Hello, GamerNation!
It’s GM Rikoshi again, ready to tackle another query! This one is kind of a long one, but it’s an excellent question, and one whose answer, I hope, will provide some good insight and advice for other GMs and even players out there.
This one comes to us anonymously, and it involves the player in question having some woes surrounding character creation…
I played in a game awhile ago that had a frustrating experience. […] I had never played this system before. The GM explained the basics of character creation, we rolled up characters, and then played our first adventure. It was pretty fun, but it was one of those slowly advancing system. After about 3 sessions, we had enough XP for our first advancement. I went to pick a skill that I had been planning on getting (I had debated getting this one at creation). This new skill was essential for later skills, but wasn’t as fun on it’s own, so I opted for a different skill at creation in order to give my character something fun to do at the start.So I select the new skill, but am then told I can’t take that skill as it is only selectable at character creation. I was surprised and read the notes a bit more carefully. That’s when I found a symbol that, when referenced, indicated it was indeed character creation only. This new knowledge completely cut off my entire character progression plan as I wouldn’t be able to have this skill.I pointed out to the GM that I didn’t know that at creation and had never played this character. He decided that, because I had used the skill I had chosen a few times, it was too late to change. This really pissed me off and kind of ruined the game for me and made me want to skip the next session. That session ended up legitimately being the final session due to scheduling conflicts so we never had to deal with it again. But I still remember the annoyance.
Yikes! Well I, for one, do not blame you for being annoyed in a situation like this!
The backbone of the RPG hobby is rulebooks. It’s the format that the very framework of our games is built around. And because of that, many of us–GM and player alike–are sticklers for the rules. After all, without following the rules, isn’t it just pure anarchy? Are you even playing the game right at that point if the game only even exists as those rules?
Allow me to point out that the “R” in “RPG” does not stand for “Rules.” Allow me to also point out that the “G” stands for “Game.” And the entire point of a game is for it to be fun.
Yes, way back in the Before Time of our hobby (something I’ve written about in the past), RPGs often had an adversarial, GM-vs-Player structure to them–which makes sense, seeing as they were spawned from competitive wargames. Nowadays, however, the hobby has largely progressed past this binary, black-and-white setup. Far more often, an RPG campaign is about weaving a fun and exciting story about the world and the characters that inhabit it. Heck, most systems that I see nowadays make it pretty hard for a player character to even die–something the earliest RPGs would have had a hearty laugh at, I expect (if RPGs themselves were sentient or something, that is).
But back to the matter at hand: you’ve got a GM here who’s saying that, according to the rules, a) the skill the player wanted to take needed to have been taken at creation, and b) no, the player mayn’t go back and swap it out after the fact.
I don’t know the system in question, but I’m certain that a) is completely true according to the rules, and that b) is probably at least implied (by the preceding point if nothing else). This means that, yes, it’s definitely within the GM’s purview to rule as described above.
But oh, sweet lord, is that a really jerk move in my book.
Even if this weren’t the player’s first time playing the system, punishing someone who wants to better tweak their character concept after a few sessions after play has begun is lame. Heck, even a TV show pilot tends to have characters acting far differently than they wind up after the first few episodes, because the writers, actors, and directors are still all finding their footing, finding what does and doesn’t work–and the parallels between a TV show cast and a cadre of RPG characters are actually pretty strong in that regard.
Yes, in this case, the player and character had already used the skill chosen at creation. But so what? It’s been three sessions. Even without the “I made the character before I properly understood the rules” clause (which in my book is more than enough cause for lenience), how much does swapping out for a creation-only skill really break the verisimilitude of the game? Not much, if at all, I would wager.
Heck, if you must, declare that the new skill the character is taking is the one he was using already, and that the creation-only skill he’d be adding now has been in the character’s skill set all along–and it simply hasn’t come up yet (and maybe the “new” skill is one he’s recently been learning via the rolls he’s made in the handful of sessions so far). I don’t even think this is an issue that requires even that much narrative justification, but it’s there if you want it.
But most importantly, any and all meta-justification aside, my key thoughts on the matter are this: why insist on ruling out a player’s fun when there’s no harm to be done by allowing the switch? Seriously, what benefit is there to the GM making this call (other than the GM getting to be smug, presumably)? You wind up with a PC that’s less effective at what the player wants, a PC that doesn’t quite match the concept the player wanted all along, and a player who is now less invested in that PC because of those things. Hooray!
(Also, even if this were a GM-vs-Player style of game or campaign, I would put a big darn asterisk next to any W you got because you didn’t properly explain the rules you were playing by to your opponent.)
Remember, it’s a game. It’s a hobby. It’s you and your friends getting together for a few hours to have fun. Don’t rule against fun just because you feel obligated to. Not even “Well the book says…” is good enough justification for that when fun is the whole point.
Kevin Frane
Latest posts by Kevin Frane (see all)
- Tabletop Thursday – Fury of Dracula (Third Edition) - October 27, 2016
It’s [i]always[/i] a good idea to give your players a chance to go back and do character rebuilds after three or four sessions with new characters, and [i]especially[/i] when it’s your first time using the system or the GM! Even in systems I’m completely comfortable with, more than once I’ve built a character with certain expectations about the game that turn out to be at odds with how the GM actually intends to run it. (For example, building a sneaky infiltrator character in a game that turns out to be a combat-focused dungeon crawl, or contrariwise, a devoted monster hunter in a game that turns out to be focused on politics.)
Well, darn, those tags don’t work.
I should clarify that in the second case, the DM did tell us ahead of time that politics would be a big element of the game, and I took that into account; what he didn’t mention was that virtually every fight would be against human or near-human troops belonging to an opposing nation, and not against the beastly and monstrous enemies I had very openly specialized against.