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.
Hudson Carter
Show the players the consequences of letting the bad guys go. For example, have the players run into a bandit camp out in the wilderness. After the fight, there are a lot of surviving bandits that the PCs have captured. Now they have a few choices: - Kill them. - Try to move all the prisoners. Some prisoners will cause a distraction that lets other prisoners escape and continue their banditry. Then comes the problem of feeding everyone while taking them to the authorities. - Let them go. The banditry continues.
A while later the PCs come through a village near the bandit camp. If any bandits escaped, they find a village that has just fought off a bandit attack. The PCs arrive after the fighting is over, but before all the fires are out.
The dead are everywhere. It's easy to tell dead/dying villagers from dead bandits due to their clothing. Now pass a note to a player saying that he recognises one of the bandits as one that escaped/was let go. Then pass that note to a different player in regards to a different bandit corpse.
Now they come across a bandit that is still alive, though likely to slowly die if the PCs don't treat him. One who can still speak. One they all recognise. He laughs, then asks the PCs for mercy (try to echo something they said back at the bandit camp). Then some villagers come round a corner and start shouting that one is still alive. Now they have another choice: - Save his life. Which means protecting him from the villagers. Should they fight the villagers, they either wipe the village out or word gets spread that they are working with the bandits. - Kill him. - Leave him to the villagers. They burn him alive.
John Rogers
>Should they fight the villagers, they either wipe the village out or word gets spread that they are working with the bandits.
Actually, better idea: If they let the bandit survive, he talks about how they saved him to anyone who will listen. If they release him, that's other bandits who will gossip. If they hand him over to authorities, he tells the authorities everything.
Luis Hughes
my advice is stop giving a shit and let the guy have fun the way he wants to have fun. it's not your job to decide how he should play his character.
Jose Price
I usually try to play something different every game but usually it's a pretty boy of some kind.
With the exception of the 'by the books' Half-orc Barbarian I made a little while back. I had been told about the game literally hours before it took place and I didn't know anything about the world so I made something literally no GM in the world could object to.
Brayden Green
>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.
I dunno, if he does something sensible like taking them prisoner, disarming them, and dragging them into town, then you can have the authorities can do what they want.
Honestly, I think it would be kinda cool to have mass executions of all the bandits and cultists the party met in the dungeon. Including some fiery inquisitor type reading out charges, denouncing the accused, and praising the PCs' heroism in bringing them all to justice.
Eli Roberts
>bad people who probably deserve whatever's coming. That's what you think, and he thinks otherwise. What's the big deal? How is this any less legit than playing shitty utilitarians? How does his playing the same character every time ruin your games? If you are desperate for change try to get him into building variations on his character instead of prodding him to play something else entirely. Even if it's just a game, some people are sensitive to this kind of thing and you have to respect that. Pushing forced and supposedly mature and dark choices and consequences like wrote isn't a good thing to do either. Every Western RPG today does that and it's cringy and artificial as fuck. Unless your setting is supposed to be morally dark, not dark as in Dark Souls, don't push your players into acting in this or that way. Create consequences for their actions, but don't use it to railroad their morals. Now if the player was Steven Seagaling (always plays LITERALLY the same character, just with different names) that might actually be a problem, but that's not what's happening here.
Jason Anderson
Does he really have to murder though?
Tyler Hughes
> help, one of my players is having fun in a different way that I like to, what do!?!?!?!?! Take the dick out of your mouth and talk to him if it bothers you that much, but honestly there's nothing wrong with good-guy characters.
Honestly I'm quite tired of the opposite. Half the time my players actualized alignments are like:
Lawful Good = Neutral - Well Meaning Neutral Good = Chaotic - Good Chaotic Good = Fuck the police Lawful Neutral = Lawful Evil True Neutral = Fuck Everyone Else Chaotic Neutral = Fuck Everyone Else Lawful Evil = Neutral Evil Neutral Evil = Fuck Everyone Else Chaotic Evil = Fuck Everyone Else
Had a player once explain to me, "Well, he's technically Lawful Good, but like... if there's an orphanage, and there's a demon in that orphanage, that orphanage is burning." That is not paraphrasing, he said that word-for-word with a completely strait face. And I said to him, "That's like... True Neutral at best; complete disregard for the moral and legal implications of orphan-murder; more interested in making sure evil extrapolates die a.s.a.p." And he was like, "-nah, but like, he's still a good guy though." "...but he'll haplessly murder orphans to kill one evil being." -and then the dude just looked at me and said, "well... you know," in a tone that was like, "you know damn well what I mean," and I'm like, "No, I don't, please elaborate," and then he was just like, "He's a good guy, but he puts killing demons before everything else; even." "-even the well being of others?" ". . ." -and then he showed up to play with Lawful Good on his character sheet, and not two sessions in actually did actually set fire to an inn with the wizard and thief still inside because there was an unidentified monster in there and everyone else was outside.
I get how op's player could be annoying though, but only if the guy's like full preachy-fedora mode when he does it.
Wyatt Martinez
>two lines of text >>tl;dr I feel insulted
Matthew King
Sorry, could you shorten your post for me, it was two lines too long.
Kayden Wright
Those aren't exclusively Shonen protagonist traits.
Make him suffer for his ideals. Have one of the villains he spared come back and kill a major NPC that's important to him.
James Johnson
Find out what the character's breaking point and most strong moral views are
Prod at those, for example if they want to protect cute animals and kids have villains that do the opposite of that.
Put pressure on the choice and consequences depending on how they deal with those villains. Though don't have every single character that they spare backstab them because that's shitty.
Morally good characters don't mean morally perfect characters. I've played several that refuse to straight out kill people, but that doesn't mean that they haven't lost their temper or been forced into situations that they have to act against their nature. If characters don't have any moral compass or any cares or wants in the world, then honestly it can be pretty boring. Killing people when they don't need to be killed is a pretty basic moral code even in the case of enemy combatants and criminals. Don't look at him not killing as a problem, but as an opportunity to challenge their code and beliefs.
Joseph Carter
He captures them, brings them to lawful authorities and is invited to the hanging next morning. Observe his reaction.
Cameron Hughes
A related idea would be to have the local lawful authorities be either incompetent, corrupt or unable to act due to bureaucracy. Especially challenging if the person they're trying to bring to justice is irredeemably bad and likely to go straight back to doing bad things unless jailed or killed.
Isaiah Perry
Or do the cardboard prison thing. One time. Then he brings him in again and the captain of the guard says "Yep, that's the guy that escaped last time. You must've missed that the bounty didn't say 'dead or alive' this time." and shanks the escapist between the ribs.
Carter Gray
Naah, that's too much autofail. Execution demonstrates that his morals do not strictly apply to the world he's in.
Grayson Ramirez
This. I'd rather party with a guy who thinks that no one really "deserves" what happens to them and that they don't have the authority to decide who lives and who dies than some consequentialist edgelord who dismisses everything he does as being "for the greater good." I'd rather GM for the pacifist, too.
Adrian Wright
sounds like your friend has been playing too much fire emblem fates
All you have to do is show them that their actions have consequences. Have a character betray them, try to kill them, etc, to make them question their beliefs. It'll create character conflict, either them not wanting to spare anymore, or the party getting fed up with them allowing enemies to backstab them. Challenge your players a little bit.
Zachary Nelson
>"I'll never stop sparing. It's always someone's choice whether or not they want to betray me, but that's no reason to stop sparing them. Even if I know that they'll turn around and stab me in the back again, all they have to do is prove me wrong. Anyone can make a mistake, and anyone can see the error of their ways and find the resolve to lead a better life. I'll keep stopping them from doing bad things, but that doesn't mean I have the right to judge the value of someone's life."
The third option is that they'll start justicing even harder just to troll whatever edgy bullshit OP thinks constitutes a good campaign.
Brayden Davis
Yeah I have a similar problem with one of my players. The guy is super nice, but he's so nice he literally wouldn't hurt a fly, actually he wouldn't even hurt a freaking imaginary fly if he can help it which is the problem.
Irredeemable murder - goblins whose favorite snack is babes? "Let's capture them and bring them to legal justice!"
I think my next villain is just literally going to eat babes in front of the party and escape 100% of capture attempts via bullshit until they deal with it properly.
Maybe not literally that bad, this could be a good chance for a batman moment, where they properly arrest someone only to discover they done fucked up later as he escapes to go on a murder spree.
Angel Brown
Do you write the witcher series by chance? Because fuck you
Jonathan Cox
I have had a player who moralfags hard in game to the point where he gets to order the party on all their actions or he'll drag the game to a stop with "in character" arguments on why they can't do the option everyone else is fine with. If they do it the fucking player will try and rectify the situation and put the game at a stand still why he basically splits the party between him "repairing the situation" and the rest of the party wondering if they should go on/get slaughtered cause they're now a man down and no one but him wants that.
No killing, no duplicate means, no hasty generalizations, Hyper lawful good morals only. Final Palidization.
Robert Phillips
If he's constantly forcing the rest of the party to do something they don't want to do, they should just kick out his character. I'm all for capturing some villains alive, but not if it keeps stopping the game for everyone else
Juan Campbell
Take cues from how Edward Elric's morals get strained over his adventure. A lot of his good actions are done because of projection - he's trying to deliberately do good to counter or suppress the idea that his personal goals or past actions were done out of selfishness, gross negligence, and open flaunting of moral taboos. Whenever he's made to realize what he's running away from, or is tempted with some immoral chance to fulfill his personal goals, he sometimes gets close to breaking and giving in.
You're trying to get him to murder based on a checklist of things that should justify it, when he's coming from a place where that checklist is empty by default.
Luke Wilson
>it's cringy and artificial as fuck.
>Being noblebright pacifist that never kills ever >Doesn't even banish >Catches BBEP >BBEP escapes, numerous times. Slaughters entire towns in the process because fuck you . >BBEP isn't a person, actually is a plague with legs and laughter. And needs purged like the cancer it is.
Break your oath, 'noble warrior' and save mankind. Or damn it with your selfish convictions.
Luke Adams
>not befriending patches >not getting amazing deals shit players detected, you only kill NPCs at the end of the run
Brandon Russell
>Year of our lord 2016 >Still not realizing grimdark is the dumbest, cringiest shit ever
