atemu1234
2022-03-25, 06:36 PM
Alright, so, for starters, a bit of context here - I've GMed 3.5e and Pathfinder since about my sophomore year of high school. I'm now in my mid-twenties, so my relationship with this game has been far more stable than any romantic relationship I've ever had. I started off learning the rules and teaching some of my classmates, and that was the start of my group.
Most of the members left over the years, and new people joined, others left, we've gone through a few different campaigns, some homebrew, some adventure paths, so on, so we run into a bit of a Ship of Theseus situation in a lot of ways. Still, I'm close with a couple of my friends from the O.G. (original group), and they still take part in some of my campaigns, and others among them have even GMed a few times themselves.
Now, I've been trying to stick to APs for the last couple of years, because as it stands, I need to spend slightly less time trying to come up with adventures for people and a bit more time trying to keep my work life from eating me alive. But old habits are hard to break, in a lot of ways, and I usually wind up homebrewing a fair bit of what goes on in my campaigns, enough so that it sometimes makes the APs hard to recognize, and definitely divergent from the original plot.
One of my players (let's call them R) has been a consistent member of the group since it first formed - the third person I ever taught how to play, first 3.5, then Pathfinder, who has GMed a few times. I've had... issues with them in the past. Nothing too ridiculous - but I still remember the first time they had a PC die, and they stormed off and ended the session early. That was when they were still a teenager. They're only a year younger than me. They've never really improved.
As much as I try to avoid it, there always seems to be some kind of an issue - they decided to target one of my characters in their campaign a while back, because they didn't want a Necromancer character making too many undead, clogging up combat. Wouldn't have been an issue if they'd talked to me about it out-of-game and we'd come up with an agreement. Instead, they threw an encounter about +6 CR above the party level specifically to kill my character, and then got into a huff when one of the players pointed out they'd have to leave the dungeon to get someone to resurrect me.
We're playing Way of the Wicked, now, and the group for this has dwindled by a lot - it's just me, them, and two other players - one from the O.G., but a big sufferer of Inattentive Gaming Syndrome, and another that's a new arrival. I mention my massive amounts of homebrew for a reason. This is my second attempt to run this campaign after the first crashed and burned midway through book one, when one of the players decided a spree-killing in Balentyne was the perfect distraction for an assassination attempt on the paladin running the place. They split the party three ways, a barbarian going on a murder spree, a rogue attempting an assassination, and a psion and alchemist blowing up a grain silo. We met up for a couple sessions after that, but it became pretty clear that they weren't going to be able to come anywhere near breaking the watch wall, and so we decided to shelf it for a while.
That was going on four years ago.
Now, with a new party, R is playing a Rogue (they were the Psion last time), Inattentive is a barbarian, and the new blood is a Sorcerer. They made it through Balentyne alright - though I had to, ironically, let them unleash anthrax on the soldiers to make it work. I shouldn't have, in all likelihood, but what the hell, I figured at least then they'd be on to bigger and better things.
Except, they weren't. Without a healer, I had to give them an NPC healer on behalf of Tiadora and Thorne to make the party not run the risk of dying horribly. For my own enjoyment, I made the healer an updated version of the 3.5 Miniatures Handbook class, instead of a Cleric. That was fine by me, not a big risk, and better to have a mute slave NPC for the players to RP off of rather than the alternative. In Farholde, I've introduced a half-dozen or more homebrew NPCs, to add flavor, and altered existing NPCs, Vandermir in particular, in order to make it more interesting.
Now, here's where things get hairy. The party has... authority issues, to put it mildly. I've RPed Tiadora and Thorne as, frankly, arrogant asshats, and made the NPC healer - who is one of Tiadora's former victims - very sympathetic. The goal here was to push them to try and redeem themselves.
See, I've GMed long enough to spot certain trends in players. From the get-go, none of them was really willing to make the push to RP an Evil character. Sure, they had the alignment on their character sheets, but every time I explained what happened as a result of their actions, it made them supremely uncomfortable. I knew there wasn't going to be a way for them to make it to the end of the AP as-written.
Unfortunately, they still need to get the Tears of Achlys. They've dallied around Farholde enough, I turned Wrecker Isle into an actual hidden grotto-***-dungeon that they needed to clear, and in doing so, they managed to restore Salhain-the-Spider-Waits to life, by bonding her to the Yew tree in Calliver's Green, making her into a psuedo-dryad and region-locked demigod, something of a guardian spirit for Farholde to protect the city from the Tears when the party gives it to Thorne.
But now, we run into the real issues. R has gotten it into her head that the party needs to break the contract with Thorne, effective immediately. And not in some minor, subterfuge-y way, either, but by hunting down the Contract Devil who holds the contract - because they've been metagaming enough to figure it is an infernal contract, even though it isn't, at least not in the "classic" sense - and destroying both the contract and the devil. This has lead to several problems.
First, R expects instant results. I B.S. a ritual to contact a contract devil - Dessiter, who doesn't have their contract. I use it to foreshadow a bit, he sends them a key engraved with a runic "Z" and a warning to stay the course. R doesn't like this.
After the session ends, R sends a passive aggressive group message about how they need a good reason to show up next session or they're quitting the campaign. Why? Because apparently they feel like I'm railroading them after three sessions over two months and an in-game fortnight spent messing around in Farholde. Then they feel like I misled them with the ritual - the whole "why let me do it if it wouldn't accomplish anything?" bit, even though I used to foreshadow future events and give them a useful plot hook later on. Apparently they expected the contract devil to just teleport to them and let them get a surprise round, or something.
But, I can play ball. I send out my own group message, letting them know that if they aren't happy with the campaign - and, frankly, I'm not really surprised by it, given that none of the are content playing evil characters in the first place - I'm entirely willing to let them make new characters and we could do a playthrough of Rise of the Runelords. My logic was that if they wanted me to burn a year of writing for this campaign, then they should be willing to start from scratch with new characters.
Then, while they're mulling it over, R throws a fit. Because they expected me to let them keep their characters from the current campaign and send them off to do something else if they quit working for Thorne. I explain that they aren't in a place where I can write a proper adventure for them if they leave the area they're in, in the time they're at, and especially can't just write a new campaign on the fly right now. I've been preparing for some time for them to break faith with Thorne, but I need them to at least do this part of the AP in order to be able to justify the fall of Talingarde - that way, the players could actually go up against Thorne as a big bad instead of the majority of the plots of the last half of the AP. The Tears of Achlys and the fall of the Vale of Valtaerna would be the best time.
But I can't explain that to them fully without spoiling the plot of the next book and a half. Something which became no longer an issue, it turns out, when R takes it upon themself to explain to the other two members of the group precisely what is supposed to happen, per the book, for those next books. Including things that I've re-written to remove from the plot, or expanded upon, or altered so fundamentally that they're irrelevant. The way they do this is to suggest that nothing they're doing really matters anyways and they shouldn't be doing anything at all, and taking a dump on the other two PCs character motivations along the way.
So, I admit, I kind of snapped. I messaged them about how they need to back off and let me GM, and take a moment to evaluate the fact that I don't GM directly out of the book, and they know that, and how inappropriate what they were doing was. They shoot back that I told the players in one of their campaigns, Kingmaker, about the backstory of the Stag Lord - right after we had already beaten him and were about to kill him anyway. Sort of a different magnitude, especially since they hadn't put forth any effort to characterize the Stag Lord even during a roleplay encounter between him and the bard.
I tell them that the fundamental difference between them and I is that I rewrite ahead of the game, knowing to a degree what the party will want to do, and that by spoiling as much of the plot as they had - all the way up through book five or so - they've given the other players too much of an idea for what "should" happen, versus letting it happen organically - and making my changes far more obvious. I feel like an ass for pointing out the first bit, but I was angry. I then point out they don't know nearly as much as they thought they did, no matter how much of the books they'd read, and that if they felt like they were in over their heads with the plot in Talingarde, then that was literally the entire goal of what I was doing.
So, I guess what I'm asking is, am I a jerk for how I've handled this? I've argued with them a handful of times, but I usually try to make amends after, but I honestly don't know if I'm willing to let this one slide. I'm definitely not willing to apologize for not letting them metagame their way out of a central plot conceit, but honestly, I just don't even know at this point if this player is going to even keep showing up.
Edit: Sorry for the initial wall of text; been a long time since I posted here, forgot how formatting works.
Most of the members left over the years, and new people joined, others left, we've gone through a few different campaigns, some homebrew, some adventure paths, so on, so we run into a bit of a Ship of Theseus situation in a lot of ways. Still, I'm close with a couple of my friends from the O.G. (original group), and they still take part in some of my campaigns, and others among them have even GMed a few times themselves.
Now, I've been trying to stick to APs for the last couple of years, because as it stands, I need to spend slightly less time trying to come up with adventures for people and a bit more time trying to keep my work life from eating me alive. But old habits are hard to break, in a lot of ways, and I usually wind up homebrewing a fair bit of what goes on in my campaigns, enough so that it sometimes makes the APs hard to recognize, and definitely divergent from the original plot.
One of my players (let's call them R) has been a consistent member of the group since it first formed - the third person I ever taught how to play, first 3.5, then Pathfinder, who has GMed a few times. I've had... issues with them in the past. Nothing too ridiculous - but I still remember the first time they had a PC die, and they stormed off and ended the session early. That was when they were still a teenager. They're only a year younger than me. They've never really improved.
As much as I try to avoid it, there always seems to be some kind of an issue - they decided to target one of my characters in their campaign a while back, because they didn't want a Necromancer character making too many undead, clogging up combat. Wouldn't have been an issue if they'd talked to me about it out-of-game and we'd come up with an agreement. Instead, they threw an encounter about +6 CR above the party level specifically to kill my character, and then got into a huff when one of the players pointed out they'd have to leave the dungeon to get someone to resurrect me.
We're playing Way of the Wicked, now, and the group for this has dwindled by a lot - it's just me, them, and two other players - one from the O.G., but a big sufferer of Inattentive Gaming Syndrome, and another that's a new arrival. I mention my massive amounts of homebrew for a reason. This is my second attempt to run this campaign after the first crashed and burned midway through book one, when one of the players decided a spree-killing in Balentyne was the perfect distraction for an assassination attempt on the paladin running the place. They split the party three ways, a barbarian going on a murder spree, a rogue attempting an assassination, and a psion and alchemist blowing up a grain silo. We met up for a couple sessions after that, but it became pretty clear that they weren't going to be able to come anywhere near breaking the watch wall, and so we decided to shelf it for a while.
That was going on four years ago.
Now, with a new party, R is playing a Rogue (they were the Psion last time), Inattentive is a barbarian, and the new blood is a Sorcerer. They made it through Balentyne alright - though I had to, ironically, let them unleash anthrax on the soldiers to make it work. I shouldn't have, in all likelihood, but what the hell, I figured at least then they'd be on to bigger and better things.
Except, they weren't. Without a healer, I had to give them an NPC healer on behalf of Tiadora and Thorne to make the party not run the risk of dying horribly. For my own enjoyment, I made the healer an updated version of the 3.5 Miniatures Handbook class, instead of a Cleric. That was fine by me, not a big risk, and better to have a mute slave NPC for the players to RP off of rather than the alternative. In Farholde, I've introduced a half-dozen or more homebrew NPCs, to add flavor, and altered existing NPCs, Vandermir in particular, in order to make it more interesting.
Now, here's where things get hairy. The party has... authority issues, to put it mildly. I've RPed Tiadora and Thorne as, frankly, arrogant asshats, and made the NPC healer - who is one of Tiadora's former victims - very sympathetic. The goal here was to push them to try and redeem themselves.
See, I've GMed long enough to spot certain trends in players. From the get-go, none of them was really willing to make the push to RP an Evil character. Sure, they had the alignment on their character sheets, but every time I explained what happened as a result of their actions, it made them supremely uncomfortable. I knew there wasn't going to be a way for them to make it to the end of the AP as-written.
Unfortunately, they still need to get the Tears of Achlys. They've dallied around Farholde enough, I turned Wrecker Isle into an actual hidden grotto-***-dungeon that they needed to clear, and in doing so, they managed to restore Salhain-the-Spider-Waits to life, by bonding her to the Yew tree in Calliver's Green, making her into a psuedo-dryad and region-locked demigod, something of a guardian spirit for Farholde to protect the city from the Tears when the party gives it to Thorne.
But now, we run into the real issues. R has gotten it into her head that the party needs to break the contract with Thorne, effective immediately. And not in some minor, subterfuge-y way, either, but by hunting down the Contract Devil who holds the contract - because they've been metagaming enough to figure it is an infernal contract, even though it isn't, at least not in the "classic" sense - and destroying both the contract and the devil. This has lead to several problems.
First, R expects instant results. I B.S. a ritual to contact a contract devil - Dessiter, who doesn't have their contract. I use it to foreshadow a bit, he sends them a key engraved with a runic "Z" and a warning to stay the course. R doesn't like this.
After the session ends, R sends a passive aggressive group message about how they need a good reason to show up next session or they're quitting the campaign. Why? Because apparently they feel like I'm railroading them after three sessions over two months and an in-game fortnight spent messing around in Farholde. Then they feel like I misled them with the ritual - the whole "why let me do it if it wouldn't accomplish anything?" bit, even though I used to foreshadow future events and give them a useful plot hook later on. Apparently they expected the contract devil to just teleport to them and let them get a surprise round, or something.
But, I can play ball. I send out my own group message, letting them know that if they aren't happy with the campaign - and, frankly, I'm not really surprised by it, given that none of the are content playing evil characters in the first place - I'm entirely willing to let them make new characters and we could do a playthrough of Rise of the Runelords. My logic was that if they wanted me to burn a year of writing for this campaign, then they should be willing to start from scratch with new characters.
Then, while they're mulling it over, R throws a fit. Because they expected me to let them keep their characters from the current campaign and send them off to do something else if they quit working for Thorne. I explain that they aren't in a place where I can write a proper adventure for them if they leave the area they're in, in the time they're at, and especially can't just write a new campaign on the fly right now. I've been preparing for some time for them to break faith with Thorne, but I need them to at least do this part of the AP in order to be able to justify the fall of Talingarde - that way, the players could actually go up against Thorne as a big bad instead of the majority of the plots of the last half of the AP. The Tears of Achlys and the fall of the Vale of Valtaerna would be the best time.
But I can't explain that to them fully without spoiling the plot of the next book and a half. Something which became no longer an issue, it turns out, when R takes it upon themself to explain to the other two members of the group precisely what is supposed to happen, per the book, for those next books. Including things that I've re-written to remove from the plot, or expanded upon, or altered so fundamentally that they're irrelevant. The way they do this is to suggest that nothing they're doing really matters anyways and they shouldn't be doing anything at all, and taking a dump on the other two PCs character motivations along the way.
So, I admit, I kind of snapped. I messaged them about how they need to back off and let me GM, and take a moment to evaluate the fact that I don't GM directly out of the book, and they know that, and how inappropriate what they were doing was. They shoot back that I told the players in one of their campaigns, Kingmaker, about the backstory of the Stag Lord - right after we had already beaten him and were about to kill him anyway. Sort of a different magnitude, especially since they hadn't put forth any effort to characterize the Stag Lord even during a roleplay encounter between him and the bard.
I tell them that the fundamental difference between them and I is that I rewrite ahead of the game, knowing to a degree what the party will want to do, and that by spoiling as much of the plot as they had - all the way up through book five or so - they've given the other players too much of an idea for what "should" happen, versus letting it happen organically - and making my changes far more obvious. I feel like an ass for pointing out the first bit, but I was angry. I then point out they don't know nearly as much as they thought they did, no matter how much of the books they'd read, and that if they felt like they were in over their heads with the plot in Talingarde, then that was literally the entire goal of what I was doing.
So, I guess what I'm asking is, am I a jerk for how I've handled this? I've argued with them a handful of times, but I usually try to make amends after, but I honestly don't know if I'm willing to let this one slide. I'm definitely not willing to apologize for not letting them metagame their way out of a central plot conceit, but honestly, I just don't even know at this point if this player is going to even keep showing up.
Edit: Sorry for the initial wall of text; been a long time since I posted here, forgot how formatting works.