Craer said:
My group is in the process of falling apart. It's interesting to watch, in a Kafkaesque sort of way.
Really, it's because of player bloat. At the session last night, we had ten people running around in my basement. That's a ridiculous amount of players. Well, minus one for being the DM, but still. Ten. Egad.
Our group used to consist of one DM and four players, with an additional player every now and then when he took a train from the city into town to hang out with us. It was good. And then, the DM suddenly brought in three new players.
The Beginning of the End.
I've learned the hard way that anyone wanting to join the group has to go under a couple of test runs. That is, the new player comes and plays a game or two to see how everyone gets along with him/her. If you then aren't prepared to say "Sorry, but I don't think you'll work well in this game", don't try to bring anyone in. If the new person doesn't mesh, it can destroy an otherwise stable group.
New Player 1 is a silly powergamer. That's it. If the character isn't twinked to hell with at least four prestige classes, two templates, and based off of an anime hero, he's not interested.
He should be playing Exalted. Well, everyone should be playing Exalted. But especially him.
New Player 2 is a rabid rules lawyer. Not only is he bad at being a Rules Lawyer, but he's quite stubborn about being right, even when shown the proper page in Book X that directly contradicts his eagerly shouted mandates.
The only cure for a rules lawyer is a harsh DM. I recall hearing of one DM that use the Pencil of Doom against his rules lawyer player. He would actually draw a line through the rule the player was arguing about. If he behaved, then eventually the Eraser of Life could bring the rule back.
New Player 3 is worst of the rotten lot. This girl is a seething pit of mental issues, on top of being a poor and distracting roleplayer. She frequently makes pointed attempts to steal the spotlight of the entire game for herself with her overly dramatic characters. Case in point, her last character was a human fighter that, after a whispered conversation with the DM mid-game, suddenly sprouted wings made of chains. When the rest of the party understandably uttered a collective "WTF?", her character started crying tears of blood and flew off over the city. This change in her character was never explained. Later, her character tried to commit suicide in front of us, and when none of our characters stopped her, the player became angry at us.
By the way, she's dating new player #1, in addition to being the subject of the DM's unspoken affections. I can't be the only one to see this DramaBomb-a-tickin'.
Run. Seriously, run as far and as fast as you can. This is what is known as a Queen Bee. They are much more common in White Wolf games, which is what this player sounds like she wants to be playing. If she's dating one player and getting affections from the DM, its only a matter of time before she starts in on the rest of the group. This is the female version of the CPM. I could be off on this, but you're right, this has the potential for a lot of drama.
On top of all of this (!), one of our players is leaving to join the U.S. Navy in March.
Another player simply doesn’t play. When he shows up, he sits down for five minutes, grows bored, and wanders off to play GameCube, no matter if the party is in the middle of combat. Last session, he got up in the middle of a fight, wandered into the guest room, lay down on the bed, and fell asleep for two hours. Then his girlfriend, another player, went into the room with him, and closed the door.
Cue awkward silence.
At that point, our DM just gave up and packed his stuff up.
I figure that my group has about 3 months left before we shatter for good. Luckily, I'm in a second group that doesn't meet as frequently, but I believe that to be a good thing. When we do meet, we actually play a decent game for the alloted time. The group I described in this post meets every week.
Changing scheduling is helpful, as is changing up the players. My own long term group disintegrated. What really brought it about is that we had about half the group wanting to play a heavily tactical combat game, with the other half wanting to tell a storytelling type of game. This is not good, as there's no way to have a good game, because the group was split over what made a good game. And I for one blame the tacticians. Us role-players were more than happy to get into some scuffles, kill some things, and take their stuff. When the story stuff was happening though, the tacticians refused to participate - doodling, OT conversation, or sitting there in a daze waiting for something to kill. If they'd been willing to give a little on one of their less favorite parts of the game perhaps it could have been saved. But it was not to be.
Now I've just got one of the hack & slashers left, and hopefully he'll come around. We're also playing shorter, more frequent games. Something I've been pushing for quite some time. Playing in Warcraft D&D, and running All Flesh Must Be Eaten. I hope to expand into other games as well - I'm itching to try Exalted and the new World of Darkness. I'd love to play Buffy, but our host and best roleplayer is an avid Buffy hater - have a hard time talking him into that one! But the plan of alternating D&D, the good ol' standby, and newer fresh games I think will keep the creative juices running for everyone.
