Now, I'm not looking for names or anything. Just that in another thread..
Joana said "He left over not-playing-nice-with-the-party issues: expecting personal side quests to take priority over the storyline of the AP, and not agreeing that selling captured foes into slavery and killing people in their sleep were evil acts."
.. and I could swear that it was the same guy that killed a few of my groups' diff campaigns. I'm just wondering how many times people have had it happen where one player's one act, just stopped a campaign cold? Either caused a TPK or degraded the whole session into a big disagreement?
Now, I'm not looking for names or anything. Just that in another thread..
Joana said "He left over not-playing-nice-with-the-party issues: expecting personal side quests to take priority over the storyline of the AP, and not agreeing that selling captured foes into slavery and killing people in their sleep were evil acts."
.. and I could swear that it was the same guy that killed a few of my groups' diff campaigns. I'm just wondering how many times people have had it happen where one player's one act, just stopped a campaign cold? Either caused a TPK or degraded the whole session into a big disagreement?
I had a player almost kill a session by not playing in a boss fight. I just downplayed the fight to make it winnable. If a player does something stupid, such as killing someone in public in front of the guard, the guard or myself will word things in such a way that the non-suicidal members of the party have a way out.
Now, I'm not looking for names or anything. Just that in another thread..
Joana said "He left over not-playing-nice-with-the-party issues: expecting personal side quests to take priority over the storyline of the AP, and not agreeing that selling captured foes into slavery and killing people in their sleep were evil acts."
.. and I could swear that it was the same guy that killed a few of my groups' diff campaigns. I'm just wondering how many times people have had it happen where one player's one act, just stopped a campaign cold? Either caused a TPK or degraded the whole session into a big disagreement?
I had a player almost kill a session by not playing in a boss fight. I just downplayed the fight to make it winnable. If a player does something stupid, such as killing someone in public in front of the guard, the guard or myself will word things in such a way that the non-suicidal members of the party have a way out.
We have a player just like that in our group and we would end up dead or in jail. The guy's our friend so we just let it go though.
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I have had plenty of munchkins kill my campaigns. Turning my campaign into an arms race or trying to 'beat' me is the quickest way to find yourself short one GM.
I have had plenty of munchkins kill my campaigns. Turning my campaign into an arms race or trying to 'beat' me is the quickest way to find yourself short one GM.
Ok CF just out of curiosity how do you define an "arms race" vs a upgrade that is needed for charecter survival.
Case in point: at 1-3rd lvl noone "needs" a magic weapon but by 4+ you had better have at the very least a +1 primary attack weapon, a silver or adamantine secondary weapon and you must have at all times all 3 types of damage(slash,bldg&peirc), and thats just for wizards!My mage just made a pair of boots of springing and strideing for our cleric so he would have a 30ft movement instead of 20. Is that an arms race or makeing sure that he can keep up with the rest of the party?
We had 7 people in our last game 2 of which died, we sell their loot and use their bodies as undead trap finders(one of them was the theif)
As I have stated happily before I consifder myself KING of the munchkins and Lord of all power gamers so please explain to me the diffrence between upgradeing for survival against things with DR and SR and resistance vs sliver,magic,etc. or getting into an "arms race"
A sfar as the original topic yes we have had a few guys that ruined it for the rest of us but they didn't last long. I don't pull my punches and I will gladly tell someone "dude, you f'n reak, what is your problem" or hey guess what dipshyt your guy was over in another room looking for soemthing else you can't be in two places at once so let someone else have something to do in the game.
In otherwords if you don't want to play with them and it's YOUR game ask them to leave and tell them why.
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If I offended you, Steven Tindall by using the contentious term munchkin, I apologize. Also, I do not play Pathfinder or D&D, so your specific examples are not really going to apply. Furthermore, I sense that you and I have very different creative agendas and therefore approach the game quite differently.
Ok CF just out of curiosity how do you define an "arms race" vs a upgrade that is needed for charecter survival.
This concept is rather odd to me. I generally do not run pre-made modules. I try to tailor my games specifically to the characters. My approach to gaming is that it is an interactive narrative. Characters should not be built for survival, but for the type of character the player wants to explore (maybe even a little wish fulfillment) and what will be entertaining.
I think that demonstrates why I will clash with someone focused on damage output. Killing things is simply not the focus of my games. Sure, there is combat in the game. There is even killing and character death, but it serves to support the story. It is not the story.
Please do not think I am saying anyone not doing it my way is doing it wrong. I use to think that way, but I realized I was wrong. I may still harbor some prejudice against that style and for that I apologize.
By arms race, I mean constantly having to up the ante to make things challenging for the characters because they are so tricked out. Conflict should be challenging otherwise, it is not really conflict. If you try to side step all conflict, I either have to ramp it up (which leads to more character power ups attempting to avoid it) or let the players walk through the session without breaking a sweat which gets boring real fast.
I see a lot of posts about how ability/build/class/spell/tactic X is broken because a player is walking through encounters. 99.9% of the responses are use tactic Y to nerf said ability/build/class/spell/tactic which only sends the player running, looking for a way to shore up this weakness. And you end up right back at point A.
A good story requires conflict. Bad things need to happen to characters for them to overcome. Players and GMs should communicate better to identify the kind of 'bad things' they will enjoy suffering and overcoming. In my opinion.
I guess if you emphasize the game in role playing games, then trying to out tactic your GM is not only acceptable, but enjoyable. That is just not what I play RPGs for.
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I once had a player kill the rest of the group after four or five years of playing together. To a high degree it was my own (the GM) fault for misjudging the player and the rest of the group.
Approx. Half a year ahead of the incident his character got killed. I used a priestess of Cyric which pretended to be a priestess of the morning lord to resurrect the character. At the same time I gave hints that didn't fit with the story as well as dreams. All of them ended in bloodshed and several players got the dreams - but non as clear as the character resurrected. All of them had an evil act done by the person dreaming against the own group.
The whole plot-line was to avoid that character to slide down into evil. It took half a year of real game time. Like cattle to the slaughter the group followed down the path I had set out in the prophesies - and which I had set out because the group had to ensure the prophesies would not come true.
But players never shared the different information they got, they ignored all hints no matter how obvious. On the final day only two players realised where it was going. And one didn't care and the other one just did follow Cyric.
I I'd plan for five different outcomes that night - but I was aware that one of the group killing everyone else was one option to happen. And the way people played and dice were rolled this is how it ended.
It wasn't even planned by the player. The first kill was spontaneous when being insulted instead of reminded of the friendship in the group by the dwarf who finally figured out that he was going towards evil. The second one followed because there was already blood on the floor. And before the third one went down the player realised - wait a moment - I'm now killing my friend here. But at that stage it was too late to turn back.
It was probably the blackest day of being a GM. I could have stopped it - but in the end I though I had tried for weeks and the group just had failed in their Quest.
Thod
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Setup: An Ascension campaign. The PCs were destined to become the new gods of a world that had been cut off from the rest of the multiverse due to mistakes made by the previous gods. Obviously this was intended to be an Epic campaign, though we only made it to levels 19-20.
One player had retired his Assassin PC (by ascending to minor godhood, the rest of us wanted to be more powerful) in order to play the Wizard who had been his cohort up to that time. Late in the campaign we recovered an artifact that needed to be 'charged' with the same mystic energy that was giving us our divine powers. It was a balancing act to charge the artifact and us as well. The Wizard (evil, he was an assassin's cohort, remember) plotted behind our backs to get the artifact and drain it of it's divine power and ascend himself, making two gods for this player, and none for the rest of us. The loss of this massive amount of divine energy made it effectively impossible for the rest of the party to become strong enough to stop the world destroying evil and the entire campaign world was consumed.
Half of the group, including myself, left the group over the next few months as the player in question had taken the DMs seat and was running in a shattered world with only one deity, which was obviously his Wizard from the previous campaign.
Not a fun experience. And to answer the obvious questions, the player was a mature player and was actually one of the better roleplayers at the table. There were other issues, not game related that factored heavily into peoples actions. I'm still friends with all of the major players in that game, and still game with most of them, but in different campaigns.
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I have had plenty of munchkins kill my campaigns. Turning my campaign into an arms race or trying to 'beat' me is the quickest way to find yourself short one GM.Ok CF just out of curiosity how do you define an "arms race" vs a upgrade that is needed for charecter survival.
Case in point: at 1-3rd lvl noone "needs" a magic weapon but by 4+ you had better have at the very least a +1 primary attack weapon, a silver or adamantine secondary weapon and you must have at all times all 3 types of damage(slash,bldg&peirc), and thats just for wizards!
Gotta say, we've never played like that. Everyone generally has one melee and one ranged weapon, and if it's not the "right" type, we just eat the DR. We're not walking weapon shops, if only because everyone but the fighter would be over-encumbered!
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If I offended you, Steven Tindall by using the contentious term munchkin, I apologize. Also, I do not play Pathfinder or D&D, so your specific examples are not really going to apply. Furthermore, I sense that you and I have very different creative agendas and therefore approach the game quite differently.
So what the f&@% do you play then? Also, when you post CF, people will assume you're referring to Pathfinder, as it is essentially Pathfinder's messageboard. Make sure you specify.
So what the f~~@ do you play then? Also, when you post CF, people will assume you're referring to Pathfinder, as it is essentially Pathfinder's messageboard. Make sure you specify.If I offended you, Steven Tindall by using the contentious term munchkin, I apologize. Also, I do not play Pathfinder or D&D, so your specific examples are not really going to apply. Furthermore, I sense that you and I have very different creative agendas and therefore approach the game quite differently.
It's CourtFool, he's the resident Hero missionary, trying to convert all of the heathens and un-believers.
So what the f*@~ do you play then?
G.U.R.P.S., Hero, Mutants & Masterminds. I may be playing shortly in an Exalted campaign. I would like to try True20, Spirit of the Century, Prose Descriptive Qualities (PDQ), Savage Worlds, Icons.
Make sure you specify.
I'll do no such thing. If you want to make assumptions, that is your issue. Paizo sells a great many products. They even have areas specifically set aside for other games.
Don't game profile me, bro.
G.U.R.P.S.+2 Internet cred. I have a newfound respect for you, poodle.
It was third edition. Does that still count?
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I have had plenty of munchkins kill my campaigns. Turning my campaign into an arms race or trying to 'beat' me is the quickest way to find yourself short one GM.Ok CF just out of curiosity how do you define an "arms race" vs a upgrade that is needed for charecter survival.
Case in point: at 1-3rd lvl noone "needs" a magic weapon but by 4+ you had better have at the very least a +1 primary attack weapon, a silver or adamantine secondary weapon and you must have at all times all 3 types of damage(slash,bldg&peirc), and thats just for wizards!
I love when people say stuff like this, in my game, I have a player in my rise of the runelords campaign with a TWF rogue at level eight and his weapons are an adamantine non-magic rapier, and a +1 dogslicer.he has no bludgeoning weapon and has a non magic shortbow for when he needs a ranged attack, no other weapons. The dogslicer is his off hand weapon. So no, you don't need a +1 primary weapon by level 4+.
OK CF here goes,
If I offended you, Steven Tindall by using the contentious term munchkin, I apologize. Also, I do not play Pathfinder or D&D, so your specific examples are not really going to apply. Furthermore, I sense that you and I have very different creative agendas and therefore approach the game quite differently.
First lets start by clarifying that I was not, in any way shape or form offended and that I enjoy disscusing things like this because I learn from it. I do not need an apology but I thank you for it.
Second i have to admit I assumed that you did play D&D in some incarnation or else I would have sited other examples so please accept my apologies for the incorrect assumption. If we wanna talk Shadowrun I can do that all day long. My shamans kicked lonestars butts and even when the national guard was called in he held his own(for a little while anyway.)
As far as far as approching games diffrently I have to whole heartedly agree and thats what makes for intresteing disscusion.
Trust me it takes alot to offend me and so far on these boards the only time I have even been slightly put out was when someone thought that my veiws on immigration were soooo far out there that I couldn't possibly beilieve them and was simply trying to stir up trouble or incite dissent. Which was not the case.
Anyway i realise inflection and meaning can be lost just by typeing but I was hopeing for some ideas on your game. My GM is an ok GM but he never gives EXP for anything we don't kill so we have learned to be very methodical and effective killers in the D&D 3.5 game.
As far as the other post by Joana:
We're not walking weapon shops, if only because everyone but the fighter would be over-encumbered.
We get around that by useing mules and servants or magic items like BoH, or a Hewards handy haversack at low levels. Trust me my mage cranks out a lot of woundrous items for the party and himself.
We generally have some good strength charecters. Heck my wizard has a 15str just like the fighter and the theif, the cleric is hateing life with a 10str so he's always encumbered till I can tweak his armor at 5th lvl with Craft arms and armor.
We do some role playing though so it's not all hack and slash. My charecter just paid a 100 gold to the theives guild to do a background check on my brothers new love intrest and see if she posses a threat to the House Orien(eberron) if she doesn't then great if she does well, I'm a dragonmarked mage with favored in house I can make her dissapear.
Then my brother might decide to do the same with my love intrest who happens to be a cousin of ours. Hey I didn't create this soapopera plot I just play in it.
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So what the f*#& do you play then? Also, when you post CF, people will assume you're referring to Pathfinder, as it is essentially Pathfinder's messageboard. Make sure you specify.If I offended you, Steven Tindall by using the contentious term munchkin, I apologize. Also, I do not play Pathfinder or D&D, so your specific examples are not really going to apply. Furthermore, I sense that you and I have very different creative agendas and therefore approach the game quite differently.
Actually, just about anyone who pays attention knows Courtfool is a proponent of the HERO system.
And, as this isn't in one of the Pathfinder specific areas of the forum, why should anyone assume anything? He doesn't need to specify jack. The thread is about crappy players. Not specific games.
Anyway, looks like Courtfool already said all of that.
Hey, how about we get the thread back on topic and stop the smurfing debate about what is or isn't munchkin?
Destroying campaigns, much like derailing threads, can happen in any system.
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So what the f*#& do you play then? Also, when you post CF, people will assume you're referring to Pathfinder, as it is essentially Pathfinder's messageboard. Make sure you specify.If I offended you, Steven Tindall by using the contentious term munchkin, I apologize. Also, I do not play Pathfinder or D&D, so your specific examples are not really going to apply. Furthermore, I sense that you and I have very different creative agendas and therefore approach the game quite differently.
Actually, just about anyone who pays attention knows Courtfool is a proponent of the HERO system.
And, as this isn't in one of the Pathfinder specific areas of the forum, why should anyone assume anything? He doesn't need to specify jack. The thread is about crappy players. Not specific games.
Anyway, looks like Courtfool already said all of that.
HD remember who you are talking to.
First lets start by clarifying that I was not, in any way shape or form offended…
No worries. I use to be a bit of a Narrativist Nazi, so I still owe some back apologies.
Second i have to admit I assumed that you did play D&D…
Again, no worries. I use to play Basic and Advanced back in the day. I have played a couple games of 3e and 4e and I have a passing familiarity with the mechanics.
My GM is an ok GM but he never gives EXP for anything we don't kill so we have learned to be very methodical and effective killers in the D&D 3.5 game.
If that works for your group? Fantastic. But if your GM ever complains that all you ever do is kill things, it could be he is to blame.
"That which is measured, is done."
Mr. Fishy has had a player that would throw a tamtum and end a game if he didn't get his way.
He threaten a game because of another players character. Threaten the same game because Mr. Fishy wouldn't swear and oath to the party!?!?
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I'm just curious, why are you on the messageboards if you don't play Pathfinder or D&D?
Why shouldn't I be?
I'm just curious, why are you on the messageboards if you don't play Pathfinder or D&D?Why shouldn't I be?
There's certainly plenty of general interest discussion on this site. So why would anyone expect it to only appeal to PF players?
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Not to mention this board started before Pathfinder. You do realize Paizo is an online store that sells other stuff…right?
ok update to the killer game we had this weekend.
My DM ran a great adventure that was fast paced and lottsa exp with the most treasure we have ever gotten at 3rd lvl.
The module was written for 4 5th lvl charecters but since we had 7 3rd lvls he ran it as is. We only suffered 2 party deaths because one player got hit by flanking theives and the other one didn't want to follow the rest of the party and ended up in the boss fight alone. He had low stats and was looking to suicide his charecter anyway so nobody was too worried about it.
The issue comes from 1 player that refuses to interact in anything but combat. He's playing a sorcerer and unless he is killing something he streches out on the couch and sortta dozes until it's time to kill stuff, then it's wands ablazing destruction. He does not help progress story line at all, he isn't intrested in a charecter back story so our DM can weave him into the game and make it fun to develop his charecter. All he wants is to see how much damage he can do per round, moan that even though he is causeing the most damage the monsters shouldn't target him over a more heavily armord charecter and when combat is over he goes back to sleep and lets the rest of us do the leg work till the next combat. Total glass cannon.
+3 then. You drive a hard bargain. :)
I don't think I've had one player utterly KILL a campaign. There have been player issues at times that have strained games (and I'm sure I've caused them too. I'm totally a diva and need help to be reined in at times).
Couple issues where it boils down to player-style conflicts:
1. The powergamer in a sea of non-optimizers. It's not about whether someone is a munchkin and someone is not by itself. It's about having five players, four of whom build whatever weird concepts they like, which are certainly effective, but far from "optimized." And the fifth is a person who self-professes to love to "break the system" and constantly wheedles and needles the GM to be able to use questionable splat material which the GM only realizes too late how powerful/abusable it is. When you have, effectively, a Tarrasque in a party of well-armed kobolds (who by themselves would be happy to be kobolds as long as they all have something to do), it doesn't work--not for the Tarrasque, not for the well-armed kobolds, not for the GM. Because if the GM wants to actually challenge the one player, he risks utterly creaming the rest of the party, and if he tones down the challenges for the rest of the party, the power-player takes over and smashes everything before the rest of the party can even do anything.
I've seen this a couple times; one was particularly bad because a number of the players were new to the system (which was an easily broken system). While they built perfectly effective characters, one of the most experienced players was the power-player who not only had an extremely powerful character but was trying to tell everyone else what to do. It didn't end well. I don't think that player by himself killed the game but certainly contributed to its untimely demise.
Again, the issue isn't "WAAAH POWER-GAMERS" it's about a conflict of styles and one person's selfishness. If the whole group were experienced players and someone showed up with "I want to play this goblin bard with a constitution of 6 because it's a GREAT CONCEPT" that could be annoying for everyone involved too.
2. Explorers vs. Narrative Shakers -- Not sure what else to call this. I ran a game where I had one player who was an explorer, very detailed in describing his actions, every room they went into he would ask, "What's over here, what's that, what's this?" And I had another player who, if satisfied there was nothing of interest, wanted to move on ASAP to advance the story. They were constantly getting on each other's nerves. I did my best to balance the gameplay so that player A got some details while player B got to the plot but it was hard to do, especially as both players in question had very strong personalities and had better presence and intelligence for me to match wits with. The game was definitely not killed in this case, but patience was certainly strained.
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Case in point: at 1-3rd lvl noone "needs" a magic weapon but by 4+ you had better have at the very least a +1 primary attack weapon, a silver or adamantine secondary weapon and you must have at all times all 3 types of damage(slash,bldg&peirc), and thats just for wizards!I love when people say stuff like this, in my game, I have a player in my rise of the runelords campaign with a TWF rogue at level eight and his weapons are an adamantine non-magic rapier, and a +1 dogslicer.he has no bludgeoning weapon and has a non magic shortbow for when he needs a ranged attack, no other weapons. The dogslicer is his off hand weapon. So no, you don't need a +1 primary weapon by level 4+.
Dear god, I'm gonna agree with lastknightleft. I feel dirty. I have to redeem my self....
Andrew Garfield is a Caucasian. Ha ha ha ha ha !
I feel a bit better now.
Three good stories, from best to _worst_:
1) My main group I played with through high school was sundered by the introduction of a new couple, my friend Kaleb and his girlfriend Brandi. They'd just moved to AZ so I invited them to play in my game, and as time went on, they started to grow apart... Soon, Kaleb lived in the middle of the city, a 20 minute freeway drive away, and Brandi was dating another player in the game who was there earlier. High tensions all around between Kaleb, Brandi, this player, and the people in the group who were close to Kaleb. The guy Brandi was dating, Phil, was a notorious cheater, often wandering across the room and declaring absurd rolls no matter what character he was playing. He was famous for never missing attacks unless people watched him roll. Brandi began to become abrasive, and tried to be the de facto leader of the party, but the group resisted, feeling she was ordering them around or being rude all of the time. The other 5 members of the group, sans Kaleb, since he had returned home in another, voted to kick Brandi and Phil out, and they haven't been back since. One of the people who voted them out quit the game maybe six sessions later, and one of the other people who voted them out is a friend's little sister who doesn't play as much as show up and wander off to play video games. The group essentially was destroyed and we've just started to rebuild it again, so it's been pretty good. I definitely don't miss running a game of 8 players.
2) I had a game that was killed by players and DM alike. He was running Legacy of Fire for me, two of my good friends, a great acquaintance of mine, and another friend who I thought would be good but turned out bad. The game went one session, and the guy I thought would be good quit. Another session and the acquaintance was in California. A TPK later, and a new guy joined... and then the acquaintance was _moving permanently_ to CA. Then the monk died in a random encounter, and the game was quit.
Now, I say "players and DM alike" I mean that the constant quitting and cancelling by players was part of it, but the majority was the DM, who we knew for a fact he was reading the AP as he ran it-- he'd never read it before. Rooms changed on the fly. Monsters were inconsistent or missing vital clues. Encounters were drab and boring. We encountered a horde of baboons and the DM couldn't find them in the bestiary, so they became monkey familiars. The DM talked behind our backs to the guy who had quit about how much he hated running the game and how all of our characters were stupid, and that he hated the three of us who had shown up to every session and we all couldn't roleplay or had stupid characters. The kicker was in the second to last game where the DM rolled a die behind his screen and was announcing that the creature made his save when another player pointed out to him that he could see that his dice had rolled out from behind the screen and that he had rolled a 1. Feeling suspicious, we began to check monster stats and learned that he was rolling dice and making up numbers completely-- no monsters in the campaign had yet to fail a saving throw, and monsters were consistently hitting with all of their attacks. Then we realized something-- a monster had full attacked my paladin, and had "rolled" numbers that had to have been a nat. 20, a 19 and a nat. 20 to get those numbers... while he was misfortune hexxed, meaning he had to roll 2 d20's and take the lowest. So the monster had rolled 2d20, got two 20s, rolled 2d20 and got a 19 and a 20 and rolled 2d20 and got two 20s again. Then he had failed to mention crit confirming or rolled dice after. In the end, he cancelled two games in a row because we felt that he dreaded reading the second book of Legacy of Fire, since it was open ended, and we quit.
3) The third story is about the same guy who had DMd the Legacy of Fire game. He started playing in a WFRP game with us. He rolled up an extremely fat, extremely short, extremely ugly halfling with the profession of dung cart keeper or something. He decided to play this character as a halfling prostitute and constantly solicited the other characters and NPCs while making a loud screeching high pitched voice for her. Like clockwork, he derailed the game to screech on about absurd and obscene sexual things to people. When the game ran more than an hour or so, he would fall asleep. The game ended after my character tried to roll her unconcious body into the woods and bury her under a snow drift so that she would die and the player would get the point and play something less annoying. He survived, and pretty much the entire group decided to try something else on Tuesday nights.
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I had a couple of players kill a game once, many years ago, although I (as DM) was probably as much to blame as them – in retrospect I probably should have confronted them more strongly about the issues I and the rest of the group had with them, and/or kick them out of the game rather than ending it. Oh well, you live and learn...
These two players joined an existing game I was running. One guy was quite loud and overbearing, and took up far more of his fair share of table time, usually on ‘side missions’ that he wanted to do that did not involve the entire party nor address the ongoing themes of the campaign. Generally these side missions (that usually involved only him and the other ‘problem’ player) involved trying to become more powerful with various hare-brained schemes, such as stealing the spellbook of a powerful wizard in town (both these two played wizards), breaking into the local magic shop to steal magical items, setting up a fake ‘magic conference’ to dupe various mages in town out of their secrets, etc etc.
The other player was really quite, but every now and again would just burst out with utterly inane, stupid or dangerous actions or speeches for his character to perform; wandering off in the middle of a dungeon, insulting the captain of the city guard, casting Fly on himself and performing figure eights in the air above the town square, throwing his spell book at a monster etc.
Although I and the other characters tried to dissuade them from the worst of their plans, or mitigate the damage they caused, it really bogged down the games and also caused a lot of in-world problems – the group basically had to abandon their on-going quest and their base of operations due to the fallout from these two clowns actions.
The other players (and myself) got really fed up with these two. They wouldn’t take hints (or outright ‘can you guys stop this crap?’), but no one wanted to stand up and be the one to say ‘you have to go.’ People started missing games or not looking forward to the next session due to their crap and the direction the game had spiralled into. After a while I told everyone that I was cancelling the campaign ... then started a new game a couple of weeks later inviting everyone back except those two.
one of the most memorable killers was in the first game I ever took part in. We had a guy named mike that refused to bath, dressed like his charecter, freaked out the 3 women we had playing with us by speaking in medival speak AKA "my lady or fair maiden" trying to be chivolrous but failing miserably. Finally after I had killed his charecter for the 3rd time he got the point.
A few weeks later he was back saying he had been invited back and that he was told he was needed. No one would come clean as to telling him that lie, so we suffered through the game but after that campaign was over we moved the game location and game nights.
There is nothing wrong with charecter interaction and role playing some stuff out but this guy was just tooooo deep.
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Oh ya. Had one bring a campaign to a dead stop. We were playing in a homebrew setting (God trapped in a City) and the PCs were all in their early teens. There were in essence trying to keep said God trapped in the city. One player was playing the Psion of the group and had an issue for doing things that would get the party in trouble. It was manageable right up to the point where I drop a LE Intelligent Psionic item. It WAS to be a key to unlocking on path to keeping the God trapped. But it kept offering power in exchange for small favors. Well, Mr. Psion is basically drooling over it. (I should have seen this coming.)
The rest of the crew wants to seperate him from the item because they don't want a enthralled PC, especially the groups Psion. They were gonna lock the item up and keep it on the downlow until they could get enough clues to use it properly. The player freaks, takes the items and basically runs for the hills. The resulting chaos brings the game to a grinding halt as the PCs (who sorta trust each other. It was a dirty dozen kinda campaign) swore to kill him for his foolishness. Player vs Player angst...and Old TLC learns to keep his toys closer so the chest to players don't feel so entilted because of them.
Oh and Fool. Fellow GURPS GM here. Also, I've run Exalted, o/nWOD, M&M, you name it. But I'm a HERO junkie as well. Call me Mr. Generic system.
*holds up print copy of ICONS* Just saying. :)
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I've had this happen once or twice while playing in high school. The one time it happened even though the campaign was derailed it ended up turning into something even better then I could have planned.
It went something like this (note we were playing 2E AD&D at the time). The three PCs (a wizard, a psionicist, and a rogue) and an NPC (fighter) were investigating a bar/tavern, the last known location of a lycanthrope cultist who was wanted for murder, when things went a little haywire. The wizard decided that he had had enough of the occupants of the bar who were being very uncooperative so when one of the bar occupants (secretly a cultist) threatens to knife him he states that he is going to lightning bolt the room. The other two players (the psionicist and the rogue) both tell him no, he can't do that, it would be wrong, and that they would try to stop him. He decides to do it anyway. Needless to say he wins initiative and manages to lightning bolt the room destroying a third of the ground floor, setting the building on fire and killing over a dozen random people. The other two players decide that they are going to capture him and hand him over to the police. The rogue tries to knock him out with a club but misses as he was trying to only subdue him. The psionicist on the other hand doesn't hesitate and attacks scoring a critical. Since he declared that he was trying to cut off the wizards hand I decided that cutting off his hand was the result of the critical.
Needless to say the player of the wizard is a little miffed and annoyed. As the remaining occupants of the bar now try to rush him and people start shouting for the town guards he dives out the window and makes a run for it. Thus begins what became three sessions worth of playing with two of the characters trying to hunt down the third character who, as a 4th level wizard, is doing a spectacular job hiding and escaping even though he is missing a hand.
We ended up having a blast with the whole thing but that lightning bolt definitely ended that campaign. I was amazed at how well my players did at not meta-gaming even though they were all sitting at the same table and how immersed they were with their characters.
I was a DM in High school and we had a group of about 8-10 players but one of them wasn't really liked, he just hung around us (he was one of those people who just said the wrong thing at the wrong time).
Well, the problem was that the rest of the group used to attempt to kill his character - the only way he could survive was by me fudging dice rolls and giving him special items.
I simply couldn't kill him off because everyone was around level 8 and the Golden rule was that if you died then you would have to start a new character at level one; and I knew that if he started again as level 1 they were going to simply keep killing him (at least at level 8 thief he could, sort of, look after himself).
After a long period of this they finally got him - the following is a quote from another thread that i wrote -
Background: The player was very annoying and the amount of times others tried to kill him was incredible, but I always fudged the rolls and allowed this player to live - but they finally got him :)
Circumstances of Death: Thief swam under water (with the help of a ring) in order to get under the pirate ship that was sitting in the bay. The water was about 10 meters (30 feet) deep.
The thief finally gets under the ship and the other characters on shore, using a variety of magic spells and items, manage to make the water under the pirate ship disappear. So the pirate ship falls to the ocean floor on top of the PC - I allowed the PC to live with one HP (to the howls of derision from the other players).
But then the water rushed back in and and drowned the PC, the pirates and the Princess who was a hostage on the ship.
After this incident we quit the campaign and went to another game (forget which).
Must admit we all laugh about it now but it was so difficult being the DM for that group :(
Oh, man...
A while back, I ran a Top Secret campaign for my brother, sister, and a friend of my brother's. We'd played other games before, and the friend was a nice enough guy, and a fairly decent player... except for Top Secret.
He decided his spy was going to have an ego signature, which was fine, though he wanted to leave joints as his signature. That crisis was narrowly averted when my sister convinced him that it was A Bad Idea (tm) so he settled on roach clips. (Anyone seeing a theme here?)
I cut him some slack on that, and ruled that customs would not automatically jail him for carrying around a bunch of them.
On with the first mission. The agency sends the spies to an island to retrieve a defector. The spies are hiding in the woods, trying to get close to the compound, when they spot a guard leading a guard dog, neither of which had clearly not spotted the spies.
Agent Roach Clip breaks cover, runs up, and kicks the dog.
In the end, three agents were disavowed by the agency.
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Ooooh... Okay, here goes:
When we were running a 3.5 game, this guy (we'll call him Tyler), seemed hell-bent on derailing and "crashing" the campaign.
- When approached by an informant who would lead the party to the next part of the adventure for a price, he didn't negotiate with the guy or even threaten him. No checks of any kind. He just up-and-knifed the guy between the ribs (luckily, the party paladin was not present at the time, running an errand).
- Speaking of the paladin, he offered a "healing potion" to the aforementioned do-gooder, only to reveal (after it was consumed, naturally), that it was actually universal solvent.
- When a demonic invasion had begun and thousands of lives hung in the balance, he convinced the rest of the party to abandon the city, the people, and go do "something else" because "we've saved this city from disaster, like, ten times... They should learn to watch out for themselves."
- Released a chichimec from it's ancient prison but decided he didn't really feel like chasing it down and stopping it. It proceeded to annihilate a large population within the campaign setting.
Problem Player: "Screw those people. They should've had some sort of defense against that."
Me: "They did! The PRISON YOU JUST DESTROYED AND OPENED!"
The campaign was killed... Later, I discovered he just hated gaming with me and was DMing a campaign across town (with my old gaming group, who were under the impression I had decided to "take some time off from gaming"... which was untrue) to which I was not invited.
Now THAT, my friends, is a campaign-killing player.
Gotta say, we've never played like that. Everyone generally has one melee and one ranged weapon, and if it's not the "right" type, we just eat the DR. We're not walking weapon shops, if only because everyone but the fighter would be over-encumbered!I have had plenty of munchkins kill my campaigns. Turning my campaign into an arms race or trying to 'beat' me is the quickest way to find yourself short one GM.Ok CF just out of curiosity how do you define an "arms race" vs a upgrade that is needed for charecter survival.
Case in point: at 1-3rd lvl noone "needs" a magic weapon but by 4+ you had better have at the very least a +1 primary attack weapon, a silver or adamantine secondary weapon and you must have at all times all 3 types of damage(slash,bldg&peirc), and thats just for wizards!
Neither do we. Even our resident optimiser will not get so many weapons that he can overcome each possible combination of damage reduction in the game.
He can usually contribute well to fights even if he can't bypass the DR and has to punch through it.
- When a demonic invasion had begun and thousands of lives hung in the balance, he convinced the rest of the party to abandon the city, the people, and go do "something else" because "we've saved this city from disaster, like, ten times... They should learn to watch out for themselves."
- Released a chichimec from it's ancient prison but decided he didn't really feel like chasing it down and stopping it. It proceeded to annihilate a large population within the campaign setting.
Problem Player: "Screw those people. They should've had some sort of defense against that."
Me: "They did! The PRISON YOU JUST DESTROYED AND OPENED!"
That sounds so familiar.
We had a similar incident. It didn't destroy the campaign, but ruin the weekend for a couple of people, and ended with the character in question being banned from the game and the player quitting.
They were defending a small town (which had their base of operations for some time now and the scene of several adventures so far) against a warband of giants.
Now, the guy played an elf fighter - and the elf fighter was arrogant, "I'm better than humans". This guy had a thing for playing supremist elves. Or annoying paladins who went all b$!++&$ with the code, using it as an excuse to annoy everyone.
So he kept making disparaging remarks about this crappy town that couldn't defend itself against a few giants (note that it's a small town with a population of just over 1000, and no higher-level characters. And the party had a bit of a hard time fighting that warband themselves!)
So far so good, so the guy likes to talk trash about people. He had a sarcastic wit in real life, and he could usually make it funny. Nobody thought anything of it.
Until a we find out that the giants are on the warpath - not just a few of them, but a whole army who will come down from the mountains (it was a couple hundred stone giants and half again as many lesser giants to boot, or something along those lines). They wanted to flood the whole area, killing everything.
The leaders of a nearby city (the closest the region had to a capital, as it was mostly unclaimed frontier wilderness) find out about it (the party told them) and they ask the party to travel to the Giants' headquarters to kill their leadership - hopefully to stop the invasion.
Everyone's OK with that - they're adventurers, right - except mister better-than-though. He goes completely off the reservation, has a rant about this worthless city that doesn't have an anti-giant strike force handy (this might have been partially because he knew Forgotten Realms best of all, a setting with lots of high-level characters everywhere, but the world we played in wasn't like that) and bitterly complains that he has to risk his life for some idiots again, idiots who deserve to die for not being powerful enough to stand up to giants. He then goes on to make outrageous demands: He is to be ennobled for this (note that the city doesn't have any nobles) and of course will want mountains of gold. All of this because he wouldn't work for a pittance, as he could get rich far easier and without the risk of being killed by giants!
I'm still not sure what provoked this outbreak, but the game came to a screeching halt. We stopped playing, and I was pretty pissed. Another player apparently was annoyed about this, too, because he lashed out at me in an email (though we resolved that).
In the end, I decided that the character was gone. Out of game I stated that he was a disruption and not welcome any more. In the game, the city of course refused his demands and in fact told him to get lost. Another adventuring band stepped up and told the city that they'd gladly do the job - without asking for compensation - or alternately support the rest of the group of they wanted to go through with the thing regardless (the other group wasn't as powerful and famous as the players' party). The disruptive character's family was very upset about this, told the city that they wouldn't dream of demanding to be made nobles, and condemned their son's aberrant, racist behaviour (since in my campaign, elves and dwarves aren't racist as a rule).
I further added a new rule for characters: While I don't have a fixed alignment restriction, all characters must be adventurers who WANT to go adventuring (as opposed to being merchants or others who go the slow, boring and safe way to being rich) and have a vested interest in the general storyline (i.e. if the campaign is about keeping a certain country save, the characters need to be attached to that country somehow)
Of course, I told them that they would never really want for treasure (I run a very relaxed campaign in that regard) and that their deeds would be rewarded appropriately without them having to hold the world ransom.
The player in question refused to play a character with such restrictions, as that would go against his sense of freedom in character creation, and since I wouldn't let go of the new ruling, quit the group.
The game continued, and when the guy's visiting (he's going to university and lives there, since it's quite a ways away, but he's usually back home during semester break) he usually plays a session or two in my campaigns (taking over the GMPC I tend to run)
KaeYoss, I am just glad to know someone can relate.
I simultaneously cringe and feel a thrill whenever I see another of these threads. The thrill comes from knowing that for about eight years on and off (and on again), I GM'd for the King of All Disruptive Players. A man whose tales of disruption, outrageous, awful behavior, and pure s**t-headery left people speechless back in the 3.5 days on the Wizards forums. I can own any thread like this with him. I can think of four campaigns his bad behavior ended just off the top of my head.
But I also cringe because I know how easily he can hijack something like this. Just like he hijacked all of those games. I could go on all day. Every small to great bad habit, bad idea, and bad behavior you all can name your worst of worst players as having done, he was a regular practitioner of. But his real talent resided in going above and beyond to use his disruptive antics to really destroy friendships.
So, after first composing a twenty-paragraph highlight reel of a collection of his shenanigans, I have decided to delete all of that and try to distill him to his essence in just a couple of sentences. Maybe this one out-of-game behavior will hip you all to who he was both in game and out:
He regularly manipulated the other players on the phone and in email about the schedule to try to get them to change things around so they would show up on the wrong days and be unavailable on the right days. Because he thought it was funny.
People took off work for no reason and babysitters had to be sent home. So he could be entertained.
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He regularly manipulated the other players on the phone and in email about the schedule to try to get them to change things around so they would show up on the wrong days and be unavailable on the right days. Because he thought it was funny.People took off work for no reason and babysitters had to be sent home. So he could be entertained.
I have actually become so mad that I have ascended into a spirit, an avenging angel, whose entire being is composed of pure rage.
Farewell, humans.