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Does anyone else (player and/or gm) have any problems with finding or maintaining characters in a party?
I have seen a trend in games I have participated in as a PC and organized as a GM that, while the players get along well, the characters seem to be forced to continue banding together with the party members despite having no motivation.
I was wondering if anyone has any advice?
I have tried- from a PC standpoint- to create characters in conjunction with another player. The two of us were brothers (twins even) and this worked to give us motivation to be together, but our characters desires were SO disparate that we ended up compromising so much that we both felt like we were maintaining this sibling relationship more than we were playing the character (I am an only child so I don't have a lot of experience with sibling relationships??? maybe that is normal? lol)
Another time I played a witch//summoner who believe that her Eidolon was the reincarnation of her dead son. She often fought to protect him but other players would get him caught in AoE and splash dmg effects, requested healing and did little to sympathize with her feelings deciding that she was creepy and weird... When some Night Hags offered for her to join the coven if she killed her allies... Well... I did. Slumber hex is some serious mojo. The party was surprised when I turned on them, but one player had never even told me their name... and I had used healing magic on them...
As a DM I run a Kingmaker homebrew and find that in general the characters have the overall goal of "make the kingdom better" as well as "Rovagug is gonna getcha!" to keep them all fairly on the same page, but almost every session I hear the "If you do anything like that again, I am leaving!" This was uttered from a prostitute assassin (CN) to a cavalier (NG) after he would not intercede to stop one group of homeless despots from murdering another group of homeless despots. His defense: "These aren't my people." -I am watering down that drama a little, but this would be a bare bones paraphrase.
I am not saying I need EVERY moment to have the 100% assurance of group think, but I feel like the lack of interrelatedness between the characters is something that could be remedied somehow, and would make for a better playing experience for all. And again, our players get along fine- not a lot of drama in our group of REAL people besides work conflicts.
Any tips? Tricks? Advice? Or even just commiseration or tell me not to worry about it?
This is a player problem, not a character one.
Character concept is not just simply "I want to play X." It is also "I understand what your character's motivations are and I will have my character support that motivation in this (Y) way."
Characters need to be established together if a long term campaign is going to work out.
I think the difficulty of this is that we often don't have a chance to create our characters in tandem... and when we do we still have differences in how we want them to play out
Not been that serious a problem since I realized that if I make adventuring the main motivation of characters then the fact that a party is necessary for adventuring provides the subsidiary motivation of party cohesion. not to say that there haven't been individual characters that I've wanted to boot out of the party and sometimes a party that my character just couldn't work with, but it became an infrequent occurrence. note too that the main motivation doesn't have to as raw as 'adventuring', it could be 'hunt down and end the evil that threatens my home, family and everything I love' or (one of my personal favorites) 'fulfill the charge the leader of my paladin order laid on me to collect a band of misfits and lead them to glory even though I know he only did it to get me away from the chapter house because he considers me to be an officious git."
I am finding that whatever the inciting incident is... our characters are not bonding sufficiently in order to maintain relationships after the first bad guy is taken out... Once problem X is solved the king pays us and we know we are supposed to say: Hey lets stick together! But usually we have a mixed bag of people that end up lacking a reason to work together.
After the evil is faced what keeps the LG Paladin working with the CN Alchemist?
A chaotic neutral may find the party makes it easier for them to obtain the finer things in life (like more money for better quality equipment, etc).
Something that's helped me (when GM'ing) is to have the next story arc connected to the first one. Problem X is resolved, but that caused Y to happen and also snowballed Z into being a threat now that X has been removed. If the story is constantly evolving, the party is given less reason and less chance to dissolve.
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An idea I had: have the players write "connection stories" about how their character already knows at least one other character. This can be part of their backstory, or in addition to it. You can award them traits for it - say, default is zero traits, if you write a backstory you get one trait, if you also write a connection story you get two traits.
We started using this in the campaign I'm currently playing, and it has definitely reduced the number of times I've had to ask myself "what am I doing with these people?"
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The best way to deal with this type of problem is to let the players know what type of campaign you are planning on running. By simply communicating the scope and focus of the campaign many of these problems can be minimized or eliminated. This allows the players to write up appropriate characters for the campaign instead of random concepts. Keep in mind that not every concept will fit a campaign. If for example the focus of the campaign hunting down undead, then you probably don’t want to go with the enchantment focused sorcerer this time.
Another thing that works well is to have some sort of a sponsor or organization the players are working for. If all the players are agents of the king, they don’t need any further reason to stay together. This works well when the characters don’t get along. They may not like each other, but all of them are loyal to the king. As long as everyone has a connection to sponsor then keeping them together is fairly easy.
Both of these are the responsivity of the GM not the player. Any good GM will have an idea of what type of campaign he is going to be running and should let the player know.
The people I play with really seem to li e the kind of inter party drama but they are too delicate sometimes to handle it being thrown there way. Case in point, I play a paladin so bro changes his rogue to assassin. I make paladin cool with that within reason (he has bigger fish to fry) assassin starts ripping out hearts of hostages. I call him out and he complains that I'm infringing on his fun or whatever. I give up and play a morally bland sorcerer no one bats an eye.
So then I figured to maximize my fun all my characters would be morally and or ethically bland, caring only for the premise of the adventure and their companions safety. Anything else was too fair tender for these guys.
Barbarian wants to kill big monsters, deosnt care how. Cleric of erastil wants to save his village, doesn't care so much how. Bard just wants a great story to tell his kids...
You get the idea.
(1) I specifically ask players to create backstories that (a) connect with each other and that I know (b) somehow connect to the overarching theme/plot.
(2) In your example, you say the "brothers" thing isn't helping - but that's literally players deciding that one part of their character choice is more important - that "brothers" isn't as important as the other stuff... but that's the drama you've picked. Play it out, but don't expect it to be like a band-aid. The real solution is that it's not a band-aid.
(3) Players shouldn't need to find "a method" to keep them from being in constant conflict. They should have fun playing the amount of conflict that is fun, and then moving on. I've played and GMd with wildly different party members - and in the end *you play out the scene*. And that's it. Your characters have to find a way through and that's part of the fun. If it isn't fun... then I think the players are expecting too much of others and not of themselves. "the play is the thing"...
tl/dr: if the players in the game can't have fun playing characters of disparate goals/alignments/what have you because they can't "play the conflict" and get through it "as play", then they shouldn't play a group of characters that are that disparate.
- cs
My experience in pathfinder is players want to create their characters independently.
You wind up with a bunch of people who may well not associate let alone be constant companions through thick and thin.
About as far as players will usually go is to try to get a group that has a decent spread of abilities [read classes] and are more or less alignment compatible.
And regrettably its not uncommon for players to behave in ways that make no sense if you depend on people in dangerous situations or even to play on "you can't kill me I am a PC".
In my experience it works well if the players agree on a theme or the GM sets a theme.
We had a group where all the important members were there to support the cleric, who was really a disposed prince.
If the GM feeds that this is his responsibility then i suggest telling folks stuff about the game before hand and then let the setting and campaign decide whos story is told.
The players need to be in charge of there characters and that also need to leave room for them making characters that dosent work in the group(and in the story that is told as a group). And if they do than they can change them or make another.
When I started up my current game I told my players explicitly that they had to make a ironclad reason for why they were allies and why they wouldn't betray each other.
When it comes to PvP we have a simple rule: we don't do it.
-but we do roleplay it.
Meaning that if one of the characters is lying to another character, the 2 players in question make an arrangment ooc to make it feasible.
Ex:
1:"I hide the magical plot thingy from the others"
2: "what the heck dude, we need that! are you trying to get us killed?"
1: "nono, but I don't think it's something character would give away"
2: "but are you going to tell us later?"
1: "probably not, but maybe I'll let something slip and you can call me out on it?"
2: "ok yeah that sounds fun, give our characters a chance to blow off some steam and sort out their differences, maybe a bar-room-brawl or something"
1: "cool, I'm in."
It's metagaming, but the good kind.
We've also set a hard rule that no player rolls dice against another player, for us it's a Cooperative game - not a Competitive game.
Luxuriant's last point is a very good one. I'm in a game where the other characters THINK they're helping my character by stopping her doing something stupid (protecting an ogre who's pretty much her morality pet). But they slumber hexed her to do so. She is having NONE of this. Luckily, she's dedicated to one other character or she'd have left.
As long as the characters have some sort of loyalty to at least one other character / concept / God / Quest you can keep it going.
We've found it's useful to share some more background stuff as this doesn't always come out in gameplay. Realistically, though, if you travelled with someone for months you'd know a fair bit about them. This allows characters to make connections / alliances etc. Also gives people more idea of characters' motivations / limits etc. It depends on your group, but if people have very strong characters, it's useful and kind of fun. And two of our characters sort of hooked up. That wasn't exactly planned, but did make sense... Not that you have to get everyone paired off / triangled off... :/
In my opinion te problem come from the players.
It's not always practical to create the PC together giving them a Backstory justifying why they are adventuring together before the game starts.
The player needs to be reminded that it is a cooperative game and that they need to have the party function as a team in some way.
It often means you'll have some funny scenes like you can see in some webcomics where adventurers who barely knows each other implicitly trust each other more than they should.
Also the GM should try to give them the opportunity of RP scenes to bond with each others.
And lastly if some player wants to play some alignement/class that can cause problem for the cohesion of the group they should let the other players know and check if there will be any issues with other PC (like the Paladin/Assassin though it could be handled well as Scott Wilhelm said).
Thanks guys. There was a lot of helpful info here. Several things to implement :)
One easy mistake to make is to get so involved in your character and the thrilling backstory and deeply complex personality you have created for it that you forget you are actually playing a cooperative team game. Basically, if you make a character that doesn't want to or can't work with the group you are playing, you probably made a horrible mistake and are likely to screw up the game. If everyone does that, and I have been part of such fiasco, you can pretty much guarantee a crashing halt to the campaign.
Some things that can help is to limit the 'special' and 'complex' parts of your character. A little of that really does go a long way. Also, you can specifically try to learn what is motivating the other characters in your group, and chose to have things in common with them. Lastly, don't fall into the trap of 'it is what my character would do.' that is a cop out, you decide both your characters general personality and the specific responses to any stimulus. If your character is acting like a jerk, it is you that are acting like the jerk
(this doesn't apply if your character acting like a jerk is enhancing the fun of the other players, but this is a rare thing and takes some serious social skills to pull off).