How do you deal with people who are bordering on the edge of "That Guy...

How do you deal with people who are bordering on the edge of "That Guy?" Yesterday I had a guy flee from battle in the first session of our campaign because "That's what his character would do. This isn't his fight, he doesn't know these people and he has no reason to help." Even though he likes the setting, he says the system is too hard but he didn't even do anything besides run away. He's not a bad guy by any means, and he's a great player in my other game but he just completely checked out in the first session.

Any advice?

That's a bit dickish, but it's not That Guy material. In your particular case, I'd ask him why he chose to make a character who has no reason to help the other players in the first place.

What said. The player pact involves wanting to fight and to follow the adventure alongside the rest of the party. Tell your man to give his character a damn good reason to make that fight his.

I'm assuming it was a fight involving other party members. Is it possible you just didn't provide any motivation? Did they work out backstories for how characters know each other, or did you provide any reason for them to be working together? Did you put them in a situation where fighting was the only and obvious answer? Sometimes running away, diplomacy, sneakiness, etc. are viable alternatives.

If it wasn't a fight with the rest of the party (and they just joined in), did you give him any reason to care about the NPC's involved?

A group of thugs almost killed a mother and her child in an botched car bomb. He was outside smoking a cigarette and got knocked back by the explosion while the thugs stormed inside waving shotguns around and demanding the woman show herself. If that's not a call to action I don't know what is. And he just ran away.

I had to have this talk with my group a while back. They each made great characters, with backstories and goals.

None of those goals was to adventure. Which meant I was supposed to come up with a personalized mini-quest for each person to get them into the party, and want to leave their bakery/blacksmith shop/whatever they were doing.

What they made were very well thought out NPCs. As part of a group contract, everyone needs to make a hero, someone who, even if they are the baker's son, yearns for adventure, and won't shy from it like 99% of people, because they're goddamn adventurers.

And because it's going to come up, the reluctant hero certainly works, but as much as the character is uncertain about lots of actions, they always go with the party. Think Bilbo. He didn't want to do a lot of what was asked, but he did, and had a great character arc come from it, turning him into a proper hero by the end.

Tell him to make a character who will actually be involved in the campaign, or to quit and stop wasting your time.

It's important to communicate with your players as a GM, to tell them about the campaign, what to expect in terms of theme, tone and focus. Players, in turn, should make characters who are appropriate to that premise.

Okay in a lot of fairness "running away from the car bomb" is a completely human reaction. I can say with absolute certainty most of us would do exactly that. The only people who would stick around are those rubbernecking creeps pulling out their phones to film it and off-duty firefighters.

That said, I question the integrity of any player who wouldn't run towards something like that. This is why it's always best to have every character already know at least one other party member.

Playing a reluctant hero takes a lot of skill on the players part, to keep it as a relevant character trait without them just being an annoying stick in the mud who doesn't get to be involved when something interesting or fun happens. I've seen it done well a few times, and done poorly many, many more.

Assuming you're playing Shadowrun, you're running food fight? It needs to be clear to the players that "hey, this is the start of the adventure. You're welcome to do whatever your character would do, but if that is to run away, they're not going to be where the story begins, and probably won't come back. After all, why would they? So either they stick around to do a good deed (or rob the thugs of their gear/loot the Stuffer Shack after/protect one of the other PCs they have a relationship with/whatever), or they roll up a new character for the PCs to meet and bring into their group of mercenaries.

I don't think I can ever wrap my head around players who are only interested in playing out some banal domestic fantasy. Why the fuck are you playing a game about fighting dragons and skeleton knights and then turning it into some weird pursuit of a mundane ambition? Like what the fuck? Is it lack of imagination or are these people that desperate for some measure of success on their real lives they have to "commit" to running a small business in a game most likely meant to emulate action stories? There's like a million mobile games out there which scratch that itch so I don't know why you wanna drag others down into it.

I feel like if these guys wrote Star Wars, Luke would just tell Obi-wan he can't go to Alderaan and he's gotta get back to his space farm and tend his goddamn space crops. Then he goes and does just that, and the movie ends with Luke winning the blue ribbon for biggest space pumpkin.

Have you tried talking to him?

No! Why would he do that? The type of people that make posts like this are the same kind that hate any sort of confrontation with another person. It is much better to bitch about someone you know to strangers on the internet than it is to just talk to the person and see what is going on.

In this case I think the player is justified in running away if it is just some random woman and her child that he doesn't know. Unless his character is some lawful good hero the first thought is almost always going to be self preservation. Does the character have a weapon? How close was he to the car bomb when it exploded? If it was close enough to throw him back it should have been strong enough to disorient him. Do you expect every one of your players to help everyone they encounter? That can be as bad as characters that kill everyone they encounter.

Luke did tell Obi-wan that. They went back to his house and his family had been roasted so it was no longer an issue. Luke has also always wanted to leave but his family obligation was stronger.

Classic case of making the wrong character for a game he thought would flow differently. If he thought at all.
He'll have to make a new character or retcon the the current one's personality or someone's fun will be ruined.
It's hard but the only way.

t. a guy who did this all the time.

I was pretty clear that this was the introductory session and that, since my players are pretty well versed in DnD, this was the future version of "you all meet in a tavern." Two of them rolled with it, making an infiltrator elf obsessed with anime and a Jessica Jones style occult investigator who had a severe addiction to dick.

My That Guy, and I hesitate to even call him that, didn't know his character's name or how to play him, after agreeing to be the team's decker.

I did talk to him afterwards. He said he found the rules too confusing and just wanted to watch the story pan out. I might be able to accept that if he did anything else other than run away, but I'm just at a loss on how to reach him. A call to action isn't necessarily a call to heroism and in SR I don't expect it to be. I would have accepted wanting to bash ganger skulls in or even trying to rob the woman after "rescuing" her. I just wasn't expecting this level of apathy.

It's Shadowrun's fault. Not only is he playing a decker, the chunk of the book with the rules that could work as a cyber-crime deterrent, the book's basically sent him mixed messages about what kind of character he's supposed to be playing. Is it a bleeding heart hero type or a ruthless, true neutral mercenary? Just tell him to make a new character and give them decker support through an NPC.

I'm playing fairly fast and loose with the actual crunch of shadowrun, because there is an abysmal level of crunch. He seemed drawn to the idea of being a decker when I told him that in the Sixth World pretty much anything is hackable. I even helped him set up the Cyberdeck Aid app, which simplifies everything down to a single button press, but again, he didn't do anything but run away. I suppose I might be able to hold his hand on the next run and point out stuff for him to hack.

As for the character playing, that might be a bit harder. He mentioned something about wanting to look like Snake Plissken and smoking a ton, but I don't believe he put any more thought into it than that. That's why I came here, to get some advice on how to get him interested again.

STOP disempowering your players with railroad plots.

There's also the fact this kind of situation is a flawed introduction from the get go. You can't start a campaign with strangers witnessing an event they have no obligation to respond to unless it puts them in a situation where they have to cooperate.

The party already should have known each other before the bomb went off. While the guy was a dweeb for basically saying his character had no reason to be in the game, OP shouldn't have relied on meta knowledge to motivate characters.

Yeah but that's also Shadowrun's fault. Food Fight has been sold as THE starting scenario for decades. It's tradition to run it for a group's first outing. If you did a census of "the shadows", most runner teams met while buying snacks.

I don't know what those writers we're thinking then. Strangers witnessing a catastrophe and then teaming up to stop it really only works if you're basically playing a superhero game.

It was the first session. What would you have done to get them all together and thrust into the shadows besides just handwaving it as part of the backstory?

I think the best introduction to a campaign should be a call to action, a scenario that allows the main characters to rise above the rest of society and prove their worth, even in the shadows. Witnessing a car bombing and seeing some violent thugs about to kill a woman with a baby should be a pretty good kick in the ass. His reaction was to shrug, give up on learning the system, and run away. That's not what a main character does. Hell, that's not even what an amoral runner does.

What better way to join and bind a group together than with shared trauma and triumph? They weren't superheros, just normal people who stepped up in a crisis (and found themselves drawn into the shadows after realizing the girl they saved was the niece of a mob underboss.)

You can't rely on an amorphous desire for valor and heroism to unite a group for a game quite explicitly about playing a bunch of self-interested mercenary types. And no, "but they can loot the thugs" doesn't answer that because a smart crook isn't going to try roughing up a half dozen armed assholes while they're busy murdering people.

What I'm getting here is you're frustrated your character didn't play Batman.

Meh, I'd just say "okay, your character left the party and was never heard of again. roll a new one"

So what's the alternative? Have them already be runners before the game starts? I'm not just introducing them to the rules but also to the world. I'm just wondering if you think I could have done anything different to elicit something other than "My character doesn't care. I leave."

They're not as well versed in Shadowrun as they are in DnD. I helped them through character creation pretty heavily and they're still grasping the rules. Plus this dude is the only one in our DnD group who died and I'd feel like a dick having him make a new character.

Characters generally need some kind of personal motivation for getting involved with the story. A hero complex counts, but expecting this of every character is unreasonable. Especially in a cyberpunk game.

If you're looking for reasons the characters are where they are and doing what they're doing, just look at works of cyberpunk fiction. Generally the protagonists in these works are self-involved and disinterested in helping others. But they participate in the plot because a third party has some kind of leverage on them. Maybe they need money and don't care who gives it to them. Maybe they need a friend in a high place. Whatever it is, the first session should start with this already established it be about establishing it.

A car bomb like this is a crap shoot because it presents an obstacle the player can simply avoid rather than tackle. And there's no reason a Manlet computer hacker who's just looking for drugs or money would stick around unless he wants to film it and upload it to YouTube. You need to think about these things.

>Have them already be runners before the game starts?

Yes, basically. Or at least, the PCs should all know each other and have some sort of existing connection - they could be gang members or ex-Corporate employees laid off together.

Thank you for the advice. You're right, I should have thought more about the characters individually than just throwing them into a scenario and expecting them to stick together. The problem with this guy is that he didn't acutally have a backstory going, but I'll definitely help him out with that at the beginning of our next session.

It's funny that you mention the Youtube thing, because that's exactly what one of the players in Shadowrun Storytime did. He snuck out the back with the elf momma and watched the thugs get turned into chunky salsa by the street sammy then uploaded it to Veeky Forums.

That's another good idea. Hell, they could all be drinking at a bar when the same scenario happened, putting their lives in jeopardy as well.

As suggested have the players know each other as part of their back story.

For your guy and situation. Help him make up a back story and he can be the connection to the other characters.

Simple- just have him make a new character, since his old one left.

Slap him