Bad Chemistry
I think we can all agree that, if we’re talking about getting a group of players together, the Handbook is on point. Just because your drinking buddies seemed to get along with Stu from work and Bob from softball at last week’s BBQ, it doesn’t mean that they’ll necessarily play nice together at the gaming table. There’s another issue here though, and in my mind it’s got more to do with characters than players.
For some pairings, you know you’re in for trouble from the outset. The paladin and the thief is the classic example. Same deal with the humorless, high fantasy Aragorn archetype trying to game alongside the gonzo, awakened kangaroo gunslinger. Sometimes you can just tell that two characters shouldn’t mix. Sometimes however, you may not know you’re set up for this problem until it smacks you in the face.
Case in point: I once rolled up the Exalted equivalent of a D&D ranger. He was the blond dude in the left-hand corner over here. Did you notice the unicorn in the background though? Her name was Thuna. She was my familiar. And she was far and away the most interesting thing about my PC. It was my own fault, really. I’d given my character a very run of the mill barbarian tribesman backstory, and this lisping magical unicorn was my only unique quirk. People loved her, but not even I loved my Marty Stu of a ranger. I wound up jealous of my own familiar, and I’m still not sure what I should have done to fix the situation. (Probably I should have made a better character.)
I’ve seen it happen with my Pathfinder group too. As the GM I’ll introduce a talking shield as treasure (it’s possessed by the ghost of an elderly knight) and think to myself, Surely the group will love his sage advice! They installed a torch sconce over his mouth. I’ll plan a session around this incredibly fascinating drunkard sorcerer in a pirate bar, and think to myself, He’s such a great source of information about the dungeon, they’ll probably wind up recruiting this guy! I believe they burned down his bar. I even did the classic, “I shall serve you for a year and a day!” when they rescued an under-leveled adventurer from a troll. Great chance for a cohort, right? They made him their cook and promptly forgot about him.
There’s no telling what will work with a party until you test it out in practice. In my experience, the best policy is to remain flexible. Boot an NPC if it’s not fitting in. Retire a PC if it turns out to be a flop. There are only so many hours in a the day when you can game, and it’s no fun spending your leisure time trying to force a round peg into a square hole.
How about the rest of you guys? Have you ever encountered a PC or an NPC that should have meshed with the party on paper, but actually turned out to clash in practice? What was it?
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I’ve only seen one PC that didn’t mesh that wasn’t due to the player failing to mesh with the group.
This character’s name was Chum, and Chum had his moments, don’t get me wrong. The theory was solid enough: a childishly simple brute, ala Lenny from Of Mice and Men. For his introduction, he accidentally killed a man who was hassling him about bringing his herd of boars into a tavern. His girlfriend’s character, a Swashbuckler and aspiring brothel owner, saved him from trouble with a well-placed lie. Not bad! Fun session.
However, it soon became clear to the group that having a dangerous and mentally challenged boar-herder around was a bad idea. He would hug people hard enough to cause damage and derail many attempts at diplomacy with his ostensibly lovable antics. The boars were pests; maybe one boar would have been lovable, but a herd was difficult to keep track of. We all started to tire of it.
Also, in a group of character optimizers, he decided to use a Greatclub. Normally this wouldn’t be an issue, but with a character that is already a nuisance, having greatly reduced combat ability made his faults less forgivable.
That campaign ended a bit early, and we all groaned when Chum Jr was presented for the next one. Fortunately that one never got off the ground, even though I really liked the character I had made for it.
If Chum Jr. was coming down the pike, I have a feeling this dude never realized that his character wasn’t working. Was this one of those “grin and bear it” situations for the rest of you guys?
No, he was fine at first. His original character was a fairly compelling dwarf. Then came Chum, and… well, yeah.
One of my first tabletop experiences (Of course, they’re all online – I live in the middle of nowhere,) was a Marvel Superheroes game, themed around the ‘Nightmares of Futures Past’ scenario of the US going full Nazi Germany against mutants – Giant Sentinel robots ‘protect the people’ from any ‘mutant menace,’ mutants are forced into concentration camps with horrible conditions where most of them die or are killed.
Everyone else made ‘normal’ mutants. People with powers. Most of them attractive. We had a psychic, a combat specialist, a skill monkey. All of us were hiding out in an underground aquifer/cave system from which the group was trying to work in order to break into a concentration camp and free the prisoners before heading north to Canada to a ‘safe place.’
I rolled randomly for my powers and got stuff like water breathing, electricity generation…
So I looked at everyone else, and decided to play the group’s Beast. Everyone else was an attractive person. My guy was a humanoid electric eel. Ugly son of a bitch. Incredibly monstrous looking. This guy was the kind of frightening that usually ends up freaking even his friends out if he surprises them.
He wasn’t a loner, he craved company and attention (He was like 15 or 16.) But he knew what he looked like and knew he scared people. It was pretty hard for him to ‘come out of his shell’ and talk to people, and he had a massive complex about being seen because the day his mutant powers kicked in and he transformed, the town had actually gotten together to hunt him down. Rocks and bricks had graduated to guns and molotovs in short order.
Long story short, he didn’t fit in with the group, and while that was sort of the idea when I made him – to create a character that reminded everyone that even if mutants were allowed back into society as equals, not everyone was going to have a happy ending where everyone holds hands and dances in circles singing Disney songs because their powers had changed them too much for people to easily accept – the fact remained that he didn’t fit in, the other players weren’t sure how to deal with him (except the psychic, who could usually deal with him on a personal level because she usually ignored physical bodies and concentrated on psychic impressions anyway,) and he eventually just kind of ended up being a hanger-on to all the inter-party shenanigans rather than being able to get directly involved in them himself.
Oh man… That’s too bad. X-Men seems like the perfect time to explore those outsider themes. Were you too much of a lone wolf for your own good, or was it that the others in the group didn’t know how to fit you into their “attractive people melodrama?”
The character wasn’t so much a lone wolf as he was kind of separate from them. He talked to them, and they asked his opinion on things, but he was usually talking to them from the water. He was underage, despite his monstrous mutations, and so the inter-party romances were kind of out since there was no one else his age in the party, and there just wasn’t a whole lot of interaction outside of combat situations (He practically soloed a Sentinel – climbed it like a spider monkey and unloaded electricity into its systems. Of course then the other Sentinels adapted and became shock-proof… Freaking Sentinels man,) where thanks to some useful powers/mutations and me getting some pretty lucky rolls during combat, Eel was one of the more dangerous of the group.
Ive been lucky enough that most of the groups ive been with were pretty chill save for three exceptions.
The first was a wizard who’s player didint knew what the fuck he was doing and was a big drama queen too. It was awkward to deal with him at first and escalated quickly.
Second was a fairy rogue. the guy had picked that combo because last time he did it, it was in DnD4e and his GM had letted him get away with some dumb stuff like using bigger weapons than he should for full damage. Of course when he joined us in a pathfinder game, things went south. The guy was interested solely in combat and doing big numbers. Sadly for him, i was playing an earth kineticist who was basicly splatting goblins and kobolbds on the walls with his boulder throwing shit (i was inspired by tremor from mortal kombat X). So yeah, didint end well.
Third is from the same group. A druid who was a little too much on the peaceful side. Were hired to cull kobolds and goblins from the countryside because theres a war raging on and the army dosent want to have its smaller village get fucked over. We go, find a cave with kobolds, theyre visibly already freaking the fuck out. Druid gets the bright idea of using diplomacy on them. He dosent know draconic and the kobolbd visibly didint knew common. He tried way too hard to reason with them after those two facts were established.
Fight start, my kineticist is splatting shit against the cave’s walls while the fairy rogue flies over to get flanks, druid isint exactly too keen on fighting. Fight goes on, kobolbds are now visibly defending something specific very fiercely. Druid goes for it after i make an opening and the GM gives him a note as to what he found. Suddenly he gets between right in the middle of the fight and tries to stop it despite we killed half of the 6 kobolbds by now and the survivors are in a fucking blood-frenzy at this point. I was about to do a big blast so if i missed my roll, he was the one about to be “jackson pollock’ed” on the cave wall. I succeeded my role. Anyway, fight goes on and he keeps being disruptive and just shouting to stop the fight and shit. Mind you, never once did he provided any explanation in any way, shape or form as to why we should stop attacking what were now murderous kobolds.
Turns out they were defending a baby that the druid picked up. I can understand his motivation but jesus, the context didint lent itself to this.
Also, we were hired by a paladin zealot who very specifically drafted us and threatened us of treason if we refused or didint do the job properly. The druid basicly had no way or reason to save that baby and we ended up abandoning it.
In the end the rogue just sulked and said he would make a new char (he didint, we never heard of him after) but thankfully the druid made efforts to catch himself up (thats something i guess.) ultimately the campaign died down cause it just wasent working.
phew, thats a rant and a half 😛
So if I’m hearing you right, you gamed with “fairy rogue munchkin who’s used to GMs bending the rules in their favor.” Yeesh. There’s enough red flags there to disqualify Brazil from the World Cup!
One word: Usidor.
Too many names?
Too long a diatribe. I love dropping it whenever ANY NPC asks who he is. Or if I feel like the DM is being a dick.
I have never had this really happen, but I have a story similar to it.
I was a human bard, and one of my spells was Animal Friendship. The only other person in the group who had Animal Friendship was one of our Druids. She cast it on a Direwolf that had already been attacked by one of our party members, and had a battleaxe embedded in its skull. Needless to say, she had Disadvantage. The druid succeeded, and she and I started chanting “It’s never too late for friendship!” when the rest of the party got mad at her for using the spell. I will never understand why people hate Animal Friendship so much…
Long story short, the druid and I are now Co-DMing a group with a couple of the people that argued against the spell. >:3
Animal Friendship is great at first. You’ve got a pet! Then you’ve got another pet! And next thing you know you can’t leave them in camp, and they won’t fit into the dungeon, and they cost a bunch to feed, and everyone is irritated that you’re spending so much in-game time dealing with your personal menagerie instead of adventuring.
…
I may have some personal experience with this one. :/
Once, after the first leg of the adventure path, nearly the entire party vanished. One player had school, another couldn’t see an RP reason for his character to continue the adventure, a third didn’t like how the DM was using his backstory*, and a fourth who just got bored with his character. That left my character (an elven noble cleric who took charge by right of nobody else bothering to object when he did) and the party rogue—not quite the stereotypical Paladin/Rogue duo, but given how often players thought my character was a paladin, it was close. Anyways, the DM decided to make bringing in the new players easy by having them be Lord’s Alliance members sent to protect and assist my character. The third player mentioned above made a dragonborn paladin who loved dragons and hated giants, while the second and third made an ettin wannabe-hero who was well-meaning but didn’t think through the implications of anything. We were also joined by a utility NPC who had an obvious infatuation with the rogue and was heavily implied to have stolen a previous character’s precious adamantine dagger.
Naturally, this lead to conflict between…me and the paladin. To be fair, his player was an idiot, the conflict didn’t flare up much, and there were still some (largely comedic) disagreements among other party members, but the most serious conflicts were between the two characters who had no inherent reason to come into conflict.
*TL;DR: Character’s uncle was in the Zhentarim (I know I spelled it wrong) and offered to let the player join, but the player thought all Zhentarim people were evil. It was dumb. (If anyone cares, this was the Galaxy-Brain I keep mentioning as a Doer of Dumb Stuff.)