Breaking Up Is Hard to Do, Part 1
I had to do this once. It was not fun, even though it was warranted.
This is a tale from yesteryear, but despite the time and distance between then and now it still rankles. You see, one of my favorite players was stoked beyond belief. After more than a year of long-distance relationship hell, he’d finally managed to save up some IRL gp. He flew his girly out to visit.
She was a 10 in the looks department. Full-on Suicide Girls type (NSFW), which was very much his jam. Sweet tats, bottle blonde hair, eyeliner like she was a PC from Vampire: The Masquerade… I could see why he was into her. I was happy for him, and I wished him many happy ride checks to come.
Two days later and I heard that my guy was looking for a new apartment. When I asked him why, he told me a tale involving his now ex-girlfriend, his now ex-roommate, and one of my least favorite players. (Hint: the last two in that list were the same person.)
This posed a problem. I had no problem kicking the jerk. I wanted to keep my games going, and the offending roommate was a douche and a half anyway. But as the hyper-masculine-alpha-male-natural-leader of the group, it fell to me to do the deed. And even knowing everything I knew about the guy, I still found it difficult.
I called him on the phone like a fucking coward.
Hey, man. Listen, I think it might be a good idea for you to step back from the game for a few sessions.
Dude! Are you kicking me out of the group!?
I repeated my line about “stepping back for a few session,” but I hated the feeling. As we all know, ostracizers are evil in geek social circles, and I was deeply uncomfortable with my self-appointed task. At least I stuck to my guns. Turned out to be the right thing to do, as both the group and the game improved because of it.
What about the rest of you guys though? Have you ever had to “fire” a player? What happened, and how did you handle it? Let’s hear about all those rough breakup stories down in the comments!
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I was present at a firing.
The player in question had been showing up late to sessions, and then when he did arrive, he didn’t make up for lost time by getting into the game, he wanted to socialize as we always did pre-game.
Let me say I hadn’t been forewarned; I arrived, there was a grim atmosphere, and I was told we were waiting for the guy. Once he showed up, we didn’t go right into firing, but intervention-mode. The guy was asked to be more punctual, or at least not to waste time once he showed up – and he blew up.
Words like “it’s just a game” and “I have stuff going on and I come here to have fun” were used, but the others stuck to their guns. He was not making it fun for them. In the end, he fired himself, telling two of us he never wanted to talk to them again, another that he’d call him soon, and me … that I was okay in his book. Which added to the wtf-feeling of the occasion a lot.
I felt bad about it all. Even if this was the same guy whose porttayal of a paladin of tyranny made me walk out on a game to join another sub-group (cue his dumbfounded “Wait, you were really angry?”), I didn’t hate him. I wish things had been talked out reasonably.
Then again, I wish that whole group hadn’t stopped playing rpgs, but there we are and there we go. As I recall, we gamed after he left, and continued to game until the group finally just stopped. It’s still a sad memory.
Man… Why can’t people just take this mess out respectfully? Just inconsiderate, your know? Cannot even consider someone might feel different from them. :/
Good riddance to bad assassins.
I see that well-poisoning has come home to roost for the whole Anti-Party.
They should’ve listened, if not to Paladin’s actual voice, then to their conscience when it sounded suspiciously like him. 🙁
You know, even if Paladin has a Lawful Stupid steak a mile wide, there might be some Good in there as well. 🙂
Thankfully I’ve never had to do this, but I play online so if I ever needed to, getting rid of a bad apple is a simple as right click, Ban from Server.
But I mean… Wouldn’t you be guilty about not giving someone an explanation?
If they are shitty enough to want to kick from my game? Not even a little bit. I’ve had to deal with garbage people all my life, and I realized that it’s not worth engaging them on it. Usually that’s just what they want anyway. (See Kalfa’s story below my post for the perfect example.) I’m much happier trimming the bad out of my life then I am trying to convince the bad to be good.
But I mean… What’s it like being healthy and well adjusted?
LOL Believe me, I’ve got other issues to make up for it. And it took me way longer then I care to admit to reach the point where I can do that. Baby steps!
I once had to help a new DM fire a player.
So basically a friend of mine had recently started playing D&D with some colleagues of his. One day, on a whim, he invited me (I wasn’t playing any campaign at the time, but I had been playing D&D for a while otherwise) to a game that was DM’ed by one of those colleagues – That Guy in question. I accepted, sat through a remarkably boring 5 hours session where basically nothing happened except one player jacking off (judging from the others’ reaction, this was a regular occurrence), so I respectfully declined to come back from another session. I thought it’d be the end of it, but then my friend decided to try his hand at DM’ing, and he invited me – and his colleagues.
What followed was a serie of one shots so my friend could get his feet wet. Of course, he was new, so there were growing pains. But mostly, the biggest problem was that, quite clearly, That Guy DELIGHTED in making characters that were a chore to manage for the DM. For example, one scneario involved an army of orcs attacking a fortress we were in, but That Guy preferred to stay in the tavern and dance. Instead of, you know, engaging with the story the BRAND NEW DM was putting forward.
Slowly my friend’s colleagues lost interest and dropped (including Sir Wanks-a-Lot, mercifully), but That Guy was still here. I couldn’t stand him, but hey, I had fun anyway and he was part of my friend’s social group, so I just gritted my teeth and dealt with it… Plus we had started an actual campaign now… Until my friend came to me in private and basically told me that he was just as fed up with the guy as I was. But he didn’t want to confront him alone (also he was pretty riled up and was afraid to come out to strong if he started the confrontation).
So, I went to our public channel on Discord, and started talking to That Guy. I started acting like I was concerned about how his character fit in the campaign (his latest shtick was a total pacific – as in, he will not tolerate killing ANYTHING -, in a campaign whose premise was the characters being teleported in the middle of a super hostile wilderness). Which he just casually dismissed (“that’s the name of the game” was his answer). My friend joined the conversation at that point, started pointing out how That Guy constantly went out of his way to make difficult characters that didn’t mesh well with the campaign and/or the group. That Guy was unapologetic, so after something like 20 minutes of us pointing out all his problems and him doing the text chat equivalent of an arrogant smile and a shrug, I told him we simply weren’t going to play with him anymore. That Guy said my friend was the DM and he was the one who could decide that, to which my friend answered “yeah” and booted him.
Then we took some time off until found another, better player, restarted the campaign, and had a vastly better time. Totally worth it.
I am flabbergasted.
Maybe I’m just an anxious person; maybe I have an over-active imagination.
But that guy really was part of *that* converation and then expected the DM to *not be on board with this*?
Like, how could he not suspect what was happening next? How could he not worry?
I got the impression this guy got a kick out of pissing people out and ruining their good time. If I had to guess, I’d say he knew exactly what was coming, and acting nonchalant and arrogant about his behaviour was just a way to get one last little shot at us before it happened.
There is a perverse pleasure in “poking the bear.” Do it too much though and your ass gets mauled.
Out gaming group has a player who formerly made a habit of inviting new faces without consulting the DM (often me) or the host (most solidly not me, it rotated, and often one particular player, as he had the nicest table). Our group size often ballooned to ten PCs or more per session, and every game descended into noisy, drunken chaos, despite my best efforts to herd screaming goats.
Finally, the host said he’d had enough and banned all non board-game Game Nights and large gatherings from his house. (Only a handful of people showed up if we weren’t D&Ding.) We had a couple more sessions at other houses (minus our Rogue) until COVID hit. Now, slowly, game night has reestablished at a 4th venue, and they’ve invited me back to run a couple of D&D sessions for a decidedly smaller party.
TLDR: One player (the host) essentially fired the rest of the team.
Let me pick your brain on this… Is it really discourteous for a GM to spring a new player on the group?
I have been in that situation, and I think it is. In one case the player was a friend of everyone in the group and in another he was a friend of the DM and me and another group member. In almost all cases it drastically altered the dynamic of the party and the feel of the game, as the new player were suddenly thrown into an established dynamic. I have also tried having someone be a guest player a couple of times, but the group (Who were all friends with him) talked to me about him before hand, so while I might not know if he was going to be at the session, I at least knew that he might be. Which was nice.
I personally credit one of the cases as being what ultimately caused the end of the campaign. As while the guy joining is a great guy, the character he made just fully didn´t fit in with the party, which ended made everything awkward.
So I personally think it is rude, and I would feel uncomfortable as a player to suddenly have someone I don´t know plonked down at the table. I am perfectly fine roleplaying with strangers, but I want to get a heads-up about it at first and preferably a say.
Every time I have GM´ed a group that have a space for a player, I have made sure to float my suggestions by the players before I allowed someone else to join. For longer campaigns I also often run a get-together one-shot, so that the players can get a vibe for each other. I think its just more comfortable for everyone that way.
While the GM is the one putting in the most work, and is a type of “Group Leader”, I think the players and their comfort should still matter at the table. It is a group game after all, and a lot of players put a lot of themselves into their characters and roleplay, which can be uncomfortable if you have to suddenly and unexpectedly share that with a stranger.
Of course, this is speaking from my personal experience playing with friend groups. So it might be different for other types of games, through even if it was something like an online game with mostly strangers, I would still prefer a headsup and pre-game introduction to a new player (Even if it was just a “Hey, my name is Bob” in the chat).
It was an IRL friend’s new girlfriend. She was great. I just hated to come into my comfortable environment and find that it had shifted on me. Not a pleasant thing, regardless of how good the player is.
That is pretty much how I felt. Sure I liked the people they introduced (and were friends with some of them beforehand), but it changed up the whole thing very suddenly.
For many D&D is a type of safe space. It is a place where they can experiment, let the imagination wander and explore themselves and themes they might not want to deal with in real life. And for me, to suddenly and unexpectedly have someone plonked into that space can be awkward at best. As one now have to continue playing ones character, while putting out feelers for what sort of person/player the new guy is and what energy they are bringing to the table.
Its kinda like when you are having fun behaving stupidly, or playing around, and then someone comments on it being childish or on it being kinda stupid. Or just laughs at it, and not with you. Making you get self-conscious about it. Even through you already knew that it were childish and stupid, but were still having fun with it. It gets stilted and uncomfortable as the illusion is shattered by someone with-out the shared buy-in of the participants.
And I rarely get why they do this. In some of the cases it was because the DM wanted to surprise the players with the player (Again, a friend of most of the group). But in others it was clearly because the DM just didn´t consider the how the players (Or at least some of us) might feel about it. Because, sure three of the players might be okay with it, but for the fourth one it can be a really big deal. And I think not hearing out that fourth player is disrespectful to them.
I don’t know that introducing a new player would necessarily be awful, but I’d think that *springing* a new player on them is awkward, as it changes the dynamic of the group without warning. Even a heads-up from the GM of “Hey, [so-and-so] is going to join us on Friday. I told her to make a Tiefling Rogue. We’ll see how it goes” would be considerate.
Our particular problem arose from the homeowner [Rogue’s player] suddenly having a dozen houseguests (instead of four) without warning, some of whom were complete strangers, and the DM [often me] having to scale up the evening’s dungeon and encounters on the fly without knowing the gaming experience, playstyle, or characters of the newcomers.
Never had to kick a player, but I have experienced being kicked myself (along with 2 others)! Back in the early 3rd edition days, I was in an 8-player D&D campaign. Thankfully the DM had a large living room, but we were still crammed in and had to jump couches to hit the restroom or get snacks.
Anyway, we went through many hijinks from level 0 to 10 or so. I still have a few funny stories I tell from that campaign, despite the unfortunate ending, like the rogue dying to a Bodak in our party bag of holding (we had a bad habit of keeping important enemy npc bodies in it).
However, there were some rough points as well. The druid’s player had a very odd sense of humor that didn’t always mesh with everyone else. The monk was doing a vow of poverty build, which had very specific rules that affected the entire party (he *had* to have an equal share of every item to give to charity, which meant that the party couldn’t just hand out magic items that were found without giving him a share of the value). While slightly annoying at times, the math wasn’t that hard (whoever took the item payed him 1/16 of it’s value) and he had informed the party well in advance of starting it with no complaints.
Anyway, there was no fanfare or warning, but the 3 of us were told that we were no longer part of the campaign one day. Why was I included? Not sure – I might have been too vociferous in defending the other two during prior issues, or I might have missed how I was annoying them. My suspicion is that the remaining players and DM were closer friends. The official reason given was that there were too many players (which hadn’t stopped us previously of course), but that kinda ran into trouble when they invited another friend to join them.
Never gamed with any of them again, save one who told me about them inviting in the friend afterward. I was pretty salty about it for awhile, but in the end it just became a story to tell about when I got “voted off the island” ; )
Well that’s butts. For real though, sounds to me like they just wanted to play with their own clique. And that isn’t about you.
Our gaming group had been playing together for about ~1 1/2 years before one of the less social players asked to invites new guy to the group. As we maintained around 5 people per session, we all agreed to let them join. As the old player had mentioned that Jeryl (not true name) had never played in a campaign this big before, we thought he’d be fine. Our group also started off with a bunch of newbies (including me) and an experienced DM, so we thought we would know how to handle the new player. Boy, were we wrong. While not acting out of malice, Jeryl was simply a wrench in every way. His bard fit into the campaign, but he had no backstory at all, or why this random bard was level 12 and joining up with the heroes/craziest people of the realm, despite the campaign being heavy roleplay focused. He frequently had to be reminded (at least 3 times per session, over 10+ sessions) that the dice he rolled was in fact not a d20, but a d6 or d8. Finally, his only mission in the campaign was to get a pet, because “everyone else had one.” Pets such as my artificer’s battle smith companion Pedro the Power Pigeon, 2 familiars, a baby gelatinous cube in a bag, and a basilisk that one player rolled 3 Nat 20s on animal handling in a row to tame (that one mostly stayed in the airship stables and ate stupid pirates). Incredibly hard to plan around, as while everyone else would be fighting a horde of gnolls in a savannah wild fire, he’d be in the flavor text tiny village looking for pet stores. I believe two different pets the DM tried to give him died, one from a fireball and another from a dragon’s breath weapon, before he finally got one that lived. Lucky for the rest of the group, Jeryl simply left after that point, and the group dynamic settled down to status quo. Not truly a bad player, but one who didn’t fit the groups dynamic that we were happy to see go.
Give that kid a banana slug. Along with a little leash.
More than once. These are the ones I remember.
First one was a kid that was way to emotionally involved in the game. Serious mental issues, as in broke down crying when his character died and then had a whole kicking and screaming tantrum when the other players wouldn’t resurrect his character. I kicked him out and told him not to come back and was seriously thinking of getting in contact with his first sergeant and recommending he send him to the mental health clinic (I was still active USAF at the time)
Second was a kinkboy and for the two whole sessions he was there was constantly trying to turn my game into a XXX porn film. I’m female, but I’m also a ice cold bitch when needed so he got told in no uncertain terms what I thought of him and his idea of fun before kicking him.
Third was a rule lawyer to end all rules lawyers. My homebrew is based off SPI’s DragonQuest, with a huge chunk of AD&D and bits of everything that’s ever passed my eyes. He was absolutely infuriated that he couldn’t bend the game to the way “it’s supposed to be run”, because it wasn’t a standard AD&D game. He didn’t even make through setting his character up.
Last wasn’t really kicking out, but I was GMing for a group of 12 and 6 of them wanted a more hack and slash/Monty Haul game. There was another room at the Rec Center where we played, so I STRONGLY suggested they split off and go play their own game. They did for about two months(?) and then a couple of them wandered back to my game. Made it a LOT easier for me to only have to run 6/8 players and the griping dropped to a manageable level.
Lol kinkboy.
Poor emotionally troubled kid though. That mess must have been rough to deal with.
It was. I’m still troubled that the guys talked me out of reaching out to his First Sergeant. He really did need therapy. But back then it was almost guaranteed to get him kicked out with that on his record. I hope he got help later in life.
As a DM I’ve only booted one player. He did a lot of metagaming, and his regular use of sexist language made people uncomfortable. Not the worst, but not great.
He was the fellow mentioned in the second story here: https://www.reddit.com/r/rpghorrorstories/comments/ed5snx/two_stories_about_two_players_dying_twice/
I also like no sexist language at the table. GJ kicking the nerd.
Most of my games are online and they tend to be very theater of the mind. This means we heavily run on trust. If a person says they got 5 successes, we take them at their word and move on.
All except this person.
Beyond the problems of their character (being a lone wolf batman with a gun in a game where team building was encouraged, attacking party members, and generally not interacting), they never failed a roll after the second session. Even for bad dice rolls. In combat, it was always great, stealth was always insane and they could do no wrong when a roll was needed. The co-GM and I started recording people’s success/failure rate and became convinced they were just saying the numbers they thought would work.
After the third “attack a party member” instance where they got annoyed at consequences for their actions, we politely asked them to stop playing. The suspicions of cheating we’re revealed to the group afterwards but we made the official reason for not inviting them to return read more about their inability to work well with others.
“Doesn’t work well with others” is a fabulous euphamism for “is a cheating dickhead.”
Had the unfortunate experience a few times.
One time was ending a play-by-post campaign as the DM due to fatigue, responsibilities and generally not having fun with it anymore (not to mention players posted increasingly rarely).
Another time, our group of players had a genuinely nice person who, unfortunately, was unable to play the game in any reasonable way due to overwhelming panic attacks.
Our group also had a few problem players that were far less problematic to remove on account of the problems they caused. One of them infamously signed up to a new AP we were starting under a new alias, after being removed from the previous campaign for various reasons. We were halfway through recruiting them before we figured out who they were.
What the…!?
“We don’t want to play with you, dude. Go away”
“Fine then. But what about my identical twin brother John-with-an-H?”
*a genuinely nice person who, unfortunately, was unable to play the game in any reasonable way due to overwhelming panic attacks*
I nearly had to deal with that in my first attempt to run a game (which ultimately failed to materialise due to my own mental health issues, but that’s another story). Halfway through prepping and creating a custom dungeon, one of my selected players messaged me about a friend that was interested in joining a game. This was fine by me, was there anything I should be aware of?
Well, yes, they have sex-related trauma, so try not bring that up in any context.
OK, I guess I’ll scrap my joke magic item that seems incredibly dangerous, but only shows ribald images to people. That’s not too hard, they can make their character, the only stipulation is that they have to be related, however distantly, to noble family X.
*No, having parents or ancestors at all is too much for them. Can they be some kind of homonculous created from their flesh?*
Sure, OK, but this is stretching the worldbuilding a bit and family X will be extremely upset by their character’s existence.
*That’s fine, they want to overthrow the monarchy and aristocracy anyway.*
This Setting. Is built. around the idea that the king is a populist, benevolent at best and a necessary evil at worst. Overthrowing them is possible, but it will lead directly to several rival nations sweeping into the kingdom to claim it as their own since the King is the sole controller of the Fantasy Nuke (Their ancestors have done well by the country, but they were stingy and ruthless in acquiring power) that keeps those powers at bay. …OK, let’s not stifle player creativity, we’ll see how it plays out. How’s your character doing, by the way?
*Pretty good, but I need to change the names of some of my NPCs. They’re triggering for my friend.*
…Sorry, I can’t run a game where I’m having to check every NPC’s name for traumatic content. Please let your friend know that this game isn’t a good fit for them.
It was a shame, as they seemed nice enough, but that was just too much to deal with, especially on my first time attempting to run a campaign.
I’m guessing the Anti-Party didn’t win enough popularity polls to avoid being trimmed down!
Or the DM has an adventure idea where they discover BBEG’s takeover of Hell. But first they got to get there, and this is the fastest way the DM could think of.
Holy crap I am hypothetically clever!
Thankfully, I never had to fire or help fire a player – because we mostly play between friends, and that would be pretty awkward to handle.
Sure, we’ve had a couple of disagreements, I listened in private to some gripes certain players had with how the others behaved during the game, but it never really escalated. The worst we had was firing a couple of *characters* and ask the player to make a new one, which worked to resolve our problems.
Luckily, nowadays, I’d be only the second, not the first, person-in-charge if someone needed someone else kicked…
Second in command is a much healthier place to be. Heavy less the social geek crown, you know?
I’ve never had to kick someone out of a group, but I did remove someone from a group Discord server. It wasn’t really misbehavior on their part so much as it was that everyone else in the server knew each other from college and this person was an Internet-only member. One of the other server members had had some significant medical issues that he would tell the rest of us about, and he was getting uncomfortable that there was this “stranger” who could read those personal messages and wasn’t even in this server’s particular campaign (they had joined the server for a oneshot with the rest of this group a few months back). So even though the person wasn’t misbehaving, their presence was still negatively affecting another player.
I approached the relevant player (digitally) privately, emphasized that they hadn’t done anything wrong, but that we needed to refocus the server on the campaign it was supposed to be about. I didn’t mention the player who had complained and placed myself, as the DM and server owner, as fully responsible for this decision. The “problem” player (who has a long history of getting thrown out of servers or having bad breakups with internet friends which they perceive as not their fault, though I can’t judge how accurate or not that is) agreed fairly easily. I made a public announcement on the server that simply said that it was decided that this player would leave the server and again emphasized to the group that the player had done nothing wrong and everyone was free to remain in contact with them, including in other servers that we shared.
I believe it worked out as smoothly as it could have – everything went smoothly and at this point I’m not sure if anyone even remembers that that player used to be in that server. But it was NOT fun to have to perform that balancing act, even if it all worked out in the end.
Sounds like this one was handled maturely. Still, you’ve got my empathy in terms of that discomfort.
I kinda couped the DM for my first campaign of 5e… Well, it was a group effort. It basically became very clear to all us players that he:
– Didn´t really know the rules of 5e. He regularly getting basic stuff wrong, such as having us play a 13th age module while insisting it was 5e, not understading how grappling worked (Which got one of my characters killed) and wanting to reinvent the whole spell system from scratch to fit with an elemental system. In the middle of a campaign. Without consulting the players. Or understanding how spell slots actually worked…
– Were pretty bad at making encounters. Clearly having no idea of how CR worked and thinking that regular encounters with CR ½ creatures in an empty field were fun and challenging encounters for a group of level 6 players.
– Wanted everything to go in a specific way, so DCs would be arbitrary, backstories ignored, changed or dealt with in strangely unpleasant ways.
– Had no idea on how to engage us in the story. When I took over I discovered that his main plot revolved around an NPC that sometimes gave us very optional feeling sidejobs, that we mostly ignored. Not helped by the guy being annoyingly vague.
– All his NPCs were snippy, vague and generally antagonistic. We had to pull info from them like it was teeth.
– Regular use of “You didn´t specify that), which at some point resulted in us wandering around in a place for some 6 real time hours, while constantly asking him to make checks to discover some solution. While several of us had an idea of how to solve it, because we didn´t say the exact words he wanted us to say, our attempts generally didn´t count.
– Generally be really bad at pacing. Such as having us spend several hours a session on travel that consisted entirely of him describing plain fields and then have us roll every now and then to see if we ran into a swarm of CR ½ creatures or found a random object on the trinket table. We spent like half a year traveling from one city to another, because there were constant, mostly uninteresting, delays. And the ones that weren´t uninteresting just felt random and misplaced.
– At the end he was very clearly tired of DM´ing and attempted to outright just kill our characters with way overpowered encounters. That we still managed to escape. And that were still a pretty uninteresting encounter.
So us players discussed it (After I brought it up), mainly the fact that he didn´t seem to enjoy DM´ing, and I was chosen to talk to him. I basically told him that he seemed pretty tired, asked if everything was okay and suggested that I could maybe DM a couple of canon one-shots and he could be a player for a bit. In the end he decided to just bow out from the campaign, and I took over. Through not before he tried to kill us all one last time, with an encounter that didn´t really have anything to do with anything.
And while I think it was the best decision for all involved, I do still feel a bit strange, getting my DM title by basically getting rid of the old one.
But overall I stick to the decision. I think he is much more of a writer than a DM. And the few one-shots I played with him were someone else (Or I did) DM´ed, he generally made annoying characters. Loner rogues that thought themselves to be the smartest person in the room (Because he thought them to be the smartest person in the room) and stole from the party, sort of characters. Overall not a bad dude, and he had some fun ideas. But it felt like he just wasn´t that great at sharing his story with others.
Catching since second hand rage on those bullet points. “You didn’t soecify” indeed! Hrumph.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/key-item
The big turning point for the group was when I tried doing a one-shot, and made some encounters that involved terrain, tactics and mixed types of enemies. I could literally see the gears click in the heads of the other players as they realized the games potential.
But the thing was, that it wasn´t really one big thing with him. Because on its own, a lot of the issues weren´t completely utterly terrible or a horror story (The only two things I would describe as one were 13th age incident, and then when he killed my character because he thought escaping from a grapple required a flat roll. Vs a DC of 18…). But over the game they small things just piled on, and added to that mess was the complete lack of progress in the game due to spending too much time on meaningless travel and constantly getting sidetracked by sudden and mostly unwanted sidequests (He was very big on us going to bed and then suddenly waking up in a new place). Which overall made for a frustrating experience. I sincerely believe he is the main reason I tend to just skip over travel in a lot of my games. Which does kinda annoy me, because you can do a lot of interesting stuff with it. Oh boy, here I go venting again.
But yeah it kinda goes to show how a bunch of minor issues can quickly pile on. Which is sometimes worse than one single big problem, because those you can at least see pretty clearly. With the small issues they sometimes sneak up on you and wear you down before you can mount a response.
I missed your announcement until I saw the link in today’s story. Congrats on discovery. It’s funny that it was Wizard’s story arch that helped me figure myself out, actually.
As for the hard action of kicking a player. I am always the person for that in my group, and it has not always been that easy. I think the one that stands out was the player I kicked out and thought it was wrong of me for kicking them out just because their first action was to begin hunting the other players
Deeply touched that this little comic could help somebody figure themselves out. Other than me, that is. 🙂
It’s weird… I think that “antagonist introduction” can be cool, but you have to talk to the other players beforehand and set some ground rules. PVP out of nowhere can lead to feels-bad in a hurry.
One time, we added a new player to our campaign that played a pixie swash. She seemed fine to me in that first sesson. But then I had to miss the next two sessions do to some real life scheduling issues. (We played once a week.) When I came back, the pixie was VERY dead and the player was gone. I have no clue what happened and no one would tell me.
Freaking yikes! Guess it’s a good thing you missed out on the negativity.
I’ve had to kick two players before. The first was an amiable breakup that he knew was coming. He’d no-call no-showed too much, and my game was a long drive. Good guy and we are still friends, but this game didn’t work out.
The other guy was a co-worker in a profession based around rules and processes. He was also at least 20 years older than me and claimed to be an experienced TTRPG guy. We had to re-teach him the basics of his character every week. His character sheet was illegible, even to him. Even the simplest plans took twenty minutes of detailed questioning about environmental minutae. He stole from the party. I provide all that to give you context as to what comes next.
At work, we were embroiled in the middle of an unrelated sexual harassment investigation. Literally the day we were all being questioned by high-priced lawyers, this guy decides to start widely spreading a rumor one of my players was sleeping with another player’s wife, which made the only woman at my table uncomfortable to the point of wanting him gone. So I had to kick him to preserve peace and keep my three favorite players.
I let him know the decision immediately via text and get no reply. At work the next day, I swing by to apologize and ask how he wants his character written out. He only asked me why I was talking to him, and then proceeded to give me a noticeable silent treatment for the next six months before he left for another job.
So yeah, breaking up is hard to do, but extremely necessary sometimes.
OMG… Thank you! Went to Google a simple meme for this reply. Never knew the origin. XD
https://youtu.be/IVXJmfd3cmg
The first time I ever did it, it was awkward. The third time we just mutually realized the situation wasn’t working out for either of us.
The second was a “Hey, you. Beat it.” scenario. It killed the game; he was close friends with one of the other players who begged me to let ‘im stay, but I scored a N20 on my Withering Glare check and everyone knew it was over.
I’ve been on both ends of getting kicked from a group. Getting kicked wasn’t a huge surprise, even if it wasn’t phrased as such. IRL issues on my end meant that we had to do a lot of last minute cancellations, and the group had a bit more of a hack and slash approach than my wife and I’s “talking over fighting, take enemies alive whenever possible” approach.
On being the one that was kicking, the player was from an old college group and had been with us through one campaign, even Co-DMing. The guy’s first PC with the group was a prideful wizard, and so a lot of the player’s personality flaws were initially missed as being part of that character’s RP. It was when his later precocious child and peace loving cleric PCs in other campaigns similarly defaulted to personal attacks when challenged that we started to suspect an issue. Especially when the same approach was used for OOC conflicts (which were frequent).
He then ran a campaign that had his former wizard PC as a primary questgiver, doing the old “condescending max level wizard with artifacts and massive political influence” schtick. For me personally, the line was crossed when the finale of said campaign consisted mostly of being teleported to various locations by the wizard and then after the final boss fight against an evil god, watching the wizard solo a pantheon of deities.
Ultimately, the group decided to kick the player in a discussion while he was away from our Discord server for work, and did so without discussion with him. It felt like it would have been more of a headache than it was worth. Still not sure if that part was the right call or not.
If it was between campaigns it was probably cool. You don’t owe anyone an invite.
Still, I hope you dropped the guy a note before blocking him. Even if he was gonna default to personal attacks (which you are not obliged to sit for) it’s nice to have a bit of closure.
Close call in either case. And I certainly don’t fault you your decision.