Has anyone else run into the problem where your players embrace the “Monster” but lack the “hearts”?
4/6 of my players have characters who care about nothing. In two sessions, they’ve remorselessly killed half a dozen people and burned down two houses.
Yup, currently having that problem right now.
My players made up truly monstrous characters that are evil and totally okay with that, completely missing the drama of struggling with their identity. I think if I run it again, I will add questions during character creation about what each character cares about and loves to ground them better as people with a full spectrum of emotions, rather than psychopaths bent on world destruction.
I find that certain playbooks are attractive to players like that. The ghoul is a playbook that I’ve decided to cut from con one shots.
Those sorts of questions are absolutely mandatory for any roleplaying game, but especially M<3s. Ground them in other human beings by asking them evocative emotional questions, like who is always on hand with a great prank, who is nice enough to let them copy their homework, who did they trust enough to let touch their junk behind the sports shed, and so on. Emotionally preload those questions with sympathetic teenage situations. Who's the kid with the really awesome Panic! At the Disco tumblr fan blog you follow? Who's always making those killer skate videos you want to be in? Who stood up for you when you were being bullied? Lead them into emotional high school entanglements
The ghoul in my game decided she was thousands of years old, staying with a man she called her “uncle” but really he was just a lecherous dude she was screwing. Not a lot of room to turn that and show that humans can be monstrous, because she already made him a disgusting pedophile from the start. I tried to show that he wasn’t in love with her, but abusive, and she relished and encouraged it. When I had him arrested because they found his video tapes of them together, she celebrated and went out of her way to make things worse, rather than feeling any guilt for her part in his self-destruction. When one of her classmates was driven to suicide because of the way the players messed with him, and killed himself using live video on social media, she wanted to race to where he was… not to stop him, but to watch, or maybe help him along. The fact that she was under investigation for distributing drugs at a school party bored her. The fact that she lost her foster home and was about to become infamous for what she did with the guy whose house she had been staying at bored her. The fact that the other PCs were burning down houses in their small town and murdering people left and right bored her. I finally had to admit that if all that bored her, I don’t know how to make her life not boring as a GM is supposed to.
They’re all pretty much new to PbtA. And really, so am I.
One thing I noticed is that they looked at the available moves and let their desire to trigger moves determine their course of actions. Instead of playing out the opening scene naturally, they instantly wanted to give Turn Someone On a try, i assume just to see how it worked. I did my best to push back and ask, “You say you’re trying to Turn Him On.. but what are you actually doing that you think should be triggering that move?” to emphasize the “to do it, do it.”
Monsterhearts does not sound like the right game for that person or the group. You have to want to play a game about teenagers, about teenage drama. Sure things, can GET crazy, but that should not be the starting point, that is the contrast to show the humanity that was lost and to try and get back to that place again.
John, my thought initially was to go to consequences of actions as well, but it didn’t feel right. It seemed an awful lot like a carrot and stick method. These are players who obviously aren’t concerned with a big baddy consequence coming their way, they probably even want it. To them, the biker the splash the more impact they’ve had on the plot. To them, chaos bring the carrot.
I think instead the trick might be to retrain them on what the carrot looks like. If the goal is control of plot then give them more of the backdrop to paint. Ask them questions that set the scene “ok, you make it home in one piece, who surprises you in your catacomb?” Give them control over major plot points too “ok razor, your peeling off the pushers skin, torturing him into telling who’s been selling vampire blood on the streets. Alison, who’s name does the pusher scream.” If you give players more input into the npc’s then they’ll care more about who lives and who dies.
Wow. Sounds like murder hobos in spades.
That’s why I left D&D. Not so much the game, but the players. Hopefully yours will come around.
This seems like a miscommunication between the players, including you the MC Grey Kitten. I say sit everyone down and talk out what type of game you want to play. Everyone needs to be on the same page about what they want from the game.
I’ve played in and run games of Monsterhearts that turned into bloodbaths with PCs killing people left, right, and center and causing all sorts of trouble. Those games can be fun, though I don’t really care for them, and they tend to end very quickly. Either everyone dies or the cops get involved, forcing PCs to run away or get locked up.
After a few experiences like that, I now start my games by laying out some expectations. I make sure everyone knows that the cops will get involved if things get too violent. I remind players that the game is meant to emulate a teen drama, and that usually means small, petty retaliations rather than huge body counts.
Ultimately, don’t be afraid to retcon, start over, or even scrap the game if people want different things from it Grey Kitten.
Christo Meid, MH isn’t supposed to be about murder hobos. It’s actually about different aspects of being a teenager. The ghoul is about dancing in the boundaries between enjoyment, need, and adiction. The queen is about the isolation of extreme popularity. The vampire is about being porpusely emotionally distant. The werewolf is about emotional swings. When players forget that they are supposed to be teenagers, things get wonky (I always describe the game as ‘you play monsters because you’re teenagers. You just also happen to be monsters).
David Rothfeder Oh, I know that. As Yoshi Creelman can attest, I’ve played and loved MH, and in our OneShot, I don’t think we killed a soul. Lots of intense passionate drama, and it rocked. I just tend to shy away from the murder hobo players, who also seem to obsess over chainmail bikinis. I’ll take a good angsty, sexy game of MH over that any day.
OK. A whole bunch of new comments while I typed mine up. Personally, I think any skin can be a problem depending on how the player plays it, not just the Ghoul (but then again the Ghoul is my favorite skin).
I’m very hesitant to say you’re playing the wrong game Grey Kitten because there multiple ways to have fun, but that might be the case here. Your players need to have characters with hopes, aspirations, goals, and things they care about. Otherwise they’re just teenaged monster murder-hobos.
That Ghoul character you described sounds awesome to me. But if they don’t care about anything, which seems to be the case, then yeah. You have a problem. If three of your other six players have similar characters, you have a big problem.
Don’t try to solve this in game. It won’t work. The players have characters who don’t care about the fictional consequences, so any kind of in game roadblocks you set up are just going to get ignored. You need to talk to your players. All of them. Including the two playing non murder-hobo characters. You need to check if everyone is having fun. You’re obviously not, so bring that up. Explain that this isn’t how you intended the game to go, and that perhaps a different game would be a better fit.
Lastly, I feel it’s fine for players to make decisions based on mechanics. Saying “I’m going to turn him on because my Hot is highlighted and I want that XP” is totally valid. However, the players do need to narrate what the action looks like fictionally to make it happen.
I agree that it is not only the ghoul playbook that can cause problems and that the ghoul is totally awesome, I’ve just noticed when a player who wants to play a murder ball sees the ghoul, they’re eyes light up. It’s just easier to remove the temptation and let them be a creepy ghost.
Oh, I already pulled the plug and told them all that where we had gotten to is not the game I expected to be playing and that I felt I had missed the mark on setting the appropriate tone. That I need some time to reflect on how to do the game justice before (if) we try again.
I thought about trying to plow forward and see how all the fallout plays out, but it just didn’t seem fixable with the characters as they are. And as they are, the “be a fan of the PCs” is a real struggle. It’s possible I could bring the same people together again and make new characters and get a completely different experience now that they’ve gotten some murder-hobo action out of their system, if we discuss what we’re all looking for in the game and agree on a different focus.
It just surprised me that the discussions we did have before playing, the pitch for the game I gave, the opening introduction I presented, etc. failed to align with what we ended up playing so drastically. I’ll take some of the blame for that for failing to hook them with NPCs to like in our opening session, and perhaps coming on too strong with petty high-school nastiness. Next time I will balance with more positive interactions.
Too bad, John Henry Are you all in the Gauntlet community? We play a lot of PbtA faces, and murder hobos are the exception. Try it: it might give you a break from your regular game and players, help you keep from getting disilusioned.
Every player is not the intended audience for every game.
John, how do they handle other ptba games?
We play online via the Gauntlet Community. The official games fill up quickly, but we also do pop-ups.
Oh, there are two or three people in the Bay Area, actually.
John Henry You could always do online games (Gauntlet Hangouts), that’s how I game with them… there are a couple of us in the Bay Area (I’m one of them)
There is a second community, linked from the first, called Gauntlet Hangouts. There is also a calendar here: http://www.gauntlet-rpg.com/gauntlet-hangouts.html
Eh. I realized that my previous comment could come off as flippant and unhelpful. So I’ll elaborate. I’ve had several players tell me Monsterhearts simply isn’t their type of game. That’s totally fine.
Some people don’t realize that until after they’ve started playing. Others don’t even really realize it, but unintentionally cause problems, much like in the OP’s post.
Some people want to be bad ass monster hunters fighting werewolves with chainsaws and what not. Those people aren’t going to enjoy playing a teenaged werewolf fighting their feelings.
Not every game is intended for everyone, and not everyone likes every game. It’s fine to find a game that everyone does enjoy.
My Masks campaign just fell through for similar reasons. One of my players wasn’t buying in and kept proposing disruptive stuff that didn’t fit the fiction. I kept allowing it because I thought she was going somewhere with it, but when it became clear she didn’t know, I had to talk to her directly.
It turned out that she’d been proposing ideas expecting me to deny or redirect them, and when I allowed them, it alienated her even further from the fiction. That threw me – I’m not a super-experienced GM, and I’ve never had a player who throws out ideas expecting them to be shot down before. She also yearned for the explicit reward structure of trad RPGs, and was annoyed that it didn’t feel as though her character was progressing. Finally, it turned out that she hated teen drama, which I took as a sign that we were playing the wrong game. I would have just let her leave the game and continued playing with the three remaining players, but the campaign had been off the rails for a couple of sessions by that point, and getting it back on track would have been too much work, so I made the executive decision to drop that game and move to something that was a better fit for the group. We’re now set to play a Stars Without Number campaign.
I mention all this merely to point out that I agree with Chris – you should talk to your players and make sure you’re all playing the right game. If it turns out you aren’t, I’d recommend ending the campaign and playing something else. If you’ve played enough sessions to sunset the campaign reasonably gracefully, maybe you should ask your players if they’d like to do a season finale before you move on to something else? I dunno.
John, I’d actually go the other way with them and really showcase how ptba can be different. I’d try The Warren (a game I really want to try). It is really difficult to go murder spree when you are playing an anatomically correct bunny.
“It’s difficult to go murder spree when you are playing an anatomically correct bunny”. I take it you’ve never read/seen Watership Down David Rothfeder. That shit is downright bloody.
The group seems to be stuck in old habits that are encouraged by some of the more popular systems. Those systems have more brakes to stop these things from getting out of control, so much so that players need these behaviors to wrestle the narrative control back. I stark break from what they are accustomed to in a why that prevents them from using these antics might give you a chance of showcasing how these games can be different.
The warren is not a “soft” game. It’s hard AF… or at least it can be… and having players pre-disposed to that type of behavior, could look at it as a challenge to make it like that… and they can do it. The Warren will totally let you do that.
That may be the case David Rothfeder. But if the players enjoy the way they’re currently playing? They’re not going to care about how other systems can be different. Talk to the players and see what kind of game they’re interested in.
I started reading it but I got bogged down by the writing, (I liked the plot and characters though). I know it’s get bloody, I’m past Holly’s story of what happened to the original warren. The thing is a rabbit fight is vicious, but they have no means of flat out killing everything they come across. It makes a rabbit fight stand out as brutally gory.
I find that words alone don’t break habits. People tend to need help and coping mechanisms for change. A break away from the comfort zone is a way to get them to clear their heads without easily falling back to it.
I agree that words alone don’t break habits. All I’m saying is that the players might want to play a game where they murder everything they come across. While playing as an anatomically correct rabbit will prevent that, I doubt the players will have fun. Meaning the game will fall apart and the might be even less inclined to try new systems.
So, to sum up the advice here on how to do a better job at hitting the right tone:
* Discuss beforehand what we’re playing and make sure everyone understands and agrees on what type of game we’re all looking for. This is the most obvious and probably most critical thing, in my opinion
* Stop and discuss OOC when things go way off the rails (or better yet, before they do when they start heading in that direction!) an figure out how to get back on track, or decide to play something else
* Make sure to ask questions during the character creation session to ensure that the PCs share what their characters care about. This way they actually care about things and are less likely to go full murder-hobo
* Give PCs more control of the narrative by asking questions that let them answer what consequences they face when they wreck everything in sight
* If the players simply aren’t interested in the type of game it’s intended to be, either play something else or get different players
Did I miss anything? Any more advice for how to make the game go better, or to fix issues like mine when they come up not covered here?
Grey Kitten Great summary!
I think this is a clear case of lack of what Ron Edwards calls the Social Contract among players. You seem to have provided enough info to your players about what the game was about and what was to be achieved, and some people agreed at the time BUT in practice are playing against that view for whatever reason. The problem doesn’t seem to be with you, but with them.
This kind of situation arrises very commonly when someone, say, is bringing a Gamist agenda to the game while others are going for a Narrativist agenda. The result is a disfunctional group/game. If the group as a whole fails to be on the same wavelength, then either the problem can be solved by discussing it or quite simply you’ll have to play something else (or find other players).
The main point to remember here is that playing a game is not about making the players happy or about making the GM happy, but about EVERYONE playing with the same agenda in mind. If that’s not the case, then there’s nothing to be done.