ASL

Urgh... I got A's on the first three classes... why is SHS 202 so hard?

DnD rant

Last time I complained/worried about what Tim thinks about me.  I may have mentioned DnD.

Well here's a DnD focused rant on the differences between Tim and I.

In DnD the difference in our vision is greatest, and thus the most conflicts emerge.

I want to play slow and savor the role-playing, the talking, the planning.  He wants to go in and crush the enemy with overwhelming strength, and resolve it through the fastest means possible.  I originally thought this was him wanting to go to bed, but he seems to play this way regardlessly.

In combat, I would like to accept surrender, capture not kill, and use diplomacy, coalition-building, and conflict-resolution as the primary tools.  For both myself and 2/3 characters, once combat is joined you have already lost.  Conflict and violence is the last resort.  For Tim and his characters, it seems to be the solve-all tool.  Again, I thought this was his characters at first--a vindictive holy knight and a angry barbarian--but I'm starting to think that the characters thoughts are excuses for this sort of action - I have seen him act against his character's personality, using an excuse, several times.  We were fighting pirates, and he(barbarian) was raging at the pirates, and slaughtering them.  Their ship started ship sinking, and he quickly found an excuse to take the chest full of gold, rather than finish off the pirates.  It could be that his character is ill-defined enough that I have not noticed this trait?

Metagame-wise, I like to play by the rules, and I will point things out that are not apparent.  I like to give suggestions to anyone interested, which largely means the DM, Zeno.  The more knowledge the DM has, the more tools he has at his disposal, the better he can DM.  Tim hates this, says that helping the DM is bad DnD.  For me, my character is loyal to the party, but what I the person does is not under the same restrictions.  If Zeno would like my help, then I will give it to him.  I will suggest encounter situations, I will remind him of his options.  I think that Tim's argument that this makes the game harder is foolish - the DM can throw whatever he wants at us, with whatever power level he choses the encounter to be.  Giving the DM more tools means that he can provide a more exact encounter to the level that he wishes, as high or as low as that might be.  Am I missing something in Tim's argument?

My knowledge and my character's knowledge are different.  For example, last encounter we were fighting against a dragonborn warlock.  I know the warlock class, having read it, and so I had a pretty decent idea of what he might throw at us.  Does my character?  Hell no.  I don't think he's ever run into a warlock before.  So he is surprised when he can use his combat superiorty and combat challenge to keep the Warlock from running away.  Tim's old paladin was a dragonborn, so he had read the racial paragon class for dragonborn.  He recognised it from the wings, etc.  However, his character, a minotaur barbarian probably has not - a paragon would be extremely rare, being more powerful than even our set of nearly-paragon level characters.  And we are just about the only in the land.  His reasoning is that his character is the same drifting soul as his previous one, and thus can recognise it just the same.  This works reasonably well, if it weren't for the fact that his previous character probably never saw a dragonborn racial paragon, and was a good 6 or so levels away from ever being a paragon himself.  A better excuse, in my mind, is that the Motherland is a land of predominantly humans and dragonborn, and the history of that land probably includes some rather epic dragonborne heroes.  But the question should be whether the character knows it, not how does the character know what he knows.  (Player knowledge would be extreme for a rule-savy, DM chatting guy like me.)

I want my characters to be interesting people.  I give them detailed backgrounds that can be used liberally, I give them room for character growth (Mae finding his place in the world, and strenght to act on the goodness of his heart; Shensu learning that revenge against the parties that have wronged her and her people is not as important as leading her people to freedom; Selnar learning more about the world than his slave upbringing and his effect on it; etc.)  I want my characters to be learning and growing every encounter.  But the way this game has been working, very little has been happening.  Relationships with the other character don't grow much, and the only character growth since he took the place of his sister was last session.  Some guards died because the party asked them to guard against a high-level bounty-hunter.  What effect will that have on him?  He's not as introspective as Mae, so probably a minor effect.   ...but Tim?  He seems to think that complicatedness, people, and the like are extraneous and slow the game down.  To him, the guards outside were just tools he could use because Wilhelm's Templar (us) are heroes to the people, not people whom we abused the trust and reverence of to fight against an opponent they had no chance against.  If this happens again Selnar will ask for other people not to get involved, even ask them to stay away so that they don't get caught in the crossfire.  But I think that the character growth won't have an effect because Tim is the defacto leader, and he will want to use guards for the group's advantage.  Ruins the relevance of my character's growth and pushes things into the mold of a game, not an alternate world.

Part of this is that my player motivations are different than his.  As described by the Dungeon Master Guide (Pg. 8), my motivation falls between storyteller and thinker.  Tim, on the other hand, is mostly slayer, with a hint of power-gamer (as seen in his interest in picking up wealth to become more powerful, which is in addition to the optimization of bashing in heads that slayers and powergamers share).  Scott and Bryan are power-gamery actors, Alex is a watcher, and our (generally absent) leader Tucker is an actor, which I am very thankful for... while he's there.  I'm not much of an explorer, but the true lack of explorers in our group makes me hunger for rich setting every now and then.  In theory, it should be up to the DM to make the adventure fun for all parties, but Tim and Bryan do a pretty strong case for they way DnD should be played - going out, slaying monsters, getting treasure, etc.  The game is created that way on the DM end of things - Zeno is used to catering to these tastes.  However, this creates an over-balance where the game is played the way that Tim and Bryan prefer it, and the other options aren't apparent.  Winning in combat is fun, sure, but that's all we enjoy.  We don't explore the spectacles, cultural or physical of the land our characters live in.  NPCs are dry and functional, only existing when the players look for them.  The main plot doesn't have much effect on game-play, and encounter-based plots basically don't exist - we have objectives, not plot.  The other players don't get much of a taste of these things, and I don't know how to change it.  If I did change it, it would be Tim's loss, and I don't know how to convince him otherwise.  If I didn't talk to him, and talked with Zeno, he would deride the changes as unfun - this last encounter had a bounty hunter trying to capture us, one at a time, which, while combat, was a lot less mindlessly and continually violent as the previous three - fighting a dragon, fighting a cypt of skeletons, and fighting a vampire lord in his lair.  Instead he attacked us while we were unrested from the vampire lord, escaped when we threatened to overpower him, attacked us while we were staying in a more-defendable inn, but got curb-stomped when we jumped from the inn to the roof he was shooting acid at us from.  I enjoyed it more, though it wasn't as detailed as it could be, but Tim specifically complained about the style after the session ended...

Tim accuses me of trying to be the DM at times, with suggesting and informing Zeno.  This is more true outside of the session than what he sees inside - I have shot a dozen senarios past Zeno to give him ideas, we talk about possiblities, etc.  Am I trying to be the DM?  Zeno notes that I'm better at strategy and a few other things, but the way I see it... ...I would be a very good DM for myself.  I could provide rich setting, provide personable characters that Selnar could simply enjoy a chat with, provide tactically varient encounters, and a ongoing plot that drives the action.  All of that I could probably do better than Zeno.  But would that be what this group, sans me, would prefer?  If I were the DM, who would I be catering to?  Besides, I can never be a DM if Tim does not respect me in the position, and I don't have the time for the numbers.

How do I resolve this?  How do I play the same game as Tim, yet have it satify us both?  Perhaps Tim has a Story-teller side thus unrevealed?  I dunno.  I hope that I'm seeing things all wrong, and there isn't as much of a difference as I currently percieve.

Respect.

I don't feel that Tim respects me.

Am I being paranoid?  Am I reading him wrong?

We clash, with differing opinions.  I am okay with that.  But he doesn't seem to care much about my opinion, and doesn't seem interested in even searching for a compromise in action.  We have different views, and, as I see it, he considers that his view is right, and my view is wrong.

Maybe this is me seeing it all wrong.

Maybe it's a problem with me - I know that I get contray and absolute when someone tries to tell I am meritlessly wrong.  Perhaps I am not seeking compromise to as full and extent as I could.

Or maybe it's a question of the situation - he makes decisions unquestioningly, and acts on them, as I see it.  I think of possible courses of action, try to gather information, build a concensus on a good action, and then implement it.  Not a matter of respect, just the fact that his style acts before mine is ready at all, and is in the middle of action by the time I say anything.

But the same question applies as always:  What do I do?

What to do, what to do...