I kinda wanna get this book for a future campaign.
If you are DMing and you have an action your players are “supposed” to take, you have made a grievous error.
Been there. Players are so insane with the curveballs they throw. It’s why I don’t invest heavily into reading/planning on what’s specifically in the adventure packs anymore. I just write down a list of the most important rules for the campaign/universe and vibe the rest.
My players are the opposite. They seem to probe for the “right” railroad choice and I wish they’d throw me a curveball every so often! I’ll improvise if they let me!
I see some DMs with their 400 pages of notes going into session 0, and I’m just like “oh honey.” For me, it’s primarily a cooperative storytelling game, and you’re not being cooperative if you decide the story you want told up front.
If the action one player takes prevents the rest of the party from contributing, I can see why the GM would be annoyed.
On the one hand, totally fair. on the other hand, I’m not sure how familiar the DM was with law, or how to turn that into an exciting encounter for the other players.
At the end of a day, a DM’s creativity is allowed to have a limit, they’re human. Even if the obviously correct answer is an Ace Attorney-esque court battle with the vampires where every player can live out the fantasy of shouting “OBJECTION!!!”
Absolutely DMs have limits — I’m a DM and I am acutely aware of my limits. If you can’t make filing the paperwork exciting, maybe the party gets jumped on the way to filing, or the law clerk you have to file with is a vampire, or the inspectors keep getting vampire-ified and the party has to go investigate. But you can be guaranteed that any time you make a plan contingent on the party doing what they’re supposed to, they won’t actually do that thing.
Depending on the length of rules around combat, having mandatory ones seems reasonable.
Non-combat sessions can be great if everyone is on board. My fondest tabletop memory is a bottle episode where half the players didn’t show, so the two players left pretended to be security consultants and scammed the nobleman we’d just robbed the previous session.
Easy fix make the zoning committee super corrupt and the vampires willing to bribe more than you can.
Or have the city’s enforcers come after them for nearly revealing the supernatural. Rule one of most urban fantasy settings is “don’t break the Masquerade”.
Id say it isn’t over in this case. vampires have a charm ability, so I think it’d be fun to give the players a chance to play through the inspector went to check it out, let them know that they should be listening in so that the vamps don’t just charm the guy into a passing inspection. if they don’t play out that part, the inspector was charmed and passes them
In anarchy online there was a character class of bureaucrat that would wear suits, summon bots to fight for them, slow/snare with red tape nanos, and motivational/demotivating speech nanos for buffs and debuffs
Oh man, there’s a game I haven’t thought about in a long time. I really enjoyed my Fixer, spent weeks grinding for a Grid Armor Mk4 disk, and then the entire thing became useless in the expansion packs.
I thought a bunch of classes were really creative, fixer and metaphysician were my favorites. I have some nostalgia for the game leveling in the sewers, group pvp, etc but it had some downsides too. It was the first game I saw a video ad play in there was a display above the shop kiosk playing military recruit ads 🤮
Yeah, I remember when they went free to play (without expansions) and added in the billboards. I think one of the first advertisements was Fanta?
I also always thought the implant system was very interesting, but it suffered from there being one or two mathematically best setups and everything else was just fluff. Still, it was fun to run around half naked and dual wielding heart print pillows asking for buffs to get stats high enough for a new gear/implant upgrade.
The Trader being able to step their way up through stat drains was kind of the epitome of this - for those unaware, the game had a half million stats that controlled individual aspects of your character, including which gear you could equip and spells you could cast. The Trader class had two different ‘lines’ of stat stealing spells, drains and divests, and they stacked… so the loop was to hit with the highest drain you could cast unaided, then a higher level of divest, then a higher level of drain, and so on until you couldn’t hold any more buffs.
My personal second favorite class, though, was Agent. The combination of stealth + multi-critting aimed shot + being able to use other classes’ spells was a lot of fun, albeit a lot to juggle.
I feel like there’s an easy fix here, where the bureaucracy of a fantasy city could be either so slow or just non existent that this wouldn’t matter.
“What is the purpose for the inspection? Yes, you’re free to go inspect it if you have some business purpose… What do you mean, ‘city inspectors’? What’s that? Commercial zoning? What? Build whatever you want there. No no it’s perfectly fine. If the last person contaminated the area… Well then build somewhere else or clean it up? That’s not our responsibility. If you don’t like the area, just don’t open a business there. No, the drinking water is not contaminated, I’m telling you I just drank from the well this morning and it was perfectly clear and clean water. If it made you sick, well, that tends to happen now and then everywhere, doesn’t it? We have no laws about water never making you sick. That’s ridiculous.”
Or go the Ankh-Morpork way and make all bureaucracy completely nuts.
Daredevil meets What We Do in the Shadows
The city hall episode is one of my favorites.
