Amen to that. That’s why it’s so important to talk to the player in question, and see what’s going on behind the scenes.

(mcv) The more detail the GM has worked out, the more the players will be inspired by it. They need to have a feel for the world before they understand it well enough to contribute meaningfully. Sounds like a good subject for a future blog entry.

Some indie games do this quite well, I’m told — like Dogs in the Vineyard (town creation system) and Stranger Things, wherein the players describe map elements during setup.

(Jeff King) Thanks for the advice.

You’re welcome, Jeff. I hope you’ll come back and let us know how things went.

(mcv) School. Work. Be careful you’re not taking this too seriously.

I think the parallels that DM T brought up often have a lot of merit, especially from a GM’s perspective. This is mainly because for a hobby devoted to fun, GMing requires a lot of work — and if one player isn’t sharing the rules-load, that can be pretty frustrating.

Be careful. If he just has trouble getting in character, putting him in the spotlight might make him more nervous or put the spotlight on his inability to get into character. Or it could work fine, ofcourse. You know the situation best, while all of us don’t. (Since when do you have to be an amateur shrink to be a good GM?)

DM T said: “The new guy” haven’t done any of the readings, and have been avoiding my phone calls to schedule a “tutoring session” where I’ll personally teach him some of the game mechanics.

You make it sound like homework. Be careful you don’t scare him off. I’d say just help him out with the game mechanics during play, point out his options, and eventually he’ll get the hang of those.

It feels like having to fire someone for repeatedly not doing a good job at work.

School. Work. Be careful you’re not taking this too seriously. It’s still meant to be a game, and most of all, fun. That said, some games do indeed require quite a bit more commitment than others (imagine playing ASL with someone who refuses to learn the rules). But since he does have RPG experience already, isn’t it possible that the problem is just that he’s looking for a different kind of RPG experience? I think in less tactical games, the exact details of the game mechanics don’t matter nearly as much.

So far, it’s a disaster according to a player of mine. “The new guy” haven’t done any of the readings, and have been avoiding my phone calls to schedule a “tutoring session” where I’ll personally teach him some of the game mechanics.

I’m afraid I’ll have to give him the boot if this doesn’t improve by the end of the adventure. It feels like having to fire someone for repeatedly not doing a good job at work.

No suggestions this time, just sharing today

I wanted to wait to comment till I got a chance to talk to the player to comment. It went pretty good. He said that it just takes time for him to get into a character. I can understand that but I still intend to try and put him in the spotlight as much as I can.

The one thing that I wouldn’t have thought of my self is to talk to the other players about it. The thought of this makes me a little nervious but I’ll definately give it a try.

I’ll let you know how it goes with more comments

The Q&A session: each PC gets to ask one question of every other PC, which must be answered in-character. (Whether the answers become character knowledge is up to the group.) The questions are usually built off of selections of “visions”, pictures or short narrative descriptions of images that mean something to the character.

For a more thorough description of the process, look at the “ontology” section of the House of Cards web site.

And in fact, I think one is the cause of the other. The more detail the GM has worked out, the more the players will be inspired by it. They need to have a feel for the world before they understand it well enough to contribute meaningfully. Sounds like a good subject for a future blog entry.

In any case, in our campaign, the troll player just read a lot of background about Earthdawn trolls and used those to spice up the game. I don’t think he made up much himself. And that’s perhaps the core of one of the problems here: some players can come up with a whole world if you just hand them a sheet of paper, others need a bit more help to get going. I played a human warrior, and I immediately had some ideas about what humans and warriors were about. When it later turned out to conflict somewhat with official material, I adapted and nobody noticed. He just saw trolls as big brutes and that’s it. When he later read about the troll culture and customs, he had something to work with.

So when a player looks like he’s not really in the world, help him out with some ideas. Give him official background material about the city he was born, his people, his guild. If there’s no official material, make some up. Or better yet, do it together. That should help him think a bit more about his character as an individual with a real past, culture and background.

I think the real problem with most “bad roleplayers” is that they see their character mostly as a collection of stats. So help them see it in a different way.

Ofcourse if that doesn’t work, you can still try more extreme measures.

I always struggle with how to accept player contribution, but I do try. In my first Arcana Unearthed campaign, the player of the thief (I mean Rogue, I mean Unfettered) showed up one day with a bunch of NPCs he had created and a story about how they were basically his guild and since the PCs had just captured a tower, he wanted to move them in. We kind of joked around, and it never became really important, but I didn’t shut him down completely, I let him have his guild. Now I should have worked better with the player to figure it out, and to use it to drive an adventure or two (though the player also soon retired that character).

That player’s wife is my “barely plays” player. Unfortunately she just plain doesn’t read (she’s learning disabled, as is he – he at least reads some stuff). I’ve been totally unsuccessefull at getting them to read background material, otherwise the idea of sending them home to read up and have something to contribute would be really good.

Frank

You might say that this is more like step 0.9 than 1.1. It’s being assumed above that Bob really is not roleplaying very much–then deciding whether or not that is a problem.

In a group that’s focused on immersion, I could see this being detrimental. Apart from that, though, I’m with you — it’s never been a problem in any of the groups I’ve gamed with.

Is this sort of thing really a problem for anyone? In my experience it’s never a problem if a group is part first, part third person.

The bar for comment quality is always pretty high on TT, but some days I feel like I need pom-poms.

1. Give the player’s character something that is truly his.

Something that helps flesh out his identity and gives the player a better feel for the world.

For example, when my current group started, we had 3 very experienced RPers and 3 newbies. One newbie picked things up pretty quickly. Another newbie is a bit nervous and clumsy about it, but he’s like that in real life too, and at least he tries. The third newbie liked to smash things. Loves fights, big epic events, that sort of stuff. Not much into the roleplaying. But he was the only troll (Earthdawn) and a skyraider, so the GM gave him a book about the troll skyraider culture, and he loved it. He figured out his history (the last survivor of his clan), relationships (the party is now his new clan), and goals (get a skyship so his clan is skyborne again), and keeps throwing bits of troll skyraider culture into the group, which is great.

I’m not sure how much the GM talked to him about it, but he loves it and we love it. Now we only have to figure out what to do with the nervous guy.