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

[Lanefan]

I wonder if your way of thinking on this goes hand-in-hand with what I've gathered about the way your table runs and plays from reading your posts over the years? Wherein it seems (to me) that your campaigns tend to appear much less about specific characters and more so on the experiences of the players? A player can have character after character die, but that's fine, because it's the player who is the one getting to experience everything the campaign has to offer, and not any one specific character. So with regards to "that's what my character would do!" character behavior... since the characters in your games seem to appear more disposable than other posters' games here (and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, as like I said this idea I have is merely from just how you've talked about your games in the past, not from any concrete knowledge)... if a character is a jerk, that's completely fine because there's a good chance its going to get killed soon anyway (either from events in-game or perhaps even the other PCs throwing the character out of the group because that's also "what their characters would do"). It's a character behavior that will come and go just as all the characters continually come and go throughout the life of your campaign.

I could be completely off on this... and I fully admit this is me just spitballing... but I do have to think that when there is out-of-game knowledge by the players that a disruptive character is not going to be one they are going to have to deal with or suffer under for years on end... it's probably much easier to just laugh that character's actions off. But please feel free to let me know if I'm way off.

Particularly for lower-level play, you're pretty close to the mark overall here.

Our games tend to be fairly lethal at low levels to begin with - kind of like a very slow-motion DCC funnel - even before any CvC stuff might rear its head, and so players tend not to get attached to their characters until one or two have lasted long enough and built up enough resources that if-when they die they are likely to be revived.

Thus if CvC shenanigans do erupt and a character gets killed or run off or whatever it's not that big a deal (and on more than one occasion a character that was run off has followed the party in secret, and come bursting in to save the day when the remaining party - including the player's new character(s) - found itself in over its head).

Story still evolving in my game: in the second adventure in this campaign - i.e. late 2008 - a couple of PCs ran afoul of the rest of the party, and after a crazy and unforgettable session of shenanigans those two characters were left bound and gagged in an inn room while word was quietly passed to the local slavers regarding some free inventory to be found in said room. One of these two was Turin Two-Axe, a Dwarf.

Fast forward a few real-time years and a later version of the same party is going through a modified version of the A-Series Slavers modules. Well, lo and behold, among the rescuees is good ol' Turin; who promptly retires from adventuring.

Now, fast-forward about 15 real-time years to last weekend and another Dwarf character needs a hench. Turin's player is still in the game and jokingly says "Hey, you're in the town where Turin was last seen - why not hire him?". As I'll ignore metagame considerations when it comes to getting a PC into a party, Turin "just happened" to be there and was hired - meaning a PC given into slavery 17 years ago by one party has just re-entered play with another.

Proof that getting run out of a party isn't always the end!

 

[Kurotowa]

I generally agree with this, but I do have to note its possible for someone to find themselves in a situation where to play their character outside a specific way in some specific situations violates the psychological integrity they have for the character sufficiently that it is extremely disruptive not only to their current enjoyment, but to their ongoing enjoyment of playing the character.

This is, however, almost always an indication of a breakdown in process somewhere along the way, whether its the player's understanding of possible events in the campaign (or disregarding that those might happen and force their hand), or the GM or another player ignoring that they have created a situation that backs the player into a corner (or not understanding the seriousness with which they engage with their character so that they don't see it as such.

I'd mostly agree with this. There's certainly been a failure somewhere along the creative process, but what and where have a lot of range.

Charitably, often it's a player who mistakes the genre or medium they're creating for. A cowardly homebody in a game about risky fortune seeking or world saving heroics. A troubled lone wolf protagonist, who suffers in an ensemble cast where no one else can hear their interior monologue and see their flashbacks. A zero to hero who starts out incompetent and only later blossoms into a hero, in a campaign where no one wants to drag around a dead weight for ten months before they start contributing. Characters have to be suitable for the medium of a TTRPG and the genre of both D&D in general and the campaign in specific.

Less charitably, there's a concept that carries over from PvP video games. "One sided fun." In short, it's weapons or characters that are fun for the people using them, but anti-fun for everyone else. And we've all seen that somewhere. Someone who brought a character whose entire point was to mess with other PCs or disrupt the campaign. They're doing what's fun for them, even if it comes at the expense of the fun of everyone else at the table. And that's the sort of selfish character design that needs to not be tolerated.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Sure. But there are lots of things that are disruptive to ongoing enjoyment of playing a character - character death being the most obvious.

I'll make an arguement that character death can be less disruptive in many ways than playing a character sufficiently out of character is. The former is an outside effect that does not violate the core of the character; the latter can very well be.

Playing a game with other people will almost certainly involve some amount of compromise. You can't always get what you want, as the man said.

Yes, but notice I said "in some specific cases". There are things where this is not critical and there are things where it is.

(emphasis mine)
This is just "but that's what my character would do" by that other player.

The difference is that they may be doing it out of cluelessness rather than disregard, and the effected individual is just an individual so they may not consider it as important in the first place (or simply be the kind of person that doesn't take their character particularly seriously so they don't see it as mattering). I think its easier to do that than miss you're throwing a brick through the whole campaign for everone else.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'd mostly agree with this. There's certainly been a failure somewhere along the creative process, but what and where have a lot of range.

Charitably, often it's a player who mistakes the genre or medium they're creating for. A cowardly homebody in a game about risky fortune seeking or world saving heroics. A troubled lone wolf protagonist, who suffers in an ensemble cast where no one else can hear their interior monologue and see their flashbacks. A zero to hero who starts out incompetent and only later blossoms into a hero, in a campaign where no one wants to drag around a dead weight for ten months before they start contributing. Characters have to be suitable for the medium of a TTRPG and the genre of both D&D in general and the campaign in specific.

Yeah, there's a lot of different failure states here.

Less charitably, there's a concept that carries over from PvP video games. "One sided fun." In short, it's weapons or characters that are fun for the people using them, but anti-fun for everyone else. And we've all seen that somewhere. Someone who brought a character whose entire point was to mess with other PCs or disrupt the campaign. They're doing what's fun for them, even if it comes at the expense of the fun of everyone else at the table. And that's the sort of selfish character design that needs to not be tolerated.

Usually that's self-adjusting after a while in a normal gaming group, but I do get what you mean; I remember hitting a particularly blatant (and oddly honest) case when MUSHing many years ago.

 

[Scott Christian]

A while ago...
Retire the character because he found his missing daughter and wanted to stay home and protect her.

Cast heal on my sister in game who was at 1 hp even though we had someone that fell and failed their first death save.

In some recent games...
Destroy a book in Candlekeep. (He really hated books, especially this one.)

 

[Sausages]

I should have added: in the game there is a mechanic called "shadow points," which lead characters into bad directions if they accumulate too many. Little Mr. Man had a bunch, and was on 'the path of despair,' which means he struggled with acts of courage. Still: epic moment. Super dramatic and emotional for all of us.

ah, nice bait-and-switch