Hey guys, been reflecting on this one game I played in earlier this year, I’d like to know if I was the asshole.
So I was playing in this Draw Steel game, which is a lot like D&D. And in this GM’s custom world, the big gimmick was these giant clockwork animals called the Gear Lords, who are like gods. They keep the world in one piece and look after the land and they’re super duper important.
So the bad guys have been attacking the Gear Lords, and we the heroes have been saving them. And eventually we come to the Iguana Lord’s domain, which is a big volcano that’s erupting because the Iguana Lord is in trouble. And we actually meet the BBEG for the first time, but we’re losing because we’re low on resources and we’re not being very tactical. And I’m giving the party healing and saying “run away”, and we survive long enough that the BBEG leaves because he doesn’t wanna get blowed up by the volcano.
So the volcano is erupting and it’s gonna come and turn the Iguana Lord to scrap. But I’m a magical healer with all of these teleports and buff spells, and I think I can save it. And in this moment, I can kinda tell that I think we’re supposed to lose here. The Iguana Lord is scripted to die. But I don’t want to. And I’m like “Isn’t there something I can do? Can I spend a few more minutes trying to save it?” And the GM relents, and he lets us do a montage test to save the Iguana Lord and help it stop the volcano. So the entire region is saved from disaster, yippee!
And I feel like the GM didn’t want that option to be on the table. I feel like I kinda strongarmed him into letting us save the Iguana Lord.
Another moment from that campaign that really stands out to Me in My memory is this moment where an NPC (Who we suspected was the BBEG) was going on about this old hero from the previous generation who was super important in the lore and we all had a connection to and respected. And he’s arguing that nobody can ever live up to this hero’s example, so life is pointless and we shouldn’t try to do good things.
And I speak up in character and I say “You’re right, I can’t be like that hero…” and the GM starts to reply but I continue: “I’m going to be better than him.” And I can feel that he wasn’t expecting that at all. The GM thought we were all going to agree with the maybe-BBEG’s nihilism. I really don’t think he was expecting that kind of shonen-protagonist energy I was bringing to the table.
And this moment stands out in My memory because a week after that session, a week until the following session, I get a private message from the GM saying I’m not in the game anymore. And I don’t get a lot of details about why, most of the message is “no hard feelings” type stuff. But he does say that “the things we value in a TTRPG are quite different” and that we have incompatible narrative approaches. And he also had seen some of the stories I told from the game and felt I was unintentionally portraying him in a negative light. Which was very unintentional and I still don’t fully understand.
I wish I had got a chance to talk about these issues with him, and I regret not communicating with him more when I had the chance. It has become clear in retrospect that he had way stronger feelings about all this than I did, and I didn’t know. So that sucks, because I enjoyed playing in his game, and if a darker tone or more struggle before overcoming the bad guys is what he wanted, then I wish we had been able to do that.
As I write this I realise that you can’t really tell if I was being too pushy about saving the Iguana Lord based on reading My memories any better than I can. So I guess I’m looking for is a kind word, and a suggestion of how to be more receptive to others’ feelings. Which I do struggle with as an autistic being.
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I think you should take what the DM said at face value. No hard feelings, just vibe mismatch. It happens.
Your characters were there in the first place to help the Iguana Lord. The whole point of going there was to save him (even if the GM had a different intention in bringing you there) so of course you wanted to. If you badgered or harassed the GM into letting you do something, that’s wrong. But if you literally just asked to try and said you really wanted to (leaving him the option of saying “no”) then there’s nothing wrong with that.
As far as the conversation about the legendary hero, you were already going to do the best you could. So having ambition or confidence about it isn’t really a problem. It’s just the mindset and emotional state of your character.
There’s a school of thought out there that a GM’s main job is to manipulate the emotions of the players. From that perspective, it could be said that the GM failed to make you feel hopeless at the volcano or inadequate when discussing the legendary hero, and maybe they found that disappointing or frustrating. But I’m not in that school of thought, and even people who are in it would not necessarily blame you for the GM’s failure to evoke the emotions they wanted to.
Sounds like you wanted to interact with the GM’s world, while the GM wanted to write a book. You can’t make people value the things that you value: they have to choose to value them themselves, or they have to value you enough to make a change. And vice versa.
If uou cared about helping the GM write a super cool novel, you wouldn’t have broken the mould. If the GM cared about player choice, they wouldn’t have gotten pissy about you taking the plot off of their rails.
You have had this experience, but now you know not to play with this person anymore. Good riddance. Next time you have a session 0, you have a preference to probe. “Hey, GM, you’re not using a module or writing a book, are you? I’m hoping for some more fluid ad libbed interactions, rather than everything being preplanned.”
@Grail I think you are not the asshole, but it’s a possibility. It sounds like you’re making an effort not to be defensive about your choices, but obviously you can’t be fully objective. Were you behaving in the way you describe just because you wanted to defy the expectation, or did you think that it would be more fun and more narratively satisfying for the table to tell a story where the heroes “win” and save the Iguana?
I think in this case, for me, intent outweighs impact.
I wanted to save the Iguana because I was playing a hero.
NTA. General tone is something that should be established in session zero. Furthermore, it seems a little rushed that your GM went straight to kicking you, rather than sitting down with you and talking about the difference in tone. As for the change in ‘script’: you should keep a finger on the pulse of what’s vest for the story, but from my perspective, a good story came out of that, just a different one that predicted, which I regard as perfectly okay in TTRPGs. I haven’t seen any other your other posts about him, so I can’t comment on that.
@Grail If he’s hinging his entire plot on one event and can’t cope with that event not going the way he intended it to, it’s his problem, not yours. That shit’s what we call a “railroad”. He does not seem to understand the First Law of GMing: No strongly-determined plot ever survives contact with the players. You are not the asshole; he is. In fact, you’re the exact kind of player I’d like to play with.
ETA: If he’s so worried about “being portrayed in a negative light” then he shouldn’t act like an asshole. You just told the truth. If he doesn’t like it, again, that’s his problem, not yours.
If he’s so worried about “being portrayed in a negative light” then he shouldn’t act like an asshole.
I don’t think I told any stories about him doing anything bad before now. I’ve told quite a few stories from his game before, and they were all about how much fun I was having and how cool My character’s adventures were.
The closest thing that happened is one time I was gushing about Draw Steel’s social mechanics, and I’ll tell that story again here:
So our band of heroes pulled into town on a time-train, and we got mobbed by the press. They were all shouting and none of us could get a word in edgewise. But then I told the Director that I have a feature: Engrossing Monologue. Whenever I deliver a monologue, everyone in earshot will listen and pay attention to Me while I speak for up to one minute.
Now, the journalists were all trying be the first to write a story about how we were disgracing the name of the old hero (mentioned above) by coming here to this town where he had once broken our organisation’s rules to deliver aid to the people. So I gave a monologue about how we had been named members of this organisation by the old hero, and we come in both his name and the organisation’s name, to apologise for how our organisation had once abandoned this town, and to pay our respects to the old hero. And to save the town from a new threat against the Gear Lords.
And using this feature, I completely reframed the narrative and turned a cutscene into a moment to be super heroic and improve our reputation. You’re not railroading Me! I’m railroading you! (I joke, but our Director is very nice and would never railroad us).
That’s as close to what I said as I can remember, including the disclaimer. So I thought I did adequate work to make it clear that I was just joking with the railroading, and what I really meant to say is that Draw Steel’s feature made a really awesome and fun moment of roleplay possible. I never accused him of railroading until today.
And I still didn’t, because he didn’t railroad us! I came up with a clever way to save the Iguana Lord and he threw away his prep and improvised something on the spot to make it work, even though he didn’t have to. He could have told us the lava was coming too fast and we had to vamoose, he could have let us save the Iguana Lord from its prison but fail to save it from the volcano. He made the plan work, he let us be big damn heroes and save everyone.
And even though it was really fun at the time, I now look back and think maybe he didn’t like that, because I don’t have a better explanation what he was talking about when I got kicked out of the game.
