I actually wrote this ages ago, just finishing the last bit and posting it because I have nothing else at the moment, going bonkers working on everything.  So tired and wired and yarded out…  Anyway, classic flavor me.  Enjoy.

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What happens when a tough cool guy that don’t take no guff meets another tough cool guy that don’t take no guff, and one of them gives the other one guff?  Something that is not cool, guy.  Something like the opposite of fun.

In real life, we often have to accept affronts to our dignity, minor and major, in order to avoid destructive conflicts.  So when we play RPGs – when we create a cool character to identify with – many people want their character to be a badass punk who takes no shit.  The problem is that an RPG is not a truly consequence-free environment.  Yes, you won’t necessarily die or end up unemployed or jailed if your character insults the wrong person.  But you can ruin everyone’s fun – including your own – and harm real life relationships.  RPGs are collaborative entertainment.  Your fun should not detract from that of others.

And this becomes much worse when more than one player is a hardcase.  Any disagreement can grind the game to a halt or destroy it altogether, if neither character is willing to back down or even disagree with civility.  It also serves no purpose dramatically.

When you see a character of this type in a movie, they get away with it because the Universe created by the writers is full of unreasonable people who can be put in their place verbally by the Eastwood type and his snappy comeback.  When two PCs draw swords or break up the adventuring party over a trivial matter, what does that mean, from a literary or dramatic standpoint?  Only one thing: both characters are assholes.

Neither of them can be the wisecracking guy who just keeps it real in a world of weak-willed phonies.  It was a questionable aspiration in the first place, dependent on all other PCs and NPCs to support the idea by diminishing themselves.  And once it’s put to the test, the illusion shatters.

Think about it.  Very rarely is there more than one Eastwood type per movie.  Recall times when it’s been attempted and how that went.  I haven’t seen The Expendables or its sequels.  But I can remember some cringe-worthy writing when this is the idea.  When the writer wants both of the show’s heroes to be unstoppable badasses, some plot contrivance must keep their rivalry forever unresolved.  Badass Cop One is arguing with Badass Cop Two, when their fight is interrupted by the Hardcase Police Chief, and so on.  The best way to keep this from going sour is to write both characters with a reasonable limit to their ego.

A variation on this is the snarker whose feelings are easily hurt by snark.  One of my best players had this problem to some extent in real life and imported it into (and even exaggerated it in) their characters.  I think they’re from a culture where everyone insults everyone else constantly, and they all imagine everyone’s cool with it, but inside of human heads, that culture has produced a jacked up pile of sad.  But my sample size is one, so maybe it’s just them.

The following list of traits are not necessarily bad traits in any given character, if you take off the “never” and “always” from them…  Eastwoods never take guff, always get the last word, never stop fighting, never submit, and are never afraid.  They always have someone to blame for any plot occurrence which was on any level humbling, and are aeternally spiteful about it.  They dish but they can’t take.

Anyway, this kind of shit is why I do not miss GameMastering.  I do not have to collaborate with bad writers to make my story happen.  Eastwoods, yer attitude bores the hell out of me.  It’s so played out.  Noli me tangere.

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I may have given the idea, by way of some cheek, that I am an inflexible taskmaster as a GM.  I think it’s possible to have standards in player behavior while also adapting to what the players want to do.  Observe the comments on this old post, where I GM’d a little adventure, wordpress style…

RP by Comment

If the whole thing is too much to read, the teal deer:  In the end I had one player left.  He wanted to cut jeezis some slack, which is not what I’d originally set out to do at all.  But he was being a good player, writing a story that worked, so I let it happen.

Maybe consistency isn’t the thing I’m desiring the most.  Maybe I just want to see players write characters that I would ever want to see in media.  Hero, antihero, villain, joker – just be entertaining.  Not to yourself alone; consider the audience of people you are playing with.

That includes the GM.

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On my previous post, I suggested an alignment system – a declaration of a character’s moral inclinations – could be a useful tool to avoid some of the annoyances I’ve had in players having wildly inconsistent characters.  But why does that bother me?

On one level, the obvious.  Hard to plan the overarching path of a story if you have no idea how a character will respond to it.  But there’s something more.

I can’t help but see TTRPGs as an act of creative writing.  I’m bothered by shit characters because they are shit writing.  If I could just get with players on their level I’d be ok, right?

I can’t.  I can’t see it as disposable fluff time, a meaningless jackoff session.  Why not?  If it is, I’m just the fool distributing handjobs for free.

I would literally rather hold the unhygienic penii of strangers in both hands and tease them to climax on my t-shirt than GM for bad players.

Does that make sense of where I’m coming from?  heh.  coming.

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I don’t have a computer right now (composing this on cellphone) so I can’t type well enough to really write.  But I’d like to start a little discussion.  Alignment systems in TTRPGs:  yea or nay?

For the longest I wasn’t going to include one in my home brew RPG, but as I reflected on my annoyance with inconsistent player morals, I think, yeah, I want that.  I want to be able to point at that entry on a character sheet and say, what are you doing now?

Wanna change that “nice” to “naughty”?  Again?  Why don’t you just start your next guy as naughty and save yourself the trouble?  Why do you keep doing this to me mothafuckas?  This was supposed to be a fun game, not a morality play, not a psychodrama.

I don’t want to make that alignment have metaphysical reality / game effect to it, just want a guardrail for player behavior.  Assuming it would even work, I dunno…

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Baseball dude Ken Griffey Jr. once did a rap with Seattle rapper Kid Sensation which referred to piece-of-shit Damon Wayans classic In Living Color character Homey D. Clown’s catch phrase “Homey don’t play that.”  I’ll always remember this, tho it sux tremendous: “Girls with attitude, yo, don’t even say that. Forget about it homey, cuz Griffey doesn’t play that.”

Speaking of girls and play, my BF had a funny anecdote from the Who’s-Gonna-GM Wars.  Went to play D&D with some relative strangers and one of them had a new GF who didn’t really understand the game, and ended up GMing.  First interaction:

Baby GM: “There’s a door in the hall.”
PC: “I open it.”
Baby GM: “OK.”
PC: “What’s in there?”
Baby GM: “How should I know?”

I heard about a better GFGM who rolled a random encounter with a giant gar in a hallway, and not knowing a gar is a fish until after the beast made its appearance, conceded that it must already be dead.  Free XP.

Do GFs always suck at GMing?  Of course not.  Just how things shook out for us.  Ladies who have GM’d for bro-ish PC groups, how did it go for you?

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Got another donation with no suggested topic, here’s the words for dollas, tho my micro-thesis derails at the end:

Who’s gonna Game Master this time?  What do you do when everybody wants to play but nobody wants to GM?  This is why DMPCs exist, Dungeon Master Player Characters, from the D&D-centric term for a Game Master.  It’s the compromise – I’ll DM if I can also play.

I do this, though it is a challenge.  Worse GMs will make their guy the center of the universe and get the kids mad.  Not my problem.  My characters become small, barely present support characters, because I’m too busy populating the world with everybody else that needs to be there.  Still, nice to have a little dolly to dress up in +2 Armor of Gingham at the end of the day.

I wanna share this RPG sesh I did on a forum, about vampire dudes who used to be druggies in life, relapsing into villainy.  I was DMPCing the character Darren, who is kind of a Sid Vicious/Kurt Cobain intersection.  The formatting breaks if you don’t read it at a certain zoom distance, and there are a lot of references to the game setting and events that won’t make sense, but there are parts that still make me deathLOL years later…

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