How to Play Good: Work with your fellow players
Last week we talked about working with your DM. Remember also to work with your fellow players. If the party decides to go east and you decide to go west, you’ve more than likely just made things infinitely more difficult for the game to run smoothly.
Sure, you can just run around and do whatever you want. That’s a thing you can do when you’re playing a game in an open, imagination-limited space. Before you do, though, you should ask yourself if going the opposite direction is in the best interests of everyone’s fun rather than just yours. Chances are your DM has little if anything prepared for the opposite direction. Chances are your friends and fellow players want the entire team to do the thing. You’re just going to flip them off?
Congratulations. Your selfish desire to be an edgy rebel has reduced everyone’s fun but yours. Happy?
Make your characters together, too.
When beginning a game or campaign, work together with the DM and the other players so you don’t all show up with halfling bards (although now I write that, I totally want to play that campaign). Or so you don’t show up with an edgelord loner jerk evil-aligned wild-magic sorcerer when everyone else is playing work-together good-aligned heroes.
More practically, this lets you work out as a group whether you want to fill traditional party roles or strike out in a different direction in terms of party composition. Do you as a party want to default to Warrior-Rogue-Wizard-Cleric roles? Or can you break up that all-bard boy band idea to make the party more sensible in the meta? There are all kinds of bard Colleges, different combinations of which can lead to healer bards, caster bards, stabby bards, tank bards. The point is you should get together and talk about it. This can (and should) happen at Session Zero.
Working together happens throughout the campaign. Holding up your end of that bargain is mostly just making sure you pay attention. More about that in next week’s edition.
Every week as part of the How To Play Good series you’ll get a different post with tips and tricks in this series. But if you don’t want to wait, you can get the whole thing here, along with a crap-ton of GM tips.
