Brander, campaign integrity as I used it has nothing to do with story, plot, or literary railroads (in fact it's pretty funny because I'm about as allergic to story in RPGs as you can get, ask anyone here).  It has to do with the players being free, yes to make their own mistakes.

In the "Owlbear Scenario" if I had a NPC, I'd point out that since one Owlbear tore us a new one, engaging some more might not be the best idea, but I would be doing that roleplaying the NPC, not to give "Hermit Warnings".  But I'm not going to cross that line to go OOC and tell my players they shouldn't do it.  Why?

Because they don't want me to.  Me helping them, for them isn't fun.  Again, we're not talking about a player forgetting character common knowledge, of course you fill in that stuff, but when the player is about to make a bad decision, the way we play is hands off, let it happen.

For my group, who cares if Friday night, June 13th, 2014, we had to make up new characters?  It's one night out of how many?  The tales of that last fight we'll be telling for years even if it's just "Man, remember that time we charged into that Owlbear lair?  Ouch don't remind me, better yet do remind me not to do that again."  If we spend weeks, months, years in this campaign though, then succeeding and eventually retiring the character when we move on is just that much more rewarding for having survived with everything played straight.

Your mileage may and obviously does vary.

Quote from: CRKrueger;758015Brander, campaign integrity as I used it has nothing to do with story, plot, or literary railroads (in fact it's pretty funny because I'm about as allergic to story in RPGs as you can get, ask anyone here).  It has to do with the players being free, yes to make their own mistakes.

In the "Owlbear Scenario" if I had a NPC, I'd point out that since one Owlbear tore us a new one, engaging some more might not be the best idea, but I would be doing that roleplaying the NPC, not to give "Hermit Warnings".  But I'm not going to cross that line to go OOC and tell my players they shouldn't do it.  Why?

Because they don't want me to.  Me helping them, for them isn't fun.  Again, we're not talking about a player forgetting character common knowledge, of course you fill in that stuff, but when the player is about to make a bad decision, the way we play is hands off, let it happen.

For my group, who cares if Friday night, June 13th, 2014, we had to make up new characters?  It's one night out of how many?  The tales of that last fight we'll be telling for years even if it's just "Man, remember that time we charged into that Owlbear lair?  Ouch don't remind me, better yet do remind me not to do that again."  If we spend weeks, months, years in this campaign though, then succeeding and eventually retiring the character when we move on is just that much more rewarding for having survived with everything played straight.

Your mileage may and obviously does vary.

I agree with this; great way to run a game. I would only add that the players might on occasion need some info to make informed decisions if the characters know things the players do not.

Quote from: CRKrueger;758015Brander, campaign integrity as I used it has nothing to do with story, plot, or literary railroads (in fact it's pretty funny because I'm about as allergic to story in RPGs as you can get, ask anyone here).  It has to do with the players being free, yes to make their own mistakes.

Some people value their characters more than others.

I had a player... decent player, actually, just needed some refining. He got too caught up in the moment, and had read too much Mercedes Lackey. He was willing to accept the consequences of his actions. He enjoyed being defeated if it was part of the story.

The rest of the group got tired of also sharing his consequences. After the last, and most outrageous stunt (where his character ignored the consequences and tried to be Arnold Schwartzenhero), I got emails from every single other player in the game requesting his expulsion from the game. They were fed up.

I would have paused and looked at him, and said "Really? You really want to charge into a lair of owlbears, protecting their young? Does anyone want to hide while McMoron here throws away his life?"

Or use analogies. "You're an armoured knight, about to run full tilt into a den of bears. Who are all huge. And supernatural. Defending their young. Is there some cool plan you want to mention right about now?"

Saying "No, you don't" sounds to me like a fed up GM, not a railroading GM. I've been fed up before. My manners wane rapidly when I'm fed up with a misbehaving player.

Quote from: Coffee Zombie;758805Some people value their characters more than others.

I had a player... decent player, actually, just needed some refining. He got too caught up in the moment, and had read too much Mercedes Lackey. He was willing to accept the consequences of his actions. He enjoyed being defeated if it was part of the story.

The rest of the group got tired of also sharing his consequences. After the last, and most outrageous stunt (where his character ignored the consequences and tried to be Arnold Schwartzenhero), I got emails from every single other player in the game requesting his expulsion from the game. They were fed up.

I would have paused and looked at him, and said "Really? You really want to charge into a lair of owlbears, protecting their young? Does anyone want to hide while McMoron here throws away his life?"

Or use analogies. "You're an armoured knight, about to run full tilt into a den of bears. Who are all huge. And supernatural. Defending their young. Is there some cool plan you want to mention right about now?"

Saying "No, you don't" sounds to me like a fed up GM, not a railroading GM. I've been fed up before. My manners wane rapidly when I'm fed up with a misbehaving player.

The way I see it, a misbehaving player at the table is a character in the world putting themselves or other people at risk.  If the players are fed up with dealing with his consequences, then the characters probably are fed up too, why don't the characters take care of it?  Why do the characters do nothing while the players send emails?

Quote from: CRKrueger;758810The way I see it, a misbehaving player at the table is a character in the world putting themselves or other people at risk.  If the players are fed up with dealing with his consequences, then the characters probably are fed up too, why don't the characters take care of it?  Why do the characters do nothing while the players send emails?

Because it's a game! I never try to ruin someone else's fun by just offing them. That's juvenile and way beyond my purview as a player because that issue is pure DM territory. So I email the DM and say handle it in whatever way is appropriate to you.

Quote from: Brander;757989No you aren't but you two seemed to be speaking the same language, you are as into "unforgivable" on this topic as Jibba it seems. Though part of me thinks Jibba might have been hyperbolic. I somewhat thought you were, until the conversation continued and I realized you appeared not to be. I'm happy to be wrong on this part.
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Frankly, I'm still hoping you were being hyperbolic, since I recall you do have opinions in other threads I have enjoyed and/or agreed with.  And despite as vehemently as we disagree here, if you are having fun, then keep on doing whatever works for ya.  If what you are doing works for you and yours, then fine, but it flat out wouldn't for me and mine and it's absolutely NOT because my friends and associates who are players are somehow not up to par overall.

Yeah I am certainly an arse on this point.
Whilst I don't believe in one true way-ness there are I think some basic principles that RPGs need to adhere to and the most important of these is that the DM can't make "out of world" decisions about actions the PCs can take. You can charm a PC with magic and all sort of in game things but you can't say DM to player your PC can't do that or your PC wouldn't do that or any variation of that. If the player says "what chance do I think we would have against these creatures?" then by all means volunteer some info and if you are playing with newbies and they hear about a monster that should be common in setting then by all means describe them, although I would do this as an in play description I can see that some DMs might give them then in game detail.
The other rule is describe the world as the PCs perceive it. Want a monster to be scary then describe it as scary, want the little girl to be vulnerable but with a little touch of spooky then describe her that way. (This is how I use social skills by the way roll for the NPC then roleplay the event to that degree of success).

I don't agree with Krueger about shit players though. If the players feel that it is in character for them to fight an unbeatable foe and die in so doing then to me that is a sign of good roleplayers. Now if they just kill everything
'because" then meh but if they discuss their options and the paladin decides he has no choice but to attack for strong roleplay reasons then excellent but he will still die, well the owlbears will attack to the best of their skill and ability and all rolls with be in the clear so .... the party will probably die.

I never really have set agendas for play so to be the party pursuing a side quest is exactly the same as the party chasing the mcguffin. Sure the world might end as a result but no skin of my nose I can always invent another world.

If for some reason I did have a reason that the party were on rails up to a certain point in the game then I would usually start the PCs at that point and deliver the group formation part in flashback, but from my perspective that would only happen in a con game or similar and in that case the PC backgrounds would all have the why you are here blurb in them.

Yeah, in general if something is an OOC problem rather than a purely IC problem then that's got to be something you deal with OOC. I have never known an OOC problem to resolve itself through IC means; that's just passive-aggressive avoidance of the actual OOC conflict which is causing hard feelings.

It's entirely possible to play a character who is IC is putting themselves or the other PCs at risk whilst at the same time not irritating or ruining the fun of other players at the table. In that case, it really is a purely IC problem. But if players are irritated with this one guy to an extent where they unanimously demand that the DM ditch the player in question, that's got to the point where the OOC integrity of the gaming group itself is on the line.

At the same time, I don't agree that this sort of thing is 100% the DM's responsibility all the time. Obviously a player can't unilaterally declare that someone else has to leave the group, but then again the DM doesn't really have that power either unless the rest of the group broadly agrees with the decision of who has to leave - if a DM tried to kick someone out of the group that all the other players loved gaming with and who hadn't been causing that much of a problem, that DM would find themselves without a group just as rapidly as a player who tried the same. But what you can always do as a player is make it known to the player in question that they've done something that bugs you. That doesn't mean getting argumentative, aggressive or confrontational mid-game, but at the same time saying something along the lines of "Could you please not do that? I really don't have the energy this evening for yet another spontaneous fight against harmless NPCs" could give more self-aware players a prompt to reconsider how their actions are affecting your OOC enjoyment of the game.

As a tangent broadly related to the thread topic: I've never personally seen people on either side of the screen pull the "Either Player X goes or I do" gambit out of the blue, and listening to other people talk about their groups it seems to be a rarity. What seems much more common is that if someone is kicked out of a group it's because a consensus was reached between the rest of the group that the person in question needed to go.

This is sometimes an explicit consensus (like the example of everyone writing to the GM saying "Please make Player X leave"), but it's just as often an unspoken consensus - I vividly remember one session in which a player went off on their own IC and did something silly, pointless, and destructive, and in such a way as to completely undermine everything the rest of the party had been trying to accomplish for the whole 6-hour session. We'd understood the campaign in question to be a broadly co-operative affair with PvP discouraged, and what this player had done a) was obvious enough that we immediately realised that he was responsible and b) was a huge slap in the face to the rest of us. You could feel the mood in the room turn sullen and sour in an instant and it was clear that the player in question couldn't viably play with us any more. (To his credit, he recognised this and agreed that it would be best if he just left.)

The thing which bugged me about the GM's handling of this situation, though, was the fact that he allowed the action in question to go ahead anyway - despite the fact that he'd taken the player to one side to spend half an hour urging him to reconsider, and despite the fact that he knew damn well that if this action went off the rest of us would be completely enraged, would want the responsible player out of the game, and may even have soured on the campaign as a whole if he didn't do some rapid damage control. The icing on the cake is that the GM then turned around and massaged events in order to essentially neutralise the consequences of the PC in question's actions anyway - the PC was duly disappeared, the NPCs in question understood that we didn't approve of the relevant PC's actions and didn't hold them against us, and the awfulness was smoothed over and forgotten about within a few sessions.

It's always pissed me off that, since he was going to whitewash over the events in question anyway, the GM didn't just boot the player, rule that his PC had been caught by the NPCs' guards and prevented from performing the action which he had been attempting to do, and just have the game carry on as normal without subjecting to us to the awful gut punch of seeing 6 hours' work flushed away because of one PC's impatient and itchy trigger finger.

Quote from: CRKrueger;758810The way I see it, a misbehaving player at the table is a character in the world putting themselves or other people at risk.  If the players are fed up with dealing with his consequences, then the characters probably are fed up too, why don't the characters take care of it?  Why do the characters do nothing while the players send emails?

It's never cut and dry. Letting the dice run the game and ignoring that people are involved, on both sides of the screen, is your choice. It's not the default right position. There is merit to what you are saying, and I think a group of mature players would be able to accept it. Mine would, for example (my less advanced player is more advanced now).

I also think a functional, got their crap together kind of group also wouldn't do something so daft either. So when you don't have an A-Group, and you're training up players, sometimes it's helpful to pause game and say "WTF are you planning here!?!?" rather than slaughter the group and waste progress. Especially if it's not fun.

The only, I repeat, only part of the entire "don't go into the owlbears" bit I don't like is that the DM said "No, you don't," as opposed to "Are you seriously going to do something so stupid?"

Quote from: Marleycat;758820Because it's a game! I never try to ruin someone else's fun by just offing them. That's juvenile and way beyond my purview as a player because that issue is pure DM territory. So I email the DM and say handle it in whatever way is appropriate to you.

That is a cop-out. If, as a Player, I know that a guy is going to go off on a Leroy Jenkins style suicide run because that is his idea of fun and it may result in triggering a TPK, I will shoot that PC in the back. Nothing kills a group's fun like having a TPK due to someone's deliberate idiocy.

I prefer Players to police their own.

Quote from: jeff37923;758831That is a cop-out. If, as a Player, I know that a guy is going to go off on a Leroy Jenkins style suicide run because that is his idea of fun and it may result in triggering a TPK, I will shoot that PC in the back. Nothing kills a group's fun like having a TPK due to someone's deliberate idiocy.

I prefer Players to police their own.

I can handle a TPK just fine...as long as I get some chicken.

Quote from: Exploderwizard;758835I can handle a TPK just fine...as long as I get some chicken.

Hell, I would initiate the TPK for a bucket of KFC.

Quote from: jeff37923;758831That is a cop-out. If, as a Player, I know that a guy is going to go off on a Leroy Jenkins style suicide run because that is his idea of fun and it may result in triggering a TPK, I will shoot that PC in the back. Nothing kills a group's fun like having a TPK due to someone's deliberate idiocy.

I prefer Players to police their own.

I was talking as a PLAYER because as one I would just leave if the fool didn't listen to my earlier IC suggestions to rethink things. And then I watch them die.

Quote from: Marleycat;758820Because it's a game! I never try to ruin someone else's fun by just offing them. That's juvenile and way beyond my purview as a player because that issue is pure DM territory. So I email the DM and say handle it in whatever way is appropriate to you.

Do you have to off them?  How about have the character say "Sir Guy, I think based on our last owlbear fight, we're not ready to take on several more, perhaps we should return later." or "Look, Darkshadow, I know you don't like authority, but you know the King's men are about to kill us all if you insult the King, right?"

It is a game, however, it's not a game of Yahtzee, but a "roleplaying game".  Handling IC stuff OOC or through back channels is what I consider juvenile, hamfisted, lame, whatever floats your boat in dismissive criticism terms.

Quote from: jibbajibba;758822I don't agree with Krueger about shit players though. If the players feel that it is in character for them to fight an unbeatable foe and die in so doing then to me that is a sign of good roleplayers. Now if they just kill everything 'because" then meh but if they discuss their options and the paladin decides he has no choice but to attack for strong roleplay reasons then excellent but he will still die, well the owlbears will attack to the best of their skill and ability and all rolls with be in the clear so .... the party will probably die.

You misunderstood me then because I do agree with you.  If the party knows or suspects they are going to die and do it anyway because the characters want to, have to or need to, that's awesome.   In the "Owlbear Incident" though, it seemed pretty clear that a whole group of players couldn't figure out that if one Owlbear=beats our ass, then 2+Owlbears=Death. Something off there.

Quote from: CRKrueger;758971It is a game, however, it's not a game of Yahtzee, but a "roleplaying game".  Handling IC stuff OOC or through back channels is what I consider juvenile, hamfisted, lame, whatever floats your boat in dismissive criticism terms.

Sometimes the only way to reason with a jackass is through a swift punch to the dome. Same with OOC means to silence their stupidity. It's certainly a last resort, but by no means unwarranted in certain cases.