Does anyone one here have trouble with players who always play the same character? One of my players, though he plays mechanically different characters, always ends up as a whiny angsty shonen-protagonist type do-gooder. Some of you fine fa/tg/uys complain on this board about incurable murderhobos. This guy is the opposite. Kidnappers, murderers, enemy soldiers, bandits - he's pretty much unwilling to kill any of them, ever, because of muh morals. Even though he knows he's just playing a character.
As a DM, I like to make some enemies understandable and worth sparing. But I also like making some that are just dyed-in-the-wool bad people who probably deserve whatever's coming.
Looking for advice on how to break players out of their ruts and stories about your own DM problems.
Dominic Collins
Tell him to stop playing the same character over and over.
Elijah Bennett
as a DM, your job is not to force the PC's to do anything you want. Its to build the adventure around them. Have the BBEG they captured escape and go into hiding as he amasses a new army type thing. recurring enemies add flavor to the story. >tl;dr use the PC's choices to your advantage instead of railroading them
Michael Walker
If you're my DM, I'm sorry mang.
But I still think casting hold person and then coup de grace said enemy is evil as fuck, the guy is already out of comission, just let me tie him up. both are full round actions if I'm not mistaken.
Zachary Sanchez
>As a DM, I like to make some enemies understandable and worth sparing. But I also like making some that are just dyed-in-the-wool bad people who probably deserve whatever's coming.
Remember that you aren't the players. They're different people, they don't have access to the same information as you, and they're not going to think like you do even if they had all the information you have. You might think that Thing X deserves to die, but everyone else around the table might not.
As always, if it's actually a problem that you cannot work around, just talk to the player about it. You're not going to fix a problem with a player by applying some half-arsed in-game conditioning.
Sebastian Butler
The problem is that I do talk to the player about it. Every time he makes a new character the other players try and prod him into playing less of a do gooder, as well as myself. He's been interested in doing it, it's just a matter of having a hard time following through. I'm just trying to figure out if there's a way to run a campaign to make the transition easier.
Connor Nelson
You could try being really obvious with a mean choice with serious personal gain perhaps
Dylan Robinson
Character spares an enemy?
Have the enemy spurn that kindness and backstab them.
Then beg for forgiveness.
Rinse, and repeat until you snuff out any last hints of optimism.
Elijah Green
>I'm sorry! I didn't mean it! We're friends now... right?
Ryan Peterson
They don't always play the same character, but I've got two players in my current group who are just boring motherfuckers.
They want to go off on their own, snark at everything, never have any real ambition, not cooperate and work with the group, and all around act like stupid assholes.
