How have you gotten rid of unwanted players?
- Thread starter Emirikol
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werk
First Post
We usually cancel the game entirely, take a couple weeks off, and start fresh without the problem player, and usually a replacement.
It's worked pretty well for me, but I largely game with strangers...the first time I meet them is to game. I move a lot, and this is really the only option available, so don't get on my case about only gaming with friends, etc, etc.
It's worked pretty well for me, but I largely game with strangers...the first time I meet them is to game. I move a lot, and this is really the only option available, so don't get on my case about only gaming with friends, etc, etc.
Mark
CreativeMountainGames.com
I usually give someone repeated warnings about disruptive behavior before ever even considering removing them from a game I am running. I'm very forgiving of people who aren't doing anything persistently problematic. That said, when I find out someone is purposefully causing problems that are a detriment to myself or other players having fun, I remove them from the game by the same medium by which they were invited (email, person to person, etc.). I keep it short and avoid placing blame (divergent playing styles) as I don't wish to spend more time on the issue once I've made my decision.
Chimera
First Post
I've only ever booted one person from my table (as a GM). That was a long-time "friend" who was becoming less so as the years went by. In my D&D game, he started cheating. Then blatantly cheating. Then not even bothering to roll dice at all, just claiming that he hit every single time. Then he denied the whole thing despite everyone at the table knowing about this and watching him do it.
So I simply failed to inform him of the next session. One day he stopped over at my house with his gaming materials, claiming that I had told him that we were gaming that day (Um, NO.). At that time I informed him that I wasn't planning to invite him anymore because of his cheating.
His response was to cry foul and deny ANY cheating in any form.
Dude, everyone watched you do it, everyone talked to me about it. People would watch you roll the dice, then shake their head at me over the result. The last time, you didn't even bother to pull your dice out of your bag. You were blatant, obvious and downright STUPID about it.
Nope, he claimed, never happened. That was the end of our friendship. But hey, we were already walking down that road...
Once, as a player, I informed the GM that a certain other player was no longer welcome in my house because he trashed the place. Happy to play with him elsewhere, but he's not welcome in my house. Shortly thereafter, the GM dissolved the game group because he didn't like several of the players.
Beyond that, I've left a group or two over one particular individual. Oh well.
So I simply failed to inform him of the next session. One day he stopped over at my house with his gaming materials, claiming that I had told him that we were gaming that day (Um, NO.). At that time I informed him that I wasn't planning to invite him anymore because of his cheating.
His response was to cry foul and deny ANY cheating in any form.
Dude, everyone watched you do it, everyone talked to me about it. People would watch you roll the dice, then shake their head at me over the result. The last time, you didn't even bother to pull your dice out of your bag. You were blatant, obvious and downright STUPID about it.
Nope, he claimed, never happened. That was the end of our friendship. But hey, we were already walking down that road...
Once, as a player, I informed the GM that a certain other player was no longer welcome in my house because he trashed the place. Happy to play with him elsewhere, but he's not welcome in my house. Shortly thereafter, the GM dissolved the game group because he didn't like several of the players.
Beyond that, I've left a group or two over one particular individual. Oh well.
James Heard
Explorer
Am I the only person who's gotten rid of unwanted players by calling the police? 
I've pretty much kicked people out for an awful lot of reasons, because I've played with an awful lot of people over the years.
I've pretty much kicked people out for an awful lot of reasons, because I've played with an awful lot of people over the years.
Except for one time, all the times I've been involved in player evictions have been as a player rather than as a GM. Usually, when I GM, people get a sense of my unique style and if they do not like it, they move on reasonably soon.
The one exception to this was when I had two difficult players, one of whom had quit the campaign in two separate huffs, only to return for a third time. Back then, because he was dating my ex, I didn't trust my own impressions of how obnoxious he was being because I figured I had plenty of subconscious reasons to see him in a bad light. In the first session of the game, he came up with what is, for me, the emblematic bad player quote: "A 17? A 17!? If I knew I had to roll a 17 I wouldn't have even come tonight."
The other player was a close friend who had, up until this game, only played wizards. In this campaign, he decided to play a paladin. He was the worst paladin in the history of gaming. I've never been a fan of alignment rules and have found them totally non-descriptive of human behaviour so I am pretty laid back about alignment in my games. But this guy played the paladin as the very embodiment of Lawful Evil. Furthermore, he insisted that acting like a law-abiding sociopath, obsessed with gaining material advantage over others was the very essence of what it meant to be Lawful Good.
While both players were, as you can see, a trifle problematic on their own, every time there was loot to divide, these two would be at eachother's throats, the paladin's player going into a kind of passive-aggressive pouting fillibuster and the ex's boyfriend (who went through more than one character in the game) hurling ad hominem attacks at him (in one situation, this went on for 2 hours of a 3.5 hour session). Weirdly, both characters, unlike their neutral-aligned, barely theistic party-mates, played their characters are narcissistic paranoids, unable to do anything altruistic, even if it meant hundreds or even thousands of innocent NPCs dying.
Eventually, I cancelled that game. While the other players were quite empathetic, the two antagonists, whom I would take refuge in the kitchen to hide from, were deeply disappointed; they maintained the campaign was one of the best they had ever been in.
As a player, I have participated in the eviction of fellow players on two occasions. In one case, we had a player who was a trifle odd anyway who developed some kind of souped-up Seasonal Affective Disorder which seemed to us a little more like Seasonal Affective Psychosis. She decided that she was a worthless person and that the only good thing in her life was her character. A memorable quote in her case was, "I don't care if people don't like me. But if people hate Emmanuelle or want to hurt her, what it means is that they hate everything good about me and everything I want to be."
Needless to say, this presented some serious problems for the GM when NPCs interacted with the character. This was not helped by the fact that the GM was running a campaign world that was incredibly brilliant and filled with references and metaphors that only I was getting. As a result, he had begun to use the already semi-toxic game dynamic to encourage people to act our subconscious resentments towards the other players, thereby yielding a situation where not only were NPCs working against the problem PC but so were two of the other players.
In the end, we basically voted her off the island. Everybody else in the group agreed it was time for her to go and saddled the GM with the problem of breaking the news to her.
In the final instance (and I feel blessed to have only been through this three times), when I first moved to my present location, I joined a group that was on the edge of collapse because a number of the players had moved away. The GM, unfortunately, had a total open door policy and accepted anyone into the group who asked to join. So, we ended up with the player who took the jittery, paranoid, desperate-for-approval, hyper-geek persona to the next level.
In the first episode, which was the first of three wrap-up episodes for the previous campaign, the abandoned 17th level character he was running, when faced with a relatively benign challenge, cast Wish. I remarked, "Are you sure you want to do that with the experience point cost?" The next episode, he began to complain about how he would never have cast Wish if he knew it cost experience points. For the remaining two episodes, his character spent his time seeking out a wish-granting magic item so he could Wish his lost experience points back.
We then began an equestrian campaign based on Northern 14th and 15th century Eurasia. He insisted on playing a Rogue and his wife (yes -- this guy had a wife... sigh... I console myself with the fact that she may have been motivated to marry him in part to obtain Canadian citizenship) a Monk. Over time, he became more and more frustrated because we were riding horses everywhere, despite the fact that all the setting material we were handed, before we did character creation, told us that's what we would be doing. Finally, he blew up at the GM over the fact that the campaign was what he was told it would be. After he expressed he wasn't enjoying the game, before my GM could say something nice and conciliatory, I suggested that the obvious remedy was for him to leave the game and never return. So he did. I may have received bonus XP for my remarks.
The one exception to this was when I had two difficult players, one of whom had quit the campaign in two separate huffs, only to return for a third time. Back then, because he was dating my ex, I didn't trust my own impressions of how obnoxious he was being because I figured I had plenty of subconscious reasons to see him in a bad light. In the first session of the game, he came up with what is, for me, the emblematic bad player quote: "A 17? A 17!? If I knew I had to roll a 17 I wouldn't have even come tonight."
The other player was a close friend who had, up until this game, only played wizards. In this campaign, he decided to play a paladin. He was the worst paladin in the history of gaming. I've never been a fan of alignment rules and have found them totally non-descriptive of human behaviour so I am pretty laid back about alignment in my games. But this guy played the paladin as the very embodiment of Lawful Evil. Furthermore, he insisted that acting like a law-abiding sociopath, obsessed with gaining material advantage over others was the very essence of what it meant to be Lawful Good.
While both players were, as you can see, a trifle problematic on their own, every time there was loot to divide, these two would be at eachother's throats, the paladin's player going into a kind of passive-aggressive pouting fillibuster and the ex's boyfriend (who went through more than one character in the game) hurling ad hominem attacks at him (in one situation, this went on for 2 hours of a 3.5 hour session). Weirdly, both characters, unlike their neutral-aligned, barely theistic party-mates, played their characters are narcissistic paranoids, unable to do anything altruistic, even if it meant hundreds or even thousands of innocent NPCs dying.
Eventually, I cancelled that game. While the other players were quite empathetic, the two antagonists, whom I would take refuge in the kitchen to hide from, were deeply disappointed; they maintained the campaign was one of the best they had ever been in.
As a player, I have participated in the eviction of fellow players on two occasions. In one case, we had a player who was a trifle odd anyway who developed some kind of souped-up Seasonal Affective Disorder which seemed to us a little more like Seasonal Affective Psychosis. She decided that she was a worthless person and that the only good thing in her life was her character. A memorable quote in her case was, "I don't care if people don't like me. But if people hate Emmanuelle or want to hurt her, what it means is that they hate everything good about me and everything I want to be."
Needless to say, this presented some serious problems for the GM when NPCs interacted with the character. This was not helped by the fact that the GM was running a campaign world that was incredibly brilliant and filled with references and metaphors that only I was getting. As a result, he had begun to use the already semi-toxic game dynamic to encourage people to act our subconscious resentments towards the other players, thereby yielding a situation where not only were NPCs working against the problem PC but so were two of the other players.
In the end, we basically voted her off the island. Everybody else in the group agreed it was time for her to go and saddled the GM with the problem of breaking the news to her.
In the final instance (and I feel blessed to have only been through this three times), when I first moved to my present location, I joined a group that was on the edge of collapse because a number of the players had moved away. The GM, unfortunately, had a total open door policy and accepted anyone into the group who asked to join. So, we ended up with the player who took the jittery, paranoid, desperate-for-approval, hyper-geek persona to the next level.
In the first episode, which was the first of three wrap-up episodes for the previous campaign, the abandoned 17th level character he was running, when faced with a relatively benign challenge, cast Wish. I remarked, "Are you sure you want to do that with the experience point cost?" The next episode, he began to complain about how he would never have cast Wish if he knew it cost experience points. For the remaining two episodes, his character spent his time seeking out a wish-granting magic item so he could Wish his lost experience points back.
We then began an equestrian campaign based on Northern 14th and 15th century Eurasia. He insisted on playing a Rogue and his wife (yes -- this guy had a wife... sigh... I console myself with the fact that she may have been motivated to marry him in part to obtain Canadian citizenship) a Monk. Over time, he became more and more frustrated because we were riding horses everywhere, despite the fact that all the setting material we were handed, before we did character creation, told us that's what we would be doing. Finally, he blew up at the GM over the fact that the campaign was what he was told it would be. After he expressed he wasn't enjoying the game, before my GM could say something nice and conciliatory, I suggested that the obvious remedy was for him to leave the game and never return. So he did. I may have received bonus XP for my remarks.
merelycompetent
First Post
I have had to boot a small number of players over the years...
Threatening another player with physical violence: Yup. Loved being a skinny nerd between two quarreling college linebackers (American football). Fortunately, I could act like I was crazier than both of them.
Failing to show up for games: Gaming once a week, same day, same time, called each player mid-week to make sure there weren't any changes, and *still* didn't show up. After a month of no-shows, I stopped calling him. Then he showed up:
Player: "I'm ready to play!
Me: "Sorry, your character died two sessions ago from mummy rot, and his soul was eaten by a demon. You can go home now."
Yes, I admit I didn't handle that one very well. I later apologized, in public, to him.
Hostility to other players: I don't know why this one player decided that the husband-wife team at the table were his character's enemies, but he did. And went out of his way, in character, to continue the hostility. After about 8 sessions of this, with multiple attempts to get him to either change characters or change his attitude, I finally called him up and told him not to come any more. Later activity on a personal level leads me to think that it was more than just an attitude problem at the gaming table.
Falling asleep during the game/constantly screwing over the other PCs in lousy grabs for personal power: Hated to boot this one. Gave him three chances across two campaigns, but he consistently went for the power grab at the expense of PCs, NPCs, and the campaign. It wouldn't have been a problem if I'd been running an evil campaign (likely the other PCs would've use charm, geas/quest, or similar magic to force his character to behave), but the player material handed out before character creation clearly said "Heroic Fantasy! Make a HERO!" Finally had to tell him that it wasn't working, that this wasn't the game for him.
Never Did Anything - At All: This player never did anything with his character. And I mean ANYTHING. His character was an amnesiac half-celestial (with wings) who woke up in a crater on a battlefield, grievously wounded, surrounded by the slaughtered remains of gargoyles. He had the hilt of a broken sword in one gore-spattered hand (the blade was sticking out of the biggest gargoyle's head) and was wearing a rent breastplate (celestial armor, 1 hp left). He decided that his character had no curiosity, so never checked into why he was on that battlefield, why certain members of a religious order would always seek him out - while other religions avoided or were actively hostile. He never investigated where the shadowy assassins came from or why they were after him. He never followed up on the prophet's warning to him that his brother was in torment. ("I don't remember having a brother, so why should I care?") He never passed any information on to the other PCs. Ever. Kinda made it hard to not kill the PCs when one of them knows about the coming ambush but doesn't bother to tell anyone else. I finally told him he needed to leave the game. He refused. So I booted him.
This last one led to me adding two rules for all players in my games:
* No Passive Characters Allowed. If your character has no curiosity, no motive, or no drive, then he'll die of old age sitting in the tavern waiting for the adventure to hit him over the head and steal his money. Roll up a new character or find another game to play in.
* If you have to leave the game for any reason, always do so with dignity and grace.
Threatening another player with physical violence: Yup. Loved being a skinny nerd between two quarreling college linebackers (American football). Fortunately, I could act like I was crazier than both of them.
Failing to show up for games: Gaming once a week, same day, same time, called each player mid-week to make sure there weren't any changes, and *still* didn't show up. After a month of no-shows, I stopped calling him. Then he showed up:
Player: "I'm ready to play!
Me: "Sorry, your character died two sessions ago from mummy rot, and his soul was eaten by a demon. You can go home now."
Yes, I admit I didn't handle that one very well. I later apologized, in public, to him.
Hostility to other players: I don't know why this one player decided that the husband-wife team at the table were his character's enemies, but he did. And went out of his way, in character, to continue the hostility. After about 8 sessions of this, with multiple attempts to get him to either change characters or change his attitude, I finally called him up and told him not to come any more. Later activity on a personal level leads me to think that it was more than just an attitude problem at the gaming table.
Falling asleep during the game/constantly screwing over the other PCs in lousy grabs for personal power: Hated to boot this one. Gave him three chances across two campaigns, but he consistently went for the power grab at the expense of PCs, NPCs, and the campaign. It wouldn't have been a problem if I'd been running an evil campaign (likely the other PCs would've use charm, geas/quest, or similar magic to force his character to behave), but the player material handed out before character creation clearly said "Heroic Fantasy! Make a HERO!" Finally had to tell him that it wasn't working, that this wasn't the game for him.
Never Did Anything - At All: This player never did anything with his character. And I mean ANYTHING. His character was an amnesiac half-celestial (with wings) who woke up in a crater on a battlefield, grievously wounded, surrounded by the slaughtered remains of gargoyles. He had the hilt of a broken sword in one gore-spattered hand (the blade was sticking out of the biggest gargoyle's head) and was wearing a rent breastplate (celestial armor, 1 hp left). He decided that his character had no curiosity, so never checked into why he was on that battlefield, why certain members of a religious order would always seek him out - while other religions avoided or were actively hostile. He never investigated where the shadowy assassins came from or why they were after him. He never followed up on the prophet's warning to him that his brother was in torment. ("I don't remember having a brother, so why should I care?") He never passed any information on to the other PCs. Ever. Kinda made it hard to not kill the PCs when one of them knows about the coming ambush but doesn't bother to tell anyone else. I finally told him he needed to leave the game. He refused. So I booted him.
This last one led to me adding two rules for all players in my games:
* No Passive Characters Allowed. If your character has no curiosity, no motive, or no drive, then he'll die of old age sitting in the tavern waiting for the adventure to hit him over the head and steal his money. Roll up a new character or find another game to play in.
* If you have to leave the game for any reason, always do so with dignity and grace.
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