Control Freak GM: Therapy Needed

[Archpaladin Zousha]

I've sort of noticed a bad pattern in my GMing style. I'm a huge control freak when it comes to narrative and characters. I find myself insisting certain character styles and archetypes to players that fit best with whatever Adventure Path I'm running with them (currently Rise of the Runelords, where I sort of cajoled a player away from being a cleric of the deity she really wanted, Arshea, to Desna, which I felt meshed better with RotRL's storyline, and basically dictated to another player their character, as they had no idea what Golarion was like and as long as they played a rogue, they'd be happy). It also compels me to play GMPCs if I feel the party's makeup doesn't include something I deem important to the narrative (like a wizard to be obsessed with Thassilonian stuff in Rise of the Runelords). I know that controlling aspects come from fear, and I believe I've identified mine as a fear of a lack of narrative cohesion. That if I just let people play what they want, the characters won't mesh with the Adventure Path's storyline or setting, and that as a result, certain themes or ideas I feel are essential to the AP's narrative structure simply end up not addressed, or that certain items don't reach their full potential as a result (Raven's Head in Carrion Crown, for example, only gets its best abilities when wielded by someone with the channel energy class feature who worships Pharasma. Many of the items or characters in Kingmaker seem to be geared towards a chaotic party, especially Briar, which as a CN weapon won't work in the hands of, say, a paladin in the group.)

What should I do to curb this tendency so I'm less of a jerk to my players?

[MonochromeTiger]

that's... a liiiiiiiittle difficult to actually give advice on, tricks that work for others may not work the same for you and vice versa. I think the best suggestion I can think of is to distract yourself a bit, are your players enjoying the game? are they interacting with the story to some degree? because having gone through that particular campaign I can honestly say the story will work even if they don't notice all the details.

[valadil]

Why not just run games with pregen characters? If cohesion is that important to you, this is the best way to do it. And you can be totally up front about it, as opposed to inviting players to your game and then telling them how their characters work.

I did a lot of LARPing in college. I don't think I made a single character for those games. They were all weekend long pregen affairs. And they ran beautifully because you had 10-70 characters with interwoven plot, carefully crafted over many instances of the game being run.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

Somehow I doubt the players on the forum I run this on would respond well to pre-gens.

[BWR]

There's nothing wrong with telling your players up front that for the type of game you will be running they must restrict themselves to certain choices. That's not being a control freak, that's just prepping the game to run smoothly.
Even encouraging someone to have certain mechanical or personality aspects is ok. Just be honest about the reasons and make it known before character creation, and most people will be happy to play along.

If they have made characters and you try to change them after creation, that's a bit annoying but I wouldn't call it game breaking.

Trying to artificially limit their actions in game, telling them that they have to do this or not do that during play, taking over their characters; that's being a control freak.

[Brookshw]

There's nothing wrong with limiting class options for a campaign if they don't fit, don't stress too much about it. Someone playing a high knight in an oriental campaign has a hard time meshing with the setting. I'd say try to work with your players to have a coherentparty that makes sense for the campaign. Refluff things they want to make it work. I don't like running premade settings, but if a player wants something from fr, sure, let's take a look together and see if we can tweak it to match whatever we're doing for this particular campaign.

[Mastikator]

Somehow I doubt the players on the forum I run this on would respond well to pre-gens.

Can't hurt to ask if they're interested.

[Frenth Alunril]

This has a feel of over scripting. Don't help them, and back off on your script.

My players recently entered a dungeon crawl, because we were kind of stuck in our old game. So, when I started designing the dungeon, I made it clear there would be lots of traps and tricks. To make it easy for them I let them all play gestalt characters, expecting them all to play something and a rogue. I even suggested that they would need rogues.

5 players, 10 classes, no rogues, guess when the tpk happened? It didn't take long.

But, all of that being said, it feels like you are way over scripted. Role play is about generating responses collaboratively, it feels like you want to hand them scripts, and read from the top.

If your story arch requires specific classes, then you must hand them out, if it requires specific abilities, then those must be known to the players. If there are lists of specifics that are unknown, or extensive, you have over planed.

It honestly sounds to me that you need to move to a system you are not so heavily invested in.

[Jay R]

The ideal answer is to pick the adventure path after seeing their characters. Second best is to change the path to fit their characters better.

Consider it a challenge to your skills as a DM and story-teller. Can you create a compelling game that fits this group of characters?

[Drakefall]

One option, that while not a solution in and of itself could be helpful in tandem with other such considerations, is to edit the APs themselves in certain instances to fit better with the characters that the players have made rather than to try to twink the characters to fit the AP. The effectiveness and appropriateness of this would of course vary from AP to AP, but could help nonetheless.

As an example let's take this Raven Head weapon thingumy for example. Is there a reason why it has to be restricted to a worshiper of Pharasma? Could it not be refluffed to work with a god whom one of your party members is a cleric of? Similarly could not that Briar be tweaked to work for CG characters (If you have any), or entirely refluffed into a LG weapon without changing the mechanics too much?

This could also be applied to plot elements. The major npc ally priest of god X that is supposed to help out the PCs and generate sympathy makes you yearn for a PC who worships god X for thematic reasons, but no PC worships god X? Well if God Y is similar enough that switching out X for him wouldn't change the priest's character too much and you have a PC happily worshiping that god, then why not do just that.

You'll forgive me for having next to know knowledge of Golarion or the Aps you have mentioned, which may render some of the above examples as useful as a rather useless thing, but the the general idea stands I think.

I hope this advice is at least vaguely helpful, and wish to further comment that, for what it's worth, realising that you have a problem in your gming style and seeking advice to curb it speaks well of you as a GM in my mind at least.

EDIT: Oh dear, it appears I was ninja'd in a succinct fashion.

[Lorsa]

My short answer would be to stop treating roleplaying as a medium where the players are the audience to a narrative and start treating it as the players being the creators of the narrative.

Do you want a longer answer? You are here seeking help but I still don't really know what/where/how you want it.

[Starchild7309]

From what I am reading it sounds like you are acting like the main character in Zero Charisma. Please remember its a game, its supposed be fun for everyone. If you take choice away from your players and and force them to play your game only, they lose all interest eventually. Check out the movie Zero Charisma and don't be like that guy.

[Sebastrd]

The problem is that you're viewing the adventure as a narrative, a story, when it is not. The adventure - even an adveture path - is a blank canvas.

Imagine six people sitting in front of a canvas, each with their own distinct pallet and brush. As the DM, most of what you paint will be the background. You have some ability to guide the creative direction of the piece, in that your players will likely paint a winter scene differently than, say, a jungle scene. But the foreground, the "action" of the painting if you will, is the milieu of the players, and you need to stay out of that as much as possible.

In your situation you've already envisioned the finished product in your head. You've gone so far as to dictate the players' pallets, brush sizes, and creative directions in order to ensure they produce the finished product you have in mind. You're using DMPCs to fill in bits the players have "left out".

While you may end up with a close approximation of what you envisioned, it will leave you and most definitely your players unsatisfied. If you have players with strong creative voices of their own, they will likely chafe at and rebel against your direction. At the same time, you'll be tempted to push and prod the players with weaker creative voices, and you need to resist the temptation. Sometimes adding just a few small details or augmenting the work of others is all the fulfillment they need.

[jedipotter]

What should I do to curb this tendency so I'm less of a jerk to my players?

Relax. A RPG will almost never be perfect. It is not that type of game. And that is really the whole point of an RPG: it's different.

In fiction, everything works out perfectly. All the ducks are lined up in perfect rows and everything flows from A to B to C. Just think how amazing it was for Luke (son of Vader) to just happen to get the droids at the start of Star Wars and get involved in the whole plot. Seems like pure luck that the only good Force user in the whole galaxy just happened to be flying an X-wing at the Battle of Yavin. But it was not luck, of course, it was writing.

But RPG's are not like fiction. Everything is not perfect, and never will be.

Ask yourself why it matters. So if your group of all dwarves finds a magic long bow of awesomeness, does it matter if none of the characters can use it? Must they use it? Why? Is it ''that much more fun''? Must everything be used?

In a RPG there are no guarantees, unless the DM uses plot armor or other wise changes things. Say the group goes to Dark Swamp to get the Sword of Slaying that only an elf can use. But the elf character is killed by the lizard man king. What now? He was the only elf character. Now the sword is 'useless' to the group....unless they figure something out. But as that can be too hard for most people, the DM will often just 'save' important characters or items. "Oh no that is not 56 damage, it is 6, um the sun got in his eyes''. But in a ''let the dice fall where they may'' type game, anything can happen.....and that is what makes RPG's great.

Advice: Just change things. This is why D&D has a DM and is not all players. Don't change the characters, change the plot, story, items and such. So the Crown of Worms that can only be used by a chaotic character becomes the Crown of Serpents that can only be used by a lawful character.....like the characters in the group. You can even mostly keep the abilities: the worm crown summoned worms with summon swarm, but the serpent crown summons snakes with summon swarm.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

jedipotter hits it the best: learn to accept that no adventure path will be fully explored by any one group. You must detach yourself from the desire to infuse it into the players' narrative, and only then will you ascend to the heights of gaming comprehension...take a deep breath, visualize in your mind...

*starts snoring*

Um. Right. Where was I, again? Something about enlightenment.

The players won't follow the adventure path's storyline or setting, not exactly. Instead, what you're going to get is a creative mishmash of that adventure path and what the players bring to that. It's actually pretty cool. There's a lot of ways a story could turn out and be entertaining, and that's one of the reasons GMs have players--to remind them that there's a lot of ground to explore.

[Craft (Cheese)]

I've sort of noticed a bad pattern in my GMing style. I'm a huge control freak when it comes to narrative and characters. I find myself insisting certain character styles and archetypes to players that fit best with whatever Adventure Path I'm running with them (currently Rise of the Runelords, where I sort of cajoled a player away from being a cleric of the deity she really wanted, Arshea, to Desna, which I felt meshed better with RotRL's storyline, and basically dictated to another player their character, as they had no idea what Golarion was like and as long as they played a rogue, they'd be happy).

My advice: Always remember that the players doing something you don't expect is an opportunity, not an obstacle.

Here's a great example of this in action: In my Carrion Crown game, one of the players' backstories was that he was hunting his estranged wife, who had become a necromancer. I cut Auren Vrood out and replaced him with the wife (but didn't tell the players this). Thing is he still loved her and thought they could work their differences out, which made the party's encounter with Vrood *far* more interesting than it would have been otherwise.

Another player was Kendra's long lost little sister, finally reunited at their father's funeral who (unbeknownst to Kendra and the rest of the party) had become a vampire. She wants to get close to her sister again but is deathly afraid of her finding out what she really is. I had to modify Petros and Kendra's backstories quite a bit to make it work, but this turned Kendra into the ball and chain keeping the party in Ravengro for the first chapter of the campaign into one of the most compelling NPCs.

It also compels me to play GMPCs if I feel the party's makeup doesn't include something I deem important to the narrative (like a wizard to be obsessed with Thassilonian stuff in Rise of the Runelords). I know that controlling aspects come from fear, and I believe I've identified mine as a fear of a lack of narrative cohesion. That if I just let people play what they want, the characters won't mesh with the Adventure Path's storyline or setting, and that as a result, certain themes or ideas I feel are essential to the AP's narrative structure simply end up not addressed, or that certain items don't reach their full potential as a result (Raven's Head in Carrion Crown, for example, only gets its best abilities when wielded by someone with the channel energy class feature who worships Pharasma. Many of the items or characters in Kingmaker seem to be geared towards a chaotic party, especially Briar, which as a CN weapon won't work in the hands of, say, a paladin in the group.)

Here's a pro tip: If you want narrative cohesion, the *wrong* way to do it is to paint Sihedron runes over everything and pretend that they're symbolically connected. Yes, this is what RotR is guilty of doing, and this is one of its major weak points as a campaign. It's 6 completely separate adventure modules tied together by sihedron runes and railroading.

As for overly specific items... yeah, those are pretty stupid. I just change them so they can work with any PC.

[Scow2]

Well, in the DM's defense (especially when it comes to the rogue - He wanted to play a rogue, and you saw something that could be interesting there?), there's nothing wrong with having the DM encourage certain character builds to fit better into an adventure path/planned campaign - but you want to make them suggestions, not dictations.

[TheDarkSaint]

It might be helpful to think in terms of what your job description really is. As a DM, you describe how the world reacts to what the PC's do. It's a really reactive kind of job and I don't think it can work being pro-active.

I regularly take modules and adjust what is in them to fit my party. I'll insert important NPC's, refluff magic items and alter locations to make it all more relative to what the PC's are experiencing.

I think if you view your job in that light, it will satisfy your "controlling" tendencies as you are able to alter and craft the story around the PC's instead of trying to alter the PC's to fit the story.

[Airk]

I think we're all thinking about this too hard. There is no "Good" or "bad" in this. The question is simple - are the players having fun? And would they be having more fun if the DM stopped "dabbling"?

There is NOTHING wrong with saying "we're basically going to be playing this story. You're here to make awesome performances and overcome obstacles, but you don't really have agency to change the plot" - so long as everyone nods and says "Okay, sounds like fun!"

On the other hand, if you feel like your players are starting to chafe at this, then yeah, hearken thee unto the advice in this thread.

Or maybe just ditch the adventure path stuff entirely and play a more freeform game.

[jedipotter]

jedipotter hits it the best: learn to accept that no adventure path will be fully explored by any one group.

Too True. I've run hundreds of adventures. And most of the time, you only use about two thirds of the adventure. Often you just run out of real time. Some times it is just ignored as silly. But most often the adventure just swings the other way. The adventure might have a small half page diversion, like two dwarf clans fighting over a gem mine. The writer clearly intended it for a small couple minute type thing. But then your group embraces this tiny half page and spends the next hour on it (where you as the DM just have to make it all up). As they take so long at the dwarven mine, they never make it to Official Adventure Encounter Six. So a whole five pages of the adventure are simply not used.

[SowZ]

One, if you have even the slightest inclination towards being overly controlling, put a hard and fast rule right now that you won't have DMPCs ever again. Maybe some people can pull them off, but it likely isn't one of your strengths. Two, during chargen, explain the setting and campaign and important things, (ancient magic and the church of Vecna are going to be really important, guys,) and make sure everyone is in the same room talking to each other during chargen. Resist the urge to shut anything down and only interject to offer suggestions, (make sure they are gentle suggestions,) near the end when people have decided on their concepts. This should help with a cohesive story. 3. Keep in mind that the very best story things are often unintended consequences of unexpected actions. Railroading will likely make your story worse. Your job isn't to tell the story, that is part of your job and part of everyone else's job. Your job is to provide a setting and plot hooks, not the whole plot.

[valadil]

Somehow I doubt the players on the forum I run this on would respond well to pre-gens.

Or they might surprise you. You always could throw it out there as a one shot. Players are more likely to try something weird when it isn't a long term commitment. If that style works for you and they find they're okay with letting you write their characters, the door is open for longer games with pregens.

[ComatosePhoenix]

So far it doesn't sound like you nudged people to much. But if your concerned about being overly controlling take a break from your Serious Roleplay scenarios and try something more comedic, or hack/slashery.

Simplifying the story, or outright eradicating it for fetch the McGuffin

set up a scenario that has some interesting elements but you won't get incredibly attached too, then let the players flesh it out with their decisions.

But like I said, make a little side campaign clearly seperate from anything you might currently be writing.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

If you have the time and bandwidth to do it, consider playing a game like Fiasco or Kingdom. They redistribute the traditional load of the GM across multiple players, and that can help you learn to ease up on the flow of the story.

[Brookshw]

If you have the time and bandwidth to do it, consider playing a game like Fiasco or Kingdom. They redistribute the traditional load of the GM across multiple players, and that can help you learn to ease up on the flow of the story.

I'm not familiar with the games you've referenced but it did bring to mind a thread I saw recently. It sounded pretty good to me, I might just try to incorporate such a world building strategy in some of my upcoming games.

[Faily]

There is a middle-ground.

IMO, there is nothing wrong with telling players ahead of time what sort of campaign you will be running, what you (as the GM) think would be needed or fitting for the adventure. Or out-right restrictions. When making our characters for the Savage Tide-campaign, our GM *strongly* adviced us not to make Lawful Good characters due to a few events in the story that would one way or another result in an alignment change.

The GM knows the campaign and the setting, and it's his job as a GM to "properly advertise the game", so to speak.

The other spectrum is that players should still feel able to make a character they want to play without feeling like they have to follow a recipe from the GM. It's perfectly OK to change certain parts of an adventure to better fit the group (like if there's a magic item geared towards a Cleric of God X, but PC is a Cleric of God Y... easy swap). Craft (Cheese)'s post telling how she changed certain NPCs to fit into the PCs background is a great example of customizing a published campaign to fit your group.


Also, just gonna say that GMPCs should most of the time go DIAF.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

The problem is that you're viewing the adventure as a narrative, a story, when it is not. The adventure - even an adveture path - is a blank canvas.

But...but that's why I play these games to begin with! To craft a compelling narrative!

Imagine six people sitting in front of a canvas, each with their own distinct pallet and brush. As the DM, most of what you paint will be the background. You have some ability to guide the creative direction of the piece, in that your players will likely paint a winter scene differently than, say, a jungle scene. But the foreground, the "action" of the painting if you will, is the milieu of the players, and you need to stay out of that as much as possible.

In your situation you've already envisioned the finished product in your head. You've gone so far as to dictate the players' pallets, brush sizes, and creative directions in order to ensure they produce the finished product you have in mind. You're using DMPCs to fill in bits the players have "left out".

Well, part of it is that what I really want to do is play, but nobody else WANTS to GM, or if they do, they don't want to play the stories I want to play in. I want to play a Knight of Ozem in Carrion Crown. I want to play a Shoanti Paladin in Curse of the Crimson Throne. I want to play a Thassilon-obsessed wizard in Rise of the Runelords. But no one else in the community has the books. No one else in the forum has the same interest in the Pathfinder setting as I do. Most of the games just end up being free-form extrapolations from established systems anyway because the combat drags and players get frustrated with things not progressing. And most of the stuff they want to run invariably bores me anyway (most of them involve arenas in the center of the multiverse where characters of epic level fight each other for some vague divine prize, and then various lurid scenes of intimacy when they're not competing with no real plot to follow).

While you may end up with a close approximation of what you envisioned, it will leave you and most definitely your players unsatisfied. If you have players with strong creative voices of their own, they will likely chafe at and rebel against your direction. At the same time, you'll be tempted to push and prod the players with weaker creative voices, and you need to resist the temptation. Sometimes adding just a few small details or augmenting the work of others is all the fulfillment they need.

This is happening in my game right now! There are some players who are going exactly where I wished they hadn't gone (straight to Sandpoint's brothel, specifically), but I let them do that, despite how annoying I felt it was. And then there are other players who are basically saying "Direct me someplace, please? I know next to nothing about the Pathfinder Setting and I'm just waiting for the first fight to start."

Before you ask "If what you want to do is play, why not join an RP here or some other place?" I don't want to abandon the forum I'm a moderator for, people I've roleplayed with over the web for almost seven years now, but which is drifting apart due to posters having RL take precedence, internal drama amongst members driving others away and just the fact that we're less a roleplaying community and more a group looking for a place to continue a roleplay we started on the Wizards of the Coast mature board years ago but got kicked from there due to them considering the roleplay there spam. A roleplay that barely even updates anymore as most of the players don't even post anymore, or even remember what their characters were doing the last time they did so. Plus, I feel so nervous about RPing on forums like these. There's a lot of people, and recruitment feels more like an audition than an invitation. At least with the forum I'm on, I'm pretty much guaranteed a spot in anything that goes on there. Here, it's a lot less certain that what I want to play will be here, that there'll be a quality GM, and that I'll be able to play what I want because in order to maximize my chances of getting in I have to focus on a niche that isn't being focused on by the other posters rather than what I WANT to play, which EVERYONE is posting characters similar too. And because a lot of the games I've joined here have collapsed. I'm more than a little bitter about that.

[Honest Tiefling]

Maybe you need a new challenge. Perhaps you should think of ways to change these APs to suit the characters you are presented with? Certain weapons made for class/race/whatever combos? Change that up, so someone in the party could use it.

Certain themes in the narrative not appearing? Look at your characters. See what conflicts you can stir up with them and change the themes to suit the party. View the challenge as not as presenting the AP as intended, but to make the AP the starting point of a narrative that weaves these different characters together.

Heck, I think if a DM outright said 'I would like to do a gothic horror story focusing on X religion in Y region of Z setting', I'd honestly be okay with that. There's still some flexibility in there, but the DM does get a say in what happens, after all.

If all else fails, forbid yourself from making suggestions or DMPCs unless the party asks for it.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

So far it doesn't sound like you nudged people to much. But if your concerned about being overly controlling take a break from your Serious Roleplay scenarios and try something more comedic, or hack/slashery.

Simplifying the story, or outright eradicating it for fetch the McGuffin

set up a scenario that has some interesting elements but you won't get incredibly attached too, then let the players flesh it out with their decisions.

But like I said, make a little side campaign clearly seperate from anything you might currently be writing.

Or maybe just ditch the adventure path stuff entirely and play a more freeform game.

That's just it! All I've GOT on that forum is freeform games in generic settings and I'm freakin' sick of them! I want to play in the Pathfinder setting. I want to experience the brilliant stories the great minds at Paizo came up with! But nobody else is interested enough or knowledgeable enough in it to appreciate it on the same level as I do. And on the one AP game I'm playing in here on the forum, the GM made it evident from the get-go that he was gutting the AP and changing it on a very fundamental level, which means I'm flying blind and can't ensure my character fits with the narrative themes I've read about in the AP books.

[Kane0]

The best thing might be to take a step back. Try something else, have a look around, come back later if you like.

It sounds like what you want is different from what the people you are with want. A compromise on either side might not turn out well.

Edit: You seem very focused on narrative. Not a bad thing, but make sure you realize that your narrative may never come close to someone else's. And that's fine, they can coexist. Just ensure that the narrative is flexible enough to still be a game rather than a story.