"Gaming Divorce"

[reveal]

1) Dropped out of my first gaming group as an adult after 2 sessions because the DM decided to introduce the Law of Armed Conflict (actual military rules of engagement) into a freaking fantasy game. I was a 2e Elven Bladesinger and I killed an unarmed Kobold, who had earlier tried to kill me mind you, so the DM ruled that my sword broke because I went against LoAC.

2) My second group broke up because 2 of the players, husband and wife, moved away and another player got married and didn't have time to game.

3) I left my third group because one of the other players decided to hit on my wife (He didn't seem to be able to separate the in-game character romance his character had with my wife's character from out-of-game "don't touch me jerk!")

4) I got kicked out of my fourth group because... Honestly, I don't know. The people weren't the type to have conflict they just said "Come get your stuff you're out" and didn't want to "bother" to tell me why. Pretty poor if you ask me.

5) I've been with my current group, plus and minus a few people, for the past 3 years and it's been great.

Edit: I forgot to answer the question.

Kicking someone out is a heckuva lot harder. The only time I have kicked someone out of a group was a complete fiasco. He was out of town and the rest of the group decided he was too much of a nusance at the table to let back in. I was going to wait to tell him face to face once he got back but another player decided to do it over e-mail...

Ya... Not good. The guy took it hard and I've spoken to him a few times since then but he's not one of my close friends anymore. Which is really sad because if they are supposed to be a close friend, why would they get so mad because you didn't want to play a game with them anymore? Oh well...

 

[derelictjay]

Gotta say giving someone the boot. Though I've never actually done it, I have had a hand at doing it.

I also did the remove myself, and it left me with a nearly 2 year long self-imposed exile from roleplaying. That left the group dead in the water.

But to tell the truth, the group was already breaking apart. See we had this player, and he gets on everybodies nerves, needless to say he either directly caused various players to leave or other players quit showing up because he was there. I probably should have booted him, but hey hindsight is always 20/20 right. As to what happened to that group, its been slowly reforming, minus the guy mentioned, and me (though I have other reasons for not joining the group, none of them people or gaming related), yep, I definatly should have booted that guy.

 

[Mystery Man]

I have kicked one out because of some serious issues that we didn't quite understand until recently. He's a drunk and a mean one. Hopefully he can get these issues straightened out.

 

[The_Gunslinger658]

I had to boot players from my old campaign a few years back, it was a pair of them and they drove me nuts. I think Joe K. had to deal with these two also, funny thing is, they are famous (or infamous?) among chicago gaming groups.


Scott

 

[el-remmen]

I once had one player who kept dropping out of the game and coming back in with a different character even though every time he said he would be dropping out for good - but when he would hear all the other players (we were all close friends) talking about how much fun the last session was he would want to re-join. . .

After a half-dozen times I had to tell him he could not come back. He was persnickety and self-centered kind of player to begin with and his coming and going kept messing with the over-arching plot.

If there is one pet-peeve I have about gaming groups it is people who change characters mid-campaign or who want to come and go when the whim hits them. . .

But even in this case, asking him to go was really hard for me to do. . .

 

[TheEvil]

Think I'll just toss my vote on the 'harder to boot' pile.
Having moved around alot, I haven't had to deal with the gaming with friends issues, and the few times I did, it was because I was moving, in one case to the other coast. Generally, I try out a group and decide within a few session whether to stay or not. Most often I leave because I don't like the personality of one or more of the other gamers. Only rarely have left because of game style. The worst of experience of this sort was when I was a security guard and agreed to play a game where one of the site supervisors as a GM. He was TERRIBLE! NPCs were far more powerful then players and did any heavy lifting and most of the roleplaying. He also insisted on singing from time to time during the game. He was very proud of his world.

Since only my wife and I were playing, we told him that we were too busy to play anymore after one session, and I switched to the graveyard shift at the jobsite.

 

[fusangite]

I was put in the unenviable position of having to organize the GM and other players into a united front to kick out the person who had recruited each of us to the group.

Basically, she was a pretty high-maintenance player at the best of times but had a particularly severe episode of seasonal affective disorder and became completely obsessed with the game in the most negative possible way. It was one of the ugliest interpersonal interactions I have ever been involved in.

Quitting a campaign is a piece of cake by comparison.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

I wasn't the DM, and in fact the player wasn't asked to leave, but I've been in a situation where the presence of a certain player drastically impaired the experience of a game for the rest of a group.

She was in two games; in both she created characters with their own specific goals which were not generally compatible with those of the rest of the group, and complained often and loudly that what the group was doing was "boring" and that she wanted us to do something her character cared about.

In one, sadly, run by her then-boyfriend, she got what she wanted more often than not, even after they broke up. In another, a d20 Wheel of Time game, he helped talk that game's DM into giving her character a more powerful and "interesting" character class from d20 Legend of the Five Rings after a few sessions playing with the Wheel of Time version didn't satisfy her.

She talked people into giving her more powerful options or gear than the rest of the party, but still complained bitterly whenever she felt useless - and often objected to the party even engaging in activities that she couldn't directly contribute to. Playing a social character in Wheel of Time she complained about having nothing to do in combat, but preferred to rely on her (overpowered) social skill bonuses and dice rolls when interacting with NPCs, often flat-out refusing to even come up with an out-of-character explanation for exactly how she was planning to convince or intimidate or manipulate other people, much less attempt the barest amount of in-character dialogue.

In the game her boyfriend ran, she came into a game which had been established for around nine months and refused to alter her character concept even though it was immediately clear that she'd have no reason to adventure with the party any more than we had a reason to help her attain her goals - which, incidentally, kept ramping up in difficulty as it became clearer to her that they weren't that impressive compared to the long-established campaign-driving goals of the original players.

She was also that fun kind of gamer who takes the reactions of other people's characters to her character as the other players' criticism of her ability to roleplay, to come up with character concepts, or of herself as a person. Yet at the same time, she'd openly criticise other players and their characters for various reasons and be hurt when people reacted negatively.

You get the idea.

I bring this up for two reasons: one, because it's a good example of how one player can really ruin the fun of a campaign for the rest, and how important it is for DMs or the other players to have the guts to ask them to leave; two, because it was part of the reason I left the campaign run by her boyfriend.

Still, I think asking a player to leave is harder than leaving yourself, for the same reasons most other people have put forward. If I leave a game, my friendships with the other players only suffer if the reason they're breaking down is the same reason I'm leaving the game. If I kick someone out of a game and they don't agree it's reasonable, the friendship inevitably suffers.

The aforementioned player solved the problem herself, in a way; while she played until the end of her by-then-ex-boyfriend's campaign (the one I left), she decided a few months later to quit the Wheel of Time campaign, which was a relief to the rest of us even though she essentially gave her reasons as "I'm a crap roleplayer, my characters suck, and you all suck for hating me for it".

Had she been asked to leave her boyfriend's game (nigh-on impossible, though it might have been nice if she'd done so after they broke up), I may not have quit it myself; while she wasn't the only reason I did so, part of the rest of it was that I was irritated that the DM was willing to cater to her demands for storyline and goals to pursue, while at the same time he was reversing the campaign's earlier course of being driven by the original group's goals and desires and railroading us to what he thought was a fitting conclusion to the game without concern for our opinions.