Help needed... Player going off-track

Hi all,

My group and I are having some troubles with one of the players in my group, and I wondered if maybe some Narrators had had the same experience and could help...

We have played regularly for 4 years, adding new players each time a slot opened. Today, after some cast changes, three players from the original set remain.

And one of them is... going off-track. For a year now, he seems to focus primarily on his own roleplaying instead of the plot. RPGing is good, of course; but now he's kinda pulling lots of the story to himself, including some goofy action - apparently, just for fun.

He also tends to rush headlong into action, without thinking.

Example: last night, in and underground cave labyrinth, he went to scout the areas beyond. When he came back later to the others, instead of clearly showing himself, he made them think he was a guard - happily, phaser fire had been forbidden by the away team commander; the PC just got a good beating.

His pranks are almost never dangerous - just utterly annoying.

Now why does he do such jokes? We don't really know. We don't think he lost interest, he just has a "solo cowboy" attitude that is a problem to the good march of the group.

The superior officer of the group tried talking to him. To no avail. I, as a Narrator, tried bashing him on the head several times with the heavy consequences of his actions (girlfriend taken by Section 31, multiple court martials nearing the eviction of Starfleet...). To no avail.

Direct speaking as player-to-player is not an option since the guy has quite a personality.

What's sad is that the guy can be one of the most wonderful players I ever played with. 4 seasons (50 eps) went perfectly fine with him. But now, for some time, he seems sidetracked.

We're all out of ideas... I was wondering if any of you had had similar experiences, or if you had some comments or ideas... I'll take anything :(

Thanks a lot in advance.

Well, we sometimes have such problems in my group, but not with this gravity - and so far it has not been necessary to find a way to prevent it (BTW this reminds me of our common friend Frenchy_2001 who liked to do such things from time to time...;)).

What I could suggest (but with no guarantee that it will work since I never tried it for the reasons stated above) would be to plan a retaliation with the other players. For instance, every one of them could begin to act like him during a particular game; or, you could devise an ingame prank - like, for instance, making him unknowingly play an hologram of himself during a holodeck training session for the rest of the group (him learning in the end that his character was sleeping or on duty during this time).
Since apparently you tried every ingame diplomatic method, you could try to fight fire with fire and spoil his game the same way he does to you, with very annoying pranks. Of course, depending on his personality, this may not work at all.

Just my 0.02 €

Thank you C5 for attempting to help us and even it's a really good idea and it would be a great pleasure to play a such story, I think it's useless.

In fact our guy here hate when he's not the "star" . If we begin to play like him he will be so disappointed to not be the center of everybody's interest that he will go further and further in jokes and stupidity in order to be THE important character.

and when KW will tell us the end of story he will not understand

so he would learn nothing af a such experience.

I don't know if i'm clear enough but if your idea would be goodfor anybody i think it will not be enough good for him
:(

thanks a lot

You got me laughing, C5 ;)

I think Loryk summed it up - the idea would sure be a big laugh! But the guy has such a strong personality, he would either be encouraged in his behaviour, either get angry.

Yup, that got me thinking too of sometimes Frenchy_2001... But he, at least, gave warnings he was to play a goofy character (I mean, if you do an Ewok, nobody can expect you to act in a very reasonable way!). Here we have ten times the power of it... mostly because the player wants to be the star of the show :(

Thanks for your input however - I may use the story idea in a different context or RPG :)

Quote:

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Originally posted by KillerWhale
Hi all,

{sound of savage snipping in the background}

Direct speaking as player-to-player is not an option since the guy has quite a personality.

{...}

Thanks a lot in advance.

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What do you mean exactly when saying "quite a personality"?

I had a similar problem a few years back ... we were playing a Warhammer campaign ... or at least attempting to. Two of the players were seasoned roleplayers, with lots of years of roleplaying under their belt. They were kind of duetting together, sometimes monopolising game time. However, the roleplaying was good and had a rather beneficial influence as the other players had to roleplay harder too. So I did not intervene. Maybe I should have ... anyhow, at some time, the characters were keeping watch of a small wood near a village, hoping to catch cattle thiefs (or something). One of them (one of the roleplayers) stumbled upon a small chaos warband. He managed to avoid being noticed, but the mutations of the chaos warriors scared the hell out of him (well, he failed his roll big time). So I described this by saying he felt as if the warband's chief was whispering to him in a horrible manner to forget he saw them, ang get the hell out of here, and so on. He stood there prostrated till the end of the night.
When he saw the other players, he said absolutely nothing about the encounter. This was not exactly what I expected, so I had the other players roll to see if they noticed that he was acting a bit strangely. Only one succeeded: the other roleplayer. So he went and spoke to him in private, and learnt the truth ... and decided the first player was right. They both came back to the others and did all they could to persuade them there was nothing worth investigating, that they'd rather follow that other lead, and so on. Being de facto the group leaders (heavy roleplayers often are), they managed to convince them, and end of the campaign. Why did they do that? I think they didn't care about the campaign much. They were quite content to roleplay ad lib with no stupid scenario to get in the way I guess.
The worse part is: there was not much I could do. I tried to reason with them, but the first player told me his character had been scared to death and it would not be realistic for him to want to investigate. The second one explained how the first one had convinced him that the warband really looked fearsome, and his character certainly did not want to have anything to do with them. Somehow, I felt quite disheartened to have such cowards among the characters ... and I think the other players felt it too (well, they heard some of it), so instead of pulling a deus ex machina later to get back on track we progressively switched to other games and tried to forget about it ;).

In a way, you could say that roleplaying and lack of willingness to help from the "lead" players killed the game. IMO, "lead" players have a very strong influence on the way the game flows. If they are cooperative, the game will do well. If they just want to have fun and don't care about the others (the players nor the GM) ... things won't be that easy.

All right, so, my advice? Restrospectively, I think I can say I saw it comming, somehow. I felt that both players were having more fun acting their character and competing against the other than they had participating to the adventure, trying to solve the mistery, or interacting with the other players or the GM. I saw it becoming worse. And I should have put and end to it before it was too late. Not in-game. When in-game, players can always justify their action, say the circumstances were specific, and so on. No, I should have talked to both, player-to-player (or rather GM-to-players), and simply told them their behaviour was really disrupting the game, and that I would probably have to expell one of them if it kept on ... specially as there was already 6 players, and 5 is already too many in my book.

Well, as usual, YMMV :).

Just tell him he's ticking you and the other players off. If that doesn't do the trick, I'd blaze up the character. More likely, he's bored in some way; ask him if he wants a new character, to play something new, or take a swift combat tread to the beaner...

Works for me...

I had a player do something similar...turns out he was tired of playing the CMO and wanted to play a more aggressive, combat-oriented player. My co-GM and I didn't figure it out until he had pissed off the rest of the group and drove us nuts with his antics.

We took him out to dinner one night and just talked about the game. He explained that he was sick of his character and wanted to change. Once it was out in the open, it was much easier to work with. We transferred his CMO in-game, then added his new security officer. He was happy after that.

My suggestion would be to talk to the player outside the game. Maybe he has real-life issues bugging him, maybe he's just sick of his character. Whatever the case, try to fix it before the rest of the group has major issues. Don't let your long-lived game collapse because of one player.

IMO, anyhow. :)

Thanks guys for your feedback!

Calcoran, thanks for sharing the experience - unfortunately that has some similarities with what we're going through.

It indeed seems the player is most interested in RPGing without some annoying backstory getting in the way.

The guy has such a strong personality that we can't just tell him "Man, refrain from your sidetracking, everybody's getting bored", because he may have a variety of reactions, from just walking away slamming the door, to playing in a unnatural and/or dull way, providing no input at all.

I'd also like to avoid drastic solutions... Like killing him off. Although I think he may well kill himself if he continues like that.

The Science Officer self-appointed counselor will have a talk with his character as soon as the current mission is over... I hope it works.

But it's true, Ineti, that he may just be fed up with the concept of his character. Or even with the universe... When we finished our 50-eps story arc,
there was a kind of downtime, perfectly natural of course since the big bads had been vanquished, new objectives had to be found and all. Now everybody has found that - they have their own prototype ship and all... Maybe he stayed stuck with the downtime? Maybe he needs a fresh start with another character? Maybe he's not motivated by the current campaign? If the ingame solution doesn't work, I guess we'll just have to talk out of the game. Try, at least.

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Here is an idea. If the player will not straighten up, flat ask him what is wrong with the game, infront of the others. Make him answer. Since he is a strong personality he will probably state what his problem with the game is. If it is the fact he just wants to cause trouble, yes I have had one of these in a game, tell him that his actions are becoming annoying. his action may be giving the newer players a bad idea of how a game is supposed to go.

Posted by Styro:

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Kill him. And his character too.

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Ditto.

He's probably rp'ing this way because he's tired of his character. It's happened to some of my players before, they simply lose interests in the character but don't want he/she to die, because of storyline hooks.

Talk it over and insert the death into the story.

We had a similar issue in a fantasy game I played in once upon a time (Hero system I think, not that it matters).

The GM was getting frustrated so a bunch of the other players/PC's banded together. In the midst of an adventure we were suddenly off to the chemist shop then the whole band of our character's drug his to a bar. Gave him a mickey, stripped him, tattooed him, pierced him, and left him with the dwarves. I thought the GM was going to wet himself laughing - needless to say we aced the dice rolls.

Point was - when the player saw how irritated the rest of us were with his charcter he changed. He was certainly rather irritated with us for awhile - but I think in the end he realized that at least we'd only done it to his character! Which is a good thing really.....I don't know where we'd have found real dwarves....:eek:

Seems like talking is the only way out :( Not that I didn't expect that... ;)

I'm afraid ingame jokes will really set him off... He's already not happy when he has to follow orders from the superior PC...

Discussed the matters with the players - we got an idea! :)

The player has a rival from his past that never showed up.

Now he will. In the person of a Starfleet counselor observer who is here to assess the performance of the crew and of its "unstable elements"...

Needless to say, the guy is charming, competent, nice to work with, respects the hierarchy and discipline - he's a fine officer. A model our PC here could follow ;)

We'll see if it works.

Nice idea, KW. Tell us how it worked when you play it !

I usually just sit down with the player and ask if he or she has a problem with his or her character, the direction of the campaign, etc. If he or she is uncommunicative, I confer with the other players to determine whether they want the offending player to leave the group. If so, I politely inform him or her that he or she is no longer welcome.

It would be difficult to do since the player could take this as an offense... And we want to keep him, and keep good relations with him :( But we will resort to that if ingame solutions fails.

I'll tell you how it goes :)

Here's a side thought for you KW.
Do some type of a 'side-trek' game, holodecks are good for this type of game session. The kicker - inform you trouble maker to design and run this session, this gives the GM a break from the norm, and allows the player to see things from the GM's point of view.
Lastly don't let the other players know about the switch, it's more fun that way (evil GM grin). Really though I've had about a 75% success rate with this, 25% of the time it only compounds the problems, however, use your best judgement with this person.

One other item, Calcoran BREATH MAN

An interesting idea - thanks! I'm not sure if this would work, the guy is already GM for other games (and a good one at that), so he knows what problems GM face...

But the trick could be reused in other contexts :)