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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mmu1" data-source="post: 1636719" data-attributes="member: 319">Some of the events of a game I played in today started me thinking - how far out of their way do people usually go to let new PCs (you know, those strangers that for some reason have a large red "Trust me" glyph floating above their heads <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />) be introduced into the party?As a bit of background, the campaign I'm in has been in an urban setting, and centered (so far) on two rather hard-boiled professional mercenary / ex-military types that are, by standard D&D rules, pretty thoroughly evil. We've knocked people senseless and dropped them into canals to get rid of them quietly, assassinated most of a (fairly small-time and generally not deserving of capital punishment) street gang to get rid of witnesses, set a city block on fire to destroy evidence and cover our tracks, cut a man's arm off to be able to turn in the rather distinctive tattoo he had for a reward and still have him pay us for letting him leave town alive, beaten and tortured a lot of people for information, and slapped one small child unconscious - all while providing invaluable service to king and country in the best tradition of black-ops operatives everywhere. Enter the new PC - a shifty street-urchin type and a pathological liar. We run across him at what's basically a mass-murder scene (he had witnessed some of it, and had information that was valuable to us). He loses initiative, gets braced by two very serious-looking men with large weapons - and what followed was actually the funniest 1/2 hour of D&D we've had in a long time, as we tried to see through his truly extravagant line of BS (the new player was doing a great role-playing job) and get some reliable info out of him.The problem was, these are characters who'd probably gag the poor guy at the first sign of non-cooperation, cut off one finger, let him think about it for a minute, then cut another one off without giving him a chance to talk just to make sure he knew they were serious - and then ask their questions again. Which you really don't want to do to another PC, and so the whole thing, while fun, obviously involved breaking character in a serious way.Which isn't a major problem, really, but it leaves me wondering how hard a DM should work to make the integration of a new character as painless as possible, whether it's fair to expect other players to break character at certain times, and how much onus in there on the new guy to make a character that'll get along with the party. (while balancing that against letting people play what they're happy with) Opinions?</blockquote>

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