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View Full Version : Have you ever kicked a PC from a party?



TyGuy
2019-05-14, 01:05 PM
And I mean a PC from the party, in game. Not a problem player from the table.

How did it go? Did the player take it well or poorly? What lead to it? How was it handled when the PC was kicked from the adventuring party? Did the player just sit around awkwardly for a while? Did they leave the table for the session or for good?

Quertus
2019-05-14, 03:56 PM
And I mean a PC from the party, in game. Not a problem player from the table.

How did it go? Did the player take it well or poorly? What lead to it? How was it handled when the PC was kicked from the adventuring party? Did the player just sit around awkwardly for a while? Did they leave the table for the session or for good?

Many times.

The best were when I kicked my own PC for not fitting.

Koo Rehtorb
2019-05-14, 05:58 PM
Yes. Players need to be more willing to oust a poorly fitting PC from the group. It's their player's job to make a character that can fit in with everyone else to a tolerable degree, it's not everyone else's job to bend over backwards to keep accommodating a PC that's making himself a problem.

Kyutaru
2019-05-15, 12:24 AM
The players went further. They were so panicked by what he was doing that the rogue backstabbed him then coup de graced his throat. I'm sitting there as a DM thinking... "Well technically that works."

I gave him control of the kobold they enslaved though.

Florian
2019-05-15, 12:43 AM
And I mean a PC from the party, in game. Not a problem player from the table.

How did it go? Did the player take it well or poorly? What lead to it? How was it handled when the PC was kicked from the adventuring party? Did the player just sit around awkwardly for a while? Did they leave the table for the session or for good?

Did happen more often than not. Most often in cases when a player brought an absolutely unfitting or disruptive character to the table (quite often, because there was a misunderstanding about what the game was about) - hence, I only do group character creation at session zero for some years now.

Call a time out, talk about it, depending on the system, take a break so the player can come up with a new character, then continue, redcon the old character out of existence if need be, but don't, under any circumstances, try to solves this in game, especially not via PvP or murdering the character. The only times I had players leave because of that, was when it became clear that the player was not interested in playing the game, but rather in playing his particular character.

Satinavian
2019-05-15, 01:39 AM
Often.

Sometimes characters don't fit or groups don't work out.

I can't say that the players always took this fine. "Your character/playstyle doesn't fit this group" can be taken as insult. But it tends to work smoothly if the player in question sees and recognize the problem himself.

Usually in game the characters just leave and do their own thing, vanishing in the background. But sometimes they get a proper send-off mini-arc. Sometimes it just escalates to PvP and the character gets killed off by his former companions.

Next character would usually only start next session because most of the systems i play require some time and thought for a proper new character.

Kurald Galain
2019-05-15, 07:04 AM
On the contrary: I have seen several groups disintegrate because the GM's unwillingness to deal with a problem PC, and flat-out disallowing the other PCs to deal with it in character.

Such as the drow rogue who decided that she wanted to pickpocket party members, and claimed that we couldn't retaliate because "it's a non-PVP game". ...yeah :smallcool:

Particle_Man
2019-05-15, 04:27 PM
I ran a PC that got executed by my party, does that count? :smallbiggrin: No hard feelings, though.

Once a player almost got their pc kicked from the party because they wanted to go adventure off on their own to the North (say) so I asked, "Ok, so what character do you want to play after Grodnar goes to the North and leaves the party?". The player had second thoughts and Grodnar stuck around. :smallbiggrin:

Frozen_Feet
2019-05-15, 05:08 PM
More often they just leave, but it's still a common occurrence. My players don't have to play their characters as part of the same group, so they split fairly often. It's a player's choice if they want to keep playing a separated character. If they don't, the character becomes an NPC and fades to the background. The player can roll a new character if they want to keep playing, otherwise they're out of the game. If they do want to keep playing their old character, the game shifts to follow that character during their turn until said character reunites with the rest or dies. (Sometimes they get lucky and all the others die instead.)

Usual causes:

1) characters don't along. F.ex. hippie halfling gets upset about killing monsters and leaves the group.

2) characters really don't get along. F. ex. one guy tried to murder another in their sleep, the other guy retaliated, leading to death of the first one.

3) accident happens. F. ex. a cave in separates characters from each other.

4) it's planned. F. ex. half of the party go forward while the other half go to fetch backup or look after the wounded.

Spore
2019-05-15, 05:20 PM
Well, my DM disallowed my orc brute (Int 5 Cha 5) in a noble drow round for obvious reasons. But he did allow me a short arena show match where he eviscerated a pair of Fire Giants just because I wanted to test the build.

Other than that, our group mostly chose to remove their own characters to switch. But in a long lasting side group (1 year plus) I wish the girls would have made clear my character concept (frontline brawler with extras) doesn't fit what they expected from the games we played (mostly story focussed non combat dramas). In the last 4 sessions (most of which where 6+ hours long) I was bored out of my fricking mind playing my Brujah army vet ready to crush some Sabbat skulls when all that happened was a relationship drama between our Ventrue and their mortal lover.

Mastikator
2019-05-15, 05:49 PM
Only myself and only twice, once was half my fault and the other time was totally my fault. It was many years ago with a group that has since disintegrated, this was in a campaign setting that is very low fantasy, iron age and gritty

The first was a warrior type character, we were rolling back story events to enrich the character and I happened to roll werewolf, for most characters this wouldn't have such a huge problem since they only hulk out during a full moon at night, with the only exception that they have a penalty to rolls against fear and fail that roll (then they would get an extra roll and if they fail that they hulk out) the paper with the back story elements even said that werewolves have to kill everything, it's not just a cool powerup, it's more like a horror movie where you kill your best friend, then your wife etc. Since I had decided prior to this werewolf discovery that my will power was going to be my weak stat (everyone had at least one weak stat, I chose will power) and since will power is used against fear I would now potentially hulk out during fearful moments. I figured you only roll against fear when you see ghosts or big scary monsters, this was a low fantasy game and you don't roll fear against human bandits.

Wrong, big time wrong. We circulated GM-responsibility and every single one wanted to do campaigns with the undead or demons. Yeah I ended up hulking out a lot. The bigger problem was that I was also the big strong warrior guy, even in my normal state none of them could stand up to me individually but when I changed into a werewolf it became a lot worse.

After 3 sessions I decided "enough is enough" and just said that my werewolf character is not coming back.

The reason I say it's only half my fault is a) I rolled it, it was not my decision to even have this list and b) I did not decide that every campaign should have big scary monsters, they could've gone with bandits but noooo.

The second one on the other hand is 100% my bad, I thought it was a cool idea, it was a cool idea, it was also a bad idea. Because this was when we finally got a dedicated Game Master and I had (I think) three character ideas to pitch to him, the cool one was the main one and then I had two backups depending on the structure of the campaign.
So the idea was that in this campaign setting there are dragons, they are very rare creatures of wonder and magic, they are also greedy and care nothing for humans. One of the races of dragons had the magical ability to shape shift and there were even stories about dragons shape shifting into humans or elves (this was all in the monster manual BTW, I'm not making any of this up).
I wanted to play as one of these dragons, this is in game cannon that you could potentially do this, I don't think it was designed to be that way though. He liked the idea and was impressed with my research but had a few caveats
a) it has to be a young dragon so I can't just start off with a thousand character points (normal is 200-300), I was able to get away with 500 which is A LOT but
b) I had to spend most of it on "useless" dragon skills like dragon language, dragon culture, so I took a huge array of esoteric skills and put only a little in combat and magic
c) I have to roleplay as a dragon, meaning vain, impulsive and greedy became my main character personality traits. He was extremely clever, strong and handsome.
I was also granted a huge amount of starting gold but since I was vain and greedy I can't trade it for useful stuff. No I had to be clad head to toe in jewelry. Pretty, shiny and useless jewelry.

Well here's the problem, I was basically playing a sociopath and the GM demanded that I don't stray from character.

It did not take many sessions before I decided this was untenable so I asked the GM if I'm allowed to "exit with style", he said "sure" with a look of morbid confusion. So my character told the rest of the party that it had been a pleasure to travel with them, he then rode a bit away into an open space and turned into a huge glorious red and green dragon, wingspan the size of a castle, maw big enough to swallow a horse whole.

Did I mention that only the GM knew it was a dragon at all? Yeah the other players were shocked and then became a bit annoyed with me.

It still makes me happy.

Psyren
2019-05-15, 11:35 PM
Not "kicked," no. Usually a PC who leaves our group(s) is either being retired or killed. The former often results in them showing up later on as an NPC under the GM's control.

FaerieGodfather
2019-05-16, 02:52 AM
Not without killing them first, no.

Pretty much every PC I've ever seen that the rest of the party wasn't willing to work with was more than just a "poor fit" or "dead weight", they were actively hostile to the group's goals and interests.

One of the reasons I so often play the Token Evil Teammate is so that Idiot DMs don't whine when I refuse to go into combat with people who've already betrayed me once.

Porcupinata
2019-05-16, 03:11 AM
I've been on all three sides of that - the player whose character is kicked; a player in the group doing the kicking; and the GM when it happens.

In none of those cases has there ever been any hard feelings. Most of the time we just all laugh about it and then the player in question creates a new character that's a better fit with the party, although occasionally rather than a simple kick it has resulted in multiple character deaths and the end of a campaign. In that case we'd all just laugh about it and start a new campaign. We still reminisce about some of the funner times it's happened.

Examples I can think of include...

1) In a D&D game, one character woke up one morning to find that the rest of the party had packed up their things and moved on without him leaving him behind with a note saying not to follow them. That one turned up again later as an npc antagonist.

2) In an Eldritch Skies game, the party worked for OPS and one of them was explicitly the unit's commanding officer. One of the unit disobeyed the commander and killed innocent bystanders, so at the end of the mission the commander had her court martialed and removed from the unit.

3) In a superhero game, the rest of the superhero team turned on one character, beat him up, and then turned him over to the police while explaining that the crimes they had committed were his fault as he had mind controlled the rest of them into doing them (this one was one of mine and was particularly funny because although my character was known to have mind control powers, he had never actually mind controlled any of the other heroes in the group).

4) In a Deadlands game, one character was the "chosen one" who had been conceived during an occult ritual and was destined to be sacrificed by a cult in a ritual to bring about the end of the world. The rest of the party spent their time defending her from the cult and hunting down the cultists. However, she proved to be so uncooperative and difficult to protect that in the end the rest of the group decided that the cult couldn't sacrifice her and end the world if she was already dead, so they killed her themselves. This one was a campaign ender, since two other characters died in the explosion too.

5) D&D again. One character pissed off the rest of the party so much over a long period of time (I don't remember all the details, only that the final straw was murdering an ally of the party) that they killed her, animated her as a zombie, and then disintegrated the zombie.

That might sound a lot, but those incidents are stretched out over the course of 20-30 years of the group's games. It's not as if it's something that happens every campaign.

Alhallor
2019-05-16, 08:29 AM
Normally we kick out the players not the charakters, but there was one example where it did happen.

We played, I think the third time with the character a animal-loving witch, where animals where... Pretty much not that important. The straw was, when we got attacked by wolves, she calmed one with her witchy powers and another PC killed "her" wolf because the animals had to be sick to attack humans. And even beside that, IC there were just wolves, killing sheep and other useful animals. (The Black Eye by the way. Only People who like wolves are farther up North.)

The Player played a NPC for the rest of the evening and we never saw that player again because he saw that as a personal attack (the GM had secretly gave this player hints that the wolf could be her animal companion, the other player didn't knew that and probably would have killed the wolf anyway.)

Cozzer
2019-05-16, 10:06 AM
It happened, the characters all sat down and told the unstable, sociopathic rogue prone to losing control: "Look, it's not you... well yes, it's you, it's all you, but it's not personal... I mean, our chances of survival are higher without you than with you and well, we like you but... well, kinda sort of like you, but we also like surviving...". He was honestly sorry because the party was the closest thing he had to having friends, but he also understood.

Somehow, it was one of the most embarassingly real scenes I've ever roleplayed.

(The player is fine, we're friends and still play with her and her army of maladjusted antiheroes :smalltongue:)

One Tin Soldier
2019-05-16, 08:53 PM
Oh, yeah. In our Changeling game, one of our PCs had a backstory character show up - the person that he sold to his former master in exchange for his freedom. He was already a bit nuttier than the average Changeling, and really amped it up once his buddy showed up and started hunting him down. We excommunicated him from the freehold and watched him get killed in a Hedge Duel. It was a great arc, and I want to see something like it happen again some day.

BWR
2019-05-17, 10:29 AM
I've had my PCs kicked from the group. The most memorable was my frost dwarf with a Charisma of 4. Last time I detailed how I roleplayed this I got a warning, so suffice to say he was offensive and (much worse) really annoying. The only reason he lasted one entire sessions was a) there was no good spot to bring in a new character and b) I couldn't make one that quickly.

I have removed a PC from the party after one incident where one PC suddenly became evil and for some reason every other PC but mine went along with him (bros before morals, I guess). Cool roleplaying session, but it was obvious that there could be no believable reconciliation between my PC and the rest of the group, so I retired him before he could be kicked.

Conradine
2019-05-18, 12:54 PM
I never kicked out anyone. I was kicked out only once ( sadly, it was my very first group ) due an attrition with the Game Master.

I don't think to be perfect, and for sure I had my wrongs, but let's take into account:

1- he made epic monsters randomly popping up ( at level 15 ) "punishing" characters for choices he didn't agree with
2- he mistake an action of full movement I made for a flee ( I was simply creating distance for my ranged attacks ) and "punished" it with an overpowered monster - then said to my face it was a punishment
3- he allowed other character aberrant levels of power ( like the paladin / knight who killed a Greater Heart Dragon - GS 23 - in a single charge, at non epic levels ) but he disallowed me to buy a +6 STR / CON belt ( that was in Fist and Sword )
4- he throwed tantrums and insults for players being even 10 minutes late

Sometimes you meet the wrong people.