"Why am I risking my life for these fuckers?"

It feels like there comes a cartoon point of any "you take quests and delve dungeons" style adventure where character motivations and personalities clash to such a point where the only reason they stay together is to avoid making someone at the table make a new character.

Do you guys have any strategies for making groups feel more cohesive? The party dynamic for almost every game I've ever played feels like it boiled down to "these guys all kill monsters for money and tolerate each other because the group needs an X"

Bump I guess

Stop having people drag together a bundle of faggots with no common background.

The two main solutions are "Alright, you (brought / are making) your characters? Good. Backstory time! You all know and trust each other. You're all close friends, and you've got a mission! Work together to come up with how you met, how you bonded, and what your group goal is." and "You're all part of ORGANIZATION. Work that into your backstories. "

They may not be good friends, they may even hate each others' guts, but in a line of work like theirs they absolutely have to learn to trust one another and work together.

I think the only point of contention would be their motivations: if they genuinely clash so badly that they can't all be fulfilled at once, then they might not be able to stick together. But otherwise they can make it work, and them disliking one another will become a humorous personality quirk rather than party-wrecking dysfunction.

>Do you guys have any strategies for making groups feel more cohesive?
Roleplay, proper planning and willingness of the players to stick together for the game's sake will go a long way in creating intertwining motivations. If the players have no motivation beyond "muh money", you're not creating an expansive enough world, or at the very least not a world with high enough stakes.

I learned this the hard way in a MythWeavers game I ran once. There were no motivations beyond "I want to become a knight" and I tried to run the game as a sandbox full of player choice. I effectively expected to not do my job and that everything would turn out fine, which it of course didn't. Now in a current campaign I'm running I think I learned my lesson: don't run it like a sandbox, run it like an "open world" vidya. I know it's a meme that Veeky Forums hates the term BBEG, but I feel that it really helps as a storytelling crutch. Introduce one early one, have him do bad shit, make it personal and make the PCS want to wreck his shit. Then have him disappear for whatever reason. Maybe he retreated to a backroom to discuss strategy with his officers for the rest of the campaign, maybe he stole some sacred tome in the first act of the story and spends most of the rest of it trying to decipher its language, maybe he goes on an "off-screen" rampage destroying entire nations that aren't directly part of the players' direct surroundings but still show that the stakes are high, whatever. Just don't force players to shit out their own motivations, tickle them into either developing pre-existing motivations or creating new ones.

Even the "greedy rogue who wants to hunt treasure to become rich" stereotype can become interesting if stimulated in a proper manner by a talented GM with a compelling story to tell.

>You all know and trust each other

Bitch you best not be telling my character what she thinks.

The DM has absolute authority over every other aspect of the game world, but the only power he has over my character sheet is making sure that the numbers add up correctly and making sure that my character doesn't violate any fundamental rules of his world ("when she was 12 she beat Drizzt in a swordfight, and when she was 13 she beat Larloch in a spell duel, and when she was 15 she fucked Mystra-as-a-bear for TWICE as long as Elminster did.")

Now the gentleman's agreement between player and DM is that the player will endeavor to make sure that his or her character will not be fundamentally disruptive to the game. The DM can encourage or endorse whatever he likes. But the powers of a DM ends at the edge of my character sheet, and the right of a player to come up with whatever backstory and personality he or she wants for his or her character SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED.

The powers not delegated to the Dungeon master by the Dungeon Master's Guide, nor prohibited by it to the Player's Handbook, are reserved to the Players respectively, and to their characters.

If the GM says "in this campaign you're all pirates," you make a pirate. If the GM says "in this campaign, you're all kobolds," you make a kobold.

There's really no difference between that and the GM saying "in this campaign you all already know each other and you've been on a few adventures before." Those are just the parameters of character design that have been laid out.

>Bitch you best not be telling my character what she thinks.

Go through a few dungeon crawls with this other guy, fight back to back against a bunch of goblins with him, delve into the horrifying old catacombs full of skeletons and ghosts, then tell me you still don't trust him.

No one's telling your character what she thinks but it'd have to be pretty unusual and downright irrational to still mistrust her companions after harrowing experiences such as those.

If watch this niggas back and he watches mine we can both get rich and then never have to see each other ever again

>the party puts aside their differences and becomes buds
>betrays gods and kings for the sake of ultimate friendship
>take on the entire world that wishes to tear them asunder
>weaponize friendship
>kill all who oppose you

A DM can drop your HP, your stats, ruin your equipment, turn them into a chicken, fundamentally reverse how they view morality, ethics.

The powers of the DM extend to every nonsentient object within their game. If the DM says you've all known and trusted each other, you bet your ass they have, and if you refuse to admit it as your character, well then your character is a loon with split personality disorder. Meh.

If the DM says your character thinks one thing or the next, through magical influence or otherwise, that is an infallible declaration, tough shit, is declaring how characters react to a given situation while the game is running shitty? Sure. At character creation, no. It's just the GM trying to get the game running smoothly. Get used to it.

Sure. But the DM doesn't get to make that call at the start of the game.

I disagree. If the DM says "this is a pirate campaign", there's a number of different angles that can still be gone into for each character. For example, Caribbean and Barbary pirates took a lot of slaves, so I might want my character to be a slave instead of a pirate. They also pressed otherwise honest people into service, usually doctors.

The DM can lay out that "this is a Caribbean campaign and you're all going to start on a pirate ship, I'd like for you to be pirates". But if I want to roll up a slave or pressed doctor instead, the DM should work to accommodate the character.

This only goes so far, of course, like I said - in the same Caribbean game, there's no real way to justify being, say, a Kshatriya warrior from India.

>weaponize friendship

Se nuovi amici vorrai incontrare,
prendi il volo, ascolta il cuore,
e d'ogni avventura potrai affrontare!

If a DM says Pirate Game and you say "No" you get told to get hoofing because the bus home is arriving soon. As a player, you do not get to fundamentally change the premise of the campaign because you want your character to be extra speshel and kewl.

>tfw you realise that Tyrone is the only one in the company who is gonna get the blonde Elvish pussy

why live?

Whats up with Sadness the Hun in the back?

>DM tells everyone to make pirate characters
>that faggot insists that a samurai fits into the setting just fine

And as a DM, you don't get to utterly dictate every aspect of my character's backstory. It's supposed to be a give-and-take relationship. What's wrong with playing a pressed doctor in a Caribbean pirate game?

Or perhaps an apprentice blacksmith just looking to get his romantic interest back? Or maybe a prisoner of the pirates who is being kept for reasons that are unknown to her?

Why do you hate Pirates of the Caribbean: the Curse of the Black Pearl?

>No one's telling your character what she thinks but it'd have to be pretty unusual and downright irrational to still mistrust her companions after harrowing experiences such as those.

Not really. It's entirely consistent for someone who's a shady person to watch your back and fight by your side purely for short term gain- I.E. "this guy's a faggot whom I'm gonna stab in the throat later, but for now we ain't getting out of this dungeon alive without his skills" etc

In fact it's kind of interesting that you'd even make that claim, considering the "mortal enemies band together against a common for" cliche is as old as time.

I played in a Dark Heresy campaign where my untouchable and another dude's payker tried to kill each other between every mission.

Except I did almost exactly the opposite of that when I pointed out that some characters make sense to be overruled, like a Kshatriya warrior from India. But in a Caribbean pirate game and even aboard a Caribbean pirate ship, there are a host of options beyond simply "pirate".

There's also, as a good example, Jayne Cobb from Firefly, who only works with Mal because he bought him right out from under his last employers, and has said to Mal's face that if someone comes along with a better offer then what he gets from Mal, Jayne will take it without regret.

Jayne Cobb: Chaotic Evil done right.

If the DM sets parameters, the players play within those parameters, or leave, no ifs ands or buts, the DM says no clerics are in the world? Fuck I guess nobodies playing clerics then. Tough. It. Out. If the DM defines literally every aspect of your character, he has every right to because he is the literal arbiter of the universe in game. You as a player have the right to tell him to see if he can taste the stick up his ass. Defining one or two minor characteristics is simply best practice for ensuring a cohesive start.

Because a pressed doctor does not have the authority of a crewmate, and when the pressed doctor acts in literally any way out of line or the pirates just get bored and take his head off. The player is going to get angry. Thus, everyone's pirates, everyone's on an even keeling.

Maybe because playing Orlando Bloom would be really fucking grating to other players after a while?

I love Pirates of the Caribbean, what I don't love would be trying to play Pirates of the Caribbean as a Dnd game. Because the premises of movies often don't translate well into D&D games.

This DM sounds like an inflexible asshole.

Firstly, pressed doctors were not typically killed. They were actually given full run of the ship and often received half-shares or even full shares and were treated as members of the crew. They might even have been allowed to leave the ship when it made port - since Caribbean pirates were a fairly tight-knit community and would only put in at pirate ports, pressed doctors didn't have any real means of escape. Everyone knew which ship they were stuck with. Even still, their time aboard a ship was more comparable to being stuck at a party surrounded by assholes you don't like than one of constant fear for their life, particularly since they had a valuable skill that most pirates didn't, so it wasn't in the pirates' interest to harm them.

Second, most were released after just a few months, although some turned out to like the pirate lifestyle and so became pirates themselves.

Third, Pirates of the Caribbean practically IS a D&D game already. We had a giant thread and everything.

Not him but nothing you've described counts as dictating every aspect of a character.

In the example, sure a GM can dictate that you must be a pirate- it's within a GM's purview to dictate what everyone IS- but a GM does not have the authority to dictate that your character must be a pirate and must also LIKE being a pirate (or dislike being a pirate, etc). The GM does not have the authority to tell you how your character FEELS about any given subject, including his allies.

Now can a GM force a player to have his character like his allies? Sure, and a police officer can force you at gunpoint to suck his dick- that doesn't mean that a cop has the authority or the right to do that though- he's just a shitty cop abusing his power. Similarly a GM can force your character to think X or like Y but that just means he's a low-quality GM who's abusing his power.

At which point you can use the player's rule zero, and walk away.

Make them family. Current group is all brothers, sure they bicker everyone once in a while, but they've always got each other's backs.

In case you can't tell, I'm that asshole player who often knows more about a given historical setting than the GM running the game. Although post-Roman Italian history (particularly Fascist Italy), the Golden Age of Caribbean Piracy, and the 1980s in general, are my specialties.

He can tell you that your character has to like being a pirate, because if the character doesn't like being a pirate, because unless he is an captured party, when he hits port he can simply stop being a pirate. Then the player can roll a new character that actually enjoys being a pirate. And if that's not the kind of game you want to play, walk. It makes everyone happier.

I typically run freeform games where there are no class or race restrictions, however what I'm saying is that if DM's want to restrict their players options, it is completely within their purview to do so if they want a snugger narrative.

Now we're breaking down into semantics, the problem doesn't lie specifically with the character of the slave-doctor, it lies with the fact that that is explicitly going outside the DM's parameters that they set because they have a specific idea in mind. "All pirates" If you as a player do not want to play under that parameter, and that parameter is fundamental to the game being played, you do not play. Rather than you forcing the DM to acquiesce to your desires.

So the player is always expected to give and the DM is not? That's some grade-A bullshit right there.

Begin the game with the group trapped/captured/lost together and the only way to survive is to work together.

I've done it a few times now. Works every single time, because usually you have the characters able to point to specific times they saved each others' lives.

The give on the behalf of the DM is a player saying to him "I want to play a cleric, how can I be a cleric and a pirate?" and the DM works it through with them even though he had not really imagined dedicated casters in his campaign, it doesn't break the fundamental premise of "no pirates". "I want to play with the noble background" definitely not pirate-like in any regard, but the DM can figure out a way to incorporate a noble into the pirate game.

"I do not want to be a pirate" is not the player asking the DM to give a little so that the game can be fun for that player. It's the player asking the DM to break the fundamental premise of their campaign.

Go fuck yourself.

Didn't work for me one time. Some fucko just decided to go his own way anyway and died.

Its not foolproof, is what I'm saying.

A scathing rebuttal, sir.

>It's the player asking the DM to break the fundamental premise of their campaign.

Except, as I've outlined, there's still numerous ways to make it work, and the DM is just being an intractable asshole because he wants every player to be a pirate without exception, because he isn't interested in collaborative storytelling, he just wants the players to dance to his whims.

Adding to this for example, I once put a group all waking up inside coffins without their memory in a crypt filled with undead and graverobbing kobolds. They felt compelled to work together to solve the mystery of why this happened.
More recently, I made an introductory adventure with the group being abducted by bug aliens and they had to fight to get out and back to their spaceship.

Helping each other in this way, even out of pure necessity, is literally the best way to justify them becoming friends and working together on other things later.

I fail to see how that person would have survived in any other scenario, so clearly the flaw is with the fool, not the introductory adventure's design.

>I fail to see how that person would have survived in any other scenario, so clearly the flaw is with the fool, not the introductory adventure's design.
Well it didn't keep the party together or alive, so by the nature of this thread it did, in fact, fail.

If such a minor thing as that makes a DM an intractable asshole then I'll leave that to your better judgement user. A DM may well be interested in collaborative storytelling, however the DM, and perhaps the other players. Want to play a story in which they are all pirates, that is simply the way the table wants to play, and if the player cannot fit in with the fundamental premise, then he doesn't play.

Usually, players sort of need to have a brain somewhat larger than a kumquat, so by your logic, no successful intro adventure design exists at all.

During character creation, the players work out why they are together. Don't waste time introducing them in-game, just get them to give everyone a little bit of background before you start.
Then you can jump straight to the action instead of spending an hour roleplaying the awkward tavern scene.

This. People who let their players make the PCs in a vacuum and then get upset when none of the PCs have anything in common are retards.

>Chaotic Evil
Then why did he feel bad about selling them out

Are you drunk?

>Shows up with a disruptive character.
>DM vetos it for that reason.

If I'm running a game where I want the players to work together, I'm going to ensure they make characters who can work together.

>You've all known eachother for years and have proven trustworthy to eachother on several occasions. Each backstory must include at least two instances where another PC earned your respect and trust, saved your life, got you out of real trouble, etc. As for who did what, we're drawing names out of a hat.
>You all have "thing" (race, guild, faction, politics, culture, city, religion, blood ties, or whatever fits for to ensure common motivation in the main campaign premise) in common.
>Plus whatever the constraints are for the campaign. Like, if it's supposed to be pre-firearms, no guns. If you're starting with more points or a higher level than default, then you tell them what they get to start.

Then they build whatever character they want within the provided constraints, and they have reasons to work together as well as reasons to be invested in the themes of the campaign.

When it comes to your in character actions, no.

When it comes to building characters that *fit* in his campaign, absolutely.

And if you don't like it you're welcome to dm your own game, and people have to cede to your boundaries because you're the GM.

DMing is a lot more work than building a PC and showing up.

If the DM is going to do that work, he gets to set the character concept and option boundaries wherever he wants them.

If he says his world lacks elves, you can't make an elven wizard.

If he says you guys are part of a xenophobic elven nation surrounded by enemies races who are, by necessity, killed on sight? No, you can't make a dwarf/orc/demonspawned human.

If his game is about an order of paladins, a cleric is probably fine, but a CE wizard is out.

This is just reasonable common sense shit. Come on man.

Because he wasn't CE at all. He was CN.

Through this whole thread of conversation the best I can tell is you want to brag about knowing more about pirate history than random people online. That seems to be "the goal"