I game with passive-aggressive Canadians. People in groups I have anything to do with never directly confront eachother about anything. They make up an excuse and leave the group or they suffer silently. The only story I have that comes anywhere close to this is the only campaign I have ever come here to complain about.
Problem #1
My ex was a player in the game. All my friends like her and, when I started running the game we had split up five years previously so there was no residual uncomfortableness. We had, after all, ended up with joint custody of a small political party after the split and had, over the previous half decade, established a pretty good modus vivendi.
Her current partner, however, was not generally liked by the other gamers. He seems fine in other social settings (I have many house party and dinner party experiences to prove this) but during games, he has a number of pretty grating behaviours. Basically, any time the rules get in the way of what he defines as "a good story" (ie. an utterly flexible set of objectives centred on his character effortlessly doing something that looks cool), he becomes whiny and then, if that's not working, beligerent. I occasionally quote what he said when confronting a minor demon in the first episode of the campaign as a defining feature of his play style: "A 17? A 17!? If I knew I had to roll a 17, I wouldn't have even come!" (Actually, 17 was the armour class of the creature; his second level barbarian only needed to roll a 12.) It was in that episode that he felt I as the GM was treating him unfairly when he poured some beer on a table and attempted to set it on fire -- he felt I was against fun because I explained that beer does not burn.
Of course, it took me a long time to realize his gaming behaviour was weird and inappropriate because I would always assume that my frustration with him was a manifestation of residual feelings for my ex and some kind of subconscious primate sexual jealousy. So I would always make excuses for him... up to the first meltdown incident.
Problem #2
Another player (the greatest Paranoia GM in the world) is very much like Larry David's character on the Larry David show except that all of his frustration is repressed or sublimated. As a result, although being fabulously wealthy and privileged, he is convinced that he is being unfairly persecuted much of the time. D&D is actually the only RPG he can really enjoy because it is so heavily codified -- all the rules are absolute and can be seen to be equally applied to everyone.
Unfortunately, he chose to play a paladin in this campaign, and a stupid one at that. Now, a metagaming genius playing an 8 Int paladin could be a problem in some campaigns but I wasn't especially worried. Except that, as the campaign evolved, it became clear that there was no possible way to apply alignment rules to him. He was the only player affected by alignment (strike #1) and alignment compliance decisions are always judgement calls (strike #2). To give you a sense of his obsession with fairness, he pressured my players in another campaign to all refuse to accept bonus experience points because he was convinced they were getting more than he was; I later calculated that he had, in fact, received more bonus XP than any other player. But the fact that I was making essentially arbitrary, uncodified decisions about additional XP (usually a total of 100xp per session in total handed out this way) was just too stressful.
To make matters worse, he and the ex's boyfriend clearly had unresolved hostilities that came out every time there was treasure to be distributed with the paladin's player (the highest-level PC) making neo-classical economic arguments about how the power disparities in the party needed to be maintained (he was the highest level and had the most stuff) and could be by the other players getting his hand-me-downs and the barbarian making highly personal attacks about what a bad person the paladin's player was for acting this way.
The Synergy
So, you can imagine that the game reached its nadir when these two, for what I recall as being the only time ever, decided to do one thing while everyone else in the party did something else.
A group of vampire mages mounted a surprise attack against the city in the middle of the night, knowing that the paladin and the ex's boyfriend's brand new character, a cleric, would be caught off-balance by a midnight attack. The rest of the party -- a sorceror, a wizard/rogue, a bard, a rogue -- rushed to prevent the slaughter of hundreds of people while the paladin and cleric spent the next 1.5 episodes, while the climactic battle of the campaign took place, putting on their heavy armour. Because there was no way they were going out to save people, no matter how many people there were, without it.
The cleric's player of course felt that it was wrong for me as a GM to make him choose between putting his armour on and doing his job. (The guy's new character had entered the campaign on the pretext of having been sent on a mission by his order to fight the vampires.) So he walked out of the game and hid in his room until the end of the session, at which point he heaped verbal abuse on me and quit the campaign (for the second or third time), explaining that I obviously had no idea that the point of the game was to have fun. And I was clearly against fun -- otherwise I would have waived the armour donning rules. Fifty innocent NPCs died; about half were turned into vampires. The paladin's player was fine with the whole thing, once he was assured he would get exactly as many XP as the players who actually showed up for the battle.
After that point, things just got uglier. I began allotting an hour for every treasure division in an episode so the paladin could sullenly stonewall everyone while the cleric shouted about what a horrible person he was. Strangely, when, 10 episodes later, I cancelled the campaign, the only people who were sorry to see it go where the paladin and the cleric. In fact, they begged me to continue it. Go figure.
