Dysfunction at the Magic Tourney [D&D 3.5]
JoyWriter:
Ron, if he felt that the characters should be competing but the players cooperating. What are they cooperating on? Because my natural answer would be "they are cooperating in producing some clever kick-ass magical duel, where intelligent people with amazing powers use them however they can within the rules". And to be honest, cooperating at that objective should produce exactly what Raven did!
I can't imagine what he thinks they should be cooperating towards, and why that violates it.
But on the second match Raven, I can see why the GM sided against you, even to the point of bending the rules; you might have hit an implausibility in his idea: It's a magic tournament that can't handle people using magic? In other words, if the tournament was supposed to be running for years, and it had such an obvious flaw (especially in a world where you have both illusionists and transmuters as specialisms!), then you flagging that up would just break the suspension of disbelief. Me or David Berg would probably handle it being going "hang on that's stupid, we'll need to retroactively add more rules to the tournament!" (see complex decisions in the link) but this GM just tried to blur over it, so it's not a viable tactic for some unclear reason.
Now that breaks suspension of disbelief too, but you can hope no-one noticed! In competitive environments, people are very likely to, and to argue it.
He could have made it a little better by going "I hate the anonymity of D&D magic, let's change the rules like this" and then sticking with the new structure where targeting is obvious and so is spell identification.
Aelwyn:
My first time posting:
Some people hate to lose.
When my brother-in-law got married, his best man treated him to a day of paintball, and I got invited along. I had met some of his friends but didn't know them very well. One of the rules was, when you're "dead," you can't help your teammates. You have to go to the sidelines and watch the rest of that round quietly. My team was pretty consistently outmatched, and we lost almost every match all day. At one point I got very frustrated and yelled some information to my teammates from the sidelines. A "dead" member of the other team pointed out--quite politely--that I was violating the rules, and I stormed off into the woods. Part of it was anger, part of it was I just didn't want to watch anymore, and part of it was I was ashamed that I had blurted out the help and violated the rules. And maybe I was just taking myself out of it so I wouldn't make that mistake again. And doubly frustrated, angry, and ashamed at myself because I was taking this way too seriously and ruining what was otherwise a good time. I was doing exactly what PL did--I let my frustration at "losing" make me do things that were "out of character."
Anyway, we spent the day running through the woods shooting each other, and at the end of the day I mooned the other group, and they all shot me in retaliation, which pretty much dispelled any bad feelings that were left. Then we all went out for beers and thai food. Second best bachelor party I've ever been to.
My advice is, look for ways you (and your character) can cooperate with this guy (and his character) rather than compete with him. He doesn't sound like he enjoys losing. I'm also wondering if he was given ANY chance to have some success in this tournament. I've been in a lot of role-playing situations where I'm the first-level hobbit thief in a group of tenth-level fighter-wizards. And I don't just mean my character--sometimes I'm the one guy at the table who doesn't know the mechanics or the style of play well enough to contribute anything to the group. That gets old fast.
If you want to see another example, watch the last quarter of a 4-0 hockey game.
That business about him bragging about undermining other characters is troubling, though.
greyorm:
Josh,
While I agree with your logic, I think you may be overthinking it. We're talking about some subconscious/instinctual stuff of "what we do at the table/why we're at the table", so I can very much see the situation Ron suggests as a possibility, where any sort of character conflict, quite regardless of the circumstances, is a violation of that "understanding" of player camaraderie. Again, not saying that's what happening, just it is a possibility.
As to the flaw in the tournament, the GM's decision doesn't have much to do with what was happening between PL and myself at the table.
(Tangentially: that is indeed one of the things I thought of right away and even asked about openly at the table, as we'd retro-fitted other rounds when something would kind of break the game or didn't seem sportsmanlike. I was surprised, but it turned out to be a legal move in terms of the fiction. I don't think the issue is that the GM "sided against me" because the action broke the fiction; he was letting it pass until PL reacted to it and things got all weird for me. The GM's response is really not even a thing in this particular discussion as I see it.)
Aelwyn,
Greetings! Nice to meet you! I'll keep that in mind about the reactions to frustration, thanks for pointing it out.
As to your question: he had a chance...heck, his character is a higher level spell-caster than I am, so I'm not sure that was it. I didn't say it above or in-game, but in play I know that I was completely uncertain that I was even able to win because I felt it was such a close situation, and he kept more-or-less effectively countering my tactics until he gave up. Whether or not he thought he had a chance, I don't know.
Callan S.:
Sorry, I was reading it that some game event made him drop the feather? He just decided to drop it?
greyorm:
Quote from: Callan S. on March 13, 2010, 03:07:33 PM
Sorry, I was reading it that some game event made him drop the feather? He just decided to drop it?
No, you read it right the first time, Cal. He gave up after the feather was dropped, but the drop wasn't a deliberate action on his part.
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