Quote from Cindrellic >>

Quote from Halfastbracegirdle >>

Quote from Xalthu >>

He is using what is known as ”the wangrod defense” its in a Matt colville video, I don’t know which one. (Virtually) any time a player says ”But that’s what my character would do” it means they are being a jerk and at least part of them realizes it. This is doubly so if they’ve gone cn for alignment, which most people just think of as a license to be crazy. They are the one who made that character. They are the one choosing to make the character behave in that way. The player is not passively watching their character interact with the world, they can choose to behave differently.

You need to have an out of character discussion with the player and tell them, basically, they need to stop. If they don’t, kick them from the group. (Players are a dime a dozen, you’ll fill the seat easily) It sounds harsh, but it’s the most efficient way. I could also bring up that if a character starts acting like that, the rest of the party, in character, would be very reasonable in telling that character to leave, but that’s not really the issue. In character consequences for the behavior of a player do not solve the problem. It needs to be a frank real person discussion.

As for the cheating, you have well-founded suspicions. It’s possible that the die were with him that day, but not likely. You can require everyone use some kind of online due roller where he won’t be able to cheat, or demand he point his camera at the die while he rolls. But here, again, I’m leaning towards just kicking the person. They are cheating and a jerk. You don’t need the headache. 

 CN is a wonderful alignment, not a "Licence to be crazy" Your player has harmed the tradition of chaos and his evil must be used against him(Hint: Grazz't is a shapechanger who can disguise himself as a weak human for your player to murder).

 Would it be wise to point that out? The way how the player is acting is more CE than CN? Then encourage him to act more CN?

Do you think you could then explain the tangible difference between the two? The descriptions in this edition are very small. One could argue that a cn and ce character might behave close to the same, but the ce is motivated by greed and power.

Personally, I’d get rid of alignment altogether. It’s a relic from early editions. In this edition, there is no mechanical impact for it, and little rp impact. I think the idea at this point is that it mainly serves as a way to keep players consistent (so someone isn’t nice all the time, but then have no problem torturing someone, then back to nice). So if your players are generally good at rp, they shouldn’t need the scaffolding that alignment provides. Just have players be internally consistent and the label you hang on it won’t matter. Also then, they can’t use it as a shield to defend bad behavior. 

But really, between the playing like a jerk and the die rolling (which is a big deal. You should not have to monitor your players like they’re children. And I wouldn’t want someone I can’t trust in my house.) I don’t think things will improve without an out of character talk. Yes he should be able to play the character he wants, but only until his fun starts ruining the fun for others. He needs to rein it in and find a compromise. If you want to be generous give him one chance before he’s out. But that’s often the way things like this end, might want to just cut to that point. 

Quote from Halfastbracegirdle >>

Quote from Xalthu >>

He is using what is known as ”the wangrod defense” its in a Matt colville video, I don’t know which one. (Virtually) any time a player says ”But that’s what my character would do” it means they are being a jerk and at least part of them realizes it. This is doubly so if they’ve gone cn for alignment, which most people just think of as a license to be crazy. They are the one who made that character. They are the one choosing to make the character behave in that way. The player is not passively watching their character interact with the world, they can choose to behave differently.

You need to have an out of character discussion with the player and tell them, basically, they need to stop. If they don’t, kick them from the group. (Players are a dime a dozen, you’ll fill the seat easily) It sounds harsh, but it’s the most efficient way. I could also bring up that if a character starts acting like that, the rest of the party, in character, would be very reasonable in telling that character to leave, but that’s not really the issue. In character consequences for the behavior of a player do not solve the problem. It needs to be a frank real person discussion.

As for the cheating, you have well-founded suspicions. It’s possible that the die were with him that day, but not likely. You can require everyone use some kind of online due roller where he won’t be able to cheat, or demand he point his camera at the die while he rolls. But here, again, I’m leaning towards just kicking the person. They are cheating and a jerk. You don’t need the headache. 

 CN is a wonderful alignment, not a "Licence to be crazy" Your player has harmed the tradition of chaos and his evil must be used against him(Hint: Grazz't is a shapechanger who can disguise himself as a weak human for your player to murder).

In my humble opinion, Chaotic Neutral is the best alignment for the party to steal tables, and burn tapestries. It is a license to be crazy, but not to kill everything.

Quote from Cindrellic >>

 

 

Cheating his rolls, 

I don't know if anyone addressed this, I just skimmed the replies, but with all the online gaming going on now, I'm sure there is some sort of of app or program to take the place of actual dice rolling, in an online setting, that could be used to correct this. I've never done online gaming, but I'm sure I've read of this.

Cheating at rolls is one symptom of the larger problem, which is that this player almost certainly has a different take on how to play D&D than everyone else at the table (or in the zoom/facetime/whatever).  The OP might be able to stop the cheating by using a die rolling app or a VTT, but that will not address the motivations the player has, which are behind the entire suite of table-destroying behaviors the player is exhibiting.

This player wants to play, for lack of a better term, "random murder-hobo" D&D, and the rest of the players want to have a more traditional, serious campaign. The two approaches are not generally compatible.

Quote from Cindrellic >>

I have played with him once as a player myself. His character was an anti social air genasi archer. This character did not like RP nor does his current one. 

My current plan:

First is to talk and ask him to chill out, try and learn why he acts the way he does.

If he continues, kill off his character in hopes that he will make a reasonable like the one I played with.

should it continue even then, I will express how we (Me and the players) have asked you to stop, and must now ask you to leave.

As for cheating: This was our very first session online, this week we are going back to in person. Anytime it was in person he would roll legit, and not be a jerk. But when it seems like it since we couldn't see the rolls, he took the chance to make himself win. 

 

Does this seem reasonable? Let me know if I should add or remove something

 

 

 Don't murder his pc. If you talk with him about his behavior, and after two sessions he does not play nice. Toss him from the game. This will save you time. Remember no gaming is better bad gaming. And you don't have to  play with jerks. Well only if your mom is making you play with your younger brother.

for cheating rolls just use discord or roll20 instead of facetime. they can roll on chat with everyone else.

This character is “too stupid to live”. It is implausible that they have lived their life to this point and not gotten themself killed.

In principle you could prove this point by just setting a deadly trap that the character will idiotically blunder into. But that’s kind of a dick DM move. Better is to just ask them to change their ways. “My character would do that,” is not the last word. They have to create a character that can play harmoniously with the other characters in the party. Otherwise, when it comes to kicking their character out of the party, the other characters would do that. The fact that they haven’t yet is because they are metagaming, in a positive way, to try to keep the game going. The problem player needs to return the favor.

Otherwise, when it comes to kicking their character out of the party, the other characters would do that. The fact that they haven’t yet is because they are metagaming, in a positive way, to try to keep the game going. The problem player needs to return the favor.

Yes, this is a very good point.

The "It's what my character would do," players, never seem to realize that OK, what the other characters would do is leave your sorry butt down in the dungeon and walk away from you, because you are putting their lives and the quest in danger.

Like the friend I had who was playing a Tasselhoff-like character (I guess -- never read those books), and kept klepto-like stealing from his own party. "It's what Seth would do." (HIs character.) OK then, what my Lawful Evil assassin would do, after she almost died when she reached for the healing potion she thought was in the pouch on her belt and found it wasn't there because your character stole it, is cut your character's throat for stealing from her first chance she gets, and take the potion back. 

The thing is the person saying this doesn't really want to play this way -- he wants to be allowed to run roughshod over the party, and uses "It's what he/she would do" as a shield to prevent others from doing the same thing back.

So one way to solve this, but it is certainly not going to reduce friction (rather it will increase it) among the players, is to take the rest of the players off the leash. Tell them in no uncertain terms that as a DM, you have no problem with them acting as their PCs would, in response to wangrod-boy doing the same. "If your character would leave him to this fight, go ahead." Make sure they know that they don't have to keep metagaming to help this guy out, just to please you the DM.

But again this is not going to do any favors for table cohesion, and might cause some serious fights. Absolutely the wangrod will throw a temper tantrum over it, because that is what happens when they suffer the actual consequences of their IC behavior.

Players like this can be incredibly difficult to manage, which is not helped by the fact that they are usually unwilling to cooperate. A few tricks that I've discovered:

1) make your DC's higher when this player rolls, or ask them to roll with disadvantage on certain things.

2) Talk to the player, and if that doesn't work, you might have to ask the rest of the party individually and confidentially about how they feel about this and use that as backup without mentioning names.

3) Ramp up the difficulty of combat encounters, or impose large consequences to combat. Players usually don't realize that the stuff they do comes back to them.

I don't think it's fair to set different DCs for a player, nor is it necessary. If you want to teach a reckless player a lesson, just set some high DCs with deadly consequences, use good description to signal the danger, and let the problem player rush in and die. It doesn't really teach them any lesson if you up the difficulty for them, other than that you have it in for them. If you play fair and they lose, then they may learn that their way is not a good way to play.

I agree with pavillion -- a DM is not supposed to "pick on" PCs. Also, it doesn't do to punish the PC by being unfair to it, for problems with the player.

No, I'm not saying PCs have rights -- but if the problem is with the player, the solution needs to be with the player. Doing bad things to the PC will almost never fix player behavior. If you are dealing with an otherwise reasonable person who does not recognize that there are risks to PCs in D&D, a lesson like this may work. If you are dealing with a player who is doing this because they're bored or don't take the game seriously, letting them run into massive danger and die isn't necessarily going to un-bore them (other than during the moment of the battle) nor make them take the game seriously. I've known players who thought it was hilarious that their PCs died, and joyfully made up a new character in the vein of "let's do THAT again!" (Having their PC die...). You cannot do anything in-game to alter behavior like this.

The OP sounds to me like a player who is at core not really taking the game seriously, or shall we say, as seriously as the rest of the table wants to take it. I don't mean whether they make cracks during combat or something, but rather, that they are not taking as realistic and potentially serious the dangers of the environment, or the NPCs of the world. "There's a merchant in this shop.", followed by "I attack him," or "There are many goblins down the tunnel," followed by, "I run at them," is someone not taking the game seriously (these are my examples -- I am not asserting that this is literally what the OP's player is exactly doing).

You can kill the PC by having the goblins be so many and well armed that the PC dies... but you're not necessarily going to change the mind of someone who thinks that running down that hallway and attacking is "fun".

There needs to be consequences for his actions in game. I know someone said to kill off his player. You can put them in a situation that is certain death if they do not yield or retreat. Make sure its a situation that gives them the choice of life or death. It will be their fault, not yours. You can also toss them in jail when they get overwhelmed and go down. If you do this, take all of there stuff, and I mean all of it. If they want to play the, "that's what my character would do." Then do it to them and tell them something like, "the jailers, court, or whatever npc/s take all of your stuff because that's what they would do." I have a player who is very much into the whole, "that's what my character would do," mentality. I just roll with it and use it. I can tell it frustrates my players at times then they pull that nonsense. Just be creative with it. Worst case the player might not like it and say something like its unfair. But hey That's what npc's do and they will have to get over it or find another group that will put up with it.  

Honestly, I think the best policy is to just talk with them. I understand you say it is what your character would do, but ultimately everyone here is wanting to have fun and enjoy the game. The actions you have been taking can make that difficult at times. Would you be willing to change your approach for the good of the group? I would even say he could work it into his character to try and make amends to the party. So he may even have some funny rp moments where he always asks to stab something in an obvious combat moment.

If it helps at all, this is the way I have worked past the problem I foresaw happening in my own character. It may be helpful to suggest something similar to your player.

I am currently playing a Barbarian whose first instinct for any problem is to liberally apply axe and repeat as needed. If he was creeping through a setting and saw some guards, he would want to charge in and kill them. If he saw a locked door, he would want to batter it down. If someone insulted him, he would want to punch them until they stopped moving. However, I could see how irritating this would be for other players and the DM (which includes me, as I am sharing DM duties with another player).

I made one change to my character, and also had a discussion with my group. The first change was that it would not always be my go-to response. I would still react emotionally in social situations, but sometimes it would be to laugh, sometimes to get upset, sometimes to get angry and attack (often rolling a die to figure out which). Think more like the Hulk from Ragnarok than the earlier Hulk. "Apply axe" would still be my first instinct for enemies, but that's where the second part of my solution came in.

We discussed it as a group, and agreed that the rest of the party would know this about my character and work to either control it or use it as the situation demanded. If we could plan something out in advance, my character would generally be able to hold his instincts in check. If one of the others in the party could intercede before I actually ran off to smash, it would often help. The character is still generally the same and could be roleplayed similarly, but the strong bonds with the rest of the party and the small tweak to emotional response change me from being a general murderer who would have screwed the party over all the time to an amusing, lovable character with idiosyncrasies to be worked around.

One of the key things with the "It's what my character would do excuse" is that the character should LEARN that it isn't really what they would do after experiencing the consequences a few times.

I was playing a naive low wisdom character new to human society and the concept of emotion who was learning much about the world. I was playing with a group of fairly experienced players for whom "Never split the group" was a mantra. Some players were a bit more devoted to "optimal" play than others.

There were a few encounters where my character stepped into explore which I (as the player) knew were non-optimal choices since from experience as a player I expected either traps or an encounter. However, my character doesn't have the advantage of the player's metagaming knowledge. Anyway, after almost dying a couple of times due to these less than ideal decisions (at significant risk to the rest of the group) my character "learned" that these sorts of decisions often need a bit more consideration. This reduced some of the friction with another player in the group who getting a bit bothered by the sub-optimal decisions the character was making.

Later on in the same campaign, my character who was part-warlock picked up the Mask of Many Faces invocation allowing for disguise self at will. We were exploring a boat which seemed to have quite a bit of spiders so my character, in the interests of seeing the reaction of the other characters, used this opportunity to change their appearance into a spider like humanoid. In character, it was a fairly amusing, unwise and ill considered thing to do perhaps - though when the character said "BOO!" behind the rather tense character of the player who didn't like the earlier events ... the reaction was ideal when this PC drew their sword and made it clear that they were going to attack. My character dropped the disguise self, and learned another lesson so the character swapped out Mask of Many Faces on the next level up. (It didn't help that we actually ran into spider like humanoids (ettins?) in the next room ..).

However, the point is that players who use the excuse "It is what my character would do" aren't actually playing their character since when the results of their actions are bad - their friends lives are at stake, their own life at significant risk, something they care about is threatened - most of the time the character should learn to modify their behaviour in response to the consequences. Most people who use that excuse, use to to cause chaos and sow dissent in the party and with the DM rather than as an actual role playing tool.