Dysfunction at the Magic Tourney [D&D 3.5]
greyorm:
Weirdly, this is going to tie into at least two other current threads happening right now...
For our last session we took a break from 3:16 to play in our sporadically on-going 3.5 game. Our characters were involved in a magic tourney, which took up the whole session (~two hours). It was a fun session, except I went away feeling like not-so-much fun. Some weird things happened at the table personality-wise between myself and another player (PL), first when my character and his were matched against each other in one of the rounds, then later when I had my character "cheat" to win the last round.
What happened: the second round of the contest involved getting a feather from the top of a pole and bringing it back to the judge. PL's character (a dwarven cleric polymorphed into a wind elemental) ended up grabbing the feather faster than anyone else could, but my character (half-orc wizard) spent the next four or five rounds casting spells that kept him from reaching (or even finding) the judge, then PL's character dropped the feather into a fog-bank I'd raised and I managed to find it and get it to the judge for the win.
PL can be pretty high-strung at times, but he became incensed when he dropped the feather and swore about it at me, ie: "Fuck this, I give up. So much for being on the same team!"
Note: three players were taking part in the contest as well as four NPCs, no one was on teams in the contest, we were all competing individually. So I took his meaning as because we were in the same adventuring party my trying to win the contest was somehow stabbing him in the back.
And I mean he was really, personally angry: red-face, scowl, glaring at me, clenched fists over this.
Which made it kind of weird for me, because I still don't know what the issue was beyond a kind of angry guilt-tripping for not just letting him win. Unfortunately, I'm bad at confronting social situations on my feet, especially when I don't really get why they're happening. So I didn't ask or even say, "Wait. Are you upset with me personally? I didn't know we were on teams in this contest. Why are you upset?"
So he sat and stewed and I tried to shrug it off as just frustration on his part on losing the round. Figured I'd talk to him post-game to find out what was up (as well as give him some time to cool down).
In the third round (task: find a needle in a haystack) my character came in fourth (non-placing), so I had him cast a spell to turn the 1st place NPC winner's needle into a rusty nail to disqualify her (*ahem* well, it WAS a contest of magic) so my character would come in third place for that contest, and also win the whole shebang.
The minute it left my mouth, PL threw a fit about my doing so ("You can't do that! I can't let this stand!") and despite not knowing my character had done anything of the sort (no Spot checks or similar were made, just my announcement to the GM about what my character was doing), PL said his character immediately went to the judge and accused mine of cheating.
PL kept defending it -- to me as a player, not to my character -- as, "Sorry, I'm a cleric of Law, I can't allow that to stand. You can't cheat while around me," but it came across a lot more like "a-justification-repeated-often-enough", because I wasn't repeatedly demanding an explanation. It felt more like "I'm getting you back for taking the win from me/'betraying' me in the second round."
I argued against the whole situation given the "How the fuck would he even know?" question, but the GM allowed the calling-out to stand and we sort of resolved it post-accusation (apparently, at least in our group, you can now just Detect Magic with a Wisdom roll, no skills or spells required...*). So I let it slide and just used the question above as my character's defense against the accusation.
This worked until PL's character cast a Dispel on the "nail" and it reverted back to a needle. So there was proof now of cheating having occurred, though there was still no proof of my involvement (wizard tourney, could have been anyone -- again, used as my defense). PL had his character continue to insist it was me, and the GM ruled it ended up disqualifying my character entirely since the judges had no proof of who...but since my character had been fingered...
(* This sort of weird "ignore the rules rulings" is a different on-going issue in our group that I've generally just learned to live with, despite the frustration it has caused me in not know what my character can now actually do or not do because the rules apparently only occasionally apply. This is perhaps a topic for another time. For the moment, I'm just accepting it as a major case of unwritten/unacknowledged Drift.)
Retro-actively, it might make sense my character got hosed, and so we could explain it all away as "I'm a half-orc and they are universally despised in the kingdom, so, yeah, {sarcasm} clearly I must have been cheating because I'm a half-orc" and role-played it all up. But that wasn't even remotely part of the fiction happening at the table.
I'm not upset about the losing: my character "cheated", got caught, and lost. No big deal specifically. Because that was always a possibility.
However, if I'd instead slipped a note to the GM with my sneaky tactic on it, I suspect the situation and PL's reaction, and quite probably the outcome of the whole thing, would have been completely different. There would have been no immediate proclamation that I was cheating for PL to leap on, actual skill checks would have to have been made, spells cast, etc. It wouldn't have felt like a "I'm going to so get you back!" moment.
Yet slipping notes to the GM is not something I'm really a fan of. I've been playing D&D for twenty-plus years, so I'm pretty good at separating character knowledge from player knowledge, and I'm invested in being a participant and/or audience to other character's stories. PL's been playing D&D at least as long as I have and has often, while GMing, cautioned against metagaming and (re)acting based on player knowledge.
His reaction and course of action seems pretty blatantly not in line with that at all, and very much a case of the bad kind of metagaming, as well as a seeming case of (crudely) my-character-is-also-my-penis. At least I can't figure it any other way after both the above, and given that PL continued to be completely cool towards me (ie: pointedly ignored me) at the end of the night after we had put our books and characters away and were BSing and getting ready to head out.
Problematically I now have the situation on my hands that: my character should be ready and willing to get some payback on the dwarf for throwing him to the wolves at the end of the tourney. But I am concerned that if I decide to play up this aspect of my character, PL is going to take it personally again as a player and become angry with me as a player, instead of viewing it as a conflict between characters. In fact, I'm worried that could now happen with anything.
And really, that isn't any fun. At all.
So that's the situation.
It is also confusing, as PL has bragged in the past about how his characters have hosed/betrayed the parties they've been a part of and stolen things from other characters, etc. So I'm WTF? He can do inter-party conflict and betrayal and clever-sneaky-behavior and it's a hoot, but if anyone else does he gets (passive-)aggressive and verbal with them inside and outside the game?
I'm also a bit concerned about bringing it up directly with PL -- this isn't the only issue this has happened with, there are some things I'd posted about elsewhere some folks might have seen about how passive-aggressive/furiously PL reacts when he's corrected on the rules, or the rules don't let him do exactly what he wants (ie: cast 8th level spells at 10th level; create dozens of cure potions overnight for free; etc) -- which I cut him some slack for because there are other issues at work, but I'd still prefer not to be on the potential receiving end of a mood swing.
So I'm left wondering: what I did? And: what I do now? PL and I have very different perceptions of how to play/what play "should" look like, particularly in D&D, but I figured I was at least in the same sandbox that we could play D&D together...clearly I'm still not. I don't want to need to be sneaky among the players...but now I'm not so certain. And here's the thing: we've been playing this game for a year, I think, and it's been unspoken thus far that we tell a mutual story together, being open as players even if our characters aren't. This seems to have completely reversed that, but really I'm more concerned about what the hell was going on at the table.
Also, for the record:
PL and I have been good friends for years outside gaming.
There are just the four of us (with a once-every-few-months fifth).
This is the first local gaming group I've found in ten years (yes, really).
We have never had issues like this with one another in our other campaigns (3:16, Sorcerer, Cthulhu).
Callan S.:
Hi,
Just to clarify, he didn't say anything until he lost that match? Like, the very first time you cast a spell to block him getting the feather back, he didn't go "Dude, wha? Were on the same team!", he actually went through about five rounds of you casting against him, but it was when he lost that you got that responce?
Ron Edwards:
Hi Raven,
At the usual risk of guessing about people I don't know ...
It doesn't confuse me at all. To PL, it's likely that the characters competing was in no way, shape, or form some version of you as players competing. Looking over your post, I similarly guess that to you, when the characters started competing, you found it perfectly reasonable and with-any-luck fun to have your guy compete fully. Whereas to him, that meant that you (the person) competed with him (the person)
To clarify: "the same team" means you as players, with the characters as instruments, and I think to PL that means no matter what - never mind that the characters think they are competing, never mind if they were (say) mind-controlled to fight one another to the death. No matter what. Violate that, and you spit on every value that holds the two of you at the table at all, and held you together from the start of play.
I mean, this is one of the main things the Big Model was constructed to deal with. The primary causes, or driving real-world actions, go from Outer to Inner - Social Contract holds Exploration, System within (and with the rest of) Exploration holds Techniques, Ephemera arise from Techniques in play. Anything Inner-to-Outer is resultant, emergent, and conditional.
Raven, in that context (and positing that I'm even 50% on the money about this), it seems to me entirely ineffective - and even perhaps perceived by PL as deceitful - to try to resolve the hassle by talking about in-fiction content. That's In-to-Out, and not causal in Big Model terms.
Does that make any sense? Please understand that I'm not talking about blame, but rather about a person's specific perspective or presumption about "how we play" which may be the single important factor at work in a situation about this.
Best, Ron
greyorm:
Callan: as I recall, everything seemed fine right up until he yelled what I quoted above about giving up and teamwork. It is possible I am misremembering, or missed some cues that things weren't OK prior to that.
Ron: It makes perfect sense. I'm right with you on all that and it sounds plausible (I was even thinking something along the same lines). But I really don't know. My confusion stems from WHY he would see it that way given his own reported play history of intra-party conflict/betrayal (which isn't to say he might not see it that way now).
For example, in the game just prior to the one above, he was telling us about how his "paladin" spent nearly an entire campaign undermining his own party, and they never caught on, at least not until he murdered them all. As an example, he mentioned working shards of glass into another character's dragon-form's wings while healing him, so that the next time that character polymorphed and tried to fly, its wings shredded. And various other "dick moves".
So, you can see why I'm kind of iffy on that being the explanation, even though it still could be despite that.
More importantly, what do I do with it now/how do I handle it given all the details in the above. Though I'm not certain I can do anything unless I figure out why it even happened.
Callan S.:
Wow, I'm just reading it as him liking to win and being a bad loser, precisely because he didn't react after five rounds of it. Also with the history of the clever backstab bragging. Before anyone reads 'judgement from un high' into that, if I saw a dark, hunched figure at the end of an ally holding something sharp, I'd consider it a badguy - even if it was mother Terisa with a slice of cake in hand. I totally speak as someone who recognises their own perceptions may not match reality. And besides, the cake is always a lie...lol
But as you say, perhaps he did respond and you missed it - I could imagine someone trying to somehow take some rough from the team or something, until they snap...but it feels like a bit of a stretch to me. But all the same they are both possibilities.
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