Ahran's page

(hope this is the right place for this, and that this kinda story sharing is allowed, haven't found anything one way or the other, I just feel like sharing some stories about a bad player I had in a game once and ask how, if at all, I could have handled it better. Feel free to share similar stories because I'm weirdly fascinated by them)

So I once had an old friend, we'll call him K, who was a lot of fun to hang out with, but no fun at all to play games with. This eventually led to me no longer associating with him because he refused to not be in a group I was in, he couldn't stand the idea of me being in or running a game he wasn't part of.

Anyways, the longest running campaign I ever did with K was a game of Rogue Trader. I was new to the system, but he claimed to be an old hand at it but wanted me to run (red flag one) because he wanted to play. The party elected him as the Rogue Trader, since no one else really knew the rules either, but instead of playing the Rogue Trader class he wanted to be an Explorator (which should have been red flag 2) which is normally the ship's mechanic or engineer. I allowed it as I was new and he said it would be fine. Years later looking back I can see how blatantly he was cheating.

There are several moments that spring to mind, the first of which was when a planet the party was contracted to protect came under attack from a Tyranid splinter fleet. First up was the space combat, Tyranid ships are surrounded by spore clouds which make it hard to hit the actual important bit in the middle, as you are dealing with millions of contacts on sensors at any time. I did some math, thinking that the highest a player could reasonably get their ballistic skill this early in the game was mid 60s. I imposed a -20 to hit thanks to these spore clouds thinking that this would reduce any shooting to mid 40s, meaning they could reasonably expect to hit, at most, 3 times (every 10 you beat your to hit with you get an additional hit with ship based weapons) and with the tyranid ship's armor it would require at least 2 hits to get through. Combined with his ship's lance weapons (which ignore armor but only hit once) it should make a difficult target.

First round of combat he rolls the macro cannons and claims to have gotten 5 hits (I told him to take a -20 on the to hit roll) but before letting me see the roll he scoops up the dice and rolls again for the lance which he claims to hit with then scoops up the dice before I can see them to roll for damage. He does the GM thing of covering the dice with his hand so no one else can see it (which I generally see used to build tension or let the player decide their course of action without letting them know what will happen before a grand reveal of the result).

With all these hits he does enough damage to one shot the Tyranid ship. I ask him to explain how he managed to get 5 hits, and he tells me that he has a ballistic skill in the 80s or 90s (can't remember exactly). I ask him to explain how he manages it and he says he can't quite remember (he didn't bring his character sheet (red flag 3)) but promises to explain it later. Not knowing the system all that well and thinking he may have found out how to squeeze more to hit out of it I figure we'll just move on.

Despite the... hastily resolved space battle tyranid spores will still raining on the planet below, which would result in a ground battle one way or another. Taking into account his apparently vastly higher shooting skill I up the difficulty of the combat I intend to put the party through on the fly, hoping to provide a difficult enough combat that the rest of the party might have something to do.

Previously I had decided on a pair of tyranid warriors (which are labeled Elites, meaning two should make difficult encounter) and grouped them with a hoard of 30 Hormagaunts (which are minions which can and will die by the dozen). With his increased ability I upped it to three warriors and added a second group of gaunts. Additionally I upgraded one of the warriors to a venom cannon which could conceivably one shot a player if it hits.

The party gets off the shuttle and is immediately attacked by this force. K draws his own rifle and steals the rifle from another party member, declares he is going to duel wield (-20 to hit on main hand -30 for off-hand) both rifles (additional -20 for over-sized weapons) on full auto (-10 to hit) bringing the total penalty to hit to -50 for his main hand and -60 for his off hand. Getting hits in ranged combat when firing on full auto is similar to space combat in that for every 10 you beat your hit roll by you get another hit.

One round of rolls-I-didnt-see-but-totally-happened-like-for-real he got max hits with both weapons, doing over 100 damage to two different warriors, instantly killing them both (he didn't tell me he was shooting at two different targets which should have incurred another -10 or something).

At this point I called BS and asked to see how he had over 100 ballistic skill, literally higher than was actually possible, since he himself said he had no duel wielding talents. 20 min of arguing about he couldn't remember where he got all the bonuses, but totally got all these bonuses I could tell the rest of the party was upset and called the game session there.

From then on I never put him in combat again, whenever there was combat I was sure his character was elsewhere (which worked fine till he decided he hated not being involved and tried to use orbital weapons in a combat the rest of the party was having on the ground which, given the rules for orbital bombardments, would have resulted in a TPK, something he knew and was ok with). The only reason I kept running was for the other players, who enjoyed when I could separate them from K and we had some great moments.

I don't know what I could have done beyond sitting him down out of the game and force him to walk me through each step of his character creation which I sadly never managed to do. When we did hang out outside of the game he was still a great guy, which is probably why I put up with him in game and let him get away with such bull. Not saying I'm without fault but...

Anyways, thankfully we had a falling out several years ago where I finally got sick of it an called him on all his bull, pinned him down and tried to get him to explain why he can't play a normal character (apparently it's his job, his responsibility, to break rules/outright cheat and my job as GM to keep him in line, and me not knowing he's cheating means I'm a bad GM).

Maybe I could have handled it better... gotten him in line while keeping him as a friend but, honestly, I don't know how.

Anyways, that's (one of) my little horror stories. Anyone else have a bad player they just couldn't handle?

(again, hope this isn't breaking any rules of the forums, if it is then... please don't ban me!)

I haven't found any posts pertaining to this... oddity of the rules, so I figured I'd ask.

The question is simple: does monk stack with war priest for unarmed damage dice, assuming that unarmed is the war priest's favored weapon?

Just from reading the rules I'd say no personally, both war priest and monk seem to set the damage of the weapons in question to a certain amount, not increase it. Therefore the unarmed damage would simply be the higher of the two.

But if a player wants to multi-class monk-war priest, it almost seems like they should stack. The rate at which the unarmed damage die increases are, almost, identical between the two. So, one would think, that a character with 5 levels of monk and 5 of war priest (unarmed) would do a d10 unarmed damage, rather than a d8.

The other, more silly, alternative is that the monk damage increases are considered 'size increases' and the war-priest is used for the base damage. So the 5th monk/5th WP would have a d8 base, increased two sizes to 2d6.