Character Suicide

[Talakeal]

I would say that most "It's what my character would do" problems have a more fundamental root.

The players enjoy different things and are unable to reach a compromise.

Imagine, if you will, a group where half the players came to the table to feel like heroes and the other half came to the table to act out sociopathic power fantasies.

For one side to have fun the other side is going to have to suffer to some extent. This is a bad situation and, depending on the nature of the people involved, one without any simple answers.

But it isn't really fair for the DM to choose one side as "right" and declare that the other side is playing the game wrong when that isn't the game they signed up for.

Now, if you want to run a specific kind of campaign, and the players are on board with playing that sort of campaign, then you need to make this clear upfront and tell them before they make a character what sort of personality is allowed.

For example, many DMs would actually punish the paladin for NOT attempting to help the gold dragon, and going by the RAW code they wouldn't be wrong. If you aren't playing that sort of game you need to be upfront with the player before letting them make a paladin.

[Beta Centauri]

Maybe both of you missed where the OP said that the problem is not the willingness of the group to do this fight, but the tendency of this one player to ditch his allies and leave them twiddling their thumbs while he runs off on his own to get killed.

I obviously didn't miss it, because my other advice in this discussion speaks directly to it. So, no need to patronizing.

Anyway, what I said still applies. If the GM doesn't want the player ditching his allies, the GM put in things he might ditch his allies for and leave them twiddling their thumbs. He's depending on the player to act a certain way, and he can't depend on that. If he wants to be able to, he needs to talk to the players and get some agreement, and maybe be willing to modify the scene he has in mind.

I think talking to the player is definitely necessary, and I'm looking forward to the original poster reporting how that conversation went.

[BootStrapTommy]

{scrubbed}

Doing what your character would do? That exactly what roleplaying is. Being someone else an acting according to their priorities, not your own.

[Ceiling_Squid]

{scrubbed}

Doing what your character would do? That exactly what roleplaying is. Being someone else an acting according to their priorities, not your own.

Contextually, it's often cited as an example of a player making excuses for disruptive behavior. And rightfully so.

That said, I don't think this situation necessarily falls into that common interpretation.

[Beta Centauri]

{scrubbed}

Doing what your character would do? That exactly what roleplaying is. Being someone else an acting according to their priorities, not your own.

Yes, some people roleplay that way. They don't care about the social situation, because their character doesn't care. That's a fine way to play, unless not everyone at the table is playing the same way. Taking actions that the character would take and which are compatible with the social situation is also a way to roleplay.

[SiuiS]

Maybe both of you missed where the OP said that the problem is not the willingness of the group to do this fight, but the tendency of this one player to ditch his allies and leave them twiddling their thumbs while he runs off on his own to get killed.

And the response "sideline him, run the main game and let that player have his solo session when convenient" has already been given. The responses you responded to was 'hey, everyone go with him so it's NOT solo time'.

[Talakeal]

Doing what your character would do it the opposite of bad roleplaying.

It might, however, be a bad way of playing a roleplaying game.

First, you do have some control in how your character will behave, particularly when you are creating it. In a lot of cases the problem is making a character who won't get along with the rest of the party or the DM's campaign. That you are playing the character how they were intended is not the issue, the issue is bringing such a character to the table in the first place.

There is also the issue of your characters fidelity being more important than the other players enjoyment. For example, maybe your paladin would kill the party assassin, but is the discomfort caused by your having to play your character wrong more important than the (presumably much greater) discomfort of the assassin's player needing to die and reroll? This of course goes both ways, which is why party creation needs to have a serious element of communication and compromise.

Likewise the DM needs to temper verisimilitude with the setting with the players enjoyment. It might be realistic to lock a PC thief up in a dungeon or cut off his hands, but that likely won't be fun for the player. Likewise if the party is captured by the pirates they weren't sent out to battle there is a good chance the pirates will do some very unpleasant things to any female party members in a realistic game, but very few DMs in their right mind would actually have such consequences as the discomfort it puts the players under far far outweighs the benefit of having true to life villains.

[DarkestKnight]

I'm going to throw my vote in with the 'let him do it' camp here. While there are reasonable limitations, letting your PC's play out their characters is pretty much a prime directive. However, there may be ways that you can make the player feel like they are contributing, although in a minor way.

For clarification, how does the paladin operate with his code? There are a surprising number of variations between 'Protect the weak', 'Purge the evil', and 'Lawful dumb'. If he is running back into combat to help the dragon how do you think he is going to do it? use what spells he has to heal/buff the dragon or go toe-to-toe with the enemy dragons? Running a bit of magical support could make a minor difference and the player's intent recognized. If he wants to enter combat, unless he finds a conveniently unattended ballista, I doubt he would pose a serious threat. If you give him the opportunity to be a legitimate threat to dragons (as in via magical Flak cannons (I should note that other than the nearby forest I have no clue as to the setting of the encounter)) and he takes it, then the NPCS should respond as such.

When I DM I try to give my characters enough space and opportunity that they feel like they have free will. And as such they should be prepared to reap what they sow. And if your paladin is lawful dumb and sees no danger in this plan (The DM won't kill me! I'm a PC!), this could be a very useful opportunity for making him reevaluate life choices (the paladin, not the player. well maybe the player too.)

[fallensaviour]

some of my favorite rpg moments came from doing something the dm thought was foolish then getting the rolls to back it up...though the times i've split the party for too long were usually run as solo adventures between sessions....except the one where we were totally on a space ship and i was crawling through the maintenance droid tunnels because i was the only one small enough to do so

[Milodiah]

You guys REALLY ARE missing the point this badly, aren't you?

OP's fine with actually HAVING the battle, it's the fact that he doesn't want to keep wasting the 2-6 other players' time letting this guy run off and play hero when the rest of the party rather adamantly said "no".

Honestly, the way I see it, the narrative follows the party. He left the party to go fight the dragon, so the narrative isn't following him anymore. Sure, you can swing back around and let him play it out sometime, but if this is a genuine suicide mission then he's practically resigned from the party anyway, so he is no longer relevant.

[Ceiling_Squid]

You guys REALLY ARE missing the point this badly, aren't you?

OP's fine with actually HAVING the battle, it's the fact that he doesn't want to keep wasting the 2-6 other players' time letting this guy run off and play hero when the rest of the party rather adamantly said "no".

Honestly, the way I see it, the narrative follows the party. He left the party to go fight the dragon, so the narrative isn't following him anymore. Sure, you can swing back around and let him play it out sometime, but if this is a genuine suicide mission then he's practically resigned from the party anyway, so he is no longer relevant.

ARE we missing the point, though?

I see a couple of suggestions on how to involve the party as a whole, particularly by having a more immediate and nearby secondary threat crop up that they could all deal with. Something pressing that might sidetrack the paladin and give the party a threat they can actually engage.

If the paladin decides to press on his original course instead, then we'll just "come back" to him later.

I also see a lot of admonitions against "cutscene battles" the party isn't able to effect in the first place, and a few points about how this could be avoided in the future.

I think the point is actually getting some reasonable discussion.

[Milodiah]

This is true (also, I apologize for the edge of rudeness up there, I had a killer headache last night and my mood was matching it).

My primary GM splits his attention between a split party based more on the number of PCs per group, as opposed to significance to the plot, relative levels of action/excitement, etc. I've found this to be a fairly optimal solution to the issues of splitting the party, because player-character allocation does tend to follow the levels of action involved. For example, last major party split was 3 PCs infiltrating a military R&D lab in disguise, while the other ~1.75 PCs (one full-time main PC who was joined by two characters controlled by two easily distracted and generally sporadic players) tried to track down the escaped "experiments" in order to find out about their escape tunnels.

Due to the fact it was 3 main PCs versus 1 main PC and two other dudes (in reality this fellow was alone for most of that), as well as the fact that group 1 was engaging in exploration of the objective with sporadic combat while group two was doing things like speaking to a local archaeologist, driving halfway across Texas to talk to a potential escapee, etc. we got most of the focus, but when the focus shifted we still had the opportunity to discuss our next move without the GM applying pressure or introducing new threats.

By this logic, the thing I would do in this situation is give the group about 30 minutes real-time getting to either a good pausing point or a good cliffhanger depending on how sadistic I feel, then cutting back to this fellow arriving on scene, with the justification that it took him time to return to the battlefield, track down the two dragons since they've probably flown off during the continuing fight, etc. Then give him the five to fifteen minutes it would take to resolve a fight with an already-weakened badguy dragon, an even more weakened goodguy dragon, and Joe Schmo the random pally crashing into the clearing brandishing his sword like a marginally less delusional Don Quixote.

Due to the absurd power-level of my primary group, I usually am not afraid of throwing fights I assume are too big to handle at them when I GM, because I've seen the **** they handle. We're currently playing Rifts. Primary GM tosses a train-sized giant cyborg centipede monster at us, we knock it from a couple thousand HP MDC to literally 9 before we decide "Meh, this thing no longer poses us any threat" and going about our business. Primary GM tosses recurring battles versus small groups ridiculous flying animated suit of armor with more MDC than the high-grade power armor in our party, can go from 0 to Mach 1 in a quarter second, is literally 99% immune to laser/plasma/ion/particle-beam fire, can engage targets from a mile away with a magical halberd that can shoot plasma and sweep the area like a flamethrower, etc. etc. and we shoot a few down. Probably because there was a Glitter Boy at that second fight, but still.

At one point during a naval/pirate campaign, I threw a Coalition patrol boat versus their patrol boat. No big deal, they slightly outclass the PCs in weaponry but the PC's boat has marines aboard. Then I roll to see nearby forces. Yep, a destroyer's right over the horizon.

Player summons an eighty-ton sea monster that practically swallows the patrol boat in one attack. Destroyer notices distress beacon, sends a wing of flying power armor troopers to check it out. This player and the other caster collaborate with a screwy spell combo to make the thing fly. It eats the flying power armor troops, or at least most of them, in what was perhaps the strangest dogfight in Coalition history (to illustrate, it was six of these being chased around the sky by this). Then the thing gets sent to attack the destroyer five times its size, and it freaks them out so badly they deploy tactical nuclear weapons.

So yeah, I've always accepted that a sufficiently resourceful player (*coughcoughIancough*) can and probably will find a way to beat a technically superior enemy force even if you don't pull the punches. I know in 3.5 there's a lot more mechanics to support the idea of a level 5 paladin being bound to lose versus a level (I dunno, let's say) 15 or 20 dragon (which I assume has class levels in something pretty scary given it's beating a dragon of equal level with class levels of paladin), but I will never allow my assumptions to become assertions when I am GMing.

[goto124]

...which falls apart if you know your players don't have that kind of intelligence?