D&D thread
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@Mason_Wheeler grone
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Had a not-fun Shadowrun session today. It started out well enough with tying up the loose ends of the adventure that finished last time we played (healing up, getting back home from Amazonia, getting paid — that sort of stuff), but things broke down OOC when the PCs were about to be hired for the next shadowrun. Basically, their prospective employer tells them, “Racists killed my sister, I want you to make them pay.” We didn’t even get to the point where she tells them she wants the PCs to blow up their meeting hall with the racists inside, because the dwarf rigger immediately interrupts and demands — not just asks for — proof that these people are responsible, else he’s not going to do it.
Okay, OOC I can understand that, because basically the employer is asking them to commit cold-blooded murder. But when the ork street samurai IC tries to calm things down a bit in an OOC effort to keep the adventure going, the rigger pulls a pistol on him and tells him to be quiet, all the while demanding the lady gives them proof to back up her allegation. She says she can’t, not here and now, anyway (OOC: she doesn’t have any proof because 1. she has no sister, and 2. the folks she wants to blow up aren’t the racist conspiracy she’s making them out to be — that’s all just bullshit to try and get the runners to sympathise and do this for her) so eventually the rigger puts away his gun and walks out of the room, saying he’s not going to do this.
The player then went outside to smoke a cigarette, leaving the rest of us to wonder a bit about what just happened here. Because this is not the first time he’s done stuff like this: the last run to Amazonia (Brazil and surrounding areas), he strongly objected to having to traipse through the jungle and walked out too. Only to decide to come along after all a few minutes later.
Anyway, when he came back in, we asked him a bit about what he was trying to do here, which seems to have perplexed him a little. After some back and forth, pointing out among other thingsthat we are here to play a game together, which is kind of hard when one PC refuses to come along, he suddenly went back on the decision and said he’d do the run after all … sigh There followed more OOC discussion about this, because it makes playing very difficult OOC and working together very difficult IC.
In the end, things got heated enough that he basically told us to leave (we were playing at his place). Needless to say, once outside we had a fairly lengthy conversation about what just happened and what to do about it. But we didn’t arrive at any solution we feel happy with.
As I’ve mentioned before, the player in question has some mental health issues, and those seem to manifest in him alternating, over maybe 30 minutes to an hour or so, between being passive or even almost lethargic, and becoming very active, impulsive, and not listening at all to others. The episode I just described happened in the latter state, and this is far from the first time. When talking it over outside, we figure another issue is that he seems to play RPGs mostly for roleplaying his character — he’s quite good at that, coming up with all kinds of stuff his character is doing, inventing places, people, situations and so on. But we also worked out that the other two players play RPGs mainly for the fun of solving problems, and roleplaying in-depth is much further down on the list of what they want to do. Though I’m the GM, I’m in the latter camp too — I’m not a great roleplayer or storyteller, but I do like solving problems, and setting them for the other players. Someone impulsively making rash decisions to “solve” problems does not fit well with that style of play, though. (Read some way back up for the story about the bus station, another good example of this.)
We’re now really at the point where we’re wondering: Will he quit the group? Do we want to play with him still? Will we have to tell him that we don’t want to play with him anymore?
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
mental health issues ... alternating ... between being passive ... and becoming very active, impulsive...
Diagnosis from totally-not-a-qualified-psychologist: That sounds like bipolar. Is he on meds? Is he supposed to be? Does he need a change to his meds?
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@HardwareGeek I’m not a psychologist either, but AFAIK bipolar disorder generally has much longer cycles — a week or more of (over-)happiness and a similar time of depression, with more or less normal in between? He’s been diagnosed with some form of autism long ago already, but I forget the name, and currently lives in sheltered accommodation (basically a normal house with multiple people with varying mental problems, plus some staff) because last year, things were on the verge of being too bad for him to live on his own any longer.
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@Zerosquare That guy sounds like he’s a Freebase player.
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