Get Going, Keep Going (Player Advice Blogwagon)

This is a twofer - both myself and the in-house testing team - our thoughts for the Player Advice Blogwagon.

In-house test team thought a bit and suggested the following:
1. Do not run off doing your own thing. "Don't split the party" is not just a safety measure, it lets more people get more done because the single 'camera' of the DM's attention can play upon more folk at once if everyone sticks together.
2. Avoid "That's not what my character would do" - find a way that makes sense in character for your character to join in or go along with whatever everyone else wants to go do
3. Particularly for one-shots, help the DM by heeding the call to adventure - or "Bite Hooks".

For myself, I had some additional thoughts; the first two I made before in On making your game flow:
Avoid re-work - as a player when your turn comes up, be ready to roll. There is a continuum of actions anyone can take to make it easier to do the things you do a lot. The simplest is book-marking the pages of rules you reference all the time (my PHB bristles with different eras of sticky page-marker tabs - yellow paper from an old hunter, orange from my summoner, etc.
Be clear - document the weird thing your character can do, master that little patch of the rule book - contribute to the table by handling that thing. If you have a single giant combo, write up the way the bonuses stack or however it works on a post-it and give the DM a copy to stick on the inside of their screen. You are now sure it works, they have it as a reference, job done.

I would also add to Bite Hooks or 'act, and see what happens'. Also to be paraphrased as "Drive a character like you stole it" in Four encounters for a caravan mini-campaign. See also Go For The Schmuck Bait by For Want of a Silver Bullet. In 5e in particular, PCs have the resilience of cockroaches, you might take some hits but it is very hard to put you down permanently so take those big risks.

Farmer Gadda makes a point about spotlight sharing and I think there is a broader point in thinking about how you can contribute to driving the table on. This varies hugely depending - if you are sitting with a new-ish DM and some inexperienced players, shepherding the other players towards adventure is helpful if everyone seems indecisive. This being helpful and not overbearing is wholly going to depend on giving everyone at least a chance to make a move already rather than just shoving folk in a direction at the first opportunity.

I like when LootLootLore says "I am sorry, but you should show your entire ass" and I think that is the better way to be - taking big swings for the chance of great moments rather than crouching down in beige for fear of annoying someone at table. I think this is easier if you play with long-standing friends but in the absence of those, taking the chances and being brave enough to fail when playing with strangers or relatively vague acquaintances also serves to forge friendships even if "the bit" falls flat - whatever it was.

I will drag out one personal bugbear do not, do not, come to the table with a character who has a significant communications problem. Even in the best case, where the concept is clever and you can pull it off, it will get old and irritating before the end of the session, if not for you then for everyone else at the table. I am not talking about 'my character has to write on a chalk board' and that is assumed to be happening whenver you speak - I mean directly choking interplayer communications through some entirely optional character oddness. There is enough going on without being unable to talk to the rest of the party

The more time I spend with folk just starting off in D&D, the more I see decision paralysis around the complexities of 5e so I now increasingly advise "Keep it simple, change it later" - go for a fighter or rogue starting out, take a standard stat array - just get to the table throwing dice and that hour or two of actual play will give you the context to then make sensible decisions or revisions afterwards.

The above I will mostly stand by for one-shots or games where you anticipate it will be 'all action, all the time' - where the needs of the moment will strongly guide your characters actions.

For longer campaigns or gaming with more non-critical social/RP aspects, it can be more helpful to figure out a lens or two to bring the character into focus in your mind than to minmax the stats and a bunch of other entries in this blogwagon resonated with me on this.

I really like To Be Resolved's advice for 'create characters in dyads' because it gives that one strong foundation stone starting out that lets you riff off when you do not know what else to do - and once you have that, other things will suggest themselves and you can lay more and more atop that foundation.

Similarly the thought of 'find your center' from Today I Was... speaks to having that one strong base concept for the character to lean on that you can reach for when there is no clear move to make.

Both of these talk to having one or two things to breathe life into the character - their centre, that one pre-build relationship - that make them spring into focus in your mind and help you figure out what angle they might be taking in a given situation.