This is my first post on the sub and I’ve been thinking about this post for a while. I (21M) run a homebrew DnD 5e campaign with a few of my friends, all around the same age as me. I’ll use their character names in lieu of their real names. There’s Mic, Vorg, Soren and Gnavin with Gnavin being the player in discussion here. The campaign started out good but I noticed that Gnavin would typically hang back in combat, maybe fire a few stray shots from the background but otherwise nothing else. But he was exceptional at roleplay so we were fine continuing to let him play.
Fast forward a couple sessions and they get to a point where they receive some magic items, one of them being a special revolver. Mic wants this as he’s a warlock and can make it his pact weapon but Gnavin scoops it up first. Mic is upset but lets it slide until they get into more combat where Gnavin returns to his running/hiding method. The party attempted to get him to actually fight multiple times and he would refuse, citing the fact that he’s a bard and has low HP. So one day before our session, Mic comes to me and asks if he can pickpocket the gun from Gnavin and I agree.
So the session begins and I have Mic roll Sleight of Hand against Gnavin’s Perception. Mic succeeds while Gnavin rolls a nat 1 but I don’t want to leave him in the dark. So I inform him "You feel your belt get a little lighter and feel a piece of information you should know leave your mind" (the gun had a special attribute that made the user aware of the ammo remaining within it). He thinks nothing of it and continues. This is where the fight starts. They encounter some imps and Mic pulls out the pistol which immediately catches Gnavin’s attention. He starts to complain about Mic stealing his gun and telling me that he can’t do that. I tell him that he, in fact, can do that which sets him off even further. Mic offers to give him a normal pistol if he can keep the revolver and explains that he did it because this weapon would be very valuable in combat and does nothing if its in the hands of someone who won’t fight. But Gnavin isn’t hearing it. He casts Fly on himself and flies back to the city that the party was just in and goes silent for the rest of the session, murmuring a few yes or no responses when I ask him a few things.
After the session ends, Gnavin dms me privately and tells me he quit, saying we were meta gaming, ganging up on him and we were scheming behind his back. I told him that while Mic had asked me before the game, I quite literally had them roll against each other at the table and told him that he was missing something after Mic succeeded. He gets even more upset and starts insulting me for allowing it to happen. I stop responding and just let him continue his tirade of insults until he finally says "I quit" and leaves the group chat and campaign for good. Looking back over the chat made me think, Am I The Asshole for allowing Mic to steal from Gnavin for the good of the party?
INFO: Did you have a session 0 and talk about PVP actions like this? This wouldn’t fly at my table, and player disputes over magic items would be handled either in game or between players out of game but at the table.
I do think it’s bad DMing to let a player steal from another player without everyone consenting to it, but I also think Gnavin is a shitty player. Canonically, Warlocks have lower AC than Bards, so the HP talk is BS.
Let Gnavin quit, but let this be a lesson on how destructive PVP is, and in general consent of players. This sounds more like bad DMing and a poor team player. You might want to post this on r/DungeonsAndDragons or r/DnD
100% agree with you. If PvP wasn’t a thing, this is very bad DMing. You are responsible for managing player conflict. Even if a character is a “cowardly bard” there are still productive things they can be doing in a combat situation that benefit a team. That’s something that needs to be discussed with the player privately instead of allowing a vindictive action in a non-PvP game.
ESH. I think this needed to be sorted when Gnavin wouldn’t give the gun to someone who could use it. Magic items in D&D are pretty important for feeling progression and getting stronger, and having a player hoard any items that could be used should immediate trigger a chat to them outside the game and say “Why aren’t you sharing loot that could be beneficial to the party?” Is there RP reasons? Does the character need money for some backstory, could you drop some loot that nobody needs instead? Etc etc.
Its a team game, so the moment a player acts against the interests of the party without at least discussing it first, you have to stamp that shit out fast.
Gnavin is right that you allowed PVP without discussing it with him, but his reaction was also over the top to resort to insults, he sounds a bit toxic, so let him quit.
We did have a session 0 and I informed them that PvP is absolutely an option, though they should make attempts to solve things without it. They did attempt to solve things out of game but as I said, Gnavin’s only excuse for not helping in combat was “I’m a bard, what can I do?”. We even had a session where, after combat, the only thing Gnavin did was cast Cure Wounds on himself after taking maybe one attack for the duration of it while Vorg (Barbarian) was near death as he kept most of the enemies attacking him.
INFO
Did you have a session zero and was the game meant to be adversarial?
NTA. It’s up to the DM how the game is played.
You can absolutely have a discussion directly with the DM about your choices away from the group. In the same way you can learn information and choose whether to share it etc.
The person complaining might be good at role-playing or whatever, but they’re not a team player. Avoiding combat, expecting loot from other peoples efforts etc.
The player who quit is the AH. Let him find a group that’ll tolerate such nonsense
ESH. The problem here was player behavior (Gnavin hogging a magical item and refusing to engage with combat) not character behavior (Gnavin’s character not supporting the party.) You needed to talk to the player about it, not allow adversarial actions between players. Mic is an asshole for similar reasons. Gnavin is the least assholish of the people listed, but if he wasn’t engaging in a key part of the game then he was being an asshole to his fellow players.
Unless you explicitly allowed PVP actions throughout the campaign, YTA. I am the forever DM and still make sure everyone knows that the style of play that happens on my table does not include adversarial actions between the players. That is more or less the baseline for most campaigns I’ve ever played or ran.
I am also the forever Bard, and I also usually hang back and do my bard things without being in the middle of the action. I do agree that a bard should not have this item, but the way to go about it is to roll persuasion in game on top of a discussion, not a player conspiring with a DM to steal something from another player. You may not have intended it to come off this way, but that is how it came off.
I would say even if PVP actions were allowed OP would have been a bad DM. This was a conflict between two players, not two characters. And conflicts between players should not be handled in the game.
Sorry to say, YTAH. Fortunately this is a good lesson you can take with you into your future campaigns. PvP, as a possibility, is something that needs to be discussed amongst all players and agreed upon unaminously.
I would also say these issues your players were having with each other should have been discussed before it came to this, and thats your job as a dm to facilitate that, but even my table of 40 somethings that have been playing for years struggle with that.
I’ll leave you with, it was an asshole thing you and Mic did to Gavin, but it also sounds like Gavin wasn’t a good fit at your table, and thats a hard lesson to learn that not everybody fits at everybody’s table, and theres not really ever a great way to bring that up.
I wouldn’t say youre the asshole in its entirety, as we could all feel Gnavin was a troublemaker as a player. Saying he has low hp and refusing to fight because of that is also meta gaming, cause in game and role-playing, there is no term for HP. That is a character sheet data, and thus, using that is metagaming.
However, I feel that the situation with Mic could have been dealt with differently. I wouldn’t allow for the steal to happen, as I’ve been in other groups with evil and good characters where the evil ones would directly steal from me or others and DM would let it happen, and that used to frustrate me a lot. And I have also DMed a group that one of the characters was slowly being corrupted and when it got to the breaking point of stealing from the group I declared that if he wanted to proceed, he would lose control of the character and I would control the character from that point as a campaign villain. He accepted and since he was a Warlock, I drew a path in which he lost counciousness for breaking his pact and turned into a full demon, bound to his Patron. He loved it, the group loved it. The group remembers that charavter since today.
So yeah, there is many ways to deal with it, but I would not allow for it to happen without deeper developing or just “for the sake of it”. The weapon being valuable in combat is not enough of a reason for it to be happening without consequence.
YTA. Your could have talked to Gnavin directly and instead you basically just made them feel unwelcome. Even if that’s what you wanted it was an AH way to do it.
YTA. As a DM – bad DMing all round. If you made a roll for how well you DM’d, you got a nat 1 with a -5 modifier.
First, you make no mention of your session zero setting expectorations, which almost certainly means you didn’t do it, because if you had and it’s come down “no PvP”, you’d have no doubt. And if it had come down “yes PvP” then it’s explicitly allowed.
Then, instead of going “right, it’s come up, we need to take this above table and talk it through” you just allowed it.
Your “the dice allowed it” is *utter* nonsense. The dice allow *anything* that YOU as DM allow. They aren’t magic, they don’t mind control you. You are the arbiter and it is your job to keep things fun for everyone. And sometimes, even a lot of times, that means telling someone “no”.
Literally the only thing that player got wrong was calling it metagaming, because that’s OOC knowledge blending with IC knowledge.
But you did screw up the information – you honestly think that “your weapon is gone” is something an adventurer is going to miss? The first he knew was the other guy pulling it out.
But you screwed this up, royally. To the degree that if I’d been a third player at that table, uninvolved in this, I’d have quit your game too. After all, what’s to stop this “mic” from deciding he wants my stuff and stealing my key gear and my not finding out until combat.
You want proof, take it to the closest things you’ll get to subject matter experts – r/DnD and r/rpg. Or just accept who you are and post this over to r/rpghorrorstories.
I mean this scenario doesn’t even make any sense. Why would people, in character adventure with each other if they are worried they’ll get their stuff stolen. This wasn’t a “steal item and get rid of it or trade it or something and then lie about doing it with some deniability.” They explicitly started using it. Theres no lying or plausible deniability there the person literally took someone else’s things, admitted it and said “no you’re not getting it back”. It is 100% meta gaming if the party stayed together after that.