Personality Conflict
First and foremost, if someone in your group is being obnoxious, please refer to the flowchart.
Secondly, if you’ve gamed for any length of time you know that RPG horror stories are a thing. Talk to any group of grognards and you’ll get tales of rage, misogyny, extreme social awkwardness, and outright Marty-Stuism. I used to think it was bizarre how role-playing, that most intensely social of all group activities, seemed to attract the least socially adjusted people. The more I thought about it though, the more I realized that That Guy is a thing for reason.
You remember doing group projects back in school? Remember how the one guy was too controlling, the other guy didn’t do his share of the work, and the last guy flaked out on every other group meetup? I submit to you that gaming groups are subject to all of these same failings because all small groups are subject to these failings. It’s simply that most of us stop doing small-group projects once we get out of high school. That makes RPGs seem like a unique source of drama, prompting countless forum posts asking for advice for dealing with “problem players.” The flowchart I posted up top is the short-hand version of these threads.
The secret is that there’s no magic bullet to small group dynamics buried in RPGs. Changing the way you GM won’t magically make someone a better person. No amount of tweaking the rules or punishing bad behavior in-game can help. You’ve just got to talk it out like a human being. Unless of course you’re an elf.
How about you guys? Have you ever had to have the “please stop being obnoxious” talk with a fellow player? How’d it go?
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Why do I not see that chart daily on /r/DND? Thread ender, right there. Nothing more to say.
We’ve only had to remove players from a group once. They really rubbed the rest of the group the wrong way, and I didn’t care enough to stop the group from kicking them so I said i’d support their decision. Over time, I came to realize that we didn’t give them much of a shot to improve, or if they did I didn’t know about it. I feel a bit guilty about it still.
If I had access to a wish spell, I would ask that all my fellow gamers read two things: that flowchart, and the “Five Geek Social Fallacies” article.
http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html
I don’t know all the specifics of your situation, but #1 might be relevant.
Excellent article, always worth the re-read. That could be what happened there, but from my vantage point on the situation, we didn’t really do anything to try to improve the situation before we got to that point. Maybe the DM did in private, though, and i’m just not privy. It’s old news now, so I’ll probably never know.
In my very first actual group, started while I was in the military, we gathered some roleplayers from all specialties and walks of life. This made for some excellent roleplay, as none of us could really one-up the style benefits we brought to the group. The partyman was there to make everyone laugh, the girl who’s fantasy worlds revolved around dragons was dependably a dragon every time she could be (an interesting dynamic), I tried to put as much Japan as I could into the game until I learned better *wince*…
And then there was DT (last name abridged because who knows). DT was the kind of guy that brought Schlitz malt to a pizza and pepsi setting. The sort of fellow who would show up without eyebrows because he got drunk and shaved one off, then had to even it up when he came to. Several of our characters died on different occasions due to him. “No, I won’t move my ice storm 5 feet down on the map, even though that would make it not hit my teammate and wouldn’t have any lesser effect on the damage to enemies. He’s got a d10, he can take a hit. Deal with it.” And one round later I have a dragonspawn’s wing attack puncturing my chest, killing me with the difference in damage from that ice storm to have kept me up. Salty? Yeah. A BIT.
Eventually, we all did have the discussion. “DT. You’re not acting like part of the group. You’re actually acting -against- the group, and we’re all still trying to be a group despite you. You’ve either got to change your vector or change your location, because this isn’t going to work with what you’re doing.” He wound up changing location and leaving the group, last I heard he was on Detail for getting a DUI on base.
I would say that I’ve been ‘very lucky’ since then, and that 80% of the groups I’ve been in have had party members actively try to attain combo bonuses with each other. Whether it’s the Bodger and the Arcane Mechanik in Iron Kingdoms teaming up to get a warjack operational, or a wizard teaching the two fighters he’s befriended how to properly use his Fly spell when he casts it on them, my general experience with groups is that they’re willing to make concessions to be a group.
Handled it like a pro. My own experience with a drunken gamer also ended happily. This is the tale of how my gaming group came to measure gin in units of thermoses.
So we’re playing Exalted and we’re captured, just sitting there in these big fuck-off cages made out of soulsteel. The stuff is indestructible, our rogue-type character had missed the session, and all we’re left with is faces and fighters to figure a way out. And also our necromancer.
Now our necromancer was new to the group, and new to roleplaying in general. He must have assumed that it was a drinking group with a few dice thrown in, because he had pregamed before coming over. There were two thermoses full of gin on the table and a handle of backup gin in his backpack. He was kind enough to share the hooch around, so no complaints. Still, the dude was lit.
Anyway, this necromancer used to serve one of the big bads of the setting, and he still had a magic mirror that could send messages back to his Deathlord boss. You write a message in blood, the guy on the other end sees it in his own mirror. Easy enough. Since we were captured by highwayman ghosts his pickled little brain came up with a brilliant little plan. I imagine the thought process must have gone something like this: “I know! I’ll bluff the ghosts into thinking I’m still in league with my old boss. They’re scared shitless of Deathlords, and if I spell out a kill order on my mirror they’ll fall all over themselves letting us go. I’m so smart. I deserve more gin.”
So with a big shit-eating grin on his face he tells us he’s got this, then pantomimes holding up the mirror. He points with one meaty finger at the imaginary magic item, then he shouts at the top of his lungs, “TERPINATE!”
The rest of the table sits there in befuddlement. So do the ghosts. Thinking that we must not have heard him properly, he gestures insistently at the invisible fucking mirror in his hands and repeats, “TERPINATE!”
We glance around at one another like, “What’s he trying to tell us? What does this mean?” It was an existential crisis on our end, and must have been pertty frustrating on his. He proceeds to explain the plan. “No guys. See, the mirror says ‘terpinate.’ Like a kill order, you know? They’ll get scared and let us go.”
Somebody pipes up. “Do you mean ‘terminate?'” And we all proceed to lose our collective shit. Necromancer laughs so hard that gin comes out of his tear ducts.
That was something like five years ago now. He became a regular in our group, and a pretty good gamer. He still giggles every time we shout TERPINATE at him.
IKR?? OMFG, so friend 1 brings a new to our group, but well-known former roommate to a new 5e campaign, along with a slightly known person from gaming store, and while the barely known was chill, shy, but chill, the well-known dude was a frigging horror show- gouged the new hardwoods by sliding his ample self around in the chair- which we specifically noted, hey, please keep the chairs on the rug, new hardwood floors! at intro, and kvetching about not being able to smoke IN THE HOUSE and then, the icing on the “Don’t ever darken my door again” cake, tried to kick the kitten, who wanted to investigate the door THAT GUY wouldn’t close while he was smoking- in mid-winter, on the windward side of the house, after being asked to close to so as not to blow smoke IN the house nor let the newly adopted kitten escape.
Terpinate was good times, tho.
I hope that your kitten was OK. But more than that, I hope that your kitten was actually a druid in wild shape who proceeded to summon a squirrel swarm on That Guy.
That’s a special kind of horror show guest. I’ve only encountered one of their ilk myself, and may God preserve me that we don’t find a second. I feel that feel.
A few times. Mostly it was resolved by the player getting the message that we didn’t tolerate their That Guyness and not showing up next time.
Though there were two friends who were both notably That Guyish back in high school who we just tolerated their bad behavior since in neither case was it a deal breaker or anything you could hope to fix without involving a lobotomy.
There was a That Guy as part of a My Little Pony RPG forum I was a part of (well ok a notable That Guy, several people including the Admins were actually That Guys…. UGH). He went by the handle of Fury. At least he was honest and upfront about it? That’s about the only nice thing I can say about the guy though.
Sounds like Fury needed more friendship magic.
Yeah that whole forum was basically an extended case of Mass Missing the Point.
Had on Extremely high level group that got a new member. I was playing an Ancient Dragon (very high lvl). This new guy had a powerful sword, “That will destroy the world if I let it!”
We were plane-hopping and he got separated from the party and was subsequently captured and raped by a Demon Prince. Of course the guy playing the Kinder says, “Roll to see if he’s pregnant.” DM shakes his head and rolls a nat-20 of course. The fetus was growing at a hyper accelerated rate, so of course our wizard helpfully says, “I polymorph into a woman so he can have the child.”
At this point the table is shaking with laughter, except for one person. I hear him mumble about his sword. I pass the DM a note: “I am monitoring him telepathically. If he even thinks about destroying the world, I EAT HIM!”
But, everything turned out okay after all! The guy got a super powered demon daughter that really loved him. (And he never knew how close he came to being dragon-chow.)
A sword “That will destroy the world if I let it!” sounds pretty silly.
That said, Ima be honest: I’m not sure that a guy who joins a group, gets raped by a demon, gets pregnant, sex-swapped, mocked by the group, and then has to deal with a dragon plotting PVP against him, is the “problem player” in this scenario.
Possibly true. But I wasn’t DM and those kind of things happened in his campaign. Was a very weird but fun time. Like I said, He discovered that he wasn’t being picked on and things went smoothly after that. (He wasn’t the first demon rape, just the first male mom!) (There may have been a SMIDGE of alcohol involved!)
It was an extra session in the middle of the week so I couldn’t make it, but apparently a player that had recently joined us turned toxic and had to be kicked. On the Discord server, she had written that she was being picked on, but none of the other comments had seemed like that and I hadn’t noticed anything close to that during the previous game. At the next regular session, I asked where she was, and Fighter held up a cage with a dead pixie in it. That was what the character had been playing.
Well, at least you got a light source out of the experience.
Pixies glow when they’re dead.
That’s a question, FYI.
That’s for your GM to decide. But I for one don’t want to live in a world where you can’t use the corpses of slain problem players for flashlights.
Does the DM count? I mean, he was obnoxious as a player and we tried talking with him about it then, but our only real success was the time we convinced him to stop DMing.