I did this in the very first RPG I played. It was Star Wars and I was playing a smuggler (who thus had a ship). Obviously the GM intended my ship to be used to move the party around. Well, the jedi PC shows up wanting to board my ship as I’m getting ready to leave. I don’t know this guy so obviously the first thing my character would do would be to say that and then turn the turrets on when this strange jedi tried to insist on joining me, followed by promptly flying off so he ended up needing to find another way to our adventure.
No idea why I was like that. The player was pretty much my best friend at the school, too, so it wasn’t anything personal against him. I think I was just trying to hard to do what “my character would realistically do” instead of just playing a game.
Obviously, I’m probably missing some context here, but reading the way you’ve described this, I don’t think you were at fault here. If the GM’s decision really was to fold that character into the group by just having them stroll up to a smuggler’s ship like “Yo, I’m the jedi, let me in,” that was an incredibly fucking stupid way to handle that character introduction.
If that happened in an actual Star Wars movie or TV show there would be a million youtube videos ripping on how stupid that scene was. Forget “Paranoid smuggler trying to evade the law”, basically anyone working against the empire should have been suspicious as fuck there. That’s not a jedi, that’s an imperial spy, or worse, a sith lord.
Yes, players owe to each other to try to move the story forward in a collaborative way, but the GM also owes it to the players to never demand that their characters act like complete and total morons for the sake of the story. There should have been some kind of framework there for why this group of people would trust this random-ass dude wandering into the docking bay. A message sent ahead by their contact in the resistance saying “This guy is gonna help you out, you can trust him,” something like that. Not just “Yo, I’m a party member, lemme in.” Real life doesn’t work like that, and when games try to work like that it just makes everything feel stupid and pointless, because it’s so obvious that none of it is real or meaningful.
That would have been more cool than whatever unmemorable shit actually happened in that campaign. Only other thing I remember is the GM offering me 3 capital ships if I bought him lunch one day and then promptly destroying two of them that same session, which I actually appreciate in hindsight because it contributed to seeing pay to win games as a waste of time and money. Either the shit “bought” in game can be lost that easily or it just breaks the game into a “just give me money and you, uh, win! That’s the whole game!”
I did this in the very first RPG I played. It was Star Wars and I was playing a smuggler (who thus had a ship). Obviously the GM intended my ship to be used to move the party around. Well, the jedi PC shows up wanting to board my ship as I’m getting ready to leave. I don’t know this guy so obviously the first thing my character would do would be to say that and then turn the turrets on when this strange jedi tried to insist on joining me, followed by promptly flying off so he ended up needing to find another way to our adventure.
No idea why I was like that. The player was pretty much my best friend at the school, too, so it wasn’t anything personal against him. I think I was just trying to hard to do what “my character would realistically do” instead of just playing a game.
Obviously, I’m probably missing some context here, but reading the way you’ve described this, I don’t think you were at fault here. If the GM’s decision really was to fold that character into the group by just having them stroll up to a smuggler’s ship like “Yo, I’m the jedi, let me in,” that was an incredibly fucking stupid way to handle that character introduction.
If that happened in an actual Star Wars movie or TV show there would be a million youtube videos ripping on how stupid that scene was. Forget “Paranoid smuggler trying to evade the law”, basically anyone working against the empire should have been suspicious as fuck there. That’s not a jedi, that’s an imperial spy, or worse, a sith lord.
Yes, players owe to each other to try to move the story forward in a collaborative way, but the GM also owes it to the players to never demand that their characters act like complete and total morons for the sake of the story. There should have been some kind of framework there for why this group of people would trust this random-ass dude wandering into the docking bay. A message sent ahead by their contact in the resistance saying “This guy is gonna help you out, you can trust him,” something like that. Not just “Yo, I’m a party member, lemme in.” Real life doesn’t work like that, and when games try to work like that it just makes everything feel stupid and pointless, because it’s so obvious that none of it is real or meaningful.
Probably for the best. If you’d let him onboard it might have ended up like this story.
That would have been more cool than whatever unmemorable shit actually happened in that campaign. Only other thing I remember is the GM offering me 3 capital ships if I bought him lunch one day and then promptly destroying two of them that same session, which I actually appreciate in hindsight because it contributed to seeing pay to win games as a waste of time and money. Either the shit “bought” in game can be lost that easily or it just breaks the game into a “just give me money and you, uh, win! That’s the whole game!”