even the DM.

Actually agreeing with you here - the backstory is the roadie of PC fluff, not meant to draw the spotlight. If the backstory really was this gripping and captivating, it would be played out on the table and not be written down in your character sheet.

Reversefigure4
2018-07-23, 07:16 AM
Ah, the famous 'surprise' game, wrecking a lot of setup and expectation for a 2 minute reveal. Pretty much always a bad idea.

The one piece of solace I have for the OP is that at least it took place pretty rapidly into the campaign, so the reveal is out of the way. Imagine playing for several months only to discover that your character and everything they'd done in game wasn't real.

Cazero
2018-07-23, 07:26 AM
I played a freeform one-shot that ended with the reveal that none of the things we did during it was real. And it was a good game.
Why was it a good game? Because the GM gave us premade character motivations and history that fitted perfectly with the whole "nothing was real" narrative. If we had to come up with our own characters, the whole thing would have been nonsensical from start to finish.

Stan
2018-07-23, 07:35 AM
Ah, the famous 'surprise' game, wrecking a lot of setup and expectation for a 2 minute reveal. Pretty much always a bad idea.


I did that once as a kid - they were imprisoned but got most of their stuff back later. I'd never do it again.

If a DM wants something weird, it should be part of the initial setup. Something like, "Hey, how about starting as prisoners in a pit? Don't bother buying equipment." Otherwise, the DM is just asking for angry people leaving.

mgshamster covered the options well. Who's to say your backstory isn't real? If you were in the alternative reality for a while, it would be a large part of your memories and would still affect your character. Maybe screw the DM and get all the players to work together to get back to the simulation.

icefractal
2018-07-23, 11:52 AM
And this is why I'm not a fan of the bait-n-switch / "what a twist!" campaign. At best it makes the players waste time, often it negates character concepts, and the payoff is seldom that great. In fact, it can leave players with a sour taste about campaigns they would have otherwise been fine with.

Jubal_Barca
2018-07-23, 11:58 AM
The storytelling-or-not bit is interesting for me, in that I think storytelling in the sense I think of it does work, but storywriting doesn't. I do traditional style spoken storytelling as a hobby and I think that's actually quite applicable, because a massive part of that is sensing what to lean on and which short elements to tell or focus on depending on how your audience will react. The story as a structure is really useful to draw people in and give them something to get invested in, but you as a storyteller also need to think on your feet to manipulate it properly for the people in front of you. That sort of storytelling I think transfers quite well, whereas a book-style "this is the linear story and you're along for the ride" is what frustrates people.

Stan
2018-07-23, 12:38 PM
The storytelling-or-not bit is interesting for me, in that I think storytelling in the sense I think of it does work, but storywriting doesn't. I do traditional style spoken storytelling as a hobby and I think that's actually quite applicable, because a massive part of that is sensing what to lean on and which short elements to tell or focus on depending on how your audience will react. The story as a structure is really useful to draw people in and give them something to get invested in, but you as a storyteller also need to think on your feet to manipulate it properly for the people in front of you. That sort of storytelling I think transfers quite well, whereas a book-style "this is the linear story and you're along for the ride" is what frustrates people.

(emphasis mine)
Good point. In that light, bait-n-switch plays into player agency as well as expectations. It's like, "Whatever you do, this weird thing is going to happen." which somewhat defeats the point of roleplaying.

Psyren
2018-07-23, 12:43 PM
And this is why I'm not a fan of the bait-n-switch / "what a twist!" campaign. At best it makes the players waste time, often it negates character concepts, and the payoff is seldom that great. In fact, it can leave players with a sour taste about campaigns they would have otherwise been fine with.

But surely the special snowflake DM is so creative that the players will prostrate themselves before his narrative skill, eagerly throwing the worthless scratchings they had the temerity to call "backstories" onto the trash heap where they belong, and unquestioningly accept the DM's clearly far superior story offerings.

Right?

Right?

:tongue:

Calthropstu
2018-07-23, 01:47 PM
Couple things.

Ok, you wrote an in depth backstory that is basically ignored, and your money is not given to you.

A couple notes on your backstory:

Unless I am using a prebuilt setting such as Golarion of Forgotten Realms, the campaign setting is MINE to build as a gm. Creating countries and custom building a city or town to suit your taste without consulting me as a gm? Yeah, I'd kick your backstory to the curb as well.

Also, as a gm I have enough work to plan settings and scenarios without reading your essays. If you want to write a page or two backstory? Fine. 10 pages plus a bunch of other crap? I don't think so.

That's what I would say as your gm. Now the money and equipment thing? I doubt that this is something I'd do. If I built a campaign world and referenced previous campaigns, the setting would be in universe. Not sme sort of simulation.

But whatevs. It sounds like you have some legitimate gripes, but as a gm, some of your actions and gripes sound like you crossed some lines yourself.

Andor13
2018-07-23, 02:37 PM
Couple things.

Ok, you wrote an in depth backstory that is basically ignored, and your money is not given to you.

A couple notes on your backstory:

Unless I am using a prebuilt setting such as Golarion of Forgotten Realms, the campaign setting is MINE to build as a gm. Creating countries and custom building a city or town to suit your taste without consulting me as a gm? Yeah, I'd kick your backstory to the curb as well.

Also, as a gm I have enough work to plan settings and scenarios without reading your essays. If you want to write a page or two backstory? Fine. 10 pages plus a bunch of other crap? I don't think so.

That's what I would say as your gm. Now the money and equipment thing? I doubt that this is something I'd do. If I built a campaign world and referenced previous campaigns, the setting would be in universe. Not sme sort of simulation.

But whatevs. It sounds like you have some legitimate gripes, but as a gm, some of your actions and gripes sound like you crossed some lines yourself.

The OP said that this group has a custom of writing long back stories. He also said he didn't expect the GM to read it right away, and even wrote up a half page list of bullet-point cliff notes to give the gist of it. So he was actually following the regular practice of his long time gaming group, and going quite the extra mile with the cliff notes. He also said he talked with the GM about it, repeatedly, over weeks.

In that light your post comes off as really arrogant and entitled.

JMAP94
2018-07-23, 02:41 PM
I did have fun here and there, to be honest, and there were some nice references to old campaigns we played, but overall the experience even sucked more because I feel like I'm just not getting along with these people as much as I used to. I thought they were really close friends of mine, but like i feel like i'm getting distant from them, and I was not having a good time in my life besides that, and it was kind of getting me depressed.

I often retreat in to my head when i'm down, and i felt like showing them this cool character I made was going to be a fun moment, and it kind of fell flat. To be honest, at the end of the campaign the DM was saying stuff along the lines of "some of the stuff in our backstory is true, but some details aren't" but it was obvious backpeddaling when he brought it up. And with the whole two rapiers, all the bombs the alchemist can use, and a gun for the rogue coupled with the "Fine! we can pretend its a wakishashi, but one that's a d4" thing and the whole piteous "oh that mask your character made is real" that just happened to be in the back seat of the jeep out of nowhere with no explanation, just made me feel more like ****, and more of an outcast.

And all those problems kind of fed into each other, and i just had a crappy day is all, and I need more friends.

I appreciate everyone letting me air and read through my salt though.

CharonsHelper
2018-07-23, 03:09 PM
And this is why I'm not a fan of the bait-n-switch / "what a twist!" campaign. At best it makes the players waste time, often it negates character concepts, and the payoff is seldom that great. In fact, it can leave players with a sour taste about campaigns they would have otherwise been fine with.

It can be done well in subtle ways - but this sounds to be pretty ham-fisted. And it was the whole world being a lie - not an NPC who happened to lie to them.

I know that in one campaign the players were trying to prove the innocence of a girl who was accused of murder, but they could never get quite enough evidence. It turned out that she was guilty and that they were being used to spread political propaganda (they had a good rep - so they had political clout).

She escaped the execution (had a double who died) and the players were SO MAD at her. But because they COULD have found out at several points they weren't mad at me (the GM) just her (the NPC who tricked them).

Reversefigure4
2018-07-23, 03:40 PM
I did that once as a kid - they were imprisoned but got most of their stuff back later. I'd never do it again.

If a DM wants something weird, it should be part of the initial setup. Something like, "Hey, how about starting as prisoners in a pit? Don't bother buying equipment." Otherwise, the DM is just asking for angry people leaving.

Yep. I'm strongly of the opinion that anything you're going to reveal in the first few hours should be revealed before the game (with the exception of a one-shot, where it's fine). Heck, I've run a mini-campaign based around being stranded on a desert island, with amnesia and GM-secretly-edited backstories. I openly told the players, right from the get-go, not to bother buying equipment of any stripe (since I'd take it away immediately), that they could have broad-strokes backstories but there was no point in adding NPCs or goals (since they wouldn't be interacting with them), and that they had only hazy recollections of the voyage itself and I'd be unlocking their memories as the campaign went on (stealing equipment, interfering with backstories, and railroading to a crash on a desert island are often broad-GM-no-nos).

I could have had them make standard characters then hit them with "Surprise, you're stranded on a desert island!", but the 5 minutes of interesting reveal would have annoyed them to the point of tanking the remaining 30+ hours of campaign. As it was, everybody was perfectly happy with it, because they'd signed on to play exactly that sort of game!

No brains
2018-07-23, 03:52 PM
Your DM rolled the dice (har-har) on pulling a twist and it didn't work out. I could talk more about what your DM did, but without your DM here to hear it, I don't know if it will be useful. The short of it is that it was a huge waste to put someone into a sim of being a ninja and not have them encounter any ninja-relevant things outside the sim. Otherwise, what was the point? A control group?

As for you, I'd say that you might have made a mistake in making your character great through their backstory. While that is a lot of fun, it puts a lot of narrative eggs in one basket. If you want to develop your character in a TTRPG, I would advise that you let your character's story develop through play. Some of my favorite characters were a few basic assumptions of how I wanted to play with something lazy like an impression of someone else tacked on. As time went on, I ended up earning my characters' heroic stories.

Related: if you have a permissive DM, it's possible to "Texas Sharp-shoot" a good backstory by working backwards through things that turned out to be true about the character. Things will pop up in characters' actions and choices that must have been influenced by their past. Improvisational storytelling might not be everyone's thing, but it can help to strengthen the connection between campaign and character.

Last thing, don't throw out that backstory if you still like it. You've still got the chance to play that character in another game somewhere down the road. If you want to give your DM better than they deserve for tossing out your continuity, you can still make the assumption that your character's backstory had to have happened to a real person at some point in some Assassin's Creed kind of way.

Calthropstu
2018-07-23, 05:11 PM
The OP said that this group has a custom of writing long back stories. He also said he didn't expect the GM to read it right away, and even wrote up a half page list of bullet-point cliff notes to give the gist of it. So he was actually following the regular practice of his long time gaming group, and going quite the extra mile with the cliff notes. He also said he talked with the GM about it, repeatedly, over weeks.

In that light your post comes off as really arrogant and entitled.

To be honest, I take what the op says with a grain of salt. If the regular practice is 10+ pages of backstory for character creation fine. But I wouldn't read all that. Also, I don't see where he talked it over with the gm before inserting an entire country into his campaign setting. I doubt the gm even read it. That's what is really raising my heckles.
The campaign world is the sole purview of the gm. Players don't have the right to be creating places and people outside of their own characters and maybe a few people in their backstory. The towns, the world, the cities... those are the gm's prerogative.

Cluedrew
2018-07-23, 05:55 PM
To be honest, I take what the op says with a grain of salt. If the regular practice is 10+ pages of backstory for character creation fine. But I wouldn't read all that. Also, I don't see where he talked it over with the gm before inserting an entire country into his campaign setting. I doubt the gm even read it. That's what is really raising my heckles.That the GM didn't do their homework before accepting a character?

I mean if I got a 10+ page back story... well I would try reading it, because I am that kind of crazy. If I couldn't get through it I would try to gage the density of the story in terms of important character aspects and figure out an appropriate summary length. Page or two most likely. I'd ask for that and read it and approve that. The longer story would have a kind of soft acceptance based on the fact that the summery of it made it in so it is unlikely that any of the details will be problematic.

How that relates to this case, if you accept a character it should because you either have gone over it. Maybe if you trust the player a lot you might just take it and deal with any problems later. You should not however accept a character's back story because half way through session one they might as well set it on fire.

JMAP94
2018-07-23, 06:55 PM
To be honest, I take what the op says with a grain of salt. If the regular practice is 10+ pages of backstory for character creation fine. But I wouldn't read all that. Also, I don't see where he talked it over with the gm before inserting an entire country into his campaign setting. I doubt the gm even read it. That's what is really raising my heckles.
The campaign world is the sole purview of the gm. Players don't have the right to be creating places and people outside of their own characters and maybe a few people in their backstory. The towns, the world, the cities... those are the gm's prerogative.

The backstory wasn't long because It was complex, and I even included a summary along with a message saying "the only thing I expect you to read is this summary right now." We only meet a few months put of the year so if he didnt read the thing for like fpur sessions, it wouldve been probably next year. The long version was like four pages (my personal backstory) only because it was a letter my character had written to his son in the first person describing his outlook in the events in his life and the advice he would give his son.

Also yes long backstories are commonplace in my group. For our last campaign, my friend wrote a 14 page backstory, which included backstories for side characters. The guy who was dming wrote about like a 6 page backstory for his character for my game.

I didn't expect my long lost nemesis to show up session one, or it seven being acknowledged in the slightest within the first couple of sessions. I never even expected to return back to my homeland or interact with it in anyway directly, nor to have it have any impact on the plot. But I also didn't expect to just actively screw with it and it kinda sucked is all.

Characters were part of a detective agency and i had come to the town because there was a guy murdering people with the same m.o. as someone my clan and i killed long ago, and I knew about the agency because I worked for another characters relative (I got permission from both the dm and the player to do this).

Listen, I'm admitting that it's partly me being salty, I had something in my mind that I thought everyone agreed upon, I got excited to go to Disneyland, and instead we ended up in some max headroom matrix b.s. and I didn't get what I wanted out of the game. But I don't really think it's an unreasonable thing to get to play the character you made for the game you were told we would be playing.

I also felt like I was singled out during the session. I felt like everyone got to play their character, and the dm bent over backwards to give them the stuff they could use, each of them got a base weapon that they had in the campaign, one got two swords, one got a sword and a firearm, the other gets bombs, and I got a nerfed version of a base weapon for some reason that he snottily "pitied" to me.

I'm probably going to give it one more shot, but if it goes to hell and I feel like I'm being singled out again, I think I'm just going to stay clear of hanging out with them, either that or go out to blow up their campaign in a third session, but I'm not that petty lol.

Andor13
2018-07-23, 10:52 PM
To be honest, I take what the op says with a grain of salt. If the regular practice is 10+ pages of backstory for character creation fine. But I wouldn't read all that. Also, I don't see where he talked it over with the gm before inserting an entire country into his campaign setting. I doubt the gm even read it. That's what is really raising my heckles.
The campaign world is the sole purview of the gm. Players don't have the right to be creating places and people outside of their own characters and maybe a few people in their backstory. The towns, the world, the cities... those are the gm's prerogative.

I don't disagree with you, but you're presuming that there was no discussion with the GM. As a GM I would absolutely stomp flat any PC who tried to walk in cold with a ninja-war back story into my Venetian politics game, but someone who came to me with the idea, and agreed to modify it to fit with the local politics/classes/races would probably get a cookie for saving me some work. If a player in interested enough to want 10 pages of information, one of us has to write it. Out of curiosity, how much material do you provide to your players, and are they expected to know it?

Hell, I've had a GM tell me that they had a pretty blank map and that if I wanted to draw up a country, go right ahead. ... It was not a great game, and frankly as a player I prefer your approach because it shows me you're a GM who has invested considerable thought in his world, or has a strong vision for how it should be, (or is a control freak, but that's usually pretty obvious.) The point being, your personal GMing style isn't universal and you shouldn't assume that a player is being obnoxious just because they aren't using your table protocols.

Psyren
2018-07-24, 03:05 PM
I don't disagree with you, but you're presuming that there was no discussion with the GM. As a GM I would absolutely stomp flat any PC who tried to walk in cold with a ninja-war back story into my Venetian politics game, but someone who came to me with the idea, and agreed to modify it to fit with the local politics/classes/races would probably get a cookie for saving me some work. If a player in interested enough to want 10 pages of information, one of us has to write it. Out of curiosity, how much material do you provide to your players, and are they expected to know it?

Agreed - a player who shows that kind of interest/initiative in the game should be embraced, not stomped flat. You should take their write-up and try to incorporate it as best you can. Sure you have veto power over what actually makes it into the campaign, and creative freedom to file off/rearrange the serial numbers... but I would err on the side of using more stuff from those 10 pages rather than less.

More to the point, if you get those 10 pages and know for a fact that you're going to be running a bait-and-switch campaign that invalidates them, even without reading through the whole thing, the onus is on you to let the player know that they shouldn't get too invested in what they wrote this time around. Failing to do so is a jerk move by the DM, not the player - the player isn't the one who knows what's coming.

Kardwill
2018-07-25, 04:37 AM
The campaign world is the sole purview of the gm. Players don't have the right to be creating places and people outside of their own characters and maybe a few people in their backstory. The towns, the world, the cities... those are the gm's prerogative.

That's not true of every game or every gametable. On my current Dresden Files campaign, we created the setting together (we selected a real world city, fished for info about it, and then decided together what the supernatural factions and their interaction would be, who were the bigweight NPCs and villains in town, what the city's main problems would be, and how the characters would fit into all of this), and it allowed us to have a setting in which the PCs were intricately woven.
And even on a more traditional D&D game, I would have no problem with a player who wants to flesh out his hometown or the knight order he's part of, or the organisation he fights, as long as he makes sure I'm okay with it and we work together to make it interesting and useful info (So no 15 pages angsty novel about the character's tragic childhood without asking first "I want my assassin to be a deserter from an evil cult. Is it okay if we flesh out those bad guys and the people who helped me out?") :smallsmile:

GungHo
2018-07-25, 09:39 AM
What we've got here is a failure to communicate.

Calthropstu
2018-07-25, 03:55 PM
What we've got here is a failure to communicate.
****** rifle*
BANG!

Edit: Really? You can't **** a rifle on these forums?

Scripten
2018-07-25, 05:23 PM
****** rifle*
BANG!

Edit: Really? You can't **** a rifle on these forums?

You probably shouldn't **** a rifle anywhere, really.

mgshamster
2018-07-25, 05:30 PM
You probably shouldn't **** a rifle anywhere, really.

It's the way he likes it, so it's the way he gets it. I don't like it any more than the rest of you.

Calthropstu
2018-07-25, 05:33 PM
You probably shouldn't **** a rifle anywhere, really.

**** as in "word for setting the rifle into the ready position." Same word for a male chicken, as well as male anatomy.

Elricaltovilla
2018-07-25, 06:49 PM
**** as in "word for setting the rifle into the ready position." Same word for a male chicken, as well as male anatomy.

You gotta admit, it's funnier when it's censored in this case. Kind of like the censored version of Snakes on a Plane.

Calthropstu
2018-07-25, 07:35 PM
You gotta admit, it's funnier when it's censored in this case. Kind of like the censored version of Snakes on a Plane.

Lol fair enough I suppose.

Lord Torath
2018-07-25, 08:45 PM
****** rifle*
BANG!

Edit: Really? You can't **** a rifle on these forums?Yes, you can **** your rifle, or shotgun, or pistol. Or even your hip or your eyebrow. You can also play badminton with a shuttlecock and talk about roosters. You can get around the filter as long as you don't use it for swearing. Or for crude references to male (or female) anatomy. **** Tracy is a safe topic of conversation (in the Media Discussion boards, or if you want to base a character off him), for example, but if you just want to say ***, ****, *****, or everyone's favorite, ************, then trying to get around the filters will get you in trouble with the mods.

Hey, JMAP94! After you talk to your DM, come back and tell us how it went. We all like to think we give good advice, but we won't know unless you give us the after-action report!

JMAP94
2018-07-25, 10:43 PM
Hey, JMAP94! After you talk to your DM, come back and tell us how it went. We all like to think we give good advice, but we won't know unless you give us the after-action report!

So I did talk to him, and he saw my point of view. He told me that he kind of screwed up, and he wanted to do this story line mainly because he didn't like the city we were in on account of it being too generic feeling, and that the reaon my character got screwed on item is that he forgot to put in stuff for my character which I mean I still didn't like how he handled that in game.

Apparently all the stuff we had in our backstories is true but the city wasn't and they just happened in the real world, but then we got the memories given to us thay were identical but we were made to belive they all happend in the fake world, but we also have amnesia.....idk. I'm less annoyed now, but I'm now confused.

most people had a problem with it at the table from what I hear, but not nearly as bad as i was.

As a gm, I would probably just have the characters leave the city if I was bored with it.

I was really salty about it which is why I titled the posf as is. Like sometimes you try something as a dm and it screws up I get that.

CharonsHelper
2018-07-25, 10:55 PM
So I did talk to him, and he saw my point of view. He told me that he kind of screwed up, and he wanted to do this story line mainly because he didn't like the city we were in on account of it being too generic feeling, and that the reaon my character got screwed on item is that he forgot to put in stuff for my character which I mean I still didn't like how he handled that in game.

Apparently all the stuff we had in our backstories is true but the city wasn't and they just happened in the real world, but then we got the memories given to us thay were identical but we were made to belive they all happend in the fake world, but we also have amnesia.....idk. I'm less annoyed now, but I'm now confused.

most people had a problem with it at the table from what I hear, but not nearly as bad as i was.

As a gm, I would probably just have the characters leave the city if I was bored with it.

I was really salty about it which is why I titled the posf as is. Like sometimes you try something as a dm and it screws up I get that.

I'm glad that it seems to have worked out as well as could be expected. Glad that he took ownership of any potential screw-up and that it doesn't seem to have soured your friendship!

Calthropstu
2018-07-26, 12:33 AM
I'm glad that it seems to have worked out as well as could be expected. Glad that he took ownership of any potential screw-up and that it doesn't seem to have soured your friendship!

Agreed. A gm that can admit screwing up is a good thing. Even better if he can fix it.