What to Do When People Won't Upgrade Their Character?

>people who reject a straight-up mechanical upgrade to their character with no disadvantages, crunch-wise or fluff-wise, because of "muh character values"

Look, I get that it's your family sword, but this isn't just roleplaying, it's a role-playing GAME. You need to be upgrading your weapon, specially as a fighter, in order for your character to be viable.

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make the family sword stronger.

though if you're playing an edition where this gripe is coming up you should probably just ban fighter

Can't you just enchant the sword to a higher level?

And if you're playing 3.5 there is literally a feat for your weapon to grow with you if you want to do that.

>fpbp
Just have him pay a little extra and trash his magical weapon shit in order to fuse them with his dinky heirlook spork...

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>Your devotion and famile ties grow stronger, now the blade strikes with the force of your ancestors.
>On an successful attack of 2 or more degrees of success roll damage agian for the phantom sword that follows your blow.

So, let him upgrade the damn family sword

Or just let him keep going with that sword, unless the player goes out of their way to upgrade it they'll learn that they should have as they fall behind the party in damage

It's not a masterwork sword, so it can't take enchantments, and he refuses to change it in any way because of "muh ancestors"

Like nigga, if it's so normal of a sword, how has it survived 3 generations of fighting

DM Fiat it then.

>Look, I get that it's your family sword, but this isn't just roleplaying, it's a role-playing GAME.

Its also a ROLE-playing game. And the character's role seems to be that of a character with strong bonds to his family heirloom.

Isn't it OA that has stuff about unlocking dormant powers in a family heirloom? You might want Weapons of Legacy too.

>It's not a masterwork sword, so it can't take enchantments

yeah, you should definitely have banned Fighter.

dnd.arkalseif.info/classes/oriental-adventures--96/samurai/index.html
retcon it into a masterwork sword and use the ancestral daisho rules

OH HEY TURNS OUT IT WAS MASTERWORK ALL ALONG, YOU JUST HADN'T GOTTEN USED TO IT.

WHADDAYA KNOW ALL THAT FIGHTING HAS AWOKEN THE +2 ENCHANTMENT INSIDE IT.

>Like nigga, if it's so normal of a sword, how has it survived 3 generations of fighting
Swords are pretty durable, my dude. Also, stop adhering so strictly to "MUH RULES!" Most of it is fiddly minutiae that doesn't need to be there in the first place.

I mean, is that unreasonable? The spirit of the blade has awoken/deemed the fighter worthy, and is being more cooperative

It absolutely is not, there's like a million ways to do this and all of them are cool and good for roleplaying.

jesus christ, TRPGs are roleplaying games first, GAMES second. people like you are fucking ruining this medium.

That's the point. Just make (if you're the DM) or get your DM to make (if you're not) the sword to have latent magical powers that are being awakened as he fights with it.

>Father/previous wielder shares with you a dark secret
>He lost the real one at x place
>The one you wield is a convincing fake
>Go reclaim the true family sword
Done

Assuming the sword is mundane, have a hostile spell caster destroy it. Could even use it as a ludonarrative plot element where the fighter learns to becone emotionally independent from his familial identity.

you don't like your father, do you?

>Playing DnD
>Playing any game where this is an issue
C'mon senpai, you are better than this

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Sure I do, but I'm not going to risk my life and those of my friends just to continue to use a family heirloom as a weapon over superior alternatives.

While this is a good solution and all, it feels like a complete cop-out 'Oh, you won't take my upgrades? Okay, here, I upgraded the weapon you're using all the time'

It would be more interesting if the character used the weak weapon until the end so they could be proud of achieving so much with so little and you're taking that challenge away from them.
They wanted a challenge, they get a challenge.
That said, you could at least have that one high level fighter dude talk about how surprised he is that the fighter can still fight well with such a sword, and you can drop in mentions about how you'd have expected the sword to have broken by now yet it's still going. Heck, it might even be fun to put in some sort of magical creature or trap that fucks up powerful magical weapons and mostly ignores magic and the thing ends up in shock that some legendary high level fighter is still doing fine because he's using mundane equipment.

As long as it's not going to mechanically hurt the player, sure. If it's going to be a matter of him taking the enchantments/bonii or fall behind, then no, you need to upgrade the sword in a way the player will accept.

At least 5e d&d is designed so you're still functional even without magical items. It's harsher on martials because of the whole 'enemies with resistance to non-magical weapons' but honestly that should be cut from the game entirely anyway unless you're really worried about the party getting 100 peasants with longbows.

Not to mention fights shouldn't be all about raw damage, anyway.
That said, there are lower-tier magical items that can potentially double your damage output (and that's all they really do) because whoever designed the magical items is a fucking tard.

give the sword an experience bar, make it level up with him

Your player sounds fine, you sound like shit.
Anyways, introduce an elf, or some sage, or a distant family member. Give him a story about how the sword isn't actually in the state it's meant to be in due to generations of wear, and make restoring it part of reclaiming the legacy, where refusing to is less true to it than not.

>not going full Earthdawn

So, speaking as a DM who personally really likes the idea of not constantly swapping out equipment in favor of getting attached to a specific piece of gear, I don't see how you wouldn't instantly think "this is a great opportunity for some story stuff." If the dude has repeatedly kept the sword over objectively superior ones, in a world laced with magic that should have some serious meaning.

I'm personally fond of the idea of artifacts at least partly becoming powerful because of significant deeds done with them. If his family has a history of wielding it in battle, there is no good reason -not- to say that his god or the spirits of his ancestors honor his devotion to his family's tradition.

This is an OPPORTUNITY, dude. I would be absolutely giddy at this kind of thing. You can really get creative here. What's more, you could let it come as a surprise to the player - as he's making an attack, pause the action and describe the sensation of his sword gaining an ethereal quality, or lighting up along the edge with ghostly flames, or whatever. How are you even complaining about this?

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>They wanted [to attention whore], they get [to attention whore].

No.

Attention whoring is one thing, but you're role-playing a hero that does heroic things in these games. Having a flaw is perfectly acceptable, right down to obsessing over the family sword. Maybe this is their downfall, or maybe this is a really cool character point. All depends on whether or not the DM and Player are spergs about it.

>TRPGs are roleplaying games first
>roleplaying games first
>games first
I'm assuming you didn't think this through.

I'm assuming you can't read you trog

The coolest way to do it is to have the weapon become magical by the deeds its done, the enemies its slain, and the battles its fought. It's much cooler to have a sword become more powerful through actual action, like a weapon of legend, than just have some basement-dwelling fag enchant it at some time and then leave it in a box in a bombed-out ruin.

I did, that's why I'm assuming you didn't think it through.
>It's a role-playing GAME first
>TRPGs are roleplaying games first
You both basically said the same thing, except OP put more emphasis on the word GAME while you're trying to treat the two concepts as mutually exclusive when you, honestly, can't have one without the other.

RP without the G is just freeform nonsense with no scale, trials, or weight. G without RP is just sitting at a table while one dude prompts another dude at the table to roll dice and call out random numbers, which without context offers no scale, trials, or weight either. However, when you have both, now you have context that gives meaning to the numbers and numbers to justify why you pulling off something awesome was so impressive in the first place.

This, pretty much.
They gave their character a flaw and you're barging in and saying 'NO you must be hero.'
It's not being a snowflake to have a flaw, especially when that flaw is something like not being able to get extra cool powers.

I don't really like the 'it becomes magical' route. The coolest route is to say that it's actually a key for some long-lost family vault or treasure or something the family was hunting down.
It gives meaning to it being a family sword and it isn't a straight-up 'you must accept an upgrade to your current sword even if the upgrade becomes your sword' but still rewards them for all their effort of using the sword all this time.

>It's not being a snowflake to have a flaw, especially when that flaw is something like not being able to get extra cool powers.
False! Just because you're playing not playing the standard mary sue archtype doesn't mean your character isn't a mary sue.

At the end of the day, you're just going against the grain to garner undeserved attention while expecting everyone around you to not only has to deal with the fact that you're dead weight who brings nothing to the table, but also wants to warp the setting around your concept so that it works, in spite of everything about the setting telling you that it won't work without several caveats that puts you at base level.

>Being a dead weight is being an attentionwhore
Only if you're a fucking masochist

It really isn't very 'against the grain' to create a character with a family sword passed down for generations. It's a very typical story.
Games are just odd in general for insisting that you constantly swap out swords for the latest 'super ultra magical sword'.

Since when is [i]not[/i] having the magical weapon attention whoring?

Aaaaaand my point was ruined by my inability to format. And it won't let me delete the post for some reason. I feel great shame.

>It really isn't very 'against the grain' to create a character with a family sword passed down for generations.
It is against the grain to refuse all opportunities to improve your character's abilities solely because you refuse to make your sword anything special beyond it being passed down from generations to generations.

I mean, at the very least, the player should've allowed the weapon to be masterwork so that he could add enchantments to it later or something. If that didn't fly, he could've at least picked up an extra weapon that could be upgraded later on.

>all opportunities
Have you ever heard of magical [Anything Besides A Fucking Sword]?
You know, like armour, a ring, boots, out of combat items like a jar?

>allowed the weapon to be masterwork so that he could add enchantments to it later or something
In this case blame the fucking system for this 'masterwork' condition. Glad 5e fixes this fucking shit.

>he could've at least picked up an extra weapon that could be upgraded later on.
This is reasonable, though. There's so many fucking idiots who play melee who don't pick up a ranged weapon who don't realize that ranged combat is fundamental to gameplay, or even adventuring in any world at all, not just in D&D.

>make the family sword stronger.

Are you seriously complaining that one of your characters wants to roleplay, and rather than encourage and reward it, asking for opinions on how to crush the behavior.

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Good DM. Work the aspects of your world the characters are interested in into the plot.

>The character is interested in you fucking with their weapon whenever you feel like it because you have to fulfill a quota

Damnit, I wanted to have the bones of my character’s dead lecherous uncle compressed into a diamond. Then I can finally use it to make my character’s Whip of Uncle’s Lecherous Binding

Power gauntlet then? Ring of awesomeness?
Anything... it can even be an item or potion that permanently gives him the passive ability to see his ancestors souls, maybe give him an at-will spell-like ability that allows him to pay hitpoints to infuse the blade with his ancestor's might and then give him a bonus to hit and to dam...
You're being uncreative.

>How are you even complaining about this?
It is not a masterwork weapon. It CANNOT be enchanted.

>Complaining that someone wants to roleplay
Autism

I'll gladly take a player who is ready to fuck up his character sheet for roleplaying over some autistic minmaxer.

Have him discover some sort of heirloom companion item to the sword (a scabbard, a gem that fits in the pommel, etc.) that makes the sword magic and lets it change materials or emulate elemental enchantments. This gives it a lot of utility that can be expanded upon while keeping the numbers relatively low keeps the crunch stable.