D&D General What are your reasons for doing something because "It's what my character would do"?

[pukunui]

This meme (honestly, like most of the ttrpg memes) has sat uncomfortably with me for as long as I've been in the hobby, because while I get that it's used as a defense for poor behavior, it's also like...the entire appeal of the hobby to me? I like to make characters with flaws and stick to them, if I'm not doing that it's probably not a game I intend to stick around in for very long.
If you're asking for times it caused friction with the party, it's historically mostly been when I'm playing a character who is good and the rest of the party are...tabletop good, where they just want to kill bad guys. I've had a paladin who tried to redeem a plot villain, which irritate the players who just wanted to kill her, and a character who ratted the party out to the police in a World of Darkness game when one player randomly decided to murder an antagonistic NPC.

There's a world of difference between RPing your character's traits to the point of irritating your fellow players and RPing your character to the point that the GM has to create a solo campaign for you on the fly because you refuse to go along with the rest of the party. I did that once, and I regret it still, and I have had several people do that to me in the past. These days, if your PC doesn't want to go on the adventure because it's not what they would do, then that PC can leave the party and you can bring in a new PC who does want to go on the adventure.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I recently played three Mothership adventures (Haunting of Ypsilon 13, Decagone and the first third of Another Bug Hunt) and my character lived because he was a coward who was in it for the money, had no particular love for the Company and was very clear that he was a "volunteer" on these missions in name only.

Those scientists are chanting weird things while standing around an alien artifact? Not my problem; we've got our mission objective, let's go!

It might have been "more fun" for my character to have poked at all the weird stuff, like the scientists in Prometheus, but I was happy to not be an idealist or a starry-eyed dreamer. I made sure not to ruin anyone's fun -- when other players wanted to poke at alien samples, I stood at a respectful distance without snarking at them -- but my character's goal was to survive, period.

 

[pukunui]

I recently played three Mothership adventures (Haunting of Ypsilon 13, Decagone and the first third of Another Bug Hunt) and my character lived because he was a coward who was in it for the money, had no particular love for the Company and was very clear that he was a "volunteer" on these missions in name only.

Those scientists are chanting weird things while standing around an alien artifact? Not my problem; we've got our mission objective, let's go!

It might have been "more fun" for my character to have poked at all the weird stuff, like the scientists in Prometheus, but I was happy to not be an idealist or a starry-eyed dreamer. I made sure not to ruin anyone's fun -- when other players wanted to poke at alien samples, I stood at a respectful distance without snarking at them -- but my character's goal was to survive, period.

That's all perfectly fine to me. If you had, however, said you were going to have your PC ditch the others and go find adventure somewhere else on their own while the other PCs were poking at the alien samples, that's another story ...

Like, for instance, the time when I was running Legacy of the Crystal Shard, and the most of the party trekked halfway across Icewind Dale in wintry conditions to reach the Reghed Glacier ... while one player decided their character wouldn't do that and insisted on staying behind in Bryn Shander.

Sometimes this behavior is malicious - the person derives pleasure from being oppositional or otherwise disruptive. Sometimes it's due to a lack of consideration - perhaps the player had a great idea for a character and didn't bother to consider whether it was a good fit for this specific adventure, or perhaps the player is so hyper-fixated on their own character's story that they've forgotten D&D is a team game. And so on.

 

[gnarlygninja]

There's a world of difference between RPing your character's traits to the point of irritating your fellow players and RPing your character to the point that the GM has to create a solo campaign for you on the fly because you refuse to go along with the rest of the party. I did that once, and I regret it still, and I have had several people do that to me in the past. These days, if your PC doesn't want to go on the adventure because it's not what they would do, then that PC can leave the party and you can bring in a new PC who does want to go on the adventure.

Like I said in my first post, I understand the point of this meme is not "doing what your character would do is stupid", and people in the know are also going to get that it's really about the bad (whether intentionally antisocial or just poorly socialized) behaviors it's covering up. I just don't think they're very useful beyond little shibboleths to repeat at each other or jokes. Both of those things are fine, but in my experience you don't need to stray very far afield to find people who do take this to mean anyone making decisions based on what their character would do instead of the most optimal from an objective game play point of view are bad players (I see this a lot but have not personally experienced) or that anyone who makes an in character decision that doesn't go along with what the rest of the group wants to do in anyway is a bad player (This one I have experienced).
As with most things about TTRPGs, a lot of the examples of people "just doing what their character would do" aren't really bad (maybe not yours, I've run for a person who did something similar and it was frustrating) they're just not a good fit for that particular group.

 

[Koloth]

IMO, the question is rather redundant. The whole point of a RPG is to 'Do what the character would do.' If you design a character that is a poor fit for the rest of the party, then that is on you, the player. The trick is to design characters that are different but can still mostly do things as a group.
It is OK if the barbarian wants to smash the door in and the rogue wants to sneak in the window. Difference of opinion on how to do the mission.
Less OK if the barbarian wants to smash in the door and the rogue wants to stay in the bar. At some point, one of the characters needs to wander away and be replaced by a different character.

 

[Deset Gled]

I ended up being "that guy" earlier this year, and I didn't enjoy it.

The campaign had basically gone off the rails. We were on a side quest of a side quest of a side quest that was an offshoot of the main story that the campaign had started on. We also had a problem player that (we suspected at the time but would later confirm) was communicating with the DM outside of the game to push storylines that gave him the spotlight, and to get game info ahead of the rest of us. That player was a wizard that would go nuclear at every encounter, then whine until the party long rested. My cleric had spent the last couple of combats holding back in a big way. Primarily because I was trying to be conservative with spells assuming we would have more combats a day than we did, but admittely also because my character had less and less connection to the story. At the end of the last session I had taken a bit of ribbing, both in character and out, about my character not being much of a team player.

At the start of the next session we immediately got pulled into another side quest, lead by the aforementioned problem player. Vaguely, it involved pretending he was our boss and a powerful Red Wizard to impress some NPCs so we (he) could befriend a group of yuan-ti that were in a civil war with other yuan-ti, which would somehow get important intel about the location of an item for another different fetch quest we were on (that also had little connection to my character). I immediately knew my cleric was barely a side-kick in this side story, and I would have no meaningful role in it. I hit a breaking point and basically went on a short "What would my character do?" rant to he DM. I questioned why we were talkinig to the yuan-ti, why my character would want to get involved in their war, why we trusted anything they said, what reason we even had for being in the area, what my character's motivation was supposed to be, how any of this related to the main quest, etc. It ended with me basically saying that I might as well sit out for this session, because "that's what my character would do".

To the DM's credit, he stopped the game, talked a bit with the group, and offered another side quest via an NPC that was blatantly dropped in to get us moving back towards the main plot. The group took a vote, and took the new hook (abandonning the yuan-ti plot). The next part went a bit better. Unfortuantely, the game was still rapidly deteriorating and eventually ended up crashing and burning hard.

In retrospect, that entire "That's what my character would do" moment was just one symptom that the game was doomed for multiple reasons, and there was nothing that was going to save that gaming group. But I didn't know that at the time; I was still trying and failing. I would like to say that I was doing my best in the situation, but I will also say that I could have done better with the power of hindsight.

 

[Kurotowa]

I use it when I decide that the character does something that I, the player, know to be non-optimal or unwise, but that suits the limited information or personal biases of the character. But I also exercise player override when such a decision would be overly disruptive to the group or derailing to the adventure, because I have veto authority and I can usually come up with some stretched justification if it's needed.

There's a priority list at play, and while "It's what my character would do" is reasonably high up, it's definitely not the top of the list.

 

[Clint_L]

Usually it goes without saying that your choices are what your character would do, so if you have to say it, there's a good chance that you know your choice is going to be objectionable.

I just veto choices that are likely to cause strife. I don't bother coming up with a story justification, I just say "no." We cover all that in Session 0, and it seldom comes up.

Your character isn't a real person, so if you think they would make choices that are detrimental to everyone else's fun...change them.

Edit: last year I had one player who tried to insist that her character wouldn't participate in most fights because she (meaning her character) would keep herself safe and flee at the first sign of trouble). We had a quiet chat and I explained that she needed to come up with character traits that were amenable with taking part in an RPG built around heroic adventuring.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Generally I do so because, well, its kind of the point. That said, I'm not the guy who's going to ignore the impact it'll have on other players or the game as a whole, so I'll do my best to steer around problems there unless the other actions seem pretty much oppositional to what the character would intuitively do (and if that comes up, that was probably the sign I made a mistake when creating the character in the first place).

 

[Brendan Byrd]

I once had a DM drop an unwanted story element on me out of the blue.
It was not the type of thing I would have initiated within the game, as a player.

Caught off-guard, I asked myself: what would {character name} do?
I considered what the character's background and persective were, and and since it was plausible, I "played along" with the DM's "gotcha" surprise (that was supposed to be a positive thing).

Playing a game with a group of people requires some tact and diplomacy.
I didn't make a fuss about it, even though it was an irritant to me...right up to the day I quit that group.

So I realized that, for me, "that's what the character would do" is a good point to evaluate a game in progress, and the group as a whole...and deciding from there what (if anything), needs to be done.
The concept of using an "X card" was decades away at that point.