D&D 5E Dealing with a trouble player and a major blow up

[JackOfAllTirades]

It's absolutely not worth the trouble to keep this guy in your game.

 

[iserith]

While I totally sympathize with players who feel the DM isn't giving their plans a fair chance of success, there isn't any excuse for behaving in the manner described. Many DMs in my experience look for reasons why a player's plan can't work instead of imagining how it can and presenting the players with fair, interesting, and fun complications to overcome (which may or may not call for rules and dice) to make it happen. This can be exceedingly frustrating. I can't say with any certainty that's what happened here, but it's a common enough thing to make me wonder if it is so.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

You really need to sit down with your friend and talk things out. It may turn out that playing D&D together is not worth it. Maybe you can reach a happy compromise in your play styles.

That's what I'd like. Though I suggested the idea to my roommate, the other DM at our public games. He seems to think that attempting rational dialog with the person in question is impossible. He has known him for just as long as I have. He pretty much said that attempting rational dialog with someone who stormed out of a game because his plan didn't work the way he wanted it to was inevitably going to end in another fit where he stormed off and decided not to speak to me at all again. He suggested I don't talk to him at all about the issue and pretend like it never happened and just show up for our next Dnd session without ever mentioning again. He said the person in question had such a short memory that he likely forgot about it by the next day.

I just can't help but feel that ignoring this issue means it'll just come up again with another blow up.

 

[AriochQ]

While I totally sympathize with players who feel the DM isn't giving their plans a fair chance of success, there isn't any excuse for behaving in the manner described. Many DMs in my experience look for reasons why a player's plan can't work instead of imagining how it can and presenting the players with fair, interesting, and fun complications to overcome (which may or may not call for rules and dice) to make it happen. This can be exceedingly frustrating. I can't say with any certainty that's what happened here, but it's a common enough thing to make me wonder if it is so.

I thought about this as well when responding.

If you ever take an improv class, one of the things they teach you is to always say 'Yes!' and never say 'No'. You want to feed off of what the other person is saying and try to develop the interaction rather than shut it down. I try to take that approach whenever possible as a DM.

For example:
Player: I walk up to the castle and tell the guards I am a janitor here to fix the plumbing.
DM: A look of worry crosses the guards face! "No one told me about any problems, but we better get it fixed right away!" He leads you around the outside of the wall, kicking a wooden cover off of a deep sewage filled cistern, he asks you if you want him to hold a rope, or will you just swim?

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

While I totally sympathize with players who feel the DM isn't giving their plans a fair chance of success, there isn't any excuse for behaving in the manner described. Many DMs in my experience look for reasons why a player's plan can't work instead of imagining how it can and presenting the players with fair, interesting, and fun complications to overcome (which may or may not call for rules and dice) to make it happen. This can be exceedingly frustrating. I can't say with any certainty that's what happened here, but it's a common enough thing to make me wonder if it is so.

I admit that my DMing style is much more "realistic". I don't like saying yes for the sake of saying yes. If someone tries to convince the guards of a castle that they are a plumber and there is no such thing as plumbing in the world, the guards like likely going to arrest the person on the spot and hopefully ship them to an insane asylum for making up words and speaking in tongues.

I know many other DMs like to say yes to plans no matter how silly or unlikely they are simply to keep the game moving and to make their players happy. That's not me. Attack head on a castle with 100 soldiers and you are dead. Try to cast charm person on the leader of an army while the army watches and they'll open fire on the caster assuming he's doing something hostile. I know many other DMs subscribe to the "rule of cool" and will allow anything that sounds cool or looks awesome to succeed, sometimes without rolling. In my games you tend to die when trying outlandish ideas.

Though I don't say no to all ideas either. If someone comes up with a well thought up plan, I give it a reasonable chance to succeed.

Edit: to me it's that you get a benefit in the game equal to the intelligence you show outside the game. Putting a bucket on your head and pretending to be the ancient Vorlon God, Bouji is funny but no one watching is going to believe it for a second. Using an illusion spell to make you appear exactly like the God and mimicking spells using special effects has a real chance of success.

 

[Umbran]

Taking the OP as straight truth...

Humans sometimes find that they can get what they like if they behave horribly. It is best to not have much to do with them.

It is also possible that this person is otherwise a fine human being, *except* in the context of a game. In a game he may have his ego engaged via his character (a bit of self-insertion), so that failure n game feels a lot like just failure to him, leading to unfortunate results.

A bit of commiseration that may help...

A ways back, my wife was in a car accident with some significant injury. The GM of a game we had been playing in for over a year said... nothing. No, "Geeze that must have been scary." No, "I'm glad you'll be okay." Nothing. A couple weeks passed, and he came over to our house to run the game. My wife, rather put out that this person who she thought was a friend seemed to show no concern for her welfare, thought it best to not hide that and let it fester. In a calm voice, she mentioned that it kind of hurt that he hadn't said anything.

His response? "I didn't come here to be attacked. I knew this was a mistake." Picked up his stuff, and left. We have never heard a single word from him since. I find that while the game had a good story to it, I'm ultimately not put out that it fell apart. I find I don't miss anyone who was at the table.

 

[Jaelommiss]

It seems like the player really wants to 'win', whatever that means in D&D. In my experience, this comes when players don't realize how complications can make the game more fun.

Remember the story of the halfling that never saw trolls in the woods, safely traveled over the Misty Mountains, didn't leave the path in Mirkwood, and backstabbed the sleeping dragon before heading home with a pile of gold that didn't have multiple factions trying to claim it? No? That's because complications make for a great story. Always winning is just plain boring. In everything I've ever done in life, satisfaction is proportional to challenge overcome, and some players just don't quite realize that this applies to D&D too. Winning a certain fight isn't victory because there was no chance for loss. Making the perfect plan that cannot fail is a great way to 'win', but really isn't as exciting. One of the most fulfilling victories I earned in D&D was a frontal assault on a hobgoblin castle, despite knowing of back ways in that would be far safer and more likely to succeed. By creating greater risks, victory was sweeter when it finally came.

If you decide to talk about the situation with the player as others have suggested (I support this suggestion, if only to get it off your chest) it might help to explain that failure is one way to advance the game and that it doesn't mean that he has 'lost' at D&D.

 

[GlassJaw]

Life is too short for bad beer and bad gaming.

Move on.

 

[iserith]

I admit that my DMing style is much more "realistic". I don't like saying yes for the sake of saying yes. If someone tries to convince the guards of a castle that they are a plumber and there is no such thing as plumbing in the world, the guards like likely going to arrest the person on the spot and hopefully ship them to an insane asylum for making up words and speaking in tongues.

Such an approach really isn't about "saying yes for the sake of saying yes." We say "Yes, and..." to accept someone's idea as valid and then add to it. This makes other people feel good that their ideas are being acknowledged, it moves the scene forward in a positive way, and doesn't take away from the DM's ability to challenge them.

Arguably, if the guards in your example aren't aware of plumbing because it doesn't exist in the campaign world, then that might be so of the player character. So rather than attach an uninteresting consequence to the action, you can just tell the player that plumbing isn't a thing in the campaign world and suggest he or she try another ruse. The challenge is getting past the guards and the approach is deception. I would work with the player to come up with a deception that fits the expectations of the setting and then we can decide what to do from there.

I know many other DMs like to say yes to plans no matter how silly or unlikely they are simply to keep the game moving and to make their players happy. That's not me. Attack head on a castle with 100 soldiers and you are dead. Try to cast charm person on the leader of an army while the army watches and they'll open fire on the caster assuming he's doing something hostile. I know many other DMs subscribe to the "rule of cool" and will allow anything that sounds cool or looks awesome to succeed, sometimes without rolling. In my games you tend to die when trying outlandish ideas.

Though I don't say no to all ideas either. If someone comes up with a well thought up plan, I give it a reasonable chance to succeed.

Then perhaps you can understand that there is a mismatch of expectations and that how you are responding to your players' ideas is creating tension and frustration for some of them. There is likely other baggage here as well, based on your other posts, that exacerbates the issue. You can't change other people. You can change yourself and your approach, if you so desire.

This still doesn't excuse the player's behavior, of course.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

There is a guy I've known since @1985. We went to HS together, we game together, and have been on bowling teams together.

While he is a good guy, he has a volcanic temper. It has never manifested at the gaming table, but it HAS during bowling. He's just shy of being pro-level good, so when he's a tad off how well he thinks he should be going, he can pitch a real wobbler. He's also 6'3" and over 280lbs, so when he loses his temper, its kind of like when Chewbacca does...

One night during league play, he was having one of those nights...and his brother tossed him off the team. His brother hadn't formed the team, he and I had. But his bro saw how others in the alley were reacting to his older sibling- teammates included- and assumed authority and tossed him.

Not only did the atmosphere clear then, but in the long run, it improved my buddy. He didn't bowl with us or anyone we knew for a while, but when he did, his demeanor- still not perfect- was vastly improved.

Life is too short to put up with BS in your recreational time. Boot him and let the chips fall where they may. Even if you lose half your group, you will decrease your stress level, and maybe, just maybe, your friend (and the woman he's dating) will learn a lesson about mature adult behavior.