>running Lamentations of the Gingerbread Princess module in 5e
>players get to the end and have to choose between killing a child to end a wish the child made or making a wish to try end the childs wish that unknowingly entrapped the party
>trick is the wishes are always cursed in some way by the idol granting them so they have to be careful
>players wish for the childs wish to be ended
>I choose to curse their wish to mean they have to end the wish by their own hand
>player gets upset and claims I'm taking away player agency by essentially forcing their character to kill the child
>I figured because their player is so reluctant to kill the child it as the obvious curse to their wish
>session ends with an argument over how unfair it is and that I railroaded them
Did I fuck up? I realize I did make the wish option into a trap to force them to kill the child anyway, but I figured an evil idol knows you don't ant to kill the girl so it is going to force you to do so. Seems reasonable right? It wasn't too dickish? The player said he didn't care about killing the child but he was pissed I took away player agency and railroaded them.Last group I ran it for wished for selfish shit and just killed the girl and I expected much the same since this group is way more morally ambiguous.
>>48089803
>Did I fuck up?
Yeah, following modules is for potatoheads.
>>48089803
Yeah, your logic kind of breaks down at "forced the players to perform the wish". Granting a wish means it happens by instant act or by the appearance of something other than the players. Wishes are not fulfilled by forcing the wisher to do the thing he wished for.
Eg, if I wished to "be rich", it would be stupid for the wish-granter to force me to work hard for 40 years until I became rich. That is not the commonly-accepted definition of "granting a wish".
So you kind of fucked up, though your players shouldn't be such bitches about it.
You reduced the number of alternatives to a single one, so you did take away their agency. If you thought that was fair (and it seems fair, if boring) then that's fine. Your players obviously didn't though, and I think coming up with a second option - that was still negative - would have been better for the game.
Basically, they made a choice not to do something and you decided that meant they still had to do it. So their choice *was* meaningless. Is that what you wanted? Is that what they wanted? Is that the purpose of the module?
>>48089891
Yeah that is true about wishes generally being granted instantly. I mean they made the wish knowing that the worst possible outcome would happen and I realized that for his character the worst possible outcome was to have to kill the girl, so on the fly I figured why not have the idol make him have to do it right?
Meh, I'll probably just retcon it if it is still an issue that the girl simply dies. Probably dickish enough.
>>48089803
What you did was a good response. The issue is it was not a good response for your group. They obviously wanted an easy way out, hence choosing the wish, rather than wanting to resolve it themselves.
Theres also the fact that a wish option shouldn't involve the person wishing to make it happen. More accurately the kid should've died from something else rather than forcing the players to act.
Basically, you took away player agency because you mishandled the idol and the wish process. The kid should've had a heart attack or been messily torn apart by bears or something. That would have fulfilled the wish and had an evil twist.
>>48089803
yeah you fucked up. If wishing to end the wish means "do it yourself" then there's no actual option. Heck, that wouldn't even be a wish cause nothing has changed.
You said the wish accidentally/unknowlingly trapped the party. What was the main/intended effect of the wish? You could have whatever the child wished for reverse so hard that something even worse happend. For example, if the party was trapped because the girl wished for friends, the idol could do something worse than kill her and instead make everyone (sans the party) instinctively loathe her; she isn't dead right now, but she's going to suffer a lot at the hands of strangers until she eventually does die, and arguably a sword through the throat would have been a more merciful act.
>>48090061
>They obviously wanted an easy way out
Not necessarily the easy way, just another way.
>>48090118
Well, when the only option currently available is what would usually be called the ''hard way'' (murder a child because they made a mistake, in essence) then any alternate becomes the easy way, does it not?
>>48089803
Option A: Kill the child
Option B: Make a wish that results in them killing the child
Literally railroading.
>>48090209
More like
Option A: Kill the child
Option B: Get forced to do A by a genie.
>>48089803
Having monkey paw wishes always leads to hurt feelings unless it's done humorously. Even then it can be grating. Your interpretation is basically designed for maximum butthurt and you shouldn't be surprised at the results. Give them another way out, a technicality to work with, or just go back and declare a different result.
>>48089803
Reminds me, I gotta buy more of that strawberry flavored milk along with some chocolate milk and some flavored straws.
Oh and yeah you fucked up.
>>48089803
OP fucked up and made the equivalent of mass effect 3 ending.
It might make sense, but if you give the players an option, have it actually end differently. What you did was allow them two widely different looking roads but they both lead to the exact same thing. A.K.A. Railroading.
>>48089803
Should've just made the wish kill the child, problem solved.
>>48090426
Especially if it means the child dies slowly and horribly as a result of the wish.
>>48089803
The responses in this thread are mostly spot on. You did indeed railroad. You made both choices the same choice in the end.
>but I figured an evil idol knows you don't ant to kill the girl so it is going to force you to do so
>Seems reasonable right?
I'm going to say now that an evil idol would make the party do something worse. The choice between killing a child and, oh, let's just make something up- Imprisoning the child by means of having her become adopted by the pain elemental versions of the Dursley Family.
That's not nice, and arguably killing the poor kid would be the kinder act. But it's still a choice.
Now Mass Effect isn't entierly /tg/ related, but why do you think everyone got so mad at Mass Effect 3's ending? Hell, Why were they mad at Mass Effect 3, the whole game?
It's because it removed player agency. After years of building up a narrative that was constructed by you, the player, over the course of a promised trilogy. in a Role Playing Game. They suddenly decided to rewrite your story completely, assuming you had made no choices at all.
Keep in mind that ME2 read your save data from ME1 in order to keep -your- story as a sexy space commander going.
Back to this point:
>but I figured an evil idol knows you don't ant to kill the girl so it is going to force you to do so
>Seems reasonable right?
This means that there was no choice to begin with. Yes, to begin with. You had to have known what your players'/PCs' were like to have forced that choice onto them, which means that you had plenty of time to see your error in advance.
Which brings me round to your players.
You assumed that your players would do the same as your last group did. It should be obvious why you are wrong here.
Add you lead on that have ran this particular scenario twice, which means you had twice the time to think about it.
TL;DR: You fucked up very very badly.
>>48090480
Every wish the child has ever made slowly unravels before them. Friends, good health, family, a roof over head, and happiness.
>>48089803
> You can do A or B
> We chose B
> Your choice makes A mandatory
Yes, you fucked up.
>>48089803
OK, so it's been made painfully obvious that you've fucked up, so here's a few hints as to how to not fuck up so badly:
When designing choices, make them personal.
Good vs Evil choices are hardly choices, since a good person will undoubtedly do good things, and an evil person will also undoubtedly do evil things.
So instead, you tailor the choice to the individual. Make the Good person decide between the lesser of two evils. Make an Evil person decide between wants and needs, especially Chaoric Evil PCs.
Examples for good guy players:
>Village is being raided, and you have to choose between rushing all the way acorss town to save your beloved or stopping regularly to save strangers who are nearby.
>Chief is forced to choose between either Fucking over Cancer or Fucking over World Hunger.
Examples for evil guy players:
>You were hired to kill this corrupt official, but as you approach, he offers you a much higher payment. Accepting his offer could muddy your rep and make life harder for you, but it's damn good coin he offers...
>>48089803
You should have made it so that the idol would have just killed the girl and ended the wish.
>>48089803
You fucked up enough that the scenario comes across as you secretly masturbating under the table to the idea of killing a kid. That, or pushing some sort of weird Utilitarian lesson on the party, ala one of those shitty Make the Paladin Fall DMs who use damned if you do, damned if you don't options.
>>48089803
Why the fuck would you ever run Lamentations of the Flame Princess with players who aren't okay with MAXIMUM EDGE?
I would literally never begin a LotFP campaign without showing them pictures of the "Nothing personnel kid" hedgehog and letting them know that they're entering a dark, edgy realm of guro and arbitrary player character death, mutilation, and mutation.
The better solution is to have the wising dolly force one of the PCs to marry the little girl who would immediately start acting like an attentive housewife. The shame of being in such a corruption of the nuclear family would no doubt drive the player to kill himself.
>>48089803
>Did I fuck up?
No, your players are being bitches. And they don't understand the concept of OSR modules (although you might not have told them in which case, that was dumb of you)
>>48091920
It isn't normal for OSR at all, just for Lamentations.
>>48092072
Lots of OSR has highly dangerous situations and malicious cursed items that do weird shit. But I agree that LotFP is crazier than most.
>>48092191
Yet nothing even remotely on the scale of what OP is concerning and it would be out of place in nearly anything but DCC and LotFP.
>>48092257
Really? Even old TSR modules had stuff like this, and many of those had even less foreshadowing and more bullshit.
>>48090556
This.
OP, this is what you should have done.
>>48092271
>Even old TSR modules had stuff like this,
Well, no. Some old TSR modules had bad stuff (ie. Tomb of Horrors, which wasn't remotely the norm or intended as a template), but nothing even teensily tinily close to what OP is talking about.
Railroading the players into killing children would be out of place even in Ravenloft.
The worst TSR ever got was probably the hideously deformed mutant child named Goy who gets turned into an intelligent zombie that the mother still cares for but Requiem was a gonzo adventure even by TSR standards.
>>48092313
Well to be fair, the module actually doesn't railroad the players. There are several ways to fix the problem other than outright slaying the girl, like killing the fairy princess, waiting for the girl to die naturally, and maybe tricking the wish gremlin somehow. The players should've also realized that the wish will fuck with them, it's hinted at so much.
>>48092384
>Well to be fair, the module actually doesn't railroad the players.
Either way, the 40k morality nonsense isn't a part of TSR era D&D and isn't something distantly common in OSR stuff.
>>48092431
Yes, I agree with you that TSR didn't have all the heavy metal and edgelord stuff of LotFP. What I meant was that they had stuff in their modules that fuck with the players way more.
>>48089891
>Eg, if I wished to "be rich", it would be stupid for the wish-granter to force me to work hard for 40 years until I became rich.
But that sounds exactly like the sort of thing that would happen if you're playing with cursed Calypso wishes, and it sounds like that's what OP is playing with.
>I wish to be rich!
>CONGRATULATIONS! Please, enjoy your new life of servitude- er, I mean, contract, with Wage-Slave Industries! I'm sure you'll amass that fortune in no time flat... If you can live to see it.
>>48092495
>What I meant was that they had stuff in their modules that fuck with the players way more.
Way more than LotFP? Impossible. Way more than tricking the PCs into killing a kid? Very improbable. TSR generally eschewed that level of rat-dick fuckery.
Actually one of the better arguments for the OSR scene is that usually they are light on narrative/plot, and narrative/plot in RPGs often boils down to "Hee hee hee, you started to roleplay your character? Well guess what, you gotta kill a kid now/the BBEG kidnapped your little sister, haw haw!"
>>48092586
At the risk of sounding edgy as fuck, what exactly is so bad about killing a kid in an RPG? Especially if you're put in a morbid and shitty situation which is what should happen if you're adventuring is a grimdark world.
It's certainly much better than "touch thing and you die" stuff that is way more prevalent, especially in TSR stuff.
>>48092542
Really?
Almost always a cursed wish would be something like "spikes of gold grow through your testicles!" "a billion GP worth of diamonds appear in your house and everyone knows you stole them!" "you are transported to a planet made of gold a quadrillion years in the future. There is no air and so you die, and even if you didn't, there is no one left alive to trade with you" "everything you touch turns to gold, including the air! you suffocate on gold"
That being said, that game (?) does sound like its legitimately bringing you closer to getting rich.
>>48092610
>what exactly is so bad about killing a kid in an RPG?
Punishes players for roleplaying and flushes a large portion of your character's personality down the drain.
>Especially if you're put in a morbid and shitty situation which is what should happen if you're adventuring
It really shouldn't. The universe generally has better things to do than warping and folding just to be edgy against one group of people. These things are never legitimate or remotely plausible moral considerations either like "there's a child soldier with an RPG," its always convoluted and inescapable supernatural phenomena.
>grimdark
40k garbage should stay in 40k.
>It's certainly much better than "touch thing and you die" stuff that is way more prevalent, especially in TSR stuff.
Not really, poisoned needles etc. are a hell of a lot easier to defeat than contrived ways to force PCs to kill kids.
>>48092628
Calypso literally does whatever the fuck he wants in most cases, and adheres to the most minute relation to the wish when he feels like it. That said, everything you've listed is par for the course as well.
>>48089803
Better options:
Targets of Child's Wish die, Childs wish is ended as there are no longer any valid targets for it
Childs Wish is ended by the idol summoning a demon to posses the child which ends the wish but leaves the idol never bothers to remove the demon.
Wish is ended by making the wish never happen, child wished for a worse thing instead, child becomes Hitler
Child's wish ends in the world but the child is now trapped in a coma living out what they believe is their wish but is in fact just a dying dream.
Child's wish ends but the child finds life grey and boring and ends up killing themselves(should have specified they wanted to save the child).
Child's wish ends temporarily but the child will inevitably return to make the wish again.
>>48092703
>Punishes players for roleplaying and flushes a large portion of your character's personality down the drain.
On the contrary, if anything it leads to character development. Will the character refuse? For how long? Will he stop anyone else if they try to kill the child? Whatever happens they will grow as characters.
>The universe generally has better things to do than warping and folding just to be edgy against one group of people.
But that is almost exactly what the module is about. A creature that is a motherfucker and only wants to cause malice for its own enjoyment. Yes it's edgy but it's LotFP.
>40k garbage should stay in 40k.
I don't like 40k much either, but the OP clearly wanted to play a grimdark game and in all likelihood the players realized this way before they got to this situation. Who are you to tell him what kind of game to run?
>Not really, poisoned needles etc. are a hell of a lot easier to defeat than contrived ways to force PCs to kill kids.
How is a situation where you have to kill a kid something that's hard to "defeat"? Other than moral defeat I suppose. In any case it's a situation that (most likely) pits the characters in a moral battle with themselves and that's interesting.
>>48092811
These are all interesting options.
>>48092841
If the players knew this would be a game in which they do shit like murder kids and are now complaining about it then yes, they're bitches, however if they didn't then it's perfectly easy to see why they're mad about it.
Saying that it's 'good' or 'interesting' to have that dilemma is all well and good but if it's not the kind of story that you want to tell or be a part of then it doesn't matter.
>>48092841
>Whatever happens they will grow as characters.
Its generally the opposite of character growth. A significant portion of their personality has to be excised to continue, and there's not even room for debate because these situations are usually "lol kill the kid or something objectively worse than that happens."
> Who are you to tell him what kind of game to run?
The burden is on the DM to let the players know it will be Ow the Edgehog. Ergo, the DM fucked up. He is however playing LotFP correctly.
>How is a situation where you have to kill a kid something that's hard to "defeat"?
If you "have" to kill the kid, or if at least its a situation that will pursue you with long lasting consequences, it is very hard to defeat.
>In any case it's a situation that (most likely) pits the characters in a moral battle with themselves and that's interesting.
For the DM, as it gives him a thrill of pleasure. For people who wanted to roleplay a character with more depth than a sheet of paper, not so much.
I generally try to avoid completely two dimensional situations like this, as I'm of the opinion that once you force PCs to become simplified, cookie cutter versions of themselves, you're cheating yourself even more than the players. Now they know to play their characters in a more flat fashion, and to make flatter characters in the future.
Its like the whole "BBEG kidnaps your parents and rapes and murders them" thing, yes it gives a short lived burst of drama and reaction but rubbing players in the nose of that not only are they totally powerless to affect the world, but that they can't even play their character how they like.
Afteral, these situations are never "Kill a kid to get a cool reward" but "kill a kid to keep the world from being shittier than it was before this scenario unveiled itself." There's no element of player choice involved, as the DM will fuck them over for not doing what he wants them to do.
>>48089803
Yes. Why offer a choice if all the outcomes are the same?
>>48093065
I agree, but I have a feeling that the players probably knew what they were getting into. This situation is in the very end of the adventure, and there's plenty of other morbid shit that happens before. But yeah, I'd like to hear from the OP about it.
>>48093074
>A significant portion of their personality has to be excised to continue, and there's not even room for debate because these situations are usually "lol kill the kid or something objectively worse than that happens."
This really depends on the characters, no? Some players/characters might not have a problem with killing a child. And maybe not everyone agree that not killing the kid is objectively worse. In fact, if it was that easy then they probably would've just killed the child no problem.
>The burden is on the DM to let the players know it will be Ow the Edgehog. Ergo, the DM fucked up.
We still don't know whether OP told the players or not. If he did, the players should have known that stuff like this was coming.
>If you "have" to kill the kid, or if at least its a situation that will pursue you with long lasting consequences, it is very hard to defeat.
I understand what you mean then. But long lasting consequences are good for campaigns and roleplaying, right? And as I wrote before, the players should've had more options if the module was played correctly.
>the rest of your post
I sort of agree with you in some sense, but I think this once again comes down to campaign world and stuff like that. If this is played like a horror film, which it is supposed to be, I don't see a problem with it ending like this. If this happens in a noblebright world where everything so far has gone peachy and player death and moral problems are rare, then I probably wouldn't be happy.
In the end the main thing everyone's arguing about is "did the OP tell the players that the game was gonna be like this?" and since the OP up and left we have no clue.
>>48089803
Of course you fucked up. They made a wish and the magic eight ball returned "Do it yourself, faggot." Should have just had the Idol murderize the child right in front of them.
Or done something even more heinous. Seriously, making such an open-ended wish to a known malicious wish granting entity is absolutely, indefensibly retarded.
You could have had the idol explode, killing all of them with no saves, and it would have been totally justified.
>>48093290
>Some players/characters might not have a problem with killing a child
Right. It punishes players unevenly and arbitrarily, all because the DM suddenly wanted a specific outcome.
I hate this shit. D&D is at its best when it at least has the "dungeon" part down pat, as in an environment full of tricks and/or traps, probably treasure, and probably monsters, that the PCs interact with and learn to deal with as they see fit. Its at its worst when the DM moves from creating environments for the players to creating antagonists that actively seek to fuck over the PCs.
>But long lasting consequences are good for campaigns and roleplaying, right?
Hm? Long lasting consequences of the player's actions, when they're the active agents, sure. This is the antithesis of that, as its the consequences of something an NPC did. The DM holds all the cards.
And yes, if they did know what LotFP is about, its their own fault.
>>48090560
> You can do A or B
> We chose B
> Your choice makes A mandatory
>tfw OP accidentally "but thou must!"-ed his players into murdering a child
Great job OP
>>48093552
The thing is, I do agree with you, I think. What I'm confused about in this whole thing is that the module actually HAS other choices the players can make, so I don't know what the OP was up to. Another problem is that they actually decided to make a wish when it is very VERY clearly hinted that it will be bad, so you could sort of say that the choice they made to fix the problem was to do an incredibly dumb thing.
>>48093907
Fair enough.
>>48089803
How did they word their wish?
>>48089803
>Did I fuck up?
Yes. You turned what was intended to be a legitimate choice into a Telltale style "nothing you picked made any difference at all" situation. It's "kill the kid or have a bad thing happen"; not "kill the kid or kill the kid". You chose the one bad outcome in the world that was not a valid thing to pick.
>>48091642
In fairness, that's just one end of the range for LotFP modules. They go from pushing boundaries in an interesting way to Coldsteel the Hedgehog
>>48089803
Yes, you fucked up when you picked the LotFP without applying vaseline to buttholes of your players. On the situation - yeaaah, that certainly denied the players their agency, but falling into painfully unfair situations is half the
>>48093074
>A significant portion of their personality has to be excised to continue
That's... absolutely not how it works. This is not a vidya "you did a bad thing and now your angelic wings fall off". Characters process the moral consequences of such decisions through reflection, and that can lead to a fuckton of different outcomes. Someone might be scarred for life. Someone may make an adamant resolution for the future based on that experience. Maybe they'll just agree that their hand was forced on that one, and it's the idol that is to blame and not them. Someone may just do what most normal humans would do in such a situation and refuse to face the consequences of the situation, and just carry on like nothing happened. The only characters who'd have their personalities "excised" are the ones played by autists who don't roleplay, but make choices only to built a character like a LEGO construct to suit some image.
>>48096062
>*...but falling into painfully unfair situations is half the point of LotFP.
Selffix
>>48096062
>>48093074
Also I absolutely fail to see how did you drag 40k into this. If we applied Inquisitorial 40k context to the situation, players would start by killing the child to contain the magical fuckery outbreak, proceed by nuking the idol and then feel pretty well about the whole ordeal, since they just did their entirely legal and universally approved job down to it's description.
Lots of character backgrounds in 40k allow for adhering to a strict dogma that justifies a lot of shit for the sake of some greater good, which works wonders to prevent massive amounts shaky legs and angst over such shit.
>>48090535
>>Now Mass Effect isn't entierly /tg/ related, but why do you think everyone got so mad at Mass Effect 3's ending? Hell, Why were they mad at Mass Effect 3, the whole game?
>It's because it removed player agency.
I dunno I was also pretty mad because the Catalyst was the single most retarded Deus Ex Machina in all of history, and the entire plot of Mass Effect was turned into a farce befit of a Spaceballs sequel
>Oh no, synthetics will eventually destroy all organics, we have to stop it!
>Oh I know, let's create a race of synthetics to destroy all organics perpetually, that way synthetics will never take over the organics!
>>48089803
>players get to the end and have to choose between killing a child to end a wish the child made or making a wish to try end the childs wish that unknowingly entrapped the party
You told them pick A or B, then told then B was secretly actually also A because of several reasons you feel are justifiable. This, in video games and stage magic, is called the illusion of choice. You essentially lied about there being a choice and definately railroaded your players, because there was never any way for them to not do what you wanted. They are upset at you, and this is a reasonable reaction.
