Use Your Powers for Good!
I want to tell you all a story. A friend of mine from the net, who happens to be a fellow player, game master, and writer, came to me with a story and he wanted my opinion. I suppose he figured out that I have lots of them and they are real cheap. So, now I’m going to share the story and my opinion with you.
Picture this, it’s a fantasy game set in the olden days… OK… go…
A group of PCs arrived in a little town. It wasn’t their final destination, just a little no-where place along the way. (Hope I’m getting this all right.) When they arrived, they realized that they were a little short on funds. So they put their heads together and came up with a clever little scheme. Now in order for it to work at all, the Players had to bring the Game Master into their confidence.
They then began to implement their plan. The plan was pretty simple and rather ingenious.
They gave all their money, which wasn’t much, to one character and he went into a tavern and pretended to have lots of money and pretended to get drunk. He then went outside as if to relieve himself in an alley, and in doing so lured a thief into the alley as they thought he was helplessly drunk. Once in the alley, the other PCs attacked the thief and stole his ill-gotten fortune from him.
So far, so good. That was the plan. It was, in my humble opinion, a good plan. I would have let my players get away with it. O.K., I probably would have rolled on chance of them getting caught or failing.
In the game in question, the Game Master had them fail. There was no rolling of the dice. Well, they succeeded at robbing the thief, but a constable happened to have picked that night to stake out the tavern for no explained reason and he caught them and arrested them.
They left town with even less money than they arrived with. The event did nothing to further the plot along. The players left the game truly unhappy and feeling as if nothing had been accomplished.
And why?
On the whim of the Game Master who had previous knowledge as to what they were planning.
O.K., that was the story portion of our article this month. Now onto our regularly scheduled opinion….
What the Game Master did was an abuse of power and, worse, an abuse of player knowledge. In my book, both are big ol’ no-no’s.
I have said again and again that it is the Game Master’s responsibility to ensure that the players enjoy themselves. True, you cannot please everyone all the time, but you should be able to please at least someone besides yourself.
One of the hardest things for a Game Master not to do is to use knowledge gained about the players against them, knowledge that the villain wouldn’t know or discover under other circumstances except that the Game Master waves his magic scepter and makes it so. In this case, it wasn’t the big bad guy, but you have to ask yourself, why was that constable there? Maybe he was waiting to catch the thief? If so, then why did he defend him? Maybe he was helping the thief. Maybe he was trying to catch his wife cheating. We don’t know. The players don’t know. There was no rolling of dice, no use of an item of chance to put him there that night in that place. That is simply abuse of player knowledge to spite the players.
And because it is the Game Master and no one can call him on it, it was an abuse of power. My game. My rules. My way.
Unfortunately, the people who understand and see this as wrong are the ones who don’t need to be told or reminded. The people who read this and go “So? What’s the deal?” are the one’s who will abuse the power they have as a Game Master every time. I cannot say it enough, with great power comes great responsibility. You pull that kind of thing often enough and you’ll have a game and no players. If you want to control other character’s lives and make them miserable, play “The Sims”, if you want to be a good Game Master, learn how to balance your power with responsibility and fairness.
Learn to use your powers for good.
This raises such a good point. I had a game master once who was very bad about allowing villians to act on knowledge that they didn’t have, so it took away from the game so badly that the group folded with-in months. This happened in an area where it’s hard to find a GM so, it had to be pretty bad.
Yupp. Same here. The copper could also just havel istened to the characters story, have it put to paper and arrested the thief for robbery, but preventing the characters from stealing his money. Surely all with proper dice rolling. But the plan has one flaw in the first place: Why would a thief carry much money with him? The fact that he is a simple cutpurse seems not to imply that he has much money. I don’t know your ingame economy, but in every D&D game no thief would have so much money the players would care about. What are some copper or even silver coins tothem?
While I’d echo some of the sentiments above, such as “why would a thief be carrying a lot of treasure with him on-the-job anyway, I think it also bears to mention a few other points.
1. Why did the PCs assume that a thief would just be lurking in that alley anyway? Did they pull this, drunk and in the alley trick more than one night? My point, it’s no less likely for a guard to be a random encounter than a thief.
2. Assuming that people do get mugged in that alley all the time, the DM may (reasonably and in-story) assume that a guard would be watching the place. Fighting in the alley is going to make some noise.
3. If this really was some nowhere little town, it’s also possible that someone passing by ran and got a guard because “them four strangers what was at the tavern are beatin the hell outta ol’ Larry in the alley.” (Just one more example of why this might not be just “bad GMing).
4. Also, it seems that there is a difference between “encouraging players away from certain behaviors” and “stomping on player expectation.” It certainly depends on the situation and the group, but this sounds more like the first than the second.
5. Finally, I think this DM’s worst sin is that the players are so bored that this is what they’ve resorted to. I mean, I’ve played in some “plot-less” or sandbox kinds of games, but if you don’t want your PCs mugging the locals (even the local thieves) then throw them a bone and get them back on the road to adventure!
Thanks for the comments – and excellent additional points, as well – Rhetorical Gamer!
[...] – that most people only bother posting about DMs when they do something (subjectively) bad. Take this story*, for example. I’m not sure that the party in question really had any right to expect the result [...]