Author Topic: Conflicts of style and taste...  (Read 5138 times)

Offline admiralducksauce

  • Conversationalist
  • **
  • Posts: 577
    • View Profile
Re: Conflicts of style and taste...
« Reply #15 on: August 17, 2011, 07:37:27 PM »
It's hard to go trolling for groups, man.  I've always been lucky enough to have the group where we were (mostly with only a few exceptions) all friends before we gamed, rather than joining a gaming group and then making friends.

There are drawbacks either way - I've found that it's a rare friend who's open to gaming, but it's likewise nigh-impossible to game with someone whom you can't be friends with.

Best of luck in your group search!

Offline Pbartender

  • Conversationalist
  • **
  • Posts: 136
    • View Profile
Re: Conflicts of style and taste...
« Reply #16 on: August 17, 2011, 07:56:10 PM »
Local mini-cons and game days can be fantastic places to find players.  They're often all attended by the same core group of people, and are a great way to "try out" different players and maybe make some friends who like to game.

Of the five people who play in my games, three are guys I met at the Chicago Gameday for several years in a row before I personally invited them to play with us, one answered a message board "want ad" for our game, and the other is my wife.

We have on occasion picked up a player who didn't jibe well with the way we like to play games...  We'd give them a good chance, but if it really wasn't working out, we'd cut them loose as gently and respectfully as possible (which wasn't always very, admittedly), and just go looking for someone else.

It took some years, but person by person we've collected a group of dedicated gamers who all share share similar tastes...  Or, at least, who can tolerate each other's tastes in gaming.

Offline newtinmpls

  • Conversationalist
  • **
  • Posts: 168
    • View Profile
Re: Conflicts of style and taste...
« Reply #17 on: August 17, 2011, 08:08:32 PM »
Years ago at the dawn of time ... anyway, when I first discovered D&D (the stapled books in the box, before the first monster manual was published) there were three of us that really really really wanted to play. We felt that (according to the rules) we needed more than 2 PC's to form a party, and being DM looked like the hardest job, so we each rolled up and played two characters, and we rotated DMing, so that at any given time two of the PC's were effectively NPC's.

It taught me how to share a world with another DM, play with their "stuff" but not break it, and leave loose ends that another storyteller could run with. Hard to do - very hard - but gaming was as addictive as crack to us, so we did what we had to.

Offline Lanir

  • Conversationalist
  • **
  • Posts: 208
    • View Profile
Re: Conflicts of style and taste...
« Reply #18 on: August 18, 2011, 04:10:31 AM »
Got mentioned before but bears repeating: Everyone wants different things from a game. Unfortunately this too often gets paired with something a bit like one of the annoying internet memes. "If you're not doing it my way, you're doing it wrong." A common enough sentiment and easy to fall into but decidedly false.

If you fall into a group of people that want a lot of the same things you do out of a game... Great! You've gotten VERY lucky. If you're like the majority of gamers and haven't been quite so lucky, what you get out of a game will largely depend on the approach you and the rest of the group take towards acknowledging your differences and meeting in the middle. You'll have to avoid hopping on a soapbox while you do this and don't let anyone else get overly comfortable up there either. That won't help any. Just figure out what you enjoy, what makes you happy in a game and see if the group and the GM are comfortable working that into the experience.

However the initial talk goes, you'll also have to realize it's going to perpetually be a work in progress. You can't just do it right once and then drop the idea. It's going to always be a compromise, but there are many different ways to do it. Rather than every story being directly in the middle of everyone's comfort zone you might find the players who are more into storytelling are willing to go for a more crunchy, combative storyline as long as the group is willing to accommodate them later on.

One last comment, going with canon can sometimes be it's own argument. It's also one an author doesn't run into to the same extent that a group of gamers will. If they want to add something to their canon they only have to worry about it breaking their own previous ideas rather than being concerned that it might mess up someone else's character.

Roxy Rocket

  • Guest
Re: Conflicts of style and taste...
« Reply #19 on: August 18, 2011, 11:01:15 AM »
Okay. okay I give! I'm inflexible and snippy and it's better to see my group as 'special people that saw things my way and I was really lucky to have them.'

Pbartender pointed me to the GM guide for dungeons and dragons fourth edition (or am I supposed to say 4.0?) and I can see how it makes sense. It's also super creepy and wrong to make a meta class system to describe players in like you describe characters, (but even a bad systematic understanding of the world you can test and improve and train yourself to recognize patterns with is better than nothing, yadda yadda.)

I will continue to be shocked by players characters with refresh zero, arbitrary rainbows of jade court vampires and people that play without ever having read the books. I will not pull a gun on the table, I'll just wear a tinfoil hat and put their names on my enemies list.

Thank you for your advice...even when it feels weapons-grade, cthulhu-zite wrong.

Offline The Mighty Buzzard

  • Posty McPostington
  • ***
  • Posts: 1041
  • Unemployed in Greenland
    • View Profile
Re: Conflicts of style and taste...
« Reply #20 on: August 18, 2011, 12:00:38 PM »
Okay. okay I give! I'm inflexible and snippy and it's better to see my group as 'special people that saw things my way and I was really lucky to have them.'

Pbartender pointed me to the GM guide for dungeons and dragons fourth edition (or am I supposed to say 4.0?) and I can see how it makes sense. It's also super creepy and wrong to make a meta class system to describe players in like you describe characters, (but even a bad systematic understanding of the world you can test and improve and train yourself to recognize patterns with is better than nothing, yadda yadda.)

I will continue to be shocked by players characters with refresh zero, arbitrary rainbows of jade court vampires and people that play without ever having read the books. I will not pull a gun on the table, I'll just wear a tinfoil hat and put their names on my enemies list.

Thank you for your advice...even when it feels weapons-grade, cthulhu-zite wrong.

Nah, I'm right there with you.  Zero refresh jade court vampires each wielding the same sword of the cross and such is just freaking wrong.  Unfortunately, breaking the first law outside the game applies to even non-magical means and carries pretty much the same penalty.  Doesn't matter that it would improve the gene pool.  I checked.  Snide remarks and the enemies list bit is about the best you can do.
Violence is like duct tape.  If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.

My web based NPC formatter, output suitable for copy/paste to boards and wiki, can be found here.

Offline Masurao

  • Conversationalist
  • **
  • Posts: 282
  • Liberate tetemet ex inferis!
    • View Profile
Re: Conflicts of style and taste...
« Reply #21 on: August 18, 2011, 12:06:43 PM »
Nah, I'm right there with you.  Zero refresh jade court vampires each wielding the same sword of the cross and such is just freaking wrong.  Unfortunately, breaking the first law outside the game applies to even non-magical means and carries pretty much the same penalty.  Doesn't matter that it would improve the gene pool.  I checked.  Snide remarks and the enemies list bit is about the best you can do.

Cleaning up the gene pool wouldn't get you convicted, right? Right...?

Offline polkaneverdies

  • Posty McPostington
  • ***
  • Posts: 1588
    • View Profile
Re: Conflicts of style and taste...
« Reply #22 on: August 18, 2011, 12:27:19 PM »
Videotape their actions and hope for a fellow gamer in the jury. Most of us wouldn't convict you, and all it takes is one for a hung jury.

Offline Pbartender

  • Conversationalist
  • **
  • Posts: 136
    • View Profile
Re: Conflicts of style and taste...
« Reply #23 on: August 18, 2011, 01:13:24 PM »
Okay. okay I give! I'm inflexible and snippy and it's better to see my group as 'special people that saw things my way and I was really lucky to have them.'

I don't know if I'd go that far, but...  GMing is the hardest job, because you're trying to keep round about a half dozen people (including yourself) entertained and happy.  And I'll be the first to admit that keeping yourself happy is just as important as keeping the players happy.  I've had groups in which I tried it both ways...  One group I had had players with picky gaming habits -- I was always bending over backwards to cater the game to them, and I was miserable because I never got to run the game the way I wanted.  The very next campaign I ran, I said "Screw it!" and just ran want I wanted to run, without regard for the players' interests, and I was still miserable because no one was having fun and no one "grokked" the setting they way I hoped they would.

About that time, I floated around to a few other gaming groups just to see what things were like, and ended up coming back thinking, "Holy Cow...  My group isn't nearly as bad as I thought they were."

In the end, I ended up loosening up a little as a DM, and they relaxed a little as players.  Now, when we start a new game, I toss out a few suggestions that I'm interested in, they point out which ones they might like to play in, and we negotiate it all out, until we find something everybody canbe happy with.  It does take time, trust and communication, but our games have gotten a LOT better.

Pbartender pointed me to the GM guide for dungeons and dragons fourth edition (or am I supposed to say 4.0?) and I can see how it makes sense. It's also super creepy and wrong to make a meta class system to describe players in like you describe characters, (but even a bad systematic understanding of the world you can test and improve and train yourself to recognize patterns with is better than nothing, yadda yadda.)

Yeah, I know...  I don't think the intent was to emulate D&D character Classes, but it's not unlike those personality tests that try to put people into neat little categories.  In reality, most gamers are complex mixes of those categories.  Nevertheless, I've personally seen enough players stereotypically fulfilling these roles (and can identify with a few of them myself) to say that are some good insights into player motivations, there.

I will continue to be shocked by players characters with refresh zero, arbitrary rainbows of jade court vampires and people that play without ever having read the books. I will not pull a gun on the table, I'll just wear a tinfoil hat and put their names on my enemies list.

Now see, I think that this sort of behavior could be less a problem with differing play styles and more of a problem with misunderstanding the genre and setting ("without ever having read the books" is a big red flag).  I've run into the exact same problem running Star Wars RPGs, and sometimes even in my homebrew setting for D&D.  Players come up with a cool idea for a character, before they even know what kind of game they'll be playing in, and then they don't bother to do the homework to make that character fit in.

For example, in a more recent homebrewed D&D game, one of my player wanted to play a stereotypical Southern hillbilly hick Half-Elf Bard who was a former pig farmer, played a banjo and had a flying pig for a familiar.  I had to explain to him, that while we tend to take our games a little lightly, that was just a bit too silly and that regardless, Elves and Half-Elves in this campaign setting were, as previously mentioned, patterned after Native American tribes.  In the end, after a few months of playing with him, he was one of the players we had to "gently" let go.

On the other hand, we've got another player, who was a inveterate power-gamer from the start...  He were the first table-top game he played in, and he came from a background of Baldur's Gate and World of Warcraft.  He had some terribly annoying habits. We razzed him and hazed him mercilessly over it.  However, he learned a lot, he adjusted his style a bit and so did the rest of us.  He's still a power gamer, though he's dipping his toes more into the role playing aspects more. (FATE actually had a big impact on him...  He's realized that it's "conflict" that he enjoys, not just combat, and in FATE non-combat conflict play just like combat in most ways.)  He's been with our group for nearly ten years now.

Sometimes, you do need to switch players or games, but before you get to that do what you can work things out first.

Offline zenten

  • Conversationalist
  • **
  • Posts: 376
    • View Profile
Re: Conflicts of style and taste...
« Reply #24 on: August 18, 2011, 03:50:33 PM »
I have a few players in my Dresden Files game that haven't read the novels, and a few that havn't read the gaming books (only one that hasn't read either though).  I havn't had a problem with them.  I explained what the game was about, and they went with it.