This shouldn’t be the GMs job btw, players, roleplaying and backstory are YOUR department, write a reason why your character would end up with the others. Work together.
DM: As you walk away, you feel a slight tingle in the air before a flash as bright as a thousand suns blinds you for an instant before… nothing. A bolt of lightning has vaporized your body. Miraculously, nobody else in the vicinity seems to have been harmed in any way nor even do they seem to have noticed what just happened, including the fact that you just disappeared. It’s as if the Gods themselves, for no particular reason, have arbitrarily decided to smite you out of existence entirely.
Ready to roll a new character?
DM: “Alright, so your character walks off after refusing to go along with the group. Okay. Well, guess you can pack up and we will see you next session. I don’t have anything planned other than what the group is doing, so, guess you won’t be playing today. Bye.”
Make it sting. Refuse to let them roll a new character and have them do the walk of shame. They made their choice So they can deal with the consequences of them.
If you don’t have a reason to work with the group, accept that this is a one-shot for you, which may be retcon’d as needed.
Also accept that you suck at making characters
I don’t know. One time I joined a game, and I had plenty of reasons to join the party, but the DM started RPing a really rude character, and it’s like his method of getting me to join the party was to be a huge asshole to me? I just didn’t pick up on it, and when I finally gave my character an ass-pull reason to join (that I could do some good if I tagged along) the DM was like “jeez, finally” and it sucked.
Like, if I’m playing a level 1 wizard, and the DM tells me I’m gonna die if I enter the conflict, it’s not really my backstory’s fault that I don’t jump into the fray. Sometimes you’re dealing with an inexperienced DM that expects you to metagame your way into the party. I genuinely thought he was on the verge of giving me the opportunity to convince the party to run away from the dragon, not stay and fight it.
Fun fact:
The Expanse books (and eventual TV show) were started as a unique role-playing campaign where the person running it (Ty Franks) would write a prompt, the players would explain their character’s reactions. He’d then write a story section incorporating that and the players would say how they reacted and so on.
There was a core group of characters who were the “survivors” early on, but one of the players had to drop out early-ish, so in the next bit of story that character died.
That was carried into the books and TV show, which is why after the core group of characters is established, there’s a sudden, shocking death.
Dice-less, narrative games are so much fun. Sadly finding a good group for it is like pulling teeth, at least in my area.
*Sad theater kid noises*
Wow that really is a fun fact!
Everybody plays RPGs differently, but it’s funny how some people don’t get the term “roleplaying” and are constantly, relentlessly playing their real selves in the game. So you get barbarians with the sensibilities of software developers.
Like for beginners just learning that’s fine.
But the amount of players I’ve DM’d for who always play the exact same character that is just “idealistic version of self” with different coats of paint is way too damn high.
Forget that for average people it is incredibly difficult to put themselves into the perspective of others, much less hold a continuous train of logic based on that perspective, which is what roleplaying is all about.
I mean, I think they get the term, but just have a hard time doing it.
It’s natural that we gravitate towards familiarity.
Case in point, how some actors always seem to play the same character, no matter which movie they’re in.
Yeah that’s a good parallel. Lately I’ve been watching Kaitlin Olson’s show High Potential. Even though she’s playing a super-smart crime solver, to me it’s the same character she played in It’s Always Sunny and The Mick. Not that there’s anything wrong with that lol.
I’m new to my party and roleplaying in general (though I’ve consumed it as entertainment) and I’m having a slightly different issue. My character was intentionally designed to be a bit naive to match me as a player, and doesn’t have high skills in any int based stuff (at least for now) and instead has medical, nature, survival, etc.
A lot of puzzles or traps etc I can as a player try to reason through, but my character shouldn’t be able to sus out, and I feel torn between playing the character as it should be or adding ideas to solve stuff so we aren’t just sitting there twiddling our thumbs for ideas.
Maybe your char bumbles around the room doing goofy things instead of working hard and logically to crack the puzzle and the dm can make your bumbling uncover extra clues that advance the plot.
This right here is what makes it roleplaying.
You as the player know what to do to move the story forward. Just need to figure out how the character you built would go from Point A to Point B, then roleplay doing it, even if it means they bumble their way through it like a clown.
Let the DM worry about what skills you need, if you even need them at all; the only thing the player has to do is describe their actions and their intentions.
A good DM will make sure you fail forward.
Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between factual knowledge and just cleverness. There’s no reason a bumpkin fresh off the farm can’t be curious about what makes something tick, so they look under it or break it open - and whaddya know, they find a hidden thing. It’s really up to the DM to say no, your character wouldn’t know to do that. The intelligence you show when you figure out a puzzle or a trap could make total sense as the same spark that made the naive character want to leave the farm and explore the big wide world.
“Oh, you encounter a desert. There’s nothing around for miles”
“I perform a history check to see if there’s any historical significance about this desert.”
“Sorry, but, as DM, I don’t remember calling for a History check. So, no, you actually don’t.”
Basically my only rules for character creation are 1) your stuff must be from an officially published 5e rulebook, and 2) it must make sense for your characters to party up. It’s really hard to make an interesting campaign for a group of four lone wolves who are totally disinterested in The Quest
THANK. YOU.
Players who do this ARE BAD PLAYERS. I don’t care what it takes, you WILL find a reason to cooperate. Call it metagaming if you have to. This is a team game, you will work as a team.
Players are expected to make characters that will, for whatever reason, will work together and, for whatever reason, will take plot hooks. Without those two things the game doesn’t happen.
What if they leave the party and create a new character to join the party that fits in better? Is that good or bad?
I mean, it’s good, but it feels like an over reaction. They don’t need to make an entirely new character, they just need to think of a reason they’d cooperate. It can be a contrived reason, that’s fine, but they need to work together. Some examples,
- Highly shy character “warms up” to at least one other character and sort of talks to the group “through” that character, but you can still (as a player) face the whole table to talk as a group.
- Character who is extremely distrusting has met a character before (just tweak backstory) or finds at least one other character implicitly trust worthy. Maybe the Rogue who has been backstabbed too many times trusts the Paladin because they know they’re too honest to lie.
Edit: It can also be like “my god told me” or “I just know y’all are a good bunch” lol. Doesn’t need to be elaborate.
The guy who splits the party on session 1:
Hehehe it’s so fun when I just have to sit and watch and can’t interact, I love iiiiit!
back around late 90’s early 00’s I was pretty lucky to have a group of friends that all just hung around together. Talking like 8 or more of us and it always wound up that 3 of us would have a place together out in the sticks (it changed locations/roommates from year to year but we had a good long 5+ years of everyone being consistently together). We ended up playing basically any tabletop we could get our hands on or pirate (napster/limewire back then) and print off (we still ended up spending 100’s a piece though on dice and official releases), we even ended up starting to make our own games that I still think about doing something with to this day. (all just context for how we could pull off some of what I’m about to say)
Getting EVERYONE together was rather difficult at times, people would come into stories and be quickly rotated out if they had to work or weren’t available when we were wanting to continue running a story-line (multiple different DM’s and storylines from different games going on in concert, still can’t fathom how that all worked out looking back). So we all got pretty used to being fluid about it and no one really had any FOMO unless their character was low-level versus everyone else.
At that point it became apparent on my storyline that I was going to have to catch some people up so we started doing 1-on-1 DMing where I would spend a few hours running someone basically on a solo mission that I could tie into the rest of the story and give them something to catch up to everyone else. Sometimes we would do it before a bigger session and people showing up early could sit in or do cameo appearances to help out/etc. People are a lot more comfortable to ask questions and be involved with the story that way and translates well to the group play.
It ended up being a huge success and had some of my favorite interactions. Sometimes we would have a bunch of people over and some wanted to play and some wanted to listen to music and party so it just always felt natural and those involved really wanted to be there for it.
You can get away with it while having some downtime in a village. The bard is making coin in the tavern and the barbarian is drinking in the same place, the priest visits the local chapel, the warlock looks to spend some coin on magic baubles, etc. This also increases the creativity in which you can give your players their next quest.
But once you’re out adventuring on that quest, you’re a goddamn party. If you don’t want to be a party, then go home and play a single player game.
Edit: I have had good DMs separate the party themselves though, but we always spend it trying to find each other again.
Splitting the party is fine! Here’s some great reasons why you might:
If you get in through the servants entrance, you’re gonna have access to different stuff than if you get in through the front door.
You have the most wanted woman im the country and an anthropomorphized war crime in the party, and you’ve decided you need to ask a duchess about a thing.
The tunnel splits, and you’re not about to allow that fucker to get behind you. Again.
I don’t trust these other fuckers. I spy on the rest of the party.
You fucked up and only got one invitation. Hopefully they can open a back door somewhere.
He actually can’t take the armor off. It’s a whole thing. He can be the distraction.
The rest of the party moves 3x as fast as me and has stealth nonsense. But I have points in siege engineering, and resistance to fall damage. Shout when you need me.
If your character has no reason to stay either the plothook was insufficient or you made a bad character. Both should be adressed ooc.
Create a new character that does have a reason to stick around. *Session 0 should be the creation of the story of how the group met, they should not meet in session 1.
they should not meet in session 1.
Strongly disagree. Nothing wrong with doing that, but nothing wrong with having them meet in session 1 too, as long as you have built characters who will be willing to go along with the GM’s hooks.
And even that part is flexible, depending on the nature of the hook. If the hook is “you see an ad look for rat exterminators”, then you better have a character who wants to be an adventurer and will cooperate with other would-be adventurers. If the hook is “you’re prisoners being ordered to go explore this dungeon by order of the vizier”, there’s room for slightly less cooperative PCs, as long as you PC is cooperative enough to go along with that order, even if (at first) reluctantly.
Yeah, I’m gonna back you up on that one. Sometimes assembling the group in session 0 is what’s right for the story, and sometimes it really, really isn’t. Think about how many movies literally have “Assembling the team” as almost their entire plot. The Avengers hangs two hours of non-stop action on “We need to put a party together.” Every heist movie is basically required to have an “I’m putting a team together…” sequence.
Session 0 is where you lay out the expectations of the game, and your players think about either how their characters have already interacted, or how they will interact when they eventually meet. You give people an idea of what they’re getting into, you pitch the tone and the style of the game, and you help people shape characters around that.
As an example a friend of mine always pitches his games by describing who they would be directed by. I remember vividly his “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Halflings” game, a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay If It Was Directed By Guy Ritchie experience. Just setting that sense of tone up front meant that we all knew to make characters who would fit the vibe. I played “Blackhand Seth, The Scummiest Elf You’ve Ever Met,” one part Brad Pitt Pikey, one part Jack Sparrow, and I had a blast.
In my most recent campaign I’m running a Shadowrun game where the group would be assembled in session 1 by a down on his luck fixer. My pitch to the players was simple; make fuck-ups. I wanted characters who were at the end of their rope, lacking in options, either so green no one would trust them or so tainted by past failures that no one wanted them. The kind of people who would take a job from a fixer who had burned every other bridge. They rose to the assignment beautifully, and by four sessions in the group has already formed some absolutely fascinating relationship dynamics. A lot of that has been shaped by their first experiences together, figuring out how to work as a team, sometimes distrusting each other, and slowly discovering reasons to care about each other.
Sometimes assembling the group in session 0 is what’s right for the story, and sometimes it really, really isn’t. Think about how many movies literally have “Assembling the team” as almost their entire plot. The Avengers hangs two hours of non-stop action on “We need to put a party together.”
Oh, that reminds me of a 4th way campaigns can start (in addition to the 3 I said in a different reply) that I’ve been in before and quite enjoyed—though wouldn’t want to be overused. The MCU method. Where each player individually gets a 1 session (maybe 2 at most) solo session introducing them and getting them to the right place to start the campaign.
Meeting people with the inclination and schedule that I enjoy the company of to make a party with is the worst part of d&d. Please don’t make me role play it, too.
It might be your least favorite part of DnD, but there are plenty of people (myself included) who enjoy meeting a new group of characters and finding out about their particular ticks and specialties.
I learn about the characters, myself included, throughout the campaign through their actions. Otherwise session one is like that time I asked a coworker about one of his tattoos and had to hear about his sister’s murder. That’s more of a session two+ thing to me.
For me, the tired trope of “strangers meet in a tavern” approach is the inevitable round of introductions that feels like that time at the start of school when everyone had to stand up to say their name and one interesting fact about them. It’s just awkward and everyone wants it to be over quickly.
Much better to just create characters together in session 0. Everyone already knows each other, their motivations, prior relationships established, etc… and just begin the campaign as if everyone is already on mission.
There are options besides “strangers meet in a tavern and awkwardly introduce themselves” and pre-made perfectly-tailored party. I’m a fan of starting in media res, with the characters all in a location for their own reasons, when shit happens that forces them to act as a group. I’ve just recently started the video game Baldur’s Gate 3, and it’s not a bad example of what I mean.
The DM came up with the plot hook and the players agreed to play, so the players need to put some effort into finding a reason to go along with the plot hook.
Suggestions on making the hook more engaging is an option too!
It goes for the players among each other too. It’s not just the one character in OP that dislikes or distrusts the party. It’s up to the rest of the party to also accomodate them. If you have a moral character in the group you might refrain from murdering, raping and pillaging for shits and giggles.
As they say “the only way to have a friend is to be one”.
Or third option: the person is operating independent of Table expectations or their character. Some folks just don’t get it and frankly I wonder why they want to play the game. It’s incredibly rare, but I have seen it.
You don’t have to put on a voice in a costume and write 20 pages of lore, but if you’re going to play at my table, I expect you to remain in character unless you have a question for me more or less. I expect you to take it seriously and use basic social etiquette. I’ve never played with somebody who was incapable of realizing that they are not being fun/funny, or considerate. They just get main character syndrome and stop listening to people for some reason.
It’s all about listening. If you’re capable of being at a table with a few people in life, then you’re capable of playing D&D!
For me, as a DM, real shit always happens on session 1, you swim together or fucking die.
I did this in the very first RPG I played. It was Star Wars and I was playing a smuggler (who thus had a ship). Obviously the GM intended my ship to be used to move the party around. Well, the jedi PC shows up wanting to board my ship as I’m getting ready to leave. I don’t know this guy so obviously the first thing my character would do would be to say that and then turn the turrets on when this strange jedi tried to insist on joining me, followed by promptly flying off so he ended up needing to find another way to our adventure.
No idea why I was like that. The player was pretty much my best friend at the school, too, so it wasn’t anything personal against him. I think I was just trying to hard to do what “my character would realistically do” instead of just playing a game.
Obviously, I’m probably missing some context here, but reading the way you’ve described this, I don’t think you were at fault here. If the GM’s decision really was to fold that character into the group by just having them stroll up to a smuggler’s ship like “Yo, I’m the jedi, let me in,” that was an incredibly fucking stupid way to handle that character introduction.
If that happened in an actual Star Wars movie or TV show there would be a million youtube videos ripping on how stupid that scene was. Forget “Paranoid smuggler trying to evade the law”, basically anyone working against the empire should have been suspicious as fuck there. That’s not a jedi, that’s an imperial spy, or worse, a sith lord.
Yes, players owe to each other to try to move the story forward in a collaborative way, but the GM also owes it to the players to never demand that their characters act like complete and total morons for the sake of the story. There should have been some kind of framework there for why this group of people would trust this random-ass dude wandering into the docking bay. A message sent ahead by their contact in the resistance saying “This guy is gonna help you out, you can trust him,” something like that. Not just “Yo, I’m a party member, lemme in.” Real life doesn’t work like that, and when games try to work like that it just makes everything feel stupid and pointless, because it’s so obvious that none of it is real or meaningful.
Why is it always a jump to “Overly Paranoid to the point of seeing everything moving as a spook” instead of just “reasonably cautious but otherwise still level headed”?
If the GM’s decision really was to fold that character into the group by just having them stroll up to a smuggler’s ship like “Yo, I’m the jedi, let me in,” that was an incredibly fucking stupid way to handle that character introduction.
Do you forget that this is almost literally what Obi Wan and Luke did to recruit Han and Chewie? Ya know, the famous Smuggler pair? They just walked up to the pair in a bar and had a polite discussion about requesting some discreet passage aboard Han’s ship.
Last I checked, no one bitches about that part of A New Hope.
Probably for the best. If you’d let him onboard it might have ended up like this story.
That would have been more cool than whatever unmemorable shit actually happened in that campaign. Only other thing I remember is the GM offering me 3 capital ships if I bought him lunch one day and then promptly destroying two of them that same session, which I actually appreciate in hindsight because it contributed to seeing pay to win games as a waste of time and money. Either the shit “bought” in game can be lost that easily or it just breaks the game into a “just give me money and you, uh, win! That’s the whole game!”
My rule on this is very simple; if your character isn’t a part of the group, they’re not part of the story. That goes for lone wolves, people who betray the party, “evil” characters who work against the party’s interests, etc. You make the choices you want to make, you do what seems right for your character, but the moment that means you’re not a part of the group, you either figure out a good story for how we’re going to fix that, or you hand me your character sheet. It’s really that easy.
“But thats just what my character would do!”
OK, let’s unpack that. If that’s truly, genuinely the case, if there’s no way your character could no work against the group or leave them at this point, then this is how your characters story ends. If that comes twenty sessions into a game, well, waking away rather than betray your morals is a pretty good story if you ask me. If it comes two sessions in then we need to figure out why you’re not on the same page as everyone else.
But more often, the player simply thinks its the only possible way their character can act in this situation because they’re not thinking creatively. People are complicated. Consistency is actually the bane of interesting characters. A good character is inconsistent for interesting reasons. “My character would never trust someone in this situation!” OK, but what if they did? Now we’re left with the question of why, and figuring that out is surely going to be interesting.
There’s also the other side of this coin, which is the responsibility on the GM’s shoulders. Yes, your players owe it to each other to try to keep the story moving forward, but you also owe it to them to respect the reality their story takes place in. Don’t run a gritty crime game and then expect your players to just automatically trust some NPC that turns up with no bona fides. You actually have to put the work into crafting scenarios where the players can have their characters react naturally and still drive the story. It’s a bad GM who pisses their pants and cries because they created something that looks like an obvious trap (whether it is or not) and their players refused to walk into it.
OK, but what if they did? Now we’re left with the question of why, and figuring that out is surely going to be interesting.
“I <something disruptive >.”
“You’re about to, when you change your mind. What made you change your mind?”
It’s a powerful tool. It can be overused, but it’s good for bringing people into the right frame of mind.
Maybe something happens that’s more urgent than the trust issue. Maybe they see a tattoo on another character that has meaning for you. Maybe they just realize it could be useful to be in the party for now. Whatever it is, they are solidifying the team while also taking more authorship of the story.
I don’t like prescribing a characters actions to that degree, but I would certainly work with the player to try to help them come up with an alternate path.
If a player ultimately chooses to commit to a path that puts them at odds with the party, I’ll respect that, but I’ll make it clear to them that this is where that character’s story ends.
There’s a few ways I have approached this as a GM. I’ll go from least to most effective (and, I feel, mature).
The first is to put a shared enemy in front of the party, so that even if the characters do split up, they’re working towards the same goal. The character who has “no reason” to trust the party also has reason to recognize the effectiveness of sticking with allies in a world full of enemies. If the player wants them to go off on their own, fine, but as GM, the game stays with the party - oh, and have the player who left roll on a random injury table because they were outnumbered.
Second is to invoke the “Wolverine Approach”. Wolverine in Marvel Comics always goes on and on about not being a team player, being a bad person, being a loner, etc. - and he certainly has had his fair share of solo adventures. At the same time, there was at least one month where nearly every major Marvel title had Wolverine in it - Avengers, West Coast Avengers, X-Men, the Defenders, Spider-Man, Marvel Team-Up, Alpha Flight, etc… And because it was in the era where She-Hulk was part of the F4, he had a cameo there because of the WCA. Wolverine might claim to not be a team player, and he might be a pain in the rear end, but he’s always there if there’s a villain to be thwarted or a fight to be had. You have a right to have your character complain. Just stick in or near the party. I don’t care if you sleep in a different hotel or a separate camp. Be there in the important scenes.
Third, “Take it or leave it”. I’m not ashamed of myself for this one - I have told people, this is the game we’re playing. if you want to play this game, I want to have you. If you don’t want to play what we’re playing under the terms we’re all in agreement on, there’s the door, don’t let it hit you on the way out. It’s effective, but I don’t think it’s the most mature method in my arsenal because of the all-or-nothing nature.
Fourth is an open and frank discussion. Explain that the concept of the game is cooperative. Make sure you get buyin from everyone, not just the loner. Express the expectation I have of both players and characters for the game in play. Paranoia, for instance, has a very different set of expectations and goals than Shadowrun or Spirit of the Century / Dresden / Fate. I have GMed for a loner character in a Fate game who never showed up with the other players, but because the system is so narratively driven, they were helpful by setting up Aspects with free tags because the character could realistically be “doing his own thing” and still contribute. So I’ve learned to be open and clear with my goals and intentions. I don’t care if your character is going to be a pain - I care whether or not you as a player will contribute positively to everyone’s experience in a fair way.
The more we are clear about goals and intentions, and the more we can apply nuance and understanding to the situation, the better our games will be.
