New Recruit
What’s this? A new running gag? It may have been a while since she brought home that aurumvorax, but methinks we’ll manage to squeeze some additional comedy juice from Ranger’s adopt-a-critter schtick. Who knows what our silent protagonist might glom onto in future? Perhaps a rust monster next time….
Of course, if your sympathies lie more in line with Inquisitor, then you might have some personal experience with this scenario. Say you’ve been gaming with the same group for a few months. You’re having fun, the party seems to gel, and this might finally be your chance to commit to a long-term, level 1-20 game. That is invariably when it happens.
“Hey guys,” says your buddy the monk, arriving for session with a shit-eating grin. “These are my friends Abby, Bob, Carl, and Dolrak Drakebeard. I told them about our game and they’re super-excited to try out D&D for the first time ever.”
And here they come tromping down the basement stairs all bright-eyed and ready to play. There were no prior discussions. It’s as if Dolrak et al. materialized from the aether. And because your GM is an absolute pillock he says, “OK I guess. I think I can make this work.”
So there you are, wedged into the corner of a card table in a 9-person instead of a 5-person party. And Abby has some gnarly BO. And Carl is playing your exact same ranger build. And your hopes of a long-term 1-20 game wither and die there on the battle mat, for 9-person groups are ever so slightly unwieldy, especially when they arrive all Thorin-and-company unannounced.
My friends? I’m not saying you should form a closed-off clique and defend it against all comers. Expanding your circle of acquaintance is a good thing. Adding new faces to the table can reinvigorate a campaign and introduce fun new dynamics. But for the love of Gygax, clear it with the rest of the group first. Even if you’re a GM, giving your players the courtesy of a heads-up is good social policy. After all, as Ranger is discovering in today’s comic, some adorable murder chickens and excitable catgirls just belong in different parties… metaphorically speaking.
So how about it, gang? Have you ever been thrust into the uncomfortable situation of entertaining a drop-in? Did it work out alright, or was it the impolite imposition that I’ve painted here? Tell us your tale of sudden arrivals and unexpected guests down in the comments!
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If you introduce a critter, there’s a 50% chance the party will adopt it
We have something similar, only with NPCs who are vaguely WAIFU-able.
And we shall call it Dakkath’s Law.
Murder or adoption, there is no middle ground
Mostly, we do have a closed-off clique, no drop-ins… we do have the occasional guest player, but they’re mostly old friends of regular players, visiting from out of town, and we usually just run one-shots in that situation rather than trying to fit them temporarily into an existing campaign.
In the somewhat rarer case of someone looking to play regularly with the group, they’re going to be a friend of one of us (because closed clique)… and we wouldn’t drop them straight into a long-running campaign. When it’s happened before, we’ve generally taken the opportunity to run a few sessions of one-shots or short adventures, give everyone a chance to see how well they fit in.
And in either case, we’d never bring in a new player without prior discussion…
Not even if, “My gf/bf is super excited to play?”
Like I said, not without prior discussion. I mean, we’re all old friends, so if someone has a new partner (or any other friend) who wants to give gaming a go, we’re happy to arrange something for them… but they’re not going to be showing up unannounced and unexpected, disrupting whatever we had planned.
What Ranger would probably desire next is a Disenchanter. Big, friendly, huggable, fuzzy, derpy/creepy looking, intelligent and sociable camel/elephant hybrids… That permanently suck the magic out of magic items, making them easily the most adventure-ending creature in the entire game. Or a Barbarian horde’s ideal cavalry.
http://creaturespotlight.blogspot.com/2014/09/disenchanter.html?m=1
I feel like those are kind of obscure. :/
I’ve always had a soft spot for shocker-lizards myself…
Weirdly, I think I own a half dozen of that mini. :/
Poor Magus. At least she and her noodle arm didn’t tip over an break.
What’s that written on Rangers blindfold? MIMIN?
I think it’s a transcript of Beaker from the Muppet Show reading the Gettysburg Address.
I think it’s just a design:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/unequal-treatment
Either that or it’s the lyrics to that one song from Cromartie High:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJnQqNczVpE
laughs in mirror-polished armor
It’s no good. As everyone knows, GMs deploy tar traps just before chicken-based combats.
The pedant in me wants to point out that D&D/Pathfinder cockatrices petrify by biting, not with their gaze.
As to the question of new players dropping in…most of my groups either had a consistent group without much change, or a group too inconsistent for new people dropping in to be noteworthy. Though sometimes players from the latter groups joined one of the former.
Didn’t we just do the comic about monster lore? Clearly, Team Bounty Hunter failed a very important roll.
What about Deathbeak makes you think he doesn’t bite?
I was more wondering about why the team was shielding their eyes, but I guess #1 explains that.
Though I wonder whether they actually rolled, or if Magus told them cockatrices are safe to look at and they assumed she flubbed the roll.
Look man, when I screwed up my cockatrice lore and hastily penciled in a post-hoc explanation, I didn’t pause to work out every little detail. OK?
😛
Inquisitor might just be keeping the sun out of her eyes… I don’t know how Pathfinder drow feel about bright light, but 5e ones need their sunglasses.
Hmm… now I have an image in my head of a dark elf with mirror-shades…
Pathfinder drows need their sunglasses too. I actually bought a pair for my half-drow character.
So I was trying to get a friend from work to come to D&D, and the weird guy at work overheard me and invited himself along. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
I’ve gone into his antics here before, but suffice to say he was the worst. He also never responded to the DM’s confirmation emails, instead just opting to drop in when he felt like which made things very awkward.
One of the last straws for the DM was when in addition to not responding to the confirmation email he invited his friend along without consulting.
Big oof, that.
Now I’m picturing a comedy sketch where more and more people keep showing up with progressively worse plus ones.
His friend was a better than him for the one session he was there.
As I’ve said: His characters were “We don’t let people do X because Y”.
“We don’t let male players play female characters because they make them uncomfortably oversexualized” (Not that you shouldn’t, just do it responsibly.)
His second character was “We don’t let players be Chaotic Evil because they play it like a mad dog.” (Chaotic Evil doesn’t have to be a complete lunatic. It can just as easily be someone who is just kind of a dick, or an Ayn Rand protagonist)
His third was “We don’t let That Guy play a Rogue, or he’ll steal from the party.”
For all the DM’s merits her biggest failing was that she tried to be accommodating past the point where people need to be told to stop.
We’ve never had issues with ‘unannounced additions’, but there has been issues with new arrivals in our groups. These included:
A player who copied popular media characters directly and made broken builds, effectively a power-gamer with minimal or no RP. They later tried to return to our group under a new alias until we realized who they were.
A player who was uncomfortably racist/misogynistic and had anger issues.
A player who was a nice RPer and person… But suffered such severe panic attacks during every game that they were unable to play and wound up absent for many sessions.
A very toxic player who made many games uncomfortable in general, but stuck around our group for long enough to leave a lasting bad taste and alienating players/DMs until we realized they were the problem.
Funnily enough, we just added a new player to our group (with an ask if it was okay), or rather, will, when we finish our Mummy’s Mask game in the next few sessions. They seem nice so far, and have played with other members of the group in other games. We’ll see how well they fit when that comes to pass. For now, they’re spectating how we’re playing.
I feel like those four should be the subject of their own webcomic.
When you bring new people or pets into the group:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7XFT26IvkQ
And i mean in or out of game 😛
What’s wrong with possum friends? They’re adorable! And also they eat harmful pests.
Says the guy with the behir familiar o_O
He’s a cohort!
Yeah, sure.
A cohort Behir, even better than a behir familiar 🙂
I haven’t had any experience at the table yet, but even I can tell that bringing four new players into a long-running campaign for their first session ever, especially unannounced, is a terrible idea. Not as bad as having a cockatrice join the group, but that’s saying more against the cockatrice than for the ragtag gang of newbies.
There are levels of bad afoot in the blog. At root though, I think it’s about showing respect to the work a group puts into a mutual creative project. If just anyone can drop in like it’s board game night, it devalues all that effort.
That’s understandable. Finding a good group seems like a feat in itself, so maintaining a stable dynamic within that group over a long-term campaign must be a delicate process at times.
Exactly. In that sense, I think a good RPG might have more in common with a production company than a board game night. It’s all about finding a group of people that work well together.
When you put it that way, it makes a lot of sense. Roleplaying is essentially a production without an audience. It’s kind of intimidating.
My group rarely has new players join, largely because we’re an already massive group of 7+GM, so anyone trying it out would probably feel a bit overwhelmed.
In game though, our warlock built an orphanage in our home city (he “forgot” to divvy up the money we got on our last adventure prior to a short hiatus and used most of it building the orphanage), our dragonborn bard/paladin basically acts as an exasperated team mom, and our monk adopted a dog (staying at the orphanage) that he constantly frets about when we’re on an adventure. There were other examples from previous campaigns, but I can’t remember them clearly.
I’m not following with the orphanage and dog. What do they have to do with unannounced drop-ins?
Oh, absolutely nothing. They tie more into the random people and animals that party members will pick in game without warning and more or less declare “I love them and I’ll die if the DM takes them away from me”
Happened fairly recently in a game I was in. The GM is new to pbp and felt something was off about how much players were inclined to dive into the action rather than check with our (already large) group about stuff before taking action. So they added in two more people without so much as a warning.
As this didn’t really solve problems in the way they imagined and several people vanished without word (as is a common problem in pbp), including their new people, eventually they actually had a discussion with us. I at that point had the opportunity to point out that their habit of making a DM response as fast as possible to each individual player’s post was actually the root of the issue they were experiencing. Because of how many people there already had been (six) and the GM having the world respond every time anyone did anything, people basically either lept to act as fast as possible lest someone do something that would prevent them from doing a thing important to their character or…. just sat back and waited for someone else to inevitably make things go somewhere.
They wound up solving the problem by splitting the remaining groups into two games of three players each and by taking my advice to heart and not responding as fast as possible and letting us actually have the time to discuss actions in character before moving things along.
My PBP game never took off, so I’m still inexperienced in the style. Is there a best practice for how frequently a GM posts?
I don’t have a specific answer to that in the same way I don’t have a specific answer for how fast a GM at an irl game should respond to a player saying a thing and then just declaring it happened.
Probably best to not progress things after every single person says a thing though. Better to give people at least a chance to agree, object, or suggest alterations to a planned action. Or even just respond to things other people are doing in character.
My first DnD session ever involved adopting a cockatrice called Harry – after its mother had succesfully petrified one of us, I think it was the druid. We later bought a ship, became pirates, and used Harry the Cockatrice as our mascot. I think we used petrified enemies as figurehead at various points.
So you’re saying Swash and Buckle should adopt this guy instead of Ranger? I could see that.
One of my friends is running a campaign heavily inspired by kingdom hearts, which includes the idea of world-hopping. His grand plan, which I recently took part in, was to make each world a campaign one of the other group members has run, so everyone who’s gmed gets a turn to join in and make a boss or a few encounters. It’s a really neat way to see a bunch of people’s GM style working together, though, we’re all pre-established friends, so it’s less awkward than the usual drop-in, I think.
I’ve always wanted to try out a rotating-GM type game… What did you do with the current GM’s PC when it was that dude’s turn to run? Did they become a GMPC, or did you find excuses to bench them?
So, the way it worked was, there was a 3 person party and the guest GM would control NPCs from their world as well as a 4th party member, while the main GM would control the overarching npcs / monsters like the BBEG and his lackeys. So for example, I was controlling the boss of my world as well as the party’s 4th member, but the main gm was controlling the boss’s ads and npcs from other worlds.
I just realized that Inquisy’s ears have gone purple as well as her cheeks. Nice detail.
http://www.hrwiki.org/w/images/5/54/TwitterSOAA.png
The four-person group, swelled to a dozen gamers? Alas, “I have not the heart to tell you. For me the grief is still too near.”
Looking back, the simple LMoP game in which Derrik Darkluster, Gentleman Adventurer first was breathed into existence was slightly plagued by a minor subset of this effect.
It started rather innocuously; the DM had an idea to do a guest player, and fit a custom encounter into the story, BUT that player only had the one day, and if we were to meet them in the correct place, our party would need to be on its way out of town by the beginning of the next session.
We were fine with that. There was more we might have done in town after its local quest issues had been cleared up, touch base with the locals, etc, but we had a general direction to go to get more information about a person of interest we needed to rescue, so we might as well pursue that thread immediately.
That guest encounter made for an entertaining diversion, and from there we moved on to complete a few more threads, only to accidentally get waylaid by 3 entire encounters worth of Orcs, lose several party members in the process, need to resurrect one, finally find out that the information thread we hoped would pan out didn’t, go back to town only to find a backstory element plaguing it which required that we leave town trying to rez another lost character only to fail and lose another because of that and limp our way back into another homebrew guest session.
This guest session mostly went well, until the climactic battle in which Derrik Darkluster almost met permadeath from mummyrot, needing to be rushed quickly back into town, where after a period of recovery we realized that in our rush to catch the first guest session, we had missed talking to the one person who had a proper lead for us to find the person we were looking for.
Pursuing that thread was plagued with some troublesome issues, but none quite as lasting as the 3rd guest session that wound up spinning out into 3 sessions.
Remember that person we were supposed to be rescuing? It’s a bit hard to justify someone being kept alive for 2 in game months. Looking back, the guest episodes may have been fun, but they also can be pointed to as the single biggest reason we couldn’t make the rescue in time, not just from the time lost in-game, but from the out of game decisions to pass over certain plot hooks that would have led us the right direction from the start.
I will say though, Derrik Darkluster, Gentleman Adventurer’s story and character development went in a wildly different direction than he might have otherwise done. He made and lost connections, developed loyalties and pathos I had never intended on his initial conception. He was designed almost specifically to break tropes of having some tragic backstory motivating his chosen career of adventuring, and that just kind of burrowed its way into his heart and then exploded in front of him.
Character loadout changed entirely as well. Originally meant as a Sword&Board, but wound up going Sword and Magic Staff instead (using the latter as defense and spellcasting focus only, so technically not dual wielding)
I was the “unplanned drop-in” and it was just as uncomfortable for me. In honesty, I just wanted to watch the game. I can’t remember now if it was before or after the doomed campaign of Werewolf, but it was World Of Darkness all the same and I wanted to see how the game could go with some experienced players running through a session before making any decisions. Before the session even started, I had a spare Hunter character sheet put in front of me and had to come up with a “wild west” era character out of nowhere. Not being prepared, not knowing what was going on, and not understanding the setting and system at all even on a conceptual level, meant I was completely unsurprised when my character died because another party member invented napalm, and can’t say I miss the campaign itself.
It’s a bit sideways to the expected stories, I’m sure, but it’s the same idea: If you aren’t prepared for being in the campaign, don’t be pressured to join.