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.
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”.
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For me, as a DM, real shit always happens on session 1, you swim together or fucking die.
That’s why it’s pretty common in Shadowrun to just have everyone be kidnapped and fitted with a bomb in their skull.
If their character doesn’t want to cooperate, you activate the player’s brain bomb.
That’s not common in Shadowrun… 30+ years playing and running that game, and I’ve never encountered it!
I’ve seen it once…it was used against a single player because he refused to play anything but loners who backstabbed immediately and it was mostly used to piss him off enough he quit the group.
He should have just been kicked out, sure. I think the dm just hated doing that which was cowardly. Buuut he was gone and that game was much more enjoyable!
One day I’ll play Shadowrun… I’m too lazy to learn it well enough to DM it.
What are we, some sort of Shadowrun?
DCC/MCC likes character funnels for similar reasons
My fix has always been: that’s fine! They go off on their own adventures. Now please roll a character that’s going to play the game we’re running here tonight.
I just don’t DM for people like that anymore.
Oh god I might when my kids and their friends are older though. This is why you gotta raise em right.
I recently tried to DM for my son and his friends. One of his friends insisted he wanted to be a DM. I tried to gently encourage him to allow me to DM for them, and he would have much more fun as a player. Nope, he insisted, and like a good DM, I let him discover for himself why he was wrong. It was fun to be a player character, and they all learned a lot about running a game, so wins all around.
That’s awesome!
I GM public games and games at conventions, so sometimes it still crops up. People don’t always make it readily apparent ahead of game time that they’re going to pull shenanigans like this.
That’s fair. I’m really picky with my games.
For my personal games I am as well.
“Make friends with gamers, don’t make gamers out of friends” is an old tabletop adage that took me a long time to really learn.
For public stuff the best that can usually be mustered are safety tools and clear guidelines. But (rarely, thankfully) some people are just there to sabotage.
Everybody’s gotta learn some time
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.
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.
No, Obi Wan and Luke found Han through contacts Obi Wan had at Mos Eisley having lived on Tatooine for years and gone to the trouble of maintaining underworld connections knowing he was on the run from the authorities, and they didn’t just rock up and say “Yo, we’re buds now,” they employed Han and Chewie to smuggle them somewhere, that being the job of a pair of smugglers.
He also offered him a ton of money!
“Ten thousand. All in advance.”
“Ten thousand! We could buy our own ship for that!”
…
“We can give you two thousand now… and fifteen when we reach Alderaan.”
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!
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.
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.
Wow that really is a fun fact!
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*
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.
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.
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
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.
I learned as a GM to set expectations.
“I don’t want to have to fight and force you in to making this game work, because even though I’m GMing, I’d like to enjoy myself too. You need to create a character that will want to stick around with the rest of the group. You don’t have to all get on, or have deep attachments, you just need a character that I won’t have to railroad”
I have found it productive to make part of the character creation prompt a motivation for the main plot. Like tell me your class and backstory and all that, and then also tell me why you want to be on this adventure
This is a great idea
100% this. Have a conversation about expectations before you begin. DnD is a little bit game, a little bit therapy. The DM isn’t your Unity Engine. Make sure everyone is on board for the same experience and you’ll be fine.
This is a good take. I remind players all the time that even though I’m GMing I’m a player too. I’m just playing a slightly different game. I’m here to have fun and enjoy myself, not babysit.
Lots of other good points already made, but I’ll add my own two cents.
When I run a game, I always require players to make characters together. No “go off and make a character in isolation”. That’s just a recipe for disaster. You can have some ideas already in mind, but nothing is canon until the whole group agrees.
Second, everyone needs to have buy-in to whatever the hook is. If the scenario is “you’re starting a courier business at the edge of civilization”, there are lots of good options. Guy on the run from the law. Lady studying local wild life. Intelligent, local, wildlife. Don’t play “guy who doesn’t want to be here and is a total killjoy”
Third, it’s better when characters have connections to each other. You can play the “we just met and we’re forming a relationship!” arc, but like “what if we play ourselves in a fantasy world??” it has been done.
Honestly, everyone should read Fate’s “Phase Trio” https://fate-srd.com/fate-core/phase-trio and the rest of character creation.
Biggest pet peeve with players. This is why, during session 0, I make players pre-establish a reason that they not only go along with the party and the planned campaign but also a reason why they trust at least two other characters.
I’ve made it a hard rule, “Your characters are at least familiar with each other. They’re not total strangers.” It just makes everything so much easier.
Best advice. Players start the game knowing how and why they are going to stick together.
I’m also inclined to put my thumb on the scale a little as DM and give the players a loose connection that they can build on and incorporate into their characters while building. BG3 did it really well - everyone has a tadpole in their head, y’all gonna be mindflayers if you leave the group.
I recently had players all start as fresh recruits in an organisation - they got to decide the organisation - where the higher-ups put them together. Previously I did a one shot at level 5 where players already had an adventuring group together 20 years before and were called back together for one last mission.
And the person who didn’t gets to default to being the loner outcast who doesn’t talk much, easy
How would they not? Session 0 we create characters together, anyone who doesn’t follow the previously stated rules can leave my table.
The entire point is to prevent the creation of “rando loner who just sits in a corner and sulks”.
One of the campaigns I play in is more of a West Marches or Adventurer’s League style with a rotating cast of players. There are… differening levels of effort.
Yea, I don’t DM those types of games.
I’ve played and DMed both. A West Marches campaign has been the right fit for some groups with tough schedules. That format can work really well when you have a larger world plan and story that different venn diagrams of groups slowly discover and have to post notes about to a group chat or Discord. Players remember and read about things from different sessions and piece together the story and world, then can decide on new missions and exploration in a real collaborative setting. Picture a tavern setting where they’re arguing about different plot hooks, missions, and tips, and start to switch from the selfish motivations of wanting cool loot to also wanting to uncover the story. It can be great if you lay the groundwork.
A few lazy players can disappear into the background, and they still have fun and want to hang out.
Picture a tavern setting where they’re arguing about different plot hooks, missions, and tips, and start to switch from the selfish motivations of wanting cool loot to also wanting to uncover the story.
Yea, this is exactly what I’m purposely trying to avoid with a Session 0. I, as the DM, list the plot hooks of the campaign I have prepared to run and players create characters around them that are guaranteed to be invested in the story as well as be cohesive with each other.
No arguing needed. If anyone wants to argue, they know where the door is.
