In the vein of venting about bad GMs, let's hear about some of the worst players you've ever sat at a table with. Here are three from my college days.
1. A guy who chained smoked during games and was prone to unpredictable rages. He'd scream and growl incoherently for no discernible reason. He was a mortuary science major (yeah, that was a major at my university back then).
2. A guy who stopped the game every 3 or 4 minutes to wash his face. I can excuse this behavior about his being OCD over his severe acne, but he slowed the game so much he finally just said count him out because he didn't want to slow us down. He was also only 14 and going to college. His father went to college with him and enrolled so there'd be someone to watch over him. His father wore costumes occasionally, such as a Victorian age explorer (complete with pith hat and jodhpur style trousers) or a ninja. A really fat ninja.
3. A guy whose group would play by themselves, rolling dice in the random dungeon generator in the back of the 1e DMG. They had billions of gold pieces in their "accounts", hundreds of magical weapons, and would often be 50th level or higher. When he did play with an actual group, he didn't know what to do. He knew nothing of roleplaying or working as part of a team, and would get mad if his characters took damage. He had a thief that had a 175% climb walls ability (climbing walls was a percentage skill in those days) and he claimed that made him so good he could just walk up walks on ceilings, where he would assassinate both NPCs and PCs who annoyed him with a weapon he made up called a "Vorpal Feather". I have other stories, but those will do for now. Let's hear some of yours now.
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This thread has been done a number of times but no harm in a little copy/pasta
I got one for out of game. I threw together a game of half my friends have a guy I recently met. As everyone arrives a few of us crack a beer. One of the guys I dont know says, "wait wait this isnt going to be drunken D&D is it? I dont want to play in that type of game." We tell him that no its a few beers adult type of game. His fears are quieted for the time being.
Well a few hours later he has polished off near a 12 pack and is pretty drunk. One of my friends a female player playing a female character casts charm person. The "oh no drunken D&D" guy starts hollering that she uses her huge breasts to charm. Well she was right creeped out and the game session ended with this guy passed out on the front lawn. Only session we played together and now that lady has sworn off gaming. :(
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RPG Superstar 2011 Top 32
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Back in my 1e days I played with a guy that would hoard magic items. He would want charged items like wands and potions, and then he would just sit on them without using them, always "saving them for later." He would even of this with items that had per day charges - there might be a tougher fight later today, after all. It got so bad that the party thief actually would pickpocket his stuff, and give it to other PCs. He never noticed because he never tried to use his items. He would make comments about how he "had one of those too!" when other PCs used his stuff in front of him. He went an entire school year campaign, of us playing 16-24 hours a week, without ever even attempting to use his stuff.
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Only session we played together and now that lady has sworn off gaming. :(
I really hate that she stopped gaming because of that.
I was trying to think if I've ever had a bad player, and I could only think of one.
I had one of my players invite a guy to play that he had met at a local game store. This guy was really over the top with his energy and intensity. At the time I was running a Shadowrun game set in the final days of what Shadowrun called the Bug City storyline. In essence, downtown Chicago became overrun with insect spirits and the UCAS (one of the largest North American governments) dropped a nuclear bomb on a portion of Chicago in an attempt to stop the spread of the insect spirits. They then quarantined the entire zone turning it into a sort of Escape from New York sorta zone.
This guy immediately began rubbing the rest of the group the wrong way. I would occasionally throw out hooks to the PC's for various storylines with the idea that if they picked them up, fine, if not, we would stay on the main storyline. One such line involved a human supremacist group that had ties (unknown to the players) with the insect spirits. They decided not to pursue it, and this player began roundly criticizing all the players because "Shadowrun allowed players to explore real issues, and they were refusing."
He was incredibly abrasive, and had an opinion on everyone's character. He also would specifically go through one of the players rooms to reach the bathroom, which just irritated that player nonstop. I tried talking privately to him several times, but something else kept happening afterward. Personally I could deal with him. I actually enjoyed how much passion he had for the game, but when several players threatened to quit, I had to uninvited him.
Thinking further, I did have a second player that I had an issue with. But it was pretty minor. At every door, we had to have an extensive conversation regarding what kind of hinges the doors had, and what side they were on, so that he would know how to take the door off. Every. Single. Door.
We were having a kind of a slow night during a game, because I just wasn't feeling good so I let the players pretty much do what they wanted (within the parameters of the setting). Two of my players are total over-thinkers, and they spent an hour discussing how best to open an unlocked door with no traps or creatures on the other other side. It was an empty room and they had found that out with psionics and divination spells.
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I have another story -- I never played with these guys, but this was about a dozen years ago when 3.5 was really going well. My son (then about 10) and I were at a bookstore going through some books when these two guys walk up and asked if we played D&D. I said yes, then got into a conversation with them where they said they were looking for a group. I had to tell them my group was a large as I could handle because one of the two guys smelled like rotten meat and the other had lice visibly crawling in his long, scraggly neck beard. They said thanks and left, and I turned to say something to my son, who had silently disappeared and left me to handle the situation alone.
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I ran a Carrion Crown AP once with some guys I met at PFS. We needed one more player to fill up the game. I advertised on the local meetup and a seemingly knowledgeable person applied. Later, one of the local PFS GMs in the game informed me he would be a "handful" I would soon find out what he meant.
So Joe Joinup arrives in an old minivan on a hot summers day. Rain was in the forecast and he had left his windows down. He informed me that he didn't have any AC and that he would leave the windows down until the last available min. How would he know? He forced me to pull up a weather satellite page on my laptop and monitor it during the session.....
So we get going and Joe Joinup has a set of dice and that's it. No character sheets, no rulebooks, nothing not even a pen. He informs us that he thought we were having a session zero (was explained several times via email there would be no session zero) which still didn't explain his complete lack of gaming equipment. He told us he knows the CRB so well it wont be an issue...
The game finally gets going and the PCs are starting to unravel the path forward. The group discovered a cache of useful magic items for the road ahead. Joe Joinup insists the group sell all the useful items so he can have masterwork transformation cast on his large dorf axe. Yes he was a dorf with a large sized axe which he couldn't explain why such a thing even existed. (later we would joke about J.J. playing a large dorf axe with a dorf familiar)
At some point I went over to my mini fridge and offered the group a beverage. Joe Joinup took this as an invitation to help himself and polishes off 6-8 beers without so much as a thank you.....
Fortunately, due to some schedule changes with several group members the timing of the game changed, so Joe Joinup was unable to continue with us after the first session.
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I have another story -- I never played with these guys, but this was about a dozen years ago when 3.5 was really going well. My son (then about 10) and I were at a bookstore going through some books when these two guys walk up and asked if we played D&D. I said yes, then got into a conversation with them where they said they were looking for a group. I had to tell them my group was a large as I could handle because one of the two guys smelled like rotten meat and the other had lice visibly crawling in his long, scraggly neck beard. They said thanks and left, and I turned to say something to my son, who had silently disappeared and left me to handle the situation alone.
Smart kid.
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The only really bad experience I've ever had was with a friend of mine who usually was the GM for our games. When we started another system, he changed place with one of the other gamers. So far so good, but the bad thing was that as awesome he was as a GM (he really was), he couldn't stand other players getting a bit of the spotlight and as soon as he wasn't directly involved in the action or the GM played to another player's background, he started with snide comments that were really uncalled for, found everything boring that wasn't about him and seemed to have forgotten all the lessons he must have learned before to be the great GM he was.
Made me eventually step out of that game.
There are two Daves in our Call of Cthulhu game. We almost had a third but his schedule only allows him to play on Sundays.