Night Chalice and the Dragon Waiting Syndrome

Last week I promised to look at the Night Chalice game as an example of the Dragon Waiting Syndrome. If you're not familiar, the Dragon Waiting is John M Ford's World Fantasy Award-winning novel, where the central characters are: 

• Gregory, a German vampire mercenary skilled at siege engines; 
• Dimi, the exiled heir to the Byzantine throne; 
• Cynthia, a young physician forced to flee Florence; and 
• Hywel, a Welsh wizard, nephew of Owain Gly Dwr,

So naturally the action takes place in Wales, and the characters "wage an intrigue-filled campaign against the might of Byzantium, striving to secure the English throne for Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and make him Richard III." 

Ever since I finished the book, I've referred to the tendency of player groups to make PCs that are not necessarily opposed to the GM's plotline, but disconnected from it. 

This is subtly different from what we in Alarums & Excursions used to call "Special Snowflake Syndrome", before Snowflake took on it's current internet meaning. Back then it was "all snowflakes are unique, but I want my snowflake to be specially unique!" and referred to players who deliberately built characters at odds with the GMs instructions: the canonical example was my saying that the campaign was built around the PCs being officers of a Roman Legion (ala Turtledove's Misplaced Legion books) and one player deciding they wanted to play a camp follower. When quizzed as to why, it was "because I think Roman legionnaires are boring but I still want to play." There was a lot of discussion around this "I don't like the idea but I want to play so you as GM should deform your idea into something I do like" as a valid player response and the conversations that need to be had around it. 

Dragon Waiting Syndrome isn't that. All the players in a DWS want to play with the game premise. None of them are doing passive aggressive campaign rejection. They just waged way further afield in the GM's stated "alternate history Europe with mild magic" in their designs than the GM anticipated. 

This is sort of what I ran into for the Night Chalice. I told the players we were in Eversink, and that they were the last remnants of a thieves guild. I expected some con men, burglars, pickpockets, maybe a legbreaker, and I got. 

• A former inquisitor turned smuggler who can see ghosts (which is discussed here)
• A professional duelist who assassinates under the cover of quasi-legal challenges
• A street physician who patched the gang members up, and dabbled in magic
• The dead guild leader's pet sociopath, his Luca Brasi, but secret and a nebbish. 

Now, all of these are perfectly legal justifiable builds. Just none of them lend themselves to short or long cons, caper style robberies, or any of the other things that I thought the group might be doing. This has completely re-tooled the sorts of adventures they're getting into without changing the "Hey we're a thieves guild!" premise. I could have done a lot more work on my end creating, say, 8 templates the PCs had to choose from that would have resulted in things more like I expected. I'm not sure it would have led to the players being as engaged. 

We play to learn.