Priceless
About a year ago, we looked at our little cast of characters and realized that they were all terrible gamers, each in their own special way. Fighter is our resident munchkin and jerk. Cleric is a rules lawyer. Wizard is that guy at the table who’s just that little bit too into his character. And then there’s Thief. Poor girl is an unluck loadstone, and that’s no fun for a roguish type. But in the same way that deities can gain new divine portfolios, our plucky band of heroes can gain new aspects of suck. As such, I am pleased to announce that Thief is comically inept at PVP.
Player vs. player games are ever so slightly polarizing. Ask a group of gamers for their opinions and half will relay PVP horror stories while the other half stab you in the spleen, take your stuff, and then get up on the table to attempt an IRL teabagging maneuver. (No points for guessing which camp I fall into.)
Of course, there are many different forms of PVP. We talked about a few way back when Wizard and Thief went on their first double date with that nice swan couple. More than direct thievery or literal backstabbing, I’m intrigued by the concept of opposed gaming styles. When players are at the table for different reasons, their characters’ actions can seem incomprehensible. That lack of understanding may even come across as hostile. In today’s comic for example, we’ve got Wizard trying to share his precious backstory while Thief is trying to acquire stuff. They are enjoying the adventure on fundamentally different levels. But you know what makes their relationship work? Our lovebirds communicate. Each knows why the other is at the table and rolling dice, so they can both get their jollies from the same interaction. Wizard gets to add yet another minor betrayal to his ongoing personal tragedy, and Thief gets to throw a little PVP into the proceedings. Of course, she’s failing her Bluff check pretty hard there. The jeweler’s loupe is a dead giveaway.
How about you guys? Have you ever realized that another player at that table had a fundamentally different way of gaming than you? Did you figure out how to play nice together anyway? Let’s hear it in the comments!
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So is that like a 5e thing? I could’t find “heritage” in Ultimate Equipment. I really sort of have this problem at my table though. One guy is there purely for combat. There other will do a funny voice, but really just cares about his dps. I really would like more rp at the table, but a lot of the time they just don’t seem to get it. Its like “what do you mean you won’t murder everyone in the church plus everyone who ever went there because we don’t like its god!?!” or “How dare you not spend a wish to save a complete stranger who would have tried to kill us if he could still walk and miss out on the reward that I know was coming out of character.” Yeah, I could power game with the best of them, and half the time my backstory is contrived to justify my build choices, but once my character has character I’d like him to show it. They’re finally starting to do some rp stuff with time, but its still pretty trying to know that the so called narcissistic halfling who literally should be able to resist talking about himself is also completely stoic and the supposed priest is really most interested in how much gold he can pull out of innocent peoples pockets.
Wizard: “I took racial heritage (elf).”
Cleric: “Point o’ order! That’s a human-only feat.”
Wizard: “Being an elf is extremely important to my character. That transcends silly things like rules.”
Fighter: “But if I’m reading this right, that feat literally doesn’t do anything for you. You already count as an elf.”
Wizard: “TRANSCENDS. THE. RULES.”
Recently in a 5e game, i’ve been playing with some friends of mine we hit an issue of different playstyles. One member, our elven Ranger, wanted to play a much more complex game full of thinking about every little thing you do while our Barbarian and Cleric just wanted to kill everything indiscriminately. After hours of talking and several pages of skype messages, we eventually worked out the issue and eliminated one of the major catalysts for the conflict, our Swords of Warning (If you don’t know what they are, just think Sting from LOTR) But nonetheless the conflict certainly hurt the parties teamwork, not to mention confused the DM to no end
Good on ya for finding a way to work together, but I’m a little confused. How did Sting cause problems between thinky guy and stabby guys?
Ah well the thing with Sting was we couldn’t be surprised, meaning every encounter we more or less ‘expected’ meaning no surprise rounds. Now this annoyed thinky guy because it meant we didn’t need to think, no perception checks, no stealth checks, we would just walk blindly into a fight and then win with no reprecussions. On on top of that, the stabby guys were really good at stabbing, let me tell you Spirit Guardians and plate armour + Raging barbarian with Savage attacker makes for a great team. So much so the DM was throwing encounters 2 or more challenge ratings higher than the recommended.
In my group I think *I’m* the player with the fundamentally different playstyle, or at least in a minority. Most of my group is hardcore RP-centric (some of them I think could give Wizard a run for his money in fleshing out backstory) while I’m… not. I suck at RP. Give me mechanical challenges or a good combat and I’ll usually be more than happy, because that’s what I’m good at. Heck, nothing makes me more excited than finding just that right movement that gives the Rogue Sneak Attack, or just the right spell to turn a TPK into a successful escape (Greasing an enemy’s weapon is a glorious mechanic) but when everyone else is pushing for social encounters my socially awkward self tends to go deer-in-the-headlights.
Sad times. Do you feel like you get enough of your type of fun at this table? Or are you just sticking around at this point to hang out with your friends?
I still get enough combat to keep myself happy, and since it’s PbP I’ve got several games to keep me occupied. It’s just when we have the RP-heavy segments I wind up getting really quiet in that game.
Right on. One last question then. Do you ever enjoy those RP-heavy parts of the game? Or is that always something you’d rather move past as quickly as possible?
Sometimes they can be fun, when something comes up where I can really get into that mindset. It’s just I have to really be in that right mindset, and most of the time it winds up being a bit of a drag.
It’s “jeweler’s loupe”, not loop.
Pedantic Man, AWAAAAAAAAY!
I put in the effort to learn that it’s not called “that jeweler’s eye thingy.” I think I deserve some credit here. 😛
Also, edited. Thank you for your services, Pedantic Man!
nearly every new group I feel like the underpowered fun to play multi-class to prestige-class character while the others are more or less min/maxed Advanced Classes Guide characters.
In a weird way, I find that those “underpowered fun to play multi-class to prestige-class characters” give me a sense of freedom. If I’m handicapping myself in terms of raw power, then I feel like I’m at liberty to optimize the crap out of my chosen build.
Honestly though, I think the game is well balanced enough that every PC can at least contribute. That’s all I really want from my characters: to be able to do stuff. If it’s a few points of damage less than the other guy, then it’s all good. I’m still affecting the game world, and that’s good enough for me. 🙂
oh sure, they are optimised: to be fun to play, with the occasional „how the hell did he do that?“ sprinkled in.
At my worst, I’ll admit, I openly teamkilled a fellow PC. In my defence, it was fully in character and the player was that guy – rather like Fighter. This was a group pulled together not from friends but through a meetup app, and we shared nothing but the game; and the player in question was the one who just didn’t mesh with us.
He was a gleeful, unrepentant murder-hobo; and when others in our group challenged him on his behaviour he laughed it off, saying he was just “playing the character” and anyway, he could probably kill any one of us if it came to a fight. And noone seemed to want to fight him – PK was something of a taboo. Some of us flagged with the DM that this wasn’t working, but they were reluctant to act, fearing that if that player left the campaign might collapse.
Then, in one session which began with the problem character murdering a questgiver to get their offered reward without doing the work for it, karma struck. We were heading into a dungeon and the first major obstacle was a long, narrow stone bridge over a chasm with some sort hydra living in the bottom. We took the precaution of tying ourselves together on a rope, like climbers, to avoid one fumble leading to a long fall and lizard food. But in the event, it was the problem guy who slipped, and it was my halfling investigator, following in the rear, who came over to help him back up onto the bridge.
Only I didn’t, and instead I cut the ropes securing my helpless erstwhile teammate.
It was a pretty nasty thing to do as a player. In character though, I still think it was totally justified. The guy I sent plummeting to his death took it pretty well at first (I think he was honestly not aware, despite our many protestations, at just how much we hated his character), until he realised by the end of the session that we weren’t going to ressurrect him. He did, indeed, quit; and when we could not replace him, the campaign did end a couple of months later when another player developed scheduling conflicts.
I’ve always been conflicted about what I did, and have drawn a hard line against most PVP since (at least, PVP that involves dice roles). On the other hand, I make sire only to take part in much better vetted campaign groups, too!
The key rule: don’t solve out-of-game problems with in-game solutions. This is the relevant comic:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/personality-conflict
Sucks that the GM didn’t take care of things, but I think the right call is to approach the player in this scenario, even if it’s by your lonesome.
I absolutely agree. The guy was weird and off-putting, and had already laughed off our protests, but everything he did suggested to me (in hindsight) that he just didn’t get how much we disliked his character. We could have at least given him the chance to play another character without first rubbing his face in it.
Well hey, if it was a reasonable thing for the character to do, and if PVP was on the table in Session 0, I don’t think there’s any reason to second guess yourself. The only other course would have been to quit the game, which — let’s be honest — isn’t a terrible idea sometimes.
PvP is the bane of my games. I haven’t had a game that was good when any characters fought each others seriously or stole from one another or used magic against one another.
It’s not fun.