Fellow Game Masters.

[garhkal]

In some situations, though, one person's bad call or dice roll can impact everyone though. Especially when its just one person Flying the ship everyone is on and his bad decision gets the ship blown into smithereens..
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Confucious sayeth, don't wash cat while drunk!

[Melkor]

If it's a bad decision yeah I'm going to get upset. But if it's a bad dice roll...can't blame the guy for coming up 1's on everything.

[CRMcNeill]

Here's a thought:

If a boneheaded player gets other PCs killed through no fault of their own, penalize the bonehead when making up new characters. Make them start with the standard 7D skill dice, but give everyone else bonus dice.

Call it the Karma Rule; bad behavior in a former life has negative consequences in the present one.
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"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.

The CRMcNeill Stat/Rule Index

[garhkal]

[Melkor]

I've been running with something similar for a long time. Die through no fault you can control or avert, no penalties for next character. Die through sheer stupidity and you pay the price. Depending on exactly how stupid the decision was you might start at base again.

[Zarn]

I find that the idea of penalizing the player through game mechanics for their next character to be counterproductive. The censure of the table should come through the other players, not the GM, in my opinion.

I'm usually quite upfront about what mechanics I intend to use if a character gets dead or gone - and if I have forgotten to explicitly state what I intend to do, I let the table decide the rules for that (and inputting my own ideas and desires, of course).

Doing bonehead moves is part of the learning process, and the situation around the table is a social one - and should therefore be handled in a social context, not a game mechanical context.

[garhkal]

I lean that way too Zarn. If the other players wanna penalize him (or her) for their prior pc's dumb acts, thats up to them.
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Confucious sayeth, don't wash cat while drunk!

[Whill]

Wow, you guys have have had some immature players.

When I wanted to end my first Star Wars campaign, a couple of the players were disgruntled about it and expressed it. I can't even remember why I even wanted to end it, so their complaints could have been completely legit. But they didn't whine or give ultimatums. We remained friends. There were only 17 at the time. The most immature player I've ever had was another from the same campaign. At the beginning of the campaign he would sometimes say he wanted his character to do stupid things, like acts of necrophilia on an NPC he just killed "if she was hot" (I was the one whining, no you can't do that.) Near the end of his character's second campaign, he would argue that some of his declared immoral actions would not warrant a DSP. He was 14-16 during this time. The best roleplayer out of this campaign group happened to be my fourth player, a 13-14 year-old!

Since highschool I've been blessed with adult players who act like adults. To read problems some of you have had with adult players is quite horrifying. I'm sorry.

[Error]

I've had players leave angry for more reasons than this one...lol.

I guess some folks just have trouble with perspective.

I'm sorry you had to bounce them
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The only words of explanation you need for any concept in the entire Star Wars universe are the words Science Fiction and Space Opera.

[garhkal]

Over on dragonsfoot (one of my AD&D sites) someone is on about a similar issue.. He had the enemies use a tactic that should be 'well used' by barbarians, bandits and the like, and one of his 4 players got peeved, cause of a rolled in the open crit on his mount.. Threatened to quit the game if the DM didn't cave in and lessen the crit so his 'precious mount' wasn't killed instantly...
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Confucious sayeth, don't wash cat while drunk!

[Dredwulf60]

I remember starting to run a zombie apocalypse-based game. Everyone made really detailed characters with backstory and personality and...

First game, one guy got bit by a zombie while trying out his tae kwon do background skills to keep the horde from the others as they tried to escape...and he promptly died...and turned.

It was 15 minutes into the game.

You can bet it set the tone of survival for the rest of that campaign; though it sure sucked for that player having to sit-out the rest of the 5 hour session.

Recently I've been running a X-files type game. One of the characters has latent psychic powers, one of which is precognition, though it's fairly weak compared to his psychometry.

Anyways... I had a total party kill.

Everyone was a bit depressed at the mistakes that had been made that led to everyone getting killed. And I felt the sting at all the work setting up the game and the character creation process etc...just ending on a sour note.

But there is also the discipline of being the GM. In the back of my mind is the knowledge that having characters reap what they sow is important.

Then the psychic character's player says; "I know my character's precognition is pretty weak...but it DOES say here that in times of danger to self or loved ones it can sometimes flare up. Well...what happened is fairly traumatic, is there a chance he might have had a warning?"

I allowed him to make the roll...and he got a critical.

So I regressed them all to 3 hours prior...everyone alive and with the psychic character with full fore-knowledge of how things would have gone.

I really appreciated the non-demanding humble suggestion/request made by the character in this situation.

And I was (secretly) relieved that he made the roll he did and that things worked out for them...with the tone of the game...and the feeling of danger and potential mortality intact.

[garhkal]

Have they re'played out that time frame yet, and if so, has it changed how things went?
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Confucious sayeth, don't wash cat while drunk!

[Dredwulf60]