So your group kicked you out. Let's hear all about it.

[Ravingdork]

Let it all out. Vent. Rage. Cry. Lament.

I want to hear your stories. Maybe something can be learned from them.

I'll share some of my own stories, in due time.

[Riddlyn]

I was playing in an extinction curse AP and I got kicked with 2 other people because they kept talking about politics in the group discord. The GM even told me it wasn't really anything I did.

[SuperBidi]

Is it that common? Because I've never been "kicked out" of a group. I sometimes had personal issues with a player that asked for a party reorganization, I also sometimes moved out of a group because I was not having pleasure playing with them. But being kicked out is quite violent, you need to do something really bad for that to happen, no?

[Chromantic Durgon <3]

It wasn’t me but a girl I was playing with got kicked out.

She was playing a gnome kineticist, the refused to learn how attack rolls worked, which was start of the problems.

She knew the GM outside the game and seemed to have a sort of bickering flirty relationship with them, which she tried to carry into the game, but constantly bickering with a GM isn’t really as cute as she thought it was and tended to slow things down.

Then a couple of the later sessions when she’d chilled out of the constant bickering she started to nap at the table lmao

[Totally Not Gorbacz]

How often does it happen to you, Ravingdork?

[Ravingdork]

SuperBidi wrote:

Is it that common? Because I've never been "kicked out" of a group. I sometimes had personal issues with a player that asked for a party reorganization, I also sometimes moved out of a group because I was not having pleasure playing with them. But being kicked out is quite violent, you need to do something really bad for that to happen, no?

For the purposes of this thread, violence need not be a prerequisite. Being asked to leave, dismissed, ghosted, or failing to receive future invites all qualify as getting "kicked out" in this case.

Totally Not Gorbacz wrote:

How often does it happen to you, Ravingdork?

Up until the last 6 months, it had never happened in over 20 years of roleplaying. Since then it has happened twice. The first time was with a long running online group that had decided to take a break from the normal homebrew to try Fists of the Ruby Phoenix. The second time was with a game shop group preparing to run Kingmaker, in which I scarcely made it a week past Session 0.

[Mark Hoover 330]

I recently asked someone to leave my games. They took it well in the moment. Since a few days after however, this person has messaged those of us remaining in the game so aggressively we blocked them. They still found ways to contact us around the blocks through social media.

We've been accused of "throwing the baby out with the bath water;" we have been called names; questions have been asked such as "are you happy now?" and "how could you act so normal when you were all actually getting ready to throw me out?" I could go on.

The most frustrating one however was in a list of grievances from this person that made its way to my email, the player asked "how was I given NO WARNING?" in just that way. No warning.

I was asked to join this group by a mutual of mine b/c this problem player was running their last campaign and doing it poorly. Weeks before I was asked in as GM, another player at the game, a person usually regarded as mild-mannered, threw a book on the floor and raged at the top of their lungs about the problem player's issues.

This problem player was told numerous times BEFORE I joined that they either cheat or randomly make up numbers on their dice rolls; they routinely ignore or pretend to not understand rules that would hinder or penalize their character/NPCs; they sleep or otherwise tune out during non-combat scenes; their behavior in-character is often socially awkward, explicit and off-putting, or otherwise makes players or NPCs in the game uncomfortable.

There were other things. That was all BEFORE I joined.

After I joined, I didn't feel it was appropriate to boot this person from my campaign since I joined THEM, but on 2 occasions I took this player aside and talked about their issues around cheating/incredibly poor math skills and ignorance of the rules. I get that PF1 is very crunchy and it can be hard to keep things straight but this player for example would have me explain the Grapple rules to them, then an hour later in a different fight they'd try to do something that wasn't rules-legal in a Grapple.

It was... hurtful, to say the least. This problem player blames me for their being ejected and more to the point claims in one post that I was one of the best GM's they've ever played with and then sends me an email suggesting I'm narcissistic and controlling.

IF you have been asked to leave a game and you are angry and need to vent I get that, believe me, but I would ask two things. First, direct that negativity at other things, healthy outlets, until you feel strongly you can control it without unloading on your former gaming group. Second, when you feel like you have that kind of control, don't immediately go and confront your former group but take that time of clear-headedness to actually LISTEN to their reasons for letting you go, try to understand why they took the actions they did and how everything got to that point.

We are all fallible. We all make mistakes. Sometimes we need to admit when WE'RE wrong instead of just blaming everyone else. Self-reflection is scary, and sometimes dangerous to our self-esteem, but it is necessary to grow and improve, not only as players and friends but as human beings.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

[AceofMoxen]

I haven't been asked to leave, but I was warned that I needed to speak up more or leave. I responded by betraying the party. They loved that, but I would not recommend trying this at home.

[Unbegreiflich]

has it been 42yrs already?

[DungeonmasterCal]

I have never been on either side of the ousting issue, thank goodness. Players have come and gone of their own accord, usually simply just ghosting the group and our never hearing from them again.

I watch a couple of Youtube content creators, CritCrab and Den of the Drake. Both read rpg horror stories from Reddit and I thank all the dice gods every day that I've never had to deal with the situations they talk about.

[Azothath]

I have had some dire experiences over the years that I won't air here as it won't change the past (it's gone) and there's nothing to gain. I'll grant you that misery loves company and if it's just a minor social issue talking with real live friendly fleshies over a beer can help.

[keftiu]

I've been at this 15 years now, with quite a few groups, and never been asked to leave a group myself. Consider that 'a pleasure to have in class' if you will.

I've had to ask a few players to leave over the years. One was being uncomfortably flirtatious and had made a character in pretty poor taste. Another dropped out of a campaign due to a thematic mismatch, and I had to tell them they could not return when they requested to - we'd already built story momentum, and I didn't trust the problem to not repeat itself. A pretty close friend of mine has severe sleep issues, and I somewhat recently had to tell her that it was causing significant enough scheduling problems that I didn't want them in my games for a while until that could be sorted.

Then there was the girl who admitted she was a fascist, and she got the boot pretty darn quick from the whole group.

[Freehold DM]

keftiu wrote:

I've been at this 15 years now, with quite a few groups, and never been asked to leave a group myself. Consider that 'a pleasure to have in class' if you will.

I've had to ask a few players to leave over the years. One was being uncomfortably flirtatious and had made a character in pretty poor taste. Another dropped out of a campaign due to a thematic mismatch, and I had to tell them they could not return when they requested to - we'd already built story momentum, and I didn't trust the problem to not repeat itself. A pretty close friend of mine has severe sleep issues, and I somewhat recently had to tell her that it was causing significant enough scheduling problems that I didn't want them in my games for a while until that could be sorted.

Then there was the girl who admitted she was a fascist, and she got the boot pretty darn quick from the whole group.

... what?

[Ashbourne]

I've never been asked to leave a group, but I was not let back in a group once I chose to leave. I had been playing with the same group for over 20 years. Things started to change when our forever GM's new girlfriend moved in, and they got another roommate around the same time, both new to the group.

Our GM liked to run sandbox games, and my character's actions often left the GM with plot ideas, even if I hadn't thought of them. The other players were mostly just along for the ride. So over time, the plot became all about my character. It was starting to burn out the group, and even I was getting overwhelmed by the pressure on my character. So everyone, including me, was happy when the GM gave us a quest to destroy a cursed artifact that required us to travel to a distant land to throw it in an active volcano. This quest should have taken most of a year to play through and got us out of the city my character built.

Unfortunately, three sessions into our new quest, due to my character role-playing out a scene, the GM accidentally randomly presented us with a portal into another plane overlooking an active volcano. Without thinking or delay, I threw in the cursed staff and closed the portal. Then instantly realizing I had just destroyed the GMs plans for the next year immediately asked to retcon that action. All the players agreed to have it retconned too, but the GM refused because I had role-played it well. Needless to say, that campaign didn't last long after that session, and we decided to start a new campaign.

So I volunteered to GM the next game. We had session zero, and I got ready for the next week's game. Much to my surprise, during the week, the players on their own had got together and decided to change their characters at level zero and star them out as eight years old. This is one of my first times GMing, and this derailed the plot I had and messed up the encounter balance I had prepared. I gave up running that campaign after two weeks.

So our forever GM takes over again. The GM hates elves because too many people love elves (finger-pointing at me), so he comes up with some horrible genocidal story to explain how all elves are killed off in some horrible way, and the group decides I should play a female human wizard. I'm not happy about having a character forced on me but go with it anyway. I started that campaign off with a bad attitude and decided to play her in a way that might, on the surface be offensive, in response to being forced to play that character, so I played her as someone who was flirtatious and slept around a lot to gain an advantage. My real goal was to remain innocent for the whole campaign and cast the sleep spell a lot, which I did for the one and only game I played that campaign.

In the first game session, we're on a mission to deliver a message to a distant port city on a ship six days from the nearest port and encounter a slave ship. The parties thief and I start planning a way to attack the slave ship and free the slaves, or follow the ship to see where it's going or came from, waiting for a better opportunity to free the slaves. Finally, the party's paladin and the four other players out vote us and turn the ship around, return to the port we started from and report the slave ship.

That was enough. I'm not interested in filing police reports for fun. I stopped playing TTRPgs for 20 years. Some years after I left that group, I ran into one of the players who was taking a turn GMing and asked to join in again. He said he was fine with it but would have to ask the group. I never bothered to check back.

[DungeonmasterCal]

@Ashbourne...Damn. That really stinks.

[Grankless]

Never been kicked out.

Left my first campaign on good terms and stayed in the Discord server, then got in a fight with the GM over if it was funny that Luis Carrero Blanco is called "Spain's first astronaut" (it is, btw) and quit because I was weirded out by her defensiveness over the Franco regime.

A few months later she had a freakout, quit the server, broke up with her girlfriend that was in the game, and moved to another state. Nobody has been willing to share details and I've not asked.

I've had to kick a total of three people out of games: one for being just weirdly mean and backseaty at the start of my 1e campaign, then another got kicked because I was told he was sexually harassing people in our server (and being kicked made him delete all his social media, lol), and one at the very tail end of my Hell's Rebels 2e game for like... Hardcore emotionally abusing her roommate. That one was the only one I actually felt tore up about having to do.

[Ashbourne]

DungeonmasterCal wrote:

@Ashbourne...Damn. That really stinks.

Fortunately, my experiences with Starfinder and Pathfinder2e organized play have all been great experiences. Altho I've never played an elf or human again, and value a good retcon.

[DeathQuaker]

Mark Hoover 330 wrote:

I recently asked someone to leave my games. They took it well in the moment. Since a few days after however, this person has messaged those of us remaining in the game so aggressively we blocked them. They still found ways to contact us around the blocks through social media.

[snip]

I'm no psychologist, but comparing this to a former relative-by-marriage, I'd lay money this dude has untreated borderline personality disorder or something similar. Swinging between extremes of emotion, taking rejection in particular excessively hard, blaming everyone but himself with no self awareness of his own contributions of the issue. He needs serious help and unfortunately is in a circumstance that makes it hard for him to recognize that.

Just saying this to note to assure you probably couldn't have handled it any better than you did and the person in question had little to no capacity to treat you other than abusively. You protected the group and yourself by removing him from you. Here's hoping he has a moment of lucidity and realizes maybe it's him and he seeks assistance elsewhere... far away from you.

As to the subject at hand...

I've never been ousted from a RL group in any unpleasant way. I've had a friend who we agreed that my GM style didn't suit his play style and his GM style didn't suit my play style, and we agreed not to be on "the other side of the table" from one another. Hard to put into words the exact issue in any succinct way, but I think it boils down to how we communicated action and environment. Just tended to struggle to understand each other and interpreted mechanics differently enough it was a path to frustration so we just decided to stop frustrating each other. We are still friends and enjoy one another's company in conversation, watching shows together, playing board games and miniature war games, etc. We've seen less of each other since the pandemic but that's largely my fault as I've struggled to re-adapt to making social plans.

I have disinvited players who don't show up. I put a lot of work into game prep and someone who didn't show without a courtesy call clearly is wasting my time and doesn't care that they are (and no, they weren't having an emergency, they repeatedly--more than three times--overslept/forgot/didn't feel like coming and just didn't tell me). They claimed they really wanted to play but their actions proved otherwise. In RL gaming that hasn't happened in decades though. Slightly more recently (like five or eight years ago) I did ask a player in a PBP to leave when he wasn't posting enough (like he'd make one post every three weeks and it was stalling the game; posting expectations were once every two days).

I have only been angrily disinvited from a game once, and that was in a PBP--but I had already quit before I had been kicked out! I wanted to leave because (a) My character never really clicked for me or the group, and most of the things my character could do, other people could do, and (b) the GM played serious favorites. I'd prior reached out to the GM the first, and didn't mention the second (I should have called him out on it though). Nothing had improved, and we were in a combat scene where my character was at negative hit points and not stabilizing. Mind you, the GM had created a character to attack her that was basically explicitly designed to destroy her; she was in a support-other-characters-in-melee role and he got her isolated and attacked her solo, which she wasn't capable of handling, so I half-thought he was trying to get rid of me anyway. So I sent him a message that said, in summary, "I continue to be frustrated with this character, so just let her die. Thank you for inviting me to the game." The GM was FURIOUS that I decided to leave upon character death, which surprised me considerably as, again, I was almost certain he'd designed the scene where she was dying as an intentional way to get rid of me, and he'd seemed dispassionate prior about me or my character's presence in the game or to prior concerns I had expressed. In a hilarious sort of "You can't quit, you're fired!" sort of scene, he officially disinvited me publicly in the OOC thread after I had PMed him that I was leaving. I am not sure that counts as being "ousted" since I had already "ousted" myself. But the GM's behavior was a definite signal I had made the right choice to go.

[keftiu]

Freehold DM wrote:

keftiu wrote:

I've been at this 15 years now, with quite a few groups, and never been asked to leave a group myself. Consider that 'a pleasure to have in class' if you will.

I've had to ask a few players to leave over the years. One was being uncomfortably flirtatious and had made a character in pretty poor taste. Another dropped out of a campaign due to a thematic mismatch, and I had to tell them they could not return when they requested to - we'd already built story momentum, and I didn't trust the problem to not repeat itself. A pretty close friend of mine has severe sleep issues, and I somewhat recently had to tell her that it was causing significant enough scheduling problems that I didn't want them in my games for a while until that could be sorted.

Then there was the girl who admitted she was a fascist, and she got the boot pretty darn quick from the whole group.

... what?

Which one do you need more info on?

[Ravingdork]

Ravingdork wrote:

The second time was with a game shop group preparing to run Kingmaker, in which I scarcely made it a week past Session 0.

Before Session 0 I told everyone that I was considering an elven monk, with an emphasis on mobility. Then, during session 0, after hearing some of the ideas the other players had, I let it be known that I was likely to try something different. The party consisted of a ysoki champion (GM's girlfriend), leshy druid, elf monk (me), leshy summoner, and a wizard at the time; so everyone in the party was save the champion had a glassjaw. I figured a monk flitting in and out avoiding damage wouldn't be doing their fair share to absorb much of the heat from the other characters, so I decided to try something that (1) I hadn't done before and (2) synergized better with the party composition.

At some point after Session 0 the summoner swapped to a swashbuckler and the druid announced that they were going to be a wild shape all the time build.

Over dinner with the GM, I bounced several different ideas off of him, ending with a strong lean towards an elven politician, but I still was not clearly settled nor declared.

I spent the next week wracking my brain for something that would not only be fun for me, but for the other players as well. I settled on a human thaumaturge (character shown here) as I hadn't tried it before. I figured I would start off strong with bonus feats and a weapon implement, the better to survive the low levels of Kingmaker, then pick up Regalia at 5th, so that I could start protecting my allies by mitigating a variety of common, nasty conditions. After waffling for so long, in my excitement I shared my full character sheet. I think oversharing is where I might have gone wrong. You see, most everyone else had shared little more than their ancestry and class. I posted my whole character sheet and a tenuous 1-20 level plan.

I started receiving upset Discord messages from the champion and swashbuckler players during my lunch break at work the following day. As I was still working, I only got out a few brief responses before I had to return to work.

Paraphrasing from memory; as I've since lost access to the Discord server:

Champion Player: Why do you have a battleaxe? I'm wielding a poleaxe! Isn't that a bit similar?

Me: I don't understand why this is even an issue? In any case, wedon't even wield the same weapon.

Swashbuckler Player: You're a Charisma character? I was specc'ing for Deception!

Me:I'm not currently trained in Deception, and don't plan on putting too much focus on it later, so I don't think that will be much of an issue. (They disagreed on grounds that my Charisma was higher than theirs.)

Champion Player: And you're LG AND planning on wearing heavy armor too? You known I'm the holy knight in this party, right?

Me: I am neither a noble or a knight. Just a superstitious warrior in armor. Wouldn't it be more disruptive if we had opposing alignments? I literally picked LG because I thought our characters would get along better.

Champion Player: And you're specc'd for Diplomacy too, and your Charisma is higher than mine! Why did you have to build my character, but better in every way?

Me: I didn't build your character. In any case, thaumaturges are dependent on Charisma and this is a game where we're all playing leaders of a nation, so that stat is going to have more emphasis than usual. Is it so surprising someone else invested in it? I think maybe you're focusing too much on the similarities and not enough on the things that make us different. I'm a human. You're a ratfolk. You're a holy knight. I'm a politician in exile. There's plenty of differences. Besides, if we both have high Charisma and Diplomacy, we can aid one another for even higher results. (I had an 18 Cha and was planning on getting the Aid ancestry feat chain. The GM told me that the swashbuckler had a 16 Cha and the champion had a 14 Cha.)

GM: I thought we had discussed who was going to play what. Why did you make a character with so much overlap?

Me: (Privately to the GM) Since everyone put their characters in Hero Lab, I can only see top level information. I had no way to know that the champion wielded an axe-like weapon or had specc'd Diplomacy. I'm starting to think I never should have posted my character in full. If we had all gone in blind not knowing what each other was playing, I really don't believe any of this would have been an issue.

Me: (Publicly) I'll swap out the weapon and change the alignment. I wasn't really set on those anyways. If I don't have to, I'd rather not change the character completely; I've spent a week on it already, I've played most everything else out there, and I don't know that I could get anything else ready in time before the first game at this point anyways.

Champion Player: I suppose I can switch from Diplomacy to Intimidate. But I want it known that I'm not playing a scary character. I want to be the villagers' friend, not have them all running in fear of me.

I figured it was settled. We each had made compromises. However, when I got home from work later that day, I was already out, long before having any real chance to agree to anything else or to enact changes.

GM: I'm sorry that's how you feel, but I also can appreciate where (Champion) and (Swashbuckler) are coming from. You have considerable overlap in stat and skill array with (Champion). I don't love the idea of either of them feeling the need to swap classes to accommodate your character when you were the last person to settle on a class. (Note that I never asked either player to switch classes or do anything they didn't want to do.)

You've got to see it from the other players' perspective too - they also want to shine at things - there is no "main character" in an RPG group. I don't mean this in an unkind way, but I'm personally a little baffled as to how you arrived at this character when you were aware of the current party formation - it seems, to me, as if you have little interest in collaboration with the team and are more concerned with your own experience. The entire point of session 0 was to make sure there was not a lot of redundancy and overlap - I disagree about showing up with unknowns to play for an entire campaign - it's a serious time and energy commitment to all involved.

Having said that, I feel that it would be best if I run the campaign with the other four players, and I'm really sorry to say that I don't think that this campaign is a great fit for you. I do appreciate your enthusiasm and interest, but it's crucial to me that the game is equally rewarding (or as close to it as possible) for everyone that plays. I hope you don't hold it against me - I bear you no ill will and will be nothing but civil towards you at PFS events.

***

And that was that. I'm still not sure how it all even happened. It just occurred SO fast. Before lunch, everything was great; by dinner time I was out. Maybe I'm just too old and slow for their youthful impatience? Maybe the GM was pressured by his girlfriend? I may never really know.

[Ashbourne]

It could be age. It could partially be that the internet has created all kinds of crazy standards and expectations of play. Back in the early 1980s, nothing like this ever happened in gaming.

Just Crazy .

[DungeonmasterCal]

@Ravingdork

You were far more polite than I would've been, and I consider myself to be a pretty nice guy for the most part. I can also be very inventive with profanity-laden insults and replies when needed, and those skills would have jumped straight to the forefront long before the GM told me I wasn't a good fit. I applaud your restraint.

[Cori Marie]

Yeah that seems like a table I wouldn't really want to be part of anyway? Seems like a dodged bullet to me

[TomParker]

That's deeply weird. Someone wanted to train Diplomacy or Deception so no one can have a Charisma-based character? Only one character can wear heavy armor?

"You're using a sword?! But I'm using a sword! My character concept is ruined!"

[Quark Blast]

I got booted once for "not role-playing enough". Never mind that the GM had one, ONE, voice for one NPC that sounded like an eight year old attempting a Yoda voice. That's it. That was the extent of RP we saw from the GM. Every other NPC (plus a GM-PC) were virtual clones - gender/ancestry differences notwithstanding. And never mind my character was a stranger in a strange land, wasn't yet fluent in the local language, so my voice acting was minimal - as agreed between me and the GM in my session zero.

Some people aren't worth wasting your time with.

[DeathQuaker]

Cori Marie wrote:

Yeah that seems like a table I wouldn't really want to be part of anyway? Seems like a dodged bullet to me

This. There's a weird level of *possessiveness* that people seem to be experiencing over their characters. Suggests everyone in that group is a drama queen who is going to be mad when their character doesn't "shine" enough.

I've been in groups where we've negotiated--negotiated, mind--things like "hey three of us have Knowledge Arcana and no one has Knowledge Local; Bob, do you mind readjusting your ranks, it'd make sense for your character...[blah blah blah]" Sometimes folks can step on each other's toes slightly but normally some overlap is super-useful and people can work it out.

But "Hey! I wanted to be the heavy armor guy!" is just childishly stupid. And don't get me started on someone being mad you have the same alignment...

I'd mentioned in my post leaving a game in part because I felt my character was redundant... but that was in part a recruitment fluke, and I would have stuck around if I hadn't had other issues with the game and if I'd had an opportunity to respec. No one was pressuring me to change (indeed, players had reached out to chat about how we could work together on tactics and building roleplaying opportunities). Someone being /that/ possessive something as having a similarly high ability score or armor type... yeah, the game would have been a waste of time.

[Freehold DM]

keftiu wrote:

Freehold DM wrote:

keftiu wrote:

I've been at this 15 years now, with quite a few groups, and never been asked to leave a group myself. Consider that 'a pleasure to have in class' if you will.

I've had to ask a few players to leave over the years. One was being uncomfortably flirtatious and had made a character in pretty poor taste. Another dropped out of a campaign due to a thematic mismatch, and I had to tell them they could not return when they requested to - we'd already built story momentum, and I didn't trust the problem to not repeat itself. A pretty close friend of mine has severe sleep issues, and I somewhat recently had to tell her that it was causing significant enough scheduling problems that I didn't want them in my games for a while until that could be sorted.

Then there was the girl who admitted she was a fascist, and she got the boot pretty darn quick from the whole group.

... what?

Which one do you need more info on?

That last.

[BigNorseWolf]

Ashbourne wrote:

It could be age. It could partially be that the internet has created all kinds of crazy standards and expectations of play. Back in the early 1980s, nothing like this ever happened in gaming.

Just Crazy .

You also couldn't customize your character. As a fighter you were your strength score and that was it.

[Ashbourne]

And rules lawyers could not find enough work to pay the rent.

[Ravingdork]

Most of my family members thought I was crazy, but my mother raised me to "kill disagreements with kindness."

I spent the weekend at the print shop and had these made.

I then arrived, unexpected, to the first Kingmaker game at the game shop and gifted it all to the group that had given me the boot. I told the GM and two of his players (the other two players hadn't arrived yet) that I bared them no ill will and that I wished them all the best on their coming adventures.

The GM (unprompted) told me that he felt bad, and that he would talk to the other players on my behalf. I told him he needn't bother with either. It was not my intent to make anyone feel bad and that I readily recognized that not everyone is going to be compatible with every group. That doesn't mean we can't all still have fun and wish the best for one another. Besides, I hadn't really changed my stance on the character I wanted to play, and I didn't expect them to change theirs either.

So that's that then. Time to move on and put it behind me.

And hey, if I run into them again at PFS or some other communal event, we'll be on much better footing for having some fun together.

I may lose all sense of humbleness by sharing this with everyone, but I hope to lead by example.

[keftiu]

Freehold DM wrote:

keftiu wrote:

Freehold DM wrote:

keftiu wrote:

[snip]

Then there was the girl who admitted she was a fascist, and she got the boot pretty darn quick from the whole group.

... what?

Which one do you need more info on?

That last.

This was in a public discord server for queer folks to play tabletop, and we got a gal who raised some hackles with vaguely-off vibes. Some prodding eventually prompted that confession, and any games she'd signed on for showed her the door, as did the wider server.

The internet's a wild place.

[Freehold DM]

keftiu wrote:

Freehold DM wrote:

keftiu wrote:

Freehold DM wrote:

keftiu wrote:

[snip]

Then there was the girl who admitted she was a fascist, and she got the boot pretty darn quick from the whole group.

... what?

Which one do you need more info on?

That last.

This was in a public discord server for queer folks to play tabletop, and we got a gal who raised some hackles with vaguely-off vibes. Some prodding eventually prompted that confession, and any games she'd signed on for showed her the door, as did the wider server.

The internet's a wild place.

I had a similar experience in real life years ago.

It is truly a wild place.

[TriOmegaZero]

Can’t think of any time someone has been booted. Mostly entire groups dissolve rather than go on without someone.

[John Woodford]

TriOmegaZero wrote:

Can’t think of any time someone has been booted. Mostly entire groups dissolve rather than go on without someone.

That sounds like at least one of the Geek Social Fallacies in action (and I say that despite having done similar things in the past).

[TriOmegaZero]

It usually wasn't prompted by one player leaving, just the group falling apart. Or the GM getting tired of running.

[Ravingdork]

John Woodford wrote:

TriOmegaZero wrote:

Can’t think of any time someone has been booted. Mostly entire groups dissolve rather than go on without someone.

That sounds like at least one of the Geek Social Fallacies in action (and I say that despite having done similar things in the past).

Interesting. I had never heard about those before.

[quibblemuch]

I'm pretty draconian about my gaming space. If it's not the group at my house, I'll withdraw, otherwise I'll boot people pretty fast. Like the guy who yelled at a shy 13-year-old for not being tactically brilliant enough, or the guy who would throw dice hard enough to break things when they came up badly, or the guy who sent me a five page list of questions before session zero, each one of which was an effort to wheedle some extra bit of advantage for his character.

It's like my regulars tell me: "You're a misanthrope who has an allergic reaction to the word community. It's a miracle you like us enough to regularly hang out and we'll take it."

EDIT: Gosh. Now that I type that out, I think it might not have been a compliment.

[90s Simpsons Referotron]

First thing tomorrow, I'm going to punch Lenny in the back of the head!

[Andostre]

(Great thread, RD.)

I think the only time I've ever seen a person get ousted, was due to the fact that the ousted person was a socially awkward teen feeling really great about hanging out with a bunch of 20-somethings. The teen was a neighbor to one of the players, and would ride with them to my apartment where we played. As the weeks went on, I think that he was feeling pressure to act more mature (which is ironic when you're trying to achieve the maturity status of a group of guys in their early 20s), and the younger guy would do things like walk into my apartment without knocking, which was a problem when nobody else had arrived yet, and I was surprised when someone was suddenly walking into my home unannounced. The younger guy was too young to drink, but thought it would be cool to grab beers from the fridge, open them, and give them to the rest of us at weird times. He wasn't trying to drink himself, but it was weird to do when the rest of us were capable of getting a drink when we actually wanted one.

At the table, there would be long periods where he wouldn't contribute much, and then he seemed to realize as much and suddenly make a flashy-yet-tactically-unsound decision. We would *ahem* discuss the wisdom of some of those decisions, and the younger guy would get really upset at being challenged. Often he would double-down on his faulty tactics.

In hindsight, we could and should have handled things better with a kid six or so years younger than us. But also, they were really irritating, and his reactions to our criticism were making things even more irritating, so my friend who was his neighbor just said he couldn't come any more.

I hope he found another group to game with eventually and wasn't turned off by the experience. I also hope he didn't feel the need to awkwardly prove himself so much to the players.

[Wei Ji the Learner]

The 'baby with the bathwater' reminds me of someone who deliberately attempted to attack key NPCs for no other reason than 'I was bored'.

That same player produced a custom-tailored hateifesto (hate manifesto) for each player in the game and sent them via email.

What that person did not realize was that our group had been together over a decade at that point and communicated regularly when problems would come up in games.

So there was some "Is this real" back and forth before the GM pulled the plug because he didn't want to be leveraged into a social situation.

All but one of the players expressed sorrow at the end of the campaign.

The outlier attempted to dox the group (at the time two of us lived in non-LGBTQIA+ safe areas).

Fortunately, one of the newer people to the group happened to be a tech-guru and stopped that.

Now we vet like diligently in that group.

[Mightypion]

That is... interesting.

The most dramatic thing I had was a discord server being gone after the first 2 sessions.

I find it a bit difficult via online, because due to lag, 2 people, in their view, start talking at the same time or first, but to the other it appears as being talked over.
After I adopted the simple mantra of "Oh sorry, you go first please" whenever there is me and someone else talking at the same time, things have become much better.

[Brigadoon]

Didn’t get kicked out, but it feels as little like it. Group dissolved after finishing the campaign. DM wanted to stop running games so he could focus on work/have more time with his family, which is a good thing. One player started a new job that requires more than 8 hours a day. I offered to run the game, but DM and player said no. Asked the couple who were playing/hosting if they were up for looking for new players and they said no, which is understandable, i get not wanting to invite people you don’t know well into your home. So the group just dissolved.

The thing that makes it feel like I got kicked out is I joined this group after overhearing two of the players talking about it at church, and this group is already pretty close friends with each other, so in a way all of them saying no to my efforts to keep a game/group going felt like they were saying no to me.

Rationally, of course, that’s not the case. We’ve all got small children and families and other commitments to our time that make ttrpgs a difficult thing to add on top of already busy lives, but part of me still worries that I messed up a group dynamic that everyone else was content with.