Doing Back-Flips for Drama Dice

Just an anecdote I was reminded of the other day... I don't think I've told it on this blog before. 

Many years ago, I played in this 7th Sea campaign where one of the players had clearly figured out that every time he described his action, if he said he did a back-flip as part of it, the GM would give him a Drama Die.

Drama Dice in 7th Sea are a resource you can spend to boost the effects of later rolls, or to trigger special powers like the magic his character used.

So, of course, he thereafter did a back-flip in every single turn of every single fight. I'm not exaggerating in the slightest. In fact, I remember one fight scene where with his two actions of the first Round of combat he did two back flips, and got 2 Drama Dice. Then in the second Round, he did two more back flips, and the GM gave him a Drama Die on the third action of the fight, but not on the fourth action, and the player actually had the nerve to complain. "I don't understand why I didn't get a reward for that? I thought I did something really cool?" To which the GM said "You know what, you're right. Here, have a Drama Die."

That's the moment it went from cool, to frustrating for the rest of the party. Nobody had complained up until then, because it didn't really hurt us for him to be swimming in Drama Dice. Objectively, it helped the group, and let us take on bigger challenges. And his character had a version of Sorcery that required him to spend at least one drama die every fight scene to use his powers at all, so everyone was pretty okay with him being able to consistently use his magic and not be hosed for a risky character creation decision. We could have done back-flips as well, but it was sort of his signature move, so we didn't want to steal his spotlight. 

Part of the problem was, of course, that in the 1st Edition of 7th Sea, at the end of each session, any unspent Drama Dice turn into bonus XP. The GM liked to cap each session with a climactic fight scene, so this player would always have 1 extra XP at the end of the night. The backflipper was very slowly he was pulling out ahead of the rest of the PCs. That edition of 7th Sea had an uneven character creation process, so the PCs weren't particularly balanced. My character was pretty solid right out of the gate, maybe a little too good, honestly, so it took a while before the envy monster started to get under my skin. And everyone was a friends, so, y'know, you don't want to rock the boat,  or make a big stink about something the GM's probably not even consciously doing.

You've got one player who's being constantly rewarded by the GM, punching above his weight in action scenes because of it, and also slowly getting better than everyone else. It's not a recipe for a happy, healthy game in the long term. One of the other players was a coworker of mine, and we ended up with an inside joke about difficult tasks on the job. "This one's gonna be a real chore, so you probably wanna do a back-flip before you start on it!" That little giggle definitely helped.