Want to feel like a team? help other players do cool stuff.
When your teammate spends time setting up barricades, don’t jump across and abandon the position. But also, when your teammate is a raging barbarian, don’t set up barricades in front of them.
Everyone at your table comes for different reasons. they make their characters thinking different stuff will be fun to do. They approach each encounter with differing priorities. Even within a table of murder hobos, the level of murder and hoboishness will vary from person to person. When you ignore each others’ desires at the table, it causes conflict. When we embrace each others’ desires, we can accomplish great and hilarious things.
Level 1: what Moments do you love in a session?
It’s a funny question, but a lot of people don’t reflect on DnD enough to answer this. Also, any answer you have is likely to change over time. Take a moment to think about your favorite moments from your current campaign. Are you most enjoying RP character moments? Finding cool combos of abilities to use? Uncovering tantalizing narrative tidbits? Or maybe just exploring a living, breathing fantasy world?
Now realize that every other person at the table may love something different. At my own weekly tabletop game, I’ve asked around and I was surprised when not a single person repeated the others. We have one person who is there for the story, another one who is there for dungeon puzzle solving, and another who’s there for playing the big damn hero. These three goals aren’t incompatible, but being aware of the differences can help you understand where your teammates are coming from.
Level 2: Get Excited for each other's’ moments
Once you are aware of what moments you love, and what moments your teammates love, you can start looking out for them. Show respect for and get excited for each others’ moments. Help to build them up when you can! If you love combat and someone else loves diplomacy, let them have the spotlight to talk to guards instead of jumping into combat. As players, make sure to mention your support for them in their successes.
Making affordances for each other in this way can mix people’s interests, allowing more people to share in their favorite moments together. Nothing feels worse as a player than when you are fully invested in a puzzle or a diplomatic scene, and having the barbarian say “can we get to a combat please?” Likewise, it feels terrible when you get hyped because you finally get to roll initiative and the pacifist of the group says “why are we always jumping to combat?” Remember that when other people jump into action, it is usually because they’re excited. We should try to be excited for them as well.
Level 3: Set up each others’ moments
Once you start showing excitement for others’ moments in the game, you’ll notice something funny. You may start to feel good when you see the other people at your table happy. When you do, I encourage you to start thinking about how your character can actually assist in setting up those moments for others.
One of my favorite ways to do this is to decide how we can “pass the torch” between different people around the table. Our table, probably like most, has a mixture of people who want to talk through encounters and others who want to smash their way through encounters. We recognized this, and decided that most encounters can begin as talking, but if anyone mentions “tequila” in character - it means it’s time to jump the enemy. This is a way for the diplomacy players to pass the torch to the combat players, and the combat players can even surprise the enemy, catching them off guard!
We’re all friends - celebrate each others’ successes
At the heart of this issue is simply supporting each others’ interests. We’re all friends around the table - so we owe it to our friends to build each other up instead of tear each other down. If you see your friend excited about something, it’s not a friendly move to tell them their interest is dumb. Many of us have experienced that kind of crap in real life, don’t do it to your friends for their interests within the game.
Celebrate each other, and help each other win. We’ll all be better for it.