Player wants to drop out of game
Hello all, I don't post to reddit, but I'm kind of at a loss here for what to do.
A player in a game of mine insists that he wants to drop out of a Colossus in the Drylands game I am running. I have run this campaign as a sort of series of one shots, and am now trying to convert it into a regular biweekly game.
The game deals with difficult topics, and in this particular challenge, a cult was sacrificing civilians in the ritual they were performing. As part of the description, I asked the players to name and describe each citizen that was either saved or sacrificed.
The specific mechanic was that when the spotlight came to me, I could choose to spend a Fear and a civilian who was tied up could be killed, counting down the ritual progress.
All but one of the party members focused all of their efforts on trying to kill their own distinct cultist targets, and just two civilians were saved because of this.
Now, coming to the player in question, he seems pretty bummed out about a lot of the action surrounding playing. I am going to copy the discord conversation here.
Player: "I’ll be dropping out of the daggerheart game, each time I’ve played it it hasn’t been what I’ve expected for a ttrpg
In my personal opinion, failure is much higher than success"
Me: "I understand that you haven't been rolling well and it doesn't contribute as much to the fun. I think you're character is very interesting and effective, but maybe instead of dropping out we could try a different character?"
Player: "It’s the one action roll big dog
My issue is if I’m waiting a week, I don’t want to play a game where my ass is kicked because of the bad guy all the time and our only time to beat them is AFTER they’ve succeeded in all or most of what they wanted to accomplish
I had that issue during the Cosmere game just for the very similar ending of the rituals success cause they killed all the town members
Realistically it comes down to a if you rolled any fears it was mostly the cult members killing a town member in this case
Doesn’t matter if you fail or succeed, fears equal mission success or failure from what I’m seeing and I don’t like that kinda system
Now it could be because I’m very upset right now but I’m frustrated at those things"
Me: "I would say that I understand your frustration. I think you should take some time to catch your breath and ease out of those feelings, and we can talk some more."
We haven't chatted since this, but I'd like to clarify some stuff here. I ran the Cosmere RPG's Stonewalkers campaign, and every time he was bested by the main BBEG, he became very animated and angry, which I assumed was a character decision on his part. It ended up being a cool part of his character's growth.
As far as how frequently I killed the townspeople, I really tried to hold off for as long as I could sensibly do so in this combat. It was about once every 3 activations, and even then, only one character was even trying to save the townspeople, everyone else was trying to kill someone different.
I guess my question is, beyond just giving up on him being in my game, is there anything else I should be discussing? Oh, and he's playing the Brawler from the Void, with the Werewolf transformation. He is very powerful, and is able to take down lots of enemies very effectively.
Edit: okay, it seems like people are engaging more with whether or not I talked to my players about what could happen before it happened, instead of addressing the question I asked. I will copy a comment I made explaining what I told the players and the theme of the adventure: I told them the counters at the beginning, which were 1) when I am spotlighted I can spend a Fear to have a cultist sacrifice a civilian. There are 8 civilians, and therefore 8 is the countdown. At the end of the countdown, the ritual is complete. And 2) the ground is Desecrated, meaning your Hope dice are d10s until you can clear Desecrated, which has a countdown of 6.
There were 9 Cultists, and a demon hound pack was also successfully summoned. They took out a bunch of the Cultists, but some were left unharried until the very end of the fight, where the cultists instead sacrificed themselves to complete the ritual.
The point of the ritual was a to draw out the Colossus of Loss. It narratively made sense to have this fight filled with the theme of loss.