Hey guys (relatively) new DM here. I’ve been hosting an on/off campaign for a couple of my friends since June last year, and I’ve got a player that tends to try and force the game to be about himself.
At first, it wasn’t too bad. I’m home brewing a campaign, and he was playing a blobfish-style Locathah. Locathah had not been entirely discovered as a race in this setting, so he attracted a lot of attention in that sense, as I was trying to keep things to the setting. The problems started when I didn’t immediately have my (level 4) party travel into the ocean depths to pursue the Locathah’s backstory. First major issue I had was him meta-gaming so nothing bad happened to his character. If he told the party not to do something, and then leave the area, he would roll perception checks to essentially “blindsight see what they were doing?”
That ended real fast.
He then started interrupting Roleplay moments to focus entirely on stuff his character was doing, most notably interrupting an emotional conversation between the Paladin and the Monk about the Paladin’s backstory, just to say “hey look at this stuff from my homeland.”
He’s also lawful evil, which quickly turned into Chaotic Psychopath as he did things like:
Mutilating dead bodies of innocent victims while walking through a destroyed village
Leave the Paladin to die and derail the campaign
Leave the Monk to die to secure as much gold as he could. (Last three were all the same session btw)
and finally, breaking into a house on a national holiday so that he could go to a fight club no one was at.
Oh yeah, did I mention he begged me to add an underground fight club in a small village just so he could beat people up and force combat sessions for himself?
To wrap this up, he also did classic things like get really upset after failing to steal an item, and being forced to pay for it, as well as freak out if someone got a boss kill rather than him. His backup character is also the brother of his character and is the same species, background, alignment, class, and subclass.
All that being said, I’ve put my foot down when things get out of hand, but he doesn’t seem to get the message. Any tips from other DMs who’ve struggled with this?
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“Ma’s cooking isn’t a stereotype, it’s a family philosophy.” -Me
I warn you, you will almost certainly get a lot of "bad players remove him from the table." responses. That's not a bad thing, that may be the best option for you.
However, before you kick the player out of the table it would be worth having a conversation with them as the Dm. Make sure they understand the way they have behaving and its effect on the game, your enjoyment as a Dm, and the others enjoyment at the table. Perhaps they need a reminder that they are playing a game with a group of people and that is is a group experience. It might also be worth having a talk as a group to make sure everyone is on the same page about what they want from the game.
We, as strangers on the internet, don't know the context of your situation so this is the best advice I can give.
There's also a note of spotlight hog and trying to cheese the game by doing meta-style things that maybe their PC wouldn't know to do, or what they meant.
So, besides the above video, and the obvious conversation that I feel like you've already had a couple times over at this point, there's not much that you can do to alter the player's behavior *in-game*. Sure, you could try to limit the meta shennanigans by forcing them to speak from the PC's point of view. You might have a measure of fleeting success in killing off their PC, but the next PC will inevitably be authored by the same person who thought the first one was fun. You might have better success in letting the player know that what they are doing, more importantly how they are doing it, is making the game un-fun for you. Which makes you not want to play with this person any longer.
Notice the period at the end of the last sentence? It means that is the end of that particular statement, no debate required. The other person's rebuttal might not be welcome and could be ill advised at this point. The choices might be: (A) stick with the social contract that everyone, including the DM, is allowed to enjoy the game and change their behavior to suit that style of cooperation, (B) volunteer to quit the group on their own, or (C) deal with the disintegration of the group, as the DM has just quit running games for them as long as the player in question is a member. Granted, the first option requires that the player in question do a lion's share of the work, but that means that they also do the lion's share of the growing-as-a-person thing.
No D&D is better than bad D&D.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
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Hey guys (relatively) new DM here. I’ve been hosting an on/off campaign for a couple of my friends since June last year, and I’ve got a player that tends to try and force the game to be about himself.
At first, it wasn’t too bad. I’m home brewing a campaign, and he was playing a blobfish-style Locathah. Locathah had not been entirely discovered as a race in this setting, so he attracted a lot of attention in that sense, as I was trying to keep things to the setting. The problems started when I didn’t immediately have my (level 4) party travel into the ocean depths to pursue the Locathah’s backstory. First major issue I had was him meta-gaming so nothing bad happened to his character. If he told the party not to do something, and then leave the area, he would roll perception checks to essentially “blindsight see what they were doing?”
That ended real fast.
He then started interrupting Roleplay moments to focus entirely on stuff his character was doing, most notably interrupting an emotional conversation between the Paladin and the Monk about the Paladin’s backstory, just to say “hey look at this stuff from my homeland.”
He’s also lawful evil, which quickly turned into Chaotic Psychopath as he did things like:
Mutilating dead bodies of innocent victims while walking through a destroyed village
Leave the Paladin to die and derail the campaign
Leave the Monk to die to secure as much gold as he could. (Last three were all the same session btw)
and finally, breaking into a house on a national holiday so that he could go to a fight club no one was at.
Oh yeah, did I mention he begged me to add an underground fight club in a small village just so he could beat people up and force combat sessions for himself?
To wrap this up, he also did classic things like get really upset after failing to steal an item, and being forced to pay for it, as well as freak out if someone got a boss kill rather than him. His backup character is also the brother of his character and is the same species, background, alignment, class, and subclass.
All that being said, I’ve put my foot down when things get out of hand, but he doesn’t seem to get the message. Any tips from other DMs who’ve struggled with this?
“Ma’s cooking isn’t a stereotype, it’s a family philosophy.” -Me
I warn you, you will almost certainly get a lot of "bad players remove him from the table." responses. That's not a bad thing, that may be the best option for you.
However, before you kick the player out of the table it would be worth having a conversation with them as the Dm. Make sure they understand the way they have behaving and its effect on the game, your enjoyment as a Dm, and the others enjoyment at the table. Perhaps they need a reminder that they are playing a game with a group of people and that is is a group experience. It might also be worth having a talk as a group to make sure everyone is on the same page about what they want from the game.
We, as strangers on the internet, don't know the context of your situation so this is the best advice I can give.
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"Play the game however you want to play the game. After all, your fun doesn't threaten my fun."
See: Wangrod Defense
There's also a note of spotlight hog and trying to cheese the game by doing meta-style things that maybe their PC wouldn't know to do, or what they meant.
So, besides the above video, and the obvious conversation that I feel like you've already had a couple times over at this point, there's not much that you can do to alter the player's behavior *in-game*. Sure, you could try to limit the meta shennanigans by forcing them to speak from the PC's point of view. You might have a measure of fleeting success in killing off their PC, but the next PC will inevitably be authored by the same person who thought the first one was fun. You might have better success in letting the player know that what they are doing, more importantly how they are doing it, is making the game un-fun for you. Which makes you not want to play with this person any longer.
Notice the period at the end of the last sentence? It means that is the end of that particular statement, no debate required. The other person's rebuttal might not be welcome and could be ill advised at this point. The choices might be: (A) stick with the social contract that everyone, including the DM, is allowed to enjoy the game and change their behavior to suit that style of cooperation, (B) volunteer to quit the group on their own, or (C) deal with the disintegration of the group, as the DM has just quit running games for them as long as the player in question is a member. Granted, the first option requires that the player in question do a lion's share of the work, but that means that they also do the lion's share of the growing-as-a-person thing.
No D&D is better than bad D&D.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad