Weekly Update - 150 (Patreon)

150? Weh!

Comic this week? Yes! We're currently being buried under >2 feet of snow, with possibly more coming, so I might as well draw.

Drawing: Page 164 and something special and secret thing shh!

Playing: WoW, Baulder's Gate 3 (All this talk about WotC recently has given me an intense craving for D&D, while I begin looking for alternative systems to D&D) >.>

Reading: Mistborn? Is it called Mistborn? Is it called The Final Empire? I'm just confused now. Either way it's by Brandon Sanderson and it's really good.

Ramble:

I've recently created a character to play in a new table top campaign. It's, once again, a bat, because bats are adorable and I love their theme.

The GM this time, however, a different person from the last GM that allowed me to be a bat, and unlike that other GM, they seem to be utterly convinced that flying is OP. And I'm not sure how to show them that it really isn't. They keep telling me how OP it is, but when I ask for specific examples, they can't really give me any.

I think this apprehension might come from an old school way of thinking about tabletop gaming in general. In early versions of D&D and possibly in other systems, I would wager that flying was super OP. Game breakingly so, I'm sure.  Then again, the way we play Tabletop games today is very different from back in those days. All I can find that serve as examples of that are stories like, "the party's winged kobold just flew up to the very top of the wizard's tower and then used his rod of teleportation to bring the rest of the party to him, skipping the planned 8 levels worth of content." And obviously without knowing all the details it's hard to be super critical of the players or their GM, but based on my limited knowledge of this campaign that was allegedly ruined by a single flying player, I have questions. Like, for one... why in the world did the GM allow any of that to occur? Obviously a GM can't be expected to be prepared and account for every possible outcome, but it's a wizard's tower. It could have had wards, flying guardians, anti-magic fields to disable the rod of teleportation. There were plenty of options to stop a single player from flying up the side of a massive magical fortress for half an hour. And why, WHY, then give them XP for encounters they didn't even come close to starting? If the players decide to skip all the encounters that I painstakingly planned, guess what? They can choose Door #1, which leads them to Another Tower where they have to go through all the encounters I planned, or Door #2, face the next part of the dungeon that's packed with Level 9 enemies while they're still level 1. One might argue that I'm being unfair to the players, but I have to counter that by asking this: are my players here to actually play the game or not? It's unfair to ME for them to skip all the content I spent hours designing and then ask for XP and expect me to have more content prepared for them.

That all said, I feel like tabletop gaming has evolved away from that sort of old school adversarial type gaming, and more people are realizing it is a collaborative, cooperative experience between the players and the GM, who are working together to create the best possible story. It feels super shitty to me, when I want to embrace the fantasy of flight with my flying character, and I get told over and over again what the GM plans to do to make sure I can't fly anywhere or do anything while I'm flying.  I want us to work together to create a fun experience, I'm not trying to exploit your game or avoid all your encounters by having wings. I WANT to go through your encounters, and play the game you've planned for us to play. I recognize that a big part of the responsibility lies with me, the player, to not try and break the system or the story just because I can fly. I don't even WANT to exploit the game. I want to play it the way it's meant to be played.

I'm sort of rantventambling at this point, and I think I've talked about this before. I ended up writing a 14-page long document recently on how to deal with flying players in a Tabletop game, just because everywhere I look I find videos about dealing with flying players but they are all framed in such a way that you, the GM, made a mistake allowing a player to fly and now you must remedy this problem you created for yourself. It doesn't have to be like that. Allowing flying can be fun for both the players AND the GM, it just requires a shift in perspective on the matter, I feel. Remember always that the GM has total control over where I can go and what I might find there, what I can see, what things might catch my attention. Not to mention the fact that I'm invisibly tethered to the party at all times because going off on my own can always result in plenty of danger I'm most likely unprepared to handle.  These can be used to ADVANCE the story, not hinder it.

This could be the topic of several upcoming rambles, because I still have a lot more to say about it, so consider yourself warned. But what do you think? IS flying in a tabletop game OP? Do you allow players to fly in your campaigns? Are there any times you had a flying player ruin everything for you? Are there any times you thought flying was super cool and made for an awesome campaign? Tell me about it!