[RPG] do to help a player not make antagonistic characters

character-creationcharacter-developmentproblem-playersroleplaying

One of my players heard that during the second game he played (out of a few) that his characters were always antagonistic to every other character in some way.

Personally, as a GM I didn't see this (I only noticed this two times and I had him roll a new char in those instances).

Specifically, he plays characters that are usually the gruff or silent type. Or his character is a prankster who doesn't stop pranking the other chars. The few times where his character attacked other players are countable on one hand, but they were in all honesty foreseeable (like a bounty hunter char always arguing with a Sith char and telling him that he is weak… telling that to a Sith tends to result in a violent response). All of his chars are created to be loyal to a fault although the other players see only the outer or obvious personality traits of his chars and tend to agitate him time after time without knowing or planning to.

After he heard that other players considered his characters to be antagonistic he asked me what he could do in order to broaden the types of characters he plays and not automatically fall into the same trap of creating or playing character that seems antagonistic to the other players.

Sadly I'm a bit out of ideas on how to help him. So my question is: what can be I do to help a player broadens his perspective so he doesn't fall into using the same type of character time and again?

Note: I am tying to help him so he CAN role-play and also stay in role. The problem is that his roleplaying seems to alter slightly over time into slightly aggressive, competitive behavior which agitates other players. He says he does not want to be a problem player and wants to change his behavior. So this is not a question about how to deal with a problem player, but rather a question about how to help the player to broaden the style of characters he plays.

Best Answer

I've come across a similar issue where every character the player created became annoying to the other players, sometimes right away, sometimes after a short while. As it turned out, the problem wasn't the one player, it was all the other players. You see, because his first character had annoyed them, they started to treat all his characters the same way and this led to his other characters reverting into the annoying character he originally played. The worst part was, no-one realised that this was the reality of what was happening until we all sat down over a pint of beer in the pub and discussed the issue. It never completely resolved itself (there are still a couple of players who just can't stop acting as though his character is annoying them) but it did get better.

Perhaps your guys problem is in fact similar to the above. If so, I'd suggest you all discuss openly. As the saying goes "first impressions last" and in this case, that proved to be more true than we would have thought.