Im sorry, you had a character who had been raised in a place that hated magic users, been framed and lost faith in the government, became a fugitive whose ONLY FRIEND was a magic user..... And the dm did not lap that up on a plate???? You basically handed them a plot on a platter omg
On the one hand yes, and I was trying so hard, I was single-handedly carrying the ‘giving a shit about the story premise’ flag. She told me all about the setting (but not the plot) and what the party needed for balance ahead of time, and I built my girl to interface with all of that and then it...just didn’t work out at all.
On the other, she was trying hard too. She really didn’t know what she was doing, had never played under a competent DM who cared about story, and had gone into this with a ludicrously ambitious complex political machination plotline that collapsed the second we won our first encounter, and did not get kidnapped and coerced into working for the secret police as surprise agents the other factions didn’t know about.
And fell apart harder when she let the oracle be old friends with the head of the army, and suddenly we had ties to power in the opposite faction from the one she wanted us forced to serve, and even harder when (forced to make things up to replace the original plan) she had the place we went to hide besieged by an army of secret police trying to assassinate Army Boss Lady, her only developed PC who wasn’t a Super Annoying Dude, permanently exploding the ‘sneaky subtle machinations’ vibe.
But she just couldn’t let it go. She really wanted us to experience emotional conflict about what had shaped up into a really straightforward decision that I was the only member of the party who was emotionally invested in anyway.
Even when I tried to help I sometimes put extra strain on her, because I would get really into the worldbuilding and then for example be totally bewildered that the houses had roofs you could stand on, when we were four levels down in a city dug deep into a cliff face.
It had never occurred to her to look for plot in PC interactions, I think, and if it had I can see not attempting to lean into it, when dealing with a party composed mostly of asshole divas and characters specifically designed around not giving a shit. (We started out with two wizards who were different flavors of indifferent to the persecution except re: not getting caught.)
The sorceress princess didn’t care about anything currently in the story only her distant lost throne, and kept starting drama for lulz and ego, and the oracle just steadily escalated her attempts to get the desired power trip out of the game at the expense of everything else. Apparently she was DMing the DM violent revenge fantasies about an NPC who took her character down in an ambush that we’d been kind of manipulated into with misleading descriptions of the amount of cover available. Scary shit.
DM was overwhelmed. It happens. Although the more I describe the situations we got into the more I’m like ‘wow she really had problems with wanting us to wind up in specific positions so NPC dudes could monologue plot at us, huh.’
My roleplaying was specifically designed to interface with her stated plot, but it didn’t always yield the outcomes she wanted or relate directly to her opening story goals, so she often reacted to it as a distraction, which didn’t help.
That’s a learning curve thing, but I’m still annoyed with her for getting mad that my character wholeheartedly disliked her carefully crafted Morally Ambiguous Antagonist, who was super condescending and ran the secret police, and turned out to have been maintaining a constitutional crisis for fifty years so he could be the de facto ruler of the city-state and keep us locked in a state of infighting and witch-hunting so we didn’t have the energy to devote to serious border wars, as opposed to the low-key, defensive border wars I’d fought and my adored older sister had died in.
His sole good trait was being anti-war and my character was a very young, patriotic, dedicated member of the military elite! Why would she be conflicted? Because he’s an authority figure? Maybe then don’t give me alternate authorities who have better morals and more right to boss me and are telling me to do things that make sense for reasons they actually explain!
And she caught him in a lie in the very first thing he ever said to her, even before she knew who he was. Pulling off subsequent Bluff checks doesn’t obligate a PC to trust the NPC who they know lied to them for no apparent reason about something very basic, when they have every reason in the world to be paranoid?
But I got accused of godmoding. 😩 Because Dimsil didn’t trust this suspicious man to send us to go fight sewer zombies, after a week in a bunker hiding from her own government when she was supposed to be on sabbatical going home to meet her new nephew.
I was prepared to be the odd one out for being Lawful, but not fitting into the party because I was the only one who cared on an in-character level and I cared too much was hard.
...I’m always going to be salty about all the attempted railroading with that one NPC tbh. The dude had actually set up our framing on purpose, but he didn’t tell us this, so my girl was just really scornful that he thought he was the only one who could possibly be trusted to run the city when apparently he couldn’t even run his Inquisitors effectively enough to not have them running off trying to frame random citizens to meet quota. That’s not a sign of good management!
But yeah, tiefling wizard rogue dude with his thing for bombs and my paladin starting to be real friends in the middle of the bullshit storm could have developed into something really cool, I think, if the campaign hadn’t collapsed under the weight of entitlement and drama. As they do.
And in addition to the difficult party members, flexibility and being invested in the story on a character level rather than a major-themes or detailed-moment level are useful DM skills, which is something I knew but until this ask hadn’t isolated as a concept in quite this way. Thank you!
