138
Let them sell it. Later, when they realize they needed it, let them troop back and buy it again. It can be a little mini quest: "figure out what happened to that sword we vendored".
I think your more general problem is that "the sword you need was coincidentally given to you as a reward for a fetch quest when you were low level" is already pretty hokey. So, ...
131
First, you're off the hook for "My Guy" syndrome - this is clearly a conflict the GM orchestrated. "My Guy" happens when a player decides to use his character to justify derailing the plot, but telling you that your lost love is working with the enemy means that this is the plot. You're being presented with a genuine challenge that hinges on your buy-in of ...
116
Remember that NPCs are people, not info dumps.
Your players are following what I'd call the video game model of NPC interaction. In a lot of RPG video games, the NPCs are infinitely patient and let you talk to them over and over, exploring all of their dialogue trees. Thus, the incentive for the player is to talk to them forever to get all of the possible ...
110
I want to preface my answer by saying that I understand where your impulse is coming from, that I respect it at least in part, and that I share that impulse. But with that preface, I must in good conscience push back against the frame of the question:
Consider Reining In Your Urge To Discourage
I respect and share your impulse, here. I really do.
...
105
"We can't talk to this player. So I don't know what to do."
I think you just took away most people's #1 answer.
If you can't talk to someone about issues, and you can't remove them from the game, then your choices are reduced to 1) Stay, or 2) Leave.
Stay. If the overall fun outweighs the annoying bits, then stay. Ignore the behavior as much as possible, ...
105
Ask your DM whether it's supposed to be viable to decipher it, or whether you were supposed to find the clues in game.
Given that they used a genuine (even if simple) cipher and a proper script hiding an actual message, it seems likely that they meant for cracking it in real life to be an option. But it might just be that they never expected anyone to ...
89
Like this
Life is too short to play games with poor sports.
If their leaving causes others to leave, don't worry, its a big wide world out there full of gamers who are not poor sports.
87
Your GM needs to understand that if you can’t see what’s ‘common sense’ it’s because they failed to explain the situation
Sometimes GM’s forget that they are the player’s sole window on the world. In the situation above if the gnoll guard posed no threat then the onus is on them to make that clear to you before they require you to respond. You can’t ...
87
Generally this "problem" tends to appear at the start of the game, where all the characters are new. My fix was to always refer to characters by their names, not pronouns. Once characters are well established, this ceases to be a problem.
So, as a GM, instead of saying:
What do you do?
I say:
What does Fred do?
This works for the player as well as ...
82
Talk to him, preferably as a group
This is really the only solution besides "Bail on the game." They key here is to be respectful, polite, and try to handle this like friends.
"Confront" is not the approach you are looking for here. "Discuss" would be better. You want to approach this from the standpoint of mutual improvement of the game, not of "You are a ...
81
Powerful drama requires powerful motivations. When everyone at the table agrees that they want a Horror game, they must craft their characters around these motivations. If they don't buy in, then you get the kind of power-fantasy where the heroes do the quite sensible thing of feeding Cthulhu a couple cases of dynamite and legging it. That isn't horror, that'...
answered Nov 13 '14 at 10:33
Brian Ballsun-Stanton
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79
There is no non-metagaming way...
...because class is a metagame construct - from the characters perspective, it doesn't exist. There is no good way to determine "class" as a hard fact for the character, because a particular set of abilities does not cleanly map to the character's identity and societal position in-world.
To put it a different way (using D&...
79
Your players are new to the game (and new to your game). Unless you've told them what to expect, how could they know what your game is like? Getting stuck investigating small details or trying to get their way in through the door could plausibly be what your game is about. I think you should be more active in leading the game towards the direction you'd like ...
77
There's no such thing as senseless violence, according to the one who commits it. Characters who kill or torture without at least an internal justification are crazy, not evil. You don't have a reason to kill people in the party or at random, so you don't. This doesn't make you nonevil.
Also remember that just because you're Evil doesn't mean you're a ...
77
It sounds like your fellow roleplayer just wants you to be verbally clear about what exactly you're doing mechanically without just pointing to a thing on your character sheet. It doesn't sound like their problem is that you're roleplaying at all—I'd be pretty surprised if they disliked flavourful descriptions of how people do things.
It's pretty easy to ...
72
What you're experiencing is a mismatch in what you all expect the actual game to be. As such, a boon will likely not make up for the confusion — at best it will be inexplicably ineffective at altering the players' choices, and at worst it will exacerbate the problem.
Different games, same name
You see roleplay and adventure in a believable world as the ...
71
I'm trained in conducting faith-based lessons for children focused on morality and virtues, in facilitating spiritual empowerment programs for junior youth, and in tutoring youth engaged in service-oriented community activities (this last one is my specialty). In both religious and non-religious contexts I've used role-playing as a forum for exploring ...
71
"My Guy" syndrome is often misused as a term. It's when following your idea of your character's persona creates insurmountable problems for the game, usually exacerbated by the GM being a weenie and not just saying "Well, since your PC moved to Montana while everyone else is fighting vampires in Chicago - you're going to have to roll a new character to get ...
67
I'd encourage you to read the Five Geek Social Fallacies essay (honestly it should be mandatory reading for all RPGers). It discusses five beliefs that cause geeks a lot of grief:
Ostracisers Are Evil
Friends Accept Me As I Am
Friendship Before All
Friendship Is Transitive
Friends Do Everything Together
All five of them are relevant to the situation you ...
66
You may be encountering My Guy Syndrome.
There is a fine line between role playing in depth and falling into "My Guy Syndrome" where the cooperative fun at the table between players is influenced in a negative way.
This may be what your DM is concerned about. Review what is at the link regarding the My Guy Syndrome and see if it applies to how the play ...
66
Honestly, it depends. If we're talking vague things like "he is/isn't charismatic", it would depend on his personality. For example, Johnny Bravo thinks he has high Charisma. He doesn't, but he was convinced he did because of how he saw himself. If you're playing an egocentric character, this may be the case for him as well. If your character is down-to-...
65
This is an important part of Dungeons & Dragons 3.5, and by extension, Pathfinder, history and community, and this site should include a copy of it.
The fallacy, in short, is that optimizing prevents roleplaying, or that roleplaying prevents optimization. It is called the Stormwind Fallacy after Tempest Stormwind, the WotC forum poster who first wrote ...
63
Don't tell him how to roleplay
Doing so would be a vast overstep in a social circle, as it would be telling someone how to play the game (taking control over the one thing they should have total control over).
As a GM, you can tell him his character's alignment is changing
While there is a lot of discussion and disagreement about alignment, almost ...
60
There are several ways to approach a drunk and disorderly player.
Standard drunk person handling techniques. Not really on topic for this site; Google it. Wheedle them, redirect them, you know, like you'd do with a kid. Go with it. "Roll the die, you get to take a shot!" Probably best if you're all drinking and just farting around. Some RPGs are called "...
60
When I've played (or joined in others playing) these quiet characters, the best way to run them is have an almost noir style internal monologue.
"I looked at the wall, and frowned. I wasn't certain, but there might be something behind it. Best not to mention it though, I'd look like a chump if I was wrong."
is much more interesting than.
"..."
...
answered Jun 27 '14 at 5:00
Brian Ballsun-Stanton
92.3k19 gold badges249 silver badges444 bronze badges
58
It depends on what you find to be fun
The Alexandrian has an interesting article on Meta-Knowledge and Meta-Skill, in the context of determining whether your fresh faced level 1 adventurer knows that trolls are vulnerable to fire. I recommend you read it in its entirely, but I will paraphrase.
Simply put, this sort of meta-knowledge is impossible to put "...
57
Players
The players are new and possibly overwhelmed by having too many options. Thankfully, this is easily solved by talking to them and reiterating that the game you play is more open world.
Make sure to ask the players what they would feel would be a good prompt for them to make new decisions.
You can encourage them to do just that by describing thing ...
56
Play more. Read more. Watch more. Expand your library of tropes. Once you have dozens of different innkeepers bouncing around in your head, your next innkeeper will probably be a collage of these tropes.
Another idea is to take a page from creative writing exercises. Take a bunch of adjectives - tall, fat, jolly, glum, one-eyed, nervous, red-haired, ...
56
Treat it as a contest
The players are effectively trying to use a level 0 cantrip to produce the same result as a higher level crowd control spell like Fear or Mass Suggestion. Obviously, this is game breaking.
We had an arcane trickster rogue in our group who tried this kind of thing a lot. The way our DM handled it was to treat it as a contest. The ...
55
Everyone in my gaming group has gone through this gaming evolution at some point. Finding the joy in playing a dumb character is all about getting into your character's mindspace (or lack there-of) and not taking yourself too seriously.
Make sure you are willing to make mistakes. Part of not being very bright is that your character can be confused, taken ...
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