Stop Judging me, please


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Grand Lodge 2/5 RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32

David Haller wrote:
Jiggy wrote:
David Haller wrote:

...added NPCs when needed, and I'm willing to bend, interpret, add and discard rules as needed...

As far as I can tell, (good) players prefer it that way.

So good players prefer people who do things explicitly forbidden in the Guide and repeatedly asked by the Campaign Coordinator to not do?

I guess I'm a bad player then. Darn.

Here's an interesting observation: every 5-star GM I've ever had (often before they were a 5-star GM) added NPCs and changed things in scenarios which absolutely had mechanical effects, including adding combat encounters.

When Mike Brock, in fact, ran my group through Murder on the Throaty Mermaid - and we went completely off-rail - he pulled out the GM Guide, looked up the Captain, and our Tier 4-5 table was fighting a CR 11 encounter (expert 3/fighter 9)... and we had a blast (even if we mostly died). Oh, and this was at his house in Atlanta, long before he was a Paizo bigwig... he was just a very good GM doing what it took to run games in Atlanta.

If there's one important characteristic of good GMs, it's that they take ownership of the scenario they're running - and sometimes that means knowing when to set the guide down - maybe pretend they didn't read it - and go "off book" for awhile.

(And don't even get me started on John Compton running us through Eyes of the Ten... oy!)

There's a difference between "came up with stats for an existing but un-statted NPC that the party decided to fight" and "added creatures to a combat". There's a difference between "the players' actions went beyond the scope of the scenario and I had to determine the result somehow" and "ignoring rules" (your words).

In your story, Mike Brock did none of the things you tried to defend with said story. The things you originally talked about doing are things that were NOT part of that story, and that the very same Mike Brock explicitly asked GMs not to do. Apparently you can't tell the difference, but you know what? That's not even the important part; it's still just a game, after all.

The thing that REALLY tells us what kind of person you are, is your assertion that a player needs to agree with you in order to be "good". It's one thing to ignore the rules of a game; it's another to say that those who do so are better than those who don't. Stay classy, man.

EDIT: Heh, your post is actually kind of funny in context of the thread title...

Grand Lodge 5/5 Regional Venture-Coordinator, Baltic

Jiggy wrote:
Darn.

I think you misunderstood David's comments. He's not saying a good GM must change the encounters, he's just saying that if the players decide to jump off the railroad the GM is allowed to improvise.

Also my guess is that the the 'ignoring rules' is more to allow players to do cool stuff instead of screwing them over. (For instance when I run I will allow people to use a spring loaded wrist sheath to get out a scroll of Breath of Life and spend a lot of their gold to prevent someone to have to spend even more gold although the rules are very debatable).

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