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Author
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Comment
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Asperix
Tolling Bell Cultist
(2/19/04 1:10 am)
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Upset player
Hello,
I'm currently dm'ing a group for RttToEE. I award 1k xp to any player who writes e-mail PC journal entry. One player "Jack" has been doing it for the past couple months so he's been getting 1k xp per session and I appreciate his efforts.
However he was annoying the hell out of me this recent session during a role-playing moment. They meet w/varachan (outter fane) and pick his brain. Among other things, Varachan mentions 2x's that the elemental princes are evil and they have 2-3 weeks before another prince is released. The group immediately teleports to verbobonc to sell loot and buy equip. In verbobonc
jack - "i get in touch w/a high level wizard to see if the elemental princes are neutral or evil in alignment.
me - "Verachan already told you that info."
jack - "no, verachan never informed us of that."
me - "yes he did"
jack - "no he never did"
me - "yes he did."
*He and I also went through a similar conversation 3x's today regarding other info from Verachan. At this point I'm cranky that he's got such a short term memory and that he doesn't concede to my memory or ask other players about info.*
me to other players - for 400xp does anyone remember whether the elemental princes were neutral or evil?"
jake (another player) - "yes, they were evil"
So after the session on the way home I get a cell phone call from jack. He's pissed that someone can in 2 seconds get 400xp, compared with 1000xp journal entries that take 45+ minutes to write. He's also upset that I "humiliated him" in front of the group and to retort, he won't be writing e-mail journal entries.
How do you DM's think I should respond to this? I'd appreciate constructive criticism on my part and the players. Thnx.
-Asperix
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 Siobharek 
(2/19/04 2:20 am)
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ezSupporter
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Re: Upset player
Frankly I find that using xp for remembering some factoid is wrong. Sorry to put it so bluntly, but I do. You say yourself that the player has a lousy short-term memory - don't beat him on the head by awarding other players xp for one-upping him on something that silly. You called the other players to correct him and dangled a 400 xp-carrot in front of them to make them do so. That's too arbitratry for me.
Second, I would avoid these kinds of "Yes he did" "No he didn't" "Did too!" "Did not!" discussions. They're never productive and always tedious. In stead, just make it a DM fiat along the lines of, "Look maybe I forgot to mention it, but it's something that Varachan would've been sure to mention, so your character knows it. Now, if you still want top fork over 500 gp to a sage for getting the fact in Verbobonc, by my guest."
Third... Try explaining to him that when it comes to NPCs giving PCs info, you're SO on top of your game. It may take you a little while to dig out the DC to hear an ogre farting behind a closed door 60 feet away (it's 4, BTW  ), but you know what info the PCs get. Therefore, you'd appreciate it if he took a less beligerent attitude towards correcting you on that count - hell, on any count - and in turn, you'll try to keep your cool as well.
Hope it helps.
Siobharek
...it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. |
msherman
Crimson Coil Cultist
(2/19/04 3:28 am)
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Re: Upset player
If I were you, I'd write up a summary of that debriefing with Varachan, and mail it to the players. It's the _key_ information transfer event in the one year + campaign; there's a lot of data, and much of it is vital.
Personally, I'm bad at RPing those kinds of scenes; I frequently mess up the tone and forget/gloss over key details while playing them. So after the initial discussion in game, I ran the detailed debriefing as a PBEM between sessions, so that I had time to consider my words. The added benefit is that the players have the emails as a written record to study and refer to. Our PBEM of that discussion ended up covering over 100k of text emails, not including the map that Varachan drew them of the outer fane.
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blakwind
Tolling Bell Cultist
(2/19/04 7:19 am)
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Re: Upset player
msherman's advice is very good.
I sometimes email summaries of key information events to my players between sessions. RttToEE is a rich story with many details -- way too many details for a once-a-week player to reasonably remember, IMHO.
Recently IMC, there have been many applications of various high-level divinations and Speak With Dead in order to gather information (my players just finished defeating the recovered temple -- Varachan has been out of commission for a while IMC). It's not always easy to quickly improvise good answers to unexpected questions, and sometimes my on-the-fly answers are impenetrably cryptic, rather than cryptic AND useful.  The email provides the players a record of the info, and allows me the opportunity to revise it slightly for tone and content.
This next point may be a bit contentious, but I would argue that it's the character's memory that's really relevant, not the player's memory. The character could be super-intelligent, or he could be a mindless dolt. His memory should be related to his in-game attributes, not the real world attributes of the player. Some DMs may disagree with me on that, so YMMV.
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Infiniti2000
Brother of Venom
(2/19/04 7:27 am)
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ezSupporter
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Re: Upset player
Asperix, glad to see you're still going. We haven't seen you around here in a while. 
The advice above is good (except the DC is really 21, base 5 + 6 for 60ft plus 10 for behind a door). However, I have a more pressing concern. I think the 1K XP is way too much. I gave out 200XP for a one-time event. 400XP for a factoid is out of line, too. Should you even want to give out XP for a factoid, something like 10 or 25 is more appropriate. Anyway, it's your game, so I won't unduly criticize you for the choices, but Jack should just be happy with the huge XP he is getting. My campaign is at session 43 or so, and 43K experience is a lot of levels.
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Siobharek
(2/19/04 7:34 am)
Reply
ezSupporter
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Re: Upset player
Not to derail the discussion, but I set the base at -10, equal to a pitched combat. We're talking an ogre fart here!
Siobharek
...it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. |
lightnng
Tolling Bell Cultist
(2/19/04 8:30 am)
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Re: Upset player
1000XP per journal entry? How long are the sessions? Gosh, our journaler would kiss my feet if I gave them 1000XP per session. IMC, its 100+50/lvl-above-3rd (only 50 at lvl-1); I find this keeps it enticing enough (it comes to a 10-20% session bonus, and is constant at >5%-50XP< of level requirements without unbalancing the group too badly.
I mean, how many levels of difference is this creating between characters in your campaign? Or is this sort of "insurance against death"?
Plus 400XP for info recall? Wow.
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Mr Kaze
Tolling Bell Cultist
(2/19/04 9:18 am)
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Re: Upset player
Siobharek's initial response is pretty much spot-on. Except about Ogre farts, as he neglects to force a Fortitude save DC18 (DC 36 for creatures with scent).
1) A three-hour session generally gets only slightly more than 1000 XP for a fair quantity of risky encounters. Tossing out a 400 XP ad-hoc memory award on top of 1000 XP ad-hoc journal awards above and beyond the content of the campaign seems a bit shocking to me. Of course, if the player doesn't want the bonus journal awards any more, that's up to them.
1.5) As far as handling the player; privately apologize for your behavior as it was an inappropriate breach of DM responsibility to toss out an XP award for reality checking another player. Yes, you were factually correct, the player was smoking crack and if he wants to sulk instead of continuing to take advantage of your overly-generous journal-writing awards and/or generally having fun playing, that's his business. Moral of story: What's done is done and for your part you, at least, know better than to do it again.
2) If the player doesn't remember and nobody else in the party stops him, just play along with what he's doing. Maybe he thought Varachan was lying and wanted to hire an outside consultant to confirm; that's his little mental in-character monologue and not your primary concern. Your concern is that NPC consultant that he's looking for is your character -- don't take business away from him by trying to help the player remember what happened.
3) While it is true that you're the storyteller, you shouldn't trust your memory any more than you trust your players to take notes (and vice versa; no point in bickering about that). MrSherman advises that you write up the interview with Varachan -- which is reasonable advice -- but, if any of your players were taking notes, I'd advise you to collect, polish and publish those instead as that's a much more reasonable gauge of what the PCs were paying attention to while the conversation was going on. This is very important because if you accidentally gave out incorrect information as gospel truth and the players have it in their notes, they're going to be quite irked when the truth slaughters them all... so you either need to fix the adventure or fix the notes. Blakwind also notes that this allows a chance to iron out the details of what was said to make it flow with the story and that's quite right -- if the players ask questions you're not ready for but are quite reasonable for the NPC to know, you can say that you'll put it in the notes that you'll publish after the fact and call it good at that. PCs will rarely catch you unprepared and be ready to act on the information you don't have in the same session. (I certainly did this in the conversation with Dearth Voodooer [Tarren?] when the players started the conversation at the end of the story and went backwards from there...)
That's my 2 coppers. Hopefully it added a bit of additional/new insight to the discussion.
::Kaze
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Asperix
Tolling Bell Cultist
(2/19/04 9:19 am)
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Re: Upset player
Lightning,
Unfortunately I have one of the most lazy groups. The group is 5 players, level 10-12. The sessions last 4hrs 30min, about 4x's per month. On average they go thru 2-3 battles per session. We're on session 46.
I want to discourage ROLLplaying and more ROLEplaying. Because my yahoo group has very little email activity, I encouraged people to post journals by offering 1k xp for the past 7 sessions. I discussed this w/Jack 2 months ago and he said if the journals only compensated 500xp, he wouldn't write anymore. Unfortunately there has been only 1 player "Jack" who's consistently written these past 2 months. Another wrote 2 journals, and no one else wrote anything.
Also, jack is not the highest level and recently died, so I have no major problem with xp differences.
***
Infiniti, nice to hear from ya too. I'll definately visit this DM grp more often, as it's still a wealth of info. I'll also start writing and posting DM logs of my sessions soon.
-Asperix
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