PCs: If all else fails, kill 'em all.

Alright there are some things I need to get off my chest. 

If you’ve been running games for any appreciable length of time you’ve no doubt encountered a few game killing behaviors from players. 

Things that immediately come to mind:

CoC players who act like they’re in a D&D game and treat general citizens as they do in such settings. An example of this is an otherwise scholarly investigator who has never so much as fired a gun, threatening to torture a shopkeeper or a priest or any random citizen from a postman to a ship captain for information. 

If you’re running CoC for any group, even if they’re longtime players, you have to ready for this. It will happen- unless you’re really lucky. The last time it happened to me I was really taken aback and didn’t react quickly enough. The player was strangely hostile, too.  It ruined the game for me. What’s the solution to this? Have someone call the cops- or just have the shopkeeper’s spouse or a passing policeman shoot the character in question, let them get away with it and become, knowingly, or unknowingly, fugitives. The types of characters who inhabit the world of CoC aren’t really going to stand much chance against the overwhelming force the police can bring to bear. 

Short version: Kill them. 

CoC is probably my favorite game to run, but it's tricky to get everyone onboard the midnight meat train.

Lore hoarding: If you give a player information that they should share with the party and for some reason, just don’t. I’m not sure what to do with this one, honestly. Maybe tell the player they should share the information. 

Other than this, I have no fucking idea. 

Help me out here. 

Confusion as to the difference between good and evil. Killing prisoners, no matter how evil they may be, isn’t behavior good people engage in and it’s generally considered a crime, you know, like all murder. I mean you can kill a bear, but you probably shouldn’t wack all those bandits who just threw their weapons on the ground. 

It’s just rude. 

If you’re evil, whether you admit it or not, and it gets out, and it will, actual good characters are going to hunt you down. That’s okay, though, because if you survive the initial contact, they won’t kill you; they’ll see to it that you’re put on trial and then (deservedly) killed, but with due process. 

The House of Parliament: this refers to players who just hang out in dangerous places and spend a long time going back and forth trying to decide what to do next or chewing over completely unrelated things- like what they're going to do when they get back to town. This is hard on the GM and players who are on task. 

I have to give credit where credit is due here: Gary Gygax solved this problem half a century ago with wandering monsters. I'm not even sure I'd go so far as to roll for wandering monsters at this stage. Stop talking about your wedding china, girl, a dragon is on its way. 

Making characters completely unsuited to the game. If the GM tells you to make a character who can fight- don’t make an unarmed diplomat. This is especially true if the game is STAR WARS- which has ‘WARS’ in the title. It shouldn’t take three characters to subdue a stormtrooper. Superheroes who don’t or won’t fight ( I have seen this more times than you can believe) and glass cannons are two more. It’s really difficult to scale combat for a group in these situations. 

The turtle and the special snowflake. You all know what the turtle is, I am sure, but just in case: The turtle is when players get so worried about danger that they freeze and essentially take two hours of game time to open a door. This is related to the snowflake: Some players have a good laugh and make another guy when their character is killed. Other people get really fucking angry. When I was in ninth grade I had a guy punch me and throw me out of his house. Now I’m not expecting behavior that extreme these days, but I have a hard time running a game if I know that someone is going to lose their shit if things go sideways. 

These two problems have a very simple solution- Pre Gens. 

There was a time when I hated the very idea of pre gens, but I have done a 180 on them in the last few years. As a matter of fact, I don’t think I’m ever going to start a campaign any other way, ever again. I’ll let players make their own guy once I feel confident they get the vibe I’m going for (if your idea is to subvert that vibe- move on down the road, because I’m playing this game too and I work really fucking hard to make it happen, jerk). 

Pre gens give you the opportunity to make sure you have a relatively balanced party that fits the mood of the game you are running. You can also create personalities for each one. Players don’t get as attached to these guys, and, ime, tend to play their personalities a lot better and have a lot of fun. One of the absolute best games my group has ever played involved bank robbers and hostages in a getaway car (1970’s station wagon with a rumble seat). Everyone had their own conflicting motivations and the chaos that engendered was glorious. We used ICONS, which is far, far from my game of choice these days, but it did make it possible to have an action sequence that lasted for two full sessions without a moment of boredom. 

I have a more recent example, of a summer camp slasher game I ran not too long ago, which I’ll go into more detail about in another post, maybe the next one, but I have a few ideas so we’ll see what I get to first. 

Addendum: Page flippers and wafflers. Write down the pages of things you're going to need to know in combat and/or be ready to go when your turn comes around. Everyone else is waiting on you. EVERYONE.