Why are players so often acting like they are entitled to be the focal point of the events?Time and tide wait for no man, so if they take too long beating around the bush it should come as no surprise when things resolve without them.And even if they get invovled history remembers kings and generals, not the squad of grunts with highest combined kill and warcrime count.
>hentai NTR bait question based on a /v/ threadGod's grace, we need it.
>>97056531cause its a fucking game retard
Why not just write a novel if you don't want the players involved?
Imagine if /tg/ hadnt had a decade straight of dogshit actively sabotaging moderation
>>97056563hey they've deleted like 10 of these spam threads today. there's a ray of hope.
everyday this board resembles /v/ more and more.
>>97056552There's a lot of overlap between shitawful GMs and equally shitawful wannabe writers. Often really lazy ones who think they can have their players to do the hard work of filling in their story outline for them.
>>97056531>And even if they get invovled history remembers kings and generals, not the squad of grunts with highest combined kill and warcrime count.But that's not even true you enormous faggot.
>>97056531Why would any self-respecting GM constantly prepare scenarios and then immediately discard them if the players don't immediately engage with them? Why not recycle them? Who would subject themselves to that much fucking work for no payoff? For laughs?
>>97056531>Time and tide wait for no man, so if they take too long beating around the bush it should come as no surprise when things resolve without them.This is only important if you're running something where time is tracked. Gary Gygax once famously said that a, "game with no time management is no game at all." If you're accounting for every day of adventure, then yeah things should happen around the PCs. But if you're simply handwaving time management? C'mon, what are you doing?To put a long story short because I've got shit to do, but you should only really do a "living world" if you're doing a hex crawl. Otherwise, just play it by what seems the most suitably dramatic, as >>97056550 said.
>>97056531>>97056816If the timetable is so strict that the PCs don't have any freedom to approach problems before an NPC solves it instead, then that's just a railroad with extra steps. The PCs being late to an adventure because the GM didn't like how long they were taking is just a miserable experience. There's an argument to be made to have things happen in the background if the PCs are neglecting plots. If there's a cult on the rise, then that cult should be growing in power and influence the longer the PCs leave it alone. But that should come in the form of more numerous/dangerous enemies, better defenses, etc. rather than it no longer being something they can engage with.
>>97056531counterpoint
>>97056531>see same webm posted on /vg/ earlierWhy cant porn addicts just keep to themselves or just kill themselves?Please kill yourself.
>>97058123Honestly, if the PCs are regularly neglecting quests or sidequests and you didn't make it clear the campaign was going to be on a timer for them, that's more a sign that you should be asking the players why they're regularly ignoring those quests rather than planning to punish them.
>>97058721I wouldn't call it a punishment to have events happening in the world. A villain being more successful because they were allowed to continue their plans uninterrupted is just cause and effect. I also wouldn't call it a punishment for the PCs to return from another quest to find more difficult quests waiting for them. The cultists being more numerous/powerful just means that the cult is still a threat after the party has gained more experience. It just makes it so the world feels more alive, since rather than having the previous quest just get cleaned up and ignored and introducing an entirely new quest, you can use what already exists and upgrade it, making it clear the PC's choices have an impact on the world.If players are routinely ignoring something entirely, that's probably a sign to quietly shuffle it away instead of having it become a world-ending threat out of nowhere. If they're routinely ignoring absolutely everything, then you clearly need to talk to them anyway.
>>97058589This is what the mods want.
>>97056582The biggest retarded on this board is fucking Einstein compared to the average /v/ user and I'll die on that hill. No matter how shit this board seems it's nowhere near /v/
>>97058721I had one player that arrived at a sort of contrarianism where he felt that the main point of RPGs was the "go anywhere, do anything" nature of them, so following what he saw as the "main quest" was counter to the entire experience. I don't think he could even really articulate it, I had to piece it together from various statements and opinions he shared.
>>97058576Whomst?
>>97056531Oh look, more NTR on my Vietnamese basket weaving radio stati->DOG earsHOW DARE YOU?! I'll come to your house in the middle of the night and unplug your freezer motherfucker. How depraved do you have to be to NTR-bait the symbol of loyalty itself?
>>97056531>Why are players so often acting like they are entitled to be the focal point of the events?Because the game is literally entirely fabricated for the sake of the players and their characters and the story unfolds around them and because of them. Running an uncaring, unfocused world almost always leads to campaigns that catastrophically end early, you nogames faggot.
>>97058721I've played under a GM who insisted on doing this "living world" shtick where there was a villain doing schemes between sessions and when we weren't looking. It just amounted to the bad guy becoming unbeatable before we ever learned we were supposed to care about this guy we met one time. The GM thought he was so clever and we were so stupid for not engaging with his hidden plot which he went to extreme lengths to turn us away from pursuing at every opportunity.This wasn't the actual plot of the game, but imagine it like this>band of heroes bopping around the land looking for work>come across an evil slave trader>disrupt his slave auction and free some slaves>go back about our business>later find out that the Slave Trader has a big evil lair in the distant woods>investigate lair>two elder dragons guarding the door, each easily strong enough to wipe the entire party>attempts to sneak in or circumvent the guards are met with asspull barriers and spells and traps>welp, guess we aren't supposed to do anything about that>ask a few NPCs about Slave Trader and his shit, but get no real answers or hints on what we're supposed to do. >Really feels like this is the GM saying "that doesn't matter, just go do the other story I put in front of you" at this point... so we do.>many sessions later, Slave Trader reappears.>Everyone gets their shit wrecked in different, highly specific ways>NPCs who were our friends betray us because they were Slave Trader's minion the whole time>Players who don't die are either forced to flee in disgrace and never return, or become permanently mind controlled by the Slave Trader's super powerful epic level psion minions>GM proceeds to berate us for not following up on the Slave Trader after all this time and that he was quietly amassing power because we didn't stop him earlier and now he's an Epic Level Demi-God who will rule the whole continent forever.That shit SUCKS.
>>97058576Wasn't he (rank equivalent of) a general?
>>97058769Like I said, it's fine if that's how the campaign is introduced and the players agree to it. It's when you start doing that without the players being aware that declining quests will impact their game that it starts becoming a talking point.>>97058938Sounds like someone who played too much Skyrim>>97059206I'm shocked your GM didn't get punched for pulling that shit on you. Especially considering he stuffed the slave trader behind two elder dragons.
>>97059206That's a problem with the GM being retarded. Having a threat massively outpace the party isn't helpful to anyone, because the only reason to have the villains doing schemes in the background is to maintain more threats to the party and maximize the number of plot hooks available.If after the auction was disrupted, the slave trader managed to get his hands on some tougher ogre bodyguards to help guard his lair, then everything works out, because the party following up on that plot hook finds that the slave trader has improved his resources since they last fought him, but not to the extent where he's drastically more powerful than the party could hope to be at that point. I swear, some people hear the concept of a living world and assume that means they need to be actively tracking how much XP the villains are earning or calculating exactly how many demons they can summon per day and applying that strictly as soon as the PCs show up. That shit is just as retarded as dropping a dragon in the starting tavern and acting surprised when it kills the entire party.
>>97059260They weren't actually elder dragons, but in the system we were playing, they were the equivalent of maxed out, epic level NPCs who were each kitted out with the kind of powers and stats that could insta-kill any player that actually tried to fight them. If I recall correctly, they also had some kind of elemental power that made them intangible and impossible to hit. Under any other GM it would be a big glowing "YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HERE" sign, but he believed it was a subtle indicator that we needed to more seriously pursue the bad guy.Without going into more detail, that guy was such a terrible piece of shit GM that he almost ended multiple friendships over drama from the games he ran. I do not talk to him anymore.>>97059266>I swear, some people hear the concept of a living world and assume that means they need to be actively tracking how much XP the villains are earning or calculating exactly how many demons they can summon per day and applying that strictly as soon as the PCs show up.That's more or less how he explained it. Every time we gained XP, the Slave Trader also gained XP. And also got to have behind the scenes stuff happen allowing him to gain even more XP than we were, since he was one character and we were 5 to 8 players, depending on the week.
>>97059260>It's when you start doing that without the players being aware that declining quests will impact their game that it starts becoming a talking point.I feel like we're defining things very different there. To give an example, say the PCs hear about some trouble with cultists in an abandoned temple, and trouble with goblins in the nearby mines. They decide to deal with the cultists, and when they get back to town, they hear that some of the town guards sent to scout out the goblins came back with reports of hobgoblins helping to train and fortify the mines.Now conversely, say the PCs hear about those same quests, deal with the cultists, come back to town, and hear that the town guard cleared out the goblins. But there's now reports of hobgoblins in the nearby forest.Or the final alternative, the PCs hear about the quests, deal with the cultists, get back to town, nothing has changed except reports of hobgoblins in the forest, and they now decide to go after the weaker goblins for a lower reward and less experience. This is an overly simplified example, but what exactly is the impact? The PCs are still given a quest to fight hobgoblins. It's just that in one case, it's building off of something that was already established. Declining the quest hasn't set back the players, aside from potentially not being able to go after enemies that are too weak to pose a challenge.I suppose I've just never been in a position where I need to explicitly tell players that they won't be able to fight low-level starting enemies for an entire campaign. It just seems really alien to have a world where nothing happens unless the PCs are directly there to observe it.
>>97059266This thread got me thinking about taking a more mechanical approach to a "Living world". Since normally it's pretty arbitrary, even following literal guidelines like XP or demons summoned per day. The GM decides at a certain point to up the ante. My thoughts were to steal a "clock" system from some rules-lite games, and then roll like a d6 to determine if it fills up after X amount of time. Just as an arbitration of logistics, bureaucracy and all the boring stuff of the bad guy acquiring a new lair, hiring minions or making his plans come to fruition. Theoretically it might be kind of interesting since not every plan the villain makes will progress as smoothly as others. Some might go so fast the players have no means to react, others might get bogged down in planning, paperwork or execution and the party can take advantage of that.
>>97059321Yeah, you're thinking of a different thing that most of the anons here seem to be. In your example, the main thing is that the questline is essentially escalating to stay approximately at an appropriate danger level for the player characters for when they eventually decide to handle it, like if you don't deal with a rat early on and as a direct consequence an infestation starts coming into the walls, with all the troubles that ensues. That's a natural progression.No, what I'm talking about is more like most uses of this by bad gms, the kind where it's like "the danger grows AND I take away an advantage you have/impose a penalty upon you specifically because you did not intercede earlier", like the aforementioned rat infestation eats through the electrical wiring in your house specifically as a consequent of not taking care of it immediately. Or more towards your example, instead of the goblins becoming more comfortable and evolving into a bigger nest of hobgoblins they specifically begin raiding the town and killing off beloved npcs just to make the players feel upset. That's what I mean when I say "punish".
>>97059318>That's more or less how he explained it. Every time we gained XP, the Slave Trader also gained XP.I just can't fathom why someone would handle it that way. It makes far more sense to just have rumors about the villain doing X or Y, but otherwise making sure him and his forces are still roughly on par with the party. Especially because NPC power can not only scale in quality by just making them as strong as the PCs, but also via quantity as they gain more soldiers and underlings. A slave trader especially should primarily be the latter case, where he just has more guards and maybe a new exotic monster compared to last time.>>97059334I think the problem with a more mechanical approach is that it does run the risk of the villain just getting too far ahead of the PCs for them to do anything about it. A clock system similar to what Blade in the Dark uses might be a slightly better way to handle that, since rather than time, you could put the advancement of the clock into the players achieving certain milestones. That way if the party decides they want to spend a couple weeks of downtime, the villain doesn't jump ahead as far as he would if they'd spent two weeks slaying dragons.But such a system also ultimately relies on the GM deciding exactly what the fallout of such a scheme is anyway. Whether it's the villain learning a new spell, recruiting some fresh troops, or managing to take over a town or city. The scope and scale is something that'd be difficult to quantify in some cases. Sure, gaining levels or adding monsters to his side can be a rough estimate, but it's hard to say exactly what the value of conquering a town is, or making a new lair.Settling on the length of a clock for some of those schemes is less easy to objectively evaluate.
>>97059129Some loyalties go beyond grave, others are easily broken at first whiff of big juicy sausage.
>>97059422>I think the problem with a more mechanical approach is that it does run the risk of the villain just getting too far ahead of the PCs for them to do anything about it.That's definitely the rub, but I feel tying it to milestones too tightly kinda negates the concept. I'd still probably set milestones as a unit of time. But it feels a bit goofy to me if the players fuck off for a while, the villain is less prepared after than if they go kill a dragon or otherwise improve themselves.I mean narratively, it's absolutely the better option. But from a pure mechanical standpoint is it feels a bit strange.>Settling on the length of a clockWell, in my mind at least, that's covered by rolling die for every potential advancement. Say you make the clock six segments long, every day you need to roll a 6 to advance it by 1. It could potentially be only 6 days before the villain does whatever he has planned, or it could be much, much longer. You can be less objective with things because the die would resolve things in a natural manner (hopefully)
>>97059405>That's a natural progression.Yeah, I suppose I've just always assumed that's what it was supposed to be. You leave monsters to their own devices, and you're eventually going to get more and stronger monsters.For the latter example of the goblins gaining hobgoblin leadership, I would have some NPCs deal with the problem if the players simply left town for somewhere else and forgot about it.If they were still operating out of the town, then at most it'd be raids on outlying farms for livestock, possibly culminating in a siege when the PCs are there to do something about it. As I've said, the point is to make the world feel alive and pose a challenge to the players. It doesn't achieve anything to say that the goblins killed everyone while they were away.If the PCs then decide to abandon the town mid-siege (and I mean fully abandon, not just leave the town to go bypass the army and kill the goblin leaders), then I'd say it's justified to have the goblins take over. But even then they'd probably take prisoners so there's some wiggle-room for the PCs to still fix it. By the time it becomes a threat that could truly penalize them, it's also something they'd need to make the conscious decision to allow.But that's the degree to which I view the approach. The monsters aren't frozen in place whenever they're out of sight, but they're also not seconds away from destroying everything if the PCs blink momentarily. I always figured that this was just a typical way of running a campaign.
>>97059523It's semi-typical. Most competent GMs that tell players straightforwardly the campaign will be focused on making smart choices on what you spend your time will do it like that. Poor GMs are more >>97059206 , since the main focus is trying to pull a "gotcha!" on the players over making sure they grasp that they actually do matter and their actions are not wasted if they choose to snipe particular threats early on before they become an issue.
>>97056531>Why are players so often acting like they are entitled to be the focal point of the events?Because that's like the point of roleplaying.
>>97056531>Why are players so often acting like they are entitled to be the focal point of the events?Because the collaborative story you're telling with your players and the game you're playing revolves around the most interesting characters in the setting by dint of them being the most interesting characters in the setting. If they aren't, then why are we even bothering?
Why is /tg/ so full of cuck fetishists?
>>97060005you should see some of the people in romcom threads on /a/
>>97060005/v/ cross contamination.
>>97060005Roleplaying is inherently cucked hobby - becase playing a character is imagining somebody else that's getting all the action while you sit on a chair in a dimly lit corner.
>>97056552Go fuck yourself, PbtA faggot.
>>97062762Projecting much?
>>97060005Asian and jewish trannies are trying to psyop you into liking it, same with 99% of bbc posters (who are also asian and jewish). They just out themselves as fucking weirdos instead. Laugh at them. It's a fraction of what they deserve.
>>97056531You know, I actually agree with you, but it depends on the kind of game we're playing. Generally, a more linear, railroady game (like a published campaign or an adventure path) has the implicit understanding that the PCs will be the heroes, one way or another.If I'm running something that's more of a sandbox, it's up to them to distinguish themselves. And meanwhile you have games like Lamentations of the Flame Princess, where the point is that you're a scrappy looter just trying to make money and not die horribly.
>>97068799>Generally, a more linear, railroady game (like a published campaign or an adventure path) has the implicit understanding that the PCs will be the heroes, one way or another.Railroad or linearity is not an issue here, the issue is events waiting for convenience of the players. Captured maiden being prepared for sacrifice right on the day players enter the dungeon. Or the day after if they need to take another long rest. Or the next week if they still feel unprepared and want to go back in town to restock on supplies.
>>97058944A nazi pedophile this guy likes to post around here sometimes. Only notable for beginning WW2 in a concentration camp and having a 200% casualty rate for the poor retards he was given command of.
>>97072949He was poster child for the concept of Penal Battalion (Strafbataillon), ruthless, poorly trained but highly motivated shock troops made predominantly (in this case exclusively) out of convicted criminals. The man persished but the idea lives on in contemporary conflicts.
>itt:
>>97056531GMs too retarded and fragile to handle the fact that their job is to play the side characters and bad guys should just quit.
>>97068620BBC is /tg/ core now
>>97056531The players are the protagonists by definition. KYS. /thread
>>97074285Protagonists of their own story, sure. But personal tragedies or victories are often beneath notice of the grand scheme of things.
>>97078539Most players don't give a shit about the grand scheme of things if it doesn't affect them. At that point you might as well be wanking yourself off.
>>97078568>At that point you might as well be wanking yourself off.Why do you think OP made this thread?
>>97078539Sure, but you're not playing a game from the perspective of the grand scheme. You're playing a game that focuses on the PCs. The players aren't there to listen to you monologue about the victories and defeats of an entire war effort that they can't do anything about.If you want to focus on the grand scheme, then just write a book about that instead.
>>97078576For the reddit upvotes. Which is like expecting a ghost handjob for breathing
>>97078591I've seen player getting uppity king didn't come personally congratulate him for guerilla efforts inside enemy territory.
>>97056531Maybe you play TTRPGs because you take a thespian, artistic interest in what it would be like to get inside the mindset and lifestyle of some average peasant. Same deal why Germans fucking love job simulator games. Some people really like immersing themselves in mundanity.Most people fucking don't.I play TTRPGs so I can roleplay as an important person. I'm a peasant IRL, no need to be a fucking peasant in my fantasies as well.
>>97078738Did you do anything that would make them think the king would show up in the game? The players don't want to hear you ramble about shit that doesn't matter to them, so if the king was more than a footnote, that's just the players assuming you're using foreshadowing correctly when they expect him to matter.
>>97056531>History remembers kings and generals, not the squad of grunts with the highest combined kill and warcrime count.It doesn't remember them either. Historians are paid to cobble together evidence as to what wealthy autocrats want published after the fact. The resulting identity is a mishmash of cultural pandering and authorial style more comparable to AI slop than a genuine remembrance of the personality in question.
>>97058769>If players are routinely ignoring something entirely, that's probably a sign to quietly shuffle it away instead of having it become a world-ending threat out of nowhere. If they're routinely ignoring absolutely everything, then you clearly need to talk to them anyway.More to the point, the progression of events off-screen is far more versatile than explicit events with recorded continuity. You can rationalize almost any transition to bring the players' attention back.
>>97078825The recruiter gave them the usual spiel about doing it for the king and for the country, then sent them on "a special mission" that was essentially a chevauchee. They stepped into ongoing conflict and picked a side, this felt like good way to get them involved without restraining them with command structure.
>>97059206I simply let players opt into or out of the massive world changing events.If they select not to stop armageddon, then armageddon will happen. This comes with its own encounters and challenges.Usually, the players who aren't playing active save-the-world types will ignore these world changing problems until their house is actively being chewed on by zombies or shot at by terminators. Then they'll get up and do something about it, while having zombies and terminators and demons and god knows what else to contend with.
>>97079253You say more adverse environment, I say more opportunities to grind some xp.
>>97079253If you tell the players that the world is going to end in so many in-game days, and they do nothing and the the world ends, that's silly, but at the same time, they knew it was happening. If your players actively try to stop the end of the world, but you put endless instant death hurdles in their way and give them the impression that they cannot actually do anything to stop it, so they stop trying, then you've fucked up.
>>97085109I usually just have the apocalypse be a progressive thing. Yeah, the grey goo isn't going to take over the world today, or tomorrow, and in fact is just kind of useless sludge that's easily pruned back. But it's less useless every day, as the goo ecosystem develops more complex forms of locomotion and behavior.
>>97084706This is entirely fair. It's not like the game ends when zombies show up.
If these aren't the most important characters, why are you showing them to us? Why aren't you showing us something more interesting?
>>97056816I don't "prepare scenarios". Everything is just the result of stuff happening in the world, just like real life. There is nothing to recycle since I didn't
>>97058123>plots
>>97058938The player was right.
>>97059206>plot
>>97058123>an NPC solves it instead"Resolves" doesn't mean an NPC does it instead. A resolution is merely the logical outcome of the PC's action (or in this case, inaction).If there's an evil necromancer trying to take over the kingdom but the PCs are puttinf all their efforts into legalizing gay marriage, he's not going to be stopped by some rando.
>>97085888A villainous NPC in a fantasy world has schemes and plots that they hope to enact. Do you have an objection to that concept, or is this a matter of poor reading comprehension?
>>97085874The same reason I don't spoonfeed newfags. Show some initiative, make effort, earn the good stuff. Spoiled kids make rotten adults with this absurd sense of self-entitlement.
>>97068620>Asian
>>97085883I hate to break it to you, anon, but you aren't literally creating a fully functioning autonomous world. Everything is a prepared scenario when you're a DM. Even rolling on the table for a random encounter is one because you have to have the monster starts coursed out ahead of time.
>>97086327Retard.
>>97087442Thanks for admitting it KEK
>>97087557Speak for yourself, loser.
>>97056531>Why are players so often acting like they are entitled to be the focal point of the events?Because they literally are. They are the main characters. If you, as a GM, are not treating them as the main characters... Well, go write a novel.>Time and tide wait for no man, so if they take too long beating around the bush it should come as no surprise when things resolve without them.Fine, whatever, but that isn't the same as them not being the focal point. They are the catalyst for things to happen, what happens offscreen is, generally, irrelevant.>And even if they get invovled history remembers kings and generals, not the squad of grunts with highest combined kill and warcrime count.History remembers heroes, and the players should be heroes.
>>97087453-1000 izzat
>>97073451Probably the biggest proof of what he said.
