[UA] My players are too intelligent! (long, for a change)

[Ville Halonen]

Never thought I'd complain about the players being TOO intelligent (in comparison to the slaughterers I played with before), but as I've read through some archives that offered great plot hooks, I thought that my players would hardly never catch them with their own characters. They simply don't usually make characters that can be easily dragged into adventures by introducing an intriguing plot hook, and you can never expect what they'll do. 

An example follows, although I had nothing to do with it. It just involved two of my players in a Vampire game. IIRC, the first one (the one playing the entropomancer in my game) was a low-generation Sabbat packleader, and had played him quite a while. The other players were in his pack.

The player portraying a personamancer in my game was supposed to join up with them in the campaign, and he was an Anarch. The packleader gave orders to one of his pack to call the Anarch up to a meeting, so they could get together and start playing. So the Sabbat calls up the Anarch, and it went something like this (I'm gonna make myself ridiculous with the dialogue):

"Uhh, da boss wants ya to come up to this joint, he's arranged a meeting."
"Why should I come?"
"Well, just come on."
"Why?"
"Well, you're, uh, supposta. Come on now."
"Tell me a good reason."
"'coz he wantsta meetcha."
"Tell you what: we'll meet, but on my terms. I'll tell you where, and when. And tell him to come alone, unarmed."
"Umm, okay."

So they set up a meeting at a graveyard. Conventionally, the Anarch's player should've, of course, simply met up with the guy. But the player wanted to do as the CHARACTER would do. So he called up his friend and asked for a nice chunk of plastique, just in case.

And we see the graveyard, where the Anarch is hiding, and the Sabbat leader comes up in his nice convertible, alone. He's looking for the Anarch, who goes up to the car and sets the plastique. (Or was it the Anarch's car, already set up?)

The Sabbat returns to the car, and gets a warning from the GM that his supernatural senses say something's wrong. The player, not knowing what's wrong, plays it up, looking around him, whattafugg?

The Anarch pushes the button.

Kaboom.

The Sabbat is caught up in the explosion and the Anarch's never seen again. Things could've been different, had the minor Sabbat's player done the phone call less suspiciously. It stank like a trap to the Anarch character's nose, although the player knew what was up. So, end of campaign. Sayonara. 

So here I have players that don't want to do things because they're SUPPOSED to them as player characters, but they really do what their characters would do. It's quite a challenge for an unexperienced GM such as myself to do anything, but this time I was lucky to get them to make up a group, so that I didn't have to make up a VERY GOOD reason for them to join up. And they also know of the occult, and have an interest to that direction due to the failed notch in the Unnatural, so it's quite easy now.

In the (late?) ShadowRun campaign the player characters were:
-A human technician keeping a shop. Doing NOTHING suspicious. Having NO dubious goals or activities. Just waiting for the GM to do something and put something in his path. Although he did write up a nice little history for the fellow and it was never put to use.
-A wee-bit headcase human adept with a samurai sword and a shotgun, who was a little more active, but with little written history. 
-An orc petty thief, teaming up with the above two for no good reason, and the player even thought of the orcs as a comic relief race and rarely showed up at the sessions or stayed until the end.

Why did they hang around together? Beats me. Beat us. But they were done on the fly, and we were supposed to come up with a reason, but we never did. Maybe if we continue it, we'll think something up. Yeah.

It's cool that players make something else than gun nuts, that they make ordinary people, but the problem is (in a campaign) that an awful lot is left up to the GM, and as one, I don't like it, especially when it's really gotta be something that the CHARACTERS can take interest in.

Although with the above characters the madness meters would've come to good use, witnessing for example a ruthless torture scene in the middle of the technician's store.

Well, I'm thinking of buying Feng Shui, and there it should pose no problem to get players involved in various stuff. Not to speak of the Delta Green campaign I should be playing in once the GM could get his lazy ass moving (or the chance to purchase a supplement concerning some mysterious organization which I don't know anything of). 

(Do I see a game designer pattern forming here?)

And sometime in the future, maybe after the current one, I really intend to run a UA campaign which could be described as Reservoir Dogs meets Godfather meets Pulp Fiction meets the Exorcist and where all the players are beginning occult-oriented gangsters and have cool black suits and white shirts and black ties and I describe things from a trunk POV and have them saying "we should have fucking shotguns!"

-V
Living in his own world

P.S. Bought Feng Shui since writing up the above. Love it.


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