Telling Your Players "No"

Ah yes, I can already hear the unceasing cries of people who do not actually run tabletop RPGs - "you can't say NO to your players! you have to say YES, and empower their creative juices!" Feh, spare me.

One of my players - one which I am sure all of us GM/DM/Storyteller/Referees/whatnot have at our tables - had come to me in 2 consecutive almost sessions of our D&D game with some requests for his character I have outright said "no" to. I say "almost sessions" because my group had been recovering from the year end holiday doldrums, schedule interruptions, and bad weather phenomenons, and we had not had a real session in quite a while. As has become usual when we do meet, we sit around and kibitz instead of actually playing, waiting for players who do not show, so we had "almost sessions". Anyway, this player of mine asked first to receive the effects of a powerful spell to simulate lycanthropy in his character, and then asked, for our next campaign, to bring in a powerful weapon from a video game into our next campaign. I said no to both... well, I said "no", but the player kept droning on about both requests for so long, that I turned it into "I'll think about it", but the answer will still end up being "no". But that was merely my answer at first glance, a gut-level dismissal that at the time I had problem explaining the full logic behind, part of the reason I let my player argue me into "I'll think about it". Now, after having time to chew on it a bit, I have better reasons for saying "no", and this may be a reasoned, logical explanation, or it just may be weaseling my way out of telling my player "yes", you can decide for yourself.

The first request - due to the PC's backstory, my player thought his character should be given the powers of a werewolf. My first response was, okay, but those creatures in my world are not nice and basically without going through a lot of other rituals and training, anytime you turn into your wolf-man form, you give your character to me. And he will be evil, more of a danger to the rest of the party than a boon (if you want to play a "nice" werewolf, go play White Wolf's World of Darkness game Werewolf the Apocalypse, but no, do not do that either, those games are not sensical). No wait, argued my player, this character's family has learned to control the evil-ness and so you (meaning me, the DM) should allow this non-wizard, less than 11th level PC to have the effect of the Tenser's Transformation spell for free. Obviously I have several reservations about this line of reasoning, to include the whole backstory schtick and the getting the upside without earning it or having any downside attached to it, and I am not quite sure which one gets my hair up more. Character backstories in general have always been a bugaboo for me as a DM. Should every PC have a backstory? Yes, but especially for low level characters, it should be short and it should not affect the campaign unless the DM is mining it for side quest ideas. Long, convoluted backstories may be great works of fiction (and I am guilty of writing a few "novellas" in backstories myself) and entertaining reads, but when a player starts inflicting such works on the game, trying to steer the campaign away from what the group wants or what the DM has prepared, or using the backstory as an excuse to get free, unearned powers, that is when the backstory has to go. What happens in the backstory should only inform a player (and the rest of the table) where their PC comes from and what their motivations are, but it should never, ever be used to replace earning a power or ability or skill away from the table, nor should it be the explanation for why a PC gets said power and another PC does not. Yes, this ties in with why I think Warlocks in 5e are not a well thought out class. Then add on top of it the player wants his PC to have this cool thing without having earned it and with none of the downsides (either werewolf antagonism if counted as a lycanthrope, or playing a mage to level 11 to get the spell in the first place) just because he wrote a bit of fiction. The answer is still "no", though I have been a good DM and dangled a sidequest in front of the party where said PC could run into werewolves, contract the virus, and then partake another series of sidequests and downtime trainings to control his evil, beastly nature, but that would mean he, the PC, would have to explain his backstory to the rest of the party so they will agree to undertake said sidequest, but he is very reticent to do this. Why that is a sticking point with the player, I have no idea, as he is all too willing to inflict said fiction on me. I think a lot of this is boredom from the player with his character, but the party and especially this player wants to see a full level one to twenty run in this campaign, and so the player is just going to have to suck it up and keep playing the character as is.

I found this in a recent article about worldbuilding, but it is very apt about backstories:
The thing is that worldbuilding is to a campaign what backstory is to a player-character. And I realize that, by saying that, I’m inviting arguments from all the snowflake players who love to hand the GM ten pages of Mary Sue backstory crap. But I’ve already heard them all. I’ve heard the “creative expression” argument and the “it helps me play my character better” argument and all the rest. And no. It doesn’t. But you can’t see it because you’re more interested in writing fanfiction about your awesome character than you are about playing an interactive game with other people.

Very appropriate to the discussion at hand.

The other thing this player was wanting was to bring some ridiculous, anime-inspired weapon into our next campaign. With the release of the Eberron campaign setting and my Airberron conversion, it is very likely we will play that next for our medieval fantasy setting (Cyberpunk Red is due out within the next year, so I may begin running a second campaign for that), and the arcanepunk setting of Eberron has convinced my player he can get totally ridiculous when we finally start playing it. No, while I do know which video game the proposed weapon comes from I will not be sharing that, as it does not matter. I have totally forgotten which weapon he was requesting because it does not matter which one it was and I do not play that game, so I really do not have enough interest in the idea. The basic problem I have with this is twofold - the weapon is far too powerful for even the Eberron setting and if you want something really cool from that video game, just play that video game. Again, it smacks too much to me like wanting a large power or skill or ability without the work, but as powerful as this weapon is, even if the player and party spent all 20 levels of that campaign researching and gathering the parts and then building said weapon, it would overbalance the game. Even at 20th level, where most PCs retire and call it quits, it would still overbalance the game, but the player talked like he wanted this early in the game, like the first 10 levels, and that this would again be something that would not be fully earned in game not have any downsides. On top of all of that is the fact that even with Eberron's airships and lightning rail trains and other arcanepunk accoutrements, this weapon is so ridiculous (what I have long been calling "anime bullshit") that it just does not fit into the theme and feel of the world. If the player wanted to do a full conversion of this video game (or find one online... yep, quick Google search shows me they are out there), I would allow the weapon - it would fit the power level and it would fit the theme of the setting. But I still would be loathe to run the conversion as D&D is fantastic at portraying the settings you generally find for it, that is to say generic medieval high-magic fantasy with some few exceptions, and little else. I like D&D, obviously, but I would hate to run a dystopic cyberpunk or scifi or many other possible settings using D&D rules - believe me, I have tried, like the d20 version of Star Wars. For fans of video games like this one, though, it would not hold a candle to just playing the video game itself, just would not be as fun or entertaining. It does not help that said video game has almost zero story, so besides the combat there is not anything in that setting that is compelling to play. Again, this is a "no". 

Back to backstories, in addition to the aforementioned "anime bullshit" weapons grab (no, it is a medieval fantasy game, you cannot have a tactical nuclear weapon), this same player declared that he is "calling it", he will play the Artificer in our future Airberron game, and already has this complicated backstory as to why this Artificer character has a rocket maul and a prosthetic arm. First off, said player has forgotten that he will be rolling randomly for his stats, so he may not get anything that resembles an Artificer - I have adopted the idea that your first character in a campaign is a bit Fate touched, for the whole party, and you roll your stats in the order they appear on the official WotC character sheet (STR, DEX, CON, INT, WIS, CHA) to see what Fate has brought you. Fate the intangible force that screws up or improves our lives, not the RPG rules system, thank you very much. Second, it has been a great while since I have played or run any Eberron games, I do not know if a rocket maul and a prosthetic limb are items that a first level PC would have, maybe they do, but again this smacks of trying to get something for nothing by writing a bit of fiction. Not to mention that if this story is worth telling, why not leave it until you can play it out at the table with the rest of the party? I understand the excitement for telling good stories, but if what you want is total control over your PC and their future, just keep writing that backstory until you have a book, and just play the game for playing the game. 

Fellow DMs, players, I understand the desires that cause the above requests, the interests outside our games that we think would be fantastic to incorporate, or the desire to play a character that is just a little more interesting or powerful. I have been one of those players asking for more and more, and as a DM cannot seem to leave well enough alone to the point I am converting official campaign settings to better suit my taste. However, you have to put this into perspective - is it fair to the other players? To maintain balance, will the DM have to resort to throwing only CR 20+ monsters at the group? Does it fit in with the theme of the setting? Why does the player really want this whatever - boredom, fan of a particular show that they want to incorporate, or just a greedy, munchkin of a power gamer?

I know, it sounds like I hate this player of mine, and he does frustrate me immensely from time to time, but I love his enthusiasm. I remember having the same kind of ideas as a young player, but that was when I was younger than this player is now. I remember my group at the time attempting to play the Diablo conversion of D&D, as we had all been playing that video game since the beta got released... and it was not as fun as simply playing the videogame was. Even back in the day, before high speed internet, the Battle.Net service that Blizzard introduced with Diablo was good enough you could play with your friends, even if you were too lazy to lug your 15 inch CRT (which weighed 30+ pounds) and tower to your friend's for a LAN party. But it was not just the simplicity of getting a multiplayer game together, it was mostly because playing D&D like it was Diablo was clunky, it was unappealing, and it was not as fun as simply playing the video game. Yet, no matter how hard I try, I cannot convey to this player that even if I allowed all of his flights of fancy, he would not find them not even half as entertaining as he thinks they will be. Sadly, the only way to get this through to the player is let them experience it for themself. Now I know what my DMs in the past went through putting up with me.