Inept players....

[jdavis]

I havn't even gone into him wanting to play an Ooze mephit perfume dealer

And I was being too harsh? What does the rest of the group think about him? As long as his zany hijinks remaim cute then he will be ok but once everybody else gets tired of him screwing things up you could have a real big problem on your hand. We have wonderfully funny stories about the guy we used to play with but nobody would ever dream of inviting him back, he just got to be too big of a distraction, not to mention he had to have a new character introduced almost every game session (and they were all horrible characters you knew wouldn't make it from the start). It's been nearly 10 years since anybody has gamed with him and we still cring at the thought that he might show up again.

 

[Ruined]

Yeah, please come to the NC Gameday, Shub. And btw, send me an email at: ruiner@ruined.net if you get a chance. I have gamer friends out at ECU and I'm wondering if we know the same people. I'm in the Raleigh/Cary area.

 

[Bast]

What does the rest of the group think about him? As long as his zany hijinks remaim cute then he will be ok but once everybody else gets tired of him screwing things up you could have a real big problem on your hand.

They weren't really ever cute. Boggled, baffled, bemused. That's usually the response right now. I co-GM another game with Shub, and I've seen the same sorts of problems in that game. One of his characters got personally saved from a 'Stupid Death' (tm) three times in the course of the game before on the fourth one, I'd had enough and just ran her through the obvious consequences, making the character unplayable. This was done on the possibility that "Hey,maybe the warnings and all will finally sink in if he gets nailed...". So clearly it's not just thathe doesn't get his current setting in Shubbiekin's game.

I think the best response after that that I had for him was at one point saying, "Look, I know the talking is hard - and you don't really have any idea how to handle the conversation right now - but the scene isn't critical, no one's gonna die if you fubar... take it as a chance to practice. Just relax and try..." Unfortunately there's only so many of those scenes that I can build into a plot per session.

The players right now, being an *incredibly* tolerant group, want him to learn, and want to interact with the character and him. We're all friends, not just gamers in the same game, so we've been wanting to help him along somehow, and for the most part not understanding how to help. We've had a much worse player in another game that spent easily 6 months or longer trying to help before giving up on him.

 

[PowerWordDumb]

Newbie player, or experienced?

Almost sounds to me like a newbie player who's been inserted into a high-level campaign without the necessary tactical understanding to deal with his situation. For the sake of argument, you can't just play a 15th level character effectively without having learned the skills along the way as you earned them one by one.

Roleplaying well through conversations can be tough for newbies and old hands alike, depending upon the play styles they've been exposed to, but in terms of basic tactics anyone who's played for any length of time should know not to go off alone, to be wary of spellcasters starting buff spells, etc.

The greediness and "me first" actions with the celestial seem to lend credence to the newbie angle, although we all know those traits can persist in long time gamers too.

 

[Pielorinho]

Huh -- don't s'pose you could tell me this player's first name, couldja? I had a friend in Chapel Hill who told me about the near-legendary exploits of a fellow who sounds very similar to this: he was infamous for getting character after character killed off in novel yet predictable fashion.

Daniel

 

[Bast]

Re: Newbie player, or experienced?

Almost sounds to me like a newbie player who's been inserted into a high-level campaign without the necessary tactical understanding to deal with his situation. For the sake of argument, you can't just play a 15th level character effectively without having learned the skills along the way as you earned them one by one.

We started at level 1 in the coGM game..., the other at level 10. The player has played characters at level 20 without any problem with the mechanics of the game and we've been playing with this group for going on three years...

It occurs to me that the rest may be outgrowing him actually - since they've gotten more interested in the RP side of things, and seem to have caught onto it faster as the games slid from hack and slash running through modules to more character and plot orriented stuff.