Pet peeves of D&D gaming

[just__al]

• Spotlight hogs
• DM's that handwaive rules they don't know because they are "trying to tell a story"
• DM's that decide to constantly thwart the cool thing characters do.
• DM's that don't realize occasionaly you SHOULD thwart the cool thing characters do.
• Spotlight hogs
• Players who don't thank the DM for running the game
• Players who don't understand how their own characters work
• Metagaming, most especially the counting of damage inflicted as a way to gage opposing levels
• Spotlight hogs

 

[wocky]

- A DM who'll refuse to use a battle grid and suggest we use graph paper, a pencil, and eraser instead. Gaaahhh!

- INT checks used to hand over the plot to the player a spoonful at a time.

- Monsters not played intelligently who you wouldn't be able to defeat if they were.

- A DM who provides more difficult challenges by lowering the PCs abilities instead of buffing up the encounters.

- Players who never consider playing one of the core classes on one of the core races. I hate it when they particularly insist on using something off one campaign setting while playing in another with different flavour.

- DMs who arbritrarily prohibit feats that they think are unbalanced and never saw them used in an unbalancing way (or at all).

- The "No way I'm playing a GOOD character" syndrome (through which everyone is either LN or CN).

 

[adembroski3]

* Players who think every rule published is fit for play in any campaign, and get upset when I say something isn't permitted.

* Players who absolutely must play something as exotic as possible. They must have a strange class, strange race, and a template to boot.

* Players who must have an entourage of animal companions or animated dead or something else that slows combat to a crawl and takes the focus away from the PCs. The most fearsome opponant in a group should NEVER be a mindless Hill Giant Skeleton.

* Players who think dragging said Hill Giant Skeleton up and down the streets of Palanthas will not have consiquences.

* Players who can't deal with the fact that when they commit a crime, the local authorities will attempt to arrest them.

* Players who always play the same alignment... and it's always the one that allows them to do what they feel like without reprecussion.

* Players who argue that THEIR character had a strange background, so HE wouldn't consider stabbing the helpless dwarf captive, chained up to a wall, an evil act.

* Players who assume that "Good is Stupid" or "Good is Boring" without ever trying it.

* Players who follow the plot without thought. They only investigate the most obvious clues, even when they did pick up on the less obvious ones, the figure they're unintentional. Not only is that a bad move, it insults the DMs intelligence.

* Not having a Rules Lawyer among the group. Sounds weird, eh? Well, I have a player who happens to know the rule books inside out, and he is by far the best resource I have at the table. If he doesn't know the rule by heart, he knows what damn page it's on. He's wonderful and speeds up play immeasurably. He's moving to Japan to teach English in two months, I don't know what I'll do without him.

Sorry I don't have any complaints about DMs, I am a DM and have done very little playing in my life. In fact, though I must have run 100+ campaigns, I've only played a grand total of 6 characters, two of which died young.

As far as myself... what do I do wrong? Plenty.

I tend to wing rather than prepare because I have little time to spend outside of the game. I'm pretty good at winging it as long as I've run over the overall situation in my head (not plot, I don't use plots. Plots are evil and care should be taken to remove them from every game), but I don't think a DM lives that doesn't go blank now and then and have nothing.

I don't know the rules as well as I should. Again, not much time. On top of it, I have a poor memory. I don't remember specifics very often. I spend too much time looking at the rulebooks while playing. My lack of time as a player has a negative effect on my gaming. I don't know a lot of spells, because I've never needed to be as intimately familiar with them as a wizard or sorcerer PC is.

Yeah... anyways... GFs calling me again.

 

[DragonLancer]

* Players who think every rule published is fit for play in any campaign, and get upset when I say something isn't permitted.

* Players who think dragging said Hill Giant Skeleton up and down the streets of Palanthas will not have consiquences.

* Players who can't deal with the fact that when they commit a crime, the local authorities will attempt to arrest them.

* Players who argue that THEIR character had a strange background, so HE wouldn't consider stabbing the helpless dwarf captive, chained up to a wall, an evil act.

Oh boy do I know these problems.
Even the best players seem to forget that you can't just kill a guy because he won't tell you something, or let you in somewhere.

And as for the last one above, I had a character in my current campaign (He's dead now... charged about 10 githyanki knights and ended up very quickly dead), who was CN and wanted to poison everything he met, whether it be a friendly-ish tribe of ogres or a camp of bandits. Then he would try and go to great lengths to argue that what he was doing was not an evil act.

 

[Painfully]

I cant resist this one, just because it has happened every game since he volunteered for it!

* An intiative keeper who asks, "so, who's turn is it?"

 

[Torque]

Things others do that annoy me:

Forget that it's supposed to be a game of heroic fantasy. "Oh, so some sort of demon is stealing souls from all the caravans going through this mountain pass? That sounds dangerous, we'd better get out of here." "Uh-oh, that goblin druid flew over on his dire bat and dropped a rock with a message saying we'd be killed if we went any further. Guess we should head back to town." This is despite the fact that I am in no way a killer DM- the campaign has been running for 8 months and I just had the first PC death this week.

Let the game get bogged down in OOC talk and/or meaningless detail, never taking initiative- this is partially my fault for not enforcing a steadier pace of play, but I get tired of constantly having to say "OK, so do you move on down the corridor yet?"

Not show up to the game without letting anyone know about it in advance. It's gotten so bad that I started collecting everybody's character sheets after each game so if they didn't show someone else could run the character.

Things I do that annoy others:

Not having enough material prepared in advance. No matter how much I try to force myself to spend more time prepping, I usually don't get too detailed. On the other hand, a month or so ago, I totally winged an adventure about a colony of gnome were-penguins, and the feedback was that the players had more fun than any other time in the campaign.

Forgetting the names of my own NPCs. I think the assistant caravan driver has had a different name for each of the last four sessions.

 

[Tolen Mar]

*GMs get pissy and "take their ball and go home" when things go awry.

Ok, I was going to read the whole thread before I posted, but I think that stement needs some qualification. If you mean awry in that the players refuse to follow his plot, I can understand it. But let me put a different spin on that.

You see, I recently became guilty of this myself. I wasn't just throwing a tantrum because they wouldn't do what I wanted, or they killed my pet NPC. I packed up and went home because of MY pet peeve.

My pet peeve is when (as has been mentioned before) don't show up, and dont call, email, or anything. They just don't show. Now I must be strange, but game or not, when you tell your friends you'll be at point B at time C, thats what you do. Its certainly what I do. I dont make plans knowing I have to be somewhere else, and if I do make plans and find out I wont make it, I make an effort to step in and call or email and let people know just as soon as I do. Its simply rude not to.

This happened a couple of weeks ago, the third week in a row. I gave up. I picked up my toys and haven't looked back. It's worse when you are the GM (unless you wing it all the time), because you have all that extra work to do between sessions that you have to find time to do. I gave my players every opportunity to let me know what's up, and always accepted whatever came along without a word. But most of them would skip for no apparent reason. Worse yet, I'd hear from them three days later, without a word in between. I went to great lengths to be sure they understood my stand on no-shows. If they don't respect me well enough to realize how much work I have to go to to provide them with a fun game, I'm not going to sit and let them walk all over me.

Let's face it, if the GM doesn't have fun, no one does.

 

[fnork de sporg]

• No players in my games even ask to play anything a little off the wall unless I make it a big part of the game. When they do ask for something unusual, it's waayyy off the wall and beyond the pale of what I would allow, like (actual example from current campaign) "Can I play a half-blink-dog?"

You know they have those in the green ronin Bastards & Bloodlines book. Part blink dog, part halfling. Called a blinkling, I think. Seemed totally playable to me.

 

[fnork de sporg]

My pet peeves:

*Players who use Greatswords with the arguement of: "well, my character would know that it could do more damage with a greatsword. I mean, if you put a 9mm Pistol next to a Self-Propelled Grenade Launcher and you wanted to do the most damage, you'd pick the Grenade Launcher. I mean, its just common sense. My character knows Greatswords are the best melee weapon for damamge."

Is your problem that he's wrong about what weapons do the wmost damage? Or that he used modern eaepons as an analogy? Or what? Wouldn't his character know that? If not, why not?

*Players who cannot... nor try to, play any character (both alignment and mentality wise) other than themselves. Their arguement is "well, Neutral Good is boring to me. I wanna play Chaotic Neutral cause thats what I am. I wouldn't have fun as Neutral Good and thats the point of the game, to have fun right?" ........grrrrr

Again, what exactly is your problem with this? Just that they always play the same thing? Or that they're claiming to actually be that alignment in real life? Or that the point of the game is to have fun? Or what?

 

[Fenes]

Pet peeves:
- Players who show up late. Not 15 minutes late, one hour late.
- Player who do not want to fit in a campaign style. If the campaign has been described - and been run that way for over a year - as "look in how much trouble the characters can get, and how they deal with it" you don't try to play it as "Matching wits against the DM" and throw a tantrum when the rest of the players have their not so bright characters do "stupid" things like killing off an orc that may be the witness they needed.
- Stupid Names. In my egyptian-flavored Forgotten Realms campaign you don't play a character named "Mister J. Jackson".
- Players who think just because something was published somewhere - book, pdf, webpage - by someone - WotC, other publisher, fan - it is automatically allowed and appropriate for your campaign.