Requested post #7

[ogremarco]

mtfiercewrites "How to best redirect a subgroup of players who are going off to deliberately break your adventure?"

This is a hard one for me to answer because even when I was playing traditional games I was always flying off the cuff. years before I heard the term sandbox I was doing just that and more, just reacting and creating by the seat of my pants. I

Comments

[haate]

railroading can be nice, as long as there's good scenery.

[karjack]

It's hard for me to not read 'deliberately break your adventure' and not interpret that as 'deliberately try to piss me off and waste my time.' Some of the most frustrating games I've tried to play in are games where a few players clearly want to be playing something else, and instead of playing something else, they show up and make it their business to keep the rest of us from playing the thing we all agreed to play.

The only logical and measured response is to fire these people out of a canon into the sun.

Mind you, as a GM I tend to run open-ended games where the players can take the plot in any number of directions. That's just the style I prefer. However, if it has been made clear the game is about X, and we're going in Z direction, either get with the program or gtfo. I'm not sure how else to interpret sticking around to break the adventure as anything other than passive-aggressive fun-shitting, but I admit I'm biased.

[mike_montesa]

Yup, right there with you. So much trouble and drama can be avoided by having a good discussion before we ever get started. So many people don't do this and so many wonder why things go pear-shaped all the time.

[mtfierce]

I think I had posted that straight off running a fill-in adventure for our regular gaming night, and didn't finish the rest of the thought because I was still frothing at the mouth, not having a handy cannon aimed at the sun.

You're running a game. You've given the players the chance to make characters they like. They're playing. All of a sudden a player decides his personal adventure is more important than anyone else's, and he recruits someone else in the group to make trouble for everyone else's adventure, splitting the party in a barely-supportable fashion.

Can I have permission to break one of his fingers? Just a little one - he won't need it that much, right?

[ogremarco]

You might want to have a reasoned conversation about the group's fun and how it's not cool to wreck that, but then, yes.

Two Thumbs Up

[graypawn]

Maybe this doesn't need to be said, but i wanted to point out that every game has some level of 'railroad.' Even if you're 'making up a game by the seat of your pants' there are assumed aspects of the game-play that can be de-railed by a player refusing to cooperate.

So, i don't think your advice was ham-fisted at all. Free-form, any-direction-you-want, plot-luck style gaming still has conventions with toes that can be stepped on. Discussion and communication and honesty are the only ways to avoid this clash.

What i'd like to know now is the question that's been killing me...

How do you fix a dysfunctional group?