The Pundit's thread about early RPG experiences which set the tone for the rest of your gaming thereon was really interesting, but I'm not convinced that such experiences necessarily stop early on in your gaming career: I reckon it's perfectly possible (though much rarer) to have a similar experience later on in your gaming life.

The incident I'm thinking of is the first two tabletop campaigns I participated in after coming to University, both with the same GM. The first campaign was a modern-day intelligence game which diverted into extreme weirdness, with the PCs being agents of an under-funded and neglected spy agency who stumble across a cosmic conspiracy. The second was set in a well-realised fantasy world and focused on our characters going on a journey to the New World, a place like and yet utterly unlike the Americas.

This guy was a self-described "clockwork universe" GM - he set up an intricate campaign world and then let us players explore it. His focus was very much on the world - keeping it consistent, refusing to let OOC considerations affect the action, that kind of thing.

I really enjoyed the games, but I did find some aspects frustrating. (This, I think, was what made this a defining experience: had I not enjoyed those games at all, I wouldn't have so thoroughly analysed the parts that I didn't enjoy). Essentially, this GM was so focused on his game worlds that the player characters slipped in importance to him. Here's some examples.

My first two characters were useless.

In the first game, I played a bumbling researcher with a conspiracy theorist's bent - perfectly suitable for the sort of investigative game I was expecting. However, our characters spent the entire second half of the game on the run and undertaking dangerous missions for the secret king of humanity - a situation my character simply had no suitable skills for. Passive fool that I was, I week after week showed up expecting the GM to find some way for my character to become useful again, and time and again he didn't; bending the world deliberately just to give my character a bonus wasn't his style. (To be fair to the GM in question, he has said since that he made a mistake early on in the game by not specifying whether our characters were meant to be skilled professionals or bumbling amateurs hopelessly out of their depth.)

My first character in the second game, meanwhile, was designed mainly for downtime research - he was a scientist and an occultist. The problem was, he never really got much of a chance to use his downtime skills, because we simply never had any downtime - the longest period we had was on a ship, and that didn't have the necessary resources for me to do anything interesting. There were simply too many people searching for the PCs for us to get any peace, and again the GM was unwilling to bend the in-game reality a little to allow us a breather. (It would have been as simple as one of the groups in question deciding to watch and wait for a while rather than immediately confronting us.) My few uptime skills got squished - one of the types of magic I had was keyed-in to a horrible curse that I unwittingly took at character generation, so I couldn't use it without alerting horrible beasts who were going to come and get me, and later on in the game my connection to my patron god got severed.

There is a certain school of thought which says that if a player wants to play an ineffectual character, they should be free to do so, and I can see that. But taking up such a policy places a certain responsibility on the GM to make sure that that is actually what the player in question wants.

How this has affected my gaming. As a player, I've been more careful to make sure my character has a suitable build for the game in question. As a GM, I never expect a PC to solve a problem they simply don't have the skills for. (That doesn't mean that the PCs will never encounter such obstacles in my games, but it will never be vital to the game that they solve them.) Furthermore, if a player's character is a specialist, I will make damn sure there's something in the game where their specialist skills can be useful.

My first character in the second campaign lost his powers.

He was the beloved agent of a particular god (I'd paid points for that at character gen) who lost his link with his god when he slept with a prostitute.

Now, there's two reasons that could have been the case. Firstly, sleeping with a prostitute could have spiritually corrupted me in some way so that the god couldn't communicate with me even if he'd wanted to. In which case, the god should have warned be because hello, I've paid points to be a blessed agent of this god. Secondly, sleeping with a prostitute could have broken one of the god's teachings, in which case the god should have told me.

Or, of course, I should have known from the start, since my character grew up in the worship of this god. Oh, wait, except my theology skill is only middling instead of high, so in practice I'm normally going to fail theology rolls to know things I should have been taught from childhood. Sigh.

I think this came from a "show, don't tell" attitude on the part of the GM: he wanted to reveal information about his gameworld bit by bit, because that's the fun of world-exploring games. In the course of this, of course, he ensured that the PCs a) didn't have some pretty fucking important information and b) didn't have the means of finding it out.

How this has affected my gaming. As a GM, I will always let players have information if, culturally speaking, they ought to know it. And I will never take away all of a character's useful abilities. Sure, take away the D&D Paladin's holy powers if he breaks his code, because he's still a capable fighter and usefully quest to get them back, but don't take away the mage's spellcasting abilities because without them he's next to useless and can't helpfully contribute to the efforts to get them back. As a player, I'm leery of sticking around in games where my character has been reduced to a spectator: if I can't do anything to affect the gameworld, what's the point of my participation.

The ultimate fate of the first campaign rested on one player's decision.

So, at the end of the first campaign we had obtained a bomb and were planning to use it to destroy a city beyond the world we know (which happened to be a base of the cosmic conspiracy to restrict humanity to the world we know). Only one PC was able to do this, because his player bought a quirk at character gen which meant he was turning into a fish-person (the fish-people were being let out of the world we know into the real world). However, half the players didn't want us to commit this act of appalling terrorism, so in the last session the party split: half of us racing to deliver the bomb, half of us racing to warn the conspiracy. The people who wanted to warn the conspiracy reached the conspiracy, but not in time. We sent off the person with the bomb, who went outside for a GM conference and apparently didn't set the bomb off because of the GM's beautiful description of the city.

The result: half the players didn't get the ending they were gunning for, and couldn't do anything about it. Half of them did, but frustratingly it wasn't because of any of their efforts. And all because one player took one particular character trait at game start. Again, the GM wasn't willing to violate the logic of the game world to let the rest of us have an impact on the decision. In a concession to his story-centred leanings, he wouldn't even let the guys who ran off to warn the conspiracy have an effect on the plan, even though they did get to the conspiracy, because that would be anticlimactic.

How this has affected my gaming. If a decision is IC important to multiple PCs, I will hesitate before letting one PC make it on their own, without giving the other PCs a chance to affect things. If a decision is OOC important to multiple players, there is no goddamn way I will ever let just one player make the call without giving the others a chance to let their PCs intervene.

Again, I stress that these were damn fun campaigns; that's why I've analysed the things which bugged me about them so much. And I think that analysis has pushed me towards a PC-centred as opposed to a world/story-centred GMing style: I would much rather hammer the events of my gameworld to fit the player characters' interests and goals than hammer the PCs to fit my world.

Playing through NWN for the first time a few years ago.

I'd bought it while I lived in Vancouver, played it briefly as a simpleminded half-orc barbarian, and got rather bored with it and put it away.

Sometime later, I decided I'd try and sell it, along with some of my other games, but the guy wasn't going to give me any decent money for it, so I got back home and figured I may as well give it another shot, since I'm stuck with the damn thing anyway.

I rolled up a half-elf cleric, with a nifty backstory and some rather shady morals, and dove in, and I've loved D&D and clerics ever since.  

It was the first game I'd had an opportunity to play in a while, where the mechanics were a fun game in and of themselves, whether it was characters or combat.

It also gave me the opportunity to again appreciate the joys of just going out and killing some shit.  I think the seeds of this shift in priority were already there, and something I've noticed the older I get, but it was NWN D&D that really clicked with me.

Not too long after that, I found my last D&D group, which was mostly fun, though there were some bad bits, and unfortunately wound up dying because of a disruptive player who effectively stormed off and took the whole game down with him.

I can't point to a single instance that triggered it, rather a long string of rules arguments, but nowadays I'm getting sick of mechanics. I'm not saying throw away the rules, but having everything defined in the rules (especially if poorly defined) has been a pain. I'm definintely digging more on games which utilize stat + skill as a general rule (such as Shadowrun or WW systems).

I'll still definintely play D&D and Rolemaster, but I'm burned out on trying to game the system. This is a huge change for me that's come along in my later gaming years, so I'd have to agree that defining changes aren't something that only happen early on.

Quote from: J ArcaneI'd bought it while I lived in Vancouver, played it briefly as a simpleminded half-orc barbarian, and got rather bored with it and put it away.

*snicker*

Okay.  Now, you realise that that line came out reading a little funny, don't you? :teehee:

!i!