One of the guys in my gaming group is an occasional source of chaos and confusion. Once in a while he’ll do something that seems outrageous, crazy, and wildly out-of-character, and the rest of us have to try to come up with ways our characters can compensate to keep the game from flying apart right there. I don’t want to relate a bunch of gaming stories, but it’s become a running joke in our group that his character must be this multiple-personality psycho that wants to donate his money to charity one minute but turn around and light beggars on fire for amusement the next. It’s not quite that bad, but sometimes it feels like it.
Okay, one example, for context:
The party is about to meet with a very serious, powerful, and difficult queen. We’re searched for weapons (someone attempted to assassinate her once and now she’s pretty paranoid) and then sent into a waiting room. This is a major moment for our characters, as very few people have even laid eyes on this woman in over a century. We’ve just saved the entire island from a very serious threat, and we’re wondering what she will say to us. This is a major moment in the game for many of us, and we’re all pondering how we should roleplay this and how our characters should feel.
Psycho gets into the waiting room first. The guards left him with his magical horn. When blown it can be heard a mile away and will stun anyone caught in front of it for a combat round. He proceeds to blast each of the other five party members, one at a time, as they enter the room. He gets right in their face and unloads the horn on them at point-blank. We’re a chamber away from this paranoid queen and he’s hitting us with this earth-shaking horn to knock us over. There is no in-character justification for doing this. There is nothing to be gained by doing this. It brings the roleplaying at the table to a grinding halt, because it’s pure nonsense and nobody knows how to respond. The GM (not me) has to flail around and figure out what to do about this, and has to come up with reasonable reactions from the NPCs to this nonsense player behavior.
(What probably should have happened was that he would be arrested, or maybe executed on the spot. This queen has a notorious nasty streak and is nobody to trifle with. He certainly would have fought back if the guards tried to take him into custody, and… what then? Would we have helped him? The whole thing could have either led to us murdering all of the guards or a TPK. Either way, it could kill the campaign right there.)
Rather than let him take control of the game and stop the rest of us from having fun, the GM just glazed over it and moved on.
Then I read somewhere – and if I’d been on the job I would have bookmarked it – about players “experimenting” with the gameworld, and I realized that was exactly what we were seeing. He doesn’t really want to play a character who is a barking loon. He wasn’t trying to play a jerk. He just wanted to see how the world and the other characters would react. People do this in computer games all the time. I wonder what would happen if I shoot the scientists? Contrary to what videogame reactionaries claim, this doesn’t mean the player is acting out some secret desire to murder members of the scientific community. They just want to see what the game would do about it.
In this way I think the GM’s reaction was a good one. Sure, it was unrealistic and created an odd continuity gap as the NPC’s sort of ignored the crazy stuff he was doing, but it denied the player the feedback he wanted. Letting him take control of the game and turn our story of heroes saving the lands into a story about a bunch of prankster loonies would have only rewarded his behavior. By ignoring it he was deprived of any feedback for his actions. He was still doing crazy stuff, but he was no longer affecting the world. Think of Half-Life 2: You can shoot Alyx right in the face and the bullets go right through and hit the wall behind her. She won’t even notice. If you start acting like an idiot, the game world stops paying attention to you.
In the end, this approach worked. Psycho tried a couple of other minor pranks, and when they didn’t result in mayhem he knocked it off and went back to playing his character honestly.
Of course, the GM could always just respond to this behavior with the standard “you can’t do that”, but this approach is better in my book, as it is impossible for the player to complain or dispute without them admitting and confronting just how disruptive they’re being. The player can’t very well demand continuity from the world when he’s not following any sort of continuity with his character’s behavior. (What’s he gonna do, demand that the guards come in and kill us?) In this case no feedback is actually better than negative feedback. It’s a little passive-agressive, but I think it’s worth it to keep the game moving for the benefit of everyone else at the table. A good GM will talk to the player about it later, but simply denying them the feedback they seek is a good way to stop the behavior without stopping the game.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
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