DMs, when have you found it necessary to fire a player from your table?

DMs, when have you found it necessary to fire a player from your table?
Stolen from the dm flaw thread.
1. You actual had to tell a person to leave. Not just not invite them back. Or do things to drive them away.
2. Keep it as clean as possible.

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Ok, I will go first. Randall an SCA friend who game with the group. Randall was an okay player when I was NOT DMing. But as soon as it was my turn, he was 80% of rules challenges, wander off by himself, and get upset if he did something stupid the monsters would react logically. To sum up, he was disruptive to the table. I told him he was welcome to play at my house but not sit at table if I was the DM. To top it off two weeks later he and his spouse got into an argument in my house, I told them to take it outside. They left and never returned. And would hardly speak to me if we met.
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40 years of DMing and I have never had to kick someone. There were several times where we let a problematic player 'drift away', basically not keeping them informed of the next session. I think I have managed to avoid this problem over the years by being careful who I invite to game and also developing fairly strong table control skills. Table control is paramount. I have known many DM's who did an excellent job with rules and story, but were awful at controlling the table and ensuring that everyone was having a good time.

The classic example of table control is the player that wants to go off on their own against the parties wishes. Don't reward that behavior by giving them solo play time while everyone else sits bored. I will give that player 1/7 of the play time. It is also amusing when they try to kibbitz on the parties actions and you tell them to be quiet since they are not there. Once they realize they are doing nothing for 6/7 of the session, they pretty quickly rejoin the party.

never.

But I have addressed my players for several things. If they hadn't improved, kicking them off the table was on the table.

• Deliberately sabotaging other characters. When Chaotic Neutral becomes Chaotic Stupid. This is an immediate nono because it ruins other the player's game.
• Going off the path only to test the DM, not because it makes any sense. If you're not making the story, then why be here?
• Creating a weird character and then leaving it up to the DM to fit that into the storyline. Done that once but never again. I'll sketch the story, you make your character fit.

One consistently moped and depressed the table whenever anything bad happened.
One would do wacky random things, and none of the other players wanted to play that way.
One got extremely jealous of another, and kept starting OOC fights.
One hated ever losing agency over his character. Ever.
One would randomly not show up without notice, repeatedly.
One got drunk, lied down in the guest bed, urinated in it, and never apologized or even admitted it.

All of them were talked to outside the game and given chances, of course.

I have a system where I run one-shots and, after someone has played several one-shots and demonstrated they are a good fit for my regular group, then I invite them to the player pool. As a result, I never have to kick someone from the group these days since we have a screening process.

In the past, I have definitely kicked players from the group. Chiefly this was due to bad fits personality-wise and old gaming habits the player was unwilling or unable to change.

Our game table is pretty liberal, politically speaking, but we live in a conservative county and all have friends who are not. Our host and a couple of the people at the table invite one of their poker buddies to the game. They know he's pretty conservative, but we assume it won't be a problem. Our games are apolitical. We don't even discuss politics that often except when something major happens.

The guy went on a rant about how unions, Mexican immigrants, and the #BlackLivesMatter movement were ruining the country. Like the entire time he was there he just kept bringing it up. The host of our game nights is a public school teacher, as is his wife, and so he has been deeply involved with unions for the past 30 years or so. Another player (who was also at the table!) is both black and Mexican. Another player also at the table is married to a Mexican woman. Even after the host told him, point blank, to stop bashing unions because he was a union member, he still brought it up again.

He was told we just had too many players.

Well, this doesn't quite fit the requirements stated above.

1) I was hosting the game in my home, but was not running it as GM

2) The person in question did not give me the chance to throw his butt to the curb.

One player, in private outside the game, sexually harassed and became emotionally abusive to another player. He was not going to be allowed back into my home. When the next game came around, without being told, he had the good sense to not show up.

One player actively worked against PCs znd to anger other players. Viewed game as a way to screw with captive audience. Was kept for a while after a plea from another player but eventually booted.

Another player was too unpopular due to his unwillingness to have his character do anything. It became frustrating to other players to watch scene after scene trying to draw his character in, only to see it refused but only after long drawn out will-i-wont-i. It took forever to convince the others to give him another chance, after I saw him fo better years later.

I haven't had to, well we told little Timmy to take a hike but that wasn't the same. Thankfully his stepdad who plays didn't get goofy about it.

There have been times where I wanted to toss one player for his endless spouting of leftist politics but that has died down a bit so its gotten a lot better, bad case of TDS though. But the whole table is long term friends and 2 sets of brothers and tossing one would pretty much destroy the group of friends that has been gaming together in one form or another since the 80's. I don't play RPG type games at the store or with randoms so I don't run into a lot of the issues other tables do.

I had to kick a player out of my group who I had been friends with for years. We have a pretty stable game group that’s been playing together a long time. Well, romance struck the group and two players started dating. Things were going great. They were together a few years and moved in together. So this took course over a long period of time.

Then they guy suddenly broke up with the girl. He instantly regretted it and tried to get her back. When she told him no, he stalked her. We told her to call the police or stay with one of us if she didn’t feel safe. So it got bad.

I called him and had a conversation with him about his behavior and that he was no longer welcome at the table or in any of our social circles. I informed him that his behavior was to stop and he was to leave her alone. He tried to stay in the group and get her kicked out with the “I was here first” card. I told him no and she should be welcome and not punished for his actions.

Fortunately, when she mentioned the police and we all supported her, he realized he went off the rails. So he backed off, left everyone alone and we haven’t heard from him since. We were relieved he had that moment of realization and never did anything violent. It suddenly struck him how obsessive he was being and he need to get out and fix things. That was the only time in 30 years of gaming I had to ask someone to leave though.