So how did he avoid having his ass handed to him for being such a selfish antisocial prick?
I wonder the same. He must have been terrified of his car being keyed, his tires being slashed, his house being egged, and so on.
I also remember a story I heard from people I play with. I did not play in that game, but they tell me that this one jackass destroyed a whole campaign. The GM wasn't really assertive, what made things worse.
It was 2e, they played an evil campaign, and non-standard races were possible. The guy plays a minotaur, and apparently managed to create a character no other character in the party would have been able to best. Maybe if they teamed up, but that wasn't easy in the evil party.
So he was the king. And he kept all the treasure. All of it. He justified it by saying he played his character, which was greedy.
The GM was unable to do anything about it (not a very assertive guy) so the whole campaign died.
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Board eated my post, so here's the short and skinny of it.
We had a rough player, was notorious for nose-diving campaigns the moment he got a little bored; would hold up entire sessions doing solo side-quests(while complaining when it came back to the rest of us), attacked other player's characters with little or no provocation, etc. I know I've made some posts around here regarding the guy.
Outside of gaming he's a good friend, which is why he was even allowed to our tables. One day, in our current game, his antics started flaring up again, and the DM stopped the game. We had a discussion about why the campaign was derailing, and eventually we(more me really) just unloaded and vented our frustrations at his dick-headed evil ways.
Things are going 100% better since. I don't think he meant to step on anyone's toes per se, as he'd say, he was just "playing his character." Once he saw how frustrated and fed up the rest of the table was, he's toned it down a lot.
I definitely think we could've handled the situation with a lot more civility, but the results speak for themselves. He's a great friend, and a good role-player, just sometimes you gotta step up and say "Dude, WTF. Cut that crap out."
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
This story reminds me of a PvP run in I had with the evil guy in my previous post. We were playing epic-level Eberron, using the Paragon Paths WotC put out right before 4e came out, like a sample of the paths hting they used. Everyone in the party got a path(legendary, unkillable warrior, demigod, immortal, etc.). This campaign was planned to stop at level 30, with the party gaining a level after each adventure. So, there was a definitive climax we were building towards.
Well, me and evil-guy both took the demigod path. I was Neutral Good, and he was Neutral Evil. The DM thought it'd be cute if there was some mini god-war at the climax of the campaign. Nobody else in the party had to compete with anyone for their paragon path, just us demigods. There was no story justification for it, he just secretly told us outside of gaming that there cold be only one demigod, and we'd have to fight for it. He let me in on it, but told me it wouldn't come into play until after we were level 30. Knowing I was playing a Good character, and as a player I'm fairly non-confrontational with party members, he knew I wouldn't metagame around it too much.
We were around level 23, and had just finished a massive, grueling battle with around 20 high CR devils. Resources were exhausted, HP were low, and we were cleaning up after the fight, when evil-guy starts casting buff spells. We look around confused, asking "are there more of them?" No answer. Keeps buffing. A few rounds later, he attacks me. I tried to put up a good fight, but by this point my character was too depleted and he was fully buffed and healed. He destroyed me.
Apparently, the DM also told him about the ensuing demigod challenge, but accidentally forgot to tell him the part about it happening after level 30. The DM apologized profusely for it, but it was too late. I wasn't going to bother getting resurrected, because he'd just kill me again.
We had one player who tended to derail campaigns for his own entertainment.
In a Villains and Vigilantes campaign, he brought in a character with invisibility powers. Rather than engage in any of the investigation in the ongoing caper, while the heroes were meeting with the FBI, he had his character invisibly hang out in the women's locker room. That was all he had interest in doing. Made me wonder why he even showed up to play.
His most, uh, interesting character was probably Flower, the cannibal dwarf. He had this tendency to burn down orphanages in whatever town he was in.
It didn't help that a friend of his came into the campaign around that time as a 60 year old, 4th level thief who used to take sheep up to his room at the inn.
And we wondered why our DM always brought along a large bottle of Tylenol to the games...
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.
I really hope the schedule mess up thing was the last straw, I'd probably resort to violence after somehting like that. If you allowed someone like that back to game after something like that, then it's your own fault.
I got a few maybe close to that, though not as much of a logistical nightmare(babysitters are hard to find). I once gamed with a psychopath who would blackmail people into hanging out with her, and used gaming as an excuse to spy on people.
We've all met some crazy people that do some crazy stuff, but this girl was so bad all we could was back away and ban her from any further contact with any of us. Having 5 different fully fleshed out online personalities(with pictures, comments from the other "personalities" with full conversations, etc) was just the tip of the iceberg for this psycho.
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I once gamed with a psychopath who would blackmail people into hanging out with her, and used gaming as an excuse to spy on people.We've all met some crazy people that do some crazy stuff, but this girl was so bad all we could was back away and ban her from any further contact with any of us. Having 5 different fully fleshed out online personalities(with pictures, comments from the other "personalities" with full conversations, etc) was just the tip of the iceberg for this psycho.
Wow, just...wow.
I feel blessed to not have had some of the issues you guys have dealt with. My feel rather tame, but I'll go ahead and bring them up.
Example 1: While I managed to keep the game going (the player left). His dad had played AD&D with him but was a pretty cruel DM. The player was indoctrinated to the attitude of "loot everything" and "every man for himself." The worst example of this was when he purposefully left the group in a dungeon exploring and ran into a Will-O-Wisp that attacked him. Another character went to find him and caught up to him at that point. As soon as the other player arrived he left the character to loot a nearby room. His IC reasoning was that "My character just thought it was a moving light that hurt you if you got near it." This claim was based on his playing a barbarian.
The other character yelled for help and the rest of the party came to help but too late. The character died (worse yet this character was already a replacement for one that died 2 sessions before). The party struggled against the creature through really bad luck. Once the barbarian was finished looting he came out of the room and killed it in one round. This is just one example.
Also before you ask the barbarian never attacked the Will-O-Wisp at first, only the other player hit it when he ran off. This is why it continued to attack him.
Example 2: This player is normally not bad, but there was one campaign where he helped tear it apart. The entire campaign took place in a large dungeon and this character's goal was apparently to open as many rooms as possible at a time. He'd purposefully go around provoking fights when the party needed rest or could have gotten strategic advantage over the enemies.
I've had other poor players but these two instances were the worst.
So my wife told the DM after his second session that she wasn't having fun and was going to drop out. He immediately stated the campaign was over.
Which one is the campaign-killing player?
Sounds like another sad story of a double suicide. :p
Board eated my post, so here's the short and skinny of it.
We had a rough player, was notorious for nose-diving campaigns the moment he got a little bored; would hold up entire sessions doing solo side-quests(while complaining when it came back to the rest of us), attacked other player's characters with little or no provocation, etc. I know I've made some posts around here regarding the guy.
Outside of gaming he's a good friend, which is why he was even allowed to our tables. One day, in our current game, his antics started flaring up again, and the DM stopped the game. We had a discussion about why the campaign was derailing, and eventually we(more me really) just unloaded and vented our frustrations at his dick-headed evil ways.
Things are going 100% better since. I don't think he meant to step on anyone's toes per se, as he'd say, he was just "playing his character." Once he saw how frustrated and fed up the rest of the table was, he's toned it down a lot.
I definitely think we could've handled the situation with a lot more civility, but the results speak for themselves. He's a great friend, and a good role-player, just sometimes you gotta step up and say "Dude, WTF. Cut that crap out."
Yeah, I remember that night. It was going good ... until that last session where we almost had a complete TPK, but that was the GM's fault. Seven nimblewrights? Oof.
So my wife told the DM after his second session that she wasn't having fun and was going to drop out. He immediately stated the campaign was over.
Which one is the campaign-killing player?
I seem to recall you alluding this somewhere else and reading it at another site....
You mean this.
Yup. That's the one.
Bearing in mind that I DM and play across multiple systems, am an admitted smut-mongering perv, and yet still attempt to have some modicum of tact, I can safely say that I've killed games on accident by saying the wrong thing, and ended a game or two (and stopped one or two before they began, as per another thread of mine) without deliberately attempting to be That Guy™, but my most shameful/amusing situation was due to a convention, and a sort of 'Iron GM' competition, and the system was GURPS...
Spoiler-ing for heresy, sacrilege, and utterly wrong (yet perfectly thematic) results.
I honestly view it like winning a game of Munchkin by Divine Intervention; it was its own reward, and all abuse that came thereafter was totally worth it.
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I played with a guy who by no means meant to be disruptive, but his reasoning skills were so sub-par that they frequently caused problems for DM and fellow player alike.
At one point, 5 minutes into a new campaign the party was speaking to a town guard who offered to give them directions. The player's response "I'd like to join the thieve's guild. Do you know where it is?"
I once ended a game because of a player....but honestly it was not that player's fault.
Now I have friends who have friends I just don't like and have friends who hate each other. I just remain neutral about them. But I was running a game for a group of friends at my one friend house. Than suddenly my friend's friend who I dislike was joining the game. I don't like saying 'I hate x'. I just ignore they exist or just tolerate them at a party or get together. But I could not run a game with this person playing...and did not want to cause issues so I just made up a excuse and ended the campaign.
So I guess I was 'the player' that ended the game.
My fault... Shadowrun I allowed a player to base his character off the Smoking Man from the XFiles... He sold the team out to about two different companies that they had run against and one or two more companies that were interested in something they had been paid to "liberate" (by a dragon unknown to them). It all ended in a stand off in a car park, while team was calling in favours from street gangs and the Yaks to back them up the "Smoking Man" took the Atlantean statue over to the Atzlan company reps... the team was broken their covers blown a dragon was pissed off with them... so we wound the game up and started on D&D...
When I was younger and back in high school, we often had three "solid" slots and a guest slot that some friend that was curious about RPGs would fill. We were playing an Oriental Adventures 1st edition campaign, as a clan of ninja.
Our "guest" player decided that ninja are killers, so he should kill every other ninja, while we were in the middle of a mission. My ninja was the last one he had to kill before he completely killed all of his clan members, but he failed to sneak up on me.
My bushi/ninja hunted down the yakuza/ninja and killed him, then retired and became a shukenja, just waiting for anyone from the old clan to come by and try and kill me. At least that's how we ended the campaign, since we never even attempted to get back into the campaign after that debacle.
When I graduated and got engaged to my (now) ex-wife, she wanted to spend time with me and see what my hobbies were, and she played the party cleric. She then did her best to always be the center of attention, and my friend all allowed their characters to die or tried to heal naturally instead of asking for her help.
I really didn't want to let it sink in that my buddies were having a hard time finding time to game because they figured the fiance was going to be part of the party from this point on.
Epic Level (35th) 3.0/3.5 D&D 1-shot. (The Quicksilver Hourglass from Dungeon 133? that a friend 'modified' for 35th level)
We worked on characters for MONTHS. There was a lot of flaring tempers, huge egos, arguing over rules, banning of characters abilities(mid-combat!), banning of character items(also mid-combat), and a huge mess of serious powergaming. We inched forward through this adventure once a week over the course of a month with great losses.
The DM out and told us that if we traveled back through a gate, which was what we HAD to do to advance the adventure, the dragon waiting on the other side would TPK us in the 1st round. Nope, no chance to even try, it would just happen.
On the plus side, I learned you can REALLY annoy a DM that limits your money spending by using cheaper ones effectively. And that Dust Of Choking and Sneezing is NOT an item that players, even at 35th level, are allowed to buy or carry around. :D
Does it count of the player in question was the DM at the time?
I was playing in a campaign that had been going on for about a year, where everyone took turns DMing. We had begun at level 1, and by this point we were all level 15 or 16, and the entire campaign was this huge collaboration between all of us- every character had some amazing backstory or side-story that another player had expanded upon during their turns DMing, and everything about the campaign felt like all of us had our part in building it. (One player discovered halfway through the campaign that he had a hidden library under his home that was put there by an ancient wizard, another player owned a bar in our town and that was the starting point of most of our adventures, my character had a cohort that was sent to him by his church for protection after a particularly nasty adventure, as well as a village he saved in a solo adventure that none of the other characters knew about, and so on.) It was great, and it seemed like it was only going to get better.
Except one of the players was notorious for running very, very nasty and scary adventures that always seemed like there was no way for us to win, but we'd always pull through in the end. Well, it was her turn to DM, and it started with a bang- my cohort turned on me, and suddenly our entire city was covered with this black cloud that made it almost impossible for any spells to be cast. Not only that, but demons were all over the place (many of them invisible), including a sixty-foot-tall, eight-armed snake dude wielding a greataxe in each arm. We were almost dead just from a few hours of wandering the town, due to all of the random demons, and by that point, any of the civilians that weren't killed outright were imprisoned and would probably become demonic slaves- and since we were so weak (and I, the group's cleric, could barely get off one spell in three), it honestly truly seemed like there was nothing we could do, short of walking up to the big snake guy and bowing before him. In the end, the only thing we were able to do was teleport out of town, the town we had spent the entire campaign building (in-game and out-of-game), to be completely destroyed. After we left, we were contacted by some sort of extraplanar entity who told us that we were being hunted by some... thing, and our only option was to hide in a secret demi-plane for however many months or years it took for it to stop chasing us.
So... in one session, the campaign fell apart. We talked about it after that point, and none of us could find the motivation to keep playing- in fact, one player just couldn't find any reason why his character would do anything but commit suicide for having abandoned everyone he knew and loved back in our town. (We ret-conned it so that he stayed there and went down fighting instead of fleeing with us.) The DM had some sort of side-adventure planned, but I just couldn't see how she could, without any notice or discussion between the rest of the DMs, come in and destroy everything we'd done up until that point in the campaign. It sucked.
Don't get me wrong- I liked her as a DM and as a player, but I've never understood what the heck she was thinking.
Hmm this brings back some memories with a problem player in old group of mine.
A woman in her early 30's who:
1.) A PC RP'd his descent into Evil. This upset her so much she went and cried under a desk for an hour.
2.) A GM tries to run a wraith game, and she has annoying interjections for every PC's prelude and gets into arguments over stupid things she knows nothing about. The GM finally raises his voice his voice at her (NO IT's NOT!), she runs out of the room gets in her car and drives home.
Both of these actions killed the respective campaign.
This was in addition to multiple other annoying behaviors that eventually led to her being kicked out of the group.
This was in addition to multiple other annoying behaviors that eventually led to her being kicked out of the group.
Eventually???
This was in addition to multiple other annoying behaviors that eventually led to her being kicked out of the group.Eventually???
Oh God... She was totally enabled by another player in the group and actually became worse over time. There was this whole attitude of "Well she's mentally unstable so if we kick her out maybe she'll go kill herself." I finally didn't care after 1.5 yrs of gaming with this woman. Admittedly, it wasn't like this everynight, she was at best, a +0 bonus to the group. TOok out as much as she added in. After a while, she dampened the fun when she came because we were always on eggshells waiting for her to have a blow out.
One? That's our whole damned group sadly. Though it has made for some interesting experiences. As a Jedi I set internal security systems to stun and blasted the hell out of my crew in revenge for lighting issues of all things.
My friend managed to unleash ballistic missiles on my friends while they were attempting to save Luke and ended up killing like all but 2 players who weren't on planet with them.
Another game they strapped tons of thermal detonators on the bottom of our ship for no reason, called us on the radio, and said bye before blowing us to hell.
In a feng shui game the old master convinced our senile killer that they were gay lovers... that game died quickly,
I stripped a player via fire (GM), in my defense, this girl got naked in near every game we played in at the drop of a hat, so it wasn't like it wasn't going to happen anyways.
But yeah, my group, hoo boy do we f%$% things up, hell, I just barbecued the frog/rogue via bomb damage a few weeks back,
Basically, our whole damn group is made of "those" players, we're just too freaking goofy, and while it's hilarious at times. The sheer number of games we blew up speaks for itself.
Or group has had one DM utterly collapse his own game on numerous occasions. After each instance (not getting into the details) he sulks and plays under another DM. But, he waits and drops hints that he wants to run. Then he drops more hints, or tries to get another group on different days.
Each time we've given in and he'll do just fine for a few sessions. Then he'll introduce this "little tweak of a houserule" or we'll get into a group vs. DM arguement and the campaign will crash about 7-10 sessions in. He argues that "I'm DM here, it's my rules!" and we promptly demote him. He still can't see what the other DM does differently to keep the group having fun.
He had a separate group on different days that recently up and relocated their game. And, now he's dropping hints again. It's mind-numbing!
Realized that I started the thread, but haven't put any input in it. I think I've been reluctant because our campaign killer has SO many stories.
After the session, we asked him why he decided to first steal from me, and then attack me. His answer, was that he was using it as a way to introduce himself to the party. I moved away after that, but it was a telling start.
He was the only person I've ever played with that was so completely self-centered and never worked as a part of the group. That and a constant one-upper to the levels of ridiculous, he would make up completely improbable stories where he was always one step better or had it one step worse than the original teller of a personal story.
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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...
I think I'm just now reaching this realization myself. Players shouldn't be 'trying to survive'. I tune my encounters carefully, but if the players think things are too hard they should talking to me rather than upping the ante by turning up the character optimization. That said, some players are always looking for the next level of power.
If you nerf the powergamer he will just quit or look for another avenue to do his thing. There isn't anything wrong with that style of play, it just isn't one that I'm interested in playing alongside or DMing for. Rather than try to force him to change (or adapting the campaign to fit him) often the best solution to not play with him at all.
The players in my group have a nasty habit of ruining the campaign by killing the BBEG too early. And there's only so many back-ups and revived people you can toss at them before it becomes a comedy routine.
Let's see the game that got ruined for me was because of the GM, not the players per se. The GM was a huge fan of the Dragonlance setting, nothing wrong with that, and proceeded to create his own custom setting with a lot of influences from Dragonlance. I had played in a few games of this setting, and time travel was used as a plot device around several major events, which we all thought was kind of cool. Problem was the gm didn't like giving the players money, magic items, spontaneous spellcasters, evocation spells, or teamwork. Come the last campaign we were playing in of this, we had moved through the campaign, unraveling a lot of the time travelling plot and figuring out who and where the big bad guy was. One session before the final fight of the final campaign to end the overall big bad time travelling bad guy from every campaign the gm just stopped running. He wasn't ready to accept what we had done, we had replaced his epic gmpc's with plot levels of armor, we had become the main characters in his story which we were supposed to be in the background, moving key components into place for the gmpc's to succeed. The gm was not ready to accept defeat.
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Well thats perfectly acceptable in skyrim.I played with a guy who by no means meant to be disruptive, but his reasoning skills were so sub-par that they frequently caused problems for DM and fellow player alike.
At one point, 5 minutes into a new campaign the party was speaking to a town guard who offered to give them directions. The player's response "I'd like to join the thieve's guild. Do you know where it is?"
Or Ankh-Morpork.
One? Most of the groups I played in were cool, didn't ruin games in too memorable a way, but there's this one group. I've ranted/vented about them before on the boards. I could easily fill a many-paged essay on these people.... But I'll just sum up the group and detail only a few of the things they did.
This group was full of rejects. Literally. These were the people who were so disruptive, egocentric, *insert other such words here*, that they were known by name at my LGS. No one there would play with them. Ever. Some of them were kicked out of the established groups, and one player was actually even banned from the store. Unfortunately, seeing as our other friends from TCGs had closed off RPG groups my fiance and I couldn't get into, we wound up playing with this group through two of said friends who were participating in one game.
Now, I've raved about this GM before. He's a fantastic GM, comes up with great stories, plots, pretty generous with character's personal development, and over all is pretty cool. Except for the whole "you can't use Godless Healing anymore, and you can't retrain it, just because you used a common exclamation which included a deity's name" (In this case, something to the affect of "By Gorum's Rusty Armor!")....
Make him a player, and he hijacks campaigns. Always, ALWAYS trying to hijack some ship, and go sailing to turn the save-the-planes campaigns into "Hi ho! Hi ho! Off to pirating I go!", even stating he would leave the party behind to do so. Then gets pissed when someone says "Sure, but be prepared to roll up a new character since the campaign isn't leaving the party".
Of course, then there was the thrown-together campaign I had to throw together because we took the hour drive, only to find out that the DM didn't feel like running (after being told not twenty minutes before we left the game was good to go). No one else felt like running either. I go through, contrive up some lost-island game in which the party got stranded on. This guy goes and plays a Tian Min Samurai, who, since the player takes all the old Samurai tales as fact, that all samurai who were slighted beheaded anyone who showed even the slightest disrespect, so on and so forth. Acted ultra-entitled over the small Tian section of the little driftwood town, demanded payment for his crafting services, and generally acted like he owned the place....
Fine, I could run with that. Where I drew the line was when, as the only other full time GM, I was trying to work out a half-lich creature with him behind closed doors (I hadn't DMed in years before this point so naturally, sought advice), he launched into his character background, and started trying to 'counsel' my 'rudderless' campaign to a good story after the island arc, which became little more than spot light on his character to go find his family's lost blades... Which were both near-artifact level blades, and he had stated his character would leave the campaign if it seemed like it wasn't going to go along that route.
Combine this with a player who's always changing her character, never writes out her spells known (and gets pissy when you ask for spells known/prepared), and always tries to have her character be the spotlight of the campaign... For example, she got pissy when RotRL was being ran, and my fiance's half-elf rogue had a high charisma thanks to being bluff-centric, and thus, my fiance's character was Foxglove's interest. She wanted to kill off her 12 cha cleric, and build a 3rd party Priest... But with a 20 charisma (compared to my fiance's 18). The campaign ended shortly thereafter due to... Things, mostly her "hating herself for such a stupid mistake". This was the game in which the GM told me Drag and Reposition required the grapple condition mid combat, after telling me my Maneuver Master focusing on trip/drag/reposition was cool, and drag/reposition worked the way I read it out of the book before game start.
There was also a problem player who never paid attention until it was time to roll dice, who insisted on getting pissy because he wanted to play a ninja, which would have caused problems with the Samurai. A player who lets whatever happens OOC affect his IC (such as ending one campaign when he was getting pissed off when his character, who had absorbed half of a deific artifact and become the centerpiece for the campaign, kept getting targeted by the deity's inquisitors, said 'f&#& it all' and derailed the game).
The other two of this group weren't that bad, but they derailed games more through IDGAF characters than any specific reason...
Just.... A lot of problems. Mental instability (officially diagnosed), hypocritical buddhist philosophy (I'm a buddhist, I've suffered everything you've ever suffered only worse, and look how I turned out! I'M @(*%ING CENTERED AND AT PIECE WHY CAN'T YOU BE EMOTIONLESS LIKE ME!?), and just full of "Special snowflake spot light hoggers" as someone commented at one point.
Finally had enough when the GM and one of the others start b!+&@ing about my fiance in the kitchen (we were in the living room, wasn't even a full wall and door between them, in a tiny apartment), over the fact that she created a character for a super hero system the GM was testing out, was OK'd, then when we get there "No you can't, core races only" (despite letting the jealous female play an aasimar), and she got upset over it. Confronted them, and they started going on how it was our fault that we overheard them complaining over my fiance getting upset she couldn't play the character she had been looking forward to. Resulted in the DM blowing up and shouting to leave our baggage at the door (including my fiance's bi-polar disorder), blah blah blah... When they do nothing BUT drag all their baggage into the game. This was the guy who decided he was going to hit his mid life crisis, get attracted to one of the other player's fiance, and drop anything and everything (including running the games) whenever she had the slightest little problem, while telling us to "leave our baggage at the door".
Lets see... No, that's pretty much it. Last group we tried was for a meetup group, and we only attended one session with the open PF game (which was NOT Pf, with all the house rules that were not explained, and... I b*#*!ed about this previously, I shan't here)... If there were other examples, I can't think of them in comparison.
So, yeah. Usually, there was only one or two that ruined a given game (over a 2 year span, we probably started about 10 different campaigns, at an average of every Saturday, minus a few ), but everyone in that group did it. Between in-game and out of game... I can see why no one else would play with 'em... Last I heard, they got kicked out of their apartment (all of them were living together, I might add), for being disruptive, among other things.
I have been that player.
My only defense is "it needed killin."
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I (sadly) admit to having (intentionally) broken a game before. It's not my proudest moment*. I think that it really almost always comes down to differing desires and expectations. My mantra has become, in the near decade since that happened, "communicate with your players - sit down and have honest talks with the people you are playing with."
We had a single player who I eventually banned from my tables... and I am one of the most forgiving GMs I know. This was during the 4E D&D Living Forogtten Realms campaign, so it wasn't like the player could kill the campaign... but he sure made it not fun for the rest of the party.
He was known for playing characters who served themselves and only themselves. He didn't get the 4E system. The very first character he played, was a 4E Ranger (from the PHB, not Essentials). The minute he found out about Double Strike, he was in love. Up until he discovered that the Ranger had no self-healing ability.
He tried a number of characters. The one that caused the TPK was the cleric that refused to enter combat, refused to heal anyone except for himself, and generally was a complete obstacle to the party. The party entered into combat and tried to get him to help, but he refused to even do so much as drop a healing word on critically-injured teammates. They all died except for him... until the monsters found him, whereupon the GM called it a TPK by fiat.
The last straw, for me, was during a low-level mod set in Waterdeep. The situation was an ambush in a theater. He was playing a paladin, and had pretty much shown his usual colors, up until the archers on the balconies started up. He panicked, and dived into the nearest cover he could find: the orchestra pit. Where he hid until the fight was over. In the meantime other characters managed to withstand the arrows, chase through the theaters to melee the archers and eventually drop them.
He had to leave the session shortly after that, whereupon I called the game and said we'd try again... which we did, minus the trouble player. And a much better time was had by all.
We had several people try to help the guy understand the rules and set him up with characters that suited his playstyle, but it seemed like all he wanted was an invincible tank with the largest bow in existence.
I know he went to the PFS group in town, but they got tired of his antics there too. I don't know if he got banned there, but I do know many of the PFS players in town refuse to play with him.
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Well he has a point.
- 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."
I think I've got a good term by which we can start referring to PCs with that attitude: "Bishop."
Neverwinter Nights 2, anyone?
I've been in a couple games where the DM self-destructed the game (part of the reason I prefer to DM now), but only one where a player managed it.
First session of the last AD&D game I ever played. The DM it's a long-time friend, and I didn't know any of the other players. After the first big battle, we find a treasure pile, which the DM randomly rolls up. Due to identification of magic items being much trickier in 2e than now, we decide to divide up the loot without any idea of what it does. I got a ring with a couple wishes, and one of the other players got a belt. A cursed belt. A "makes you a genderless androgene" belt. The player in question became furious. So, feeling nice, I gave him the ring with one wish left. He uses it to set up an endless time loop (wished time back a few minutes to before he put on the belt, but didn't include remembering the belt's effect), thus locking the game into a never ending cycle. Sure, the DM could have ruled it didn't work, but after the big tantrum, I don't think anybody felt like continuing.