Doing Things Better #1: Entertaining your fellow-players

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

Fasten your character securely to the party, with links either to two other characters or to the Big Iron Ring of the team's occupation or duty. When the party is drawn into an adventure by the GM scenario-hooking somebody else, your character ought to be drawn along too — without the GM having to fiddle about at the beginning of each adventure separately motivating several sub-parties and individual characters. It is part of your job as a player to generate a character who will go on adventures with the party. It is not your job to make the GM work for it.

I have a player who chronically goes against this. When I ran a supers campaign he built a shapeshifting dragon from another dimension. When I ran Worminghall he built a teenage boy sent to study human magic by the dragons who were his adoptive parents (are we seeing a pattern here?). When I ran a capers campaign he built a sniper (highly capable, but kind of one-note, and not the right note). He's actually a good roleplayer, but he has limited kinds of characters that interest him, and it's chronically a struggle to drag his characters into interacting at all with anyone else's.

Bill Stoddard