| Takilla |
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Warning ... GM venting ahead =)
I just started GMing again after not playing for several years. Our group started in 3.5 and then went to Pathfinder and it's been fun for the most part. We decided that we would each take turns GMing so we can all play. I've tried to be up on all the rules and run things in a fair way. However, no matter what I do our group ends up arguing about things quite often. Example: there is a fighter in our group that chose to get some chainmail armor +1. Well, he didn't realize that this would make his movement decrease (PH 123) and that if he slept in it he would be fatigued the next day (PH 122). This was the second time this has been brought up in our group. I had an encounter set up where they would get attacked at night. I basically just told him: "I'll let you decide now whether you slept in your armor or not, we can discuss the rules on this later, so we don't have to stop play." Well after about 5 more minutes of arguing and asking me to show him in the book where it said that he agreed that he wouldn't have slept in his armor. Then said: "why the heck do you keep springing all these unfair rules on me!?"
This happens quite a bit. If I follow the rules to the letter, and they don't like them, I get yelled at for that. If I mess up and don't know the rules, I get called out for being an idiot and not knowing what I'm doing. I even make up new rules sometimes that do nothing but benefit the chars and (I hope) add to realism and I get reamed for that sometimes too. Example: I allow the chars to use diplomacy to haggle merchants down in price. The one time I told them: hey this guy isn't going to give you hundreds of gold off. I get yelled at for "oh, come on I rolled good you have to let me get a discount you're sooo unfair!"
I remember reading that if stuff like this happens you should simply tell the player "hey, this is how it's going to be for now, rather than look it up and stop play I'm going to make a judgement call and we'll move on." Well that has not worked for me once =(. Any ideas?