Comments on: Devil Designer: Or How I Learned to Stop Leveling and Love the Nerf Bat

By: Kevthulhu

Kevthulhu — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 04:56:17 +0000

Nice entry. I’ve never understood the GM vs. players mindset. I always view gaming as a cooperative story telling effort with the only goal being that everyone walks away from the table feeling that they helped create a fun shared experience.

Oh, and I also got to explain to Mel what it means that you were Slash dotted. That was a fun conversation since her involvement with the geek world is only through marriage.

By: Animagnum

Animagnum — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 02:57:26 +0000

Alex, that’s exactly how I read it. Read parat of the story from the link I posted and you’ll see how it relates to this post. The players found what would normally be called an “exploit” and the creative GMs decided to roleplay the situation instead of claiming that the players broke the game or exploited a bug.

By: d4b3ll3z

d4b3ll3z — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 00:17:57 +0000

I’ve played with a number of DMs like those that have been described here and it’s made me wiser for it. However, sometimes it goes the other way around. I’ve had players who are so confident in their l33t skillz that I’ll purposefully trick them into difficult situations because I know that they’ll run headlong into it. And sometimes nerfing is necessary as well. When a developer create a game, they usually don’t have the time to nitpick each and every single last thing that could possibly happen, maybe. They just take care of the ones that will happen the most. IMO some players deserve it when things get nerfed because. No matter how you put the nerfing though, some people are going to see it as “The players were too good, so now we changed it on them”. What I prefer to do is something like what was describe here – up the non-player aspect instead of nerfing the player. Nothing ticks someone off more than creating a character only to have parts of it nerfed because someone decided it was too powerful. If it’s too powerful, then give them something harder to fight. As in the example, instead of getting rid of that warlock’s ability to teleport, they just made it so the boss trained the entire dungeon out with him.

Personally, I don’t like to play MMORPGs because I find that the players, collectively, get too emotionally involved in their characters. This is even more true in those for which you pay a monthly fee. Because someone pays $15-20 to play an online game for a month they feel that they’re special and in some way better than others when they’re able to get their characters to insane levels, or figure things out like what was spoken about. IMO, they should just get lives, but for those who do it an in-character explaination is always prefered to one that deal with the mechanics of the game.

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 22:56:52 +0000

Animagnum, I don’t think you see what he’s saying. He’s saying, why should it be an “exploit”, or even a “glitch”? Why shouldn’t the dumb monster and the creative players become part of the story?

By: Animagnum

Animagnum — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 19:45:36 +0000

I think see what you’re saying about exploit being a pejorative term. Rather than saying, “Hey, there was a glitch in the game and we fixed it,” using the word “exploit” places blame on the players. I’m reminded of Lucasfilm’s old “Habitat” (aka Club Caribe) where players killed a supposedly invincible character — Death and took one of his special items. The whole story can be found here about 3/4s of the way down:

http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html

By: Undercrypt

Undercrypt — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 17:36:22 +0000

One of my problems with the early days of RPGs was that I frequently ran across game masters who were engaged in some sort of perverse power struggle with their players.

Been there. Only had one really bad one, but that was enough. (shudder)

Please consider sending this (or a version thereof) to the aforementioned designers.

By: Corvus

Corvus — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 12:34:33 +0000

I think it’s a combination of all the elements you mentioned. A few of those examples were nerds in Texas, which tends to provide a slightly aggressive and hostile approach to life. Age is another consideration. Most, with one notable exception, of the examples I provided were teenaged. The worst of them I’ve met at conventions, which tend to bring out the most social mal-adjusted of the lot and provide them with alcohol… never a pleasant mix.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 12:17:05 +0000

In some twenty years of tabletop role playing I have never once met a Gamesmaster with such an appaling attitude towards the role. Is it possible that this is a cultural artefact? That such terrible approaches are endemic to the US for some reason?

Or perhaps it’s just because I ditched D&D fairly rapidly in favour of systems which better elnd themselves to story/character oriented play.