T w e n t y S i d e d
And if that seems too harsh, the second best option is whatever sounds the funniest to you personally.
From The Archives:
The Best of 2017
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2017.
Wolfenstein II
This is a massive step down in story, gameplay, and art design when compared to the 2014 soft reboot. Yet critics rated this one much higher. What's going on here?
This Scene Breaks a Character
Small changes to the animations can have a huge impact on how the audience interprets a scene.
Zenimax vs. Facebook
This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between Zenimax publishing and Facebook.
Steam Summer Blues
This mess of dross, confusion, and terrible UI design is the storefront the big publishers couldn't beat? Amazing.
The related question here is how much you’re willing to allow/tolerate the players wrecking your planned story as a consequence of being allowed to take a clearly inappropriate action. Certain actions need to have consequences or you might as well not allow them at all.
ITOF* there’s a “perk” called Child Killer you can “earn” if you kill children in the game that makes pretty much everyone hostile to you and walls off a lot of quests (I can’t remember how many – it’s been awhile). The game lets you do this even though it’s obviously bad and unheroic, and you can even finish the game.
It’s impressive to me that they were willing to allow this (later Fallouts and most other games I can think of have children immune/immortal to avoid letting you choose to kill them). I recall this being very controvesial – I think some countries banned the game because of it.
*In The Original Fallout, if you’re new here.
A problem is that a lot of story wrecking has a very simple solution, quite possibly with no easy alternates: the infringing PCs get a hit put out on them. The results of which depend pretty much entirely on how willing/desiring you are to send and run the perfect party to destroy them, and what sort of consequences/rewards happen after that. If they’re willing to do horrible/plot disregarding things such that the only thing they care about is their characters’ lives, then wiping them out is essentially ending the game- so why not just end the game? If you decide that ending the game should be done specifically with a dramatic fight where the consequences of their actions show up and crush them, what happens if luck and/or your own op-fu are insufficient to the task?
Thus I find it much easier to simply stipulate no Evil characters, the players must make their characters have their own reasons for sticking together and following the plot, and indeed you showed up to play the game with this plot so you follow the plot. Not like a straightjacket, but if you don’t want to play the game in progress anymore it’s time to start a new game.
I see the comic as a fitting joke response. The plot was not supposed to have the PCs demanding payment, nor did they agree to have ‘romance’ in the game as suddenly demanded, and the DM has seen an opportunity to tie the two together. This would as always be best accompanied by some actual communication, but still.