>>3458
>How the hell did that work?
The group started out with 4, but then they told their friends how much fun they were having and everyone wanted to join, so people trickled in over time. There were times when they separated into different groups and I ran their stuff separately, other times they were all together. It didn’t feel very difficult to me, they gave me their backstories and I knew enough about the setting to just let things flow with what they wanted. You want to go hunt trolls? For sure, you’ve got that. Looking for a job in town? Ethereal filchers have been causing trouble for the townsfolk, nicking all kinds of things, go hunt em down. Wana go kill dragons? Ok, good luck funding one since they’ve been dead forever but put an ear to the ground and see what you can dig up. They just wanted to go around and have a good time, I threw plothooks at them until they stuck then played up the things they asked lots of questions about or showed interest in. Wound up on an adventure surrounding the fate character’s now mother, elven refugees, the search for the dead dwemmer (and for boatmurdered, if you’re familiar with the dwarf fortress story), and the perfect fishing net. They were hardly interested in the civil war or the dragons, so played with minimal interaction on that axis for months until things fell apart between players. I think the fallout is also partially my fault, since I was relying heavily on their input for what to do and when they didn’t all agree they butted heads. But the good times were good, they gave me a lot of praise for the campaign, and they seemed to be engaged. I hope they had fun in the end.
>was it expected that you should have been able to accommodate a character suddenly popping away, solo, to another continent?
I don’t really know how expected it was to be honest. I had presented D&D as a game where anything can happen, and I do believe that to be true and that it’s part of what makes it great, and up until that point I had never really outright said “no, you cant do that” and instead it was more like “you’re sure you want to 1v50 the entire town guard after stealing a sweetroll? You realize you won’t get to reload like in the game, right?”
For more context we were wrapping up an adventure with a stronger party who I had thrown in for funsies. Some of the characters were played by people from my last campaign who were in town for the week, and I wanted to show off some neat builds/have a higher level PC powered group to let the party know they aren’t the only adventuring group out there and some big fish are in that pond. I also had hoped that they could someday surpass this group in strength, which would have been really cool.
After working together for a few sessions, their time together was coming to a close and it was time for the other group to go on and do high level stuff since they weren’t going to babysit the PCs. The two groups were having a debrief session after having achieved their joint goal, and as part of that everyone was asking each other questions about where they were going, what they were going to do next, how to get a hold of each other if either party heard anything relevant to the other, etc. Good roleplay was had all around. My friend, let’s call her Ann, expressed a lot of interest in these characters, specifically the translation/anthropological work being done by their non-combat scholar, and she seemed interested in getting involved in that part of the plot. The other players, however, weren’t super interested and were ready to move on to do other things, and so they said “yea, we’re good, they can leave” and then Ann started to speak up but I pretended I couldn’t hear her (I’m a little bit hard of hearing), closed out the farewell, and had the other party teleport away. I made the assumption that she wanted to go with them, and did some very fast brain thinking to come to the conclusion that if she asked to go there wasn’t a good reason for the other party to say no. They liked her, she could be helpful, and they were strong enough to teleport her over with them. So rather than let her say her peace and try to come up with reasoning why she can’t go, I just shut it down.
In post session debrief she let the other players know that she wanted to go with the other group, that she would have if given the chance, and that since they are a group two people saying “we’re done” doesn’t mean that we are actually done. She was upset more that the other party members hadn’t consulted her before saying everyone was good, and I apologized and said “if I had heard you, I wouldn’t have just ended it like that. I’m sorry. If that happens again wave your arms or something to flag me down so I can know.” It twists my stomach to think about how I just lied to her face like that. It was not cool of me to just talk over her and ignore what she wanted just because I had a storyline panic. Good DMs know you don’t put anything in your game that you aren’t prepared to have your players touch/break, and I thought I knew that too but turns out I screwed up. I wasn’t a good friend or a good DM that night, but I learned my lesson at least and I can try to be better now.
>I guess what I’m saying here is that those who came before us, whether those be ancestors or long-departed colleagues, were rarely the idiots we imagine them to be, and that it’s good to respect them, understand them, and question our urge to tear down what they built a little more than we presently do.
The work and wit of our forebears is crushed under the heel of the march of progress. We think ourselves smarter than them, that progress exists and we have become better than they were. I think, though, that if you take the time to look back on what humanity has wrought you know that they had just as much capacity for greatness, and if we look at people’s behavior now we can see that we retain the same capacity for barbarity as well. A major factor separating us from witch trials and public hangings is that we have newer, more fashionable spectacles to be distracted by, but graphic and gory depictions of violence, both staged in film and captured live, shows us that we are still fascinated by brutality. We’re no better, we’re no worse. We’re just people, trying to get by in the world. Always have been, always will be.
>Of course, when it comes to making creative works then one's free to do whatever one wants with respect to genre and convention. There's not a lot of consequence if you fuck up
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