Problem Player Woes


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So all in all a very positive experience in the end, and all of us realized how we helped create such a tense situation. I again want to thank everyone here for all the help and input.

Very glad to hear this and I hope it resolves the issue for all involved. The only wrong way to play D&D is to not have fun. I'm glad to hear that John was reasonable and that everyone discussed the situation and their perspectives and came to an understanding.


Now, get to work. Those orcs aren't going to kill themselves, you know. :)
 


If anyone's interested, here's the update, in a nutshell:

...his new character is definitely working out...

So all in all a very positive experience in the end, and all of us realized how we helped create such a tense situation. I again want to thank everyone here for all the help and input.
Can't give you any more XP at the mo', but really glad a good mutual decision was worked out between all parties and seems to be working well.

Here's to great times adventuring.
 



I'm pleased that your group came to a suitable resolution to your problem. Here's to much happy gaming in the future.

It is a tough issue and one that my group had to face a few years ago due to the actions and attitude of a friend who joined our 3.5 game. That didn't end up quite so well though. :erm:
 

Instead of starting a new thread, I continue an old one.

The thing is that I'm in for a long, long winter...
I'm running a superhero game, and we had our first full session last Tuesday. And it was the first time when I simply couldn't wait for the session to end.

Problem is that players want simply to find mistakes or flaws in the adventure. They love any mistake in the game, whether it's relevant to the story or not. Some examples from the session:
- Players found a radiophone. When they used it, some strange woman from the same city replied. Who is?
Players weren't interested about this at all. The main concern for them was that how can the signal reach that distance in the city. In the end I had give in that the lady was right next door, because unless there was a link tower it was impossible to reach any distance longer than that.
- Instead of going anywhere in the adventure, players spent considerable amount of gametime discussing every single detail they could find. Why is there no blood on the floor, even though someone was shot here? What kind of footprints are on the dust? Everyone had their own opinion and they discussed who has right. The answer was right behind the corner, but they didn't actually go anywhere.
- If there was some hole in the story, like for instance what people ate and drank if they were held as captives, took also a large portion of the game.

I'm just so jaded about next session... Players get extremely overtechnical about... well... technical things. And I'm not technical person myself, I'd like to run the story, not worry about NPC dehydration or range of radiophones. I'm happy that this will be over in early May. It's still long way to go. For next session I'll simply not prepare any adventure, I just put a gazebo somewhere. Gazebo with some technical aspect which makes no sense. That will entertain them for the whole evening.
 


Since you've already had a discussion with John about his problems with play style and participation, then the choice you face is how you should kick him out.

You can try a risk-aversive approach of shutting down the campaign, contact the other players via email to set up a new time and then game without him. I don't know how closely connected he is to you and the rest of the players, but if it's anything like my group, I could kick out anyone in the group and they'd never find out.

Or, just send John a polite email and say that's it. Be professional and cool about it, but be specific and to the point of listing out his offending behavior, the times that he was confronted about it, and that now you and the group has had enough and it's time to call it a day.

Because the alternative to this is to continue to tolerate this boorish behavior and eventually the other players are going to get tired of it by no longer coming over to play or blowing off the game dates or have excuses like, "Oh, sorry, I forgot we were playing today. Can't make it."
 

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