Creepy Player Habits - WARNING: reading may require a Sanity Check!

[white_trash_samurai]

I read this and the Linked RPG net postings and all I have to say is . . . . WOW!

I consider myself very, very, very lucky not to have ran into super creepy people . . . . just a few Lame people instead

 

[James Heard]

Man, where to start?

There's the guy who wasn't really all that creepy most of the time, except years later when everyone got called to testify in court because the cops finally had enough evidence to prove that he had bashed his ex-wife's head in with a brick and then laid her across the train tracks because he wanted to see his kid.

Then the guy who burst into our Saturday night game with an arsenal of firearms, all cranked up on whatever. I'd never met him before, so everyone had to speak fairly quickly to keep him from pushing a pistol at me. After he took some more pills he pulled out a character sheet and played the game as if he were a regular member of the party...with a pile of guns underneath his pillows on the floor.

One of my friends killed himself with a shotgun early one Saturday morning. They had barely taken away the body when apparently one of the other players showed up and said, "I just heard, can I have X's Magic Cards?" and walked in and tried to take them from the grieving widow.

I've had players go out for snacks during a break and end up in prison, players literally knocking down walls of the house we were playing in, thieves, creepy molester type guys, pauses for drug deals, pauses for sex, sex at the game table, general inappropriateness, fistfights, knives drawn, unexpected revelations about sexual orientation and disturbing crushes , and unwanted sexual advances in general. I've even had a fire started by a disgruntled player kicked out for this crap.

I think only the potty-pants guy over at RPG.net really significantly overshadows my own experiences with creepy and disturbing players, but at least I'm confident that anyone doing that around any of my players would probably face a lot more significant peril than social rejection. Guns Guy would probably make him eat his own teeth, for instance.

Just to be clear though, most of these 'creepy' people weren't really bad people (except the murderer and magic cards guy). They were just screwed up young people like myself at the time that I and my friends were around already because of work or whatever and we just were really good at getting EVERYONE to game with us. And when everyone works in 'shady professions' and bars for the most part, well I guess it's probably different than when your players are all lawyers and firemen.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Eating your own pus...or sitting in your own feces.

Hmm.

*blech*

Have you read the RPGNet story about the guy who wore diapers so that he wouldn't have to do breaks during the game session? Or the guy who couldn't be bothered to go to the toilet to take a leak, and used empty milk bottles instead - with hundreds of bottles standing around in the game room?

However, I think nothing here or there beats the story about gaming with a Brazilian Police Death Squad...

...except possibly for Kuma's "twincest" story, which he has hinted at, but refuses to tell.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

I used to game with a group of mostly older guys ... converted wargamers. (I was 20-ish, they were in their late-30s, early 40s.) In addition to D&D and The Fantasy Trip (how many of you young'uns have even heard of The Fantasy Trip?) we'd play Empire Builder, or Acquire, or occasionally poker. Several of them are still friends, though at most I see them yearly at GenCon.

There was one guy, though, whose house we usually played at. One week we were informed that the game was canceled, and the next week we found a new place to play. After some questioning, the story came out that the guy had been molesting his 15-year-old daughter, that after she'd told her mom (they were divorced) prosecutors had tapped his phone, and that she'd tricked him (over the phone) into admitting he'd had sex with her and asking her to do it again.

Pretty damned creepy. The creepiest part is that, seriously, you'd never have known. Looking at all of the guys objectively, you would have picked that guy, hands down, as the most normal looking.

 

[Trainz]

I can't express my feelings adequately about some posts on this very page because of Eric's grandma...

...damn.

 

[shadow]

The most interesting person I gamed with was a girl whom I shall simply call "S". I met S one morning at my high school's game club. I soon learned that she was despised by a large portion of the student body because she was (among other things) overweight, physically unattractive, and generally nerdy. Being somewhat of a nerdy outsider myself, I took pity on her. Seeing that she was a big fan of fantasy literature, I naturally introduced her to Dungeons & Dragons. She soon seemed to be pretty obsessed with the game, relentlessly asking me questions about every minute detail. That should have been a tip off to me, but I ignored it figuring serious gamers were hard to find in my high school.

S soon started reading Forgotten Realms novels. She then started writing (bad) fan-fiction featuring her character having a relationship with Drizzt. Finally, she stated that she was her character on the parallel Forgotten Realms plane. My "alter" on the Forgotten Realms was, of course, Drizzt. (I'm male, btw, so you can see where this was headed!) She also stated that she was worshipping the Forgotten Realms goddess Meilikki. I later learned that she had mental health problems and started seeing a psychiatrist. Still, to this day I cringe when I hear of the Drizzt novels!

 

[rowport]

I think I have to stop reading these "creepy" threads. When I read the ones on RPG.net, I mostly laughed, although there were some cringe-inducing stories. Over here, I smiled some, but felt vaguely depressed that there are so many disturbed individuals that share my hobby. I read Elirck's post about the pus-eater and moved onto utter disgust. Then, I read James Heard's post about a guy who tried to steal Magic cards from the widow of a suicide- seriously, guys, that makes me so sad. Is there any way to help some of these folks? Would psychological counseling help? Wow.

 

[Zepherus Bane]

Over here, I smiled some, but felt vaguely depressed that there are so many disturbed individuals that share my hobby.

I have to agree with rowport, where are you guys finding some of these people?

 

[fafhrd]

The hobby doesn't make these people. I'd wager that most were sad, lost or broken long before they encountered gaming, as we can see in the case of S. They game for the same reasons the rest of us do. It's liberating, expansive, and utterly opposed to the mundane. The way in which well adjusted gamers differ from those poor souls is that we have something else to go back to and lives to lead when the books close and the game ends. Who knows, maybe the game provides some joy in an otherwise miserable life. For that I'm willing to accept them as compatriots in our lil hobby, just not neccessarily at my game table.

 

[Sorren]

Luckily I've never had any real negative experiences that even resembled anything mentioned in this thread. I've made it my policy to "interview" new players before admitting them into my campaign.