With the recent massive bitch-fest that has ensued with Mass Effect 3's ending, it has me curious, have you ever, as a storyteller, had your players be incredibly pissed off with you for the ending you had to your game?
I finished my Supernatural (yes a game based off the CW tv show, don't ask) with an ending that more or less was viewed rather than experienced. The actions of my characters made the ending possible, but they became spectators when the ending happened. I got a somewhat mixed response from my players, but I was so fucking sick of that game that I just wanted it over and put very little work into it.
Same thing goes with World of Darkness games, which almost inevitably end with your characters dying because the main intrigue of the game series is wheels within wheels, the invisible hand guiding your fate. You're always the pawn of some unseen force and death is really the only true escape from that control. It means the journey is the fun part, but the ending is always what people will remember, so you need to make the journey as memorable as possible to help distract from the grisly ending that awaits.
Going back to Mass Effect, the game billed itself as the choices you make effect the overall outcome of the game, which is pretty much the same with PnP RPGS, but with far less variety. With some video games you can have control on the order in which you do things and to some degree the course you take, but ultimately you're always going to be in the same bar, talking to the same drunk C-Sec officer to get information. PnP RPG's do much of the same thing, but as it's an impromptu style of storytelling, players can do things the storyteller had no intention of doing.
Blah, my brain isn't working today. Okay here's the general gist of this argument/ question, Mass Effect was to some degree a game in which the players built the universe, a much more stripped down version of what players can do in a PnP RPG, yet there exists options for them to make. PnP RPGS are very much the same way, with the storyteller having a framework for a story, but one which is ultimately written by the players, and because of that, do the players have a say in how the ending should be?
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