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View Full Version : Roleplaying As a Game master how do you screw up your PC's life?



RazorChain
2016-03-31, 06:39 PM
Screwing up your PC's life isn't a bad thing, it just means you add complications. It doesn't mean that you use your unlimited resources to kill of characters but use your plotting and cleverness to create a narrative drama. You see I almost never kill characters but my players still call me a bastard GM. Yes I am a bastard because I always throw in a complication and screw them six ways till sunday. You might think that they should hate me for it but it is the opposite, their thrill does not come from fear of dying in combat but from whether their plans survive. Often I set them up 5 or 6 sessions ahead, dropping clues but most of the time it isn't until **** hits the fan that they manage to put the puzzle together.

Let's take an example. One player got knighted and got a piece of land in fief with a nice manor. In his background he had ties with a local criminal kingpin who his father had worked for as a right hand man before he died. The PC's wanted to get away from life of crime and spurned the kingpins daughter's hand in marriage.

Now he was happy, had his family good name restored and took a large loan with the Venetian Merchant Bank to build a horse ranch. Then off he goes adventuring with his pals. When he returns his manor has been burnt down and his stables as well with the horses in it. He hears that the bank wants a word with him. He meets with some bureaucrat that tells him that he is no longer a preferred customer and according to clause 7b in his loan contract they reserve their rights to sell his loan, which the bank already did.....to the criminal Kingpin he had broken ties with.

You may give up on crime but crime doesn't give up on you.

Now he's trying to prove that one of the Kingpins henchmen was behind the arson as he is hellbent on revenge.


So how do you complicate your player character lives?

Final Hyena
2016-03-31, 11:36 PM
No one ever beats the Kingpin
https://youtu.be/u1GJQ_iBEAo?t=55s

I like to con my PCs, one scam involves an enthusiast magic item seller desperate for the new item the party just got and will pay a silly price for it, except that when he comes to the meeting with his eagerness he's forgotten his tools and needs to borrow a pearl, the spell suddenly fails and he shouts at the party storming off declaring to curse their name for trying to cheat him (how long until they find out he switched out that 100 gp pearl?)

Another one is the Paladins slave, the party see some punk treating his slave like trash (within the law). The master walks out (toilet or some such) the paladin goes to offer his aid to the beautiful young maiden, they get talking and she's the sweetest old thing, but they're interrupted as the master comes back and teases the paladin. If the paladin tries to purchase her, oh the slave is for sale, at an extortionate price, and the worst part the next morning that slave has vanished.

goto124
2016-03-31, 11:40 PM
What, the players don't mess their own character up well enough? :smalltongue:

Mr Beer
2016-03-31, 11:54 PM
Usual things, late night phone calls, rocks through their windows, ring bell / flaming dog poo pranks...oh player characters? No, I wouldn't do that, I'm a nice guy.

Lacco
2016-04-01, 01:13 AM
Screw up? Never.

Make interesting? Yessssss...

My favourite was a mage from Shadowrun. The guy proposed a character - a student of magic at Tokio school for people with Talent, who had to run away for killing the principal - at that time he stated "he was doing something evil to his best friend, a girl". The school has been guarded by few Yak flunkies, so he had to go through them.

Fast forward few years from that. He went back and learned that he wasn't a student, but a test subject, along with several tens of other people. They have tested a special half-cyberware, half-bioware implant that sets the "IFF" in the head of people (=you can tell them "this is your enemy" and they will feel like that...and also "this is your master"), which shouldn't decrease their magical talent. Their memories were erased or modified on regular basis - and he escaped with help of free spirit. Yes, you guessed right - the "girl" was a spirit and the principal was trying to bind her after finding her true name.

He loved the story.

TheCountAlucard
2016-04-01, 03:16 AM
The big empire that has its boot on the neck of the known world has sent a fleet of warships and a legion of soldiers after the PCs of my seafaring game, in accordance with their religion, which names the PCs as wicked demons.

ImNotTrevor
2016-04-01, 05:15 AM
*looks at the Apocalypse World Ruleset*
*looks at MC moves*
*grins*

It can be that easy, depending on the system. But my favorite is giving them antagonists that they feel really conflicted about.

So for Shadowrun, something like this:
An orc comes to you and says that there is a club of the Humanis Group that hangs out in a bar. He wants you to go in there and straight-up murder then all.

Arrive at the bar and, well... it turns out these guys are a bunch of old men that haven't really done anything other than be crotchety and shout racial slurs. A good portion of them are veterans from some war or another.

So now what?

Sure, they're racist...bust they're also relatively harmless and are really only Humanis Group in name. And the Johnson is REALLY insistent that they die and has some decently valid reason. (Maybe they jumped him and his dad many years ago and put his dad in the hospital, and he just never forgave.)

Now, the above example won't work with every party (obviously) but you can tailor these things.

The two ways to make antagonists that can really put the pressure on your party are:
Noble intention, but abhorrent method
Abhorrent goal, noble method/outcomes.

For an easy example:
The Frozen King wants to bring peace to the long-warring 12 kingdoms. He does this by raising an army of ice demons and undead to trample his foes before him.
His goal is noble. The kingdoms have been in near-constsnt war for over 1000 years. Everyone just wants peace. But his method is abhorrent. (But he thinks the cost is worth it, obviously.)
Or
Ovak the Shining wants to conquer everyone and force them to worship him as a living God, and does so by force. But every country thus conquered is generally better off for it. Smaller nations have begun to renounce the other gods in favor of Ovak so they can get all the benefits of being in Ovak's kingdom without the war part.

If you have a cleric in your group, that last one may very well cause a loooot of strife.

Also, just put your crosshairs on everything. The PCs will destroy everything you love. It is their job. Just accept it. Besides, you have an unlimited number of NPCs you can use. Never make an NPC who you are afraid to lose. Ever.

DigoDragon
2016-04-01, 06:04 AM
What, the players don't mess their own character up well enough? :smalltongue:

Yeah, this ^

I for one tend to complicate my own characters well enough. The GM gets a freebie there. XD

Lacco
2016-04-01, 06:30 AM
Yeah, this ^

I for one tend to complicate my own characters well enough. The GM gets a freebie there. XD

I have 2 players like this. Sometimes I don't even have to think of a plot - they start discussing (IC) what for an animal could it be that tore apart the museum guard - and come with very interesting ideas. I just then select one of those.

A third player usually stops these discussions with "stop giving the GM ideas how to kill us!!!" :smallbiggrin:

RazorChain
2016-04-01, 07:08 AM
*looks at the Apocalypse World Ruleset*
*looks at MC moves*
*grins*

It can be that easy, depending on the system. But my favorite is giving them antagonists that they feel really conflicted about.

So for Shadowrun, something like this:
An orc comes to you and says that there is a club of the Humanis Group that hangs out in a bar. He wants you to go in there and straight-up murder then all.

Arrive at the bar and, well... it turns out these guys are a bunch of old men that haven't really done anything other than be crotchety and shout racial slurs. A good portion of them are veterans from some war or another.

So now what?

Sure, they're racist...bust they're also relatively harmless and are really only Humanis Group in name. And the Johnson is REALLY insistent that they die and has some decently valid reason. (Maybe they jumped him and his dad many years ago and put his dad in the hospital, and he just never forgave.)

I like presenting them with moral dilemmas as well but now you have to complicate things. Now the PC's stick it to the Johnson and the Johnson isn't happy so he goes to the Humanis Group and informs them(via human contact) that the PC's are bunch of Elf lovers and out to get them. Now you have a bunch of old war veterans racist gunning for the PC's. This is how your Johnson screws them over and achieves his goals for free even :)

If they kill all the Humanis club member then you let one of them be some favorite NPC's grandfather....preferably a girlfriend/boyfriend or something (she/he was too embarrassed about her/his grandfather)

[

RazorChain
2016-04-01, 07:22 AM
What, the players don't mess their own character up well enough? :smalltongue:

And then you just give them a little extra push. In my current campaign one of the PC's has nightmares, something he decided on himself. So of course I had him dreaming always the same dream, of a demon with a hook blade hands, which looks like the girl from Ring except with empty eye sockets and instead of hands she has long hookblades. In the dream he is in a building and everything is filling up with blood when the hook bladed demon starts descending the stairs, scraping her blade against the wall chanting his name "Johannes......Johaaaaannnneeees....you will be mine".

Then we have the second PC, a merchant son, who wrote in his background he was framed for a murder and ended in jail. A son of a rival merchant family was found murdered on his doorstep....the corpse was bisected at the waist.

So 3rd session in when the merchant son is cornered in his bed, trying to fend off a nighttime assassin, wearing only his small clothes and wielding a dagger. Then out of the shadows appears the hook bladed demon behind the assassin, plunges both her blades into the assassin's back and rips him apart in two halves. The merchant son gets sprayed with blood and entrails before he sees the demon vanish into the darkness again.

Now both of the players are really freaked out.

ImNotTrevor
2016-04-01, 07:54 AM
I like presenting them with moral dilemmas as well but now you have to complicate things. Now the PC's stick it to the Johnson and the Johnson isn't happy so he goes to the Humanis Group and informs them(via human contact) that the PC's are bunch of Elf lovers and out to get them. Now you have a bunch of old war veterans racist gunning for the PC's. This is how your Johnson screws them over and achieves his goals for free even :)

If they kill all the Humanis club member then you let one of them be some favorite NPC's grandfather....preferably a girlfriend/boyfriend or something (she/he was too embarrassed about her/his grandfather)

[

Which you certainly can do. I'm not exactly fleshing out this scenario. (It took more time to type it out than think it up)

But those are all valid complications, and should be catered to the group of runners you have. Really, everything you do to add complication should be tailored to the PCs.

DigoDragon
2016-04-01, 08:33 AM
A third player usually stops these discussions with "stop giving the GM ideas how to kill us!!!" :smallbiggrin:

Hee hee. I like to ask my players to provide background hooks on their characters when starting new campaigns so that we have some mutually agreed complication to use. One of the fun ones was a PC with a background that he had a half-brother who left his tribe and pretty much vanished. That missing sibling eventually showed up as a minor villain. And the the players complicated it by thinking he was a a major villain. and then I complicated things even further by having this sibling become the campaign's BBEG. :D



I like presenting them with moral dilemmas as well but now you have to complicate things. Now the PC's stick it to the Johnson and the Johnson isn't happy so he goes to the Humanis Group and informs them(via human contact) that the PC's are bunch of Elf lovers and out to get them. Now you have a bunch of old war veterans racist gunning for the PC's. This is how your Johnson screws them over and achieves his goals for free even :)

I remember one runner who had a side story of looking for his lost daughter. Eventually the team finds out that this young Johnson they've been working for was the lost daughter and they told him and things got complicated because now the father is working for the daughter as a runner and the daughter can come home to her father, but she's his boss and... well Shadowrun sitcom ensues. XD

Kid Jake
2016-04-01, 05:49 PM
In my Mutants and Masterminds campaign one of the PCs was an abusive a-hole with substance abuse issues, whose personal side plot mostly revolved around trying to reconnect with his, now adult, children after gaining super powers and assuming that he could make them proud of him after all this time. Neither of them had seen him in more than fifteen years, his youngest son was a toddler when he walked out on them; but his oldest boy was old enough to resent/fear him so he took a bit of convincing.

Over the course of the campaign he slowly won them over, even going so far as to throw his oldest son a ridiculously lavish wedding to make up for not being there for them....with stolen Mafia money.

At the wedding itself he learned a valuable lesson as to why they always wear masks when they fight crime in the comic books, when the enraged Italians gunned down his in-laws, paralyzed his youngest son and set the church they were in on fire. He nearly drank himself to death over the incident and his oldest son severed all ties with him for good, not even showing up for his (unrelated) funeral.

Pex
2016-04-01, 09:36 PM
Screwing up your PC's life isn't a bad thing, it just means you add complications.

Yes, it is a bad thing. It is not your job as a DM to make your players miserable. I disavow your entire premise.

ImNotTrevor
2016-04-01, 11:05 PM
Yes, it is a bad thing. It is not your job as a DM to make your players miserable. I disavow your entire premise.

Not players. PCs. There is a difference.

If the PCs are never challenged, never faced with something that threatens them, their belongings, their loved ones, all of the above, then nothing happens at all. At that point you're playing "ideal life simulator."

No good story ever started with "and they lived happily ever after." They all have conflict. Things go wrong. This is asking for the methods to use when things need to go wrong, even at a personal level for each PC.

I have no problem with the GM causing my character grief, so long as it is sensical and not ridiculously punishing. (Ie, I'm sent to jail forever for smelling a rose) But challenging my character's core beliefs? HELL YEAH! (Ie, my assassin goes to kill a politician he considers evil and finds him at home holding his newborn daughter and weeping with joy.)
Of course, everyone you do this to needs to be signed on and ok with it.

Pex
2016-04-02, 03:15 AM
There are always opponents to face and obstacles to overcome for any typical campaign. There's no need to murder my character's mother, rape his father, burn down his house, and the culprit is his pet dog who was a demon in disguise.

ImNotTrevor
2016-04-02, 03:31 AM
There are always opponents to face and obstacles to overcome for any typical campaign. There's no need to murder my character's mother, rape his father, burn down his house, and the culprit is his pet dog who was a demon in disguise.

No one has suggested any of that. Or anything remotely close.

It is one thing to say that you don't like a thing. It is another to say that it is always a bad thing.

Apparently you dislike GMs targetting your character to create personal drama. I would find that boring. It makes me character unable to be made vulnerable in any real or meaningful way beyond "Will [insert antagonist] succeed in killing me?" I welcome GMs targetting my character's stuff. Of he wants to kill off a loved one or family member, I ask that he at leasts asks if it's ok first. (Some people have issues with that) otherwise? Go for it. Easy lives without enemies coming for your stuff and trying to take you out are boring lives.

No one has suggested anything rampantly stupid like wholesale murdering everyone in a person's backstory.

goto124
2016-04-02, 03:45 AM
To be honest, I find that I'm either overly attached to a character and want nothing bad to happen to her, ever...

Or I don't care about the character at all and can't even bring up the energy to play it. It's not pleasant.

RazorChain
2016-04-02, 06:21 AM
There are always opponents to face and obstacles to overcome for any typical campaign. There's no need to murder my character's mother, rape his father, burn down his house, and the culprit is his pet dog who was a demon in disguise.

Yes but lot of players...or even most players I have played with want their backstories or the NPC's they have created for their character backstories to matter and come into play.

I have had one player who tended to come with a characters who were from a faaaaaar awaaaay and had a vague background. Like this: I'm a knight and I come from a noble family far far away. End of story. But then again when he's a GM he had a crime syndicate cut off the fingers of one PC's because the group was in conflict with them. Like they walked into his inn, held him down while they cut off his fingers as a warning. When the group went after the crime boss who was behind it, a TPK ensued....or those of us who were unconscious ended as slaves in the mines. End of campaign. Or one PC became mutated because of chaos magic and had an arm growing from his stomach.....These are not fun complications

So this is based on trust. Trust that the GM is trying to complicate things for a narrative drama. Nobody likes to play with a power mad GM that destroys everything you have built up just for fun.

But for example if you are going to use a recurring bad guy who is a mastermind, then you will have to think like a mastermind and use underhanded tactics. In a post above I mention a criminal kingpin that had the estates of one PC burnt down and bought his debt, of course what followed was that the Kingpin offered the PC his only daughter in marriage and the keys to his criminal syndicate.....and boy was the PC tempted, but he refused because he had vowed to turn his back on crime. This set the PC and the Kingpin on an inevitable collision course.

In contrast you can have the PC's overcome obstacles, bigger bad guys and never use any personal drama. Some might prefer that. But my players know they are entering a personal drama and what I will do to make them hate the main antagonist. This is why I get stuck as the main GM for the group.

goto124
2016-04-02, 06:25 AM
Also, it really helps for the GM and player to talk about what's acceptable to mess with in the backstory. "The big brother can turn out to be evil, but don't do that to the mentor. The mentor can die though."

TheCountAlucard
2016-04-02, 08:55 AM
As a less-group-centric example from the seafaring game, one of the PCs has had to watch his father, the chief of his tribe, slowly grow increasingly mentally unstable as a result of (undiagnosed) long-term lead poisoning. The PC and his cousin worked together to declare the father incompetent to lead, so the cousin could take power and restore order.

The cousin then used his new authority to send the PC off on a quest believed to be impossible, so as to keep him away from the tribe. Things got a little more complicated when the father in his madness murdered a respected member of the tribe (thinking he could call down the thunderbird that supposedly is the mother of the PC in question); afraid to order his death, the cousin exiled him to the other side of the isle, and had him married off to the cousin's sister-in-law (with her instructed to play the part of the "thunderbird").

The PC has been kept abreast of these most recent events via dreams sent to him by a goddess; wait 'til he finds out he's about to have a baby brother! :smallamused:

RazorChain
2016-04-02, 10:11 AM
Also, it really helps for the GM and player to talk about what's acceptable to mess with in the backstory. "The big brother can turn out to be evil, but don't do that to the mentor. The mentor can die though."

One group I have played with for over 20 years...so they know me :smallamused:
Now I have a new group that I'm Game mastering for and I explained that I wanted backstories and the backstories were a fair game for me to use. I'm not going to spoil how I'm going to use them, that's like reading the last page of a book.

ReaderAt2046
2016-04-02, 10:53 AM
In my current game, the GM actually hasn't really screwed me over at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. See, my character's backstory is that he is the illegitimate grandson of the current Lord of House Mactire. While my character's mother (Lord Mactire's beloved daughter) was alive, my grandfather tolerated me for her sake, but when she died, he wasted no time in banishing the reminder of her disgrace from his sight.

Now that was the part I'd made up. What the GM contributed was my character running into an old acquaintance and learning that, while I'd been slumming, my uncle had died, leaving my grandfather without a direct heir. The possible candidates for the succession were a third cousin (or thereabouts) who was a complete buffoon and belonged to a different noble house, a fifth cousin (or so) who was just a baby, and me. So all of a sudden I had a pretty decent shot at the House Mactire Lordship. Better yet, in the most recent session I was granted lordly regalia by a powerful spirit, which grants me just the opening I need to take my shot.

JoeJ
2016-04-02, 11:53 AM
One of the things I really like about Mutants & Masterminds is that it requires every PC to have at least two complications of the player's own choosing. And anytime the GM uses one of those complications to make things difficult, the PC gets a Hero Point they can spend to do something awesome. So, for example, if the player decides that one of their complications is that they have a dependent child, then both the player and the GM expect that the child will need rescuing from time to time. Or if one of their complications is that they're the subject of prejudice, then they'll sometimes have trouble getting cooperation from NPCs.

Kareeah_Indaga
2016-04-03, 04:56 PM
I cripple them instead of killing them. I run a Pokemon game that basically uses a heavily house-ruled version of the handheld games' ruleset—and every now and then, if someone's critter takes a good deal more damage than they have HP, I deal stat damage and (as appropriate) disable some of that critter's attacks until it recovers. It heals slowly, and while the Center can speed the process up the Nurse won't release the Pokemon back to the trainer until it has healed completely. Which means they can't switch them out and their team size is at a permanent -1 until that Pokemon recovers.

One of my players tried to switch out a Pokemon that was in that condition and got told off. Ooo, was she mad. XD

ZxxZ
2016-04-03, 07:47 PM
"That information is not available at your security Clearance, Citizen"

Faily
2016-04-03, 08:23 PM
I find that it varies from player to player. Some players are just suckers for punishment, others don't care much one way or another. Some players have a "vision" for their character and a firm idea of where they want their character to end up at the end of the day, rather than letting the game run its natural course and shape the character from that.

Personally (depending on starting level of course for D&D) I prefer to start with a simple background, and rather embellish it as I go along, or simply let background be background and focus more on the now and what the future will bring. Like my long-running Pathfinder Paladin, I gave her a relatively simple background... and no way in hell had I guessed that she would be ending up as a ruler focused on rebuilding a land that will, according to her plans, become mmore tolerant of monster-races. Her cohort is an Ogre, which was a joke at first, but Grund the Ogre Paladin has become a beloved character and her truest friend.



What, the players don't mess their own character up well enough? :smalltongue:

+1 this. :smallbiggrin:

icefractal
2016-04-03, 09:03 PM
I find that it varies from player to player.Very much so. That's why I'd say that while PC-centric tragedy can be a positive thing that everyone enjoys, it's no good doing it without talking to the player first and seeing if you're on the same wavelength - otherwise, it can be completely counter-productive.

Like for example, this:
In my Mutants and Masterminds campaign one of the PCs was an abusive a-hole with substance abuse issues, whose personal side plot mostly revolved around trying to reconnect with his, now adult, children after gaining super powers and assuming that he could make them proud of him after all this time.
...
He nearly drank himself to death over the incident and his oldest son severed all ties with him for good, not even showing up for his (unrelated) funeral.I assume the player in question liked it, but personally speaking that doesn't sound like anything I'd want to play through.

Arcane_Snowman
2016-04-03, 11:33 PM
Yeah, I'm very much on board with the "players complicate their lives themselves" sentiment though that may also have a lot to do with the fact that I've run quite a bit of Ars Magica, which gives the players points for coming up with a hook to complicate their lives. I generally don't go with a players background unless they themselves flesh it out a bit, otherwise I'm a big proponent of having their actions have long ranging ramifications, if possible.

Kid Jake
2016-04-04, 04:57 PM
Like for example, this:I assume the player in question liked it, but personally speaking that doesn't sound like anything I'd want to play through.

Yar, IC he was broken up about it; but OOC he thought it was a hoot. Sort of a running theme with the character was that nothing in his life ever went the way he wanted it to and it was pretty much always a direct result of his own violent temperament and poor impulse control.

Concrete
2016-04-04, 07:43 PM
I have a group of players who subscribe to the Blitzkrieg school of adventuring.
They move out, empty their load of spells and such, and if the enemy is dead, they move on. If not, they simply teleport back to their home base, a manor in a lightly defended coastal town they have saved from complete destruction a couple of times.

They did not think much of it when a devil they fought teleported away to safety after taking a beating from them. They didn't question that he had wasted actions tearing a lock from one of the players heads (They were more likely to assume he was a creep than to assume he was clever. I credit my superior voice acting abilities and natural creepiness.)

If they can scry, then so can the enemy. If they can teleport, then so can the enemy. If they can sweep in, expend their deadliest spells and leave the enemy base a burning ruin, before simply disappear again, then so can the enemy.
If you cannot cut their flesh, or control their minds, or tear them appart with your magic, you simply find other ways to hurt them...
Then again, I feel that a villain who doesn't gloat is a villain who doesn't try hard enough. So he had to let them know what he was planning, hen they had no chance to stop it, of course (And as every villain must learn, there is always something the heroes can do to stop him, albeit, by the skin of their teeth.)
The town survived, and the townsfolk suffered minimal losses. But now they had seen the downside of being associated with heroes, and the heroes had seen that their actions could have disastrous consequences for those they cared about.

Knaight
2016-04-04, 08:08 PM
I generally play clever NPCs as clever people, and while some antagonists are just dumb brutes who are very capable of physical violence through some means or another, they tend to be outnumbered by those who can pull off clever plans. On top of that, they tend to be proactive, and some players are very good at having their PCs make new enemies.


There are always opponents to face and obstacles to overcome for any typical campaign. There's no need to murder my character's mother, rape his father, burn down his house, and the culprit is his pet dog who was a demon in disguise.

Nobody is suggesting the sort of ridiculous nonsense that incentivizes the players to make their PCs a bunch of orphans who never found friends so that they don't have anything that can be used against them.

Felyndiira
2016-04-05, 01:03 PM
I feel that there is a line between screwing up a PC's life in a way that fosters roleplaying and diabolus ex-machina, and the line differs with different players and sometimes with different characters that are made by the same player. A young character who is trying to learn more about life and formulate a personal philosophy might take these IC struggles as an affront to his character development, while the player of a broken man who had made too many mistakes in his life might welcome such challenges.

Also, I agree that killing characters (or even side NPCs) isn't always the best way to generate in-character motivation or drama, and I feel that a lot of GMs forget this. Oftentimes, it's even better to use something other than loss and revenge as a way to motivate a player. Let's say that I'm DMing a game, and someone gave me a character living in poverty with a wife and child at home; the child has some grand dreams, and the character is braving danger to try to give his child a peaceful, happy life without having to face the same struggles with poverty and strife that he did.

For this situation, I could generate struggle by staging a kidnapping/killing of the family members, but that is likely to crash and burn the player's character rather than generating interesting character development. Instead, I would rather have the character's wife send him a letter telling him that his child have gotten the favor of the local lord and is about to receive a commission for an important post, but is being hampered by the snooty son of a rival lord - and the character, with his power and connections as an adventurer, is asked to help resolve the situation in favor of his child.

This also becomes an open-ended situation for the player, rather than something with only one path of resolution. Will he go full papa bear and destroy the rival lord's son using his cunning, and possibly make new enemies in the process? Will he try to tackle this diplomatically and perform favors with the lord/lord's son in exchange for their support, and possibly make different new enemies in the process? Will he give up and try to locate a different opportunity for his child? Or will he finally try to teach his child to earn their keep in life, and find a way to teach his child to resolve the issue on his own, with himself and his friends/adventuring buddies helping him when he fumbles and falls (possibly with promises of payment or favors from the character himself)?

Vknight
2016-04-06, 10:20 PM
I cripple them instead of killing them. I run a Pokemon game that basically uses a heavily house-ruled version of the handheld games' ruleset—and every now and then, if someone's critter takes a good deal more damage than they have HP, I deal stat damage and (as appropriate) disable some of that critter's attacks until it recovers. It heals slowly, and while the Center can speed the process up the Nurse won't release the Pokemon back to the trainer until it has healed completely. Which means they can't switch them out and their team size is at a permanent -1 until that Pokemon recovers.

One of my players tried to switch out a Pokemon that was in that condition and got told off. Ooo, was she mad. XD

That makes no sense why couldn't I have the pokemone transferred to the pc it seems like undo punishment.



Really I encourage my players to give me meat to sink my teeth into. That meat is what makes some of the best stuff storywise. When my players do not provide me with that well its always ended poorly.
The ranger demanded a personal quest and I pointed out he had no backstory blah blah at the end of it all the 2 sessions were him getting more upset because it wasn't what he wanted but rather then giving me a thing to work with he just got upset with what I gave him.

Kareeah_Indaga
2016-04-07, 05:17 PM
That makes no sense why couldn't I have the pokemone transferred to the pc it seems like undo punishment.

In game, because the Pokemon in storage are held in stasis, and thus can't heal--and various laws against Pokemon cruelty prevent them being stored without being healed because what happens if Random Joe Trainer takes his injured Pidgey out of storage and forgets to have it healed before getting lost in the woods? It might get hurt worse when he realizes that and has to battle his way back.

Out of game, because knowing this can happen is a deterrent to the players; it encourages them not to do stupid things. I've had some players do very stupid things, frequently but not always while trying to game the system. I don't want to forbid certain behaviors because that would impact their ability to roleplay...but I like for there to be consequences. So I reserve the right to send their Pokemon to the hospital when they send out the level 5 to fight the level 40.

Knaight
2016-04-07, 05:24 PM
In game, because the Pokemon in storage are held in stasis, and thus can't heal--and various laws against Pokemon cruelty prevent them being stored without being healed because what happens if Random Joe Trainer takes his injured Pidgey out of storage and forgets to have it healed before getting lost in the woods? It might get hurt worse when he realizes that and has to battle his way back.

That prevents them being held in stasis, but that doesn't prevent them from being left unattended at a hospital with another pokemon in their place. Plus, the hospital fees and them being out of commission for a bit longer are pretty good deterrents to taking dumb risks on their own.

Kareeah_Indaga
2016-04-07, 07:25 PM
That prevents them being held in stasis, but that doesn't prevent them from being left unattended at a hospital with another pokemon in their place. Plus, the hospital fees and them being out of commission for a bit longer are pretty good deterrents to taking dumb risks on their own.

They can be left at the hospital (trainer is not required to stay with them), but their Pokeball will still be registered as 'holding an active member in the trainer's team'. This is part of the same software that teleports the ball when you catch more than six. There are ways around this of course, but Nurse Joy generally doesn't consider 'trainer wants a full team' to be a big enough emergency to warrant overriding the software. 'The city is under siege' probably would be. Or 'everything's on fire and I need a Water Pokemon' possibly.

Pokemon Centers are free like in the games, so there's no monetary fee. Most player character trainers have enough extra Pokemon that being without a particular Pokemon doesn't cost them much as far as type coverage goes. Ergo slot loss.

Nifft
2016-04-07, 08:29 PM
What, the players don't mess their own character up well enough? :smalltongue:

Exactly this.

What I do to mess up the PC's lives is: present them with the easily-foreseeable consequences of their own actions.

This is apparently tantamount to being a Rat-Bastard DM.

Knaight
2016-04-07, 08:59 PM
Exactly this.

What I do to mess up the PC's lives is: present them with the easily-foreseeable consequences of their own actions.

This is apparently tantamount to being a Rat-Bastard DM.

I'm not necessarily saying that a significant fraction of my antagonists are only antagonists because of PC stupidity, but there's a lot of potential candidates in there.

Vknight
2016-04-08, 01:17 PM
In game, because the Pokemon in storage are held in stasis, and thus can't heal--and various laws against Pokemon cruelty prevent them being stored without being healed because what happens if Random Joe Trainer takes his injured Pidgey out of storage and forgets to have it healed before getting lost in the woods? It might get hurt worse when he realizes that and has to battle his way back.

Out of game, because knowing this can happen is a deterrent to the players; it encourages them not to do stupid things. I've had some players do very stupid things, frequently but not always while trying to game the system. I don't want to forbid certain behaviors because that would impact their ability to roleplay...but I like for there to be consequences. So I reserve the right to send their Pokemon to the hospital when they send out the level 5 to fight the level 40.

Except in the games a pokemon is fully healed.
And why couldn't I leave a pokemon at the center and pull another and just have Joy transfer it to the pc after its done
And why can't i have more then 6-pokemon.
etc.
Really at the end this would make me play Paul and I'd just release that pokemon then catch them so they go to the pc, after grabbing another mon from the pc. Or just leave em.

And the other side I'd have hacked my pokeballs to get around that because I don't want to deal with things like that, again I don't see the reasoning towards this.

icefractal
2016-04-10, 07:53 PM
And the other side I'd have hacked my pokeballs to get around that because I don't want to deal with things like that, again I don't see the reasoning towards this.I'm a big fan of knot-cutting, and someone with a low tolerance toward "because tropes", but Pokemon is just not a perfectly logical setting. At some point, you have to decide between a game where you do what would logically be most effective (carry hundreds of Pokemon with you at once, probably send out multiple at a time) and a game that resembles Pokemon.

There are some IC justifications you could give to it:
* It's a professional sport. Of course you can carry more Pokeballs, but then you get disqualified, same as bringing an aluminum bat to a MLB game.
* It's mandated by a treaty - civilization was almost destroyed in a world war where all sides were using Pokemon as weapons. The limit of six is the comprise that was finally reached, and is enforced rigorously to prevent another war. Also explains why kids are handling these things - because of the per-person limit, a country that starts trainers as young as possible will have the advantage over others.
* Society is ruled by the elite who control rare and high-level Pokemon. Accordingly, the laws are set up in their favor; restricting things to one-on-one duels and limited supplies of Pokemon means the serfs can't overwhelm them with sheer numbers. Much like many codes of chivalry served the needs of the feudal system.

But in the end, the real reason is that removing that limit will cause the game to stop looking like Pokemon in fairly short order.