[RPG] How to help a player to roleplay the character he created

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When we first met to create my players' characters, the first thing I asked was to create normal characters (e.g. no freaks/depression/obsession/psychologically disturbed, etc). Normal people with normal lives, career events permitting (it's a Traveller game).
I do not like freaks and I believe that you do not need a freak to make an interesting and fun character to play. (I believe a more experienced player might manage to roleplay a freak character in an interesting and not problematic way.)

One player, after making him rewrite his character twice (he was making freak characters), created a very interesting one (finally!). He told me he likes freak characters, but only after we started talking about the freak characters he was creating, and not before. He did not understand how a normal character could be interesting. I tried to explain, but apparently he did not understand my point.

Now this player is very inexperienced. I'm convinced that he plays like this because he has no experience but hack&slash. By now he seems to have grasped my point that normal characters can be interesting to play now, because he's not roleplaying a freak. However, he simply does not roleplay as the character he made. So, how can I help him to roleplay the character he made?

TL;DR: My inexperienced player described his character one way, but he's roleplaying it completely different. Since I think it's due to his inexperience, how can I help him roleplay the character he made?

Some Background

The first time he created an apathetic medic without emotions who saw people as machines to be repaired. That's not normal, that's a psychological problem! In a realistic setting (as is hard sci-fi) no one would take him as a crewman, in fact probably they would take a person like this to an asylum.

When I say I made him rewrite the background I mean I told him something like “This part is not ok because it's a freak thing. Change it please.” I absolutely did not write his background as I wanted it, I only told what and why a certain thing would not be ok with me, because looked too freakish to me. Of course I made suggestions for his background, but I believe that's part of a GM's “job”.

His character is a medic-born person that happened to become a pirate, started to despise pirates and pirate life, and decided to become a Marine (as a medic) to fight them and bad people.

The problem is that he's not roleplaying his character at all as he has described it or how it's supposed to behave: as a medic (most of all) and a marine. I realize that saying that he's supposed to roleplay it in a certain ways is bad – it's his character, after all – but how he behaves is probably not what the character he described would do.

He's inexperienced in RPGs, and in fact this is the first roleplaying campaign (strictly speaking) he's ever played in. This is probably the cause, and it's not his fault, but my problem is that when other people try to explain to him why his character would not behave in a certain way, he seems refractory to our explanations and gives us illogical justifications. He doesn't even seems to follow his main goal (the search for his missing love).

I tried to ask him if he wanted to change his character a bit, but he said he does not see any reason to and continued to explain to us why he behaves like that. I fear he will continue to roleplay a “freak”, or that he'll change the background for the worse.

A more experienced player of mine suggested changing his character by some incident in game and a roll of the dice. Something like “you have been wounded in the head, now you behave strangely,” in order to make it more similar to what he seems he would like to play, but that seems to me like cheating and a cheap solution.

I didn't know the Same-Page Tool before we started to play, and maybe using it could have helped, but I think the main problem is that he's just green at roleplaying and can't “enter” into the mind of his character.

Campaign info

This is a sandbox-style game. It's also in a hard sci-fi setting, where people should behave and react as in real life.

I am the GM, and this is my second GM experience (not counting few one-shots) and I've never been a player myself (sadly).

I told my players "give your PCs a motivation to travel in space and a reason of why they're together".

The PCs' names are Vincent, Lucien and Ryan. Lucien is my problematic player's character.
The main goal for now is to find Vincent's father, who left him with his mother when he was a child, and sister (who is Lucien's love).
Before the campaign started, Lucien saved the life of Vincent's sister, and fell in love with her. Due to his Marine duties he could not stay with her and she disappeared again.
Later Vincent found information about him and decided to meet him to get more information. Lucien had no further information, but they became friends.
Vincent then decided to get a ship and to take Lucien and Ryan (a common Marine friend) as crew and investigate about his sister.

So, why can't he be a freak? Because sooner of later (before finding his sister) Vincent would see how Lucien really is and would dump him in space before letting his sister stay with a freak (even if they do not know if she loves Lucien).
And, being a freak, I'm not sure he could have managed to enter the Marines and stay there so many years.

The players know about each others' backgrounds, we all worked them out together.

Best Answer

To make your question short, and to see if I understood it correctly, we're talking about a player who made his character a certain one and roleplays it entirely different. You added that you think that it comes from inexperience, and that he created this character after you said "no" to some "freak-character"-ideas. You want to help him roleplay the character he created.

As I see it, this problem is made from two smaller ones. The first is that he doesn't see his character as interesting because the character "is normal and normal is boring". The second is that you wanna help him understand why the way he plays the character does not fit the story-world of your game.

Helping him understand that "normal is not boring

This is the more important problem, as it stands in the basis of the entire problem. If he'll see that normal characters can be interesting his "anti-persona" will perish and he'll roleplay a normal character and not a freak one. The main trick here is to show him that normal characters are not entirely normal, i.e. "no person is like the others". In order for that to work, we need to give the character depth.

The easiest way to give depth to a character is through internal conflicts. Having goals and all is nice, but without something that blocks oneself from achieving them it is far less interesting. First thing to do is to go over his character's background and see if he implemented there an internal conflict for his character. If so, show it to him and talk with him about it. If no, sit with him and help him to come with one. The internal conflict doesn't have to be extravagant, but it needs to be there. An example one might be that he loves Vincent's sister but secretly hates Vincent himself, or another like Loves the sister but thinks that he's not good enough for there. I'll take the second one as an example for this section.

The conflict gives us a few things, a few added benefits. It gives the character 2 conflicting goals: "Get the sister and prove that I'm worthy". Now, with those two we also get a kind of an achieving-plan: "If I'll show her that I'm worthy, by getting something amazing done, she'll want me and I'll be able to get her". More than that, the character gets the knowledge that each advancement in order to achieve one goal will drive the other one to the far end.

But the first conflict is even more interesting. The character here has the knowledge that he needs the brother in order to save his lover, but he just can't stand being near the brother. He'll drive the mission onward for two reasons but he'll have doubts about his lover- if he'll marry her he'll be stuck with this brother of hers.

To make long story short, simple conflicts can show the player that even normal characters are interesting and unique. When combined with goals they force the character to take certain steps along the roads, to commit certain actions along the way, that he won't want to do but will make him doubt himself and question himself and see that his problem are far more interesting than those of every freak that he'll encounter.

Another nice way to help him see the importance of conflict is through showing him and analyzing with him certain protagonists that are normal people, from the stories and movies and series (of any form)that he likes. He'll see quite quickly that the conflicts make them interesting.

But he may say that it is not enough. For that there are a few more literary tools that might help him see why normal people are interesting. The first one is having flaws (internal or external) and the second one is using "The Ghost".

Flawed characters are characters that just like normal people aren't perfect. Those flaws can be internal (self-doubts, for example, or a mild paranoia) or they can be external (they're look frightens ordinary people, for once, or a missing hand for the other). The idea is that the character has to deal with the flaw, and one day to find the strength to overcome it. The fight for the overcoming act makes the character far more interesting. A nice example of that can be seen in The Rain Man, where he learns at the end that he can count on strangers/"dumb" persons like he's brother. Another nice example can be seen in the story of The Ugly Duckling who although looking terrible learned to acknowledge himself and to accept the way he looks, to accept his difference.

"The Ghost" is an event from the past that just like a ghost haunts the character to this day. Again, trying to cope with it is what builds a deep character. One example for this can be seen in the movie Inception, where we literally have a ghost- Cob's wife. Another example for this can be seen in the movie Casablanca, where he has to deal with his broken relationship with Ilsa. This Ghost is far more interesting as the originator of the Ghost actually comes back to his life. In Frozen we see another kind of a Ghost- the act that one feels guilty about. Elsa actually killed her sister.

All of these techniques are there for one reason- to make regular people interesting, to give depth to the characters, to make them human beings with goals and drives and psychology.

Helping him see that his character doesn't fit the world

After he understands that he doesn't have to be a freak in order to be interesting, he will be far more understandable about playing a character that fits the world. Then, try to explain to him as calmly as you can what it is in the way he played his character that doesn’t fit the world.

Explain to him that the characters are in a world where being a freak is bad, where achieving one's goals is the ideal. Each and every one for himself, as the saying goes. Give him examples from the way he played his character and analyze with him, in a one-on-one conversation where his way of acting came from. Use the background he created to illustrate to him where your problem comes from.

Then ask him what problems he has with his character, and together try to find a solution. Maybe let him be just a little bit freakish. Maybe he needs to just create a different character. This is basically between you and him. After that show the updated character to the group and get their approval.

When combining those two, you'll get a player who his far more willing to both play the character while also seeing the problems with the way he played his character before.

Combining the two solutions

When combining the two solutions you get a better player, who understands for the future also how to create regular characters that are not freaks yet far more interesting than those freaks will ever be able to be. Furthermore, you get a player who is willing to play his character as written while still making the character fit into the world. Hope any of these helped you.