#player styles

[sppph-hail-sithis]

Player Khajitt. stylin'. I can't believe I still don't have a complete Psyjic set yet.

[feebledungeons]

Roll for diplomacy

Diplomacy - What player style do you have most trouble GMing for?

This reply turned into a MONSTER long post so I’ve put it under a cut to save your dashboards!

Looking at the general types of play-style listed here, then:

The Power Gamer wants to make his character bigger, tougher, buffer, and richer. However success is defined by the rules system you’re using, this player wants more of it.

Since I favour a more free-form, story-driven game, I find players most difficult to please when they’re heavily invested in rules or tactics. 

A major stumbling block I find with this is that, as a GM, you’re expected to be the instant expert on every rule within the game (as well as you own world and story) and if the player knows the ins-and-outs better than the GM, I find it can upset the balance of power, shifting the ‘expertise’ to a player who can then manipulate the game to best benefit them and not the party as a whole.

That said, I’ve run a campaign with an awesome Rules Lawyer/Power Gamer in the party. He balanced his comprehensive player knowledge with a rigid adherence to role-play and an aversion to meta-gaming that was impressive.

The Butt-Kicker wants to let off steam with a little old-fashioned vicarious mayhem. He picks a simple, combat-ready character, whether or not that is the best route to power and success in the system.

I have trouble with this style the most. My games often employ horror or tragic elements which are completely at odds with the idea of gaming as a power fantasy/stress relief. Horror and tragedy rely on disempowering the PCs in order to create a cathartic emotional reaction.

The only way around this, I’ve found, is to only invite players in the mood for a bit of butt-kicking to a casual and fun game. Save the horror for the players who want it!

The Tactician is probably a military buff, who wants chances to think his way through complex, realistic problems, usually those of the battlefield. He wants the rules, and your interpretation of them, to jibe with reality as he knows it…

My favourite way to bring in this play-style is with complex puzzles. Something that engages the players’ brains as well as their characters’ skills. It’s one of the few times that I encourage metagaming around the table and let the players really puzzle over things.

A couple of examples would be:

The Spring Ball adventure, where the players had to figure out the identity of an assassin at the royal court based on various true and untrue rumours.

The Masks of Destiny encounter, where players had to pick a mask to wear to enter the temple of a goddess, knowing that each of them had a separate curse.

The easiest one-off adventure type I’ve found for this kind of player is a murder mystery.

With the rest of the player types listed there, I’ve found that the best way to engage them is to focus on narrative whilst keeping in plenty of opportunities for personal role play :)

[tabletopresources]

Here's a tricky one: "Diplomacy - What player style do you have most trouble GMing for?"

My answer to this one comes with some base assumptions, as I believe breaking players into types can be a bit problematic, especially so when communicating my subjective experience online to an audience who may have very different definitions and opinions on whether such labels are meaningful.

So to help out, I did a google search for “D&D player types” and will be using the very first reference for player types I found: HERE.

Going by that reference, I’ll post my answer, the definition provided on the page linked above for easy reference, and my personal (and wholly subjective) reasons below.

Power Gamer

A power gamer thrives on gaining levels and loves the cool abilities that come with those levels. He defeats monsters to take their stuff and use that stuff against future enemies. The story and roleplaying are secondary to action and awesome abilities and magic items. Most players have a little power gamer in them. A couple of the core elements of fun in the D&D game are the accumulation of power and the use of that power to accomplish astonishing deeds. Nothing is wrong with enjoying that in the game.

A power gamer…

Optimizes character attributes for combat performance.

Pores over supplements for better character options.

Spends less time on story and roleplaying elements.

Prefers combat to other kinds of encounters.

Here are the reasons why I chose this play style - note that they are as open to interpretation and disagreement as the definitions of the player types, as I noted above:

My players level very slowly. This is a conscious decision. We’ve been playing since 2007 and the highest level character is level 11. The character started at level 1 in 2007. A power gamer may likely feel lacking in their favorite reward in my games.

Rewards tend to come in the form of new allies, development of relations with other characters, and answering questions rather than a lot of powerful items or wealth. A power gamer would likely deem these to be of lesser value and feel “cheated” of suitable reward.

Power gamers have more often provided me with weaker character backgrounds and profiles - sometimes they’re even nonsensical as a player might have chosen things that quite explicitly contradict one another and their writing shows they just penciled it in for the mechanical “numbers” benefits they provide. As such, I have to work a little harder to get their character injected into the background plots. When I don’t, I get told I’m playing favorite to the other types of players. When I do, the power gamer tends not to notice or care about it, so the effort is largely wasted. It’s Lose/Lose.

Only half (at most) of my encounters are solved (in the “optimal” way) via straight-up combat. This means that a player who has focused their character around combat may feel there’s less they can do to contribute. Strangely enough, in my experience the less combat-focused players never voice concern when their noncombat-oriented characters contribute far less during a fight. So my experience alone has shown me that power gamers tend to demand the spotlight more vocally and aggressively than other types. I like to keep all players happy, so catering to this can be a bother.

I get the most enjoyment out of roleplaying and collaborating with the players on the “story” of the game. So, given the definition states that this player doesn’t care for that as much as other types, then this is often a case of a DM-Player mismatch. It’s like one guy wants to play hockey and the other wants to play basketball, but they both get stuck playing tennis so neither is really enjoying it.

My current players feel the same way. So the group tends to be happier when it’s composed of similarly-minded players. I’ve been in groups where the DM just welcomed a mishmash of the types and.. well… Let’s just say less than 50% of the game time was spent actually playing the game. I’m not saying this would be the case for all, but it has been the norm I’ve observed. A dozen times. 

So that’s the very basic and shortened version of my answer. But be careful with trying to “type” players. Very few people can be summed up in one of those boxes, and in fact most players probably blend in all or most of those to one degree or another.

The truth is though, none of those types are bad. It’s really just a case of making sure the right players are brought together with the right DM.

If everyone is having fun, you’re doing it right.

So how do you all feel? What’s your answer to the question, or thoughts on my response? I’d love to read about them in any reblogs!

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