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spearcarrier (![[info]](http://www.journalfen.net/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} spearcarrier) wrote,@ 2007-10-30 23:01:00 |
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Inter-party conflict
You know, I'm really starting to hate fighting with other characters in my tabletop games at this point.
There's the guy in D&D who's playing the cleric of a neutral evil lich-god, or the dread necromancer who wants to pretend that summoning skeletons and zombies and other forms of walking dead is not even a little icky and actionable by a chaotic good character. Or the person playing a djinni who's always made floating, unmotivated and undifferentiated characters, throwing lethal damage at another PC in Mutants and Masterminds. Or it's the guy in Champions who gets all the breaks by the GM, including special swords and rules breaks and victories in other people's backstories and has to get taken down because he promised said special sword to a devil and we have to stop him from giving it up.
I can't get through a single campaign without wanting to strangle someone. And what's worse is when it crosses over with OOC issues, like not wanting to kill another PC and thus having the conflict with the cleric and the necromancer drag out and become an acrimonious debate of alignments and behavior ethics. Or knowing that the person made the djinni to pull some variant of the excuse, "My character's not human, so she doesn't have to care what she does to other people." (Happened first session of the campaign.) Or feeling resentful of the GM and the character he so favors, then feeling guilty because I worry that's bleeding over into my character's IC excuse to beat him up.
I play games for escapism. I argue enough with people every day; co-workers over their incompetence, friends over their horrific taste for belonging to 4-chan, significant other over who has to clean the ferret cage next, and so forth. I don't want to escape into more fighting. I want to do something big and constructive and /useful/, as a team, without having to worry about tons of personality conflict to get in the way of achieving some neat goal. But instead all the games I'm in get stuck in a mire of argument and frustration. I play tabletop games with RL folks to enjoy myself, but every session I'm in of almost every game seems to get further and further away from that. Arghhh.
You know, I'm really starting to hate fighting with other characters in my tabletop games at this point.
There's the guy in D&D who's playing the cleric of a neutral evil lich-god, or the dread necromancer who wants to pretend that summoning skeletons and zombies and other forms of walking dead is not even a little icky and actionable by a chaotic good character. Or the person playing a djinni who's always made floating, unmotivated and undifferentiated characters, throwing lethal damage at another PC in Mutants and Masterminds. Or it's the guy in Champions who gets all the breaks by the GM, including special swords and rules breaks and victories in other people's backstories and has to get taken down because he promised said special sword to a devil and we have to stop him from giving it up.
I can't get through a single campaign without wanting to strangle someone. And what's worse is when it crosses over with OOC issues, like not wanting to kill another PC and thus having the conflict with the cleric and the necromancer drag out and become an acrimonious debate of alignments and behavior ethics. Or knowing that the person made the djinni to pull some variant of the excuse, "My character's not human, so she doesn't have to care what she does to other people." (Happened first session of the campaign.) Or feeling resentful of the GM and the character he so favors, then feeling guilty because I worry that's bleeding over into my character's IC excuse to beat him up.
I play games for escapism. I argue enough with people every day; co-workers over their incompetence, friends over their horrific taste for belonging to 4-chan, significant other over who has to clean the ferret cage next, and so forth. I don't want to escape into more fighting. I want to do something big and constructive and /useful/, as a team, without having to worry about tons of personality conflict to get in the way of achieving some neat goal. But instead all the games I'm in get stuck in a mire of argument and frustration. I play tabletop games with RL folks to enjoy myself, but every session I'm in of almost every game seems to get further and further away from that. Arghhh.
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