How to stop my players from doing these things?

[Umbran]

I actually prefer the PCs don't know each other at the start of a campaign.

The GM, does a lot of prep-work. The GM watches rules questions, and game timing, and deals with maps and dice and monsters and adjudicating. There's only so much time a GM has to devote to fully developing and expressing the personalities of NPCs. The players each have one character to control, and the GM has to run the rest of the blody planet.

End result - the players always do a better job of interesting, complete, and consistent role-playing than the GM does. Character interactions between PCs are thus generally more rewarding than between GM and Player.

To take away the "getting to know you" phase of PC interaction removes one of the major sources of party bonding and role-play. It removes perhaps the greatest source of compelling plot to be found in the game. Yes, it makes more work for the GM at the start of the campaign, finding ways to keep the party together until they've bonded. But it is worth that work. The PC interactions you get based upon history the palyers didn't actually play through are generally hollow by comparison. IMHO.

 

[res]

1) The "Loner" hero.

The Loner hero doesn't always have to be someone who doesn't have a background. If you're player is using the "my family is dead and I have no friends" to get out of creating a background then ask them a few questions. Who killed their family? What happened to these people? Having a background like this is a cop out, if they want a character with a back story like that it should be easy to come up with enough to flesh it out a bit.

Ask them some questions to flesh out the background and you'll probably have them come up with something pretty interesting.

2) The really really odd PC.

Those ones are always tricky. I don't like saying no outright, but you really have to weigh the pros and cons. A lot of times it is a huge power-gamer move to pick something that will make them better (ie Half-Dragon.) If you have one guy who is constantly doing this, tell him that you'd like to cut back on the ammount of "wierd" stuff in the party, so next character he makes has to come from the PHB. Then he can go back to something funny for the next game. Its kind of a happy medium really.

3) The PCs not knowing each other. Now, I'd like to keep a fairly wide range of options open(see above, I know I'll get the complaints if I don't), but I'd like to avoid the "you all meet in a tavern" cliche. How to get the PCs together but keep the options open for what they can play?

Isn't the first few mintues of a game like this are always awkward. The theme games that people have mentioned are always fun. I played one where we (the 3 PCs) were siblings. Other cases, one or two people would play a character from a previous game and someone else might be an old friend of their PC from that game.

Usually some creative PCs can come up with an idea to help a DM out on this.

 

[spectre72]

2) The really really odd PC. I have one player(you know who you are!) who, while I can understand his reasoning somewhat behind it, it gets tiresome. This guy can NEVER, EVER play just a normal PC. Just once, I'd love to see him play a normal PC race and class, instead of being asked "can I play a werewolf/halfdragon/ninja/psion?". I like to offer a diverse range of character classes and options, but he ALWAYS has to pick something outside the normal range.

We have a player like this and recently he tried to play an Orc something or other.

Well for an introduction for the character we were moving through the woods in an area infested by humanoids (which are at war with everyone in the campaign world we play in) and my monk is scouting for the party.

"You see an orc hiding behind a tree" says the GM

"I sneak up behind it" (using my exceptional hide/move silently skills)

"The Orc doesn't seem to notice you" says the GM

"I attack with a flurry of blows" says I

3 Hits, one being a critical later and the introduction is over and the potential PC is laying on the ground dying - I think I hit it after it was down just to make sure it was dead .

Our group is somewhat unique in my experience in that we will not blindly accept drow, orcs, ...etc. into the party just because someone is playing them.

Sometimes it is done through role playing and sometimes ROLL PLAYING, but they never seem to make it into play.

Afterwards when asked why he had created an Orc character the player said "Because it would have been cool"...

There were no hard feelings, but after we explained the problem he didn't try quite as wierd a combination again.

 

[MerakSpielman]

Make up your own cliche.

I mean, do something totally unusual for your group. For example:

"You are all members of an elven magical academy (must be an elven arcane spellcaster) and are the only surviving members of the academy after a tremendous attack by an unknown force." Substitute with any race/class. Throw in some surviving guards if you want to allow fighter types.

Doing a setup like not only ensures that their characters already know each other, but also quickly funnels them into a plotline. They'll get over the deus ex machina of the intro if you quickly move on to letting them do whatever they want.

 

[apsuman]

These all seem like problems encountered at the start of a campaign.

Here are my suggestions.

Start with point buy, 28, or what ever you want to be the minimum.

Award +1 (or +2) points for every one of the following that the player provides:

Back story
Family Tree
Evil family member to be a menacing plot hook later
A paragraph explaining how this character knows at least one other character.

Alternatively, the back story gets you to level 2. If you multiclass you get to start one level higher.

this does several things:

Makes 1st level TPK go away.
Encourages people to *WANT* to provide back story, etc.
People who want "unique" character have a leg up with the extra levels (including the one from multiclassing) to make a PHB standard character that fits that build.


All this, IMHO.

 

[apsuman]

Couple more ideas:

give players additional point for point buy for playing certain characters.

+1 for being a human
+0 for being an elf
+0 for being a dwarf
+2 for being a halfling

etc.

Also, give bonues for playing certain characters, if you want fighters, give them +2.

So from above, you could have a multiclassed halfling fighter/rogue starting at level 3 that had (with back story, family tree, evil twin, paragraph explaining his relationships with other characters, etc.) that would come into the game at level 3 with a 36 point buy. You get the idea...

 

[Ibram]

lets see...

1) "the Loner" My players know how I play a game, and know that if they dont come up with a background then I will. The "my family was killed" with no other explination just leaves the door open for me to use "Random Ninjas (TM)" more then I would otherwise.

2) "the wierdo" I have a notebook that has all the races, feats, and classes in it that I allow in my game. That makes it rather hard for wierd combos to appear (though they do happen from time to time).

3) "you meet in the tavern" I personaly cant stand this type of meeting, it seems so boreing.

ways that my parties have met:
two smaller parties bounty hunting for Gnolls meet in the woods
Ridding on a cariage to a city
as slaves on a galley headed to Stygia
and in the campaign I'm currently working on: the survivors of a crushed army digging themselves out from under a pile of corpses only to encounter the ghouls that have come to feast on the dead (and not so dead).

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

ways that my parties have met:
two smaller parties bounty hunting for Gnolls meet in the woods
Ridding on a cariage to a city
as slaves on a galley headed to Stygia
and in the campaign I'm currently working on: the survivors of a crushed army digging themselves out from under a pile of corpses only to encounter the ghouls that have come to feast on the dead (and not so dead).

I like these! The opportunity to start "in media res," so to speak, would make a great beginning to a game - kind of like the start fo a James Bond film, where you start off right in the action. Force the PC's into a situation where they need to work together, and then come up with another reason for them to stay together once the initial threat is dealt with.

 

[Ogrork the Mighty]

Some players just don't want to put the effort into making a background. If you have a bunch of players like that, have them roll randomly off a list of possible character backgrounds and then let them incorporate what they rolled in a history. Don't generate the whole history that way, just the framework.

 

[Mr. Kaze]

I had a long rambling post, but we'll cut it to the highlights...

- We take a character-building session to ensure that the party has a cohesive background at the start of the campaign. We started off with a tiny -- 2 human brothers -- cult to a minor outsider, a orphan troll bodyguard they'd been raising from a pouchling and a half-elf girl-groupie who was hot on the deity's avatar.

- Additions/replacements to the party have to be given in-game motivation to be where they're going to be when the party tries to recruit them. We've lost almost three weeks of in-game time while the party waited for capable new folks to recruit. The new folks don't have much background, but they do know why they're there and why they want to join the party. It's good enough to keep the story going and the background can be filled in later.

- The DM is allowed to question the validity of any character race/class being brought into their world; doubly so if a player is claiming that the character is going to be under their autonomous control. Sometimes it's obviously fine; sometimes it's very clearly not. Sometimes, it's tough to say because there's no good in-game reason for it to not be, but several metagame reasons for it to not be -- in this case, the DM is allowed to say "Sure, give it a try" without putting future commitment behind the character. We've got a 30-point buy troll as a character. He's a lot of fun to play with as a DM, but he also tends to be overpowering as the team tank -- so we won't have any other 30-point buy trolls in the future. After all, the cultists only adopted the one -- everything else is just food.

HiH,
::Kaze