Trans-Financial-Man
Arcane
- Joined
- Feb 20, 2018
- Messages
- 1,006
It works almost exactly the same way in the trad games I run/play. Not every failure ends in death, but that's also probably due in part to BRP's tiered levels of success and failure (Crit, Special, Normal, Failure, Fumble) and opposed rolls, so it's pretty easy to interpret those into outcomes that are more nuanced than "You win!" or "Rocks fall. Everyone dies." I guess I'm fortunate, the guys I play with are all mature dudes that seem to get the idea that I'm not for them or against them; when their characters meet an untimely death, it's because they got careless or overextended themselves and the hazards they come up against aren't typically of the "gotcha" variety.Best way to be a storygame GM. Never say no to your players. But make sure you always enact the consequences of their actions. If they want to charge Cthulu with a bowie knife and OPREHSHAN! you say "okay". It'll have predicatable consequences. Be cruely and utterly fair and you'll start seeing the Mercer Effect less and less. You can rear your RPG group very well this way. And if they keep making dumb de-railing choices you keep just piling on the consequences until they leave. It turns out that if you run into the throne room and try to assassinate a beloved king that his guards and the local pesantry might not be happy. If you're so exceptional that you survive that, well trying to break out of prison and deal with the political fallout of assasinating a monarch is a great story hook. Provided you can get out before the rioters get to you. And so on and so on until the asshole leaves or learns to respect the game as is. Not whatever SJW fantasy is being fed to them.
As for whatever the "Mercer Effect" is I'm not familiar with the term; I'm guessing it has something to do with Matt Mercer's game on Critical Roll (which I've maybe watched 5 minutes of before I turned it off out of utter boredom). Whatever "danger hair" zeitgeist seems to be sweeping through the PnP community doesn't really affect me because I'm pretty selective about who I will game with.
The Mercer Effect is the perception that Critical Roll gives to people unfamiliar with DnD. A perception of overblown, Mary Sue characters, death being trivial, the rules being loose and secondary to the story, and finally the GM creating a story based on a script with other actors who are told beforehand what they will do in the session. These people then try to do this in real DnD and get pissed off when autistic GMs like me try to set them straight.