General Dealing with player-character imbalance

[infojunky]

Isn't summoning Cthulhu and building jump drives the same task?

Well both operating languages for those functions are base21... So pretty much yes...

 

[aramis]

Isn't summoning Cthulhu and building jump drives the same task?

In 40K it is.

 

[Tiikeri]

Yes.

 

[LeperColony]

Say you have a player that's supposed to be a highly skilled military veteran yet wants to do things that are clearly... putting it bluntly, militarily stupid... and will likely get the party killed or seriously in deep doo doo. To me this is playing the character contrary to their nature and background.

If the mistake is a basic lack of knowledge that their character should have but the player doesn't, I'm all for supplying the missing information and making a suggestion.

However, if it's a matter of bad judgment or questionable priorities, I don't think that's the same thing at all.

Plenty of people are bad at their jobs. Very experienced people planned the Bay of Pigs or Operation Eagle Claw. Every day trained medical professionals make mistakes that kill people, incompetent lawyers fail their clients, licensed cosmetologists give bad haircuts.

 

[Ulsyus]

I find the idea of a player needing to know stuff for their character to be able to do it to be silly and not very logical.

How many players can summon a servant of Cthulhu? How many players can build a jump drive?

We play rpgs to do stuff we can not do in the real world...

What Mike said.

Plenty of people are bad at their jobs. Very experienced people planned the Bay of Pigs or Operation Eagle Claw. Every day trained medical professionals make mistakes that kill people, incompetent lawyers fail their clients, licensed cosmetologists give bad haircuts.

Some of those things can simply come down to bad judgement calls, even in complex processes or systems where a single mistake then sets the direction for every right decision which is then predicated on the supposed validity of the bad call made earlier.

In games we can replicate this with complex tasks that require multiple rolls. If players rolled something horrendously catastrophic early on in the process, a ref could let them continue, the PCs oblivious to it, with the chance that a particularly good roll later on may pick up the earlier condition-setting error. My group has had that at least once - I recollect everyone either laughing or squirming in their seats as the disaster slowly unfolded before them roll-by-roll, their PCs oblivious of the oncoming doom...

 

[LeperColony]

What Mike said.
In games we can replicate this with complex tasks that require multiple rolls.

Systemic mechanics are one way to model this, but by no means the only way. If it works as a method for you, that's great. Personally, I'd tend to use more of a narrative, role-playing method. People make bad decisions, even if they should know better.

For instance, I don't expect my players to know how to repair a jump engine. If they see it's on fire and say "I want to try and repair it," then in my understanding, that's where a roll is called for. I don't ask for an exact breakdown of where they're going to put the flux capacitor.

But if they see the jump engine is on fire and decide to try and jump anyway, that's not a roll situation. That's just a bad decision.

 

[sabredog]

So, how would you deal with a player, or even players, that have characters that are radically different from the player's own experience and background? I thought about this when another thread here brought up tactics.

Say you have a player that's supposed to be a highly skilled military veteran yet wants to do things that are clearly... putting it bluntly, militarily stupid... and will likely get the party killed or seriously in deep doo doo. To me this is playing the character contrary to their nature and background.

How do you deal with a situation like this?

I let the players do what they want to start with: we are talking about an RPG taking place within a shared imaginary universe with talking starfish and PC's flying starships.

The skill system will limit the players in my game. Skills provide all the DM's for success, and success is what this is about - not ideas. Someone can, in real life, come up with any number of ideas but if they lack the knowledge and experience (the 'skill') the idea probably won't work or end well. It works the same in the game.

For example, if a players wants to do something requiring electronics skill, but has none, then they ought to get a negative DM equal to the difficulty DM's for success someone with the skill would have to overcome. I he needs a Computer -2 to fix the computer then give him a -2 DM on his roll. If he fails he damages the system further, maybe now you'd need Computer - 3.

If he makes the roll then good for him - but he only fixed it somewhat and the thing may not run at full efficiency until fixed by an expert with at least Computer-1. Or maybe not - your mileage may vary.



I also have a rule in my game that a natural 12 is success on anything you try - but not always complete success, just enough to make it work at least once. A natural 2 means failure or 'fumble' and the weapon jams or the computer glitches to BSD or something. It's and east fix, but takes a round or something to do. Either way it allows players with no skill in something to at least try to help without everyone relying on the one guy with JoT all the time, or not being able to fix the M-Drive to get them off the hell world they are stuck on.

 

[Condottiere]

One of the advantages to the modular approach to character generation, you will have those assumed basic skills, like simple combat tactics for soldiers.

If it's a skill the character uses often, a little research by the player wouldn't be untoward.

 

[Flattened Sphere]

"Your guy has served 5 terms and risen to the rank of Major General ... he's obviously got a sound understanding of military situations. I therefore feel able to tell you - because he would be aware of it - that if you do it that way, you'll probably only succeed on a roll of 10+, even with all his relevant skills. So do you want to do it that way despite the odds, or would you like to discuss possible alternative ways of achieving the same outcome first?"

Of course, if he insists on running with the idea he first thought of, you might relent and give him a 9+ or even an 8+ roll ... but don't push it too far because whilst his estimation of the odds might not be perfect, it's not going to be tooooo far out ...

 

[Kersus]

I thought this would be more along the lines of, "What to do when all the players but one have a lot of skills."

I played at one table where everyone had 4-6 terms and one player had one term with no commission nor advancement. The poor character could still do stuff, but wasn't the gunner, the engineer, the pilot, the fighter, etc. He was the character who held the tools for the other characters.

This is less an issue for campaigns than it is for one-shots.

 

[Spinward Scout]

If the mistake is a basic lack of knowledge that their character should have but the player doesn't, I'm all for supplying the missing information and making a suggestion.

This is where the basic attribute EDU comes in. Wisdom is also included with EDU or occasionally INT. Have them make an EDU check with the number of Military terms and/or Rank as a Modifier.

The point of having those numbers on the character sheet is that the player isn't the character.

 

[kilemall]

I thought this would be more along the lines of, "What to do when all the players but one have a lot of skills."

I played at one table where everyone had 4-6 terms and one player had one term with no commission nor advancement. The poor character could still do stuff, but wasn't the gunner, the engineer, the pilot, the fighter, etc. He was the character who held the tools for the other characters.

This is less an issue for campaigns than it is for one-shots.

This is where psionics comes in handy. The younger character can max out on their psionic potential.

 

[coliver988]

I thought this would be more along the lines of, "What to do when all the players but one have a lot of skills."

I played at one table where everyone had 4-6 terms and one player had one term with no commission nor advancement. The poor character could still do stuff, but wasn't the gunner, the engineer, the pilot, the fighter, etc. He was the character who held the tools for the other characters.

This is less an issue for campaigns than it is for one-shots.

The game we played a bit ago had a couple of 1 term characters. While low in skills, a lot of the game really does not always need that. Particularly as this game was taking place after a ship crash & they all woke up in cold berths. No one had survival or recon, so from that perspective the 1 term players had exactly the same chances and abilities as the multi-term players.

We also evened things out by applying one of the skill packages and favored the, err, less-favored players to help a bit. But in Traveller it is not the lack of skills that matter, but the lack of imagination! (well, that really applies to all RPGs I would hazard)

 

[BRJN]

Given the "no-experience Player makes inept decision his military career Character would not" situation, I might hand the Player a web tablet with the Google search for "Charge of the Light Brigade" on screen and tell him something like "Your character remembers reading about this in Staff School."