Help motivating an uninvolved player (Strange Aeons)

[Professor Wonderment]

Mild spoilers for In Search Of Sanity. If you're in my Albuquerque group, don't read this.

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So I'm running Strange Aeons, three sessions in, and one of my PCs is singularly uninterested and uninvolved. He's actually a huge cosmic horror fan, and prior to the game start was by far the most psyched about this AP.

He came up with an interesting character as well - an android who developed psionics as the result of a rhu-chalik getting interrupted reading his mind, giving him a mental collective (he's a Vitalist) and a dormant mental link to the Dominion of the Black (mechanically the Formerly Mind-Swapped trait).

He's played his android very well, too, giving him a disturbingly upbeat voice and occasional lapses in melancholy when Formerly Mind-Swapped produces creepy alien memories. One of best moments so far was when he entered the party Witch's mind to aid in a mental battle with the Witch's sentient Harrow deck.

On the other hand, he's been unhappy about quite a bit. He's consistently complained about not feeling powerful (I allowed him to swap his racial Int bonus to Wis, so he's a primary caster with a casting stat of 20). He changed his archetype between sessions without telling me. He also gets upset and loses interest if his powers aren't immediately useful. During the encounter with the Taxidermic Wings, he simply wandered off and started checking other doors. He was very upset when I ruled Dr. Losandro's mind was too damaged to extract information from (and that he couldn't really do that anyway). After the third session ended, he declared that he didn't care about the survivors, about the other PCs, about fighting monsters, or anything that didn't clearly lead to him recovering his memories, and he ended up storming out.

...

So, any thought or advice?

[Blake's Tiger]

That's a tough one. How well do you know the player?

Perhaps the Race/Class combination, while interesting for a story, was not interesting in play. He's handling his boredom or sense of ineffectual effort poorly, but one thing to try is taking him aside for a brief period of time (or out of game if you're social with him) and say:

"Hey. I thought your were frustrated last session. Is it the game? Now that the concept has met the reality of the AP, is it not what you expected? How can we make it less frustrating?"

Double check that you're both on the same page regarding various abilities/feats.

Offer him a complete redo (blank slate) on his character if that's the main problem and no other solution is obvious and have everyone go on as if that new character was always the one working with them. Nothing is worse than playing an ineffectual character, waiting every session for your moment to be relevant.

Now, a percentage (between 1% and 99%) of the problem is his, but you're not going to be able to change his opinion of the character.

[Professor Wonderment]

Blake's Tiger wrote:

That's a tough one. How well do you know the player?

Well, he's my younger brother, so I've known him his whole life, but that doesn't necessarily mean I understand him.

I do think the character type isn't really in his wheelhouse. He mainly loves playing Rangers, especially Urban Rangers, so a psionic character is outside his comfort zone. He hasn't used his Collective to heal or buff the other PCs at all, and at second level, his best ability is making people fall down. Next level, he'll be able to spam Drain Health all day long, but that's not necessarily interesting.

I may have pushed him too hard in encouraging him to stick with this character. I altered the plot so that his powers have a particular connection to the party's amnesia, and he may actually be the rhu-chalik impersonating a humanoid and not even know it, so I have a personal investment.

[Bob Bob Bob]

Yeah, that is a problem. You don't want to get invested in the player's characters for basically this very reason. Sometimes it doesn't click on their end. Sometimes they get bored, or realize they've hit a limit in some way.

In this case it sounds like there's a couple possible problems. One might be that the player wants something more... video game-ish? Where the valiant hero mows down rows and rows of enemies with some minor scratch damage, instead of desperately fights with their life on the line against something they outnumber (APs lean heavily to that last one). If they're playing a caster that might happen later, but at low levels they'll feel like they're plinking away. It's also possible that they're just not comfortable with casters, especially if they're used to fighting types. A barbarian's job is easy, charge the nearest thing and paste it. Spellcasters have whole lists of options, and you have the weigh the cost/benefit of each (do I blow a spell now or will I need it later), especially if we're talking DSP psionics. Then it's a question of how many power points to put in in addition to whether to cast it at all. The player might just be happier with less options.

[Blake's Tiger]

This makes more sense now.

Your expectations of the character (and its role in the AP) and his expectations of the character are not aligned with what's actually taking place at the table. When expectations don't match reality, disappointment and frustration are born.

I suspect letting him change to something more in his comfort zone would be the best solution.

[Professor Wonderment]

Yeah, I think offering him a new character is the way to go. Fortunately, I have a fairly good idea of how to introduce a new PC and explain why they weren't with the others while keeping the amnesia.

[Varun Creed]

Has he played Wizards or Sorcerers before?

Sounds to me like his PC's gaming style isn't suited to him. I get pretty bored with main spellcasters as well for example, because I feel useless with nothing to do in combat. (Because of limited spells per day.. Until you get past lvl5 or so, which I never managed haha!)