DMing Without Inciting Rage

[SamBargeron]

I have been DMing for years. I have a friend that usually plays in other peoples' games who wants to play in mine. He wants to carry over a character from another person's game that ended. I'm okay with this, and I love the character concept.

I have the following problem. There are three versions of the character in the room:

1. What my friend wants the character to be

2. What my friend thinks the character is

3. How the character was actually built

This is a very big problem. Bigger than it sounds. Normally I could handle this kinda thing, but my friend has some anger issues and is very very very emotionally invested in the character. I'm sure that if my friend will work with me, we can surgically repair his character into a unified vision and he will love the character more than ever. However, explaining to my friend why his character isn't capable of doing what he thinks the character can do will be a daunting challenge.

Unfortunately I am burdened with living in an area with many bad DMs... a decent DM is hard to find around here... to give you an idea of how bad the other DMs in my area are... one of the DMs repeatedly sexually molested a player character every session for an entire campaign... and she let him because she couldn't find another DM...

I know for a fact that my friend tolerates these bad DMs because I can rarely run games for him and the other good DM in the area decided he doesn't want to DM anymore and is now a player in my game. I am worried that my friend built this character with the aid of one of the bad DMs who may have assured my friend that the character was something that it is not due to ignorance or lack of care. I don't know how to break it to my friend that his character's core abilities don't do any of the things he thinks they do.

I'm all about quality assurance in my games, which means that I can't just roll with this without severely crippling my ability to provide a consistently enjoyable gaming experience. I am familiar enough with D&D 3.5 and have enough experience building RPG systems from the ground up that I am confident in my ability to create custom content for my player that would be balanced with the existing system if necessary.

I can resolve the game issues. What I'm worried about it approaching the issue in a way that doesn't piss off my friend and make him associate bad thoughts with his favorite character he has ever made.

Normally I make him build character FOR my games. Now I'm regretting agreeing to let him pull his favorite character over. This shouldn't even be a problem. Yay for having brilliant and awesome friends who are unfortunately emotionally unstable...

 

[SamBargeron]

Player broke down and cried before becoming totally stoked at how awesome his character would be after we finished fixing him...

 

[Terminal Blue]

Just a very general reply.

There's a line in the VtM players handbook which has always stuck with me. Roleplaying is not group therapy. Sure, it's a game where you create author-insertion personas and act out your hopeless power fantasies by kicking the shit out of imaginary goblins, but there needs to be a line between the game and your life.

Now, it's clear this guy is your friend and you want to run a game for him so that's cool, but you don't want to get into a situation where a completely whimsical passtime is ruining your friendship or your friends' emotional life. To this end, there are very hard limits as to how much you can cater to your friend's emotional state, and he needs to know that.

Precisely what those limits are will depend on your tolerance, and how sympathetic the rest of your group is. As you've said, it sounds like they'll probably stay with you regardless simply through lack of choice, but don't ruin their enjoyment because one player needs special attention. Even if you can, they deserve better.

I imagine I'm totally misunderstanding how your friend is, but if he can't handle an honest and straight-up talk about fitting his character into the game in the first place, how is he going to react when he gets a bad dice roll or when something doesn't go his way? I'm going to assume you didn't ask him to change his character concept at all, and that you just wanted to alter the stats. That really doesn't seem like it should be a problem, and it sets off definite warning signs for me if it was.

I know I sound unsympathetic, I'm not. I've become way too attached to characters and thrown all kinds of neurotic crap at people for it in the past. Even now I generally refuse to make characters I would actually like as people for fear of repeating those mistakes. Just be careful, roleplaying is a great hobby and there's nothing like putting your heart and soul into it, but it can be the worst thing in the world to become emotionally tangled up in when you're not capable of controlling those emotions in the first place. If your friend is really not emotionally up to it, you might not be doing him any favours.

 

[Falconsgyre]

Unfortunately I am burdened with living in an area with many bad DMs... a decent DM is hard to find around here... to give you an idea of how bad the other DMs in my area are... one of the DMs repeatedly sexually molested a player character every session for an entire campaign... and she let him because she couldn't find another DM...

What. The. Fuck.

Sounds like you fixed you problem, though, so... I guess I just popped in to say that.

 

[SamBargeron]

Just a very general reply.

There's a line in the VtM players handbook which has always stuck with me. Roleplaying is not group therapy. Sure, it's a game where you create author-insertion personas and act out your hopeless power fantasies by kicking the shit out of imaginary goblins, but there needs to be a line between the game and your life.

Now, it's clear this guy is your friend and you want to run a game for him so that's cool, but you don't want to get into a situation where a completely whimsical passtime is ruining your friendship or your friends' emotional life. To this end, there are very hard limits as to how much you can cater to your friend's emotional state, and he needs to know that.

Precisely what those limits are will depend on your tolerance, and how sympathetic the rest of your group is. As you've said, it sounds like they'll probably stay with you regardless simply through lack of choice, but don't ruin their enjoyment because one player needs special attention. Even if you can, they deserve better.

I imagine I'm totally misunderstanding how your friend is, but if he can't handle an honest and straight-up talk about fitting his character into the game in the first place, how is he going to react when he gets a bad dice roll or when something doesn't go his way? I'm going to assume you didn't ask him to change his character concept at all, and that you just wanted to alter the stats. That really doesn't seem like it should be a problem, and it sets off definite warning signs for me if it was.

I know I sound unsympathetic, I'm not. I've become way too attached to characters and thrown all kinds of neurotic crap at people for it in the past. Even now I generally refuse to make characters I would actually like as people for fear of repeating those mistakes. Just be careful, roleplaying is a great hobby and there's nothing like putting your heart and soul into it, but it can be the worst thing in the world to become emotionally tangled up in when you're not capable of controlling those emotions in the first place. If your friend is really not emotionally up to it, you might not be doing him any favours.

Hey, Evil. It's cool. I expected at least one reply like that. It's not so much that his emotional problems stem from character attachment, he has serious problems. He has been off his medication for a while due to money problems. He just finally got his meds back yesterday, but they take a while to start working again. Also, he quit roleplaying for a long time because of emotional problems caused by the kind of bad DMs I mentioned in my first post. It really tore him up that he had to quit his favorite hobby because of abuse from other people. So there are a lot of things going on in there. I'm giving him an opportunity to get back into his hobby safely. I'm not throwing him into my big group, I'm running a small game kinda just for him.

Unfortunately I am burdened with living in an area with many bad DMs... a decent DM is hard to find around here... to give you an idea of how bad the other DMs in my area are... one of the DMs repeatedly sexually molested a player character every session for an entire campaign... and she let him because she couldn't find another DM...

What. The. Fuck.

Sounds like you fixed you problem, though, so... I guess I just popped in to say that.

Yeah... girl wanted to play a male character, but the DM ruled characters must be the same gender as their players. He then placed insane rules around what her character was allowed to wear in the game. Basically, she had to look sexy or she couldn't play (keep in mind, all of this is in game. He never did anything in the real world or someone would have called the cops). Then, every session he designed some way to have that girl's character raped and she had no way to avoid it. Inescapable traps that deal emotional abuse instead of damage basically... I kept telling her to quit the game, but she insisted on staying in it until she could find another game. Eventually she converted to LARPing at official venues so that she doesn't have to deal with that kind of thing anymore.

Luckily I haven't seen that DM in a few years. I have heard through facebook that he still pulls that stuff, but now he focuses all his in-game sexual nonsense on his wife and she loves it. So, happy endings all around? Kinda?