Ok, I've got a question for the G/DMs out there who have experience dealing with players who always want to be the most specialist snowflake EVAR no matter what they're playing. Short of telling them to sit and spin, how can I convince them that they need to just be content playing within the system provided by the setting?
Background: I've got a Friday night group with only a couple of friends in it. Originally, we were playing Shadowrun 4th Ed, but we've been playing nothing but SR4 for the past 4 years and I'm sick of it. I need a break from SR4, and I've always found D&D to be a good GM-brain-reset game, to let me back off of having to provide high-end content and RP scenarios for my players and let me go back to that nice, lovely little tavern at the edge of town and start fresh. Unfortunately, one of my players is a snowflake player. If we play SR4 and everyone else is playing normal meta-humans, he's gotta play a vampiric human who spreads HMHVV and turns trolls into one type of monsters and dwarves into another and he looks like an elf and only mages with magic at 8 or higher have a chance of breaking through his masking and all of his skills are critter powers so no one has any defense against them. Or he plays a pixie, or a drake, or a shifter, or anything other than a human, ork, troll, elf, or dwarf. If we're playing OWoD VtM he wants to play an Independent member of a clan normally reserved for Sabbat who has 50 different combo disciplines and can shoot frikkin' laser beams out of his fangs and walk in daylight with no penalty.
Sadly enough, he thinks he understands power balancing and tries to impose limits on his characters to prevent them from becoming completely OP - but he usually fails to keep them from being OP and just makes them Extremely OP in half of their abilities and completely useless in the other half, thereby completely negating any benefits he would have gotten from - for lack of a better term - multi-classing in the first place. Or he'll limit himself in other ways, like making a character that's amazingly overpowered, but if it takes more than 3 points of damage it's dead and nothing can be done to revive it and he has to reroll (but of course it's nigh impossible to anything to effect the character enough to cause 3 points of damage in the same hit and the character regenerates to full health each round).
And he's a nice guy, he's one of my best friends. In fact, whenever my fiancee and I can afford to get married he'll be my best man. So I can't just tell him that he's not welcome to play (game nights are the only chance we have to see him due to family drama on his end), but I need him to recognize that these ridiculously special characters are game breaking for other players, for the GM, and for the game world itself - without hurting his feelings.
Background: I've got a Friday night group with only a couple of friends in it. Originally, we were playing Shadowrun 4th Ed, but we've been playing nothing but SR4 for the past 4 years and I'm sick of it. I need a break from SR4, and I've always found D&D to be a good GM-brain-reset game, to let me back off of having to provide high-end content and RP scenarios for my players and let me go back to that nice, lovely little tavern at the edge of town and start fresh. Unfortunately, one of my players is a snowflake player. If we play SR4 and everyone else is playing normal meta-humans, he's gotta play a vampiric human who spreads HMHVV and turns trolls into one type of monsters and dwarves into another and he looks like an elf and only mages with magic at 8 or higher have a chance of breaking through his masking and all of his skills are critter powers so no one has any defense against them. Or he plays a pixie, or a drake, or a shifter, or anything other than a human, ork, troll, elf, or dwarf. If we're playing OWoD VtM he wants to play an Independent member of a clan normally reserved for Sabbat who has 50 different combo disciplines and can shoot frikkin' laser beams out of his fangs and walk in daylight with no penalty.
Sadly enough, he thinks he understands power balancing and tries to impose limits on his characters to prevent them from becoming completely OP - but he usually fails to keep them from being OP and just makes them Extremely OP in half of their abilities and completely useless in the other half, thereby completely negating any benefits he would have gotten from - for lack of a better term - multi-classing in the first place. Or he'll limit himself in other ways, like making a character that's amazingly overpowered, but if it takes more than 3 points of damage it's dead and nothing can be done to revive it and he has to reroll (but of course it's nigh impossible to anything to effect the character enough to cause 3 points of damage in the same hit and the character regenerates to full health each round).
And he's a nice guy, he's one of my best friends. In fact, whenever my fiancee and I can afford to get married he'll be my best man. So I can't just tell him that he's not welcome to play (game nights are the only chance we have to see him due to family drama on his end), but I need him to recognize that these ridiculously special characters are game breaking for other players, for the GM, and for the game world itself - without hurting his feelings.
(it was long) ironically, while trying to establish ourselves and NOT get backstab by NPC minions/followers, most of us turn to "somewhat" good cause we don't want to get overthrown like the others.
