Stars in my pocket like grains of sand: The End

inspiration
campaign-diary
#1

STARS IN MY POCKET LIKE GRAINS OF SAND

Stars in my pocket like grains of sand has been my first Warp Shell-campaign.
I have taken some time before writing this, because the situation that led to this point was unpleasant,
I have decided to cancel the campaign after a player and me got into a fight about their character’s healing ability.
The short version of it is, that I wanted to tie the healing ability to a roll, while the player felt like I wanted to decide something without consulting them first. Several following discussions later I have been accused of this and that and decided to not only ask the player to leave the group but also to cancel the campaign. I am a fairly new DM and have a lot to learn so this conflict was a bit overwhelming. Nevertheless, I have taken some time to reflect on this whole mess of a situation and have gained some knowledge that I want to share with you. Most of it is maybe obvious too y’all, but I thought I’d share it anyway.

1. Giving is easier than taking

It’s always easier to increase abilities of a player than nerfing abilities that are too powerful later on.
One part of the problem my player and me had, was in me wanting to change an ability and thereby nerfing it. Their character was able to heal for TOOL without making a check. After a few sessions and some really dangerous battles I felt that this healing ability was too powerful and took the suspense out of all battles. So I felt like tying it to a check made healing in the midst of battle more exciting. My player felt like I was taking something away that we previously had agreed on and refused my suggestions.

2. Years of Experience as an argument from authority

I am a very new DM. I have never DMed D&D, my first TTRPG was Call of Cthulhu, which I have GMed twice. My first game as a GM was The Dark Eye, which turned out to be complete disaster because I railroaded my players so hard, they decided to kill the quest giver and burn the town they were supposed to safe.
Since my Warp Shell-player has been playing TTRPGs for 20+ years and is very versed in LARP as well, they never tired of reminding me of this fact. They were the experienced one, I should just play by the rule of cool etc. Now, after having had several talks with the player and some thinking on my part, I know, that experience means very little, if it’s not coupled with the ability to take criticism, the willingness to always improve one’s own game and the acceptance of the fact that the games we play are collaborative, which sometimes means making compromises. If someone uses their experience to win an argument or belittle other inexperienced players or GMs, there’s something wrong.

3. Non-violent communication only works if all parties are doing it

Probably my biggest learning experience was to realise that a conflict can only be resolved, if both parties think of it as a conflict, are willing to compromise and communicate non-violently. Sounds too obvious, right?
The last discussion I had with my players was enormously unpleasant. I even told them that I felt very unpleasant. The problem was: my player didn’t think of the situation as a conflict or a miscommunication, but rather as something that I did wrong and needed to apologise for. So while I tried to be accomodating and use I-messages (“I feel, like we misunderstood each other and our conflict is a consequence of this misunderstanding.” etc.) the player went for telling me that they were disappointed in me, that they wanted an apology so they could forgive me and that “what I had done” (which they didn’t clarify) needed psychological counseling. Communicating like this made it clear to me, that there was no intent to resolve a conflict but rather to win an argument.

4. Life is short, games should be fun

Something that sounds like a truism when said out loud but I realised there’s a lot I had put up with just to play games with people I like. Apart from me GMing Warp Shell I also was a player in a D&D-group that I left shortly after. Part of it was me not wanting to play with the above mentioned player (who also was a player in that group) but another part of it was also that I realised that I didn’t have fun and that playing D&D felt like a chore. I feel that lots of players and GMs have similar feelings but don’t want to cause conflict, don’t want to break apart a game group and simply carry on (and get more and more miserable in the process).

5. There are different ways to play the games we love

One part of the conflict I had with my player was, that I realised that the way we wanted to play the game were not compatible. I wanted to play a game with high lethality, collaborative world building, lots of combat and giving every player the spotlight by switching between them.
My player felt constrained in their roleplay when I shifted the focus from one player to another, because it felt for them like I inhibited “free play.” Having one combat per session also felt too much for my player, because they wanted to have more time for roleplaying social interactions. Trying to change mechanics that concerned their character also felt like I was impinging on their character’s autonomy.
I am not writing this to say that my way of playing is way cooler and their way of playing is dumb. I am writing this, because I realised that there are different ways of playing that put the focus on different parts of the game and that sometimes those things cannot be compromised.

So, those are five of the many things I learned and although the whole situation has been highly unpleasant and extremely stressful, I feel that I as a person and as a GM have grown for the better (maybe that’s just me trying to find something positive about this clusterfuck, but I really think I’ve learned something). I hope some of these things are helpful or relatable in a positive way. I am taking a break from GMing now but will be back with a different group, in a different setting soon, I hope. Take care all!

#2

Bummer, dude. I am sorry to hear this.

It sounds like there may have been some poor fit between the players and your game/gaming style, which is unfortunate, but I think any player with decades of experience in TTRPGs ought to be willing to take it easy on a new gamemaster, especially if that player has ever spent a night “behind the screen.” As the Vulcans like to say on Star Trek, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one. So it ought to be on game night; a player may genuinely aggrieved after rules lawyering, but ultimately, after a fair and equitable discussion, if no compromise can be reached, an experienced player ought to acquiesce to the dungeon master (and simply not come back in the future if it’s impossible to abide by that.) As you said, it’s about the game, and it’s supposed to be fun; no single line item on a character sheet is worth ruining a session—much less an entire campaign.

For what it’s worth, it sounds to me like you did everything the best you could in a fairly untenable situation. You have my condolences regarding the untimely end of your campaign; I hope the incident doesn’t discourage you for too long before you find another better opportunity to exercise your gamemaster skills and creativity.

#3

Wow sorry man, sounds like you ran across a proper douche nugget of a player. If you GM long enough then its inevitable you’ll meet one across the screen and they can take a game down fast because they’re not only making your life harder but almost certainly ruining the game for everyone else too.

You were right to kick the player out but its a shame you felt you had to can the game too, maybe after a little time marshalling your resources you could bring it back better and brighter ? Please don’t let this person burn you on GMing, the world needs more good GMs :hugs:

#4

I know how you feel.

In fact, a lot of people on this forum do, and for most (all?) of us, it was a painful experience, just as yours was for you.

Believe me when I say that this not the end of the world, and most importantly, you indeed have learned many things which are very valuable and can be applied to many different areas in life.

All of the lessons you’ve learned are the correct ones; especially the observation that people who want an apology over all else are just trying to win the argument and feel superior, while making you feel bad. This is the case most of the time, unless you’ve done something very, very wrong (this case doesn’t seem to be one of them).

You don’t have to play games with people you love, when they make the game miserable. Love is different than fun.

We just talked about this subject very recently in a thread and I think you should read it. It can be very helpful to you:

I wish you courage and strength, which you already have within you.

#5

I’m sorry you had to go through a rough spot, I just hope that you can find the desire to return behind the screen once more. Don’t let anyone bully or deceive you, you don’t deserve that behavior. Pull through and grab the horn by the bulls: you’ve got awesome work to do and you look like the right man for the job! You might have learned some valuable lessons, and that’s good, but we’re all here for your questions, comments, and support! Take a break or hop into a new game, we’ll help you out!

Cheers! :muscle: :grin:

#6

I don’t know that the player was wrong…

Your write-up does suggest an experienced player taking advantage of a new DM but you did agree to it and as a new DM, I feel like the issue could lie in your combat encounters or how you chose to use the game mechanics.

Was this ICRPG Master Addition? What warp shell concept were they playing?

TOOL effort requires a tool. You should have, at a minimum, required the effort to match the action. If the player lacked the proper medical equipment (something you as the DM can limit or take away), their effort becomes BASIC. If this is some kind of a special ability it would be MAGIC effort and then suffer from things like spell burn if the player constantly abuses it.

Then there are the encounters. If this player was spending their action healing, there wasn’t enough on the board. Many times I played a healer and had to make the hard choice of healing someone or making an attack roll to reduce the number of threats we were up against. If this player was able to just heal, then you might not have been giving them enough to deal with including moveable levers, doors that need to be opened, timers increasing the room threats, environmental hazards, etc.

Also you pre-wrote an adventure that you fell in love with and then didn’t like it when the characters survived the fights. And it sounds like your entire thing was fights. ICRPG does lend itself to more of a fighting vibe BUT if you watch B’s latest youtube video on his Hard Suit campaign, you will see how an RPG is supposed to include role-playing not just rolling. It sounds like your player was possibly expressing a desire for more of that.

You wrote all this out as a reflection of your experience. Please take this for what it is; a 3rd party perspective on something I really don’t know much about and am sharing in hopes of helping you get through it next time it happens.

#7

I have to concede that I only gave a very very abbreviated version of the events, because my focus was on what I took away from it rather than what happened to arrive there. I can try to maybe contextualize the whole thing a bit more but my focus wasn’t so much on framing my player as someone who was wrong and me as someone who was or is right (and I hope it doesn’t read like that).

Wall of text incoming, I guess. :sweat_smile:

Wall of text

We were playing Warp Shell using ICRPG Master Edition and nearly all my players played bioforms that we made up ourselves beforehand (the player in question included). They played a species that consisted of a human host and a nanomachine parasite (like a Trill from Star Trek but with nanorobots). Those nanorobots had all different kinds of abilities, one of them being able to heal (which in-game was being referred to as “to repair”) for TOOL effort.

In our session zero, where I explicitly told everybody what game I wanted to play (high lethality, interesting and dangerous combat, kind of a West Marches-type-game, collaborative world building) I also mentioned that I wanted the rules to be flexible enough for us to change them if we felt they needed changing and to be able to introduce rules, if we felt we wanted some more crunch. We even distinguished between “individual rules” that only apply to individual players (like the above healing-mechanic) and can be adjusted by me and the player as we go along and “global rules” which would apply to all players and would need an unanimous vote to be put into effect.

In session zero the player of my initial post wanted to introduce and implement some kind of skill tree which they worked on. Other players told them that it was too early to decide if a skill tree is needed, because no-one had played the game yet. The player ignored that argument and nevertheless insisted on presenting how the skill tree would work. I allowed them to do it, but also repeated what the other players had said, that it’s too early to decide on what would be a global rule and that we maybe first play the game as is. I am mentioning this here, because in a talk with her partner (who was also a player in this group) shortly before our later conflict this was brought up and taken as a clear sign that I was a bully and a sexist (the player is a cis-woman, I am a cis-man and me interrupting her was taken as exercising male dominance). Me wanting to change the healing-mechanic later on, for her, also felt like I was singling her out, because she’s the only woman in the group.

Now, this is a topic, that I feel, is too complicated for a TTRPG-forum, but I am aware that I probably have some sexist, racist etc. notions as a consequence of my socialisation, so I try to be extremely sensitive when someone tells me I did a sexist or a racist thing. That’s why I felt the player and me needed to talk not only to somehow resolve the conflict about the healing mechanic but also for me to apologize and to understand how I could be more careful in the future. I even suggested that her partner could be there as a mediator if she didn’t want to talk with me alone.

As I mentioned above though, she didn’t want to talk and resolve the conflict, but started off with how disappointed she was in me and she only needed an apology to be able to forgive me. When I asked her, what she wanted the apology for, she replied with “for what I had done” and that for “what I had done” I needed a psychologist or life counselor. When I told her, that the implication of saying something like that, is that she’s calling me mentally ill, she replied with “Well, no. I am not an expert. I couldn’t tell you.” Her partner then intervened and basically repeated what he had told me a day ago: that she perceived my behaviour as sexist. One of the problems here is of course that in the end it was again two guys talking about something concerning a woman that was present. I apologised for my behaviour and then wanted to talk about the conflict concerning the healing mechanic. She then started to belittle me and quote our private chat to prove that I had said what I had said and that the whole thing was my own self-made problem. I told her that I felt uncomfortable but she ignored me and told me that I had written “I would like to tie your healing-mechanic to a DEX-check in the future.” which she took as a clear indication that I wanted to decide something over her head (leading up to this point she had already written me several full pages, in which she belittled me because she was the one with 20+ years of experience and I needed to relax and that she was basically not accepting any of my suggestions and would come up with something herself). I mentally checked out of the conversation, did some small talk and told them that I was going to cancel our campaign, because I was too busy with my job, searching for a new flat, conferences, call for papers etc.

I am not sure where you got the impression that I “pre-wrote an adventure that I fell in love with and then didn’t like it when the characters survived the fights”. I prepared one session at a time always asking my players what they wanted to do for the next session, so I could prepare accordingly. I wanted my players to survive the fights, but I also wanted fights to be dangerous enough that they could die. What I didn’t like, because it felt anticlimactic was my “problem” player’s character hiding from the enemies, two other players dropping with one dying in one round and her character coming out of hiding to simply heal both of them up to nearly full health without an ability check in-between.
If you want to get a feel for the combat-roleplay-ratio you can read up on my campaign diaries which I’ve posted in this forum. My problem player also voiced that she didn’t need combats every session. So what did I do? I scaled back on combats and introduced more social situations, more stuff to investigate and more non-combat encounters.

Terribly sorry for that much text, but I hope it answers some of your questions. :slight_smile:

#8

I think the main thing is to learn from issues when they come up - which sounds like you did. Things don’t always go well. You learn more from when things fall apart though than from when things go well. That’ll help going forward. Don’t get discouraged.

You are right that players always come from their own role playing backgrounds. There’s more than one way to play, and while there’s tips and tricks to improve your game, there’s no universal best way. Being aware that everyone has different experiences and backgrounds is helpful.

If I had a tip here, I’d say, tell your table about the issue as you understand it, and see if the players involved have ideas for a solution or see what they think of one you have in mind. Calling a tribunal to talk through issues can help. But, for that to work trust and a willingness to communicate as equals from everyone involved is needed.

I would stop gaming with someone who violated the trust of the table, argued in bad faith, or made the game anything less than fun. Life’s too short.

The “free play” friction with “always in turns” rule for ICRPG is a pretty common speed bump for ICRPG, especially folks who are not used to having that sort of structure placed on them outside of combat. If you do a search on the forums for this topic, you’ll find a number of good threads about it (try: here, here, here, here, or here).

#9

The word campaign, to me, indicates a wide branching story arc the GM creates in advance. You used it in your first sentence which created the confusion.

ICRPG works best without automatic success abilities. Look through the ME again and skim all the abilities. My suggestion would be to run the game as written for a first run as a GM or re-name existing abilities. The Mechanic sounds like the perfect fit for this character with the repairman ability and the omnitool as starting loot.

I had to google what cis-man and cis-woman meant. I feel like this is deeper than a simple ability discussion about a fun RPG system. In the future, don’t allow for automatic successes.

Sorry you had a tough go at it.

#10

We actually didn’t play in turns, because she didn’t want to (we talked about in session zero among other things). What I did, was to have some sort of turn order for myself and try to switch between players when I felt that it made sense. She also felt that inhibited “free play” so I stopped doing it.

Ah, yeah, I see what you mean. I probably used the wrong word. “Campaign” for me simply meant long-term play with possible big story arcs. The only campaign background I wrote was:

  • War between Genos and Xill has come to an end a century ago
  • Coalition of planets
  • Cultural fugue?

Thanks for all your input guys. :slight_smile:

#11

We actually didn’t play in turns, because she didn’t want to (we talked about in session zero among other things). What I did, was to have some sort of turn order for myself and try to switch between players when I felt that it made sense. She also felt that inhibited “free play” so I stopped doing it.

I wasn’t at your table, so only based on your description, your player seems to have felt their free play was more important than letting everyone play. If so, that’s a shame.

My experience with ICRPG is that “always in turns” is an important part of the system. Your player was not wrong, always in turns “inhibits” free play in the sense that it places a mechanical restriction on free play… but I’d suggest that this is not a bad thing. Everyone says what they’re doing, rolls some dice, and gives the next person their turn. It’s an insistence on equality and fairness at the table.

It does mean sometimes a player wants to say or do something, but it’s not their turn, so they’ll need to wait. The benefit is that this gives someone else a chance to play without needing to be so bold as to interrupt or demand the spotlight themselves, or without the DM needing to force the spotlight to move. A player waiting for their turn is a small concession to get there.

Without always in turns, bolder players are sometimes ready and willing to say and do more than other players, especially when there’s large gaps in experience at the table. Many times, you have players who are less assertive and will stay quiet during “free play” because they’re not confident their contributions will be as worthwhile or interesting. Always in turns means your player who is a bit more timid gets the same spot light opportunity as your player who would love to free play all night or who has played for 20+ years.

#12

I agree with this and have seen it happen first hand.