Turtle player - advice?

[Kerstin Schmidt]

Thanks Walt, it feels to me like we're talking about the same guy now.  :)
I'm going to give you a couple more examples below.  

--In fact after writing most of this post I've reached a conclusion about one horrible problem we have that I hadn't seen so clearly before.  I'm leaving all my thought process in, so you can see where I'm going from and maybe glean more data on the way. --

A lot of this is starting to sound more like classic Turtle after all. Instead of saying "I do [my character does] nothing," your turtle is doing nothing by virtue of never being satisfied with a proposed ccourse of action. Which is even worse, because as you say it drags others into inertia in the process.

Do you think that dragging others into inertia follows naturally from never being satisfied with a course of action? I'd expect that when one person shows dysfunctional behaviour that all the others at the game table have identified as such in situations when they weren't directly embroiled in it, those others should be able to develop some kind of alertness against future cases of it, and tell him to stop it or at least disregard it?

Instead of which his almost hypnoic effect continues. It's something I've never experienced in any group, whether professional, social, in sports or gaming. When I GM for him I see what he does, and when I play alongside him I can protect myself by using a special 'anti-turtle' filter forcing myself to divert every word he says into a special 'turtle waste' compartment where I can disregard it. That helps me break out of the general table hypnosis and sometimes has enabled me to shake others out of it by sheer verbal violence, but as I said earlier, this isn't very functional either.

I think it's one of the aspects of the problems we need a solution for, and to me it's the one I can't for the life of me understand the cause of.  

--In fact as I realised a while after writing this bit, it's part of the overall problem I identify at the end of this post. --

Teasing out the cause and effect would be interesting, if you could figure out how to do it. Is he perpetually delaying actions because he keeps thinking of alternatives and can't get them out of his mind? Or is he afraid of making decisions, and just using thinking of additional alternatives as a way of delaying or avoiding doing so? Several details (such as that he's able and willing to act when clear guidelines are in place) suggest the latter.

As far as I can see it's a mixture of both.  Often after a group has finally kicked through all his webs of thinking and outthinking and actually acts, he sudddenly groans in mid-move, slaps his forehead and says, "Of course what we should have done..." By which time hopefully things are happening, NPCs are driving the roleplaying or combat has started, so we're safe.  For now.  

There's another dimension, which is that he enjoys planning. It's one of the few things he's actually stated clearly. He likes the tactical challenge, he likes to throw out ideas and getting told by other people whether they think his plan is brilliant or "outlandish" (his word btw, meaning 'rubbish' as far as I can gather).  

That this behavior affects his pizza-ordering as well as gaming suggests that the ultimate cause does not stem from gaming (such as bad experiences in past games), unlike the classic "turtle" syndrome.

Hm, I guess.  My pizza example was fictional of course (we've never ordered a pizza to share that I can remember), meant to illustrate a particular dynamic at the gaming table.

What he has told me of other games he's played in suggests that he's used to an adversarial game approach by players and GMs - not very satisfying or functional even, or especially, in Gamist play, but that's perhaps merely my opinion.  Players like that have a hard time understanding that there is, or even can be non-adversarial approach and that as a player you can benefit from it. However, another adversarial-trained player is gradually shifting out of it and beginning to open up and trust us, while our turtle has a much harder time.

Another example in this context:
Every time he and I have tried negotiating for rules-related things that aren't in the rules but would help tailor his character (usually at my initiative), he starts by showing interest, listening for any potentially beneficial new house rules, but refuses to give any input or even consider changing his pre-planned numerical character development and ends up being dissatisfied and saying he doesn't want any new rules for now, he'll give it a think, maybe later.  Of course he never comes back to me.  

I'm not entirely sure what it is that makes him dissatisfied - I believe that he expects any character abilities or magic item abilities he could get by negotiating with me would be tacked on to the character like extra magic items. That's not the case. I have an eye to game balance to keep our Gamist slant satisfied, and an eye to what would fit the character concept. Either I'm particularly bad at trying to coax his character concept out of him, or he's refusing to settle on one.  The latter feels more likely to me in the overall context and with the vague excuses he keeps making.  
Only about a week ago we were talking to him at a social evening and he finally said that he'd like his PC to eventually become some great leader's bodyguard (in effect the path I 'prescribed' for him, remember).  He seemed quietly enthusiastic about it at the time, but when I suggested some extra abilities for his character that would give him numerical benefits when protecting someone, he merely wrote back that he was out of ideas and he didn't want a set of extra benefits right now, maybe later.
What I felt there was a barrier being erected and feet padding quietly away behind it. Why or where to, I have no idea.  He's free to not get any extra benefits obviously, if that what he prefers - but he has (in a very roundabout way) expressed dissatisfaction and envy at the fact that some other players get them.

...after a certain point, adding more options to choose from ...also make the chooser less satisfied with the choice once it's been made...

I remember reading about that a few years ago, yup, and thinking how precisely it fit my early experience with the Internet, when I started using it in earnest maybe five or six years ago. After thirty-and-something years in blissful non-access to the mountains of information out there, I was completely shellshocked and disoriented at first.  I quickly learnt techniques to deal with that - but after more than 20 years of play, the turtle doesn't seem to have adapted to the wealth of options available in an RPG.  

I mention this to suggest that if your turtle is affected by this more than most people, it might be worthwhile to consider how he reacts when decisions between limited alternatives. This is to say, choosing A, B, or C rather than "what do you want to do now."

Hm, good point. Giving him specific leads helps... a little.  In a recent scenario the group was planning to retake a fort in the forest that had been overrun by a company of orcs. There were basically two possible approaches the group figured out from the information they got in game:  either approach along the path or through the undergrowth to the main gate and try to bash through there, or find an escape tunnel certain allied NPCs had told them about and inflitrate through there.  
Unfortunately, because of time constraints we had decided that the planning was going to be done online between sessions, so dynamics were different from the usual.  What happened was that one player posted a plan using the tunnel, the turtle agreed with it and that was pretty much it.  He still complains about that bit of planning because according to him, planning online "takes way too long".  When we told him we thought it was very efficient because everyone only had to read the boards for a minute, think for another and post their comments quickly, he said he disliked it being so protracted. Apparently he talks on the phone about tactics to at least one player in another group he plays in - several times each week! He's also started talking to one player in our group on the phone between sessions.

I suspect there are a number of things that dissatisfy him about online planning that he isn't talking about, and possibly not even aware of.
One is that his hypnotic, paralysing influence doesn't work online. Not sure why not. His example of talking to players on the phone indicates that it may work through that medium, but I'm not sure because I've never been on the phone with him about game tactics.
Another is that he doesn't get to throw out idea after idea after idea without anyone realising what exactly he's doing - everything he's e-mailed or posted before will still be there for everyone to see and reread.

None of this, though, explains the balor incident, which is why I went off on a tangent looking for another theory in my previous post. You've given a lot of information and I'll have to think it over some more to see what other suggestions I can come up with.

Hm, that's his paranoid tendency there. He does that a lot; I've stated the balor example from the other GM's merely because it's so blatant, hence comparatively easy to bring acrowss without going into too much session/situation/setting detail.  

It may be partly due to past bad play experience (a balor in a goblin warren, indeed!), but there's also a real life dimension to it.  I'm reluctant to state real-life examples here because that feels too much like dragging another person's personality out into the open without their consent.  
I haven't pointed the turtle player to this thread btw. I'm usually very reluctant to talk about people behind their backs, and in any normal communication relationship I wouldn't dream of posting a thread like this without giving the other person input if they liked. In this case I felt that I needed to be able to speak freely to get anywhere, and also I felt and still feel that exposing him to all my thinking (and to people's responses to it) when he can't or won't respond openly from his side could only harm the situation further.  

Trying to think of other examples of paranoia in the turtle's play (or non-play), there's actually two sides to the same bad coin:
He has a tendency to see balors where there are none. _and_:  
He consistently ignores signs of real threats unless and until they come in the form of enemies launching an attack.

In the actual balor example, no one believed for an instant that there was a balor because our play experience with the GM and our take on the in-game environment told us clearly that this was a blatantly ridiculous assumption - but even there, after the turtle had got the balor into his head and kept talking about it, fear was beginning to spread around the table of some horrible danger that would surely become apparent once that goblin got that door open?.... surely?... And the door swung open and there was an empty tunnel beyond it, the goblin ran away and people laughed in actual _relief_.  


In both cases his mindset is harmful not so much to just himself but also to others and to the game, because in both cases he can make other players believe in what he "saw".  This doesn't happen in sessions when he's away, so I know it's his influence and not our failure as GM to introduce facts and set scenes in a way the group can deal with. When he's away there may be a misunderstanding that I can correct or play off of, whatever the cooler. When he's present, I have to fight claw and tooth every inch of the way, or my game gets warped into his weird, nightmarish and completely implausible vision of things - one that I couldn't even run with if I wanted to, because they are impossible to work with.  He says he's tried GMing and hated it, and the groups he GMed for ended up hating him for it.  (He doesn't seem to think that's a bad thing btw, it sounds more like he's reminiscing about past victories...)

It feels sometimes as if my players aren't playing in my game, they are - to an extent - playing in the turtle's nightmare of it.  I have had a similar experience as a player in the other GM's game. When the two of us started talking away from the game table and he told me about who sundry NPCs really are and what they really do, I was speechless. I had to admit there was clear factual evidence of it all that he had presented a the table, but despite all that I hadn't been able to see them like that. I was seeing what the turtle had convinced himself they were.  Worse, even after I knew the GM's approach to the NPCs, I haven't been able to shake free of "the turtle view" of them.

It's as if --

Oh hell.  I just realised.  It is as if he's dominating the shared imagination space of our games, and that without even realising that that space exists!  

That is very destructive.  In fact, that is so bad that if I can't find a solution to stop him doing that, and quickly, I think he'll have to go.  

Thanks for all the data, and stay tuned!

- Walt

Will do! Thanks for staying on it and for continuing to ask questions and to think about it.  I wish I had a clearer problem to present here, but it's complex ... unless I'm just under the influence of the turtle and unable to think clearly and see the actual facts.  

I've pointed the other two GMs-cum-players to this thread and hope they may provide additional insights.  One is the GM who had no balor in his goblin warren, the other plays along the turtle but had the good sense of not inviting him when she recently started running her own more Narr-style game.

[Kerstin Schmidt]

James, hix, thanks for reading and commenting.

I've already once set a time limit for a planning dicussion - AIR it was fifteen minutes for something fairly minor and straightforward.  No progress was made until I gave them a time warning, "You've got five minutes left," after which a plan was settled on almost in the next breath.  

It's not a technique I'd want to introduce as standard game protocol though.  It might work if my game ran on a Gamist-only, combat-only level, which it doesn't.  I want to encourage freedom and creativity, both in dealing with challenges and in developing characters and creating moments of dramatic, heroic story.  The fact that we are limited to a three-hours time slot already isn't good for that approach.  Slicing the game into time windows allotted to specific activities (even if it's only one activity that causes this to happen) strikes me as too GM-intrusive for the play style I'm aiming for.

[Kerstin Schmidt]

Ok, let me draw up my list of priorities as I currently see it, with notes on possible solutions wher apparent.

1.  Can't allow him to dominate the shared imagination space 'from the outside' with his balors and twisted, unworkable nightmares.  
Possible solutions: Nothing specific in sight yet - but I've only just hit on the problem. May involve working both with him to stop doing whatever it is he does, and with the other players to defend our SIS against his balors.  In the final analysis, if I can't solve this with him at the table, get him off my table.

2.  Want to limit the time he wastes on talking in circles and infecting other players with his do-not-engage approach.  
Possible solutions: Setting time limits can work if used occasionally and with good reason, but too much of that would be destructive for other dimensions of the game.  
Talking to him more may help. He is aware that he likes talking ideas a lot, and is prone to using up more time with that than is appropriate in my short game sessions. He'd like to have longer time slots for my game but due to our individual schedules that's not realistic at present.

3.  Would like to show him ways to get into the shared imagination space by playing in it and starring in it.  Like he did in the scenes he played as bodyguard/future bodyguard to the NPC prince.
Possible solutions:  Not sure. He'd like to return to times and places where he can be the prince's bodyguard again, I'm sure.  Might happen, but it's not likely to dominate the game. I have several more ideas for possible scenarios with the PCs 'hosted' by other NPCs in other times and other places. This might turn out to help him enter the SIS more, OTOH it might also cause him to become disoriented and clamped-down again because it's opening up additional options.

[S'mon]

He doesn't twist feedback, he ignores it.

If this is the considered result of careful analysis on your part, then I'll accept it. You have a lot more data to go on than I do. But the balor example in particular sounds to me like negative feedback is increasing his resolve for a particular belief or course of action when it should be decreasing it:

Naw, I (the GM in this case) didn't give him negative feedback - I don't think I even _noticed_ this whole Balor thing during the fight, I was busy running a big battle with D&D 3e's complex rules and had a huge number of things to take care of, AFAICR the goblin had failed a morale check and was trying to escape; this was Simulation not Narrativism I guess - I hadn't thought to myself "wouldn't it be cool if one of the goblins clawed at that door, and the players would wonder what was behind it" - I was just playing that goblin, along with the goblin king & 50 other goblins, the way I saw them behaving.

[S'mon]

I said I didn't think this was the main issue, though, because so far the evidence doesn't appear to show that he's deliberately charging into the boundaries just because they're there (my original theory); more like he's blundering into the boundaries because his social compass is out of whack. That's why the issue of how he handles social feedback seems, to me, important.

This seems to me to hit the nail on the head - his social compass is out of whack, so his responses don't make sense to us more (dare I say it) 'normal' people.  There's a disconnect - he doesn't 'read' the signals from us (or other people) the way we want or expect to be read.  He doesn't interact with other people in a (to me) 'normal' fashion.  He has many good qualities - reliability & generosity, notably.  He's pleasant to talk to; as long as one doesn't attempt to discuss eg what his character is doing _right now_, or what he enjoys in the game, or how we could all make the game better for everyone.  These kind of topics make him uncomfortable.  But the biggest problem, as SB has said several times, is his ability to infect all the other players (SB & me included, when we're players) with a kind of paranoid lassitude where all courses of action seem undesirable, so we talk interminably & do nothing - and when we eventually do act, it's on the basis of his paranoid fantasies rather than the world the GM has presented.  Since our D&D games are strongly Gamist, this causes dead PCs - no matter how much the GM cringes as s/he deals the lethal blows.  In fact this has made us both heavily reevaluate how much danger we have in our gameworlds - I used to think "PCs - there's nothing they can't handle!" - and that used to be true, but with him it's more like "If you think for a second they can't handle it, um... they can't."

[S'mon]

BTW Ron while your "trust Walt" advice initially seemed rather condescending to StalkingBlue when I read it earlier, I now see what you mean - Walt's a smart (and perceptive) guy!  >:)

SB & me, his 2 GMs, have discussed the Turtle player interminably and tried various approaches, without success and I feel without understanding either.  This thread is definitely helping me see things in a new light.  Even where SB has had trouble communicating what's actually happening, the ensuing misunderstandings & lengthy corrections have been very instructive.

We and other players have discussed playing some heavy-Narrativist games without him, but I guess what we want is to be able to play our mostly-Gamist games along with him, and have everyone benefit from and enjoy the experience.  Too often it seems we get occasional flashes of enjoyment isolated in seas of frustration, and we know that balance needs to change.  Life's too short.

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

I'm glad the moderator-comment had a positive effect. I hope as well that everyone can see that we are dealing with a certain amount of emotional pain in this particular group, which in all cases tends to make people a little defensive.

With that in mind, I hope that my following point might be accepted as more of a consensual surgical strike rather than a hostile rapier thrust.

S'mon, you wrote,

I guess what we want is to be able to play our mostly-Gamist games along with him, and have everyone benefit from and enjoy the experience. Too often it seems we get occasional flashes of enjoyment isolated in seas of frustration, and we know that balance needs to change.

My call? These two sentences may be incompatible. You want to have fun playing with this guy, but his behaviors during play are flatly decreasing the fun. You've both tried really really hard to overcome this, without success.

It seems to me that you cannot make him behave differently (nor should you). Since you cannot convince him to behave differently (the gentler version), and since playing "his way" has this weird contagious not-fun effect ...

... then perhaps he shouldn't be in your group at all.

My discussion of friends and Social Context, which I briefly summarize in a recent thread, is pretty relevant here.

Best,
Ron

[S'mon]

... then perhaps he shouldn't be in your group at all.

Yeah (oh BTW on this topic, I'm a big fan of 5 Geek Social Fallacies - http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html ).

You're right about the pain, I think.  About 8 months ago SB and me decided to drop a player from our group(s), a slightly creepy person who we didn't like being around.  When we told the group, the Turtle player was clearly devastated - not because he liked the creepy guy (one other player, more generous of nature than us, actually did like creepy guy and was notably upset by our excluding him), but because Turtle guy clearly believed that he would be next in line for the chop.  At the time we had abolutely no desire to even consider such a thing, but his behaviour since has almost seemed deliberately intended to provoke that kind of response from us - he won't talk to us at all to help us have a game we'll all 3 enjoy, so naturally we talk between ourselves, and the tendency then is to see him as a 'problem' in search of a 'solution'.  Not playing with him would be a very simple and effective solution, yet while he's a defective player, he _can_ be an asset, we _have_ very much enjoyed gaming with him at times.  It seems like there _ought_ to be a way to make that the rule rather than the exception.  If only he'd talk with us.

[Jaik]

How about a direct dose of honesty?

"Uh oh, it looks like that goblin's going off to set something on us!  Probably a balor, knowing this place..."
"Umm, no, he's running away from the massive carnage you guys are creating in here."

"We should scry this guy 24/7 for 2 weeks to figure out what elaborate defenses he has in place."
"Umm, he isn't really all that worried about being attacked right now.  He has a guard or two but that's about it."

No, it's not a perfect solution, it's actually quite far from it.  I think it does some harm to a Gamist game in that you are reducing the option space and making choices easier by giving "free" information.  It reduces the challenge.  It reduces options.

But.

You should be able to knock down these huge obstacles he's erecting until his "terrible thoughts" are more manageable and you can be all encouraging and say "Well, yeah, that could be happening, but that's not too big to deal with, is it?"  It should at least leapfrog the interminable waiting and dithering.  Once the game's ACTUAL parameters are revealed, he might start to come around and realize "Gosh, maybe the DM is serious in wanting to help me have fun."  Long shot?  Yeah, probably, but you gotta try.

[S'mon]

Hi Jaik - this is a fair point, but if I _notice_ he's being paranoid I'll often tell him so - he doesn't like it & it doesn't seem to make much difference once he's fixated on an idea*.  In the scrying case, the way 3.5e rules work the attempt would probably have failed & only served to alert the scryee.  The only thing I haven't tried is incorporating his ideas, ie 'making them right' in the game - but the gameworld he envisages seems so nightmarishly twisted and, more important, _nonsensical_ to me, that I don't want to go there.

*Also,often the only way to get through to him would be to give him all the info for free - in my intrigue-heavy game that basically eliminates the Gamist challenge, which is what he's there for in the first place.

[andy]

For me, this thread has been fascinating for the simple reason that (at least in my experience), "turtles" are usually not funsuckers who can destroy an evening's game. When I GM, I do my best to treat turtles as realistically as possible, which means that (at best) inaction is rewarded with inaction and (at worst) inaction results in failure and/or defeat.

Being a GM is work enough, albeit a labor of love. For my money, it is not the GM's job to engage the players, it is the GM's job to give the players a backdrop for them to engage themselves. If the players decide to switch from my prepared scenario, so be it-- it's time to wing it (which can be very liberating as a GM and which usually provides the best role playing interactions IMHO). At least they've taken the initiative and used their brains. I'd rather the players be hungry than spoon-fed, and I think that the best players would agree.

The part of this saga that I find most curious is the "contagious" nature of the turtlism at issue. Assuming that the other players are not turtles themselves, hopefully the rewards of activity and the penalties of inactivity will cure them of their turtlism and they can go back to being proactive. In real life, good things rarely come to the passive-- the dice helps those who help themselves (NOTE-no sacrilege intended).

Sorry that this has turned into a bit of a rant. In the end, I agree with Ron--if he's killing your game, either accept its death or ask him to leave. You can still be friends (if you ever really were).

Good gaming!

Andy

[S'mon]

The part of this saga that I find most curious is the "contagious" nature of the turtlism at issue. Assuming that the other players are not turtles themselves, hopefully the rewards of activity and the penalties of inactivity will cure them of their turtlism and they can go back to being proactive...

(Palpatine voice) You underestimate the power of the Dark Side...  (/Palpatine voice)  >;)

Seriously, I & SB at the very least know full well that inacitivity is pointless and counter-productive, and that listening to Turtle guy is not a good idea.  Yet as players we still have to fight to remember that, every time.  Turtle guy gets understandably frustrated if he feels he's having no influence on the game.  It's just unfortunate that the kind of influence he seeks is so often harmful to everyone else's enjoyment.

[Kerstin Schmidt]

How about a direct dose of honesty?

That, and the fact that it's indeed far from an ideal solution for my game style, is indeed among the options (and related drawbacks) I'm currently considering, as I posted earlier.

[andy]

S'mon--

The Dark Side is quicker, easier, but not stronger....

To be blunt, you should not care if your Turtle gets frustrated if he is not swaying you to his Dark Side. If you follow your own lead and he doesn't like it, he can either change or leave.

You are not the custodian of his enjoyment.

Andy

[Kerstin Schmidt]

When I GM, I do my best to treat turtles as realistically as possible, which means that (at best) inaction is rewarded with inaction and (at worst) inaction results in failure and/or defeat.

That has been my approach with him, yup. Unfortunately in this case, it didn't work.  It's making all of us unhappy, including to an extent our turtle.

The part of this saga that I find most curious is the "contagious" nature of the turtlism at issue. Assuming that the other players are not turtles themselves, hopefully the rewards of activity and the penalties of inactivity will cure them of their turtlism and they can go back to being proactive. In real life, good things rarely come to the passive-- the dice helps those who help themselves (NOTE-no sacrilege intended).

None of the other players are turtles.  The instant the turtle player is absent from a session, everyone proactive* and enters the shared imagination space instead of hanging around outside and peeking half-longingly in.

*to differing degrees of course, but that's individual player mentality and partly also dependent on the type of scene going on.