Gaming horror stories: Annoying players

[shadow]

I've been in many different groups througout the years. However, it seems that no matter what group I was in, there was at least one really rude, inconsiderate player. I've finally found a group that doesn't have the aforementioned annoying player. But looking back through the years I can think of a number of players and things that they did that occasionally made gaming extremely annoying. For example I've gamed with the following players:

The militant atheist/agnostic player: This player had been forced to go to a fundamentalist church growing up, so as an adult he decided to take it out on religion in general. Every few minutes at the gaming table he would try to go a rant about the horrors and stupidity of "organized religion" (even if he stopped the game to rant). He would use any instance to veer the topic of discussion back to the folly of religion, no matter how irrelevant. Not only did this get the game off topic, it also was extremely annoying to people in the group who had strong religious beliefs. There may be a time and a place to discuss religion, but the game is not one of them. The gaming table is not a soapbox!

The heavy smoker: I generally don't mind if players smoke, provided that they do it outside. However, this one player was extremely addicted, and had to take a break every few minutes to light up. He smoked cheap, extremely foul smelling cigarettes, and would come back into the apartment reeking of extremely pungent, cheap cigarettes. Moreover, he insisted on keeping the door of my apartment open so he could still talk while outside smoking, allowing his smoke to waft inside my apartment.

The rude, obnoxious player: Joking at the gaming table is good. However, a joke ceases to be funny when someone else gets offended. Good natured ribbing is one thing, but to continue ribbing on a player after he has made it clear that he feels uncomfortable is something else. When the jokes concern another player's disability, it definately has gone too far!

The Quentin-Tarantino gangsta' wannabe: There was one player in my former group that had watched Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, and Sin City a few too many times. Every character that he made was essentially a trash talking gangster/hitman. Even his neutral good druid started torturing enemies and threatening to go "medieval on their a**". (After I told him that his druid had changed alignments for his actions, he whined and complained that "I wasn't letting him role-play his character".) He made it extremely difficult for me to play any sort of heroic or epic game since his characters were always such loose cannons.

Why do we find so many annoying players in gaming? Are gamers more likely to be rude adn annoying than the general public? Maybe gaming forces us to meet with a diverse group of people. Whatever it is, let's here your gaming nightmare stories

 

[Glyfair]

Are gamers more likely to be rude adn annoying than the general public?

Perhaps a bit. The subgroup needs a group of people interested in the game to play together. That means there is less of a willingness to do something to cause that group to shrink. People are less likely to complain, and those people don't get the negative feedback as much as they normally would

Maybe gaming forces us to meet with a diverse group of people.

No, it's not that. I think it's that it forces us to interact with a diverse group of people.

Look at other entertainment areas. If you go to a ball game you will meet a diverse group of people. There are certainly annoying people there. Look around at the guy who berates the opposing player. Someone runs around in next to no clothes painted in his team colors. People constantly using profanity, loudly and around children.

However, you have very little interaction with those people. Someone is constantly leaving to smoke? Unless you are sitting next to them, you don't notice. Someone making rude jokes, unless it's loud enough to annoy everyone around (thus getting the usher to intervene), you put up with it. Someone pretends to be a gangster? You ignore it. Militant Atheist? How likely are you to deal with this?

It's the fact that you have to interact with these people in a social setting that brings these things out.

 

[Gruff]

The heavy smoker: I generally don't mind if players smoke, provided that they do it outside. However, this one player was extremely addicted, and had to take a break every few minutes to light up. He smoked cheap, extremely foul smelling cigarettes, and would come back into the apartment reeking of extremely pungent, cheap cigarettes. Moreover, he insisted on keeping the door of my apartment open so he could still talk while outside smoking, allowing his smoke to waft inside my apartment.

I had a player like this in one of my groups. It seemed that he spent just as much time smoking outside as he did gaming. The funny thing is that his body odor didn't bother me nearly as much as that stale cigarette smell!