[D&D 4E] Basic Understanding Of Roleplaying This Character
Big J Money:
This one will be quick. I was the DM in our D&D Adventure last week; we're "running through" the first published adventure to get acclimated with the system and decide if we want to make the effort to take 4E farther in some direction afterward.
So the characters are in a tomb and one of them remains back near the entrance, refusing to get near the elaborate coffin or assist the other characters in opening it with the priest to see what can be discovered. As the tomb is opened, the lid shatters and the ghost of the dead Lord appears to challenge the characters' motives for entering the keep. It so happens that the ghost is bent on destroying any he suspects have come to remove the wards he protected years ago, but with enough convincing can be led to see that maybe those seeking entry are here to preserve and protect the sanctity of the place. One of the qualities he was looking for in such a group of heroes was a toughness and determination. Since this player's character had chosen his character to be skilled in being intimidating, I figured it would come across as a well-suited encounter if the ghost sought some kind of approval of that character's gritty resilience. Game terms, this meant the player rolled an intimidate check as their character was confronted with a verbal challenge from the ghost and acted out or said some words that could be seen as suitably tough and intimidating. If it sounded good to me, I'd grant a bonus to the roll.
He instead decided to be humble and give the answer, "Well, I'll do my best, but I'm not sure exactly what I'm capable of." when asked would he press on against the darkness when all hope is lost and all his companions have forsaken him. I still asked for an Intimidate skill roll since that was what the ghost was looking for, but I decided to simply give no bonus since the answer was not a convincingly appropriate one. (I was tempted to give a penalty but the game mechanics didn't call for them in this case; though I might start house-ruling if I run similar encounters in the future.) Now, this is what I'm confused about. After the session he mentioned this and mentioned that he felt as if the group was not understanding how he "was playing his character correctly" and that they were pressuring him to play his character differently. I'm noticing this happens with this player every session. Each session he feels the need to defend his choice of play from one or more other players whenever they make alternate suggestions about things his character might consider doing. This seems to be a very big deal to this player because he seems to get frustrated and maybe a little stressed about it. It's as if his character and all his future decisions are already mapped out in his head and to alter from that course would be to upset his game experience; the different situations that might arise be damned. So, I'm left with this weird feeling that one of the players created a persona that he understands exclusively, and to him playing the game is the simple act of throwing that unchangeable persona against the different challenges and scenarios I present to the group. I'm left feeling like this is somewhat selfish and hard to please.
So this is what I really want to know. Are there some things I am unaware of that I can do to run my game better for a player like this? He said to me later that he had actually already decided his character would have a personality quirk of being particularly unsettled about the idea of upsetting graveyards, although he never told me or any of the other players this when we started playing. If I had known that, maybe I could have altered the situation, expecting that his character would not have wanted to participate directly with an undead personality. Maybe I could have made a comical situation out of it, or maybe I could have given him a shot to gain a reward for overcoming his fears with some very obvious potential plot-line prodding. Otherwise, I'm stumped as to how I can help this guy contribute to the group, beyond simply trying to escape into this character he's created. Does this make sense, or am I being silly? Also, if he is going to continue to create this character quirks and not tell me, how can I hope to devise (or modify) role playing encounters that are engaging for his character?
To be fair, my DMing play style (with this published adventure) has also incorporated some pretty unmutable elements. I tend to throw situations and encounters at the players with little modification unless absolutely required. When the ghost wanted to size up the most fearsome member of the adventuring party and found him to be humble, I decided to stick with my guns and have the ghost be disappointed. I could have allowed the player to make some different kind of check, and played the ghost impressed and made up some line about the quiet, calm reserve of a pure and steady heart. But I didn't. I had planned for this encounter to require an Intimidation skill check and I used that. (In previous sessions I had been more direct about what skill checks would be required to succeed at something, but the player's seemed to not like it. I get the sense that being too open harms some of what they would call (yikes) immersion. It's like it's better somehow when I don't directly explain that the ghostly Lord wants to see an intimidating and fearsome hero among them.)
Thanks,
-- John M.
(BTB, these portions of play account for about 25%-33% of our game. The rest is minatures based combat and puzzle solving which everyone seems to work together very enjoyably on.)
gsoylent:
To me, it sounds like it was just a poorly written scenario.
Well the way I see it is. If the GM sets me, the player, a problem and also tell me how I should solve it, I start think why does the GM even need me. He can just roll the dice for me and I can go and watch Futurama reruns this way we both win!
The fun for a player like me is not just rolling d20s on demand, a robot can do that. What is fun for me as player is to be able to express myself creatively and do things I find interesting and feel true to my character and the current situation.
In the specifc case you present, I happen to think that humble is a perfectly natural and genre appropriate reaction to seeing the ghost of a lord. In thefantaasy mindset, you are meant to respect the dead and you are meant to respect nobility. Unless there was some other clue earlier in the scenario on how to approach this encounter, it should be up to the players to decide how to solve it.
As a GM I would have thought your best bet is to ignore what scenario says and go with the moment. Respond to what the players are actually doing now and not to what was written and months and months ago by some guy. The scenario writer isn't there with you, he doesn't know your players.
Ron Edwards:
Hello,
I suggest that the key lies in this sentence of yours:
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I figured it would come across as a well-suited encounter if the ghost sought some kind of approval of that character's gritty resilience. Game terms, this meant the player rolled an intimidate check as their character was confronted with a verbal challenge from the ghost and acted out or said some words that could be seen as suitably tough and intimidating. If it sounded good to me, I'd grant a bonus to the roll.
I am going to paraphrase this: "The players will enjoy this most if one of them does exactly what I want." You basically played the scenario in your head before play, and decided that it would be successful only if specific things happened. And by specific things, you meant that a given player would have his character behave and say particular things. Futhermore, although in the fiction the characters are being presented with a choice and some possible danger, in reality you had no intention whatsoever of this encounter going in any direction except for this particular way.
Quote
... with enough convincing can be led to see that maybe those seeking entry are here to preserve and protect the sanctity of the place.
Again, that means that the players are supposed to try to convince the ghost they are here for decent purposes. And you even decided beforehand which character would respond in a particular way.
That's called railroading. I recognize it because I did it for years and years. And during all those years, I kept saying, "Why won't they play their characters well? Why don't they want a good story?" Only after far too long did I realize that by "play well," I meant, "do exactly what I anticipated and wanted them to do," and by "story," I meant, "every scene turns out exactly the way I want it to in order to lead to another scene I have in my notes."
It might make sense to talk about it in physical terms. The characters are faced with a spiked wall moving toward them. They'll be impaled and crushed. The GM has decided that if they all blast the wall with their strongest attacks, it'll be destroyed. But for some reason, one character starts digging a hole. A hole! In the floor!
The GM is flabbergasted. Doesn't the player know that if he only does the "right thing" that everything will be OK? Doesn't the player know that this encounter was actually an intermediary scene, to help them get to the really good fight planned for the next step? Doesn't the player know that the GM will be forced to kill his character and maybe all the rest if he doesn't help blast the wall? Why won't he play his character right?
I also must call out the vast majority of published adventures, particularly those which followed upon the publication of D&D3.0, as being the most unplayable railroading trash in role-playing history. By unplayable I do not mean cliched or not to my taste. I mean literally unplayable. No one wants their characters to be played by a GM. No one wants to have to play "guess what I'm thinking" in order for their characters to survive or merely to get to an important point. I would like to know which published adventure you're talking about, but if it's anything like the literally hundreds I've seen, every encounter is written something like:
"12 hyenas attack! After the characters deal with the hyenas ..."
All of which means the authors are being stupid and lazy. They aren't writing tools for actual use during play by real people. They're writing extremely poor fiction through the deceptive medium of talking as if it were being played. I don't blame you for being sucked in by that; it's exciting to read and imagine your players going through it, but upon reflection I hope you see that such readings completely disrespect the people you're playing with when real play comes along.
Fact: if you wanted the ghost befriend the characters and give them information, then have it befriend them and give them information as long as they aren't so stupid as to attack it outright. Don't make it contingent upon what a player will ("is supposed to" or "should obviously") do, and don't put in risks, like a possible fight with the ghost, that you as GM aren't willing to take.
Here's another point: in-fiction justifications or debate about any of this are not valid. What the ghost would or must do. What the character would or should do. The player's talk about "his character" is one symptom of this common error. We're really talking about the people, you, him, and the others. The question is whether you are able to fulfill the role of GM (DM in this case) without expectations of how the characters must react in order for play to proceed.
Best, Ron
Joel P. Shempert:
Hi, John!
I just wanted to add my experience to the pool in support of what Ron's saying. I went through a looooong struggle in my gaming life of feeling like if the other players would just play their characters right, our games could be so awesome. It's a recipe for bitterness and dissatisfaction.
My own bout of "why won't the player respond correctly?!" is documented in the thread, [Over the Edge] Killing the Dilemma, where I got miffed that a player didn't have exactly the same aesthetic judgment as me of the characters and situation I presented him with. My stance was especially poisonous because I was steeped in all kinds of new-fangled principles and techniques gleaned from around here, and thus feeling like I had "fixed" my bad habits and doing awesome gaming, and my dumb ol' dyed-in-the-wool gamer buddies were dragging their feet and ruining all my "scene framing" and "bangs" (by the way, what I used in this incident was a damn lousy Bang).
So this is not to dogpile you but to say, alongside Ron, "I was that guy." And maybe give you a picture of why being "that guy" wasn't too fun for me or those I played with. Note that this does NOT mean you can't have a personal aesthetic judgment of other players' input. See my current Cascadiapunk thread for a case where I played in a game where our aesthetic (and procedural) standards were not in accord, and we (wisely, I think) called it off. This is just to say that roleplaying with real shared input means definitionally opening yourself to the real risk that someone's input will be unsatisfying to someone.
I think it's worth the risk.
peace,
-Joel
Callan S.:
Hold on all. It's perfectly all right to frame a scene and then declare the required roll. Framing a scene doesn't automatically mean that system grants players a choice.
John, how did you describe entering the tomb? I'm wondering if you described it rather like a cut scene in a video game, where their all going in very cautiously, but as players, they just watch this. But then at the end one player declares they actually stay at the door and - here's the problem - trying to be a fluid GM, you go with that.
I'm thinking you had imagined the whole thing in advance, like a cut scene following directly into a skill roll. But then you accidentally gave the player a choice - a real choice. And things fell apart from there.
Did you want to give the player a choice, or did you give them one by accident?
If the set up was that they get a choice, then pay attention to what Ron and everyone else posted. If you gave a choice by accident, then it's as simple as that - it was accidentally given. Dang! In that case I'd ignore the other posts (sorry guys) because they appear to hinge on the idea the player must get a choice at this point, regardless of what the actual system is.
And on to your actual question: How to please this player?
Well, I think the question is, rather than you pleasing him, can what comes naturally to him without any real effort, please you? For example, say the situation was that some well liked NPC had been bitten by a monster and would suffer great scaring on the leg and a gimpy leg unless this players PC goes into a nearby crypt right now and gets some grave moss to tend the wound. Does he go?* I'd enjoy it if he went in. I'd enjoy it if he stayed out. Both are really interesting results to me. I'm guessing they would be interesting and pleasing to the player too. Would either result be interesting to you, or only the one that 'gets on with the story'? If it's the latter, you don't appear to match. Either you'd be forcing him to play your way, or you'd be forcing yourself to play his way. That's my rough, overall estimate. Take it with a grain of salt.
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