Have you ever struggled with the question: "Why would my player character continue to follow THIS PARTY around?"

>Character has no reason to follow the others after a few objectives together, despite them getting along well enough.
>Party up with one, simply because they're heading the same way + we're the closest of the bunch after some talks and combat related banter.
>The others are just fucking homeless and/or bored so they just follow me anyway and call me the leader.

Monsters and evildoers beware, here comes the 8 Int leader and his pack of aimless murderhobos.

I had my group figure this out a while back, they're all following the leader PC because:
>he saved my life so I owe him
>he's incompetent enough that I can easily make myself vital to this group
>he's one of the few people hiring who doesn't treat me worse for being a foreigner

The only time was when I made a pious reformed criminal type for Only War and it turned out half my squad were being pretty heretical regarding forbidden technology. Being the Operator it was down to me to drag that stuff around on tugs and (stolen) Valkyries.

It was less "Why follow these people around" and more "Why don't I just report these guys?"

Let the character retire and make a new one. You get through more character ideas that way. And it's fun to meet new characters and fold them into the mix. And if it's a crunchier system, it's fun to make a new character.

>follow

Problem detected. You need to lead where you want to go.

Most of the people I've played with would get assbusted if leadership was even mentioned. Any one of them that didn't complain loudly would just quietly undermine it by being an absolute retard.

RPG parties are held together by an invisible union worker and a lot of industrial glue.

Briefly.
The party charged into a trap, and nearly all died (everyone in the negatives), leaving my character to have a nearly-fatal shootout with a pirate captain, using the unconscious body of a party member as cover. She stuck around because she doesn't want her half-sister getting hurt.

Currently two of the other members of my party have my PC's younger brother locked up in a dungeon with orders to have him killed if I don't cooperate with their plans, so he doesn't have much of a choice.

What sort of fucked-up campaign are you playing in, man?

A few times, though I've usually either come up with an excuse, or had a talk with the gm on how to remedy it.
I've only retired a character once, and that was after a near-TPK left him the only member of the original crew.

I've been wondering that about why my party follows /mydude/ around recently, and here's my best guess:
Dragonborn sorceror:
>My wizard is more or less the only friend he's got
>He's in pretty deep shit with his folks at the moment, so he can't just go home
>There's currently a bunch of interesting magical R&D going on in my city, so he may as well stick around and observe that.
Goliath bardbarian:
>Technically, I'm his boss (not that he really cares)
>I've let him establish a shrine to his god in my city, so he may as well stick around to make sure that's going well
>Wherever we go, there's usually trouble. And by trouble, I mean fighting. And by fighting, I mean stuff that the god of war is a big fan of.
Avariel fighter/sorc:
>The majority of the surviving avariel population are in my city, so he's got a vested interest in making sure they're ok
>He needs the rest of us to deal with the reason the rest of the avariel population is dead (city fell out of the sky and turned into a fuckoff enormous portal to the Shadowfell)
Human(changeling) paladin:
>Keeping an eye on the dragonborn
>Needs our help to close the giant shadowfell portal spewing out zombies in the north
>Honestly I'm not quite sure

>Made character with shit social stats
>They are the only one who isn't a murderhobo, an edgy loner, or is generally competent or know how to roleplay, so they are the leader
I hate it when this happens.

I have. I have also had characters just leave the party because they were either sick of them, or didn't feel safe with them, or both.

During session 0, I have everyone write 3-4 sentences about their first adventure on a 3x5 card. Then they pass it off to the player on their left and that player writes a sentence how their character helped them during a different adventure.

Before session 0 I will also have a simple plot hook created to pull them into the game.
(usually based on their background, class, etc)

After that, it's up to every single individual in the party to figure it out, and if they can't and want to do things by themselves, I usually won't invite that person back to the game.

At one point I was struggling to think of a reason my character was with the party. He liked the Barbarian enough, but the Rogue was a bitch and the Warlock was an asshole.
I eventually retired him when the Warlock used magic to start looking into his mind because my character had secrets he didn't wanna talk about, and the Warlock thought that was unacceptable. (Note that said Warlock was previously harbouring the Spiritual Manifestation of Sapient Evil in his body and didn't tell us about it, but me having my own little secret was unacceptable).
So I had my character's bear beat the shit out of him while the Barbarian tried to hold me back, upon beating him unconscious I worked out a plan with the DM and had him go to seek out his own goals with the intention of bringing him hack at some point.

I ask myself that question every time we play.

The groups de-facto leaders keep insisting, in character and out, that everything we've been doing has been for a good cause and that they're the good guys, but all we've done for five sessions now is run around the countryside murdering some people who found out we had the local baron killed and replaced with a changeling so we could manipulate local politics in the area.

My character would object but, like I said, last time I tried to get in the way of the group's schemes the other players got my character's little brother tossed in jail on contraband charges and keep saying they'll have him executed if I don't play along so I don't have many options.

I just wanted to be a hero

Die valiantly.

Hell yeah. My character in the magical girl game I'm playing is quite literally being dragged along against their will.

Do the right thing, user. A hero stands up for what he believes is right.

Call the paladins, call the king, do whatever the fuck you have to.

But kill those fuckers, even if it takes you an entire campaign's worth of work behind the scenes.

totally. last D&D game I was in we all arrived separately in town just as the place was overtaken by zombies. My character, a cleric, saw Patient Zero (a little girl about the age of 5). I hit her with a turn undead, she screamed in pain. The party attacked me.

I said, "screw you guys, I'm going home."
Fighter ran over to pick up the little girl, she bit him. He laughed it off, made a Fort Save. Wasn't turned but was a carrier. Went and banged a couple whores. They failed their saves and turned. They then infected most of the town.

I haven't asked that question in regards to myself, but other players' characters. So in a pathfinder campaign I played (my very first, actually), I made an alchemist, and by process of elimination, I became the leader. The barbarian was out first, because he's a barbarian (not the sharpest bowling ball in the shed, his words, not mine). The fighter was just following his brother, the cleric, around, and the cleric was too busy drinking wine most of the time. Our wizard was an old man who fuzzed over friendship and would recruit all sorts of fucked up shit, and might be somewhat gay. And lastly, the magus-multiclassed-with-rogue(s) is really just being a dick for no reason. In the first session, we go to the adventurers guild and get a job to investigate the sewers because children from an orphanage is disappearing. The magus/rogue thought it was a good idea to ho into the sewers alone. At night. By climbing down a toilet at the inn where we were sleeping. Earlier that day he had messed with a street performer and got in trouble with the townguard. Literally Session 1 of our first campaign, and he was doing all sorts of dumb fucking shit. Oh, and he was a kitsune as well. Don't know why I felt the need to bring that up, I actually really like the kitsune in pathfinder. Magical tails are cool. Anyway, we're woken up by the fighter, I think, who had been tasked with keeping an eye on the rogue so he didn't do dumb shit like this. Obviously following him to the toilet was a good enough excuse, would be kind of awkward if he did. So the magus/rouge drops his bag down the shitter (old style toilet, obviously) and then climbs down himself. The reason? He wanted to find the thieves'/assassins's guild. In session 1. This is the guy I kept asking myself why we were still friends. The fighter discovers that his charge is gone and wakes the rest of us up. Since splitting the party is the worst thing you can do, we decided to go and find the damn magus/rouge.
>cont.

So we go find an accessible manhole, and marvel at the fine stonework in the sewers. After walking for a while we get attacked by a bunch a tiny doglike creatures. One screams and breaks all non-magical glass in the area, including my lantern. One stabs the cleric and gives him filthfever. Fucking hell. We manage to drive them off. Later we reunited with the magus/rogue, and everybody gave him shit for doing the exact thing we told him not to do! And it didn't stop there, oh no. The thing in the sewers was an utjog (is that how you pronounce it?), and we killed it. I did the finishing explosion, and the rogue and cleric was caught in the blast. Later, we join a caravan, and after travelling all day, we decide to sleep in a ruin. Now, the rogue has the BRILLIANT idea that he wants to mess with me for some reason, so he Beast Speeches with some mice, but due to a bad roll, they misunderstand him. So instead of attacking me, they climb into the caravan and eat the food we have. The mice are discovered and everybody wakes up and starts working together to get rid of the mice. Except the rogue, who realized how deep in shit he was when the temp-druid we had with us started talking to the mice, and promptly hid in his sleeping roll, pretending to be asleep. Me and the druid deducted someone had ordered the mice to attack, and with the caravan captain in tow, we followed themice to the perp. "That's him, that's him!" they squeeked, pointing at the rogue. So I began reprimanding him for risking our job, and the rogue thought it was a good idea AGAIN to attack me. I repeat, he thought it was a GOOD idea to ATTACK ME, right in front of both the druid and the caravan captain. At this point, the barbarian barrels over the little shit and ties him up, a la that guy from Asterix who is always tied up and gagged at the end. The caravan captain berates us, telling us to keep the little shit in check. Meanwhile, the cleric purifies the food to the best of his abilities.

Because then the game doesn't work

Learn to use the Enter key. Jesus Christ this post is impossible to read.

It's fine, you pansy. You're as bad as the assholes who whine about "reddit spacing". Nobody is required to cater to you.

Not personally, my group doesn't tend to make hardcore assholes

I agree that he shouldn't bitch but Jesus that is impossible to read

Never.
Even if playing a lone wolf character i'll make up a reason, ooc and, if necessary, with the gm help, about why i have to be in this group.

Ttrpgs aren't solo games, if your not able to squeeze your character concept with this idea then maybe is better for you to stick with character concepts that adhere with a group to begin with

If you're the kind of guy who offsets your groups mojo by making a "muh serious roleplay" character while the rest of your crew is contempt with fucking around, just quit. If you're constantly at arms with the rest of your group, THEY aren't that guy, you are

So we finish our caravan job, and return. But on the last night, just before returning back to the guild, we are on the road, and hear strange noises in the small gathering of trees just off the road. We send the rogue ahead of us to scout, since that's his fucking job. So through a short series og bad rolls, he ends up getting mauled and killed by a bunch of zombies. Yeah. Me, the barbarian and the cleric swiftly dispose of the zombies, but we couldn't save his life. So we loot him and bury his body, and never look back. That was the rogue player's FIRST of THREE characters in that campaign, and they were all magus multiclassed with rogue, because he has such a friggin' boner for magus. I can't understand why, but whatever. Edgy fucker. I have some faults of my own, but I don't turn on my fellow players as a PRANK. But that campaign was split up now, due to so many players missing. Doesn't really matter, I'm in a superfun L5R campaign right now. Although that one has its own fair share of trouble. Fucking scorpions, man...

It's the little bugger above the right shift key. Enter. Or if you have an old school keyboard, Return.

Dubs speak the truth.

In my experience it's bad GMs, not bad players, who turn games into boring murderhobo fests. This is why when I start a new game I spend the first half hour or so running different players through some kind of prologue. Once they're all familiar with each other they get a shared objective, and teamwork develops organically.

>6.84 MB
When was the file size limit increased from 4MB?

Of course.

This usually comes from a very simple situation: conflict between nominal starting party vs actual party.
To elaborate: let's assume you start with a party of - going by their backtories and all - noble knights in shining armour. But as the game unravels, you realise there is just only one person that roleplays a genuinely good person with strong moral conduct and personal rules, while everyone else is a thieving opportunist and "martial pacifist".
This sooner or later leads to situation where people made characters that seemingly fitted starting party, but have zero place in the actual party few scenarios in, as they literally have nothing to do with other PCs.

Sure. I talk it over with the GM and unless we figure out a way to give the character a reason to stick with the party the character will simply abandon them. It's easy to make another character.

Two of the three party members both REALLY want the spaceship they found and got working. If either side were to try to leave it would required abandoning the ship with the other person, and neither of them are willing to "cheat" this little game and just steal the ship (yet, so far only one of the two can even fly the ship)

After almost a year of constant failed attempts at treasure hunting and solo-archeology to find out tidbits of history and find artifacts culminated in desperation that caused him to almost drown in a river, what started as repaying a favour for fishing him out before he died has almost turned into hero worship as the cleric has brought the wizard back from near-death 3-4 times in the 3-ish weeks they've known each other.

Write it once again. This time with sense and proper punctuation.

My nosferatu antitribu has been quite a zealot for the sabbath. He had to constantly show how much he despised his Camarilla relations. Then the bishop claimed that we were to stay in our town while a few miles away the war had gotten frontal. I was unwilling to follow a cowardly leader and just walked out on them:
"I'm going to the front line. Come join me if you ain't mere faggots!"

Once, and I wasn't the only one in that group who asked that question. The answer, unfortunately, was "because the GM will kill the campaign if we don't play along."
>Myself and another player's character were both former crewmembers on a starship that got destroyed who got recruited by another group of "adventurers" with their own starship.
Said other group, almost immediately after recruiting us, follow a plot hook that leads to them acting like retards and walking headlong into an obvious trap, leaving us behind(myself to watch the ship while I worked on a rocket bike, my comrade because he was off getting gear that would've HELPED in the investigation the group was doing and retards were impatient).
So cue the two of us, talking in-character about possibly taking our new ship (they left the keys with me, and the two of us could run a ship that small no prob) and leaving, since we had no real ties to those guys yet. My crewmate looks at the GM and asks if this will kill the campaign, the GM answers in the affirmative, and says that if we want to continue the campaign, we'll have to walk into an OBVIOUS TRAP, and lose ALL our starting gear, wealth, and probably the starship (GM had an "it's me vs. the players" mentality, and took it way too far usually) to continue the campaign.
So, after about twenty minutes of deliberating, we decide to do something our characters both would NEVER do, and walk right into the trap. Cue us losing everything, and getting thrown into a "game reserve" as the rare game.
I was pretty mad.

And I got even more mad when we never got a third session of that game because the GM just got bored and decided to try running a different game with the same group. That one also ended in less than five sessions because of the GM abandoning it to play tabletop wargames.

For my current dude, at first it was convenient and he liked the guys. But by now? Fuck most of them, he's there because of his friend the paladin. They are the two survivors from the start, everyone else comes and goes. The thief left, the sage died, the barbarian left, the ranger died, the Druid was only ever with them due to circumstances, and the thri-keen monk got teleported out of their power to find.

But these two? These two trudge on without them. They'll find more allies in the future, but for now they have a cult to destroy, and a devil lord who wants revenge on the two of them personally, and they just climbed an Everest-type mountain pass to get the drop on the cult on the move, before they reach a city of wizards that always moves from place to place. They battled avalanches, white dragons, ghosts, the cold, and sheer ice cliffs to do it. But the two of them, together, are finally friends, forged in fire and ice, and would back each other up in anything.

Only once, when I made a harsh survivalist guy who was only in it for himself in the end. By the point the party was getting into too much trouble and his coin was running out, I was legitimately out of any ideas as to why he wouldn't just leave this futile endeavor and go for greener pastures.
I usually make more easygoing characters.

>create edgy loner character out for revenge, who didn't reveal any of his motivations until the climax of the campaign
>incidentally become face and moral compass for party of wanted criminals
>when asked in-character why they were following me into the BBEG's land of almost certain death, the group answer was "user here is a real stand-up guy, so if he needs to kill a man I'd bet it's right deserved."

Yeah, they tend to leave and I then reroll an new character

No because like any sensible group we figure that shit out at character creation.

Often because of how many terribly retarded roleplayers exist out there. There is a clear divide between the bad and the good that the later are aware of and the former are not. An unspoken understanding that THEY are the real party, and that their characters essentially go about the game functionally ignoring the retard characters until their players catch on, try to cause a disturbance to garner attention, and everyone has to pretend to care about them for a character arc or something until they shut up.

No because I build my characters with a reason to go adventuring with these people in mind.

Like who the fuck doesnt do this? Why would you show up to a D&D game with a character who has no reason to go on adventures.

What's hard to read about that? Are you both challenged? Or am I reading into thing too much?
hehehehehehe

Once, where the Character was the Maester (it was a loosely GOT inspired game) of a displaced Noble.
The only problem was that by the time the loyalty was worn out he was a drug addicted cripple, so there wasn't anything he could do about it.

But aside from i never had a problem with it. I often deliberately make characters who don't have problems following a strong leader, especially if i am playing with people who like to play that one. Not to say that my characters are doormats, but mostly consensus oriented.

Not with any characters i am playing right now.
In Shadowrun we are all essentially just hired contractors.
In another game we are all part of the same slaver gang.
And in another game my character saw himself as the leader and the others as his lackeys (even though he was just the financier who the others humored).

Plenty of times.

But then I just roll a new character that better fits the party, or I politely bow out of the game entirely.