Dysfunctional players, Stories? Options

[emo samurai]

I'm not talking about C.L.U.E. files material or simple pvp conflict; I'm talking about annoying ass habits.

I have one player who repeats shit all the time. He has a character who used to be part of Knight Errant and was discharged to appease the media after killing a good merged little girl. When fighting a beetle spirit, he used a Knowledge: Insect Spirits check to find its weak spot (its neck).

This wasn't a problem in and of itself, except for the fact that he repeated "You see that? I knew its weak spot!" about five fucking times.

Oh, and he thinks he has ESP and used it to find out his military call sign, which is "shadow." He also names his character "Shadow," because he's shadowy.

Another player is playing a snake shaman named "Cobra," so named because "He slithers." He repeated this about five times during character creation. He also said "So when the smoke clears and everything, you're gone, because my character will shapeshift you. He'll benefit everybody" about five fucking times.

Anyone care to chime in with tales of extreme player social ineptitude?

[Jack Kain]

Well I've only played about four sessions of shadowrun so I don't have the experience with this game yet.

But I have dealt with it in D&D.
For example we have a gnomish druid who his chaotic neutral self decides he's going to break chairs over the back of random people.

As the DM I ended up handling this by pointing out the lizardman in fullplate at the bar. He took the hook and bashed the chair over the lizard man's back. A Lizardman who was a 16th level fighter. (the party is level 3 at this point).
The lizardman Zorr was in town anyway so I just made him a prime target.

The gnome spent the rest of the parties time in town tied to a flag pool out of the PC's reach. Not that they had any disire to bring him down.

[ShadowDragon]

One of my players is an extreme pushover with no confidence. All you have to do is say no and look at him with a serious face after he asks you for a favor that should be no problem, and he'll start refrasing the question 10 times while squirming uncomfortably. Ironically this player is the party face lol

"Sparks, can you stand guard while I talk to this guy?"
"No Ace." *pretend glare*
"Sparks, will you please stand guard?"
*continues pretend glare*
"Please...Sparks? I really think it would be a good idea..." *squirm*
"Sparks will you please stand guard...please?"
"Whyyyyy won't you..? *giggle* Come on!"
"Pleaseeee?" *exaggerated squirming*

This will go on until I put an end to it, which usually happens after it stops being funny and starts being sad. I'm trying to cut it out and make this player act more confident (and the other players, frequently it's the guy playing Sparks), but it hasn't been easy.

[DireRadiant]

You want creepy gamers?

[Kagetenshi]

We had a player once with untreated schizophrenia. He was only with us for two sessions, since he spent more time in the back room having a religious experience than playing. It was unfortunate, as apparently he's a pretty decent player when he's entirely seated in reality.

~J

[emo samurai]

Dude, tell him that God wants him to stop grovelling and play. BE his religious experience.

[James McMurray]

She wasn't a gamer, but the guys in my group (not me) were there when the girlfriend of the guy whose house they were gaming at blew her head off in the other room.

[James McMurray]

I knew another ghuy in college. He was a gamer but I never gamed with him. He was constantly telling me and my wife how he was part vampire and if he shoved a pencil through his hand he'd pull it out and it would heal up super fast. For some reason though he never took us up on our "prove it and we'll do ___" offers.

[Kagetenshi]

[emo samurai]

Hide behind a chair.

[WhiskeyMac]

I played D&D with a guy who had his complete character planned out to epic level from character generation. Everything was planned, even feats and skill level point allocation. He refused to change the way his character acted (some hoighty-toighty chaotic neutral high elf mage fucker), would only play by 3.0 rules (even though we were playing 3.5) and called everyone what their task was, not by their names. I almost smacked him upside his head with the hardbound players handbook. He only played 2 sessions with us.

In Shadowrun, I GMed for a ADHD kid who would make characters based off a concept and then totally fuck them up, backpedal to character generation and retcon a skill in. A good example was his "electronics engineer specialist" who didn't have an electronics skill, carried about 200 pounds of equipment in a knapsack (that he would like to add to randomly to fit the situation) and dressed like a retarded copy of Neo. After I told him he had no electronics skill, he spent the next 20 minutes talking to me about his character and totally disregarded my comment. About the middle of the run he realized he hadn't added it to his character sheet and started pissing and moaning. I also had a player who's characters would fit the Uncouth bill to a T but never actually took the quality. He was always one step away from going Postal 2 at any moment.

[knasser]

I ran D&D with some interesting players in it. One was the Run Away guy who just really didn't like combat. As his wizard's skinny arse vanished rapidly back down the road at the first sign of trouble he would always turn to the other players apologetically and say: "It's what my character would do."

[LordHaHa]

[emo samurai]

Yeah, I know. It's quite a story to put next to a dude who thought he was a half-vampire.

[LordHaHa]

Well, since I'm here, I guess I could share one or two canidates. The first isn't that bad in terms of habits, it just that he is subject to these habits all the time when in game. Specifically, no matter what character he is using (Street Sam, Mage, Decker, whatever), he always plays them as abject cowards. His basic philosophy is "Don't Do Anything Or We Will All Die". When anything risky goes down, he (without fail) gives the group a five to ten minute long sermon about how said risky action is a bad idea, neatly organized into groups and subgroups of what the specific dangers are. And he does it at least two or three times a session.

---

The next guy is a bit worse, though. I was playing in a D&D 3E campaign with the aforementioned "We Are All Going To Die" fellow as the DM (actually, he isn't bad at all when he's at the head of the table, so it was ok). But no, the real problem individual was this guy who was a mutual friend of his. Not only was this guy the ultimate smug asshole, but he was also was playing politics to so that he could PK other players he didn't like (namely me and two other people). Keep in mind he had to go the political route because the DM set up the "PK = illegal" ruling.

But that wasn't the guy's main problem. The really annoying bit was when he brought over his (non-gamer) girlfriend over for a session. Half the time they were slobbering over each other (I mean, to the point where you just want them to get a room), and the other half of the time (when he was ACTUALLY PLAYING THE GAME) she whined incessantly. But that wasn't the worst part. No, the worst part was that he shouldn't have had anything to do with her in the first place, because he was already married with two children!

When news of that last little bit of info reached the players, that campaign pretty much died. Actually, I think that was the last session of that campaign we all had together.

[Critias]

[hyzmarca]

So wy would his being married make the game die? I'd think that it would make the game that much more fun. Either he had an open marriage or he was cheating. If it was the former maybe he'd hook his gamer friends up with his wife. If it was the latter then, well, we can assume that he isn't just going to kill everyone who knows about the affair so you could have used it to yank him around just a little.

Personally, I've never gamed with anyone who was insane (except possibly myself) but there was this one dude in Air Force basic training who liked to mix his fanciful neo-paganism with extreme evangelical christianity. The result was some rather amusing rants about about how to perform certain magical rituals and how to summon faries as well as explict details and clairfications about the end of the world as presented in Revelations.
He provided some relief from the tedium. Unsurprisingly, he was kicked out for failing a drug test.

[emo samurai]

Hyzmarca, your official alignment is "Lawful Amoral."

[LordHaHa]

[blakkie]

[PBTHHHHT]

Aye, when you throw a bone like that, you actually want to tell the story. Just change the names, etc... Plus, after reading the crazy players in the rgp.net forum thread, c'mon it can't be worse... can it? If so, then you gotta tell us, if not, it doesn't matter since there're worse stories out there. In summary, just tell us. :-P

[James McMurray]

I personally have been pretty lucky as far as gaming with weirdos goes. Perhaps it's because I'm a lunatic myself, but I'm pretty good as sizing up someone's looniness early on, and I just avoid gaming with the ones I wouldn't want to hang around with.

[Dog]

One player I knew was dumped by his girlfriend, and acted like he was the first person in the world that ever happened to. In real life, he was indifferent to all females. In game, he managed to berate every female character and look for opportunities to be violent towards them.
This same guy looked down on anyone who wasn't a university grad (like yours truly.) If I argued with him about anything, like maybe I happened to read something in a book that he hadn't heard of, he'd angrily truck out the "I'm right because I have a degree and you don't" argument.
This guy was a hardcore student, studied more than anyone I know. Wanted to be a doctor. Constantly said that he wanted to specialize in toxins so that he could one day poison "everybody." Smart enough to do it, but after passing his med-school entrance exams, he flunked out of the interview because he "lacks empathy."
What a relief.

Last I heard, he was shooting for dentistry school.

(Hey, the good news is nobody's mentioned me yet!)

[LordHaHa]

Well, let me say this. It involves an insane female who is well known to (and despised by) my group of friends. The non-moral player is indirectly responsible for causing her to get pregnant by discouraging the female to stop taking certain medications that prevent that condition. She wished to do so because she equated a child with profit (via the support of a husband or though the courts).

This was done without informing her male partner (who the other player in my previous post). And the only reason said male is not a father at the moment is because of a chance incident, that of a miscarrage. The other male was in the dark about it until that point.

Do the math. :S

This post has been edited by LordHaHa: Oct 24 2006, 12:26 AM

[LordHaHa]