The GM's Banes

[Grinner]

GMs often have to put up with a lot of shenanigans from their players, whether those players realize it or not. So GMs, air what ails you here.

For me:

The Modern Group - It seems like three out of every five players in a modern era-set game want characters with military, ex-military, or law enforcement backgrounds. The appeal seems obvious. They've got guns; they're the modern badasses. But c'mon, really? I don't always want to run a game of psychopaths traveling the country with heavy weapons in hand.

[Malak'ai]

I have two.

Players who have RL personal knowledge of something (eg; Architecture), even though you HAVE TOLD THEM that their knowledge check has revealed something but you are unsure of what, because their off the wall question has gone well beyond what you had researched and deemed an apppropriate amount of info, as YOU don't have the personal knowledge and that you'll need some time to look into it, expect the answer right then and there and derail the game as they b*@#h and moan because they want the info.

Players who sit there and argue that you can use a skill/feat/spell to do X even though you've held the rulebook in front of their face, pointing out EXACTLY what you ARE able to do with said skill/feat/spell and EXACTLY what you CAN'T.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Players that whine about you not using kid gloves. I don't even own a pair of kid gloves. If you do something stupid in my game, it's gonna hurt, so stop doing stupid things and quit whining.

Wow...... that was kind of hostile.....

[Grinner]

Wow...... that was kind of hostile.....

That's alright.

The purpose of this thread is twofold: catharsis and public education.

[Menteith]

Out of character problems have always been far more concerning to me that in game ones. I can deal with a person who plays anachronistic characters, or who steals everything that isn't nailed down in game, or who wants to burn down the city because they think it's funny (or whatever crazy, evil thing you can think of). I have a much harder time dealing with people who are hours late, who threaten or demean other players, or who do that crazy, evil stuff IRL (like trying to steal someone's iPhone and being hurt when the group won't game with you anymore).

[Sidmen]

For Me:

Modern games: I don't like the modern world - its rigid, boring and everything everyone does is videotaped all the time. I can't stand it when someone asks me to run them a modern game - because I end up doing it, then constantly bash my head against the wall when my immersion is broken every second I don't descend on them with 100 SWAT officers to arrest them.

[Morithias]

Players who play campaign settings like other campaign settings that have major differences. Yes I know people above level 5 in Eberron are rare, but this is World 1, where the average level of an NPC is 10, stop trying to intimidate the shopkeepers.

Hell one guy in a PbP tried to intimidate Recette into giving a better deal...needless to say the 20 other adventuring parties in her Wal-mart style store all intimidated him when she started to 'cry'.

Never assume you can beat up the NPCs in my setting, unless you're around level 15 you might lose, and even if you win, adventurers are so common you'll likely have a bounty on your head (the villains you can fight all you want, just stop threatening the bartenders and blacksmiths).

[Kelb_Panthera]

Out of character problems have always been far more concerning to me that in game ones. I can deal with a person who plays anachronistic characters, or who steals everything that isn't nailed down in game, or who wants to burn down the city because they think it's funny (or whatever crazy, evil thing you can think of). I have a much harder time dealing with people who are hours late, who threaten or demean other players, or who do that crazy, evil stuff IRL (like trying to steal someone's iPhone and being hurt when the group won't game with you anymore).

Those things are infuriating. Though I tend to get physical when someone tries to steal from me.

[Tridax]

Oh I have one, heh. His character is evil-aligned and I think some of you guys know what happens when such a character travels with good-aligned.

'What, I can't pee into this chest with the mayors body inside?! What kind of roleplay is it?!

In the end everyone were tired struggling and allowed him to do that. I think in three encounters after that monsters were strangely focusing him.
Well he still lived.

[Marlowe]

I have two.

Players who have RL personal knowledge of something (eg; Architecture), even though you HAVE TOLD THEM that their knowledge check has revealed something but you are unsure of what, because their off the wall question has gone well beyond what you had researched and deemed an apppropriate amount of info, as YOU don't have the personal knowledge and that you'll need some time to look into it, expect the answer right then and there and derail the game as they b*@#h and moan because they want the info.

Players who sit there and argue that you can use a skill/feat/spell to do X even though you've held the rulebook in front of their face, pointing out EXACTLY what you ARE able to do with said skill/feat/spell and EXACTLY what you CAN'T.

Hey! I resemble one of those remarks!

[NichG]

Since there have already been threads like 'problem players', what if we consider a 'bane' in particular to be a general type of behavior or tactic that interferes directly with the quality of the game the GM is able to provide? I think its a useful distinction in that it may not even be something annoying or that the GM personally disapproves of or even any kind of misconduct at all, but it tends to damage the game somehow. For instance:

- Prescient players: Someone who guess the next ten games of plot arc based on the fact that a guy in the tavern had two lines of description instead of just one, and had a moustache. This isn't bad play (it can come from metagaming, but it can also just be a clever player). However it does remove a lot of mystery solving, clue-finding, and discovery from the rest of the table that otherwise would have been in (or it forces the GM to try to salvage by introducing arbitrary twists that strain credulity and penalize the cleverness of the player).

- Long-lived Misconception: When a player mishears or misunderstands something and then cannot let it go (they may not even say anything until much later, or realize that something is wrong). I had a player do a 4-hour long downtime in which he infiltrated a castle, disrupted the nobility, manipulated the Inquisition and had several people jailed all so he could have a meeting with the ruler and ask her why she was going to go to war with another particular country. The problem? He had gotten two countries with similar names mixed up. He never mentioned that this was his plan (and there was a plausible reason for him to want to infiltrate the other country, so I didn't catch it either), so when he finally asked the queen 'why are you going to invade' I was kind of flabbergasted (and so was she).

- Inconsistency Spotter: Another positive behavior that is a GM's bane. This is the guy who is better at keeping track of your setting than you are, and figures out that this or that thing couldn't've happened, or shouldn't've gone the way it did or whatever because of some detail you forgot. This can derail game into a flurry of retcons, lead the GM to waste time trying to figure out how to explain away the inconsistency, or just degrade the immersion a little as the GM has to say 'whoops, just ignore that'.

- Habitual PvPer: This needn't be actual combat. Some players come from a background of competitive games, some players are just jerks, whatever. For these players, they like to antagonize other PCs: anything from plotting against them to outright attacks. In a game that is supposed to be somewhat competitive, this is fine. When it suddenly comes out of the woodwork in a game thats supposedly cooperative, it can tear things asunder.

- Party Splitter: The GM has one brain - running for one group is hard enough. Trying to multitask and run two separate interwoven scenes is hard. The party splitter could be the guy who goes off and scouts alone (could be reasonable or attention hogging, depending on context), the guy who goes off and does something else in town while the rest of the party is together (reasonable usually), or in very very bad cases the guy who sends his familiar to do X, his animal companion to do Y, his summoned monster to do Z while he goes and does W and the party does Q or whatever.

- The Fluctuating Optimizer: Its important for a GM to have some idea of the party's combined and also relative power level. Sometimes there's someone who's a good optimizer but holds back, then at some point decides not to hold back anymore (I've been this person, so I can't be too acrid here). The result is that suddenly the game goes out of whack for a few sessions as this guy dominates fights or situations all of a sudden (this can start an arms race with other players, who start to pull out the cheese to keep up, or it can make them feel useless, or whatever). This is different than someone with a consistent optimization skill, in which case the DM can plan for that and help the other players out if they're behind. In this case, the optimizer might appear behind (and receive balancing considerations) until he suddenly jumps out in front.

- Missing the Theme: Campaigns usually try to have some kind of theme (it might be as simple as 'kill things and take their stuff', or something like 'steampunk', 'post apocalyptic', etc). Sometimes a player either doesn't understand the theme, the theme wasn't clearly stated, or the player just doesn't care. The end result: their character not only doesn't fit the theme, but may force the setting to change in fundamental ways to allow for their existence. This can damage the quality of the game that the GM is able to provide, as it forces things to become inconsistent in perhaps glaring ways.

[Marlowe]

Players who seem to start with assumptions about what's going on, and seem to put anything you say that doesn't fit in with it down to a mistake on your part.

Players that don't ask obvious questions of the people that are plainly there mainly to provide them with information, then run around in circles because they don't have this basic information.

[JetThomasBoat]

I have a few. To start with, I'll say that I'm not a very experienced DM. I don't much care for DMing, as every campaign I try to start just to get a feel for everything usually falls apart within two or three sessions and I never learn anything.

The first problem relates to this. Due to my group being scattered to the winds, any time I get to run a game, it's always some new people and then the guy who's been playing D&D about a month longer than me (so he's played for ten years and one month, as opposed to ten years). What happens every time is that the veteran who's been with me this whole time ends up making this complicated character that's a lot more powerful than the other characters. Not only does this usually make the new people feel useless, but it kind of messes with what I want to do with the game. Like say they use some combo that involves some evocation spells. I see some obvious solutions, throwing them up against stuff with really high reflex saves and evasion and spell resistance or immunity, but my campaign had some semblance of story and that story wasn't to have the PCs fighting nothing but drow rogues and their golem army.

Another one for me happens when I try to run a published campaign setting. I don't want to start every campaign with them being old friends setting out from a bar to go on an adventure, only to quickly remember that their personalities and alignments make them hate each other. I want to have it be something interesting with story and so I would like them to put the barest thought into their back story. I'm not looking for them to know that the people of High Netheril in Forgotten Realms spoke Lorass or that in Eberron, the oldest druidic traditions were taught to the orcs by a black dragon. I just want for them to think about it a little bit. If they want to be a ninja in Forgotten Realms, they should come from...that country near Thay with the Shou in it (I forgot what it was called, to be honest) and not be someone who's never left IceWind Dale. Or in Eberron, if they're a druid, maybe have them NOT be from Sharn.

Last, I don't like it when the people I always used to play with would turn down a somewhat reasonable, if odd, request, then expect me to let them do what the hell ever in my campaigns. Like this one friend of mine, he was all about elaborate combinations of classes and PrCs, like one time he played a half-giant scout/psion/elocator. Which I get what he was trying to do with it, but it was impractical in a story sense, like the character's background was either stupid or non-existent, and on the other hand, he missed like at least fifty percent of the time, so it wasn't nearly as effective as the other characters. And then like the next time he was DM, he wouldn't let me duel wield tridents. He wanted me to come up with some really good story idea for it. And for why I was going to take the feat Close-Quarters Fighting (which, being honest, was because he was fond of monks and although they never grappled terrible well when he used them as a PC, I didn't want his luck to change).

After this, the next time I was DM, he picked to play the battle dancer from the Dragon Compendium. I was like "...sweet, dude."

[Malak'ai]

Hey! I resemble one of those remarks!

You resemble both to some degree dude , but you at least know the rules, you just try to think of out of the box uses for them, explain your case then leave it to the DM to decided... NOT like one of the other people we play with **cough** G **cough**
And in regards to the knowledge, you let the DM have the chance to look things up and you don't keep whinging and moaning if they can't quote a whole textbook on the subject from memory **cough** G **cough**

Players who seem to start with assumptions about what's going on, and seem to put anything you say that doesn't fit in with it down to a mistake on your part.

**cough** G and D**cough**

Players that don't ask obvious questions of the people that are plainly there mainly to provide them with information, then run around in circles because they don't have this basic information.

**cough** G **cough**

... I should really get something for that cough... .

[valadil]

Warm body. By which I mean the player who shows up and expects you to be the entertainment, providing no entertainment of he own. RPGs are collaborative. I want to see what story comes out when a half dozen imaginations collide. If I'm the only one imagining and my players just mod and smile I might as well just write a novel.

[The Boz]

Anime ears.
Anime hair.
Anime guns.
Anime swords.
Anime angst.
Anime names.
The funny thing is, I actually like anime. But good god, the players are insufferable.

[Craft (Cheese)]

- Missing the Theme: Campaigns usually try to have some kind of theme (it might be as simple as 'kill things and take their stuff', or something like 'steampunk', 'post apocalyptic', etc). Sometimes a player either doesn't understand the theme, the theme wasn't clearly stated, or the player just doesn't care. The end result: their character not only doesn't fit the theme, but may force the setting to change in fundamental ways to allow for their existence. This can damage the quality of the game that the GM is able to provide, as it forces things to become inconsistent in perhaps glaring ways.

I'm already running into this problem big time trying to run a game for a new group: I say "Okay guys, we're going to be running a cyberpunk campaign. Be back with your characters on Saturday." Note we all talked about what genre they wanted to play and cyberpunk is what all four of them agreed on.

3 out of 4 of them show up with Stone Age hunter-gatherer characters, two of which don't even speak the native language of the city the campaign is going to take place in. What the hell?

The funny thing is, I actually like anime. But good god, the players are insufferable.

A hot-headed 16 year old boy with spiky blue hair and who is the general of his nation's army regardless of his complete lack of experience. He uses a giant sword even though everyone else in the setting uses guns. He can't go two minutes without complaining about how much he wishes he could get girls to like him, yet he's completely oblivious to the harem of desperate girls who follow him around like lost puppies and fight over him constantly.

Everything annoying about anime protagonists wrapped up into a single character! It all really stems from that horrifically dissonant combination of wish fulfillment along with trying to make the character relate-able to a target audience of pre-teen boys.

[DigoDragon]

Players who seem to start with assumptions about what's going on, and seem to put anything you say that doesn't fit in with it down to a mistake on your part.

THIS. Oh so much.

Currently another member of my RP group took up the GMing mantle and is running a generic "Justice League" heroics game using the GURPS system. My wife created a time traveler loosely based on the character of "River Song" from the TV series Dr. Who.
One of our players won't stop making Dr. Who references because he doesn't understand that "loosely based on" isn't the same as "directly copied".

Got worse when the team had a small magical unicorn join the party.

[Grail]

I dislike it when players won't try something new, whether it be a character class, game concept, setting, system.

I also hate it when players decide to kill off their own character so they can get a new one.

[Marlowe]

A hot-headed 16 year old boy with spiky blue hair and who is the general of his nation's army regardless of his complete lack of experience. He uses a giant sword even though everyone else in the setting uses guns. He can't go two minutes without complaining about how much he wishes he could get girls to like him, yet he's completely oblivious to the harem of desperate girls who follow him around like lost puppies and fight over him constantly.

Everything annoying about anime protagonists wrapped up into a single character! It all really stems from that horrifically dissonant combination of wish fulfillment along with trying to make the character relate-able to a target audience of pre-teen boys.

Ooo ooo! People who say "anime" and mean "shonen".

[Malak'ai]

I dislike it when players won't try something new, whether it be a character class, game concept, setting, system.

I also hate it when players decide to kill off their own character so they can get a new one.

"But it works!"
**Throws book at player**

[Yora]

I hate it when players start putting each other in a frenzy about the cool character builds they should be making right before I am starting to explain the settig restrictions on races and classes.
I could write it down in advance, but I never have seen any player in my 15 years of GMing who had read any background material I provided.

[Knaight]

- Prescient players: Someone who guess the next ten games of plot arc based on the fact that a guy in the tavern had two lines of description instead of just one, and had a moustache. This isn't bad play (it can come from metagaming, but it can also just be a clever player). However it does remove a lot of mystery solving, clue-finding, and discovery from the rest of the table that otherwise would have been in (or it forces the GM to try to salvage by introducing arbitrary twists that strain credulity and penalize the cleverness of the player).

- Inconsistency Spotter: Another positive behavior that is a GM's bane. This is the guy who is better at keeping track of your setting than you are, and figures out that this or that thing couldn't've happened, or shouldn't've gone the way it did or whatever because of some detail you forgot. This can derail game into a flurry of retcons, lead the GM to waste time trying to figure out how to explain away the inconsistency, or just degrade the immersion a little as the GM has to say 'whoops, just ignore that'.

I want more of these. I have a bad habit of letting everything get way too convoluted, and having players able to pick up on a few of the layers of background I've got going behind things tends to make things interesting. Similarly, being able to improvise up entire new bits that patch holes and tie into the rest of what is going on making a setting deeper depends on these holes being poked, and I absolutely love that. As an improvisational GM who likes the challenge of keeping a good setting going with good characters in it in the face of clever players, these sound downright heavenly.

Alas, as is I have the opposite problem - baby bird players. The sort who sit there, waiting for the game to be spoon fed to them, utterly reactive and not very creative in their reactions. This does tend to fade with particular groups, and there are a few in which the players are very proactive, but the baby bird mentality is infuriating. My GMing style depends on the players pushing the game forward, and when I have to drag the game it suffers. I can process lots of information coming in at once, sort it into place, and invent when needed. Staying focused while waiting for a group that demands railroading to notice the rails? That's significantly harder.

- Party Splitter: The GM has one brain - running for one group is hard enough. Trying to multitask and run two separate interwoven scenes is hard. The party splitter could be the guy who goes off and scouts alone (could be reasonable or attention hogging, depending on context), the guy who goes off and does something else in town while the rest of the party is together (reasonable usually), or in very very bad cases the guy who sends his familiar to do X, his animal companion to do Y, his summoned monster to do Z while he goes and does W and the party does Q or whatever.

I love split parties. GMing multiple groups keeps one thinking, as it adds spotlight balancing and forces more attention on scene use than whole party action. As long as one is thinking and racing to keep up, the improvisation flows well, and the game is fun. To use a juggling analogy: when I'm trying to keep a bunch of balls in the air, they will stay in the air. When there is only one ball, eventually I'll forget about holding it and it will roll out of my hand.

[Rallicus]

Players who literally write out their proposed character builds when their characters are low level. I get that they're probably trying to give me an opportunity to see if anything is overpowered and needs tweaking, but it still bothers me.

Players that whine and argue over the rules, specifically 3.5e. I don't think I'll ever run a 3.5e game online again, simply because I had to break up petty arguments constantly in my online group. Always willing to DM in real life though.

Players who try to fight no matter what. If it's that character's nature to be stubborn until the very end, fine. But if ALL your characters are doing this and then you go on to complain about them dying... seriously, screw you.

Players who come late and then complain about not getting the same rewards as the players who came on time.

Believe it or not, I had a player that fit into every single one of these. As you can probably guess, I don't miss them one bit.

[Yora]

Anime ears.
Anime hair.
Anime guns.
Anime swords.
Anime angst.
Anime names.
The funny thing is, I actually like anime. But good god, the players are insufferable.

What seems to be the problem here?

Spoiler

Show

Spoiler

Show

[Analytica]

What seems to be the problem here?

Spoiler

Show

Spoiler

Show

What works are pics 3-5 from?

[Yora]

#3 is Tower of Druaga, which actually is a shonen series that just has a more realistic art style. There's also a tiny girl with a giant bow in her hair who carries the wizards golfbag of magic wands. But for shonen anime it is very tame and almost manages to get into the "serious" category.
Except the first episode! That one is pure parodie. No clue why they put at at the beginning and not the end.

#4 is Rune Soldier, which is straight unapologetic comedy. Like Slayers.

#5 is actually from a PS3 game Valkyria Chronicles, but it has 100% anime style graphics and there also is an anime. And that's also the only female character with a cool uniform. The others are more like this.

Yeah, my argument wasn't really that strong. But at least visually and in terms of power, anime characters don't HAVE to be as awful as american superhero comic characters.

[only1doug]

GMs often have to put up with a lot of shenanigans from their players, whether those players realize it or not. So GMs, air what ails you here.

For me:

The Modern Group - It seems like three out of every five players in a modern era-set game want characters with military, ex-military, or law enforcement backgrounds. The appeal seems obvious. They've got guns; they're the modern badasses. But c'mon, really? I don't always want to run a game of psychopaths traveling the country with heavy weapons in hand.

The one and only time I made up a D20 modern character... He was a show magician / escapologist type, social skills, disguise, you name it (but no combat skills, I thought I'd be able to start as a mostly non-combatant and work them in gradually).... Then we started play and it turned out to be a zombie game... (warn us first T!)


On Topic:
My group suffers from one player who is mainly interested in combat, if there is a puzzle / social / whatever non-combat section then she isn't interested and will get bored.

[Amphetryon]

The player who actively fights against and complains about any plot arc tooth and nail - including the plot arc caused by said player's actions.

[Yora]

I also hate it when players decide to kill off their own character so they can get a new one.

Why don't you allow them to make a new one in other ways?