143
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 ...
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, ...
124
As a DM, I've found that trying to distinguish characters solely by changing my voice doesn't work very well. It's not especially scalable, for one - if you have a full cast of NPCs, you're likely to run out of voices you're physically capable of doing long before you run out of NPCs who need voices. Plus, depending on the voices you have to do and the ...
118
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.
...
106
"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, ...
104
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 ...
94
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&...
92
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.
90
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 ...
answered May 2 '19 at 12:06
Sardathrion - against SE abuse
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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 ...
83
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
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 ...
78
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 ...
76
Roleplaying and roleplaying conflict are not My Guy Syndrome
"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 ...
answered Jun 8 '17 at 22:26
mxyzplk - SE stop being evil
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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
Tell them to stop
The characters are not picking on Bob’s character: the players are picking on Bob.
That’s called “bullying” and it’s not acceptable in any social setting.
Blaming bad player behavior on the character is called my guy syndrome and it is also unacceptable.
If Bob is using his character (which doesn’t actually exist remember) to annoy the ...
69
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 ...
69
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 ...
65
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-...
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 ...
63
Metagame
First, have a metagaming session between the dwarf player and the rest of the players.
Within that session, determine whether his desire to be sneaky and steal from his friends is upsetting the others. Make sure the players state their unhappiness with this, not you. Perhaps, maybe, the player will grasp that his play style is detracting from the ...
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
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59
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 "...
58
If that's the way they want to roleplay their character than why not let them? Why does it matter to you (or anyone else) if they don't "hate" their Favoured Enemy?
The PHB says:
you have significant experience studying, tracking, hunting, and even talking to a certain type of enemy (pg. 91).
Nothing in there says anything about them having to hate that ...
58
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 ...
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