My GM is my dad and...

This reminds me of an AD&D game I played in <mumble, mumble> years ago. The DM was a friend of mine. He was very creative and made great adventures, but he had a couple of flaws. First, his attention span wasn’t so great and he ended up just running his campaigns once or twice before moving onto something totally different. Second (and relevant to the discussion), he didn’t like players improvising too much and messing up his carefully-planned story arcs. If what the players were doing differed from how he envisioned the adventure from going, he’d get visibly annoyed and adversarial.

Enter in my half-orc cleric/assassin, who I had disguised as a human cleric. In this particular adventure, we were in a dungeon trying to find an evil wizard of some sort. We were in the middle of fighting this guy’s minions, and I was innocently playing the healer, staying in the back doing triage to the wounded. But, of course, I couldn’t help but give into my evil nature, so I wrote some notes to the DM telling him how I was actually assassinating the wounded, not healing them. I even told him that I was plunging my dagger into their already-bleeding wounds to cover up what I was actually doing. This didn’t sit too well with him, but he told the rest of the group that fighter X had died from his wounds. Not wanting me to get away with it, he also told them after the battle that several of the dead had “funny wounds” and it looked like there were two wounds in one. Of course, nobody said they were examining the bodies, and they were all totally clueless as to who I was.

The fun thing (to me, not to him) was that they assumed that the evil wizard, who was still at large, had come in invisibly and killed the wounded. I was trying not to smile too much, but the DM was starting to turn various shades of red. He continued dropping hints, but everyone just assumed it was the evil wizard, and I got away with it.

After the adventure was over (it was a one-shot), I told everyone what I had done. They were totally shocked, but thought it was the greatest thing ever, even the ones whose characters I had assassinated. The DM, of course, didn’t share their enthusiasm, and stewed in his own juices for quite awhile.

The moral of the story, I guess, is to let the players do whatever the players want to do, and just run with it. If it messes up your plans, all the better, because both you and the players will be entering unknown territory with the story and have even more fun than you had planned. And for Pete’s sake, don’t get mad at your players for showing initiative! Creative thinking should be rewarded, not punished.

My GM is my dad and...

And he lets you on the internet? He's a gamer he should know how terrible the internets are!

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<Mind Wipe: IN PROGRESS........ COMPLETE>

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I love my parents!

I love my parents!