| DpThought0 |
I have had a few players that either a)just wanted non-stop action with little or no role playing or b) put so little thought into their character that every one they played (over years) was nothing more than a reflection of themselves, with no effort put into actually *playing* a character.
I've had two things work. For the "a" type, I focused on action that involved puzzles and NPC interaction to keep things moving, rather than straight combat. It seemed to quell the need for combat with the short attention span members of the party, and the puzzle solving led to more group interaction generally and the role playing came out naturally in the NPC interaction.
I had one player who was straight "b" type. A group of seven of us rotate through three DMs (including myself), so there's enough play time for everyone and we don't get too burned out either running the games or get bored playing. Because the group has changed a bit over the years, we have rotated through quite a few characters. One of the non-DM players role plays the exact same character no matter what his character sheet says. In an adventure last year he drifted so far away from what his character would/should do that the other players were getting upset and wanted me to kill his character off and not let him play anymore, which was a problem because we actually played at that guy's house.
Anyway, he was always obsessed with combat and treasure, so as a group we came up with some sort of ridiculous intelligent magic weapon, that would force the character to act the "right" way or he would suffer the consequences. The player was just so thrilled that he had a "neat" magic weapon that he actually made a conscious effort to *play* his character, rather than just attack the first thing that moved and start rolling for combat. I only had to have the weapon take control of the situation one or two times for him to get the point, and both of those times he really tried to make up for almost immediately.
It's almost like dealing with little kids sometimes, but the little things really seemed to make a difference.