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Message: <blockquote data-quote="BSF" data-source="post: 4132135" data-attributes="member: 13098">Elf Witch, you aren't wrong in this situation.  But I do think you are having some clashes with current playstyles.  Yes, the group as a whole may have agreed that they want to play in a heavy story/heavy roleplaying game.  But that is a group consensus and might not genuinely reflect individual playstyles.  As well, playstyles will adjust based on changes in individual lives.  So what do you do about that?  Well, it depends.  Are you interested enough in individual players to analyze playstyles and start trying to accommodate what each player finds interesting?  If not, you are likely to lose the player, at least for a time.  If you are willing to do that work, dig out the DMG II and read up on individual playstyles.  Elicit some more feedback from all the players and see if you can tag out individual playstyles.  Please note, it is rare that any one player only fits one particular playstyle.  As an example, I have a strong emphasis in 4 playstyles.  So long as I get some feedback in one or two areas on a fairly consistent basis, I am happy.  But when I have no feedback in all four areas for a prolonged period of time, I start to lose my enthusiasm in the game.  Don't pigeonhole the players too tightly.  You will miss some opportunities if you do.  Now, back to your specific examples, I would hazard a guess that the player enjoys storytelling as well as having moments where he likes to be cool and shine.  It is possible that even though he did a lot of information gathering and was the reason the party learned information, he missed how that was actually relevant to the story.  So now he is feeling like he isn't contributing to the story at all, and is certainly not impacting it, because the story is all about the cleric - in his mind.  So when a situation erupts between two clerics, where he might be able to do the cool character thing and talk them both down, he is less successful than he hoped.  Along comes the cleric and is able to achieve the results the bard player was hoping for.  It doesn't make you wrong.  But it might mean that you are not identifying what fun factor/stress relief the player is playing the game to find.  This might be complicated by the fact that the player is having so much RL stress that the reasons he wants to game have changed since the beginning of the game.  Analyzing playstyles and then trying to accommodate them is a lot of work.  It might be something that takes too much energy away from other game prep.  Some people would even argue that doing this work is just pandering to a needy player.  I'm not going to pass a value judgement on that.  But if you are looking for a way to make this situation better, addressing the problem from the perspective of misidentified/unidentified playstyles is one possible route.</blockquote>

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