This is a weird hobby we participate. As such (and I hope I'm not losing anyone here) it tends to attract weird people, who are commonly
1) Intelligent
2) Creative
3) Lacking in social skills
As well as often having pretty powerful (or at least loud) personalities.
Tonight the group I'm in had a very volatile personality clash over something very stupid and made the regular host of the game not want to play any more. When another player and I were talking about it, we couldn't think of any game we had participated in where clashes like these to greater or lesser extents did not occur, outside of the really early years.
Are we the exception? Are the rest of you gents all functional social butterflies? And if not, if this sort of stupid conflict is unavoidable, is it really worth putting up with?
If you are asking are we bound to run into someone(s) we would prefer not to game with, and it causing drama then I think the answer is that it is very likely.
If you are asking will every group have at least one large issue then I say that is not inevitable. I have been in groups with people whose personalities were very different from mine but for the most part we enjoyed the same type of game.
That's a hell of a leap. I'm not talking about neckbearded teenagers downing orange soda and taping their glasses together, I'm talking about real, measurable trends in the people I see gaming inside and outside my group. Nor am I excluding myself from this trend. What I've noticed is people with strong personalities that often don't mix well, and as I was not the only one to come to the same question, I posted here to see if the general population had the same issues.
If you guys tend to have more functional relationships within your gaming group, then truly, the more power to you. But if everyone else sees a similar trend of in-group conflict over pointless garbage that ends up being as destructive as it was last night (two grown-ass men almost brought to tears) then I might lose faith in the hobby.
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I have some friends I know from outside of gaming, who also like to play games. Sometimes we try out new games (or teach each other games that only one of us knows) together, like Dominant Species or Smallworld or Pandemic or Ascension or... you get the idea.
Everyone's always working together. Usually one person has the rulebook, but everyone gets involved in trying to get the rules right: people remind each other of things it looks like they forgot, they ask if something doesn't look right, and so forth. Everyone happily accepts this communal back-and-forth about the rules, because we're all there to have fun.
If I were to respond to this common practice in the manner I've seen people on these boards suggest to GMs whose players questioned them, I'd be seen as a child having a tantrum. Conversely, I've seen people on the boards mention rules-related behavior comparable to the above except it was at a Pathfinder table, and they get crucified as an entitled, GM-hating rules lawyer.
There is a certain demographic of the Pathfinder playerbase that is deeply dysfunctional, in ways that are very much NOT universal to all players of games. If you're starting to wonder about your own group, have some friends over who aren't serious gamers and have a "game night" (yes, non-hardcore people have those too) and play a board game or two. Pay close attention to how people interact with each other. What you see may be enlightening.
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This is a weird hobby we participate. As such (and I hope I'm not losing anyone here) it tends to attract weird people, who are commonly
1) Intelligent
2) Creative
3) Lacking in social skills
As well as often having pretty powerful (or at least loud) personalities.Tonight the group I'm in had a very volatile personality clash over something very stupid and made the regular host of the game not want to play any more. When another player and I were talking about it, we couldn't think of any game we had participated in where clashes like these to greater or lesser extents did not occur, outside of the really early years.
Are we the exception? Are the rest of you gents all functional social butterflies? And if not, if this sort of stupid conflict is unavoidable, is it really worth putting up with?
Yes I agree,
It can bring out the worst in people.
It improves as you get older though, because you make friends with non-gamers and teach them how to play. And it's a different social climate from when I started playing 3 decades ago.
There is less stigma attached to it, as it has become normalised by the rise in popularity of rpg style video games, the t.v shows big bang theory and community. So you do get different sorts of people playing, without the unstable and antagonising personalty types.
Stick it out, the sun will shine again for you. It did for me.
Edit Stick it out with the hobby, just great axe cleave the current gaming group if things don't improve.
My personal opinion only, based on only my experiences:
Are we the exception? Are the rest of you gents all functional social butterflies? And if not, if this sort of stupid conflict is unavoidable, is it really worth putting up with?
I have no idea if you're the exception or not, but yes, my group at least are all functional social butterflies.
If your experience is how you describe, then NO, it is absolutely NOT worth putting up with. At all. In any way. Ever.
But, that's just my experience - to paraphrase another poster above: player conflict is definitely not the norm in my experience.
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Actually it is human conflict is inevitable, as good as you and I may get along, we might as well accept that conflict will at some point arise between us, we just need to agree that we will work through the difficulty and learn something new from the process.
Though it's also important to remember that "conflict is inevitable" is not the same as "behavior X is acceptable".
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The "everyone else" you're drawing from is from messageboard posters, who are by definition, the crankiest, least socialized, and most vocal, segment of the any population, by my estimate, they are at most, one percent of the Paizo gaming community.
If you guys tend to have more functional relationships within your gaming group, then truly, the more power to you. But if everyone else sees a similar trend of in-group conflict over pointless garbage that ends up being as destructive as it was last night (two grown-ass men almost brought to tears) then I might lose faith in the hobby.
On the other hand, some of the worst table behavior I've seen was in local gameplay, not on the boards. Also, some of the worst (in my opinion) of the stuff on the messageboards has been written by people I've personally gamed with.
The people who post on the messageboards are still real people, and somebody somewhere is/was at a table with them.
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In 30 years of gaming, I've had 1 occurrence of a volatile outburst, and it really wasn't all that bad. The guy, as it turns out, was just an a-hole that no one really liked gaming with, so I (the GM and the host at the time) gave him the choice of controlling his behavior or not being welcome to join us going forward. In a shock to no one, he took the self-righteous, Pyrrhic route of "I did nothing wrong" and hasn't been back since. That was ~2003.
I think these kinds of conflicts are all in the company you keep. All my players are intelligent, creative, have the expected social skills of a functional adult human, and aren't obnoxious. Either we vet really well or we've just been lucky.
-Skeld
Anytime a group of people get together for long stretches of time their personalities will grate on each other. Why do you think selecting a crew for the Mars mission is such a huge undertaking. This isn't just gamers that have these issues it's every group. HOW we handle such issues varies wildly from person to person.
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You simply can't take anecdotal stories on this venue as reprsentative.
I GM for about a couple of hundred a people a year in PFS, of that number 2, maybe 3, use the Paizo site for anything other than account management.
:)
Anytime a group of people get together for long stretches of time their personalities will grate on each other. Why do you think selecting a crew for the Mars mission is such a huge undertaking.There's a big difference between sharing a parlor for a few hours once every week or two weeks, and being locked in a tin can for years with no reprieve. Getting together for a night of gaming isn't really that different than gathering together for a night of football or poker.
Have you seen how violent football fans can get over a silly disagreement and they spend less time together than most gamers?! I mean there were riots in Canada (one of the most laid back nations in the world) over a sports disagreement.
In the case of gamers (well table top gamers not online ones) you all feel bound together in this game and you tend to think about it long after the session ends. But I am not even talking about violence, the people who react violently to this are rare, but I can't think of one group that doesn't have even a little dysfunction caused by it.
;)
The violence of sports gamers that you mention, is almost exclusively a stadium mob effect, not something generally seen in home settings.Anytime a group of people get together for long stretches of time their personalities will grate on each other. Why do you think selecting a crew for the Mars mission is such a huge undertaking.There's a big difference between sharing a parlor for a few hours once every week or two weeks, and being locked in a tin can for years with no reprieve. Getting together for a night of gaming isn't really that different than gathering together for a night of football or poker.Have you seen how violent football fans can get over a silly disagreement and they spend less time together than most gamers?! I mean there were riots in Canada (one of the most laid back nations in the world) over a sports disagreement.
In the case of gamers (well table top gamers not online ones) you all feel bound together in this game and you tend to think about it long after the session ends. But I am not even talking about violence, the people who react violently to this are rare, but I can't think of one group that doesn't have even a little dysfunction caused by it.
~sigh~
At home I have seen brothers fight over sillier things than sports disagreements. But if you wish we can both drop the sports angle. Although I could see boys being all "in people's face" over their own team's superiority. And if someone with a differing opinion came to such a football party? It would cause some friction wouldn't it?
Anytime a group of people get together for long stretches of time their personalities will grate on each other. Why do you think selecting a crew for the Mars mission is such a huge undertaking. This isn't just gamers that have these issues it's every group. HOW we handle such issues varies wildly from person to person.
Yep, I have seen similar behavior even at Chess games.
Against this, there have been hundreds of tables that I've played and judged, where everyone involved simply acted like the adults they were presumed to be.So is conflict inevitable? Obviously not, unless someone comes to the table with that thought in mind.
Sure, and in forty years+ of gaming, I have seen *ONE* table flip and it was a board game.
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Sure, and in forty years+ of gaming, I have seen *ONE* table flip and it was a board game.
We used to table flip monopoly all the time, as kids. Never really got close to that with rpgs.
I agree with above, though - drama gets increasingly likely with more people involved and more time spent in an endeavor.
Exactly KenderKin the OP said nothing about violent behavior, just conflicts. I find it hard to imagine not one argument over anything across hundreds of tables that LazarX claims. And while rule arguments are far more common online, they still happen at least once at every regular group I have ever seen. They may be far less likely to happen in a convention setting but then these people are only spending 4 hours together and they don't want to waste it arguing.
He used the words "volatile personality conflict" so that made me think it was beyond the normal rules disagreement, but I do agree that he was not very specific.
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Any group of friends is going to butt heads every now and then.
The amount of actual frustration and anger is inversely proportional to how important it is.
I've had shouting matches with friends over extremely trivial shit, and conversely had big important stuff flow like water under the bridge after a few minutes of sulking.
The important part is, really, that everyone realizes that at the end of the day, they're still friends and everybody gets over the petty bullshit that briefly interrupted the good times.
The real problems come in gaming groups that do NOT consist of friends. Especially the ones where two of the participants actively dislike each other (or one the other, even). That has the potential to escalate.
So do it as little as possible, really.
"Lacking in social skills" is an old stereotypical claim. Players working together, communicating, acting and triumphing over obstacles proves with every positive example of this, that it is more a false stereotype. Not sure why the occasional tiff and argument means we are "commonly" lacking in social skills, but slander of those in this hobby sticks.
As for "powerful personalities", I've seen all types and if this is a euphemism for obnoxious behaviour, that too varies.
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3) Lacking in social skills
As well as often having pretty powerful (or at least loud) personalities.
This isn't universally true of the rpg gamer crowd and rather insulting. In fact none of the items on the list are universal of rpg gamers. In fact there really seems to be only one trait in common between us all; we are all intuitive personality types. Intuitive types being the kind of person who can easily suspend disbelief and imagine worlds where Elves, Klingons, or Cyborgs are real; where spells can work and Dragons can fly or breath fire; where weird exotic elements can exist that can propel a ship past the light barrier or power a laser sword.
I have met Intelligent gamers and not so bright ones... I once had to mediate a fight at the table between these two types after the one accused the other of deliberately using big words to confuse him. To be honest I suspect the accusation was true, but I got that fire put out.
Creative types seem to flock to gaming BUT there are a ton of uncreative types who couldn't think up a background to save their lives or are unable to creatively think up an adventure and rely purely on published materials.
The lacking in social skills is obviously not universally true look at how many successfully find romance, marry, and start families. The difference between a Geek and a Nerd for example is a Geek has social skills.
And of the sometimes up to eight people at my gaming table only three of us have strong personalities.
Good luck being able to run a fun game for years with no social skills, lol.
Are we going to revive the idea that gamers only live in basements? Is it that time again?
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Good luck being able to run a fun game for years with no social skills, lol.
Are we going to revive the idea that gamers only live in basements? Is it that time again?
Whistles innocently while sitting in the dark
Aight, here's what I'm taking from this.
1) The experiences of myself and my friends are not necessarily the norm. I can accept that.
2) Games with people you are friends with tend to work better than games with people that you don't know very well, picked up at at a comic book shop, etc. This makes sense and correlates with my experience. I think part of the trouble comes when to have a functioning game you need to bring people in from the outside.
3) People do tend to grate on each other over time. My two cp would be that it's exacerbated slightly by the long consecutive hours typical in tabletop gaming.
4) That said, some of you guys haven't ever had problems of that caliber that I experienced recently. I'm really happy to hear that.
5) The "gamer" stereotype is a more sensitive issue than I anticipated with some people. It's fair to assume that some of you have been negatively affected by said stereotype in your time and any reinforcement of it could be hurtful or come off as condescending or douchey. Please accept my sincere apologies if that is the case. If it matters, that is not my intent.
I will stand by my personal observation and experience as well as the observation and experience of others who I respect that there is a trend in gamers of the qualities previously mentioned. I will also add that they are in no way universal among us. People do not fit into cookie cutter shapes no matter what, and gamers are no exception. While I have met plenty of people in my time gaming who defy any or all of the traits mentioned and several who (independently of said traits) are spectacular people that I am better off for knowing, I don't think that lessens the trend.
Thanks for your voices. SOme good points were made.
I would actually disagree number 2. People you're friends with come with a lot of baggage that can potentially destroy a game. They can expect a certain amount of leeway that you really don't want to give. Especially when they constantly joke about killing your character. The thing is, with friends, minor problems build up due to history. You'll tend to see them more, so even out of game things get pulled in. Such an encounter destroyed my group at the end of last gencon when the last remaining member of our group still living in town proceeded to call me a leech, and my buddy a door mat. with that, a group became a duo and I had to go look for new gaming buddies.
Of course then there is the completely ridiculous behavior you see suggested or exhibited by some players if they ever for any reason hear the word 'no' uttered about anything at all?In my experience, that seems far more common today than it did years ago. Modern players in their teens, twenties and early thirties do, in general—and please note that I said "in general," before anyone gets their panties in a bunch—seem to have much more a sense of misplaced entitlement than their older counterparts.
I know my friends constantly talk about such attitudes amongst our students, so I think something is there. But I also have to wonder how much of it is the "BACK IN MY DAY..." mentality that is sinking in as we have entered our thirties.
Back in my day there was some player conflict and newts.
I got better...
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You misunderstand my meaning. I'm not saying it as to happen. I'm saying that playing with friends comes wit it own sets of problems. If you don't like the way someone plays, you can't just kick them out. It has the chance of destroying your game, (and friendship) in a manner of minutes. having friends with a shared past time is great. But that doesn't mean it's going to work out.
Player conflict happens. Improper resolution, though, doesn't have to. It's not whether issues will come up, because they always will, but how you handle them that matters.
You misunderstand my meaning. I'm not saying it as to happen. I'm saying that playing with friends comes wit it own sets of problems. If you don't like the way someone plays, you can't just kick them out. It has the chance of destroying your game, (and friendship) in a manner of minutes. having friends with a shared past time is great. But that doesn't mean it's going to work out.
Depends on your friendship. I've had to remove friends from groups before and have never had it put strain on or ruin friendships. Well, except in one case, but that was because the person in question was a complete bastard outside of games as well as in, and I was cutting him out of my life anyway.
I don't think not gaming with someone has to ruin a friendship. I realize that not everyone has the same preferences in gaming, even if they get along away from the table. If the person takes it personally it might go that way.
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I wouldn't call conflict inevitable, though it is, in my experience, likely. However, oftentimes, it can be resolved. If it can't we move on. Serious conflicts are a much rarer occurance, but still happen from time to time, but, that could happen in any group of people
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** spoiler omitted **
Oh I can just see it...
Canadian Riot!
Rioter 1: Your player just committed a flagrant foul, and he cheats! Very sorry!
Rioter 2: No he didn't! You dress funny! So sorry for saying that, please excuse me!!
Rioter 1: You take that back! Maybe we should sit down and talk about life choices?
Rioter 2: I certainly will not! Yes, that's probably a good idea...
Also, this
And this
