Quote from: jhkim;809318Most recently, I saw this over Christmas when running a mildly story-gamish game (Monster of the Week - based on Dungeon World and its ilk) for my son, nephews, and niece - compared to their previous play of D&D. There are some players who are relatively passive in traditional RPGs, who become much more active when they have a different way to contribute.

The games I've run for kids have all been a whole lot looser... usually impromptu and sometimes we'd collectively make up setting/rules on the spot. Someone would say 'Are there any trolls around? I want to fight a troll' and sure, I'll find a way to bring in a troll.

Yeah, I think some people are missing the opportunity for this to be an inspiration, rather than players trying to get away with something.

Mind you, it can be frustrating trying to get everyone in that groove if they aren't inclined.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;809311I don't think they mean to be insulting. What they mean by "more mature" is that these games have less rules to settle things between players. So there's nothing to reel everyone back except their own self restraint. If you have a lot of competitive players, doing that can be hard when you don't have a bunch of rules telling them they have to do it. Especially since such rules lite games tend to wither under the threat of minmaxing.

Competitive, like you said, isn't confrontational. They're not trying to play a game of me versus them, they just want to get terrific results for their character. In Savage Worlds, it's cool. With Fate-style games or games with very ambiguous power/rules (like some of Demon the Descent's powers or Mage the Awakening's spells) I get a trainwreck.

Quote from: PencilBoy99;809329Competitive, like you said, isn't confrontational. They're not trying to play a game of me versus them, they just want to get terrific results for their character. In Savage Worlds, it's cool. With Fate-style games or games with very ambiguous power/rules (like some of Demon the Descent's powers or Mage the Awakening's spells) I get a trainwreck.

That's what I mean. There is no clear rule to decide it so everybody kind of has to come to an agreement together and just accept when too much is too much.

Systems like FATE kind of want to disassociate you from your character's success and focus on the overall narrative. Just like how in a movie the main character might suffer disaster before ultimately prevailing, the player has to go with the flow and accept some bad things (in FATE, getting FATE points and accepting complications) to roll with the story. So in that sense it's more like they're writers or directors for a movie that are being entertained by the character's fate rather than solely rooting and pushing for that character as if they were them.

Basically they would have to be like GMs and how a GM would treat an NPC.

Quote from: Will;809319As for 'fixing' things, I think there's no problem saying that Declarations are a negotiated element just like anything else is. Player wants something or suggests something, GM either goes with it or not.

If you are unsure of players, it may be worth simply talking it out. Say 'hey, this is the sort of thing I expect the GM to do/not do, that is the sort of thing I expect the players to do/not do. What do you guys think?'

I guess that works for you. But the rules actually say it's table consensus, not GM ruling. (I might be wrong, but some fate guys corrected me on this elsewhere). That means discussion, and in that discussion, they are in the moment and advocating for making their character terrifically effective. And now I'm in a somewhat heated situation and that makes me very uncomfortable, since I have to argue back and forth until I convince the entire table. I just wanted to play a game, not have these conflicts.

My players aren't horrible, I say yes to almost anything, and I don't railroad, we're not immature grognards, and we don't need huge amounts of crunch. However, when I try to say Fate raw doesn't work for me and my friends, one of those gets leveled at me. It's OKAY for players to like to be advocating for their character rather than collectively trying to tell a story where they just happen to have a specific characters sheet in front of them. In fact, I think LOTS of people are like this (or at least I hope). When tempers get heated, as they do when exciting things are happening and you're advocating for a character, it's nice to be able to clearly distribute jobs, particularly for people that don't enjoy metagame conflict.

Quote from: Simlasa;809325The games I've run for kids have all been a whole lot looser... usually impromptu and sometimes we'd collectively make up setting/rules on the spot. Someone would say 'Are there any trolls around? I want to fight a troll' and sure, I'll find a way to bring in a troll.

To clarify, most of the players were teens (age 13-15), not young kids. I would agree about young kids, but these were more interested in a structured game with rules.

Quote from: PencilBoy99;809332I guess that works for you. But the rules actually say it's table consensus, not GM ruling. (I might be wrong, but some fate guys corrected me on this elsewhere). That means discussion, and in that discussion, they are in the moment and advocating for making their character terrifically effective. And now I'm in a somewhat heated situation and that makes me very uncomfortable, since I have to argue back and forth until I convince the entire table. I just wanted to play a game, not have these conflicts.

My players aren't horrible, I say yes to almost anything, and I don't railroad, we're not immature grognards, and we don't need huge amounts of crunch. However, when I try to say Fate raw doesn't work for me and my friends, one of those gets leveled at me. It's OKAY for players to like to be advocating for their character rather than collectively trying to tell a story where they just happen to have a specific characters sheet in front of them. In fact, I think LOTS of people are like this (or at least I hope). When tempers get heated, as they do when exciting things are happening and you're advocating for a character, it's nice to be able to clearly distribute jobs, particularly for people that don't enjoy metagame conflict.

I totally agree; see what I said above your post. It just means FATE isn't for your group, probably. Since the whole point of that game is to /not/ be rooting for your own character and to look at it more as a writer making a story. George Lucas doesn't get upset when something bad happens to Luke Skywalker after all.

Maybe you should try Dungeon World. It's still rules lite, but less collaborative. It is still vague though so you'll have to refine your details and explanations to make sure the players understand what's going on in the game so they can act accordingly, as there are no thousands of rules to do it.

Quote from: PencilBoy99;809329Competitive, like you said, isn't confrontational. They're not trying to play a game of me versus them, they just want to get terrific results for their character. In Savage Worlds, it's cool. With Fate-style games or games with very ambiguous power/rules (like some of Demon the Descent's powers or Mage the Awakening's spells) I get a trainwreck.

Can you give some more specific examples of the conflict?

While I'm not a big fan of FATE, this sounds like a clash of expectations - where they expect to be cool heroes like Batman or James Bond, and you're trying to dial back those expectations for their PCs to instead be lesser heroes.

I think it generally works better to meet their expectations rather than fighting them. James Bond still has challenges and failures - he just always looks cool when doing so. In GMing, then means accepting that yes, they can pull out both pistols and fire on the guards as they're falling off the roof.  You then bring in the attack helicopter as the guard's reinforcements.

QuoteWhile I'm not a big fan of FATE, this sounds like a clash of expectations - where they expect to be cool heroes like Batman or James Bond, and you're trying to dial back those expectations for their PCs to instead be lesser heroes.

Yea. We always get down to me being a jerk. Thanks!

I want them to be terrifically awesome. However, I also need to say no when:
- they're doing something that would make them absurdly more powerful than everyone else;
- what they're doing puts me in a position where I can't figure out what to do next meaningfully or would make me unable to come up with future challenges

My goal is that they're awesome heroes by the end of the epsiode. Just because I need to occasionally say no doesn't mean that I'm trying to make them unimportant.

Why is it that having to say no in the above cases makes me a horrible GM who is not meeting his player's needs.

They are awesome players by the end of my sessions where I can do the above. They totally can pull both pistols as they fall backwards out a window. They just cant suddenly get the ability to roll through all the challenges I can come up with, or suddenly get a power/control that is way more than everyone else. I can't always come up with an awesome way to handle anything they want to just make up in every instance. I shouldn't have to feel bad because I'm not perfect. However, it seems like the goal of everyone who is super into these games is to make people like me feel like crap.

Quote from: PencilBoy99;809342Yea. We always get down to me being a jerk. Thanks!

I think it's clear why you had problems elsewhere. You are reading all these comments about how games play as personal attacks, when they aren't.


People can 'advocate for the success of their character' without being assholes. GMs can want to establish GM authority without being assholes. People saying a game requires more cooperation isn't saying your group is having at each other with long knives.

Yeah, none of that had anything to do with you being a jerk. People have different expectations for different games, different tastes. Obviously yours and the players are clashing in this case; that doesn't mean you are trying to crush their dreams, just that both of you like different things and haven't realized it.

Anyway, if saying "no" makes your players call you a terrible GM then it just means your players are spoiled brats.

Whenever I bring up problems with Fate style games, the response seems to be that if I don't allow players to create whatever the feel like at any time or I say no, I'm on some kind of power trip, or I'm not a fan of the players, or I don't let them be awesome, or whatever.

How is saying no to a player's suggestion that they pull a flamethrower out of a trash can magically because of an ambiguously worded power any of those things?

In this case, it would completely bypass a conflict, create a precedent that I'd always have to worry about and would make game prep for me nightmarish, make his power way more powerful than other people's powers, and put me in a situation where I have no idea what to do with the rest of the session. In the past when I've said yes to these few wacky things, it's had those effects. If I instead try to 1 up, we just get in a bizarre escalation cycle.

I'm glad there are people who can effortlessly deal with all these issues (I'm not being sarcastic, I think that's terrific) and never need to say no, but that's not my experience and not the experience of anyone I know.

And I haven't been clear enough, sorry. My player's are totally fine with this. As soon as I went to games that were less ambiguous, and gave out the occasional no for the above situations, everything has been awesome. It's just that when I bring up that when I've tried Fate-type games with my groups it's been a train wreck, I get the above criticisms from at least one poster.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;809306Do you play Dungeon World? It seems like you're applying a D&D mentality to it, where the rolls are literally to adjucate whether a particular action was successful.

Not as much as I'd like, but I've ran a few sessions of it.

QuoteIn Dungeon World, the rolls are made when a move is performed (often associated with an action) but it's not to determine the resolution of that action, strictly. The rolls are meant to direct the course of the plot. If you roll a success, it means something good happens. But it doesn't need to have any relation to your roll, nor does a failure.

That's not how I've read it. Key points like exploit your prep, make a move that follows, and moves snowball read like pretty clear assertions the game is studiously normal in it's design and structure. Nothing I read in the next made me even think "fail forward", just to make failure more interesting than "you sucked, what do you do".

I certainly think it's interesting that you're read it differently.

Quote from: PencilBoy99;809345I don't think so. I think the tone and implication of some of the posts is that if I don't allow players to create whatever the feel like at any time or I say no, I'm on some kind of power trip, or I'm not a fan of the players, or I don't let them be awesome, or whatever.

It's characters. You should be a fan of the characters... everybody should be a fan of all the characters in their game, really.

That doesn't mean they should get their own way every time (Because that would be boring), it doesn't even mean you need to like them, it means you should want to put them in situations and see what they do next.

Wrestling and soap operas have got it right. Some games just work better if thought of in that way.

Quote from: PencilBoy99;809345Whenever I bring up problems with Fate style games, the response seems to be that if I don't allow players to create whatever the feel like at any time or I say no, I'm on some kind of power trip, or I'm not a fan of the players, or I don't let them be awesome, or whatever

Dude, just say no. It will make the game better for everyone to have workable parameters.

You've been *incredibly sensitive* on this thread, as though you expect to get into a confrontation about this - but it's very simple. Run the game the way you need to. If you can't, don't run the game. Run something else or let someone else run something. It's not super hard. Just, don't let your players intimidate you (in a friendly way, probably) into what you find as a GM to be an untenable situation. Then, nobody has fun.

Just say: "Guys, I'm sorry - I have to put on some limits, or I can't run the game. Sometimes I'm going to say no if what you're suggesting is too silly. Otherwise, things get too complicated for me." Done. If they don't like it, they can run it.

//Panjumanju