DISCUSSION: Have you ever had to boot somebody from a game?

Satyrn said:

It was sort of a shame, the host's place was central, and we liked playing with his wife.

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Out-of-context quote of the day...


I was asked to drop into a 3.5 game run by an acquaintance of mine once time, who tasked me to design a serious combat monster for the session...
Which seemed odd, because his game wasn't that sort.

But, whatever. Spiked chain Swordsage 5/Swashbuckler 4.

Turned out, the party needed backup when the entire group turned on the idiot who was ruining their game (He'd apparently instigated some major out-of-game drama as well) and Julius Caesar-ed his straight-off-the-Char-Op-board uber-smiting paladin/whatever/whatever... It was a unanimous decision by the rest of the group to hit the guy in the only place he'd feel it.

Not how I'd normally handle something like that - I go for the straight "You're being an <expletive>-hat, and you're no longer welcome here" - but by the time we got to the actual beat-down it had begun to seem like a fine idea to me as well.

Mostly, though, I've been lucky enough that when a group I was in parted ways with a player it was a mutual and friendly agreement that the player just wasn't a good fit for the game.


EDIT: Damn, I'd actually forgotten about Stacy - One group I played with briefly invited a new girl to join their game and, in the third session she played in, something in the game set her off and she had a full-on emotional melt-down - the session turned into an emergency intervention. She ended up spending some time under observation. It was before my time with their group, but I heard the story.

I had one player self eject himself out of every group in the local game shop. In one of my campaigns he was playing a paladin, the kind of paladin that states he is LG Do-Right Pureheart yet acts like a CN (insert colourful metaphor) when it comes to roleplay. In the campaign the group came across a holy avenger. The sword granted the group a vision of a female paladin trapped in amber who could be saved. The sword let it be known that it could only be wielded by a woman and would enact measures to be used by a woman. The player ignored this and took up the sword as his own and was thus transformed from male to female.

This brought out a litany of homophobic transphobic cursing along with committing in character suicide. He left the shop and has not yet returned to my knowledge.

I've had to kick a few players out of my group over the years. The hard ones are guys you enjoy as players, but the rest of the group does not like.

Back in the 90's I had a player I liked quite a bit, but he made misogynistic comments and did not take suggestions from female players very seriously. Shame on me - I did not notice. The three women in the group came up to me one day and told me about his behavior and I kicked him out of the group. Not easy, because he loved my campaign.

The others have been typically fellows who have behaviors that annoy the group and the group asks me to boot him. I have had to do that a few times. I'm very straight forward about it and explain that he just was not working with the group's chemistry. Some leave on friendly terms and some have left angry.

Have not had to boot someone for years thank goodness!

Hmm, if you leave a game because of the DM and a few session later the rest of the group follows you out, and then you and the rest later form a new group and game, does that count?

I wasn't trying to toss the DM or kill the game, but I just got fed up a bit quicker but no less assuredly than everyone else.

We once booted a GM.

The GM spent months prepping for the game and getting everything ‘just right’, and several people had to remake their characters because they did not meet his approval. The game eventually starts and we had a Diviner with an emphasis on prophecy, a Rogue with a background about being great at fixing things, etc.

During the first couple of games, we were told to seek out an NPC Prophet who delivered a prophecy instead of the prophet pc getting the plot hook. When our wagon broke down and a deus ex NPC showed up and offered to fix it in exchange for help, the rogue was like “this is what I’m good at! I try to fix it myself” but the DM said he couldn’t.

There were several more moments like this. More than being a railroad, the designated story somehow negated the choices of the players. We approached him multiple times to explain our concerns, but he would argue that our feelings on the issue were mistaken or wrong. So one day 4 out of 5 players left his game simultaneously.

He was an incredibly nice guy outside of the game, and I wish him well to this day. But sometimess good friends do not make good roleplayers, no matter how much you wish it did.

Ezequielramone said:

He only cared about being the most powerful and screamed at other players when they did something fun instead of something tactical, he even read the adventure in advance in order to know better what to do and where the lot was.

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(emphasis added)

If I had a player doing this, I would be moving treasure locations and switching certain NPC motivations. Add in some NPCs, encounters, and traps not in the adventure. I wouldn't change too much, not only because why make a lot of work for myself because of a McSpoiler in my group, but because having 98% of the adventure the same, with just a few critical plot items changes would drive a player like that nuts.

pogre said:

I've had to kick a few players out of my group over the years. The hard ones are guys you enjoy as players, but the rest of the group does not like.

Back in the 90's I had a player I liked quite a bit, but he made misogynistic comments and did not take suggestions from female players very seriously. Shame on me - I did not notice. The three women in the group came up to me one day and told me about his behavior and I kicked him out of the group. Not easy, because he loved my campaign.

The others have been typically fellows who have behaviors that annoy the group and the group asks me to boot him. I have had to do that a few times. I'm very straight forward about it and explain that he just was not working with the group's chemistry. Some leave on friendly terms and some have left angry.

Have not had to boot someone for years thank goodness!

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Couldn't you have talked to him? We always here about horror stories in this threads but most offense is not intentially given and if you can talk to someone without attacking them it is possible to get folks to change their behavior. If they don't want to they will be probably leave of their own accord. I like to give folks a chance to adapt to the group if they want to continue playing.

A couple of times I've had to speak to players who have been habitual no-shows for games - saying that if they can't commit to attending regularly then they should go take care of whatever it is that's more important. If and when their circumstances change such that they can attend regularly, their seat will be waiting for them. When this has happened, they've been okay with it - mostly, they've wanted to drop out but didn't want to offend.

The other time I've had to boot a player was rather less pleasant.

The player in question was mostly a nice guy, but due to mental health issues he had various quirks that made him uncomfortable to be around. We tried to adapt, but it got to the point that our host's wife declared "no more", and this was quickly followed by the families of the other potential hosts doing likewise. So he had to go, and it fell to me to be the one to tell him.

It sucked. I did it by email, tried to keep it as non-specific as possible, but also made it clear that it wasn't really a discussion. Needless to say, he wasn't happy, and we bounced a couple of emails around on it, but that was that.

Fauchard1520 said:

Have you ever had to boot somebody from a game or a group?

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Nope, never happened.

I've played with a DM who always wanted to dominate the players, by consistently introducing powerful npc's played by him, that solved all our problems. He also had a habit of making all of our actions fail, by either setting the DC impossibly high, and/or adding extra complications that pretty much ensured our failure.

Funny how this sort of gamer is often mentioned in discussions like this. It seems to be a common thing. Are there a lot of gamers like this who are just really insecure?

He was a nice guy in real life, but not very fun to play roleplaying games with. It wasn't much better when he was a player either, with overpowered characters, dominating the table, denying other players their place in the spotlight, and outright cheating. You've probably seen this sort of player: The moment any player takes an action, he interferes because his character can do that action so much better. And the cheating baffles me. Is it really that bad to roll low for a check every now and then? Is it really that bad to fail at an action once in a while? Not every check is a matter of life and death. Who even cares if you fail a perception check occasionally? Do these players not realize that they are robbing themselves and others of fun by cheating?

So me and a few other players decided to kick ourselves from the group, and form a group of our own. In the process we also eliminated another bothersome player from our group, who was always causing problems with his strange anime-girl fetish, and attacks against other players.

And I haven't had any further problems ever since.