Bad Players [Archive] - Giant in the Playground Forums

wayfare

2012-07-16, 11:47 PM

Inspired by the Bad DM thread, what do you folks think are the worst characteristics in Players?

For me, its a lack of flexibility. I tend to see 3.5 as a big toolbox -- there are plenty of tools to pick from, but not every tool is made for the task at hand. Chances are, your ubercharger isn't going to be a stealth master capable of sneaking past a dreaming god. Thats not a bad thing, IMO. There are other ways of achieving goals.

The second thing that gets me is player entitlement. Yes, 3.5 is a huge toolbox, but that doesn't mean that this particular game has all of the tools you want. If I'm running a no-conventional-magic game (no sorcs, wizards, druids, clerics, favored soul, etc; yes to binder, incarnum, warlock, dragon shaman/fire adept), I don't see why that automatically makes for a bad game -- especially when the lack of those classes is supported by the world. Just because you lack the high-powered classes doesn't mean that the game can't be fun.

Aegis013

2012-07-16, 11:53 PM

Just because you lack the high-powered classes doesn't mean that the game can't be fun.

It certainly can mean that to the player who is only interested in playing high-powered classes. But not in general, for a typical player, for sure.

Bad players to me are those who are disruptive to the group's game experience. Trying to play music over the DM, or getting out their phone and making a phone call without even excusing themselves for the table. I can understand many problems, but such lack of consideration I find to be very problematic.

AntiTrust

2012-07-17, 12:19 AM

Grail

2012-07-17, 12:25 AM

Players who cheat on their characters.
Players who cheat with their dice rolls.
Players who cannot build a character on their own without viewing optimization forums.
Players who then build "optimized" characters and wonder why they are no good in campaigns (they aren't)
Players who get upset when their hardcore optimized character dies.
Players who don't pay attention, then make tactical mistakes and blame everyone else.
Players who constantly and consistently don't know how their characters special abilities work (or outright lie about what their abilities do)
Players who complain and moan if the DM bans a splat book.
Players who will take abilities out feats listed as "Optional, make sure you check with your DM first" without checking.
Above player who then argues and whines when found out amd told that optional rule isn't being used.
Players who argue rules our alignments after being proven wrong.
Players who think "playing evil" means that they can rape female pc's.
Players who think that a loosely organised, poorly written and ill conceived background is justification for them having X ability/race/class even when told they can't use them.
Players who are unreliable and don't tell you they can't play until you call them to find where they are.
Players who eat eveyone else's snacks but never bring any of their own.

That'll do for starters.

metabolicjosh

2012-07-17, 12:29 AM

People who get mad at the basics of human nature.

Cough Cough AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA UP THERE

Karoht

2012-07-17, 12:35 AM

Players who think blasty sorcerers are the only way to ever play an arcane caster.
I get the appeal of rolling a bucket of dice, but when when they make this arguement every single time and then get upset when a DM hard counters it with 'sorry these creatures are immune to fire, your fireball that just rolled a billion D6 does nothing'

Players who don't understand that prestige classes and feat choices are sometimes a trade off. IE-Rogue going into Shadowdancer is trading some Sneak Attack damage for some really cool features. When they whine that they want those features AND the Sneak Attack damage is when I get annoyed.

Players who play Wizards or Clerics or Druids and don't understand that prepared casting has the word prepared in it for a reason. And then take no measures whatsoever to be prepared in any case, but then complain that they don't have the right spells memorized for the day.

wayfare

2012-07-17, 12:39 AM

NikitaDarkstar

2012-07-17, 12:59 AM

Players who play Wizards or Clerics or Druids and don't understand that prepared casting has the word prepared in it for a reason. And then take no measures whatsoever to be prepared in any case, but then complain that they don't have the right spells memorized for the day.

This is part of the reason why I play a Favored Soul right now. The DM I normally play under use an alternative casting system, essentially making all casters spontaneous, so I don't have enough experience with prepared casters to play them well, and I despise the book-keeping needed for them when playing by standard rules. (The other part of the reason is melee thank with spells, boyah!)

So what I consider bad/annoying players:

People who insist on playing monster races in settings where they'd clearly be out of place. (Case in point, I'm in an evil themed (subtle evil/moral greyness, not demons and devils evil) urban campaign. Someone insists on trying to play a Barghest.)

People who insists on making their character a special snowflake. Not quite bad enough to be a Mary-Sue, but bad enough to be severely grating.

People who keep bugging the DM about being allowed to use sources clearly listed as banned because "It's needed for my character concept!". Think of another concept, if everyone else could work with the material given, why can't you? (Yes it annoys me as a player too because it gives of an "I'm special and more important than everyone else, so I could get special exceptions!"-feel.)

People who turn into pure strategy players as soon as the initiative is rolled. If your character is impulsive, hot-headed and loves a good fight he's not going to turn into a master strategist as soon as combat comes around. Sure don't kill the party because you make some choices your character would make, but every single move doesn't have to be optimal from a strategic point of view.

People who insists on over-describing their characters looks in every single post (mainly a PbP problem I think.). If it's relevant or you can sneak it in without being to obvious go ahead. But please if the first two paragraphs of your post is about your characters appearance and you're not trying to seduce someone, knock it off, we can go read your character description if we've forgotten what your character looks like.
(Lit forums tend to call it purple prose, it can die in the same fire as the Mary-Sues.)

People who try to dictate my characters actions without my consent. You play your character and I play mine and if you absolutely need my character to do something, or you think you know how my character will react to something, check with me first, don't just assume.

Averis Vol

2012-07-17, 01:17 AM

I'm going to second (or third, whichever it is) that players who try and build outside of the scope of the game constantly are annoying. I don't mind if you ask a to play a warblade off the bat and i say no, tis a completely different situation if you say "Ohh then I'll just play a crusader then...".

for example, In my campaign world the PC's started off in Vel' Varis, a land of paladins more then clerics, where there is very little magic. Almost every mage lives in Kupolen, a giant stone dome where some of the greatest learning in the land happens. So i say right off the back, "This part of the world is low magic, soooo...no magic classes. Paladins get the feat variant and so do rangers, bard lose spells but keep bardic music and get 8+int skills. this will all change once you leave this country."

I laid out the rules, cool right. The first three apps i got from one player were: Cleric, Warmage and druid.....****ing really? he finally settled with a swift hunter-ish wild runner. I can understand, again, one app because it was a month before that i told them and i didn't mind it really until he asked for two more casters and i told him if he really couldn't stand it he could kill off his character later and make a mage if he couldn't handle being a mundane type.

NichG

2012-07-17, 02:03 AM

As a DM, there are two types I just won't run for:

Griefers are the worst (the 'I'm going to intentionally try to sabotage the game/ruin other players' fun, prove my point by wrecking things, etc' types). This has all sorts of shades, but it basically comes down to players who aren't actually playing the same game as the rest of the table: they want to use your game to prove a point or torment a player or get revenge or get negative attention or whatever, but they aren't there to actually play the game.

Second-worst are players with absolute preconceptions. This could be the type that says 'hey, I'm looking for a game to play my new swiftblade build in!' types, and anything that interferes with that preconceived concept/build (decided even before they heard anything about the game) throws them into a fit. This could also be the sort who hears about the game, ignores it, and then pushes to play something that explicitly doesn't belong in the game (hearing 'a low power, realistic medieval game' and saying 'I want a mecha!', or hearing 'good-aligned heroes' and saying 'I want to play a serial killer!'). This could also be something like 'You said this was a D&D game, how dare you houserule!' types. Extreme entitlement falls into this category too.

There are other bad habits that are forgivable but still annoying:

- Table-chatterers. The guy who interrupts game for 30 minutes to tell an unrelated anecdote or discuss sports. This can edge into the unforgivable range if they won't rein it in when asked or won't allow themselves to be interrupted.
- Paradoxical players, who want one thing, insist they want another, and even if you give them either will refuse to accept it. Basically the 'no pleasing them' type.
- Unreliable players, who don't show up on time, skip game without warning or notice.
- 'Glitch-mongers': Players who tend to make rules mistakes and then learn to be secretive about their character sheets/etc even to the DM out of fear that their mistakes will be discovered to the detriment of their character's power level. A subset of these are 'assumers', who 'assume' that certain content is available (like Dragon Magazine stuff, online homebrew, whatever) and just include it in their character without a single mention to anyone at the table first.

As a player, some of these categories are less a concern from fellow players. I'd still have a serious problem with Griefers, Preconceived (mostly due to the tendency of long-winded arguments to break out) and Table-chatterers, but the other categories wouldn't bother me quite so much.

Umbranar

2012-07-17, 02:14 AM

rot42

2012-07-17, 02:47 AM

* I hear what you are saying with not wanting a dual scimitar wielding Drow in your purely urban campaign set entirely within the city limits of a city secretly at war with the Underdark. Here is my Fist of the Forest weretiger - but level adjustment sucks, so omitted that.
* Plot hooks are a plot by the DM to hang my beloved character up by meat hooks and should be avoided at all costs. Followed inevitably by: why are we always doing what the other players want, when will it be my turn?
* Here, look at this picture from 4Chan instead of reading that spell description so you will be ready to act when your initiative rolls around again. I downloaded a whole folder earlier since I could not access your router last week.
* How tall is that building with 10' written on it?

Hyde

2012-07-17, 03:47 AM

An elven druid initiates combat alongside his human (and varying degrees of racist) companions against an encampment of wild elves. When an elder druid of the wild elves joins the fray, it doesn't cross his mind that maybe what he's doing is wrong.

He charges into the encampent headfirst, leaving the rest of the party at the gates and unable to aid him.

by the way, this is after he is told explicitly that if he dies, the horrible unspeakable evil he has chosen to seal within his body will be summarily unleashed.

So he is fatally electrocuted by the elder druid after being perforated by the elves' rear guard.

in a post-session interview about his characters death, he only said, "I didn't think druids had healing spells- I couldn't find any on the spell list (read: I did not read the spell list)“

He is quoted saying "Druids are one of my favorite classes to play."

It should also be noted that during this entire ordeal, the character had a fates card ready to go from the DoMT.

The first day as his new character, a pathfinder Magus, the only spell he casts is vanish- to hide himself from a headless knight that very clearly wasn't using eyes to see. The knight smacked him for his idiocy, which ended up critting the fellow into a small pile.

It's not even "not paying attention to detail" at this point. it's just "duh".

It was funny nine years ago- now it's just sad.

Spuddles

2012-07-17, 03:48 AM

Can I vent? I'm going to vent.

I play D&D with a couple dumbasses. I am pretty sure they're legitimately mentally handicapped, as in, lower than 100 IQ. They're great guys, I trust them to help me out, and they're nice, decent people. But jesus christ they are so bad at D&D. They never read the rules. And when they do, they interpret them so wildly inaccurately I wonder if we are actually reading the same rules.

One guy, I kid you not, after playing every friday or every other friday for A YEAR couldn't figure out how to make an attack roll or calculate his AC.

Not only are they incompetent with the rules, they generally make terrible tactical decisions and fail at picking up on the very obvious hints that they're making terrible decisions.

It's gotten so bad, we just give these players all 18s for stats, then give them builds such that no matter what extremely poor choice they decide to make, they'll at least be mostly competent.

Kurald Galain

2012-07-17, 04:12 AM

Munchkins. Particularly the kind that keeps begging the DM for more power and concessions, "accidentally" misreads their spells to overlook the limitations, and then still keeps whining if he's not winning quickly enough. And even moreso if this munchkin is the DM's girlfriend, of course.

Lonely Tylenol

2012-07-17, 04:22 AM

Ignorant players.

I suppose that deserves some clarification: I'm not talking about low-op players, "bad" players, or players with poor system mastery in general. I am talking "ignorant" in the literal, Socratic sense, of a player who presumes to be good at the game, but really, really isn't. I have had players who, time and time again, "remember" the first thing that Google told them over the last week when they searched something game-related, reciting combinations or interactions or rules interpretations that they don't know the first thing about, and then screw up several parts of the combo when asked to elaborate. These are your players that actually try the Pun-Pun loop in a game (an unforgivable sin on its own), but don't know how to get the Knowledge (religion) check high enough on their own to recall knowledge on how to summon Pazuzu, or mix up the steps at the table. These are the players who still build characters using homebrewed content from dandwiki.com or some other such site months into the game, even after being told (repeatedly) that not everything on dandwiki is official material (and that, in fact, most isn't). These are the players that bring a Wizard who knows Disintegrate (because Disintegrate is clearly the most broken thing ever, amirite?) to your E6 game because "Disintegrate is a 6th-level spell". The player who believes and is in fact absolutely sure that they are knowledgeable about the game, and don't seem to be able to accept that their "knowledge" is laughably implausible in any game setting.

You see these players come to these forums sometimes; they're the players that say something that is just ridiculously impossibly untrue, and then spends 26 pages defending their opinion to the death in spite of overwhelming evidence of the contrary. I'm not talking about the fine interpretations that actually do require TO levels of knowledge, or that can easily swing either way (by viable rules interpretations, that either stand to reason or are backed by sources that produce similar conclusions); I'm talking about basic functions of the game that RAW or even simple common sense make clear, but because the player is knowledgeable in a way that just isn't true ever, the player can't accept.

LordBlades

2012-07-17, 04:27 AM

The second thing that gets me is player entitlement. Yes, 3.5 is a huge toolbox, but that doesn't mean that this particular game has all of the tools you want. If I'm running a no-conventional-magic game (no sorcs, wizards, druids, clerics, favored soul, etc; yes to binder, incarnum, warlock, dragon shaman/fire adept), I don't see why that automatically makes for a bad game -- especially when the lack of those classes is supported by the world. Just because you lack the high-powered classes doesn't mean that the game can't be fun.

Different people like different aspects of 3.5. And I wouldn't blame anyone for thinking that a game which lacks whatever he likes about D&D will be no fun. Some people just like conventional magic.

Hyde

2012-07-17, 04:29 AM

I also dislike the players that, when you tell them there's a door or a hallway, they want you to open the door or move the characters down the hallway, if you know what I mean.

soir8

2012-07-17, 04:54 AM

Bad players are ones who see everyones actions and then when his turn comes and its time for action he's hemming and hawing and after 2-3min essential does nothing "I delay".

Also spellcasting types that when their turn comes around says "I cast x" and of course I'll ask something like "Okay, does it allow a save, if so what is it". Suddenly the book has to open and pages start flipping.

Now I just house rule that your turn is not the time for deciding what to do, its time for ACTION ACTION ACTION. If you're not ready or need to look up how exactly a spell works you're just delayed till you're ready.

I had a player like this. He played a supercharged uber spellcaster build, and every combat would go "ok, one sec... I just wanna check how this spell works... ok... hmm... actually, no, that's not ideal... hmm... ok... aaah, I didn't know that did that... well, maybe i'll... hmm... *several minutes later* hmm... I think I'll just cast summon monster II... lemme just check which monsters I can summon with that... hmm..."
And then the other player in the party would look me dead in the eye with an icy grimmace and say "I move 30 feet that way and use Eldritch Blast."

This guy had absolutely no self-awareness when it came to how irritating he could be. He just lacked the capacity to consider other people. Since realizing this, I recognize it was my fault as DM for not telling him to hurry the **** up more often.

Slipperychicken

2012-07-17, 06:07 AM

The guy who seems to get off on insisting that his character is RIGGEED OOOH MY GOD SO BROOOKEN!!! When he's playing an untemplated Kobold Inquisitor with a touch AC in the high teens, and has Fiery Burst (a whopping 2d6 at level 8. That's broken like a Greatsword)... and I'm playing a DMM: Persist Cleric with Righteous Might, Fly, Divine Power, Ice Axe (all melee attacks with it are touch attacks. PA away), and some others up 24/7.

The DM-girlfriend who is playing as a cat (Tibbit. Whatever). And the DM roleplays people playing with this ****ing cat, and it never seems to end. If our characters were in the same place, I'd just beat up anyone playing with this cat. If you want to roleplay goddamn lolcats with your boyfriend, get a room, because there are 7 other people here and they want to play DnD.

The guy who can't be bothered to figure out what equipment he wants, so his character goes to market with 1500gp and forces someone to look up weapon enhancements while he stresses about it for ten minutes.. then decides he'll just keep saving, and repeats the process next session with a little more money.

The guys who can't be bothered to write down what their attack bonuses, AC, and saves are, and MUST loudly recalculate it for 5min every round while the game grinds to a halt. For some reason, writing down a damn number and referencing it is too complicated for this bozo.

The guy who can't decide what to do with his turn, when all he has are a sword in his hands and the clothes on his back, all his feats and backstory are geared toward hitting stuff with that sword.

The guy who haggles for 30min over some 20gold flowers, because he was sent to pick up some flowers and his boss even gave him the money to buy them, in additon to being paid for the service. Because he's that mindlessly greedy.

Spuddles

2012-07-17, 06:34 AM

Adindra

2012-07-17, 07:05 AM

Players who cannot build a character on their own without viewing optimization forums.
Players who then build "optimized" characters and wonder why they are no good in campaigns (they aren't)
Players who get upset when their hardcore optimized character dies.
Players who eat eveyone else's snacks but never bring any of their own.

While i can build a character on my own i do prefer to visit the optimization forums for guidance on making it functional in actual game-play (of course you start with a concept and then optimize from there whether its a build you wanted to try or a specific idea for a personality or backstory)

I have actually run an optimized batman/god wizard and a dmm persist cleric in a campaign alongside things like a druid who refused to use his animal companion and only casts call lighting (what im trying to get at is that the rest of the players were the opposite of optimized its all about not overpowering the other players)

the upset thing is just because my dm likes to use monsters with rough abilities (drowned are her favorite monster, its an undead with a drowning aura that forces con checks or drowning) i drowned on dry land lol and i was only upset in the fact that i put weeks into my characters i build

i have no excuse for the last one but if people offer me snacks im gonna eat them :smalltongue:

vrigar

2012-07-17, 07:09 AM

Bad players are bad people. When the objective of the game is for everyone to have fun those who ruin it (cheating, breaking the adventure, dominating the game etc.) are the ones you won't want to hang out with anyway.

CTrees

2012-07-17, 08:10 AM

Chronic-betrayal-syndrome-guy. You know him. His charcter is "secretly evil" and decides to randomly try to kill everyone. Or, he does something else so horrible to some third party that he forces an intra-party fight. The one my group had, I actually stopped play for a moment to ask everyone at the table, "does anyone see any in character way for me to not have to try to kill him for that?" The answer was no, FYI.

This is usually paired with the "my character is so powerful! I could take any of you in a fight!"

Unrelated is the "you just did 35 damage? at level six? your character is stupidly overpowered!" or "you've taken three different classes? munchkin! minmax!" The beliefs themselves may just be lack of knowledge of the system, but the inflamed insistence speaks negatively.

polity4life

2012-07-17, 08:25 AM

Much has been mentioned but my biggest gripe involves players who refuse to separate player-knowledge from character-knowledge.

Imagine you're in a level-1 group, comprised of mostly in-game strangers, with one player who insists in playing a sociopathic schizophrenic who exhibits no consistency in behavior. That could be a really neat and deep character but alas, the player is just derpy. He starts a fight no one else wants and is knocked out. Eventually the party either defeats the enemy or convinces the enemy to end the fight. What do we almost always do?

Loot the jerkwad that started the fight and leave him.

Then when this character is finally brought back into the fold, he wants to kill the person that stole his weapon or armor. "How do you know who did what?" he is asked. "Well I just know!" :smallannoyed: In the handful of sessions I have played with this group, this always happens.

In defense of those who use optimization guides, I present the following: I barely play D&D. I don't keep up with new content releases. Optimization guides give me the whole breadth of options available with book citations so I know where this item, feat, class feature, power came from. It's a one-stop shop for me to see what this class can do and build what I want from there. Of course I run this by the DM for fair transparency reasons.

Kurald Galain

2012-07-17, 08:35 AM

Chronic-betrayal-syndrome-guy. You know him. His charcter is "secretly evil" and decides to randomly try to kill everyone

Or, the character is openly evil and expects to be able murder, pillage and torture everything he sees around him, and expects his good-aligned party to just accept this and keep traveling with him.

Grail

2012-07-17, 08:37 AM

I have actually run an optimized batman/god wizard and a dmm persist cleric in a campaign alongside things like a druid who refused to use his animal companion and only casts call lighting (what im trying to get at is that the rest of the players were the opposite of optimized its all about not overpowering the other players)

I've yet to see an optimized character perform well in a campaign. Sure there are moments where they shine, but overall, they generally suck, because they haven't been built with the campaign in mind. These players that I refered to in my post above are all the same players that i used to play with, and they have tried to build a god character and then realised that because they've tried to be so specific in doing something amazing, that it just isn't right for the setting, or the encounters, and then they're like a bull in a china shop.

Thankfully, I've gotten rid of all the optimisers from my campaigns now. :smallbiggrin:

Unrelated is the "you just did 35 damage? at level six? your character is stupidly overpowered!"

Yeah, this one is funny. I remember playing in a silly hack and slash game, my Dwarf Monk did 44 damage at 1st level.

18 strength.
Set spear vs charge.
Nat 20
Confirmed
4d8+24 damage later.... and it could have pushed the 50 mark.

Thurbane

2012-07-17, 08:40 AM

One of my pet peeves is players who constantly forget to add in bonuses to saves, hit rolls, skills checks etc, wait for the action to move to the next player in the initiative order, and then declare "Oh wait, I forgot Bless and Haste, so I hit that guy after all!".

When this happens once or twice, it's no biggie - but when it happens consistently, it makes me a grumpy DM. It got to the point where I declared that of you don't remember modifiers before it is the end of your turn, too bad, you keep the number you declared.

Thurbane

2012-07-17, 08:43 AM

CTrees

2012-07-17, 09:02 AM

Or, the character is openly evil and expects to be able murder, pillage and torture everything he sees around him, and expects his good-aligned party to just accept this and keep traveling with him.

Perhaps, "the guy who insists on playing stupid evil or chaotic stupid, regardless of what alignment his character sheet claims, especially when the party has agreed to all be good?"

Oracle_Hunter

2012-07-17, 09:11 AM

There are 3 base styles of truly Bad Players

(1) The Criminal
No, this isn't the thief who steals from his party (see #2) this is the guy who lies, cheats and steals OOC. While I haven't ever had one at my table I figured I'd get this out of the way since he is a non-uncommon archetype judging by Internet Stories :smalltongue:

(2) The Jerk
This guy lacks basic social skills and does not play well with others. He is antagonistic to other Players, blows up at the slightest slight, and is the sort of guy you wouldn't even have around were it not for Geek Social Fallacy #1 (http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html). Don't invite this guy to your social events and that includes your games.

(3) The Dissident
He doesn't want to be playing this game, with this party or even with his own character. He constantly complains about the mechanics and how it would be so much better if you were playing something else. This is distinct from someone who objects to the story presented or other Players -- he won't be happy unless everyone is doing what he wants to do and nothing else.

Aside from that, most "bad" Players are simply Problem Players who manifest because they are unhappy about some aspect of the campaign. These Players can start displaying anti-social and disruptive behaviors but, unlike the above, they can be worked with. It is important to talk to any "Problem Player" and find out what is bothering them before simply booting them; usually their concerns can be addressed by modest tweaks to the campaign. Of course, if you can't accommodate their concerns it is important to boot them before they ruin the game for everyone.

Tim Proctor

2012-07-17, 09:21 AM

My #1 is the player that gets pissy when something doesn't go their way and doesn't say ****. I mean doesn't say anything at all.

My #2 is the player that isn't a player but someone's girlfriend or bestfriend.

My #3 is the player that complains that DMPC doesn't do anything during the campaign/fights and just adds a little flavor.

So I got all 3 in this current game that I'm playing, I ask people for backgrounds, traits, flaws, ideals, goals, etc. for their characters. I get a guy who plays a Knight with a background of "a borderland warrior between the northern kingdom and the undead kingdom, he is a stoic warrior and likes to be in the fight". Flaws/Traits are just optimized to allow him to be the tank for the group. Okay, I can work with that, but #2 his girlfriend makes a half-elf in a campaign where I stated that it is like the south in the 1860 and half-elves are black. The other players played it correctly, but this guy says that his character doesn't make fun of her and call her names, etc.

His character dies, so he makes a character that is dun dun dun his original character's brother and is dedicated to bringing his original character back. His r/l girlfriend jumps on the bandwagon to get his original character back (I'm okay with this because I like side plots) but oh no it gets stupid. His girlfriend's character dies (both characters died due to bad tactics and bad luck) and then he gets mad but doesn't say anything. I ask him what is going on and he says that, his original character and his girlfriend's character fell hopelessly in love and that is why he was nice to her (I'm serious this guy says nothing to the DM, nothing), and now his character has no reason to be with the group.

Now I almost asked both of them to leave right then and there, I have a guy that refuses to communicate anything at all. His girlfriend was not a player, he had to pick her spells, roll her dice, oh and she played a mute so she didn't have to talk and just put her head on his lap or went to sleep in the living room. Furthermore, the guy was getting upset because the DMPC wasn't carrying the group and went on a rant about how when he DMs the DMPC is always a couple levels higher than the group and guides them by leading the way. I changed the game night to a night when his girlfriend coudln't play, and 90% of the problems ended but really freaking frustrating.

The Dark Fiddler

2012-07-17, 09:27 AM

I play D&D with a couple dumbasses. I am pretty sure they're legitimately mentally handicapped, as in, lower than 100 IQ.

100 IQ is the average, so being under it isn't necessarily a bad thing. Usually, 70 IQ is considered the benchmark for mental retardation, and that's not even getting into the problems with the IQ system. [/pedant]

Anyway, I've got a group with five other players in it, and three of them have qualities that, taken to extremes, would make them bad players. I think it's interesting to look at how, despite their flaws, they're not exactly terrible, but it can still get in the way.

The first is gifted with the flaw of a short gaming attention span. He'll make interesting characters and throw himself wholeheartedly into games... but after a few sessions, his character will have regressed to the basic personality he always plays, or he'll want to play this great new idea for a character or campaign. Thankfully, he doesn't get his character killed to switch, or anything, but sometimes he can get annoying when he's saying "Man, I want to play x so bad" and "Hey, IF we died..."

The next always plays the same sort of character. No matter what, his character has to be the one in charge, and if it's not officially then he'll just bully the other characters into going along with him. They also tend to be fairly polarizing, and he's caused the group to split (in character) more than once. He himself is also fairly stubborn, which can cause some issues, but things always get worked out in the end.

The last player is the closest our group has to a bad player, I'd say, and he's only really started getting bad recently. He never pays attention during combat; he's recently told me that it's because he doesn't enjoy combat that much, and prefers roleplaying. That'd be great except for two facts: this is the third year our group has been playing together, and for all this time we all thought the opposite of him, meaning he hasn't communicated what he wants out of the game well at all, and the fact that he always plays ridiculous characters. MacDaddy Goldskin, Scar of Ibuprofen, and Captain Pinkhair are all characters he's played in otherwise serious D&D games. He's always saying ridiculous non sequitors in-character (one character kept talking about his shipments from South American drug cartels... in, again, a normal D&D game) and trying to take back actions that are obviously just a joke despite the fact that we've told him that next time he does something like that he can't take it back ("Alright, you see the orphan, w-" "I stab him and drink his blood!" "..."). Not to mention that he's always flaking out on the game, which has had the same, established schedule for the last three years, without warning. He can be hard to play with at times, but... he's also great fun when we're not being serious.

So yeah, anecdotes.

Kurald Galain

2012-07-17, 09:29 AM

Perhaps, "the guy who insists on playing stupid evil or chaotic stupid, regardless of what alignment his character sheet claims, especially when the party has agreed to all be good?"

Precisely. The kind of guy who decries inter-party conflict while at the same time acting in a way unacceptable to the other characters. It's not just a player who simply expects a different kind of game, it's a player who wants to get away with extreme behavior. I guess this is a form of escapism, but it is also annoying.

A related problem is players who use the fact that their character is a jerk as an excuse to act like a jerk out of character as well. Of course, these are just jerks, but they somehow think they have an excuse for being a jerk.

Dire Panda

2012-07-17, 09:34 AM

I seem to attract players with legitimate mental problems. We usually weed them out quickly, but oh gods do they produce some weird sessions while they're around. Three of my "favorites":

Dice Tester Guy: This delightful fellow introduced himself to the other players as follows: "My dice never fail me. I've tested them. All of them." True to his word, he did roll pretty well that game, though he couldn't roleplay worth a damn. With a little bit of prodding after the session, we learned that he had recently purchased a product called the "Pound O' Dice" (apparently a literal pound of dice) and spent several days rolling each one and keeping statistics. The dice he brought to our game were the ones with the best averages. I won't rag on this guy too much, since he might actually be somewhere on the autism spectrum, but... damn.
Twitchy Licky: I didn't investigate this one prior to inviting her into my group. She'd seemed like a normal young woman on the few occasions we'd met, and indeed remained that way for almost five minutes. In the middle of some plot narration, she has a full-body spasm and lets out a piercing shriek. Being a caring and considerate person, I ask if she's having a seizure or otherwise needs medical attention. Her response? "Oh, I do that sometimes. Keep going." This happened six more times that game. She would also regularly lick her own hair, lick her dice before she rolled them, and lick snacks to 'claim' them. There's no good way to tell someone that they need professional help, so I snuck a business card into her dice bag before she left. It belonged to a friend who'd recently graduated med school and planned a career as a psychiatrist. Never heard from Twitchy Licky again.
Tony: Needs no further explanation than this post (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showpost.php?p=13486055&postcount=1444).

Next time I'll tell you about the Drama Lightning Rod. She deserves her own post, since she managed to hit pretty much everything you've already said about problem players... and more.

wayfare

2012-07-17, 10:02 AM

Apropos of all of this are players who really, REALLY want a specific thing and get very upset when they don't get it. I've wanted a Rod of Lordly Might for literally 10 years. Never got one, and thats ok -- the game shouldn't revolve around my preferences. But when you have players who literally build their design around gear that they simply assume every town or city has in stock (say psionic gear in a world where psionics is rare), things are going too far.

Menteith

2012-07-17, 10:22 AM

I am going to make an Evil character, and stopping me is you repressing me!

I'm running Red Hand of Doom right now, and asked everyone to create a nonevil character who would be willing to defend the land under certain circumstances. While most of them were fine (though one other was CN, it's actually a well played CN) he created a LE Cleric who worships the concept of death and has dedicated himself to the Elder Evil Atropus for the vile feats, who kidnaps random people for "experiments. I've managed to get him to tone it back a little bit, and I've found a way to get him invested in working with everyone, but it was certainly frustrating. This happens with him frequently regardless of system - Sabbat in VtM, start the game as a Lawbreaker in DFRPG, etc.

Lost Demiurge

2012-07-17, 10:34 AM

What do I hate in players? Hm.

1. "I want to take this third-party class that lets me have sorceror-slots worth of spells, wizard methods of learning new ones from scrolls, and cast on the fly rather than memorization... I feel that it is totally balanced."

2. "So this character concept that I came up with yesterday is awesome. Here, I'll kill my current character off, and spend the rest of the session writing him up so that I'm slowing things down and don't have to participate and the rest of the party just has to deal with being a PC down for all those encounters you scaled for five people rather than four."

3. "I am right about this obscure rules twist and I will spend the next ten minutes arguing about it until you drop everything and look it up. At which point it will turn out that I am wrong."

4. "A game about subtle intrigue, church politics, and corruption behind good societies? Cool, I'll play a tiefling with horns out to his shoulders, and fiery breath!"

5. "Screw you, I don't want to play anything but D&D. I don't care how much you like sci-fi or horror or indy games or want to try other genres, if you run anything but D&D I'll throw a fit and sit at the table reading a book and not playing."

6. "Great, it's my turn! I'll spend five minutes measuring every inch of this battleboard precisely to maximize the impact of my fireball, even though this turn represents maybe three seconds of real-time and I couldn't plausibly do that in reality. What, measure while other people are going? Don't be nuts! Then you wouldn't get to see the full depths of my awesomeness!"

7. "So yeah, I don't know what this awesome rock does, but I totally stole it from my fellow PC's even though it's not in my character to steal stuff. Can I sell it? Huh, I wonder why they're screaming and yelling about not being able to get their prestige class without the sacred wardstone. Oh well, not my problem."

8. "So there were twenty guns in that large crate? Awesome! Hey, I'm a troll, I'm pretty big. I'll just pull my coat over the guns and walk slow. That way the other folks won't know I'm hiding them."

9. "These encounters are clearly too tough for my mount, but I insist that you, my fellow PC, resurrect him over and over again using your own diamonds to pay the cost. No, I won't leave him at home for this adventure. Now pay up and rez my horse, heal-monkey!"

10. "Well it's nice and all that you put together this dark and dramatic campaign about the loss of humanity and redemption through reshaping the world to what you want it to be, but we just came here to dungeoncrawl and loot monsters. Can we get on with that? Hey, why are you walking away? HEY!"

11. "Well, I kinda don't like this game system or the way you GM or my character, but I've got no better plans tonight so I'll hang around and tell you about all the reasons that it sucks while we play."

12. "I have OPTIMIZED my character, nine ways from sunday. This is the PINNACLE of my class, none can compete with me. I can SOLO encounters, and... What do you mean I didn't need to do that? What do you mean, "overshadowing the rest of the party?" Pfft, not my fault you suck at scaling. Not my fault they're lame losers? Wait, what? Calling me a MUNCHKIN! How INSULTING!"

13. "MY DICE HATE ME SO THEREFORE I WILL PITCH TANTRUMS AND BE HORRIBLE TO EVERYONE ELSE AT THE TABLE!"

14. "Right, I don't have faith in your GMing skills so I'm going to cheat."

15. "Dude, I am so HIGH right now."

16. "Sure, my dude is an annoying, combat-useless, anti-social raving lunatic who actively tries to kill the other party members, but it's okay! I'm really just working through my elaborate backstory, it'll be awesome around level 15 or so!"

17. "I think I won't read the elaborate campaign background, or listen much to NPC's, or talk to the other players before I show up with my character and play. Then I'm gonna be surprised and shocked when the NPC's act in a weird way because of cultural or background reasons! I'm going to be so horrified and mad that I'll hold it against you for not warning me!"

Duke of URL

2012-07-17, 11:05 AM

Many of the things that make a "bad GM" will also make a "bad player", which generally boil down to putting their own personal agenda ahead of the group experience.

That can manifest in many ways, from the overt "my character has godlike power and therefore what I say, goes" to the disruptive "plays on his mobile phone instead of paying attention" to the more subtle forms of snarking and goading to nudge the game in his direction, even if it means shafting other players out of their chances to shine, or is a premeditated attempt to disrupt the GM's story.

Specifics will vary, and there are some symptoms present for GMs that don't apply to players, and vice-versa, but the fundamental thing that makes a bad member of the table is their general lack of respect for the other people at the table and the enjoyment they should be receiving out of contributing their time to the endeavor.

I also dislike the players that, when you tell them there's a door or a hallway, they want you to open the door or move the characters down the hallway, if you know what I mean.

On the other hand, an annoying GM behavior is to not time-compress when appropriate. If you're trying to build suspense, then yes, every step down a corridor, every door, matters. But when characters are pretty much on a fairly linear path, asking them what to do at each door or corridor -- unless there's a realistic choice other than "stay here and do nothing" -- is overkill as well.

The Glyphstone

2012-07-17, 11:32 AM

My worst player is just simply railroading-paranoid. Whenever a plan doesn't go perfectly, even if it's due to dice, they tend to get upset and complain about how they weren't told the 'correct' way to fight that dragon or interrogate that prisoner. There is no 'correct' way, because there are no rails, but a little bit of player initiative would be nice.

Trebloc

2012-07-17, 11:41 AM

Most of the bad characteristics I've encountered have already been listed (and many I can't imagine running into at the table). The worst player we've run into was quite an odd individual.

His BO could be smelled at 5 feet.

He literally spent our entire 5 hour session farting at least once a minute (I kid you not).

While gasing us up, he spent the entire game session reading his novel.

In game a red dragon breathed fire on the party and everyone took damage. Cleric's turn comes around and he asks the party how they're looking. BO-man is asked and his answer is "Splat". Cleric asks if he's dead and the answer is again "Splat". Cleric asks what that means exactly and the answer is once again "Splat". Keep in mind, when damage was dealt, he didn't speak up that his character hit the ground or anything, guess he was too busy reading his book.

After figuring out his PC wasn't actually dead from the dragon's fire because he had no idea what he was doing, the cleric healed up the party and the fight continued. BO-man ran away into a side room where he sees a suspicious woman. The woman looks at him and asks what he's doing there. His next move is to walk into the middle of the room and stand there silent for multiple rounds of combat (while the group fought the dragon). Must have been one good novel.

We asked him not to return. We found out from the game store owner that was couldn't understand how people could make up their mind not to play with him after only one session.

yougi

2012-07-17, 11:41 AM

Dice Tester Guy: This delightful fellow introduced himself to the other players as follows: "My dice never fail me. I've tested them. All of them." True to his word, he did roll pretty well that game, though he couldn't roleplay worth a damn. With a little bit of prodding after the session, we learned that he had recently purchased a product called the "Pound O' Dice" (apparently a literal pound of dice) and spent several days rolling each one and keeping statistics. The dice he brought to our game were the ones with the best averages. I won't rag on this guy too much, since he might actually be somewhere on the autism spectrum, but... damn.

Now I feel bad about being like that... How does it take away from the experience of other players though?

On the other hand, an annoying GM behavior is to not time-compress when appropriate. If you're trying to build suspense, then yes, every step down a corridor, every door, matters. But when characters are pretty much on a fairly linear path, asking them what to do at each door or corridor -- unless there's a realistic choice other than "stay here and do nothing" -- is overkill as well.

The DM at one of my games is kinda like that. He'll draw a corridor up to a turn, not a crossroad, simply an L in the road, and ask what we'll do... I'm like "Oh, we don't want to go right, so we'll take picks and create a new tunnel going left."

See, even in a "Bad Players" thread, we still go back to annoying DM habits.

Duke of URL

2012-07-17, 11:47 AM

See, even in a "Bad Players" thread, we still go back to annoying DM habits.

Which gets back to my point -- while the symptoms may be different for bad players and bad GMs, the root cause is generally the same: not having a proper appreciation for the other people at the table.

The remaining cases seem to fall into people who are simply too socially abnormal (for whatever reasons) to have the capacity to engage in a group storytelling experience.

Vorr

2012-07-17, 11:50 AM

1.The Player that Does Not Know the Rules: One of the worst players. They can't be bothered to look up a single rule or understand how anything in the game works. Often this is the causal gamer that just shows up to hang out and socialize, but too often it's the hard core gamer that just does not care.

2.The Player that Knows the Wrong Rules: I hate this type of player. They played a couple times in someones basement and just kinda 'made up' rules(''Youz roll the 1d20 to hit and whatever that number is that is how much damage you do!''). The worst is when you tell them your 'running a 3.5 game' and they think something crazy (''battle axes do 1d100 damage'') that they can't be bothered to take a minute to look up in the rules if what they 'think' is true, is true.

3.The House Broken Player: Even worse then number two. This player has played in a game with lots of game changing houserules. And the player knows what a house rule is and understands the concept. Yet, when they sit down to play a game with say 'Standard 3.5 rules' they will try to play with house rule crap.

4.The Special Snowflake This player has a bad life, but has bought all the psychobabble about them being a special snowflake. But as they can't do that in real life, they do it in the game. This player will freak out if they don't feel special in the game. Even things like just doing damage: if they swing the battle axe and do three damage, they will whine and cry and complain and shut down...they have to do like 30+ damage to be 'coolz'.

5.The Lone Wolf This player is just insane. They show up and want to play an interactive social game with a group of people....but then they sit back and don't do or say anything for hours. Most of the time they are an empty seat, but it's worse when they want to do a mini game. The group will enter a cave, and the lone wolf will be like 'oh I head over there and do something else'.

Tyndmyr

2012-07-17, 11:58 AM

3. "I am right about this obscure rules twist and I will spend the next ten minutes arguing about it until you drop everything and look it up. At which point it will turn out that I am wrong."

I usually just tell these players to show me. I mean, I know the technical ins and outs of 3.5 pretty decently, so it's unlikely that I'm wrong...but I screw up at times. And I'd rather have his nose in a book searching than loudly arguing and disrupting the entire game.

I've found that going straight to "look it up" is often a LOT faster than arguing without anyone looking anything up.

zorenathres

2012-07-17, 12:11 PM

What do I hate in players? Hm.

10. "Well it's nice and all that you put together this dark and dramatic campaign about the loss of humanity and redemption through reshaping the world to what you want it to be, but we just came here to dungeoncrawl and loot monsters. Can we get on with that? Hey, why are you walking away? HEY!"

11. "Well, I kinda don't like this game system or the way you GM or my character, but I've got no better plans tonight so I'll hang around and tell you about all the reasons that it sucks while we play."

these two, except the guy compares everything to WoW, because that's all he has played up to now, & "thats how it is in WoW..."

then he pulls out his laptop to show us just how cool WoW is...

Mirakk

2012-07-17, 12:37 PM

My pet peeves:

1: "I have such an epic backstory! I already have like 9 pages!" guy, who never EVER turns in a backstory. Way to throw the DM a bone, or provide yourself some kind of immersion.

2: Players who don't read material provided by the DM! If I'm giving it to you, it's probably important. At the start of a campaign, I often times provide lots of information about the setting I'm in. What the city looks like, what kinds of people are around. I do general knowledge bits where people can learn about different factions of people within the city. Important events they would know about. But when push comes to shove, nobody actually reads it, and I end up explaining it on the fly after the fact.

2B: Players who don't listen to descriptions of anything. You can give an elaborate description of a room and what's inside it, but they'll never interact with any objects inside the room because on the battlemat there's just 4 walls and a door, herp! Players like this are sadly very common. The DM can put in a lot of time making interesting encounters and most of it is wasted because people don't actually move around and do things, or look at anything. "If there's no minis in the room it's clear, let's keep moving guys. There's more loot pinatas around here, I know it!"

3. Players who don't take the time to create a character. You know, a person. Not just a collection of skill points and HP. These people make the entire game harder to DM because you can't figure out how to properly motivate them to do anything, or make the game exciting for them in any way. These are the same people who will complain that the game isn't going in a direction they expected, or are bored somehow with the main plot.

4. Prepared casters who never prepare their spells!! Also casters who don't keep track of spells per day etc. "Wait, you cast Lightning Bolt AGAIN? How many is that today?"

5. People who don't calculate their attack bonuses or add buffs and complain about missing all the time or doing low damage. These are the same people who don't seem to understand what constitutes a critical hit etc. It doesn't exactly take a week of reading to learn how to perform these basic actions. I actually made a handout of what to add, with a buff tracker and descriptions of what to do to make a grapple/disarm/sunder/charge/run why you'd want to drop prone/take cover etc for people that I hand out every game just to alleviate some of this, but I can only do so much for you before you have to help yourself.

6. Which brings me to my next point. "I love reading. I read all the time" guy who never reads the PLAYERS HANDBOOK even once. Read my class description? LOLZ NOPE. Know what my spells do? No way Jose! You mean I have to roll to hit with that spell? WTF, that's lame!

7. Guy who creates a character, and 2 weeks later wants to kill them off and make something else. You accommodate it and actually get them in the story, only to have them play one session and say "I don't like that guy. Maybe I'll make a wizard!".

These players don't understand how incredibly hard it can be to get a new player incorporated fluidly and believably into a story. It's hard enough to do it once, much less 2-3 times, and worse yet the party usually likes to say "You know, I'll try something else too now" and the whole campaign suddenly falls apart because nobody's around from the original quest to do whatever that actually cares about it, and you've got to rework the entire plot from scratch again.

7B. Guy who wants to kill his character during the story arc portion that is specifically for their character. Really? Just suck it up and finish it out. If you want to say that character walks off afterward saying they've achieved what they wanted and now they want the quiet life in a cabin in the woods, AWESOME. But don't back out before then, because it doesn't make any sense, and it's really ungrateful to the DM who's trying to throw you a bone and make you the most important person in the party for a while.

Togo

2012-07-17, 12:39 PM

I feel that I know all the rules very well and have been playing for years. I'll give you the DM and each of the players the benefit of my accumulated wisdom in the form of constructive criticism at times when nothing important is happening, like when you're speaking.

I'll politely acknowledge when I'm proven wrong, but this will not, curiously enough, actually change the advice I give you, and will be forgotten in less than a minute to be replaced with my original opinion.

Every action by every player will be cross checked by me and challenged if I don't understand it, which will be often because I don't actually have your character sheet. Players will not be permitted to convey any action to the DM without my verbal approval, nor will the DM be allowed to convey any rules information to the players without my repeating it over and over in a slightly puzzled tone until I've understood it, at which point I will then put it into my own words and repeat it to the players. Anyone attempting to reply to the DM rather than to me will be gently corrected with a repetition of my own version of what was said.

In short (too late) any statement on any topic anywhere on the table will be dealt with by me, irrespective of who it was addressed to. If challenged on this, I will of course apend an apology to every interjection I make, making them all that much longer without in any way reducing their frequency.

I see this in a number of diffferent forms. The weirdest one was in a recent wargaming tournament, where my opponent continued to explain how my tactics and deployment were a sign of inexperience and should be improved, even after I beat him and won the tournament. Even standing up to collect my trophy only produce a slight pause in the flow of unsolicited advice.

hymer

2012-07-17, 12:41 PM

I feel blessed by my players now. :)
Well, there are a couple of annoying habits of my players.

1: The player who asks me what feat/class/whatever he should take.
Wihtin reason, this is okay, especially in the beginning of a campaign. The DM should give some advice. But it annoys me when I realize a player is asking me for two reasons: He can't be bothered to do any reading, and he wants a more powerful character than the obvious choice would give him - despite him having arguably the strongest PC in the campaign.

2: The player who is just not on the same page as everyone else around the table. Say the next campaign is going to be based on Beleriand after the Battle of Countless Tears. This sort of player signs up, and asks to play a goblin psionicist who came in on a spelljammer. Or an NPC accompanies the party, and the player spends his time making trips attacks against the NPC, as he doesn't like them moving where they intend. Or someone wants to do a diplomatic mission with pretty much no chance of combat occurring, and the dwarf fighter decides to tag along, taking up space from someone who might actually appreciate the mission, and then taking out his boredom on the other players.

Arbane

2012-07-17, 01:20 PM

I am going to make an Evil character, and stopping me is you repressing me!

4. "A game about subtle intrigue, church politics, and corruption behind good societies? Cool, I'll play a tiefling with horns out to his shoulders, and fiery breath!"

I call these players the "Mary Mary Quite Contrary". In an evil campaign, they'd play a Paladin, and in a lot of campaigns, they play the Moody Loner Who Goes His Own Way. As far as I can tell, what they want is to force the GM to split the game in two: One half for them, since they are utterly incompatible with the rest of the PCs, and one (smaller) half for everyone else. And if this fails, the other PCs having to work around them to accomplish anything means they still get their precious spotlight time... :smallyuk:

Gamer Girl

2012-07-17, 02:38 PM

1.The Stick in the Mud Players This type of player almost seems to not want to play or at least does not quite get 'role-playing'(sadly many have been warped by video games).

Example 1--DM-"The hallway ends in a small stone room. One door is on each wall and other then dust the room looks empty.
Player--"I look at the doors''
DM-''Each door looks identical: old worn wood and are plain''
Player--''Is there any other way out of this room?"
DM-"Well the hallyway you walked down to get to the room..."
Player-"The hallyway is empty, the same way it was seconds ago as you walked down it."
Player-"Ok, we just stand there"

Example 2--DM "The kobold with the star of destiny slips through a small sewer grate and gets away!''
Players--"Um, ok, we just stand there and look at the ground''
DM--"The ground is just dirt and is not intresting''
Players--"Oh, um, we go back to the happy tavern and sit around"

2.Video Game Zombies They think all games are video games. They get either beyond confused or mad when things don't work like a video game. For example, they will think that NPCs should just automatically tell them story/plot information if they pass within ten feet of them.

3.The information Demanding Player This player will demand to know all game information, all the time. They don't want to be a player in the game, they want to be more of a co-dm. They want to know, for example, that the monsters are vulnerable to fire as a player, but will 'pretend' that their character does not know and then use the information anyway (''oh, er, I randomly cast fireball out of the 100 spells I could cast..hehe")

Tyndmyr

2012-07-17, 02:58 PM

I see this in a number of diffferent forms. The weirdest one was in a recent wargaming tournament, where my opponent continued to explain how my tactics and deployment were a sign of inexperience and should be improved, even after I beat him and won the tournament. Even standing up to collect my trophy only produce a slight pause in the flow of unsolicited advice.

Had the same thing happen while playing poker once. Turned $40 into $1500, while the people told me how I was playing wrong.

*shrug* I figure it's just a sign of inflexibility.

Karoht

2012-07-17, 05:32 PM

these two, except the guy compares everything to WoW, because that's all he has played up to now, & "thats how it is in WoW..."

then he pulls out his laptop to show us just how cool WoW is...
See, I'm the opposite. Yes I play WoW but I actively avoid talking about it during DnD because DnD is the game I play to not play WoW for a bit, but I have a player at my table who, for a while, refered to me as 'the WoW guy' and any time I asked a question about a rule, he would go out of his way to say 'it works this way, this isn't WoW man'

IE-I was asking the table for advice on some equipment because I had money to burn. While one player made mention of a buff wand to free up some castings per day, he cuts in and says "Well you don't need to worry about your weapon, this isn't WoW"

I've sat at the same table with this guy for 4 different campaigns, and he still thinks I need help sorting out which game I'm playing. Gee thanks.
Made funnier and more annoying when his 'this isn't WoW' betrayed absolutely zero knowledge of WoW, but hey.

I'm very sad that it required me to completely blow up at him one day for it (I don't appreciate being belittled or spoke to as though I'm an idiot on a near constant basis) but eventually he stopped and we put it behind us.

Tim Proctor

2012-07-17, 07:38 PM

My pet peeves:
2: Players who don't read material provided by the DM! If I'm giving it to you, it's probably important. At the start of a campaign, I often times provide lots of information about the setting I'm in. What the city looks like, what kinds of people are around. I do general knowledge bits where people can learn about different factions of people within the city. Important events they would know about. But when push comes to shove, nobody actually reads it, and I end up explaining it on the fly after the fact.

Amen to that. I build a Wiki site for my campaigns that I DM, and OMFG I only have one player that actually uses it. I have one guy who simply says he's too lazy and calls the god Pelor, which I can deal with, but the guy who reads it is also the guy that keeps wanting to bring Bahmut into a campaign where he doesn't exist so he can be a Dragonborn of Bahmut which is from a book that I didn't originally allow. I can't wait til this campaign is over so I can get rid of those books off the acceptable list.

Menteith

2012-07-17, 07:50 PM

so he can be a Dragonborn of Bahmut

To be fair, it's an awesome template :smalltongue:.

Kuulvheysoon

2012-07-17, 07:58 PM

To be fair, it's an awesome template :smalltongue:.

And can be quite flavourful - one of my current players is a (dragonborn) Favored Soul of Bahamut, and he's singlehandedly inspiring the rest of the players to RP better (even converted one of them!).

Tim Proctor

2012-07-17, 09:53 PM

Yeah the problem of this is that the entire campaign is built around this ancient empire (Dragons) built portals, they were destroyed by the Titans. Anyways long story short there are no Dragons, not a single freaking one, but this guy threw such fits that there are now and no storyline for them.

Fighter1000

2012-07-17, 11:08 PM

The worst players, in my opinion, are the ones that constantly try to distract us from the game (youtube videos, for example).
Another idea of a bad player is one who doesn't ask questions about anything, and just acts stupidly without thinking. This isn't quite so bad as the above idea, but it still sucks.
I have also had players who try too hard to take over the world. They just want power and nothing else and I try to put obstacles in their way so it's not too easy for them but I just end up being seen as a huge jerk. Ugh so annoying.

Logic

2012-07-17, 11:38 PM

Next time I'll tell you about the Drama Lightning Rod. She deserves her own post, since she managed to hit pretty much everything you've already said about problem players... and more.
Is anyone else insanely curious about this person? I've had my fair share of Drama Lightning Rods, but never any RPG players.

Korivan

2012-07-17, 11:55 PM

For me, its always been the guy with the serious attitude problem and social skills of a turd. This guy always used to try to get the team to kill each other for no real reason. When he could, he always roll played the loner. Trying to sepperate himself from the group and waste lots of gaming time just trying to get him to join the group. Hate to lose his roomate, but im glad we dont play with him anymore.

vrigar

2012-07-18, 12:41 AM

Hyde

2012-07-18, 01:46 AM

The guys with their faces in smart phones and laptops who keep going "What? I'm listening!" and when something that effects their character happens you have to fill them in on what they were "listening" to.

I have an active "If I see it it's mine" policy.

It's nice that I have to treat them like grade-schoolers.

Grail

2012-07-18, 01:55 AM

5. "Screw you, I don't want to play anything but D&D. I don't care how much you like sci-fi or horror or indy games or want to try other genres, if you run anything but D&D I'll throw a fit and sit at the table reading a book and not playing."

Oh, this THIS THIS THIS

Just replace D&D with Pathfinder. I want to stop playing Pathfinder in my PnP games, fullstop. But if I do, there is no game for me.

It just gets so dull.

6. "Great, it's my turn! I'll spend five minutes measuring every inch of this battleboard precisely to maximize the impact of my fireball, even though this turn represents maybe three seconds of real-time and I couldn't plausibly do that in reality. What, measure while other people are going? Don't be nuts! Then you wouldn't get to see the full depths of my awesomeness!"

I love it when people do this in my games. I call it dithering.

People take inordinate amounts of time to try and do something, or can't decide.

Me: Right, you're dithering, next.
Them: Hey, what about my turn?
Me: You dithered, you can try again next round.

Sometimes I'll preface that conversation with a countdown infront of everyone, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, <dither convo>

10. "Well it's nice and all that you put together this dark and dramatic campaign about the loss of humanity and redemption through reshaping the world to what you want it to be, but we just came here to dungeoncrawl and loot monsters. Can we get on with that? Hey, why are you walking away? HEY!"

And another version of this is;

"Cool, meet my character 'Mr Boingo Bob the Rockstarz DJ' and his animal companion 'Disco Stu'"

ThiagoMartell

2012-07-18, 07:18 AM

Griefers are the worst (the 'I'm going to intentionally try to sabotage the game/ruin other players' fun, prove my point by wrecking things, etc' types). This has all sorts of shades, but it basically comes down to players who aren't actually playing the same game as the rest of the table: they want to use your game to prove a point or torment a player or get revenge or get negative attention or whatever, but they aren't there to actually play the game.

What really pisses me off is that from time to time we get playgrounders encouraging people to do this.

Oh, this THIS THIS THIS

Just replace D&D with Pathfinder. I want to stop playing Pathfinder in my PnP games, fullstop. But if I do, there is no game for me.

It just gets so dull.
Sorry, but not wanting to experiment new games doesn't make anyone a bad player. I play several kinds of games with different people. I have a friend who keeps trying to get me to play some rules-heavy boardgames (specially War of the Ring), which a) take forever to play and b) take forever to learn. I simply don't have the time to learn those rules even if I might enjoy the game (chances are I won't, since it takes forever). I just keep telling him politely that I don't want to learn new rules, but he still invites me at least once a month with the same arguments - "it's not that complicated" and "it only takes 3 hours for a game".

The players I dislike the most are those that have no respect for the DM.
Warning, anecdote ahead.
Once a friend of mine was DMing a really cool game, with kind of a Cowboy Bebop vibe. We are all really into the game - it was 3.5 and it was awesome, she really drew everyone into the game. The table grew popular and many people wanted to join, but the DM didn't want new players because she was afraid they wouldn't fit (all players had worked on their backgrounds before the game started). I insisted she tried it (the game was awesome, more people should have a taste of her DM skills!). Boy, do I regret that.
The first guy she allowed into the game was an acquaintace of mine, but I had never played with him. I had discussed rules with him once or twice, so I knew he had rules-fu. The problem is... that was all he had. Oh, and he was a jerk.
I arrived the game that day and the DM was thrilled "your friend is playing a cleric, I told him how the party really wanted one". It was true, we were low on divine magic. My acquaintance arrived a bit late and we were already into the game. When combat starts he says "I draw my gun and..."
Awkward pause.
DM: "Well... there are no guns in this setting, maybe you invented them?"
Player: "I don't have the skill points to spare, it would just be weird. Maybe my father created them and I'm hanging to it?"
DM: "Well, OK, that sounds unreasonable. But what if you lose them?"
Player: "I'd be screwed, my build depends on my guns, I'm useless without them, don't take them from me."
Awkward silence. Our groups is usually fine with stuff happening to your characters, since it's the game's purpose. I remember our wizard being thrilled when his familiar was kidnapped - "the next story arc is all bout me, folks".
DM: "Don't you have a spare weapon? How do you deal with gunpowder?"
Player: "Well, they're actually refluffed hand crossbows."
DM: "Can't you just use hand crossbows, then?"
Player: "That would ruin my concept, no."
DM: "Well... OK... we'll talk about that later."
Game goes on, we just ignore he has guns. Suddenly, after battle we need healing. We talk to our cleric.
Player: "I have no spells."
DM: "Aren't you a cleric?"
Player: "Yeah, like those guys from Equilibrium."
DM: "...but I said the party needed a cleric and you said OK."
Player: "Well, I am cleric, aren't I...."
She never took new players again. The game ended soon thereafter.

Another example is a guy I knew that refused to accept the rules of the setting. He knew beforehand spellcasters were feared and got pissed everytime he used magic in public and people were afraid of him.
Guys that force pvp when no one else wants it also piss me off. In a 4e game, there was a dude with an elven avenger that wanted to pick fights all the time, because he thought his high AC made him untouchable. Every session he would try to pick a fight with someone. When he finally did get it, not only did he beat the (unarmed) paladin... he murderded him. Players split, campaign ended (but it kinda sucked, so meh).

whibla

2012-07-18, 08:25 AM

The players I dislike the most are those that have no respect for the DM.

Once a friend of mine was DMing a really cool game ... it was 3.5 and it was awesome, she really drew everyone into the game. The table grew popular and many people wanted to join ... I insisted she tried it (the game was awesome, more people should have a taste of her DM skills!).

...When combat starts he says "I draw my gun and..."
Awkward pause.
DM: "Well... there are no guns in this setting, maybe you invented them?"
Player: "I don't have the skill points to spare, it would just be weird. Maybe my father created them and I'm hanging to it?"
...
Game goes on, we just ignore he has guns. Suddenly, after battle we need healing. We talk to our cleric.
Player: "I have no spells."
DM: "Aren't you a cleric?"
Player: "Yeah, like those guys from Equilibrium."
DM: "...but I said the party needed a cleric and you said OK."
Player: "Well, I am cleric, aren't I...."

I can't help feel this anecdote belongs in both the good and bad DM threads too. He might have been a 'bad' player, and she might have been a good DM, but it's a suprising lapse to not look over the character sheet of any player joining your game.

I realise that you said he'd turned up late (definitely a trait of a bad player - or DM for that matter), but a 30 second scan would have immediately thrown up the 'irregularities' you relate. Still, it's a minor oversight in what sounds like an otherwise thoroughly enjoyable game. It's just a shame that such a little thing, one player, in one session, can spoil things for everyone else.

My pet hates in players (the much shortened version) are:

Poor Timekeeping (albeit occasionally guilty myself).
Dice Blindness ("Wow, you've rolled 10/10 for your last 5 levels of HP's" - and all when I wasn't watching..)
Lack of Basic System Mastery ("I roll 'what' to hit / save / damage again?")
Cards to Chest Players ("I cast a spell this round..." - That's helpful, mind telling me, the DM, which spell you cast?)
Players that make no effort to be Engaged (I realise this can be as much the DM's fault, but it takes two to create a conversation)
Moody / Huffy Players (Characters die occasionally. These people take it really really personally, even if it's not a permanent death.)
Players that blame others, or often the DM, for their own lack of initiative, character knowledge, or tactical nous.

Ditherers don't trouble me so much, as if a player can't at least start telling me what they're doing within 6 seconds of their initiative arriving they spend their turn 'confused / bemused and assessing the situation'. Jumping off the plot doesn't really phase me too much either because, while several main plots arcs co-exist if the characters decide to go hire a ship and sail off round the world that's improvisable within the setting framework. Likewise suicide in the lair of the legendary dragons is an option. Stupidity brings its own rewards, even if that reward is the dragon getting a free happy meal with associated toys.

ThiagoMartell

2012-07-18, 08:45 AM

I can't help feel this anecdote belongs in both the good and bad DM threads too. He might have been a 'bad' player, and she might have been a good DM, but it's a suprising lapse to not look over the character sheet of any player joining your game.

They talked on the phone the night before the game and the dude basically lied about his character (he even said which god he followed). I feel bad because I had pushed to get him in the game, so she thought he was trustworthy.

CTrees

2012-07-18, 08:50 AM

ThiagoMartell's anectdote is brings to mind something PF unintentionally brought about which I quite like. Introducing the Gunslinger and different tech levels forces DMs to make the call at the outset of what level of guns exist, if they exist at all. Precludes bringing in the "hey I found rules for muskets, that's fine, right?" that some of the "special snowflake" players occassionally try.

ThiagoMartell

2012-07-18, 09:00 AM

Tyndmyr

2012-07-18, 09:08 AM

I can't help feel this anecdote belongs in both the good and bad DM threads too. He might have been a 'bad' player, and she might have been a good DM, but it's a suprising lapse to not look over the character sheet of any player joining your game.

Not in the slightest. If I say "Make a D&D char", I'm expecting you to actually follow the rules. I will happily look over sheets as requested, and offer advise and rules info, but making your char rules-legal is your responsibility.

Randomly inventing things that aren't in the game is obviously not what the char creation rules are about. His char isn't anywhere close to legal, and it's not some silly mistake where he misread a rule. That happens. This? This is just a player trying to get away with ridiculousness.

Boci

2012-07-18, 09:18 AM

Oh, this THIS THIS THIS

Just replace D&D with Pathfinder. I want to stop playing Pathfinder in my PnP games, fullstop. But if I do, there is no game for me.

It just gets so dull.

So other people are bad players for having static, narrow game choices? Its not a good trait sure, but I don't think that makes them bad players.

ThiagoMartell

2012-07-18, 09:19 AM

Tyndmyr

2012-07-18, 09:25 AM

To be fair, the character was RAW legal(ish). He was some kind of Fighter/Scout build, if I remember correctly. He had two sets of stats for his 'guns', one using refluffed hand crossbows and one using the automatic guns in the DMG. The problem was his lying. If he said on the phone 'I want to play a gunslinger', they would probably have solved everything beforehand and the game would go on just fine.

The guns in the DMG are pretty clear about being for very specific sorts of campaigns, and that the DM sets the sort of campaign. It's...very hard to imagine that he didn't know he should ask for them.

The hand crossbows are, of course, entirely fine.

Lonely Tylenol

2012-07-18, 09:26 AM

Not in the slightest. If I say "Make a D&D char", I'm expecting you to actually follow the rules. I will happily look over sheets as requested, and offer advise and rules info, but making your char rules-legal is your responsibility.

Randomly inventing things that aren't in the game is obviously not what the char creation rules are about. His char isn't anywhere close to legal, and it's not some silly mistake where he misread a rule. That happens. This? This is just a player trying to get away with ridiculousness.

This reminds me of a player in my game (who is an engineer) trying to use modern-day engineering know-how, applied to the game mechanics of spells, to invent working compressor pumps and wind-tunnel cannons for his characters for a full bloody week, in spite of repeated protests. I think it eventually ended with a rebuttal of physics/game mechanics dissonance, where I said that there is absolutely nothing to suggest that a gust of wind spell cast into the inside of a one-inch tube is going to produce the same amount of pressure from the wind as a gust of wind cast into a 5'x5' square extending out 60 feet, but compressed into that tube, but would rather produce winds of the exact same speed and pressure, as if you held that same one-inch tube in front of a fan blowing 50 mph (but the origin point of the fan becomes the inside of the tube). Using his own calculations, this amounted to a PSI of just over one, which was certainly not enough to create a pump cannon by any stretch of the imagination. All of this had to happen because, over the course of several days, the player refused to accept that his grand total of zero caster levels, zero ranks in Knowledge (architecture and engineering), Profession (engineer) or Craft (engineering doodads), and zero back story support of the notion that the character is an engineer with 21st-century knowledge of applied physics, or did anything of the inventing type, would make his character inventing wind turbines somewhat implausible, even if it wasn't also grossly out-of-place for the campaign setting.

DruchiiConversion

2012-07-18, 09:35 AM

I run a West Marches game, and that means that there's a real focus on togetherness. The party size is usually about 20, so if a few people really dislike each other that turns ugly real fast. As such, one of the things I really dislike is players who actively undermine the stability of the game, usually by overt hostility to other players either IC or OOC. That can be anything from refusal to share information to shooting them in the face.

The other one that really winds me up are entitled players who insist on playing the latest cool character. This has been a problem I've only seen in players I recruit from this forum, strangely enough, and I'm not sure why - but there seems to be a large number of people who join games then flatly -insist- on playing a homebrew class. They don't mind if I ban specific homebrew classes, but the next one they want will always be homebrew too. It's puzzling, and annoying, since I'm running a game for 20+ players and simply don't have time to check on everyone's homebrew or run extensive balance tests.

Menteith

2012-07-18, 09:46 AM

snip

He clearly should have looked into the pressure possibilities offered by a Decanter of Endless Water combined with a trap that turns it into steam. One can easily create a gauss cannon capable of leveling cities....as I learned when a similar player pulled it off in one of my games :smallsigh:.

drack

2012-07-18, 10:40 AM

People who turn into pure strategy players as soon as the initiative is rolled. If your character is impulsive, hot-headed and loves a good fight he's not going to turn into a master strategist as soon as combat comes around. Sure don't kill the party because you make some choices your character would make, but every single move doesn't have to be optimal from a strategic point of view.

Hay!... oh wait you mean when it goes against the character's nature :smalltongue:

Can I vent? I'm going to vent.

I play D&D with a couple dumbasses. I am pretty sure they're legitimately mentally handicapped, as in, lower than 100 IQ.

100 IQ is the average, so being under it isn't necessarily a bad thing. Usually, 70 IQ is considered the benchmark for mental retardation, and that's not even getting into the problems with the IQ system. [/pedant]
yup

The guy who seems to get off on insisting that his character is RIGGEED OOOH MY GOD SO BROOOKEN!!! When he's playing an untemplated Kobold Inquisitor with a touch AC in the high teens, and has Fiery Burst (a whopping 2d6 at level 8. That's broken like a Greatsword)... and I'm playing a DMM: Persist Cleric with Righteous Might, Fly, Divine Power, Ice Axe (all melee attacks with it are touch attacks. PA away), and some others up 24/7.

been there and defiantly agree. and then they claim "I could take the whole party on at once" "Ooh, you guys better watch out" "Oh my god, is this level of op even legal, I think I just broke the game" It really tempts me to use someone half their level to come and knock them own a peg before revealing the level for good measure. :smallsigh:

Oh, this THIS THIS THIS

Just replace D&D with Pathfinder. I want to stop playing Pathfinder in my PnP games, fullstop. But if I do, there is no game for me.

It just gets so dull.

Yeaaahh... sometimes people just don't have the time to learn the new system. :smallbiggrin:

He clearly should have looked into the pressure possibilities offered by a Decanter of Endless Water combined with a trap that turns it into steam. One can easily create a gauss cannon capable of leveling cities....as I learned when a similar player pulled it off in one of my games :smallsigh:.

... ouch... that's when a handy ruling of the thing exploding from the pressure and everyone taking steam damage is useful :smalltongue:

Anywho I have a few to ad to this list, but they basically come down to the same thing. If your DM says "no" then you don't debate it for hours, you can try for a minute or two to make sure the DM understands the logic behind your request, but when it drags on... or worse yet when it gets to the point that you're trying to win an argument by draining the DM of energy until they allow it there is a problem. :smallyuk:

Othesemo

2012-07-18, 10:42 AM

An unwillingness to adjust playing style or optimization to suit the group.

And cheaters.

Menteith

2012-07-18, 11:16 AM

... ouch... that's when a handy ruling of the thing exploding from the pressure and everyone taking steam damage is useful :smalltongue:

It was built entirely from Riverine, which is water compressed between Walls of Force, making it immune to all damage. More reasonably, I shouldn't have allowed him to obtain a Decanter of Endless Water shaped from Riverine, to prevent the contraption from building up NI pressure....that poor city....

drack

2012-07-18, 11:36 AM

ouch. I usually rule that such devices are made of magical components and making them out of something else just plane old doesn't work (accidentally spooked a player with the implications of what he was asking), but in that case best you could do is argue that the water pressure couldn't exceed the one expressed under the geyser effect, or it would flow backwards. :smalltongue:

Averis Vol

2012-07-18, 01:33 PM

[7. Guy who creates a character, and 2 weeks later wants to kill them off and make something else. You accommodate it and actually get them in the story, only to have them play one session and say "I don't like that guy. Maybe I'll make a wizard!".

Back when I didn't work I was guilty of this, though I would get through 3 or 4 sessions before wanting to try a new character I built, because I had soooooo much free time and every character I made was more interesting then the last. Recently though I've mellowed out and just started advancing the character I'm playing (though I still build a pretty absurd amount of characters>.>)

Othesemo

2012-07-18, 02:02 PM

Back when I didn't work I was guilty of this, though I would get through 3 or 4 sessions before wanting to try a new character I built, because I had soooooo much free time and every character I made was more interesting then the last. Recently though I've mellowed out and just started advancing the character I'm playing (though I still build a pretty absurd amount of characters>.>)

Yeah, I can do this too. I've got dozens of awesome concepts to try out and classes to test, and I can get a tad frustrated when I can only use one per year. I don't actually switch around characters any more, but I sure as hell want to.

JoeMac307

2012-07-18, 02:24 PM

He's always saying ridiculous non sequitors in-character (one character kept talking about his shipments from South American drug cartels... in, again, a normal D&D game) and trying to take back actions that are obviously just a joke despite the fact that we've told him that next time he does something like that he can't take it back ("Alright, you see the orphan, w-" "I stab him and drink his blood!" "...").

If you want to roleplay goddamn lolcats with your boyfriend, get a room, because there are 7 other people here and they want to play DnD.

These quotes made my day. Thank you for sharing. :smallsmile:

nessus

2012-07-18, 03:32 PM

I DM and play and have been since the end of the 2nd edition,
I hate:
People who cant take a joke: Dm asks a player what he does when his turn rolls around, player says: well ive missed him 5 times already and once on a 19 so screw it, i whip out my ding dong and start fiddling with it. (followed by laughs of everyone at the table, except the DM) DM says: ok, masturbating is a full round action, next... (funny little side story, when it was the players turn again the next round after masturbating for 12 seconds asks the DM if he can...finish...on the monster and DM says: roll to see if you touch him lol)

people who change the way they're character acts, learns, talks, the education he received and much more just to be able to use the players knowledge: There was this incident when i played with one of my friends he played a warblade who was not very good in the old thinking department and everyone knew it, I was playing a wizard that WAS good in the old thinking department (not to mention the 26 in INT). We were faced with a logical, number and riddle problem one after the other. The player of the warblade is in university and is an expert with numbers and logical problems and I am a high school drop out...needless to say that the warblade was cranking out the equations and vocabulary that did not fit with his character AT ALL (which led to us calling him Pythagoras the warblade, a nickname he still holds today, years and characters down the line) The stupidest part was that his character went right back to being somewhat of an imbecile right after...

nessus

2012-07-18, 03:43 PM

Sorry, but not wanting to experiment new games doesn't make anyone a bad player. I play several kinds of games with different people. I have a friend who keeps trying to get me to play some rules-heavy boardgames (specially War of the Ring), which a) take forever to play and b) take forever to learn. I simply don't have the time to learn those rules even if I might enjoy the game (chances are I won't, since it takes forever). I just keep telling him politely that I don't want to learn new rules, but he still invites me at least once a month with the same arguments - "it's not that complicated" and "it only takes 3 hours for a game".[/QUOTE]

I understand where youre coming from, but if you refuse to play: Evil, neutral, city campaigns and ANYTHING that is not in a magical medieval setting it gets pretty redundant pretty fast...I know because one of my friends who plays with me does this and its just pet's the peeve out of me!!!!

ahenobarbi

2012-07-18, 03:48 PM

people who change the way they're character acts, learns, talks, the education he received and much more

I wanted to say "hey but I'm playing character who was feeling bad because in mid 30's and still lvl 1 but then he starts lvl'n up and [re]gains confidence" but then I continued :smallfrown:

just to be able to use the players knowledge

EDIT: cut quote

S_Grey

2012-07-18, 04:06 PM

That one guy that always wants to play a spellcaster. He doesn't know what spells he has, but he played Skyrim yesterday, so he wants to cast summon monster. He then sits there waiting for you to pull up the stats for his monster, because if you didn't do it for him he'd think a lemure was a type of small rodent.

I finally decided to house rule summons to either force the player to have everything about that monster ready to go or else the spell fails.

drack

2012-07-18, 04:10 PM

man, I'm still a bit shocked people are that accustomed to video games :smalleek::smallcool:

Lord.Sorasen

2012-07-18, 04:11 PM

One sort, which has been mentioned a lot, is the player who doesn't talk with the DM about what sort of player he intends to play, or lies about it to the DM out of fear that they'll say no (maybe for good reason.) I find this to be the cause of 100 more problems, especially when a character doesn't match the tone of the campaign or has huge conflicts with another party member. I once had a gestalt party which had a paladin//healer 5 (homebrewed a bit if anyone is groaning) on the same team as a dread necromancer//warlock 5. It theoretically would have been a huge problem, but since both of my group's players told me ahead of time what they were planning, they were able to discuss with each other how to make it work, and everything worked out fine. I find a good way to work with players who insist on being against the group is to have them discuss any "conflict" interactions (Which is essentially any interraction where a dice would need to be rolled) out of character before the conflict actually takes place. It might slow down the game a bit but it tends to help things out a lot in the long run.

Now there's one problem player that doesn't seem to be mentioned here much, and so I'm going to throw it out there now: The player who judges. I find they're in a ton of groups without anyone realizing it, and I honestly consider it the worst sort of player.

To be more specific, I'm talking about the guy who sits at his table and puts down another player's attempts to roleplay. Roleplaying a character well requires that you feel your ideas will be accepted by a group. I find a lot of the time, people think of their characters very personally, and they should; that character is their creation, and an art of sorts. That's why when a player decides to put down another character, it discourages the people around from really playing like they wanted to. A lot of the time it's not on purpose, but rather that a player wanted to make a joke that they thought would be funny, but ends up making them sound like a rifftrax dub. Referring to your ranger who's family was killed by trolls as racist can be funny for a second but eventually redefines the character, and can really discourage a player over time (it also leads them to retalliation, which ends up being one of these many examples above me.)

Well now, there's my rant. Now to throw out that I can't think of any examples of bad players in my current group. To throw a glimmer of hope into this abyss of pain.

ahenobarbi

2012-07-18, 04:27 PM

Now there's one problem player that doesn't seem to be mentioned here much, and so I'm going to throw it out there now: The player who judges.

Whoa. Yes. This is annoying. Last week a guy I'm playing with described my character concept pretty accurately my character concept (prayers for power, attempting to become part of higher class, a bit of snob cleric) pointed out that it wasn't what character was before (because the character after some 30 years of life achieved something and regained self esteem) and said it's wrong. Wouldn't accept "wow dude, it worked out just as I hoped".

Alejandro

2012-07-18, 04:46 PM

For me, one of my biggest peeves (as the GM) doesn't happen at the gaming table, but beforehand.

My gaming group shares a Google group through which we all communicate together. When I'm going to GM, I will dash off a quick email saying "I'd like to GM on X day and time, or possibly Y. If you are planning on attending, or have a conflict, respond and let me/us know. Thanks!" I try to do this with at least 4 full days' notice...and yet some people still never respond. Nothing. These are people with email and smartphones, who can be reached at any time. They just don't apparently care.

What's really irritating is when they show up anyway, and then act surprised when asked why they didn't say they were coming (which can matter, depending on what we were going to cook, or what PCs were planned on.)

Karoht

2012-07-18, 05:38 PM

So other people are bad players for having static, narrow game choices? Its not a good trait sure, but I don't think that makes them bad players.
It can be if...

We had a Pathfinder campaign up and running, and going pretty good.
We had a new player who wanted to play. Had loads of 3.5 experience. The DM felt more comfortable keeping to pathfinder source material. There are reasons for this which I will quickly outline in a spoiler:

-He felt it was better balanced. Please don't argue this point, not relevant.
-Less books to deal with made it easier to look some things up.
-He had a book only rule to prevent laptop/smartphone abuse.
All of which, the table also grew rather comfortable with as well.

New player comes in, wants to run a 3.5 concept character. We (and I say we, the whole table voted) stated that we wanted to keep this a Pathfinder only campaign. After 3 weeks of informing this person that absolutely zero material outside of Pathfinder would be accepted, he makes a Dungeoncrasher Barbarian, relying very heavily on the 3.5 Barbarian rules and options.
In Pathfinder, some of these options flat up don't exist. Arguements followed.

To make matters worse, he was constantly correcting others on their spell usage. Pathfinder spells in some cases are completely different to their 3.5 name equivilants. Mind Blank is a radically different spell in Pathfinder.

Anyway, he refused to read up, any time there was a rule descrepancy he would pull out his laptop or a 3.5 players handbook and try to argue it's validity. It didn't help that he also had that attitude of superiority regarding 3.5 as well.
"Well in 3.5 it works this way which is totally better."
It took a solid 6 weeks of this for it to sink in that 3.5 was entirely irrelivant at the table. It was 6 weeks of pointless arguements pretty much every combat, which would have all been avoided had the player been just a bit more open minded.

In regards to trying new systems, IE-Jumping from 3.5 to say, World of Darkness, and being a bit closed minded about that? That isn't the worst thing in the world, some people just don't have the time to dedicate to learning a whole new ruleset just to have fun at the table, emphasized further by someone's War of the Ring example earlier.

The other arguement to be made is that it is deemed healty to try new things once in a while. Variety is the spice of life and all that jazz.

molten_dragon

2012-07-18, 06:03 PM

It's funny that a lot of the stuff mentioned here about bad players, I actually look at and think "That's not really a bad player, that's a bad DM".

Some of my pet peeves are
Players who are constantly on their cell phone/laptop surfing the internet and not paying attention when it isn't their turn in combat.
Players who tell you they want one thing and really don't. For example, they tell you they want a game with heavy roleplaying and light combat, and then ignore every roleplaying opportunity you put in front of them.
Players that regularly cancel at the last second, or simply never show up.

The absolute worst though is players who abuse your hospitality. As a DM, I frequently host games at my home. I've had some players that took way too much advantage of that.

I had one woman who kept asking me if she could bring her dogs (3 of them) with her when she came over to game, because she "just wasn't comfortable leaving them alone for so long". When I repeatedly told her I wasn't comfortable with that, she quit.

I had another guy who used to eat food out of our fridge without asking, left our bathroom a huge mess (I won't go into details), and frequently abused our furniture.

Lonely Tylenol

2012-07-18, 07:12 PM

He clearly should have looked into the pressure possibilities offered by a Decanter of Endless Water combined with a trap that turns it into steam. One can easily create a gauss cannon capable of leveling cities....as I learned when a similar player pulled it off in one of my games :smallsigh:.

The player is actually not any good at optimizing, and probably doesn't know what a Decanter of Endless Water or Riverine are. It so happens that this is one of the players that falls under the same category as I described in page 1 (players who assume they know a lot, but really don't). The idea for engineering a wind tunnel cannon came before any mention of spells ever occurred, at which point he went and looked up the appropriate spell (as opposed to finding the spell first and devising a wind tunnel cannon out of it). The combination of these facts is why the Gust of Wind Tunnel was both based on screwball assumptions of how real-world physics interact with D&D (that the gust of wind can be compressed into a one-inch tube, whereupon it would produce the combined air pressure of a 5'x5' square gust of wind blowing at 50mph focused on that tube, as opposed to the stated effect of a 50mph gust of wind) and hilariously inaccurate interpretations of what the spell actually does (that the spell could be cast with an origin point inside a one-inch tube, much less with all the original force of the spell channeled inside it, as opposed to the stated effect of the spell, which is "Effect: Line-shaped gust of severe wind emanating out from you to the extreme of the range").

Granted, he deserves bonus points for creativity, and I gave him those. But when the player can't accept that my D&D knowledge trumps his real-world engineering knowledge in a game which uses D&D rules and not real-world physics rules (because, seriously, forget that noise), and that somehow calibrating a fabricated wind tunnel to produce the exact PSI needed for consistent, lethal force in a game where PSI is an alien concept is ridiculous, even when I (as the DM) am providing reasoned explanations instead of "your attempt fails", smacks of lack of respect. I think the player just assumed that because he's an engineer, I would become too overwhelmed with the technical expressions (or simply not understand what they meant) and just give him what he wanted as I shrunk from the discussion, but two other players at my table are engineers, and not only did the "holding up a 1-inch tube to an existing 50mph gust of wind" analogy make sense to them, but they've also never introduced 21st-century engineering knowledge as an explanation for how to build things in a world that not only doesn't have those understandings, but doesn't use those rules.

The Random NPC

2012-07-18, 08:50 PM

To be fair, unless stated otherwise, it does run on our rules. But that's mostly for familiarities sake.

Karoht

2012-07-18, 09:00 PM

People who try to reconsile real world physics and game mechanics. Constantly.

Peasant rail gun anyone? *grumble*

Marlowe

2012-07-18, 10:18 PM

There is problem specifically in PbP, though it has its tabletop equivalent as well. The nature of playing on a forum is your contribution can be as long as you've got the time to write, but nobody can make you make it relevant.

So, we get people playing completely self-obsessed characters who spend all their posts having internal monologues, being wacky because they think it's funny, chatting to their familiars/animal companions/mounts or whatever, and doing nothing to relate to or even really acknowledge the other characters. If this is combined with somebody who doesn't take initiative and won't risk their personal resources to get around obstacles it can really be a drag on a group. If there's more than one such player the campaign can easily die.

You could argue that this is roleplaying, though I would argue it's not roleplaying a sane character who would logically have become a part of an adventuring group in the first place.

I used to PbP on another forum where this behaviour was very quickly stepped on, which suggests it's a fairly well-known problem within a PbP medium. Here I just have to note who seems inclined to do this, and avoid playing with them.

Amoren

2012-07-19, 02:43 PM

I can think up one notorious example. In a game I was in there was one player who... was probably the exact opposite of optimizing, not that there's anything wrong with that. But the lethality rate of his characters is a testament to how strong his characters are (one of them actually involved dragon disciple with sorcerer). This wasn't the main problem, however, and it was usually a source of humor when his latest character would kick the bucket (and he quickly had another concept on the way, ready to go too). I once had a necromancer character and joked I could have my own army of undead created from his previous characters. But, moving on, what made him a bad player was his chronic inability to let us know he wasn't coming. Which was a problem when the DM drove a good hour or more out of the way to pick him up, and he wasn't there. It eventually got to the point that he said he was no longer picking him up, and he'd have to find his own way to the game if he wanted to continue playing.

I am a bit guilty of bad character traits, too. My most notorious ones are probably poor roleplaying (a bit of shyness, on my part. The last game I played with the DM from above got rid of a bit of this, as I was playing a gnoll character and decided to dive right into it - growling voice, freaking out NPC guards by mentioning finger bones stuck in his teeth, the whole jazz), and ADD tendencies. I tended to browse stuff/play bubble shooters on my phone between my turns in combat, but I don't think I took to long doing my turns.

Oh, and optimization perhaps a bit too much to the extreme... *Cough DMM:Persist prestige paladin battle blessing cleric.*

Dire Panda

2012-07-19, 03:32 PM

Just had to kick a player from one of my campaigns halfway through his first session. I think I've finally met a representative of FATAL's target audience.

The party encountered his PC (chaotic evil, of course) while infiltrating a prison camp in search of the rebel commander. Before the session, I asked him to come up with a reason for imprisonment as part of his backstory, just or unjust. So when the rest of the PCs are trying to figure out whether they can trust him, they decide to ask the obvious - why was he here? The player then launches into a story of how he knocked out and raped a member of the city watch who'd previously caught him for pickpocketing. Then he tried to do the same thing to the guards who came after him for the first rape.
When I took him aside and told him that we had a rape survivor in our group (thankfully not present for that game) and that he needed to alter his backstory, he gave the usual "it's my character, how dare you mess with it" spiel before relenting. He grumbled something about "carving up a wench who looked at him funny" as his new reason for imprisonment.
The last straw came when the party was discussing causing a prison riot as a diversion to sneak the rebel commander out. They'd filched a map of the prison from a guard and were poring over it, looking for a weak point in the defenses, when the player's eyes lit up: "Is that the lady guards' barracks?" I gritted my teeth and told him that indeed, guard barracks were segregated by gender. "We wait until nightfall, when most of them are sleeping. I break down the door, let the wizard in, he Holds Person on all of them, we start tossing 'em out to the other prisoners. That'll start a riot."

Obviously I invited this player to find a different group at that point (and later retconned his character out of existence). The saddest part is that this isn't a game for idiot teens - my youngest player is in her early twenties. Anyone else have to deal with this kind of nightmare player?

EDIT: Just to be clear, I have used rape in my games before, but both times were part of a mature plotline dealing with war crimes. I'm complaining about juvenile misogynistic players/characters here.

Kadarai

2012-07-19, 04:02 PM

I just hate it when all the members of the group sit down, discuss about the upcoming Campaign that will last for several months, explain the theme and limitations of the game world,the concept and idea of the campaign, decide that they want to play relatively balanced but flavorful characters, that work well together, create a good and solid background that connects them, and then u have this:

1st character: Marshal, field commander undertaking a special mission and searching for some specific individuals to assist him,
2nd character: a dishonorably discharged, but top at his field court knight with a big failure in his past and a chance for redemption in his future,
3rd character: an elven cleric of the Seldarine, ambassador or her people to the human lands, and bringer of news of a dire threat
4th character: an ex-comando ranger/rogue that wants nothing to do with the army that sent his team in a trap mission as a decoy
and
5th character: a kobolt true necromancer/wizard necromancer/Ultimate Magus with dragonic feats Arcane Thesis, chaos shuffle and a thought bottle, with a horde of undead under his command and a plan to kill every1 ins his path and transform the world in an undead utopia.

And the worst part was that we had to explain to the player of the fifth character what the problem was and why the character didn't fit in the said party...
And he insisted that he had the right to play whatever he wanted.
And the DM let him.
And half an hour in game, while the other four characters have met and discuss their backgrounds and views of the quest bestowed upon them, he asks the DM, "When do i come in? Where is my character?" and the DM replies "Probably in his tower orchestrating his evil plots that none other in this game cares or knows about"

I am not in favor of DMs banning things out right but man some people are asking for it...

Kadarai

2012-07-19, 04:13 PM

Also, i hate players that complain about how weak their character is, especially when they have the right to create anything reasonable using anything legal, and beg to change their character every other session, cause the build they read about in a forum is not working as expected in the campaign. (maybe because most munchkins are created with some specific situation in mind and are weaker when faced with different situations... just a thought).
Seriously, it's a game, not munchkin tryouts and character is not weak just because their character can't kill everything.

Also "not being able to kill the rest of my teammates all by myself" is not a viable excuse to pimp your character.

Karoht

2012-07-19, 04:38 PM

Players who play nerfed characters with the reasoning "so the rest of the party doesn't get overshadowed" and then complain about it.
Typically they will not only complain about their party and the DM but their character as well just to add insult to injury.

IE-I'll play a Monk, it will totally not overshadow the party.
*Weeks later*
Blarg, you guys are stupid, the DM is stupid, Monks are the stupidest stupid that ever stupided.

TypoNinja

2012-07-19, 05:53 PM

So what I consider bad/annoying players:

People who insist on playing monster races in settings where they'd clearly be out of place. (Case in point, I'm in an evil themed (subtle evil/moral greyness, not demons and devils evil) urban campaign. Someone insists on trying to play a Barghest.)

I do this, but I do it with that goal in mind. Not to the point of silliness of course, some things just don't go together but there are plenty of 'bad' critters that are actually just neutral that work well.

The character is out of place, and that's something interesting. Case in point, in my second favorite game, our party consists of a 15 year old little girl (Who's the party leader), a reformed Drow priestess, a full on ogre, and a were-tiger who's rarely in human form (Me).

We stand out, even in places where weird is a matter of perspective we are still strange. Even for adventuring parties who are usually pretty strange, we're still pretty weird.

This can be fun, as long as the DM knows that's the idea, its an opening for interactions, plot hooks, even just problems with the locals. If they aren't aware though, it can become an obstacle, or worse, simply ignored. 800lbs of tiger isn't something that should be overlooked :P

My pet peeve, regardless of source is lack of party cohesion. Whenever I make a character I always try to include a reason for him to be there, some reason to stick around. I usually pick another Player who I trust not to be a problem and try to tie in somehow. I've suffered thought so many games where the thought for most in my mind was "Remind me a gain why we haven't killed him yet?" or "Why is that guy still with us?"

I realize that D&D has the possibility for a wide and varied amount of characters and personalities in any setting, but if the 4 of us are sitting at this table together, maybe we should make PC's who can get along, or at the very least have a reason to be traveling together.

Basically I think you should be able to answer if asked "Why exactly are you here?"

Close second is the people who think 'evil' means 'Chaotic Stupid'. Just once I'd like to get an evil game off the ground where half the party doesn't think their evil alignment requires them to eventually try to kill another PC.

Slipperychicken

2012-07-20, 12:51 AM

My gaming group shares a Google group through which we all communicate together. When I'm going to GM, I will dash off a quick email saying "I'd like to GM on X day and time, or possibly Y. If you are planning on attending, or have a conflict, respond and let me/us know. Thanks!" I try to do this with at least 4 full days' notice...and yet some people still never respond. Nothing. These are people with email and smartphones, who can be reached at any time. They just don't apparently care.

My brother had the same issue when he was trying to DM this summer. All his friends (including one newcomer) said they were interested and wanted to play, seemed enthusiastic, and at least one finished a character, and another had a concept fleshed out. But then total silence for weeks, and none of them would respond to anything. Email, calls, voicemail, texts.. they just would not answer or follow up. When game-time rolled around, nobody showed up, or even called to say they weren't coming. After calling everybody to ask why, only one person answered (the guy who finished a character), saying he was "busy". We quickly gave up all hope of starting a game.

It was almost surreal. /begin rant

Maybe it's an aspect of some psychological quirk which I don't yet understand. People get energized and excited and make all kinds of promises in person, but once the day comes, they goof off and play Skyrim or something. It's kind of like people who rant and rave about politics, whine about how democracy is broken, and how the world's problems would be solved if only we weren't so apathetic, so complacent... then forget to vote, and chalk it up to "having better things to do". It's baffling, yet not surprising.

/end rant