Tried to give what a player wanted: didn't work

[Dr TPK]

I have a certain player with whom I have played for a decade. He has said that my games are super deadly, and he thinks thorough the sessions that his character is going to die in 3 seconds. It bothers him and makes him nervous and not enjoy the game. He also tries to create horrible munchinized characters that are invalid for my games, and gets upset when I reject, because he has spent so much time on them (without consulting me first or reading the campaign info).

Once he told me that in MMORPGs he would like to have a very powerful character and only then he could roleplay it. All these events and conversations inspired me to do the following.

I had a one-shot free-form superhero adventure, which I already had successfully playtested. The character generation was freeform and up to the player. I told both players that "create something like the Spider-Man" and he created a horrible munchin character he was super strong, completely bulletproof and super fast. I accepted it immediately and said it was a great character. I had simply decided to give him all the necessary information but readily accept everything he wanted. This was something I had never tried before: don't think, just say "yes".

Then the game started and the first opponent was a nazi infantry assault with panzer support. The character was too fast for the tanks to aim at and the infantry could do absolutely nothing to harm him. There were two bazookas, but it was hopeless to use them effectively against a super fast man-sized opponent. I wanted to hear what I wanted to do and I let him do it. The nazis were actual NPCs with names and written histories and there were story behind them. The PCs didn't care for all that and it was ok. I had decided that everything would be ok with me and that I would rather eat broken class than show any discontent.

The player got bored and committed suicide. The other PC, played by an easy-going player that I know very well, soloed the adventure.

I told the player who lost his character what was the intention of the game: to let him play freely and have a powerful PC. I called me vindictive and that the whole game was just a big set-up for him. I just couldn't understand it: it was a change of pace and in that game I tried to do everything opposite then I had done before, and having heard years of whining, that was the game that was supposed to make everything better.

I have already tried talking with him, but we are in a sort of dead end.

[TheIronGolem]

Ditch him. You've done your due diligence, and more.

EDIT: Ditch him as a player, that is. Presumably you can still be friends outside of gaming.

[Flickerdart]

Doesn't Spiderman's spidey-sense let him essentially dodge out of the way before anyone can shoot him? A bunch of regular soldiers wouldn't stop him.

[Dr TPK]

Doesn't Spiderman's spidey-sense let him essentially dodge out of the way before anyone can shoot him? A bunch of regular soldiers wouldn't stop him.

I would say that a certain amount of bullets fired upon him at once would make it possible for him to get killed or wounded. Being completely bulletproof is radically different.

[dascarletm]

Doesn't Spiderman's spidey-sense let him essentially dodge out of the way before anyone can shoot him? A bunch of regular soldiers wouldn't stop him.

It lets him dodge at the speed of plot. So maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't...

[sleepyphoenixx]

Did his characters actually die (or die more often than normal for your table)? Because that's kind of important to decide if his concerns are valid or if he's just whining.

Taking into account the second story i'd have to say he was whining.
He wanted a powerful character. He got a powerful character, and promptly got bored with it and eliminated himself from the game.
You handed him everything he wanted on a silver platter and he threw it in your face, so i can't really see a way to blame you for his lack of enjoyment or the following anger.

The thing he should learn from this is that Mary Sue's aren't any fun except maybe in his imagination. Good stories need conflict, and in TTRPGs that conflict comes mainly from challenging combat or roleplaying (though going by his lack of interest in the stories of your villains i doubt that's his cup of tea).

[ComaVision]

Some players just don't know what they want. I have a player in the game I DM that has asked for riddles/puzzles. However, minor environmental obstacles that I never intended to be puzzling have held up the party for a considerable amount of time. She immediately disengages and starts messing around on her phone if a solution takes any thought.

On top of this, she's playing a Factotum. Poor class given how she likes to "play".

[icefractal]

It sounds like what he actually wants is to be more powerful than you can handle. He wants the game to theoretically be normal, but in fact he has an uber-character and just crushes everything while the other players gape in awe and you try futilely to stop him.

So he doesn't like a game that's actually challenging, and he also doesn't like a game where you let him be powerful and are unbothered by that fact.

However, if that is what he wants, it's completely unreasonable. If he wants foils for his showing off, he should hire some actors.

[Galen]

Apparently, he didn't want a powerful PC. He just wanted to whine about having a powerful PC. That's why he was staying with you for all those years. You were his whine outlet.

[jaydubs]

It sounds like he's being unreasonable. But just to give him the benefit of the doubt, here's a thought.

You could try adding problems that aren't solved by being super powerful. That's the classic way superman gets challenged, other than kryptonite. He goes up against something that forces tough choices, or is difficult in some way that doesn't involve being able to take him in a fight. Someone tries to blackmail him with his secret identity. Or threatens someone he loves. Maybe there's some kind of mystery, where the culprit can't be found easily for whatever reason. Perhaps the villain is protected by the legal system, so punching him out would turn the hero into the criminal.

It's possible to build a good game around overpowered PCs, so long as there's a focus on something other than stomping enemies. Relationships with NPCs, nation building, exploration, moral quandaries, puzzles, etc.

Again, it sounds like he's being unreasonable. But there's at least one alternate explanation.

[Yahzi]

called me vindictive and that the whole game was just a big set-up
Your player managed his anxiety by pretending that infinite power would make him feel safe. So when you gave him infinite power, and it didn't change how he felt, he completely freaked out. Now on top of his ever-present anxiety he has lost his coping mechanism. As a game, it is a total failure.

As therapy, however, it was brilliant. Maybe you can say to him, "You said having a super-powerful character would let you feel safe. But when you had that character, you didn't feel safe. Maybe your anxiety isn't really about the game." He will either thank you for the insight, or never speak to you again (my money is on the latter). The guy has serious issues that he as been masking, and you unmasked them.

[VincentTakeda]

It might be easy to simply call the guy a neutral woundwailer and call it a day, but the idea that he's simply not interested in direct confrontation is an important one not to overlook.

He may simply be a tactician gamer. He wants a more shadowrun style campaign where one of the victory conditions is avoiding confrontation... He may be interested in a superhero campaign where he's trying to operate in stealth mode behind the scenes instead of taking on a tank division in broad daylight.

The important part for me is he uses the word vindictive... It implies he told you what he wanted and 'you gave him the exact opposite' so while you might have felt like you gave him what he wanted by giving him a powerful character and thats the end of it, what he really wanted was a character that felt safe within the confines of his choices, and 'having to fight tanks' isn't the type of 'role' he wants to play. He might be looking for a game experience that's not so much about combat, easy or not.

If he made himself so powerful that a tank clearly shouldnt be able to hurt him, he may be trying to set up a situation where the tank has to realize this and is wise enough to know the encounter should resolve in some other way...

Instead the tank shoots anyway and nothing is different. You feel like you made a change but the part thats really important to change for him is the same as it ever was.

[atemu1234]

First mistake: Trying to give a player what he wanted :smallbiggrin:.

[sleepyphoenixx]

First mistake: Trying to give a player what he wanted :smallbiggrin:.

You might be joking but that's actually a pretty good point.
The problem is that what most players say they want and what they actually want are rarely the same thing.
Giving players what they want is after all the mark of a good DM (especially if they don't know they want it).

[Trasilor]

This may sound odd, but have the problem player DM a one-off. Sometimes it helps, as a player, to sit behind the screen.

If playing D&D, find an easy module to run and suggest that he run it. Just make sure you are unfamiliar with the module.

[Trasilor]

You might be joking but that's actually a pretty good point.
The problem is that what most players say they want and what they actually want are rarely the same thing.
Giving players what they want is after all the mark of a good DM (especially if they don't know they want it).

That is a bold generalization. Players are not children :smallamused:. If a GM asks me, I tell them specifically what I want my characters to accomplish as well as any powers or swag I want my character to develop.

[Scipio_77]

Like others have alluded to: The best story isn't always the story people want to hear.

Anyway, I can't comment on how annoying this player is. But as a DM any player with a drive is something you can use. This one seems driven to stay alive and amass power, and that is actually fine... a lot of interesting characters try to stay alive and amass power and can give you a lot of nice plot hooks to further your campaign. You could see if his character would fall to darkness like Darth Vader or end up as the middle man in nefarious schemes that tries to exploit his greed and fear etc etc.

[Larrx]

I had a similar experience. I typically ran intrigue/mystery games in 3.5. When 4e came out we decided to try it. The system seemed (to me) to lend itself better to squad based tactical combat, so I ran a game like that. And then another. Both were terrible, near rage quit, failures. Two of my players were . . . poor . . . at tactical strategy.

So, in a fit of pique, I ran third game with some house rules.
All enemies had one hitpoint.
All enemies could only hit on a nat20.
All enemies could only be missed on a nat1.
No enemy attack could do more than 1 damage.
The enemies could never outnumber the PCs.
No enemies could never win initiative.

I ran the game for two sessions. My problem players loved every second, but I was dissatisfied.

I realized that I had decided to do this to be vindictive, and the fact that it hadn't made my players 'learn their lesson' saddened me. I like to think that I'm a little more mature today then I was then :).

I don't think my experience mirrors your own (I actually think it's kind of the opposite), but it's on topic, and maybe it'll help?

[Chronos]

As an aside, was anyone else confused by the pronouns in the OP? A few times, he refers to the player as "I".

[frogglesmash]

I had a similar experience. I typically ran intrigue/mystery games in 3.5. When 4e came out we decided to try it. The system seemed (to me) to lend itself better to squad based tactical combat, so I ran a game like that. And then another. Both were terrible, near rage quit, failures. Two of my players were . . . poor . . . at tactical strategy.

So, in a fit of pique, I ran third game with some house rules.
All enemies had one hitpoint.
All enemies could only hit on a nat20.
All enemies could only be missed on a nat1.
No enemy attack could do more than 1 damage.
The enemies could never outnumber the PCs.
No enemies could never win initiative.

I ran the game for two sessions. My problem players loved every second, but I was dissatisfied.

I realized that I had decided to do this to be vindictive, and the fact that it hadn't made my players 'learn their lesson' saddened me. I like to think that I'm a little more mature today then I was then :).

I don't think my experience mirrors your own (I actually think it's kind of the opposite), but it's on topic, and maybe it'll help?

I don't understand how your players could enjoy that. Every encounter would be a repeat of the party caster lobbing a fireball and the DM saying "you win."

[sleepyphoenixx]

I don't understand how your players could enjoy that. Every encounter would be a repeat of the party caster lobbing a fireball and the DM saying "you win."

Some people don't like combat and numbercrunching and play for the storytelling and RP. Of course the heroes will defeat the faceless mooks, there's no need to spend 4 realtime hours rolling dice and looking up combat rules. I've tried that approach and while i prefer the other way it was still fun.
Suffice to say though that this type of player rarely works well with optimizers and fans of challenging combat at the same table.

Not that i understand why someone would use a rules-heavy system like D&D for that. Maybe they just like the fluff?

[frogglesmash]

Some people don't like combat and numbercrunching and play for the storytelling and RP. Of course the heroes will defeat the faceless mooks, there's no need to spend 4 realtime hours rolling dice and looking up combat rules. I've tried that approach and while i prefer the other way it was still fun.
Suffice to say though that this type of player rarely works well with optimizers and fans of challenging combat at the same table.

Not that i understand why someone would use a rules-heavy system like D&D for that. Maybe they just like the fluff?

I could understand why someone would enjoy a combat light campaign but with the aforementioned houserules in place you could one shot a dragon or even a god with a pointed stick.

[P.F.]

A few things going on here, I think.

1. Some people aren't happy unless they are complaining.

2. Perhaps he wants a combat challenge without feeling like his character's about to get killed. These are some of my favorite types of encounters, where the monsters hit often but deal only minor ability damage, for example, or miss frequently but have an enormous number of hit points. The players have time to adjust their tactics, move the fight to more favorable terrain, or possibly flee, and must work together to defeat the opponents. These types of fights lack the visceral threat of "one hit like that and I'm done for" while still presenting the possibility of defeat.

3. I have players whose main metric is not how they are doing in the game but in how they are doing compared to other players. I typically handle this with blatant favoritism, but YMMV.

4. When people feel dominated or oppressed in their real lives, the appeal of fantasy role-playing is often an escape from disempowerment. That's consistent with "I only want to role-play in an MMO if I can be the Top Dog and I'm going to pretend I'm not my character until then." Perhaps what he wants, is not the ability to God-mode all the enemies, but the ability to crush his enemies using a real-life skill: encyclopædic rules knowledge and optimization ability. Then he can, using a "weaker" character, slay the "more powerful" foes without ever really being in danger. Or perhaps I'm projecting.

5. Anxiety over D&D is symptomatic of a larger anxiety issue. It's not playing poker. It's not going out and getting in barfights. It's just for fun. Win, lose, or D&D, you go home the same way at the end of the night. Now I would never suggest anyone consume age-restricted substances to manage their anxiety or visit their psychiatrist over something that happens in a D&D game, but perhaps a couple shells of fresh, cold kava, or a nice hot cup of chamomile tea would help ease the tension and let him remember that it's just a ****ing game?

[Flickerdart]

Now I would never suggest anyone consume age-restricted substances to manage their anxiety
To be fair, "beer and pretzels" is a pretty classic mode for playing D&D.

[Barstro]

It sounds like what he actually wants is to be more powerful than you can handle.

This was my thought too. He probably also wants to be the most powerful; other characters need to exist so he can be better than them.

The real problem with this isn't what he wants, it's what he thinks he has been getting. OP said that this player constantly thinks he's going to die in three seconds. Since I doubt he has played for ten years with thousands of characters who die in three seconds, the problem player appears to have an unrealistic view of the D20 universe that has warped his desires.

I think another part of the problem is that OP did a one-shot free form adventure. If he, instead, did a one-shot module and followed that module exactly as written, but allowed the player to do what he wanted, he would have nobody to blame but the module and himself.

[jedipotter]

Very few people know what they want. And often what they say they want is not what they really want. And worst of all, most people even when given everything they say they want....just are not happy.

And on top of that you get the rumor problem: people are told things or hear things and believe them. So if they hear 'whatever'' and they choose to believe it, then it becomes fact for them. So someone way out in left field says ''monks suck'' and the person then hear that and believes it.

One of the big tricks of being a DM is to give the players want they really want to have fun, and not what they say they want. And you need to know your players to do this. And if you do have a ''never happy'' player, you need to understand that....

[Gnome Alone]

And on top of that you get the rumor problem: people are told things or hear things and believe them. So if they hear 'whatever'' and they choose to believe it, then it becomes fact for them. So someone way out in left field says ''monks suck'' and the person then hear that and believes it.

The underlying idea is true here, but wow, that has gotta be just about the worst example you could've chosen. Does "way out in left field" mean "with a lot of system mastery and armed with math and anecdotes" now? Because, forsooth, the monks, they suck.

[dascarletm]

The underlying idea is true here, but wow, that has gotta be just about the worst example you could've chosen. Does "way out in left field" mean "with a lot of system mastery and armed with math and anecdotes" now? Because, forsooth, the monks, they suck.

HEY! Don't take the bait!

Noone wants the monkdayocalypse to happen so close to 2015. Let's see if we can make it till the end.:smallwink:

[BRC]

Do you consider your games normally lethal? How often do PCs Die, or get very close to death?
Its possible that this is just a case of a player not knowing what they want. They spent so long having their munchkin builds denied that they forgot what it felt like to actually PLAY an overpowered munchkin build.

[Xhieron]

Isn't it possible that what's really happening is that you actually did set him up, he called you on it, and now he's rightfully upset at you for using a game to try and make some kind of point to or about him?

Maybe the session was good therapy, but if I found out that my DM was trying to therapize me at the gaming table, that would be the end of our gaming together. That's not cool. Even if it wasn't your intention, the fact that you set your rules up based on your perception of this player is a no-no. No matter what a player says he wants or whether he's telling the truth to you or to himself, no one likes being pandered to or patronized.

Now, yeah, it's entirely possible that the player has some issues, and it's also possible that his behavior, issues or no issues, may have made past play experiences with him difficult or frustrating. The solution to that is to actually talk about it with him, up to and including talking about whether he should find another group to game with.

You can absolutely cater to your players, and try to provide the kind of game you think they'll enjoy, but the line between accommodating a person's tastes and insulting their tastes with a sham of a game is bright enough that most players, like this guy, can see it when it's crossed.

[OldTrees1]

The wisest thing one can do is notice they are confused. It is highly likely that your image of the player does not match reality. The fact that the player thought you were being "vindictive" screams that this is a deep miscommunication and not a problem player(or problem DM from the player's point of view). You say you have talked to the player and reached a dead end. My hypothesis is that the dead end was caused by you talking to him as if he were a problem player and him talking to you as if you were a problem DM. You can't change how he will initially approach the next talk(since that was determined by your past actions) but you can change how you will approach it. If there is a problem and your player thinks you are a problem DM but you are not a problem DM, then how should you start the conversation?

[nedz]

A large part of the attraction of the game is aspirational: looking forward to the next level, the next feat, the next item. This is why Monty Haul games fail: the players get immediate gratification, but their aspirations are killed. You, in effect, ran a post Monty Haul game and he had nothing to look forward to. At least this is one likely interpretation, though without knowing both you and the player better: I cannot be certain.