Player Responsibilities

I’ve known a fair number of gamers who believe that the DM is the person almost entirely responsible for a gaming group’s good time. If a group is faltering or not as fun as expected, fingers point toward the DM before anyone else. But what about the players and our responsibilities to the group?

Players outnumber the DM, and while the DM may set up the paths through the world, players decide where to go, what the tone of the game will be, and create the story being told through our actions. So in that vein, I’d like to present a list of my most important player responsibilities.

1) Be a team player. Gestalt has already written about the futility of lone wolves, and I couldn’t agree with him more. Those characters may seem really cool, but they just don’t work in a group setting. If your character’s opinions are constantly at odds with the rest of the party, every minor action becomes a struggle. You can have an independent spirit, but a true lone wolf wouldn’t ever join an adventuring party, so you will need to cooperate and work as a team. Digging in your figurative heels at every party decision, though, ends up being childish and can ruin a good campaign.

2) Don’t create a character that is more powerful than the others in the group. I realize that there is vast potential in the character creation systems (especially with loopholes) for becoming a mighty steamroller of enemy-smiting, and that some cannot resist that siren song. If all the others players in your campaign roll this way too, then more power to you. However, if your group’s other players prefer to roll characters with flaws, or simply don’t like to min-max, your steamroller character will now give your DM migraines. You create an impossible situation in which the DM can either make enemies challenging for you and risk killing the other players, or make the enemy difficulty balanced for the rest of the team and let you shred them like tissue. Either way, for the balancing difficulty, it’s a situation where you have ruined the fun for the other players, who now either die or don’t get to feel useful the party anymore.

3) Know yourself, and know the type of game you’re getting into. For instance, Pensive has extreme dislike for any and all White Wolf systems. Clearly, knowing this about himself, it would be a terrible idea to join a group playing any of those systems. Think about the tone of the game and the personalities of people involved. If you like a game that has more social and puzzle aspects than combat, talk to the members of your group to find out if their campaign fits with what you like about gaming. You don’t want to find out 10 sessions in that they prefer a straight dungeon-crawl and will never get around to your favorite bits. This doesn’t mean that anyone’s play style is superior or inferior, but if you aren’t a good fit for the game being run, it’s best for you and for everyone to know that ahead of time. And the most important part of knowing yourself is knowing when you’ve stopped enjoying an aspect of the game you’re in, and figuring out how to make it fun again. Often for me this is realizing that the new character class that looked intriguing is not my style. Talking to the DM is always the best course here. You can always just have the DM kill off you character with style as Pensive once mentioned, and start fresh with something more fun.

I could add more to this list, but these are my most important three. So how about the rest of you? Are there things that you would think are player responsibilities to make a campaign great for everyone?

Happy gaming,