Nowaru

Now that I've slept and calmed down, I understand what my problem was: I shouldn't have engaged in a dialogue. At all. No matter how stupid, idiotic, or simply absurd Kira's death was, I should have just ignored all these questions instead of trying to have a conversation. *Trying to explain myself*. There are two situations: Kira's death and Hanelion's death, and I'm curious if both happened under not the "best" (lol) circumstances, but the difference between them is that one of them involved someone constantly messing with my head, while the other didn't. In short: A very long gameplay sequence unfolds, providing the player with many hints that they might not want to be here and many opportunities to get the hell out. Scene zero: The GM clarifies whether the player's character followed all instructions and identified themselves; the player answers in the affirmative. Scene one: The priest returns with a guard. The player says, "I didn't give my name." And here, the GM has to EXPLAIN. Scene three: Kira tries to take money from the Temple and teleport, and the guard shoots him. Further arguments: P: I didn't know this would be considered an action. It's even faster than drawing a weapon! GM: But that's how the game mechanics work. P: I even wrote it in gray because I didn't even consider it an action. GM: Oh, but you were also bound (and I actually forgot to mention this initially because it slipped my mind). Like, how are you going to teleport? P: [Turns out the GM understands the magic system worse than I do] GM: This rollback doesn't make sense; I don't see any way Kira could have avoided the guard after that. P: Well, never mind, that would have been my mistake, but this is just stupid! [Insists on replaying the scene with the money and teleportation, of course, continuing to ignore the thread issue] And all this went on for two damn hours. Some pointless conversation where the GM is justifying himself to the player after he himself triggered a situation that doomed Kira to arrest/death upon arrest. In the game, there are roughly three main ways to die: get into a hopeless situation like this, drop HP below a permissible level, and fail to roll the necessary numbers outside of combat. For example, Nuaesh had four chances to die yesterday. That is, there were four situations in which he would have definitely died—when he tried to escape from the Rat's Lair (he was fast enough to escape without being pursued; but I still made a roll of his dodge against the informant's accuracy, and if Nuaesh had failed it, he would have been shot). Then, returning, he failed a stealth check after the "alert level" was raised, and he was targeted by crossbowmen—he dodged nine out of ten shots and thus avoided death again. Next, he twice got through the hospital guards, even though his debuffed stealth stat was 30, while the guards' awareness stat was as high as 50. I think Nuaesh was very lucky that day, but I have absolutely no complaints about this situation, and it completely satisfies me because everything happened within the mechanics I designed. But what happens with Kira? He put himself in this situation (like the first character of Ment of Ertheia), and I, like a complete idiot, left an opening for Aretz to maneuver—I wrote that the guard just approached, instead of directly describing the fact of capture or execution on the spot. This is my damn mistake as a GM. That's it. That's what allowed Aretz to exploit my oversight and give me a headache for those two hours. I hate arguing with people, proving things, etc.; I've had enough of that outside the digital world. But as a GM, I felt obligated to answer players' questions and complaints—as it turns out, in vain. I'm not trying to claim that my games are some kind of amazing thing, just a few facts: since I started running this expedition, I've spent all my time on it; the rest goes to sleep (ha), chores, and one or two hours playing Slay with Loken and Vistrit. That is, regardless of the quality, I put effort into it. I enjoy doing this, and I like entertaining other people—that's true. But if, instead of enjoyment, my work brings me some incredible irritation, I don't need that. That's all. You might think I'm just doing this to kill player characters and annoy them, lol. Now, about rollbacks. Some might think that "pff, let there be as many as you want!", but I disagree. First, I don't want corridors, and I have my own standards for running games, but I've mentioned this somewhere before. Another point is that I'm trying to minimize my own intervention in the gameplay. That is, yes, I create situations, manage NPC actions, and so on, but all this happens according to my vision of the world. Other things, such as calculating numbers, I take very seriously. If, in some alternative universe, I decided to rig the rolls for someone, that game would be like a "corrupted save" for me. A similar situation, although to a lesser extent, applies to calculating numbers: for example, the situation with Darius, when I accidentally posted a copy of an old post and closed the new one without sending it. Fortunately, no player characters died as a result of this, but in my opinion, even this was an intervention in the gameplay on my part. What can we say about rollbacks, which go against the common sense of the game world and "fairness" to other players. And so I try to keep all this in mind, spend a lot of time running the game, follow my own standards (because I'm not interested in other game formats), and, despite all my explanations (which I might not even have provided), I get a fun conversation for a couple of hours in which I somehow have to justify myself and go against the foundations that I laid in the game itself.