PDA

View Full Version : Bowing out (How to un-hog the spotlight)



Concrete
2017-12-28, 09:34 AM
I have a problem. I take up too much space.
I'm a very talky person, and there are players in my group who are quite a lot more subdued than me. This often leads to me playing, if not the party face, then at least the person the party face plays off of.
In these cases, my incessant prattling can work. I do the talking, the others do the murdering, in which I tend to support them, and everyone has a role, everyone has fun.

And even if I do the talking, the others can play off of my character, reel the character in when it goes too far, or push me to the side if my character ends up putting his foot in his mouth. (I always make my face character with at least one crippling personal flaw for this reason). This, together with our regular game master often being capable of providing every character with their own challenges tends to make things work out.

The problem tends to come up when I step out of this role. Right now, we're in a game with different mechanics, and less defined roles than the class based games we usually play*, and time and time again, I find myself running roughshod over the screentime of other players. It doesn't help that the semi-randomized character creation has made my character (Intended to be a kind of jack-of-all-trades assistance character) better at the things that two more specialized characters were supposed to bring to the party.

This, together with my standard spot-hogging tendencies leads to a play experience that I can see isn't very fun for these two players. And they react kinda poorly to my rather clumsy attempts to defer to them when their "thing" comes up.

My plan, so far, would be to try to play it as my character being something of a rival to one of the others, but I also want to see how you tend to deal with these things.


What's your experiences with this? What do you tend to do when you feel you're trampling over other people's fun? How do you deal with players who take up too much space? How do you tend to contextualize differences of power level in-game?




*The game is called "EON", look it up if you suddenly develop an understanding of the Swedish language, it's a real gem.