Thursday, January 29, 2009

Hi, I’m the Evil DM- Trust me.

Evil DM Logo 

The other day at Target I picked up season one of the classic TV show “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.”  It’s a great show to steal ideas for Mission:Adventure!

As I was watching the episodes I came across one where the crew begins acting strangely, it turns out that saboteurs have introduced a hallucinogenic gas into the submarines air supply. I was thinking of the viability of using this plot device in an adventure. The only problem is that the players need to put their trust in the GM. 

Now I’ve found from personal experience that getting players to trust the GM is easier said than done.  Maybe its flashbacks from adolescence when a sadistic  DM killed their 9th level Elven Ranger with a trap from the Tomb of Horrors module or some such silliness, but I've found that players will rarely give up even a smidgen of their characters fate without a fight.  and while that's come to be expected in most RPG’s I find it an extremely  tough issue to get around in Pulp gaming.

Pulps almost always invariably have the hero cornered in an impossible situation where their death is all but guaranteed, only to have fate, amazing luck, or wild coincidence save them at the absolute last minute.  Now for that type of situation to happen in an RPG setting the player MUST trust the GM. The player needs to go along with the GM (with a wink and a nudge) for the good of the adventure and the ultimate enjoyment of everyone at the table.

In my case I believe my failure was that I didn't adequately explain this to my players (in my defense I will say that this was a play-test session using pregenerated characters, so I wasn't expecting quite the level of commitment to the characters as compared to a character that's been nurtured through years of constant play).  As a result, Half my players went one one way,the rest went the other, and the game folded with uncomfortable silence all around. 

The next day I beefed up the section in LoS on trusting your GM and letting your character get captured once in a while, so I guess something good came out of that awkward and embarrassing experience.

So the moral of the story:

Communicate with your players, let them know the tone of your game and remember that they look to you to provide the canvas. 

And players trust your GM. Remember that your character is one cog in a large engine that is the campaign.  There may be reasons for what is happening that is beyond your knowledge or understanding- and that's OK. You don't need to know everything right away. 

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous3:37 AM

    It's reading posts like this, along with all the threads on places like RPG.net, that makes me think maybe I'm some kind of strange enetity GM-wise, because I have never had any problems in getting the players to trust me.

    What you've brought up as good practice is something I've done for a long while, so we generally discuss such points before a game, things like genre emulation will be raised, and how we can all best achieve it.

    A lot of it (in my personal case) is down to two facts, I think:

    1) I don't play with folks I don't like, and if I'm playing with folks I don't know, I'm prepared to extend trust to them until they've proven themselves to be idiots (in which case I don't then game with them again).

    2) My players know they'll have a fun and exciting session even if (or should that be, "especially because"?) their characters are put in serious jeopardy.

    Anyway, if you're still reading this, I'd like to stamp my approval on what The Evil DM said: he spoke true. Communicate with one another, put aside any weird issues you have, and start to trust each other. Your games will improve immeasurably. And if you don't feel you can trust your GM and/or a player/players? Seriously, what the hell are you doing still playing with them? Leave the group or dump their sorry asses if they can't sort themselves out when you talk about things maturely. Poor gaming is NOT better than no gaming.

    Colin

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  2. Star Trek and Star Trek TNG both used that crew acting funny plot. In their cases it was space itself in a strange area that was causing the weird behavior. Kind of a fun riff, though.

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  3. Anonymous8:13 PM

    Well, as one of the players. I agree that communication is very important. Not to reveal the plot, but as to metagaming concepts of the game. True, it was a playtest, but some of the characters were not pre-generated. Regardless, things were not communicated from either end.
    G.

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