We finally had a character misbehave and we handled it well I think

[MarkVIIIMarc]

On the board I always hear plenty about in party morality problems. We finally had a situation come up and must say having been exposed to others' issues helped greatly and our table and DM did well also.

The setting was:

We're just level 4 and were back in the town where we have a good relationship with the govenor and get some side quests to go on based on reputation. On quest was to retrieve a potion of superior healing and some other stolend goods for a merchant.
We did and returned it for our reward. Turns out a member of the merchant's family needed the potion. One of our party members is a Chaotic neutral drow rogue who does good in big situations but has been tempted.
While we are spending some of our reward the drow goes back and steals the potion with a half thought out plan. The shop keep doesn't catch the drow red handed but it seems obvious who was standing there and now the potion is missing. Shop keep goes off chasing the drow who gets away while the shop keep is screaming for the guards.
The drow returns to the party and tries to talk us into fleeing town. Its obvious something is up and he takes off runnig from us. A couple players turns go on with attempts at grappling and all. I give chase but hold off on Phantasmal Force for another round (should have used Viscious mockery though!). Our Wizard I think it was then cast sleep on the drow.
The crafty wizard then uses invisibility to sneak the potion back to the shop keep's shop and leaves it in a silly location. A few minutes later we show back up as a party at the shop. I convince him the drow went running "because people always suspect them" when something goes missing and the wizard then rolled a good enough persuasion checo to at least create some possibility in the keep's mind the potion was just misplaced for awhile, not stolen.

I feel like we did good because the DM scared the drow with the possible repricussions of law enforcememt. Then we as a Chaotic Neutral/Lawful Neutral/Neutral Good/ Lawful Good party also scared him.

Even those of us who were of neutral allignment did not want to steal from a NPC who helped us. And it made no sense to make enemies of law enforcement in the one town we could sell loot in.

Thanks for sharing all you all's previous experiences.

[hymer]

Our Wizard I think it was then cast sleep on the drow.

No, must've been the sorcerer. Wizards have the int to know not to do that. :smallwink:

Seriously, sounds like you handled it well. Let's hope the drow player has learnt their lesson! :smallsmile:

[Malifice]

Our Wizard I think it was then cast sleep on the drow.

Drow are immune to sleep.


Fey Ancestry: You have advantage on saving throws against being Charmed, and magic can’t put you to sleep.

Let the authorities deal with him. Its theft. If I was DM I'd have him branded and spend time in the stockade.

From there, you need to RP out the parties dissatisfaction. Its not a huge deal.

[MrFahrenheit]

Yes this was handled very well (minus the sleep part as noted previously).

One note of caution though: moving forward, be on the lookout for the rogue to do more stuff like this. Odds are it's not gonna be the last time it happens.

[StoicLeaf]

particularly because you guys bailed him out.

also, CN drow thief.
Red flags everywhere!

[MrFahrenheit]

I think this brings up a larger issue though: we often see new players (and sometimes even veteran players who are either trying something new or just stirring the pot) do this sort of thing, ESPECIALLY with rogues. The risks are relatively low, the rewards high, and it isn't as obvious as a wizard genociding a town with excessive use of fireballs. Let the player know that just because he CAN steal a lot, doesn't mean he SHOULD.

[JungleChicken]

If one of the merchants family needed a potion of healing and the rogue knew it and stole it anyway wouldn't that be solidly on the evil side of the line

[jaappleton]

At lv4, I like to believe the Wizard had cast Hold Person and not Sleep. I'm just going to cast Modify Memory on myself to believe that.

[CaptainSarathai]

Very well done.
I always prefer to deal with this stuff "in system" rather than handling it OOC. At least, until it gets really bad.
We've even had some really cool situations arise from creatively handling troublemakers.


My first DM always had an order of Paladins called the White Hand. They were basically Lawful Good or Lawful Neutral Revenants. If you killed one, they'd eventually come back. They didn't eat, didn't sleep, and would just track you relentlessly. He always did cool stuff with Radiant effects, like having a giant beacon shoot into the sky when they were "activated" (if it was a serious crime) or having a permanent beam of searing sunlight "spotlight" the evil-doer until justice was dealt. NPCs feared the White Hand, more than the evil-doer, usually.

When I started DMing for a new group, I kept the White Hand, because it was the easiest way to keep players honest. So of course, one campaign the party decided to go off the rails entirely and wage war on the White Hand.
Okay, fair is fair, so I told them it would be a 20th level campaign (in 3.5) and let them actually beat the White Hand at level 19.

We had a rule that you had to sleep to level up, so they all went to bed expecting a battle against some god the next day. They all had really wierd dreams, and when they woke up, they were sealed into suits of White Hand armor. They spent the last session at Lvl20 trying to get the armor off, while being under an increasingly powerful Control Person effect that sapped their Wisdom every time they failed. When the campaign officially ended, they realized that they had become the White Hand.
From then on, the White Hand became legendary, and bogeymen for new players. I kept the original PCs, so whenever they showed up, the veterans were almost excited to see an old friend return, and just wreck the wrongdoer.

I couldn't just 'retire' the Hand, so when we switched to 4e, the first big evil of the campaign was decidedly the bad guy because he obliterated the White Hand. Bless their hearts, the party decided to attempt to reform the order as their goal. It was never the same (just mdortals, etc) but I've never been more proud of something I've done as a DM. I've also never had a more Lawful party than I did when the White Hand was somewhere "in world" to come after the party, haha


We had one DM who was playing a very railroad-y "stereotypical" D&D campaign, usual high-fantasy stuff, etc etc.
We thought we had the campaign figured out, who the bad guy was, where to find him, etc. The campaign was meant to be our journey overland to reach him, but it would have been easier and more obvious to just sail (like using the eagles in LotR) so we asked and were refused. We eventually just hi-jacked a ship, told the crew that we'd treat them better than the captain, equal shares, all that. Once we got to our destination, we'd even hand over the ship.
Still, the DM had them betray us. In our sleep, with no chance to roll saves of any kind. They stripped us of our gear and marooned us on an island in the middle of nowhere.
End of campaign. End of him ever DMing for us again.

[JakOfAllTirades]

It's always tough when one of the Player Characters isn't on the same page as everyone else.

If someone in our party began behaving appropriately, I have no idea what the rest of us would do....

[DragonSorcererX]

I never had a problem of misbehavior, I'm a new DM, but one of these days I was thinking on those Variant Rules of Madness and Honor Scores, I was thinking of making a Consistency Score that would be based in how you play character being consistent to what you defined in your character sheet, and if your Consistency Score reached 0 your character would kill himself.

[Cglied]

It's always tough when one of the Player Characters isn't on the same page as everyone else.

If someone in our party began behaving appropriately, I have no idea what the rest of us would do....

Not saying this is the best example, but having some dramatic tension among the party members isn't always the worst thing in the world.

[JakOfAllTirades]

Not saying this is the best example, but having some dramatic tension among the party members isn't always the worst thing in the world.

We've got lots of dramatic tension. We're playing Curse of Strahd and our group is quite the bunch of finger-pointing screw-ups. Since we came to Vallaki, the town's had four burgomasters! I blame our Bard for the killing the first one, but he keeps making excuses that it was an accident. I had to make a deal to put burgomaster #2 in power so he'd call off the guards that were about to kill us, so I admit that him ending up in charge was totally my fault.

But I didn't realize how weak he was, and burgomaster #3 killed him off and took over as soon as we turned our backs. She's totally evil so of course we had to come back and clean up the mess. Somehow, this is my fault again! I think my group just likes blaming terrible things on me for the lulz. At least we've found a burgomaster who can run the place without screwing everything up while we get with our quest.

We still can't agree on anything. And we're still screwing everything up! We found the temple we were looking for, and we even found a way to teleport straight to it. But we can't teleport back. Now we're way up in the mountains without any extra food or survival gear, arguing about what to do next.

Pretty sure this time it's not my fault! My character can die with a clean conscience.

[The Ship's dog]

Sometimes when a player miss-behaves it can be really interesting. For example:

Recently I DMed a 3.5e quickly done homebrewed post-apocalyptic adventure. The premise was that the PCs have come out from the Underdark (where their families had been weathering out the magical apocalypse for a few generation) and were going to do whatever. The surviving races had built garrisons around every entrance to the Under dark they knew of to vet anyone who came up and make sure noone went back in.

Instead of going off on the adventure that I had planned, the two Rogues in the party (a human and a changeling) snuck into the Captain's office after overhearing about a weapons deal, assaulted and knocked him out, the Changeling mimicked him and they stole the weapon (a home brewed high-powered rifle).

This was definitely not planned and they had the confidence (and as it turned out, the luck) to perform a freaking heist in the middle of a heavily trooped garrison and get away with it! They then made their way across the dunes into a bandit encampment and have started a campaign to defeat all of the garrisons and beckon the Underdark into the world.

It turned from being a one-shot throwaway adventure into a great big campaign potentially filled with clashing armies and wrathful gods.

[Toofey]

Let the authorities deal with him. Its theft. If I was DM I'd have him branded and spend time in the stockade.

From there, you need to RP out the parties dissatisfaction. Its not a huge deal.

Why not have the characters deal with it in character. That way you get a chastened drow and some good RP opportunity out of it.

Well done with the party response.

[Sigreid]

I think this brings up a larger issue though: we often see new players (and sometimes even veteran players who are either trying something new or just stirring the pot) do this sort of thing, ESPECIALLY with rogues. The risks are relatively low, the rewards high, and it isn't as obvious as a wizard genociding a town with excessive use of fireballs. Let the player know that just because he CAN steal a lot, doesn't mean he SHOULD.

When I play a rogue I steal all the time. I make ventures out at night for just that purpose. I don't steal from people associated to me though. That's a mistake.