TLDR : I’m telling a party member that he almost got the part killed twice in the same session. If he does that again I’m leaving him to his consequences. Meanwhile I’ll follow the party at a distance due to his liability till he proves himself.
Context below
Im an assassin who was raised by a murderous organization for as long as I can remember. I don’t have personal feelings, or empathy. Think the training at the beginning of the movie soldier 1998 with Kurt Russel. That’s her.
Anyway I understand it’s a slippery slope with being evil in a good party so I try my best to be a team player as such a character. For now I’m going with the notion that “My organization has not contacted me, so for now I’ll maintain myself “a tool” as best as I can till I’m needed by them. My teammates are “useful tools” and therefor have proven themselves worth preserving should I require their services to accomplish greater needs of my organization without there knowledge.”
Anyway we enter this town and the whole city is very inhospitable, particularly to our dwarve companion. He’s looking for his daughter desperately as she is in danger of death or dying. He’s also tasked with bringing a commissioned weapon to its buyer he’s very passionate about.
Anyway the city so far has
mocked him “and us”, gave terrible shop prices, disrespected us, gave us deadly tasks to prove ourselves without reward, and for a paid job only gave us 1g piece.
Eventually they said get out by dawn, unfortunately when we were initially taken into custody when we first entered they took the dwarfs weapon he was tasked to deliver, they said he can look for it up till dawn. Turns out we find it at a stall but the shop keeper wants all our gold for it with a smirk, turns out the guards fenced his possessions while we were doing the cities dirty work on probation.
Our dwarf friend decided to assault him, despite me telling him I’ll come back for it and take it for him. We all get arrested and once again, lose everything we’ve reacquired both in tasks and otherwise.
once in prison we spend the next 2 days formulating an escape, I start snapping bars off the doors head level window and using a minor illusion cantrip to cover it when guards deliver meals. He just sits there and occasionally tries investigating the walls using his dwarf proficiency in stonework. Eventually me and my other party member, a cleric. Decide that me sneaking out to set us all free would be the safest bet and I told them give me one more day to get the last bar removed. When the meals were delivered our dwarf friend decided to bum rush the door…he’s unarmed, no armor and now faces 3 armored guards with weapons. He then grapples one of them while the other draws his weapon, the third runs off for reinforcements and meanwhile he’s sitting there as a player getting frustrated that I’m not doing anything to help him by saying “what are you doing? His backs turned, attack him!” So I roll a series of dice.
He’s proven himself useful >< he’s a liability, let him die
i choose to help and almost die myself, now. 5 city guards dead later, the whole city is poring guards toward the prison, the dwarf used his class feature enlarge, effectively trapping himself in the dungeon along with our cleric cause he can’t go back to normal and the stone doorframe is to narrow. Meanwhile I have fly and fire breath due to a potion and have the joy of watching a gathering of 20 guards and royal guards chucking dynamite sticks into the prison window openings.
So I guess my question is, at what point does a player and player character say I’m done with this party members behavior and just let the tire burn? I’ll save the cleric but that dwarf. I’m hard pressed
First thing to do is have a civil talk about your concerns with the other player. Try to lay out your concerns without being confrontational. Really, though, this campaign is throwing up flags if you’re being hassled that aggressively at every turn. I obviously don’t have much context, but this all just seems ridiculously punitive and antagonistic, particularly if you keep losing most of your gear.
I'm not so bothered about the town being weirdly aggressive... that's clearly the challenge of this area, and it doesn't seem like the DM is just blindly shutting down all their attempts to get through this challenge. If the DM just wanted to play a "screw the players" game, instead of having the party jailed and presenting new challenges for them to face, they could just kill them or curb stomp them with some invincible creature.
I think this is definitely a problem with the Dwarf character not playing along with the plan that seems more reasonable. I don't know just how much discussion there actually was in-character... I can see when dealing with the guy trying to rip off the party to get back the weapon, a player may be fully cognizant that having the Rogue sneak in after-hours is probably the smarter move, but they know that their character wouldn't be able to control their temper when face-to-face with someone dishonoring them so blatantly and gleefully. That, I think, I could forgive... I could see myself doing that with some of my own characters I've played in the past.
But then you get into jail. He already had an experience that should teach him that his temper and impatience is getting the party in trouble. The other party members formulate a very specific plan and dedicate multiple in-game days to prepping this plan. The DM clearly isn't sabotaging them, since it would be very easy to just say, "nah, someone outside notices the missing bars and you're all executed", but they're rewarding the players for their creative solution to this problem by not going out of their way to undermine it. This was the plan, as intended and agreed upon by the majority of the party members, and the Dwarf either wasn't paying attention and just Leeroy Jenkins'd out at the last minute, or they decided they didn't want to use that plan and deliberately sabotaged it by just blindly assaulting the guards.
I don't know the whole story, and maybe I'm just a pessimist, but my instinct is telling me that the Dwarf doesn't like that these ideas put the spotlight on someone else. The literal only downside to the plans that he sabotaged is the fact that the Assassin is the "star" for these concepts. Recovering and delivering this weapon is his major story arc, and now suddenly someone else is the one rescuing it after it gets stolen.
We have already. And the setting is suppose to be hard, dark, and depressive. For example my session 0 was to murder everyone in an orphanage…everyone. The idea was, if it could happen, it will or can. Having a city besieged by dark evil creatures for months, slowly losing ground then we arrive and push the evil outside the city walls and help them reclaim it, did us some favors. But that very darkness entered our body’s and now they are very cautious and also discriminatory. Again context isn’t complete but the cities treatment is designed to affect us, how we handle it is the issue.
I did as well empathize with his first mistake. Considering everything he’s endured so far along with the rest of us. I also tried to relay in that moment we can come back. Should I was given the time I could have told him to act as a distraction to assist me. I didn’t think about it at the time as “taking spotlight” after all. If we needed strength I would defer to him. We needed that weapon back in a way that won’t have the town wanting to kill us, nor losing all our gold
I did as well empathize with his first mistake. Considering everything he’s endured so far along with the rest of us. I also tried to relay in that moment we can come back. Should I was given the time I could have told him to act as a distraction to assist me. I didn’t think about it at the time as “taking spotlight” after all. If we needed strength I would defer to him. We needed that weapon back in a way that won’t have the town wanting to kill us, nor losing all our gold
Personally, I don't think you were showboating or hogging the spotlight, at least based on your summary of the events... you came across a challenge, your character had the most reliable method of addressing the problem while putting the least amount of risk on your fellow party members. Once you were in jail you came up with, again, the most reliable and safe method of getting out of the situation. If his investigation of the wall had turned up anything I can imagine the group shifting to that if it would get the group out faster, but either he rolled low or there just wasn't anything to take advantage of.
He pulled out 3 lockpicks lol. Now, he’s proficient but I digress haha. Perhaps the dm was trying to suggest I was trying a decent plan or maybe not. But now we have to focus on getting out of this mess
One of the problem with having a party not team oriented is that the actions or inactions of any members may harm the group, either characters may die, or players may build animosity. I'm saying this regardless of race, class or alignment, a party shouldn't endanger its members recklessly or let one die carelessly, they should all work togheter and have each other's back. We might be all due for a good talk.
Yeah, there is that. Honestly, lone wolf type characters with that "I don't care if the others live or die" bit in a D&D party are not a great dynamic; even if the other person did something disruptive, actively choosing to sit back and let their character die is just going to escalate issues at the player level.
To me, this whole situation reminds me of when I was younger. Not pointing any fingers at the young, but less experienced GM's make certain mistakes, I've found. I mean, I've made them, and seen others do the same.
So the real issue here is that you're in a hostile town, and your GM (I'm guessing blind here) likely has some obscure reason why everyone is so hostile, and he's waiting for you to find out, but not giving you enough clues. This would be the classic error, at least. And it's leading to a lot of unfun encounters and situations, making everyone frustrated, and no one is having fun.
Forget about the player. Talk to the GM. Like, maybe even just tell him: Look - the next day a member of the local resistance, or the thieves guild, or some prodigy child pokes their head in the cell, and explains what we need to do next. Bam. Move the game along. Nothing to see here.
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Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
To me, this whole situation reminds me of when I was younger. Not pointing any fingers at the young, but less experienced GM's make certain mistakes, I've found. I mean, I've made them, and seen others do the same.
So the real issue here is that you're in a hostile town, and your GM (I'm guessing blind here) likely has some obscure reason why everyone is so hostile, and he's waiting for you to find out, but not giving you enough clues. This would be the classic error, at least. And it's leading to a lot of unfun encounters and situations, making everyone frustrated, and no one is having fun.
Forget about the player. Talk to the GM. Like, maybe even just tell him: Look - the next day a member of the local resistance, or the thieves guild, or some prodigy child pokes their head in the cell, and explains what we need to do next. Bam. Move the game along. Nothing to see here.
See, though, I don't get the impression that OP is bothered by the dark, oppressive setting. They even confirmed that they went into this game knowing that it's going to be dark and difficult, and that the player characters are going to be corrupted in some way as they proceed through the story and will be distrusted or feared by the general populace. It has a very FromSoftware feel to me... like something out of Bloodborne or Dark Souls. It even reminds me a bit of Shadow of the Colossus, although there are almost no NPCs to interact with in that game. I don't even get the feeling that the players are having trouble finding adventures and moving through the story... the issue seems to mostly stem from players having drastically different ideas of how to confront those challenges. I don't really see the DM being at fault for this situation as long as they were up front with their players about what kind of game this was going to be, and based on OP's statements it seems like that was made clear from the beginning.
See, though, I don't get the impression that OP is bothered by the dark, oppressive setting. They even confirmed that they went into this game knowing that it's going to be dark and difficult, and that the player characters are going to be corrupted in some way as they proceed through the story and will be distrusted or feared by the general populace. It has a very FromSoftware feel to me... like something out of Bloodborne or Dark Souls. It even reminds me a bit of Shadow of the Colossus, although there are almost no NPCs to interact with in that game. I don't even get the feeling that the players are having trouble finding adventures and moving through the story... the issue seems to mostly stem from players having drastically different ideas of how to confront those challenges. I don't really see the DM being at fault for this situation as long as they were up front with their players about what kind of game this was going to be, and based on OP's statements it seems like that was made clear from the beginning.
Frustrations are frustrations though. What I get from the OP isn't a 'everything is totally fine and we're all having fun and nothing is wrong' vibe. What I get is the distinct impression that the game is falling apart because A) the players have no real idea how to proceed, and B) because of A, they've reached the point where they're trying basically anything just to push forward somehow.
If you go back and read what I actually said, you may notice I've said not a single word about any dark, opressive setting.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
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TLDR : I’m telling a party member that he almost got the part killed twice in the same session. If he does that again I’m leaving him to his consequences. Meanwhile I’ll follow the party at a distance due to his liability till he proves himself.
Context below
Im an assassin who was raised by a murderous organization for as long as I can remember. I don’t have personal feelings, or empathy. Think the training at the beginning of the movie soldier 1998 with Kurt Russel. That’s her.
Anyway I understand it’s a slippery slope with being evil in a good party so I try my best to be a team player as such a character. For now I’m going with the notion that “My organization has not contacted me, so for now I’ll maintain myself “a tool” as best as I can till I’m needed by them. My teammates are “useful tools” and therefor have proven themselves worth preserving should I require their services to accomplish greater needs of my organization without there knowledge.”
Anyway we enter this town and the whole city is very inhospitable, particularly to our dwarve companion. He’s looking for his daughter desperately as she is in danger of death or dying. He’s also tasked with bringing a commissioned weapon to its buyer he’s very passionate about.
Anyway the city so far has
mocked him “and us”, gave terrible shop prices, disrespected us, gave us deadly tasks to prove ourselves without reward, and for a paid job only gave us 1g piece.
Eventually they said get out by dawn, unfortunately when we were initially taken into custody when we first entered they took the dwarfs weapon he was tasked to deliver, they said he can look for it up till dawn. Turns out we find it at a stall but the shop keeper wants all our gold for it with a smirk, turns out the guards fenced his possessions while we were doing the cities dirty work on probation.
Our dwarf friend decided to assault him, despite me telling him I’ll come back for it and take it for him. We all get arrested and once again, lose everything we’ve reacquired both in tasks and otherwise.
once in prison we spend the next 2 days formulating an escape, I start snapping bars off the doors head level window and using a minor illusion cantrip to cover it when guards deliver meals. He just sits there and occasionally tries investigating the walls using his dwarf proficiency in stonework. Eventually me and my other party member, a cleric. Decide that me sneaking out to set us all free would be the safest bet and I told them give me one more day to get the last bar removed. When the meals were delivered our dwarf friend decided to bum rush the door…he’s unarmed, no armor and now faces 3 armored guards with weapons. He then grapples one of them while the other draws his weapon, the third runs off for reinforcements and meanwhile he’s sitting there as a player getting frustrated that I’m not doing anything to help him by saying “what are you doing? His backs turned, attack him!” So I roll a series of dice.
He’s proven himself useful >< he’s a liability, let him die
i choose to help and almost die myself, now. 5 city guards dead later, the whole city is poring guards toward the prison, the dwarf used his class feature enlarge, effectively trapping himself in the dungeon along with our cleric cause he can’t go back to normal and the stone doorframe is to narrow. Meanwhile I have fly and fire breath due to a potion and have the joy of watching a gathering of 20 guards and royal guards chucking dynamite sticks into the prison window openings.
So I guess my question is, at what point does a player and player character say I’m done with this party members behavior and just let the tire burn? I’ll save the cleric but that dwarf. I’m hard pressed
First thing to do is have a civil talk about your concerns with the other player. Try to lay out your concerns without being confrontational. Really, though, this campaign is throwing up flags if you’re being hassled that aggressively at every turn. I obviously don’t have much context, but this all just seems ridiculously punitive and antagonistic, particularly if you keep losing most of your gear.
I'm not so bothered about the town being weirdly aggressive... that's clearly the challenge of this area, and it doesn't seem like the DM is just blindly shutting down all their attempts to get through this challenge. If the DM just wanted to play a "screw the players" game, instead of having the party jailed and presenting new challenges for them to face, they could just kill them or curb stomp them with some invincible creature.
I think this is definitely a problem with the Dwarf character not playing along with the plan that seems more reasonable. I don't know just how much discussion there actually was in-character... I can see when dealing with the guy trying to rip off the party to get back the weapon, a player may be fully cognizant that having the Rogue sneak in after-hours is probably the smarter move, but they know that their character wouldn't be able to control their temper when face-to-face with someone dishonoring them so blatantly and gleefully. That, I think, I could forgive... I could see myself doing that with some of my own characters I've played in the past.
But then you get into jail. He already had an experience that should teach him that his temper and impatience is getting the party in trouble. The other party members formulate a very specific plan and dedicate multiple in-game days to prepping this plan. The DM clearly isn't sabotaging them, since it would be very easy to just say, "nah, someone outside notices the missing bars and you're all executed", but they're rewarding the players for their creative solution to this problem by not going out of their way to undermine it. This was the plan, as intended and agreed upon by the majority of the party members, and the Dwarf either wasn't paying attention and just Leeroy Jenkins'd out at the last minute, or they decided they didn't want to use that plan and deliberately sabotaged it by just blindly assaulting the guards.
I don't know the whole story, and maybe I'm just a pessimist, but my instinct is telling me that the Dwarf doesn't like that these ideas put the spotlight on someone else. The literal only downside to the plans that he sabotaged is the fact that the Assassin is the "star" for these concepts. Recovering and delivering this weapon is his major story arc, and now suddenly someone else is the one rescuing it after it gets stolen.
Watch Crits for Breakfast, an adults-only RP-Heavy Roll20 Livestream at twitch.tv/afterdisbooty
And now you too can play with the amazing art and assets we use in Roll20 for our campaign at Hazel's Emporium
We have already. And the setting is suppose to be hard, dark, and depressive. For example my session 0 was to murder everyone in an orphanage…everyone. The idea was, if it could happen, it will or can. Having a city besieged by dark evil creatures for months, slowly losing ground then we arrive and push the evil outside the city walls and help them reclaim it, did us some favors. But that very darkness entered our body’s and now they are very cautious and also discriminatory. Again context isn’t complete but the cities treatment is designed to affect us, how we handle it is the issue.
I did as well empathize with his first mistake. Considering everything he’s endured so far along with the rest of us. I also tried to relay in that moment we can come back. Should I was given the time I could have told him to act as a distraction to assist me. I didn’t think about it at the time as “taking spotlight” after all. If we needed strength I would defer to him. We needed that weapon back in a way that won’t have the town wanting to kill us, nor losing all our gold
Personally, I don't think you were showboating or hogging the spotlight, at least based on your summary of the events... you came across a challenge, your character had the most reliable method of addressing the problem while putting the least amount of risk on your fellow party members. Once you were in jail you came up with, again, the most reliable and safe method of getting out of the situation. If his investigation of the wall had turned up anything I can imagine the group shifting to that if it would get the group out faster, but either he rolled low or there just wasn't anything to take advantage of.
Watch Crits for Breakfast, an adults-only RP-Heavy Roll20 Livestream at twitch.tv/afterdisbooty
And now you too can play with the amazing art and assets we use in Roll20 for our campaign at Hazel's Emporium
He pulled out 3 lockpicks lol. Now, he’s proficient but I digress haha. Perhaps the dm was trying to suggest I was trying a decent plan or maybe not. But now we have to focus on getting out of this mess
One of the problem with having a party not team oriented is that the actions or inactions of any members may harm the group, either characters may die, or players may build animosity. I'm saying this regardless of race, class or alignment, a party shouldn't endanger its members recklessly or let one die carelessly, they should all work togheter and have each other's back. We might be all due for a good talk.
Yeah, there is that. Honestly, lone wolf type characters with that "I don't care if the others live or die" bit in a D&D party are not a great dynamic; even if the other person did something disruptive, actively choosing to sit back and let their character die is just going to escalate issues at the player level.
To me, this whole situation reminds me of when I was younger. Not pointing any fingers at the young, but less experienced GM's make certain mistakes, I've found. I mean, I've made them, and seen others do the same.
So the real issue here is that you're in a hostile town, and your GM (I'm guessing blind here) likely has some obscure reason why everyone is so hostile, and he's waiting for you to find out, but not giving you enough clues. This would be the classic error, at least. And it's leading to a lot of unfun encounters and situations, making everyone frustrated, and no one is having fun.
Forget about the player. Talk to the GM. Like, maybe even just tell him: Look - the next day a member of the local resistance, or the thieves guild, or some prodigy child pokes their head in the cell, and explains what we need to do next. Bam. Move the game along. Nothing to see here.
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
See, though, I don't get the impression that OP is bothered by the dark, oppressive setting. They even confirmed that they went into this game knowing that it's going to be dark and difficult, and that the player characters are going to be corrupted in some way as they proceed through the story and will be distrusted or feared by the general populace. It has a very FromSoftware feel to me... like something out of Bloodborne or Dark Souls. It even reminds me a bit of Shadow of the Colossus, although there are almost no NPCs to interact with in that game. I don't even get the feeling that the players are having trouble finding adventures and moving through the story... the issue seems to mostly stem from players having drastically different ideas of how to confront those challenges. I don't really see the DM being at fault for this situation as long as they were up front with their players about what kind of game this was going to be, and based on OP's statements it seems like that was made clear from the beginning.
Watch Crits for Breakfast, an adults-only RP-Heavy Roll20 Livestream at twitch.tv/afterdisbooty
And now you too can play with the amazing art and assets we use in Roll20 for our campaign at Hazel's Emporium
Frustrations are frustrations though. What I get from the OP isn't a 'everything is totally fine and we're all having fun and nothing is wrong' vibe. What I get is the distinct impression that the game is falling apart because A) the players have no real idea how to proceed, and B) because of A, they've reached the point where they're trying basically anything just to push forward somehow.
If you go back and read what I actually said, you may notice I've said not a single word about any dark, opressive setting.
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.