DM's: Do you have one player in your group you'd like to give the boot?

[Sejs]

Nope, I'm quite happy with my gaming group.

My group is made up of my friends. If there was someone I disliked that much, they wouldn't be my friend, and thus they wouldn't be in my gaming group.

 

[Ulrick]

I usually only game with people that I like. Sometimes, like when starting a new group, I might not know everybody well. But I usually "screen them" before I invite them to play. I try not to game with people I wouldn't enjoy in another social setting.

I've had a couple players sneek under my radar that I've had to give the boot. One showed up stoned/drunk.

The second player seemed only want "to win." At the end of every last encounter of every session, right after I'd say something like "All right, that's it for this evening," he'd say "Experience?" EVERYTIME! I had even the chance to calculate experience points! It was like he wasn't even their to enjoy mine or the other player's company, but instead, to bulk up his character. The other players and I eventually got sick of him bossing them around and trying to look at their character sheets. The last straw was when I found him BEHIND MY DM SCREEN!!! claiming to be looking for a special rulebook for his character.

 

[werk]

Hmm. This thread (among others) has highlighted a trend.

Namely, not dealing with the situation until the group implodes. I've seen threads over the years in which one disruptive player results in the group disbanding.

Yeah, I see that a lot on here too. I change groups and players in my group pretty frequently because we're mostly a pick-up group and I simply have to manage it if I'm going to have any fun.

Communication is hard work and takes up time. It's just easier to be reactive than proactive, and some of us in the demographic have been associated with being predisposed to laziness (aka fatbeards). Add that together and you get some really disfunctional relationships...in and out of the game.

 

[punkorange]

I, like most, agree with Teflon Billy. It's supposed to be a game, and games are supposed to be fun, if it's not fun your not doing it right.

My current group is great, consisting of two veterans, and two new players. I'm very happy with the group. I have however had player's that annoy the piss out of me, they generally don't play more than a couple sessions though. I once invited my cousin to play and was kicking myself for it the entire session.

 

[sniffles]

We had such a player. His best friend was in the group as well, so we couldn't boot him.... it was horrible.

There's something incredibly wrong with that statement. I agree with Morrus that the friendship is more important than the game, but if a player is ruining the experience for everyone then it should be possible to ask that person to leave without ruining the friendship. As BlackMoria commented, if a friendship breaks up over being asked to leave the game - asked nicely, that is, not called names and told never to darken the doorstep again - then it was never a friendship to begin with.

 

[Slife]

Oh, that reminds me.

ATTENTION: MY GROUP.

Who the heck left their shoe? It looks something like this:

 

[Dragonbait]

Oh, that reminds me.

ATTENTION: MY GROUP.

Who the heck left their shoe? It looks something like this:

So simple and basic, but it made me laugh.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

So, in my opinion, the whole group needs to make that decision, not an arbitrary "leader" with the power of social banishment.

That happened in my group... and it didn't work, mainly because while nearly everyone agreed he was bad, they all panicked when it came to actually tossing him out.

The absolute worst was a group where everyone hated a particular player and the GM had been talking about giving the guy the boot. He was very unpleasant to interact with and openly cheated at the table. When the guy left "temporarily" for a couple of months due to RL concerns, everyone rejoiced and said that he'd never be allowed back. Then all of a sudden he came back! I asked about it and everyone just kind of looked away and made sheepish excuses for it. WTF???

I was about to ask if you gamed in Toronto... sounded too familiar to me.

Have DMs become so uncertain of themselves, so self-concious or so afraid of real world confrontation that rather than cowboy up and call the offender onto the carpet for his behavior that they would rather ignore or tolerate the behavior to the point that the group falls apart - all because of one disruptive player?

Yes.

Finding new players isn't easy. Just because the person who sits beside you at work plays DnD doesn't mean you know, or have any way of finding out. I haven't found advertising to work, especially since you don't know who the new person is, and I've had a couple of game sessions ruined by a near-stranger I invited in for a single game

For my old group, we were all spineless, myself included. I ended up having more spine by default (and by being angry) rather than having a non-wimpy personality. It does cause me to wonder, though, why people put up with a bad game.

In my case, I was invited into a new group and dropped the old one fast. However the new group didn't start for over a month, and I was used to one-a-week gaming. It occurred to me only then that no gaming was better than bad gaming.

 

[Chimera]

The friendship is more important than the game. Without a shadow of a doubt, and by a factor of ten.

The game is merely the social activity which a particular group of friends engages in together. Having the "authority" to excise a person from a group of friends is a unpleaant concept for me.

I agree with the first part.

But I've ended three friendships over people being extremely unpleasant at the game table, blatantly ignoring "hey dude, you're being a jerk" and trying to deal with it/tolerate it/find solutions up to the point where I had to say "You know, if this is how you insist on being, then I don't want to be your friend anymore". That's three people who thought that because I was their "friend", I had to tolerate a metric boat load of bad behavior.

 

[Lanefan]

I agree with the first part.

But I've ended three friendships over people being extremely unpleasant at the game table, blatantly ignoring "hey dude, you're being a jerk" and trying to deal with it/tolerate it/find solutions up to the point where I had to say "You know, if this is how you insist on being, then I don't want to be your friend anymore". That's three people who thought that because I was their "friend", I had to tolerate a metric boat load of bad behavior.

The problem also arises that some peoples' definition of "bad behavior" is what some others define as "normal mode of operation"...different people react differently to different things.

For example, if someone is in a game and doesn't say a word all night, is that bad behavior? It's not disruptive except when you've no idea what their character(s) is(are) doing...but is it by definition bad?

And friendship does come first. So does enemyship...I've seen people get into games just so they could get someone's goat, in situations where we all knew each other out-of-game. Sometimes, it produces a good story for later years. Other times, it produces arguments that go on for years...

And when someone new comes in, it doesn't take all that long to decide if they're worth keeping. The good news is, they usually are.

Lanefan