GM leniency/strictness

[zornwil]

THIS POLL IS SUPERSEDED BY TWO OTHERS, ONE FOR EACH QUESTION THAT THIS REALLY ASKS - PLEASE MOVE ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE!

Just curious - as a GM, how lenient or how strict are you? I admit, I'm really lenient typically. There's no right style of course, so this isn't intended to trigger any debate on a "better" style, just wondering what people have to say.

Yeah, I'm sure this has been on the boards before.

Anyway, when I say lenient, in my case, I mean that character concepts may be pretty far-out, stop powers are usually allowed, that sort of thing. In-play I'll give consdierable flex for cool ideas and interesting tangents. I don't stick to the preordained notes/script much at all. However, my boundaries come up not just where the fun might be hampered (I'm sure everyone has that boundary), but also where I think it will have too destabilizing an affect on the game world or where it seems to make one character just way outstanding above the others. That's probably really where it lies.

[zornwil]

UGH - where it says "stray on track" in the 3rd choice down it should be "stay on track", I hope that's evident but FYI.

[Bartman]

Well you seem to be tracking two different concepts with a single question zornwil. The first one is how close do you stick to the published rules and reign in potntial abusive abilites. And the second one is how closely you force the players to stick to the pre-planned plot. I'm not sure the two subjects are really very related. I for example when I GM tend to reign in potentially abusive character concepts fairly rigerously. In contrast I'll allow the PCs to go wherever they want and do whatever they want. So I'm a 3 or 4 as far as character concept goes and a 1 for plots.

[OddHat]

I mostly agree with Bartman; I see this as two questions:

1) Character Creation: I stick to the rules as published most of the time, with a few house rules clearly described to the players. I don't mind stop sign powers or strange combo effects, as long as they're being used to describe an interesting character concept. I will overule characters that are unplayable or absurdly overpowered; A charcter who can step into Out-Time through extra dimensional movement, perceive "real time" as frozen, and then use NND killing attacks on his 0 DCV helpless foes is not going to pass. A character who can step into Out-Time and wander around without intereacting with the physical world just might, so long as I could think of a way to make it work in the campaign.

2) Plots: I know what the villains are going to do, what their time table is, and what clues they might leave. I know what the NPCs are doing. Everything else is up to the players. If they outsmart the villains and stop the plot in time, I'm happy to go with that. If they jump the rails then the villains keep moving forward and I'll offer the players a fair chance to get back to the story. If the villains succeed, then the next scenario will probably involve dealing with the consequences, which can be great fun in and of itself.

I remember a game where the heroes failed to stop a nanite plague from turning everyone in Japan into killer-cyborgs...

[Fitz]

I used to be much more laissez faire about everything than I am these days, but I found that I could never quite anticipate just how far players could go to build characters which would have me tearing my hair out and spending all my spare cash on ulcer medicines.

These days I'm a lot more careful about setting campaign limits for character creation; within those limits I'll do my best to accommodate player concepts, but I've decided that in the end I have to be reasonably firm if I see anything which gives me the collywobbles. If running the campaign becomes a constant struggle on my part, I'll burn out and give it away, so it's better from my perspective to clamp down initially to pave the way for smooth sailing later on.

[zornwil]

Originally posted by Bartman
Well you seem to be tracking two different concepts with a single question zornwil. The first one is how close do you stick to the published rules and reign in potntial abusive abilites. And the second one is how closely you force the players to stick to the pre-planned plot. I'm not sure the two subjects are really very related. I for example when I GM tend to reign in potentially abusive character concepts fairly rigerously. In contrast I'll allow the PCs to go wherever they want and do whatever they want. So I'm a 3 or 4 as far as character concept goes and a 1 for plots.

Well, in part that's what I'm curious about. Prior observations, to me It seems like people are simlar on both fronts but am interested in answers like yours where that's not the case.

[Agent X]

My style: I have house rules and I make the players stick to those rules changes and the unchanged rules in the books concerning character construction. Most powers are generally acceptable depending on the needs of the campaign. Precognition and Retrocognition, for example, aren't going to work in a game with lots of mysteries.

On rules of combat, etc. I am happy to deviate from the set rules when they don't anticipate special circumstances.

As far as adventures: I don't really force the players to follow one lead or the other but if they follow a red herring or just ignore the adventure hooks then logical consequences will follow.

[DoctorItron]

I had to go with "None of these describe me really at all." To summarize, I'm pretty strict with Character and World Creation, and very flexible with Plots.

Character Creation: I generally go by the rules. There are some powers and advantages that I don't allow unless there's absolutely no other way to implement a character concept. I definitely enforce point limits, althought my current campaign is slowly getting rid of limits as the characters gain experience.

World Creation: Again, I'm pretty strict here. I define the campaign setting and identify the major baddies. Smaller players get filled in as the campaign evolves. If the players or I find an inconsistency or other problem, I either rewrite history and we pretend things were always that way, or I define some earthshaking event to rectify the issue.

Plots: I never railroad the players into a predetermined course of action. I preplan the actions of the villains and other NPCs before starting a session, but I let the players' actions change the course. We take all sorts of turns when the players come up with unexpected solutions.

[Stray Cat]

I'm really pretty flexible. I deviate from genre a little at times, but the gist of the rules are not really messed with. Agent X's house rules are the same as mine, since the two of us (and Superskrull) are the GMs for our group and we essentially work all this stuff out together. Each of us has our own style within the framework though.

Cat

[Ndreare]

I am not well described by any of your categories.


As far as the rules go I believe they are there to help us have fun so at any point where the rules inhibit the fun I ignore them/change them.

As far as plots and "Railroading" PC's in a given direction. I am pretty bad. I identify that I do it and try not to, but it is a noticed trait of my games that the players are meant to go in only a couple of directions or the adventure will suffer. I am good at creating notes and memorizing them. I am not as good at switching up mid plot.

(Nobody is perfect so as long as I try to fix it I guess that is what counts. I think I will create a new topic related to this.)

[zornwil]

I don't think keeping players very focused on a plot is "railroading" necessarily, just depends how it's done. I've seen it done miserably, but I've seen it done great as well. Just so no one who is very focused and keeps the players on the right path feels like I think it's railroading in the bad connotation.

[Dr. Anomaly]

Like several other posters have noted, this really seems more like two questions rather than one.

For character creation I tend to follow the rules pretty closely, though stop-sign powers aren't generally of much concern...that is, if a player wants one, it's usually okay by me. The caveat to this is that I've been doing it for so long that I could out-munchkin my players without trying. The net result is that I usually make suggestions for building their characters that make them much more "efficient" than they would be otherwise. This makes the player happy, as they effectively have more points to spend. This makes me happy because it (a) makes my players happy and (b) I know where the "unexpected" trouble spots will be, because *I* put them there!

On the plot end of things I tend to be very flexible. For the last 8 years, in all the games I've GMed, I've never had more than a page of notes (and usually just one or two lines) of pre-planned plot/details for a given adventure, and I've *never* had a player notice that I was "working without a net."

For example, I'm running a campaign based in the Legion of Super-Heroes setting. I've been running this for more than 3 years, and to date have NEVER created or used a character sheet for *any* NPC, be they hero or villain. My players have a great time, and they are none the wiser. There have been epic battles fought with the fate of existence itself at stake, great wounds suffered and triumph snatched from the jaws of defeat. The heroes have emerged bloody, battered, having made great sacrifices, but fiercely proud of their hard-won victory. Great stories and battles from several years ago are still talked about frequently, with much recounting of how narrowly they beat so-and-so, or how it took everything they had to make a dent in the defenses of Villain X, or how only their clever thinking beat the unstoppable menace. None of those epic battles or mega-villains have been written up past a line or two of notes beforehand.

None of my players have the slightest idea that what's on that clipboard on my lap is...paper on which I write down details as they *happen* and as I *create* them on the fly, not stats for things they're encountering right now...

[Lord Mhoram]

I am very very loose with powerlevel and character creation. I allow really loose ECs (down to allowing non end using powers therin), multipowers, and whatnot. I let anyone have the same access to things things, so it is balanced between characters.

My campaign and settings are generally very strict (especially my heroic level). Character conception _has_ to fit within the world.

My plots... I have overthreads, but usually don't have direct plots as such. I have three or four things that the players could head off in, and follow what they do.

[zornwil]

Yikes, sorry all! It's clearly a trend that the two diverge. I'll edit the top post and submit two polls for clarity. Thanks!