Ever had a player in your group throw a tantrum or worse? Most uncomfortable moment?

[The Crippler]

I've found that for some reason games can bring out the worst in people. Some people seem to realize that there should be a disconnect between what is happening on the table and the real world. Of course that is perhaps in part because the people who seem to have the biggest such problems don't interact well with the "real world".

Once upon a time, I was running a game for one of my two regular gaming groups. One of the guys, at the urging of his wife, invites one of HER co-workers to play. He did it as a favour to her, because the co-worker had heard about our group and bugged her to let us join. Supposedly, he was very experienced, having played since the early 80s. Character creation went fine enough and soon we were off and running.

I run a pretty tight campaign. We play by the rules as written and I usually let the dice fall as they may unless something seems particularly cruel. So, half a dozen sessions into the Shackled City, there's a particularly nasty encounter on an underground beach that the party must escape from in a cable car. The guy's character eats a phantasmal killer and fails both saves (a cleric failing both the will and fort saves is pretty unusual, but hey, it happened). The party escapes, but I am (what I think) generous and let them grab his body as they escape up cable car. The guy starts asking me repeatedly whether he was "really dead" and since it's the end of the session I say "Yes, but we'll talk about it next week." He leaves in a huff.

That weekend, I get a phone call from him. Let me say that I had never spoken to this guy outside of the 6 or so sessions I had run and he did not have my phone number. He starts calm enough, but it's his intention to get me to retcon my decision about the phantasmal killer. I'm fairly adamant, but also pliable. I tell him that it'll be ok and the cleric in town will be able to find a scroll to bring him back. That's not good enough. Not by far. He starts to rant about how in "20 years of playing D&D he had never lost ONE character! Not ONE!" and then begins to threaten me whilst apologizing at the same time! I was, to say the least, unnerved. So, I called up my buddy and passed word to him to tell his wife that she should tell her co-worker the campaign was cancelled.

I've got some better ones involving warhammer, but none that felt quite so awkward. I'll see if I can dredge some of those up. Nothing provokes a battle like a warhammer rules interpretation.

 

[Peni Griffin]

Hello, my name is Peni and I'm a drama queen.

Fortunately, my group knows this and is okay with it, mostly, though I've scared a few people. I'm not the only one who does it, either, I'm just the least inhibited about it. The time our wizard, for reasons I can't even recall, told us he was going to put his lightning wand under his chin and trigger it would have been pretty drastic if we hadn't talked him down.

The thing is, emotions are physical. If you simulate them, you have them. Just as the implied death of an imaginary fawn's imaginary mother causes real tears in the movies, do the imaginary anger, sadness, frustration, fear, etc., of your imaginary characters in their imaginary situations have real physical effects on your body when you're playing them. A lot of these "tantrums" are caused by people not understanding that and getting overwhelmed by the biology of emotion. Once you understand what's happening, you - or the people around you - can call a break to get the feelings disentangled before going on. If you don't understand what's happening, you can spoil everybody's good time.

It is true that intense identification with characters can disrupt the game even with that. We're on extended hiatus from one long-running campaign because my priestess walked away. I couldn't stop her. She was a perfectionist, a snob, and a deeply committed team leader (I made it clear to the others that I personally didn't think she was the leader, but Sofia assumed that her social class and relationship to our patron automatically made her that) who freely delegated responsibility in order to get the best results. She was fanatical about keeping "her people" alive and thought they respected her in her own right, as priestess, and as the patron's representative. When we got an adventure hook that was planted through her as priestess instead of through the patron, she asked for volunteers and - I thought - made it clear that this was *her* mission for the church and that how things were done was every bit as important as what things were done.

I have no idea, and in retrospect he doesn't either, why my husband's half-elf ranger chose this time to make his control issues with her authority overt. He'd always had them and Sofia'd always been oblivious to them, and in its own weird way it worked. He'd always been the go-to guy for tactics and she'd always respected that. But for some reason, this mission, the one she considered to be personally hers, was different for him and he didn't stay out of it and wouldn't be subtle. He started openly doing things he knew she wouldn't approve, changing plans without warning, and ignoring what she said. Twice he forged ahead into melee when she called for retreat or ranged combat, twice everybody else in the party followed him in preference to her, and both times she was bloodily and spectacularly proved correct and had to extend heroic efforts to keep everybody alive. One of those times, this involved Raising Dead on him. And then, when things were about to be wrapped up, he went behind her back, with the help of another party member, and made a deal without consulting her.

So she quit. Who wouldn't? The magnitude of the disillusion and humiliation she felt still makes me sick to my stomach. I told people I'd make another character and Sofia could retire to her villa, but - here's the weird part - nobody wanted that. They wanted Sofia back. People came to me in character and tried to talk her out of it. Even the offending half-elf realized, eventually, that he'd been in the wrong, and my husband wrote an in-character letter of formal apology that makes it possible for the game to resume at some point with the same characters. But they'll never be in the same relationship again, because something broke in the team on that mission and no apology will ever put things back the way they were.

So now the ball's in my court and I need to bluebook something that will make it possible to figure out how to get the old gang back together on a new footing, but one way and another I haven't been able to put the creative energy into it that it would require. Sofia is not an easy play. She used to leave me with a big knot at the nape of my neck because she was so tense. She'll have to mellow a lot before I'm ready to get back into her prissy head.

 

[GravyFingerz]

haha, hiyas man. Long time and all that.

Yeah, we need to keep in touch more often. Send me a PM on here with your email, so I can add it to my list of allowed incoming emails.

 

[Herzog]

Again, not a tandrum (haven't seen any in campaigns I've been in) but awkward situation:

In our groups, there is an unwritten rule that says you don't steal from the other characters, don't attack the other characters, and don't go behind their backs to get them into trouble.
This leeds to most of the sessions being group efforts toward our common goal.
However, we also believe in following the 'normal' reasoning for character reactions.

One time, we had a guest player. He'd DM-ed some groups I played in before, but I had never played with him as player. We all assumed he was aware of the unwritten rule. He wasn't.

What he was aware of, was the unwritten rule that you don't attack or kill other characters.

The session went very well, and at some point we were ready to devide the treasure.
The guest player had really set his mind on some of the magical equipment, but since our characters' reasoned he was a new, not yet fully incorporated extra, we argued that that specific magic item he wanted would go to one of the other characters.

He wasn't happy, but we played on.

Later on in the session, he proceeded to steal the magical item from the character that had taken it. That turned out to be a bad move, since the character in question already had his doubts about the 'new guy', and had a history of reacting violently to theft.

So, he proceeded to attack the 'new guy'. Who then attacked back. Eventually resulting in the death of the 'new guy'.

The player was furious and wouldn't play in that campaign any more.
He persisted in bringing up the fact that in a cooperative campaign, you don't kill the other characters. We persisted in pointing out that he shouldn't have been surprised that his actions, especially being a 'new guy', had the same repercussions we would have given any NPC who had done the same.

Maybe we should write up some of those unwritten rules....

Herzog

 

[Keeper of Secrets]

I have more stories than I wished I had. Naturally I have the dice throwers and the dice yellers (where one player would have angry words with his poor performing dice).

Warning - this is a pretty long post.

Story 1
Going back as far as I can recall, I was running D&D at about age 14 or so with the nighborhood kids which eventually evolved into the regular group. For whatever reason the group, when they found treasure, just put it into a giant sack and never used it until it was divided up at the end of the adventure. I always found it strange that they would never use the potions or swords they found until divided but the system seemed to work well enough for them. Anyway, their method was, at the end of the adventure, roll dice and the highest roller got to pick first and so on. Well, there was some really nice piece of treasure I cannot recall, something along the lines of "Holy Avenger +5" sweet. When the player who got the highest roll was caught lying about the die roll, boy did the fists fly. Rolling around on the floor, hitting each other with furniture WWF style . . . My mom came down to see what the Hell was going on. Eventually they made up and I awarded first pick to the next highest roller.

Story 2
Same group. My parents had a huge wood burning stove in the basement, off the room where we played (uh-ho). Well the tradition they created was to take the sheets of the dead characters and throw them into the furnace (during the winter months) and watch as the sheet burned into nothingness. One guy always had a fear of this, horribly afraid he would be forced to watch the burning sheet. Anyway, the players decided that they would try and get him killed or, failing that, outright attack the character and kill him. Eventually, they decided to turn against him (none of the characters were what you would describe as 'good'). They whacked him Sopranos style and forced him to watch the sheet burn. The victim cried and I felt really, really bad, fully glad I was running the game rather than playing.

Story 3
Years later. Different group. College group. The big tough barbarian of the group gets mind controlled by a fey. The characters were invading her land and she wanted them gone. The mind controlled barbarian was ordered to attack the group. The druid of the group, defending himself, swing his scimitar, scored a 20, confirmed the hit, consulted the Crit Table, and the result he got was beheading the barbarian. The druid (and his player) were horrified at what happened as the players were good friends. The barbarian's player stormed out upset. Later after the game the druid's player and I went back to his room (he had a TV in his room and I didn't and Seinfeld was on or something I was hot to see). The barbarian's player busts in (hours later, remember) and begins strangling the druid's player right in front of me without saying a word. Now the druid's player is turning purple and his tongue hanging out of his mouth and not even defending himself, I thought they were both kidding around - they had been longer friends than me. I changed my way of thinking when I see the druid player start to pass out. At that point I jumped up and pulled the barbarian player away. He stormed out. I had a talk with the player later who had never done anything like this before and as it turned out his best friend back home had just died a few days before so he was kind of having a nervous breakdown. He never did anything weird like that again (when sober).

Story 4
I am running Call of Cthulhu at the dorms and this group has a habit of being just as nasty to each other as they do the cultists. Five go into the basement, find monsters and one of them goes first and flees to the top of the stairs and locks the rest in the basement waiting for the monsters to do their business. Normally this kind of behavior was considered OK in the group as they took kind of a Paranoia approach where they found it fun to 'accidentally' kill each other, have each other committed to mental institutions, etc. However, this time the victims just snapped. They jumped up, yelled at the guy and started roughing him up. At this point the floor's RA was walking by and flipped out. One of the players threw something at him and, well, then the school got involved . . .

Story 5
I am actually a player at this point. We are fighting a handfull of bad guys and one of them looks pretty bad in terms of wounds. The villain pulls out a healing potion, pops it and drinks it down like a cold Coke on a hot day. One player (kind of a power gamer) FLIPS OUT like the GM had just told the player he had done naughty things with his mom. The player begins freaking out, screaming, fussing and saying it was completely unfair, abuse of GM power, etc. Nobody at the table seemed to sympathize with the player and the GM - who was kind of an overly sweet gentle person, seemed to feel guilty.

Story 6
I am running a supers game. The characters discover a magical artifact that was a scale. After some experimentation, the characters make the determination (incorrectly) that the scale determines someone's 'goodness' or 'evilness.' They were incorrect - honestly I forget what it did at this point since the events of the evening kind of cloud my memory of what actually happened. One of the characters (who I actually thought was kind of evil) was horrified to discover that the scale thought he was 'evil.' (Remember, the scale did not determine this, they only THOUGHT it determined this.) The player (who, interestingly enough was the druid character from Story 3) flips out at me, accuses me of calling his character evil and starts throwing a fit. (Sadly we are playing at HIS place so there is kind of general deference to letting him to do what he wants to do a little bit.) Unfortunately, I was not in the habit of telling players out of game things so I kept quiet and kind of asked him to calm down. He would not. The player sitting next to him was kind of this Zen-like, calm bastion of normalcy. While the player is ranting, raving and screaming at me that I am treating his character unfairly, the Zen dude gently and silently places his book on the table, swings back, punches the ranter in the face, sending him back into his chair. Not a word was spoken. I coughed. Said I was going out for a smoke and when I came back all was calm. The ranting player was quiet the rest of the evening and said not a word.

 

[Bayushi Seikuro]

Well, thought I'd chime in.

There have been some doozies over the years -- one when my ranger went along with looting a dragon, his bloodbrother, a paladin of Sif, decided to come at him with a weapon to stop him; I chopped him down. DM was nice, let the paladin end up with one hp. He stands up and charges me again, despite the ranger having not sheathed his weapons, and I cut him down again. He freaked out, about how could I do that to my sworn brother, etc etc.

Some weeks later, he was talking about what an awesome martial artist he was, that he had this awesome style that involved fighting at 45 degree angles, etc etc. So this mellow gamer who also was a kickboxer said, "Okay, let's go fight outside." They go outside, it's raining. The 'awesome martial artist' goes for the roundhouse kick, slips in the mud, and the other gamer just kicks him in the face once, snapping a tooth out. We didn't know what happened, most of us were inside, but the cocky guy game back in, muddy and holding his face. I couldn't help it and made a comment about his superior 45-degree-angle theory not working when someone attacks you at a 37.5 degree corner, I guess.

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Best one I heard since moving to Knoxville, and it's not even mine.

There was a drama queen in a game, always playing the kender-type -- you know, the 'Ohhh, I'm so cute and fun, no one will get annoyed when I constantly pick their pockets and rob from them.' Most people just went along with it, whatever.

A new guy started playing, I guess. After at least a session of this woman's crap, he comes up with a plan -- drug her character, open her up while sedated, and put marbles in her so they can hear her coming, so no Move Silently. All the rolls came up excellent for him and not so good for her. She got pissed, freaked out, threw stuff, stormed off, you name it.

The game went on. About 45 minutes later, she came in, still angry, and demanded to see where, on his character sheet, it said Marbles. The DM sighed, shrugged and said to just show her.

The new player? He goes: "Right here. See, it says 'Caltrops.'"

Ooops. Big misunderstanding of caltrops vs. other pursuit-delaying techniques.

I get a smile even writing that one.
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For the most part, the games have, at worst, devolved into some taunting and hurt feelings and smacktalk. Except for the melee that got drinking banned from this person's house by his fiance'/cogamer, when her then-fiance decided to get in a grapplefest with a guy we lovingly call the Farbarian. I still remember it, clear as day, seventeen years later. Boy, that wicker chair shattered all to heck.

Why do I alla sudden visualize the one-eyed guy from 13th Warrior telling the tale of the Fire Wurm?

 

[Emirikol]

kender-type -- you know, the 'Ohhh, I'm so cute and fun, no one will get annoyed when I constantly pick their pockets and rob from them.'

Yea, we all know the type. People like that get what they deserve.

Wait..was that a mean-spirited comment from me?

jh

 

[Doghead Thirteen]

Fun with pressure hulls.

It's the first session of the campaign. The players are aboard a beat-up old starship that's just been thrown through a wormhole Voyager-style clean out of known space. Wormhole transit was pretty rough and knocked the power down, took out the comms, etc.

They've got the ship patched back together. Player 1 discovers that the atmosphere has been pumped out of the underworks escape bay, undertakes a visual check of that part of the hull, and finds it to be sound. So he decides to cut through one of the rusted-down hatches leading into the escape bay.

At this stage, Player 2 (our token Scandanavian) threw a tantrum, ranting on about player 1 trying to TPK them on the first session, blah blah blah, and stormed off.

The thing being, his character was in the cockpit - at the other end of the ship, behind three pressure doors...

MY bro managed to get him calmed down and we're still gaming together, but we still call taking a tantrum 'having a Swedish moment'.

 

[Tclynch]

OK, so here is the story.
Years (maybe 15 or so) a bunch of us were doing a weekly D&D game with "M" running. Now, people liked the game and M had been running for a while. It was known that he was VERY stengy with magic (5th lvl character MIGHT have 1 magic item) and if you got an item, it wouldn't be around long.
Now M and I didn't get along very well in real life. Opposite politics among other things, but things were pretty much ok when he DMed. Well, he went on a run of slowly removing Magic items from characters in the game, as well as suddenly requiring Mages (I was playing one) to have a list of all spells, in order of thier appearance in thier spell books. All mages had to account for all components and where they were located on thier person (lots of real detailed BS).
We all "liked" the game but it became a struggle to enjoy it. One day my character had been hit with some spell and M required me to make separate saves for all my items (including spell book). So he says that I lost 4 spells from my book and that I should hand over my list so he can make sure they are gone.
Frankly, I'd had enough. I just up an left. It was not worth it anymore. Other players tried to get me to come back, but not M. I would play in other games, but not the one run by him. Eventually, other players left as well and the game folded. M no longer plays with us.

 

[Hypersmurf]

We're on extended hiatus from one long-running campaign because my priestess walked away. I couldn't stop her.

I remember the first time one of my PCs did something that surprised me. It was scary, in a way, but very cool.

Sadly, it's only happened once or twice since.

Where it gets fun, though, is trying to explain the concept of your character doing something you didn't expect to a non-gamer.

-Hyp.