PC's long-term roleplaying/repetitive actions.

[Ointhedwarf]

A common thing I find in some players is how they take advantage of the game's... loss of interaction. There are times when as a Dm you have to skip parts of the story to avoid tedious, unnecessary descriptions. However, some PCs find this opportunity to do things that their character would most likely never do. For example the party chases a rat in a library and the small animal hides inside one of the thousands of scrolls on the shelves. One of the PCs says that he checks every single one of the scrolls. Now, as a dm I don't really care about the rat, the PCs actions however break the link between him and the character in my opinion. How do you make your PCs understand this?

The rat example is one of countless similar ones. The PC offers to speak with every denizens in a bar. The PC reads every book in the library while searching for a particular name. During off -time, the PC checks every single person that enters or exits the city gates.
This very often makes the PC take control of the story. If he met everyone in the bar, it's harder for me to introduce the shady character later on. if he's read everybook it's harder for me to give him information he doesn't know. It can simply surpass the predictive capacity of the dm, the 5 npc bar must suddenly triple in number. I don't mind preparing more for a session, what bothers me is that the PC fails to realistically roleplay his character. Why would a bored, reluctant fighter suddenly act out of character and show the eagerness to do something that would take most of his time?

[HerbertWest]

The way that I counter some of these types of interactions comes in two forms. The first form is the practical time commitment. If the character truly wishes to read every book in the library, or wants to chase a rat down through thousands of scrolls, make sure that they realize the amount of time that these actions will take. Many times, adventurers and their players fail to comprehend the time sink of their actions. For instance, if your quest is chasing down a Werewolf pack that has stolen important town officials, and during the research phase you want to read every book there is available to you, you will not be successful in your quest, because you've spent weeks pouring over tomes. Option two is to offer them a skill check based on the search for information, and based on their roll, they can do an overview of the situation. For instance, with the rat, they roll a skill check to find it, and after rifling through one hundred scrolls, they find the thing. After the twenty minutes of searching and countering the rat's movements.

I hope that if these options aren't something you would like to do at your table, they at least give you some ideas!

[Flickerdart]

Why would a bored, reluctant fighter suddenly act out of character and show the eagerness to do something that would take most of his time?
Chatting up people, people-watching, reading books...it all seems like exactly what a bored and lazy person would do in lieu of something useful.

It sounds like the player is desperate for something interesting to come his way. The problem seems to be that you have no idea how to react to bulk actions. There are two ways:
1) If he's decided ahead of time that he will be doing everything, you can just give him surface things since he's more likely to be skimming. A quick chat with people in the bar will not give him much beyond people's names, occupations, and one or two little details (which by the way is an excellent opportunity for plot hooks). Watching everyone who walks through a city gate won't give him much beyond the general clothes, races, and prominent equipment of the people, and possibly also a scolding from the guards. Reading all the books will give him their titles and maybe rough ideas of the topics; I would ask for some Knowledge checks to see if he understands the more technical ones. If he's interested in something, he can go back (track the traveler, read the book in more detail, buy the bar patron a drink) and get more details.
2) If you don't want to come up with background setting stuff, just throw him a bone and say "one book catches your eye" or "after talking to a dozen people, you meet Derek the Interesting Person" and then give him useful info. You can always ask him for a roll (a Gather Information check, perhaps) to see if he actually finds the interesting thing in the set of things, or not.

[NichG]

I think there's two issues here, and its important to separate them.

One issue is the PCs doing exhaustive actions which you didn't expect, to the extent that its breaking things you had planned in the game. This is independent of the characterization issue - just ask yourself, would you have been as bothered if the Int 24 Wizard who spent his life among scrolls searched every scroll for the rat, or if the Bard whose life work is hearing people's stories talked with everyone in the bar? Based on what you said, this would still have caused problems. So lets handle it separately.

The answer to this issue is generally to be more flexible and learn to recognize the breaking points in your plans ahead of time. For example, so what if the PCs talk with everyone in the bar? The clientele is allowed to change from hour to hour, day to day, week to week. There's no reason that this 'shady guy' has to be there already. More to the point, if you put him in the scene, you've already accepted the possibility that the PCs will interact with him. In fact, this kind of thing is an opportunity for you as a DM. When players do this kind of thing, they're basically saying 'hey DM, give me a plot hook!'. It gives you the ability to provide hooks while at the same time having it be a consequence of their choice, so to them it feels more like they actively sought out the information/quest, which means that they're going to be more heavily invested in it.

Abstraction is also a tool for you here as well. Just because the PCs read every book in a library doesn't mean that that library contained the book they were looking for, nor does it necessarily mean that the PCs recognized the relevancy of everything they read along the way and connected it to the big picture. If they search every scroll, it doesn't mean the rat stayed in place during that whole procedure, or even that they actually did manage to systematically check every single scroll without accidentally skipping over a few. Once you're glossing over something, its pretty natural to ask for a skill check or stat check to determine how well the job is done.

The second, separate issue is that it feels like a characterization glitch for you, in that the attention required doesn't suit your mental image of the player's character. The thing is here that the characterization is really up to the player. If they play their fighter as very detail-oriented and attentive, so be it. Don't try to bore the player or tell them they're playing the character wrong, because it is their choice to make.

That doesn't mean ignore it and pretend it didn't happen though, it just means to accept the player at their word (including their implied, ill-considered word). NPCs who were present at the time can express amazement and be impressed and bring that kind of work to the fighter in the future. I find that often when there's weird characterization, just having the world play it straight and act, very clearly, as having perceived the behavior will either make the player correct themselves (when it was un-intentional and they didn't want to portray it that way), or make the player really buy in to it and play it to the hilt, which also works.

[Ointhedwarf]

Thanks guys. Maybe I have been looking at this the wrong way after all. I never thought that their apparent "boredom" could pose a good opportunity for a hook. Or that checking the entries at the gate could give me a good chance to provide elements about the people, clothing etc. which I good use later on.

But what about in-game interest vs. off-game indifference? For example, in my campaign I try to slowly present my world without forcing the players to remember everything. What do you do when a player states that his character "tries to remember every saint/god" but off-game he doesn't even remember Sauron's name? :smallbiggrin: Do you surrender and just hope the story will slowly ease him in? But what if it never does?

[Flickerdart]

What do you do when a player states that his character "tries to remember every saint/god" but off-game he doesn't even remember Sauron's name? :smallbiggrin: Do you surrender and just hope the story will slowly ease him in? But what if it never does?
In D&D and similar RPGs, there are skills to represent what a character knows. Remembering the names of the gods would involve a simple Knowledge (Religion) check (after all, you could probably rattle off a solid number of Norse or Egyptian gods), and if the character wants to represent memorizing all of them, he should put ranks in the skill.

Even if such a skill is not present, remember that characters know a lot more about the world than the players do, because they've lived there for years (as opposed to meeting once a week to have the world described to them). There's nothing wrong with reminding a player that his character's party is fighting the forces of Sauron and not Sauceman or Swansonron, just like there's nothing wrong with reminding a player that his character would know taping fifty daggers to his sword to create a dagger-sword won't work. Nobody has fun when you "gotcha" the players and punish them for not being their characters.

[Comet]

Yeah, a certain level of abstraction is just fine. Most roleplaying games aren't supposed to be a holodeck where you throw the players into a new world and expect them to act out every single step and spend great effort to turn over a single stone. Sometimes it's okay to let the character do most of the work and let the player chill out for a bit.

Of course you then introduce whatever consequences are appropriate, such as the library eventually closing or the bar getting too rowdy as the night goes on, which is when the player can step back into their character's skin and sort it out. But it's okay to let them step outside their character every now and then, immersion isn't all that important.

[Thrudd]

A common thing I find in some players is how they take advantage of the game's... loss of interaction. There are times when as a Dm you have to skip parts of the story to avoid tedious, unnecessary descriptions. However, some PCs find this opportunity to do things that their character would most likely never do. For example the party chases a rat in a library and the small animal hides inside one of the thousands of scrolls on the shelves. One of the PCs says that he checks every single one of the scrolls. Now, as a dm I don't really care about the rat, the PCs actions however break the link between him and the character in my opinion. How do you make your PCs understand this?

The rat example is one of countless similar ones. The PC offers to speak with every denizens in a bar. The PC reads every book in the library while searching for a particular name. During off -time, the PC checks every single person that enters or exits the city gates.
This very often makes the PC take control of the story. If he met everyone in the bar, it's harder for me to introduce the shady character later on. if he's read everybook it's harder for me to give him information he doesn't know. It can simply surpass the predictive capacity of the dm, the 5 npc bar must suddenly triple in number. I don't mind preparing more for a session, what bothers me is that the PC fails to realistically roleplay his character. Why would a bored, reluctant fighter suddenly act out of character and show the eagerness to do something that would take most of his time?

Depending on what edition you are using, there are rules that can address these things with a simple roll of the dice. Is it 3e or later? There us a search skill or ability check. Make a search roll, tell them they spend x amount of time looking through scrolls and either they have or haven't seen the rat. If they waste enough time, tell them they need to eat or sleep at some point, or the librarian approaches them to ask what they're doing.

For the interrogating everyone at the gate, do the same thing. For every x amount of time maybe an hour or two) make a roll, assign a chance to determine if they meet anyone memorable. After enough time passes, tell them they need to eat or sleep. City guards might question them or make them leave.

Same with the bar. Logistically, you probably can't see everyone going through the gates or talk to everyone in a bar, people come and go and there is only so much time. Roll the dice to see if they meet anyone of interest during the time they spend in the bar, or introduce someone you want them to meet, and tell them everyone else they talked to were normal folk who had nothing notable to say.

Don't reward them by giving them unlimited knowledge because they spent all day in the library, but don't deny them autonomy over their character's actions, either. Realistically they could have read what? No more than 2-3 books in that time, or maybe one long book. Most likely about something mundane, like records of vegetable imports from the south or the behavior of migrant halfling tribes during the famine of 1078. Roll a die to see if they learn any specific relevant information in a given time, probably a very low chance, like less than 10%. Tell them they read books about boring and irrelevant subjects unless there is a specific thing you want them to find out. In between levels during down time, of course, they could spend skill points to add knowledge skills which they can justify having learned from the library. But otherwise, brush over the time they spend, make a ruling about what they learn, if anything, and get on with it.

It has already been said that it isn't the DM's place to decide what a character would or wouldn't do or how they should be characterized. You can ask the players if they think such behavior is consistent with their character's personality to get them to think about it, but I would draw the line there. If the players suggest a course of action that is ridiculous or unrealistic, like reading every book in the library, explain why that is so and suggest an alternative, such as spending a specific realistic amount of time in the library, and ask if they are looking for specific information there (which you can roll to see if they find).

[NichG]

Yeah, a certain level of abstraction is just fine. Most roleplaying games aren't supposed to be a holodeck where you throw the players into a new world and expect them to act out every single step and spend great effort to turn over a single stone. Sometimes it's okay to let the character do most of the work and let the player chill out for a bit.

Sometimes players are trying to get something for nothing though. The reasoning is something like, 'If I describe myself doing something involved that should logically benefit a real person, the DM will feel that its inconsistent for me to not receive some kind of benefit for that, and will make up some kind of bonus on the spot. And because of abstraction, it costs me nothing to try.', though I don't really think players think that whole line out in their head when doing this. More like, 'hey, we got a bonus that one time, maybe I should try to get one too'. That kind of behavior isn't meant to be hostile, but it does cause problems if the DM can't clarify to themselves how the game is going to work.

The way I tend to run it is that you can do things with or without abstraction, but the consequence of calling upon abstraction is that you're asking to use the system. So when a player wants their character to do all the work, they're saying 'I want to use the game mechanics'. So e.g. they can't get a free skill point in a Knowledge just by saying they memorize something that would normally require a roll in that Knowledge skill. The answer is 'okay, you try to memorize that, next time it comes up you can make a Knowledge(X) roll to see if you held on to it successfully'. On the other hand, for me at least, if a player wants to spend the OOC effort to memorize a list of gods or saints or whatever, I'm fine with them telling me later 'I don't bother to roll' because they remembered the information OOC.