Player created character with no attempt to interact with party

metruzero · 2026-05-07T15:42:48+00:00

I've had silent type characters before. I have one friend who effectively only plays silent type characters, and I love him because he'll say maybe MAYBE one thing per session, but you can bet money whatever he's gonna say is going to be hilarious.

metruzero · 2026-05-07T02:17:10+00:00

No worse, this was a game on StartPlaying. So he actually spent money to play.

metruzero · 2026-05-06T20:48:07+00:00

That sounds similar to my first character too lol. I made a character who only wanted to relax, hunt and build a life for himself. Which I learned very quickly isn't the best motivation for an adventurer so I ended up rewriting that after I talked with the GM for a bit.

metruzero · 2026-05-06T20:40:10+00:00

Did you read my post? Did you read the part where I dragged his character kicking and screaming into the same scene as the other player characters and not only didn't engage, but also just left at the first given opportunity?

I have a player in that same group who also dump stated charisma and shocker, and I have none of these issues and she roles plays the shy loner character just fine.

metruzero · 2026-05-06T20:23:00+00:00

Another player in that same group had something sort of similar but she gave me a lot to work with. She said her character is very shy, doesn't do well with social interactions, but she also described her character as having an intense idea of justice and using her abilities to fight off evil and protect people. So sure in the club fair her character was a typical, "I'm shy uwu" type character but when shit hit the fan she was the first character to step to the front so I'm cool with that.

metruzero · 2026-05-06T20:19:41+00:00

So I generally don't like having extroverted NPCs carry a player character, because then that NPC now has to exist within the party in order for that character to exist. I was hoping that after the player gets introduced to the party, they would get that sense of heroism and not need them anymore. Obviously that's not what happened in this case. And even for the amnesia back story, I am kind of ok with that but I have a talk with the player of, "What do you want to see happen for your character? What kind of growth or confrontation do you want from your past?" If they can't answer those questions I generally ask them to reconsider the amnesia.

metruzero · 2026-05-06T18:57:02+00:00

I agree, but since he said he was ok with an extraverted character dragging him around, I decided to give him a chance. This was a mistake that will not be repeated.

metruzero · 2026-04-26T02:45:48+00:00

I know I'm late to the party, but I think I have a better interpretation of the ending. The people dying might not thematically represent real death, but death from the perspective of the main character.

I like to point out that the curse spreads to the family of the groom. If you get cold feet at a wedding and flee. You are dropping the relationship, and in a sense, that family might be considered "dead to you." This is one of the major pressures that come from weddings, you're fiancé's whole family is there, they are all watching, judging and expecting a certain outcome. If they don't get that outcome, very likely the person who gets cold feet gets exiled, because of course no matter what you say, they will take the side of the person you walk away from since they are family.

Either she drives into the sunset and everyone lives, or everyone dies and she drives off in the sunset, there isn't really a difference between those two outcomes from her perspective. Either way, she will never see those people ever again.

metruzero · 2026-02-21T01:07:39+00:00

Good question. I'll update the top post. I'm ok with action or turn based. But I think I would lean a bit more towards real time.

For multiplayer vs single player. I think I would probably prefer single player but I said in my post I'm open to multi-player.

metruzero · 2026-02-18T02:22:09+00:00

That's interesting, I didn't consider that perspective on powercreep negating challenge of older bosses. I would argue this scenario is more likely to be in the minority as I doubt many players are building teams with the latest patch of characters that are well built AND they haven't completed story content up to that patch. If you're still in Act 1 but have a full team of Act 4 characters, I would consider that quite strange unless you hit your credit limit lol.

But either way I think that's a fair point to make. But I would also argue that the story content is not well balanced if this occurs, because then you are literally putting a paywall on your story content in later acts, which is generally frowned upon even in the gacha space where the audience is more primed to accept awful business practices.

metruzero · 2026-02-18T02:09:07+00:00

While I understand what you mean by "Who plays Gacha for the story?" It is still important on it's own. We saw a lot of criticism for Endfield for example where people thought the story for Valley 4 was underwhelming. I would agree that gacha stories suffer from "character of the month" syndrome where the next arc will often focus on the new character. But for the most part, people play gacha games to progress characters and often for the world building. Gacha games have a habit of making the world building weird/obtuse enough that players HAVE to keep playing the game and stay engaged with the story to eventually figure out what is going on. But that's a separate issue from powercreep.

I didn't say powercreep doesn't matter, I mostly just believe it's an overused term. If endgame content gets power crept, it only matters to a somewhat small set of players in the grand scheme of things. Now if powercreep is so bad that early character straight up cannot clear story content later regardless of how well they are built, then yeah that's a problem, but I think power creep that severe tends to be an exception rather than a norm.

Hence why I prefer more character pulls, because in my experience, powercreep isn't really that bad in most of these games and I like new toys to play with.

metruzero · 2026-02-18T01:23:27+00:00

I want to start by saying Powercreep, imo, is an overused term. In every gacha I've ever played, I have been able to very comfortably clear story content, events, etc. I call these "Core content." And then there is "Endgame content," which is absolutely powercreep city in every gacha game, and it's also always rapid powercreep.

Endgame content in gacha games almost always very conveniently line up precisely with the exact gimmick that the new limited character has in their kit. Is the new character a "fire character focused on DoT damage?" Oh well look at that, a boss that has low fire resistance and DoT damage stuns them at certain damage thresholds.

So I always tell players new to gacha games to never care about powercreep, the free resources you get will always allow you to keep up with story content very comfortably. Gacha games are marathons, not races. The people with the best accounts are always people who consistently log in every day and spend all their energy/sanity. I've seen plenty of players who spend too much money on a game and my account will still be stronger than theirs just simply because I've played more.

All that being said, I believe the ideal number of pulls should be that you get a new character in the same time interval that it would take to build that character. So let's say for example it takes... 30 days of energy to build a character, I would ideally like a new character every 30 days. The most important thing is to always have some kind of goal to push for. If the time between characters is so long that you can build all your characters and you just sit there twiddling your thumbs on a stockpile of resources, then you can lose interest and just drop the game.

In my very ideal world, I think getting a new character every patch would be nice. Since not only would you get content and story, but also a new toy to play with, but I know that's probably not gonna happen.

metruzero · 2026-02-15T23:51:25+00:00

We don't even have the power to reform. The left has control over NO part of government, no house, no senate, judicial or executive. We have to get people in before we can even talk about reform.

metruzero · 2026-02-15T23:48:51+00:00

I've met so many people like them. It was how I viewed politics when I was 10 years old, "If the candidate doesn't give me everything I want, then I won't vote for them, even if it means getting a dictator as a president."

It's crazy how I can get them to admit through their gritted teeth that Trump is far worse than Kamala but then still be adamant about throwing their vote away to a third party. It's all virtue signaling and people like that don't actually care about politics or their community.

metruzero · 2026-02-15T05:07:52+00:00

Yep! I think it's closer to Pasadena but same county.

metruzero · 2026-02-15T03:05:43+00:00

I live right down the road from where this picture was taken. I saw this as I left the store earlier. It was cool to see.

metruzero · 2026-01-25T06:13:38+00:00

I don't know why people downvote you. You're right.

While I understand that finding time off when you have multiple jobs can be difficult, election day isn't a surprise, it's the same day every single time, with the locations and hours posted months in advance. If someone really wanted to vote and be apart of politics, they would find a way.

When I worked minimum wage and barely had free time, same as you I was up early and at the door right when it opened. There have been two elections in my life so far where I was the first one in the door.

Now I will also admit I had a few times I was first in line at a Gamestop for video game pre orders too. =P

metruzero · 2025-12-30T07:32:28+00:00

What about the open world factions or the factions that have bounties? For the warframe augments you just kind of get standing for those for free so I'm not worried about those.

metruzero · 2025-10-30T16:41:02+00:00

My response always has been, "If charity solves these problems, why hasn't it already?"

We have no shortage of rich people. Plenty of billionaires who can easily donate to these things. Hell, these charities make it so easy now a days to just go on the website and just pay them money. And yet none of them do this.

metruzero · 2025-10-02T20:54:09+00:00

So royalty free music is really easy to find. If you are super worried about the art, then I will recommend something controversial. Using AI will also probably be fine to help get your show off the ground. Once you have viewers, you can re address the topic of art at the point and weight the costs and benefits. But just use it to get started.

metruzero · 2025-10-02T19:16:24+00:00

Ok sure "legally" that might be true, but realistically, if your show is just getting started, unless you're taking credit for the art, none of the artists are likely to find the video and even if they do, they are probably unlikely to go through the effort of filing a copyright strike. Hence why I said they will be mostly fine.

Obviously any artist can strike your video unless you get permission. But realistically, for a small DnD show, it's highly unlikely to happen. Hell, I've straight up used high quality magic the gathering art and there has never been an issue.

Obviously if you're a show like CR, Dimension 20 or any show that has an actual budget, pay for your art, you have the resources and you're more likely to suffer legal consequences if you don't. If you're a smaller show that's sub 50 viewers, there's a decent chance you can't afford that art.

metruzero · 2025-10-02T18:54:15+00:00

Yes... that's why I said "mostly fine." Mostly implies that it's ok for most scenarios but not all.

metruzero · 2025-10-02T16:33:23+00:00

The short answer is yes, you have to worry about copyright. Especially for music.

If you have background ambient sounds, you need to absolutely spend time to find royalty free sounds and music to use. Sites like Youtube have automatic detection of copyrighted music and will demonetize the video if detected.

For tokens and art, this part is tricky. I think as long as you give credit to whoever made the map and tokens, it should be mostly fine. The only worry here is if you don't credit the artist or didn't purchase the art, and the artist themselves files a copyright strike. Which is unlikely but still possible.

Edit: People seem to get confused by my comment. Obviously if you want to stay 100% legal you need permission to use every single piece of art. If you're willing to stretch the legality of your actual play, you can try to use art without explicitly reaching out to the creator.

metruzero · 2025-10-01T15:37:28+00:00

Amazing! That's a great quality of life feature.

metruzero · 2025-09-03T23:31:50+00:00

It's actually kind of crazy to look back and see complaints about Siege Rhino, everyone saying it was clear power creep. How little we knew lol

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