First of all If any of my players are reading this, don’t.
Hello, i’m a bit of a lurker and am running a game pretty soon. I’ve allowed my group to build characters with access to the additional preview components available for far beyond humanity (because i want to allow psionics, cyborgs and all that cool stuff).
I’m wondering how i’m going to get past the largest and most blatant hurdle in my group; a player who rarely engages and dislikes learning new rules and systems. How do i get him to better engage? I’m going to help him build a character at the start of our first session as he isn’t going to have learned how to do so. (The other players built their PCs and only asked me a few questions about how character creation actually worked).
I’m planning to get the players to write up the records of each session from their characters perspective. I plan to use this to keep the story going roughly in the direction the players are pulling it, seeing what elements they’ve remembered and forgotten and how i might pull from those old threats.
(Also if this ends up really good i might start posting the story from a chroniclers perspective with extracts from the various character’s journals somewhere)
Really all this is superfluous text because i’m excited about running this and seeing how they adapt to the infinite challenges and horrors of the universe, how many innocents die because of their actions and just how far they’ll go to survive and prosper.
But if you have any suggestions as to how to get my player to engage more that’d be really helpful.
Hi! From what I read, it seem that the player that isn’t engaging just doesn’t want to put the work in to learn new stuff. You are in luck though as PbtA games are super easy to learn on the fly as you engage with the fiction. I would advise against giving this player the extra task of chronicling the game if they don’t feel like it. I wouldn’t be adding extra burden on a player that just want to show up and…pardon the expression…just want to shoot the shit with the other players.
You best tool here is prompting. Have that player get invested in the universe and the narrative you are creating by asking him question about aspect of it as you “play to find out”, some should be loaded questions forcing a hard choice as an answer. These will hopefully get that player involved narratively which then will get the player involved mechanically since that how the game is built.
Please keep us posted on how it went after the first session!
Run a preview session? Get an hour together with a stripped down pregen (like, has the basic moves and two playbook moves) and a simple scenario – if you can link it to your campaign that’s great, if not it’s just practice.
Here’s the thing: if your player wants to play, they should express that want. If that means learning the rules, that’s on them.
But it’s PbtA! Everything is on the character sheet, it’s 2d6 plus stat and look at the list of outcomes. Could hardly be simpler. If you get pushback from the player, consider carefully if you want that person in the group.
Thanks Vincent, that’s pretty much what i’d expected and i’l ask him to keep an in character journal but i’m not going to press the issue, the other players i’m sure will jump on the chance to write up some in character fluff which will almost certainly be used against them in some entertaining way.
The biggest issue we as a group have had honestly has been his disruptive nature and general resistance to engage, though i’m hoping it’ll interest him enough that he’ll join in more (hopefully in a productive not destructive fashion).
(The prompting nature of PbtA should help here to some degree)
My real hope is that even if they end up disliking my game they see the awesome nature and simplicity of PbtA games because our group always seems to end up not running new and different game systems because of the way this player always complains about learning new rules.
Toby Sennett Even if i wanted to i couldn’t kick him out of the group, he’s been a part of the group for years i’d feel like a d**k. But the practice scenario isn’t a bad idea…
Yeah, you’re probably in the clear on the “doesn’t want to learn new systems” front, because 9 times out of 10 players in Powered by the Apocalypse games (Uncharted Worlds, Dungeon World, Apocalypse World, etc) don’t need to know the mechanics going in. Players are meant to immerse themselves in their characters and behave like real (albeit awesome) people would, with the mechanics only emerging when necessary. In my experience, none of my players have ever known the mechanics ahead of time — nor would I ask them to — and they developed that system-awareness through the cycle of roleplaying, move triggering and dice-rolling, me engaging them about how the move works, back to roleplaying.
What I’m saying is: most of the moves use the exact same die roll, and the moves that don’t are very clear about what they do, so it’s not a huge load to be worried about. You can’t make a player do stuff they don’t want to, but you will get them to pick up on things through the constant repetition of explaining the moves in the early stages of your campaign. It has always happened in all of my campaigns that the person who isn’t in it for learning systems inevitably starts knowing what they get from a 10+ on whatever given move because everyone around them is using the mechanics and talking about them.
EDIT to add: Ah, I didn’t realize he was just openly hostile about new systems, I thought he just didn’t want to learn. Well, in that case my advice applies much less. Good luck with this guy.
Schnauzer Paladin If the player has been disruptive for year, I would take the time to have a quiet talk with him outside of the game session to ask him why he games with you guys, what are his motivation to show up and hang out. I think you might be surprised by his response. Most of the time its a question of perception. You might find it disruptive and he might not even realize it. It’s all a question of perspective and there’s no better way to solve these situations than to talk them over with a level headed conversation.
The guy sounds disruptive. Take him aside and say “listen, you are affecting everyone else’s fun at the table, how can we compromise on this? how about we try 4 sessions and then we can see what we think of this system?”.
If people like this are ruining the fun at the table, sometimes you have to cut them loose.
In my experience, it’s just not worth it. Talk with him, like Vincent suggested. If he won’t play along, kick him out. One of the few benefits of being 44 instead of 20 is that, over the years, we kicked all the annoying and disruptive people out (this includes all forms of annoying, like rules lawyers, munchkins and stuff). Our games are much better for it.
We had our first game of this a couple weeks ago, with all the stuff that happens in the festive period we haven’t had our second session yet sadly though the first went amazingly well, and involved absolutely no progress, just a group of fools running from point A to point B only getting a fraction of the way because they upset C and also D through H along the way.
I’m exited to see this group succeed with glorious applause or crash and burn in the most dramatic way.