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The Worst and/or Best Player You've Ever Known

WORST: A jerk I used to play with who refused to play D&D unless his characters were ridiculously overpowered. If pressed, he would play "underpowered" characters, but he'd whine and fume about it the whole game. Somehow, he was able to convince several DMs to tolerate his shenanigans. His favorite character of all time has been an age category 12 gold dragon with 56 ninja levels (this was back in mid-2E days), when the rest of the party was between 10th-12th level. He also could not make a character without either basing it off a video game or having a DM hand him a pre-gen character. And the icing on the cake was when he'd oh-so-subtly veil threats to the other players by casually discussing how his character could beat their character's asses whenever he wanted and the characters are lucky he's on their side. He'd also physically threaten other players from time to time, but nobody took him seriously because this cat was something like 400 pounds and literally waddled from time to time. The straw that broke the camel's back for me even being on speaking terms with this social retard was when he joined a vampire LARP game and started stalking some of the female gamers (and talking about killing their boyfriends and entire families and carrying swords around in public under his trenchcoat). The only reason that the LARP group didn't lynch and kill him for what he was doing is because me and some other players convinced them that everybody would blame the vampire game instead of his the issues and all that, and it'd be just a huge bad PR thing for gaming in general. To this day, I don't know if that entire debacle was because it was the only time he'd ever been able to actually speak to reasonably attractive women at all or because he couldn't seperate fantasy from reality too well. But I don't want to know bad enough to look him up and ask him. :)

BEST: The best player was easily Paul, a marine who I met through accessdenied.net. Whenever we'd game at his place, he'd make fantastic feasts: stuff like rotisserie chicken, freshly baked desserts, homemade chili, grilled steaks, you name it. He was an excellent cook with an extremely well-stocked and well-equipped kitchen, people were asking him for recipes and lessons all the time. He always fed the group extremely well, and with food that I'd easily expect to pay upwards of $50 at a restaurant. This cat could COOK! His food sure beat the pizza I'd occasionally pick up or the KFC someone else would bring. Not only was he an excellent host, but as a gamer he'd always want to pick up the slack at the table. When the group didn't have a cleric he volunteered without a second thought, sacrificed his own XP to make magic items for the group, and otherwise took the hero role seriously. When the characters captured a ruined castle, he volunteered to take the rough maps that I'd sketched out and the Stronghold Builder's Guidebook and finish the whole thing so the group could retire in style. An all-around class act, not just as a player, but as a person.
 

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Best: So many great people to play with. I'd say, more or less everyone from my current group.

Worst: I have seen some bad players in my time - those who didn't care that you reserved the game time for game time and nothing else, and didn't bother to show up; those who would play to win.

But the worst was one guy we had for 2 sessions before we disinvited him again. He was questioning every houserule, and a great many official rules - and I'm not talking about polite disagreement. He practically shouted at me (the DM) every time a rule wasn't like he expected it (it invariably was something I - or the guys who did the revision - considered too powerful and weakened appropriately). He whined about how the game was too combat focused - and created a half-orc barbarian/fighter with - yes - cha and int as dump stats. Nothing against power gamers, but I don't like it when they get hypocritical about it, when they try to find loop-holes in the game, or use old-edition rules for it - and shout at the DM when he houserules the worst away - or even uses the official rules.
 

Worst: My worst experience ever was when I had just moved to a new area and joined a new game. I showed up at the GM's "house" which was in a small almost abandoned town about 30 miles outside the city I was living in and it was an old bank he was living in. As I walked in the door, I was greeted by the sight of garbage literally piled over a foot high or more in all directions (imagine not taking any trash or old furniture out of your house for 10+ years and you get the idea). There was a narrow path through the trash that lead back to the gaming table. The GM was filthy to say the least, his hands were black and covered in warty growths and as he played, he would walk around the table and put his hands on the shoulders of the players. When nature forced me to use his bathroom, I found a bathroom that hadn't been cleaned in 20+ years I'm sure. The sink was broken in half with the front half laying on the floor, and the tub was piled thick with trash. If it hadn't been for the fact that I had ridden with another player, I would have left within 10 minutes of arriving. They called me several times after the first game, but I always made excuses as to why I couldn't come back. The only thing that was cool about the whole situation, was the guys bedroom was the bank vault, with the giant safe door.

Best: Wouldn't be any one player, but the best gaming experience I ever had was when I was in the Navy. Our group all worked 2nd shift and we would get together every night at 10:30pm and game until 6am Monday-Friday. Through sheer luck, the main core of our group was stationed at the same place for the almost 2 1/2 years the campaign ran. We had others come and go as their tours of duty took them elsewhere but the core 4 of us played 5 days a week for almost 2 1/2 years.

Alarian
 

Frank S. (National Park)- in case you're out there!
The best player I ever played with was a friend who always looked for different ways to do things. He didn't just want hack or roleplay, he wanted to impress the other players and NPC's and strived to do so.

The worst was a guy who made 5' wide dwarves EVERY game, always wanted to tweak the rules in mid-game (only to give him more power of course), and had a gas problem :confused: . To make matters worse, he was over 6 feet tall, probably close to 300 pounds, and wanted to wrestle the other players on the front lawn all the time.
 

Rodrigo Istalindir said:
Well, there was a kid we gamed with in high-school who murdered one of the other players ... real trouble seperating reality from fantasy.

wtf?!? that's ... disturbing. i'm so sorry to hear that happened to you.

reminds me of a hackmaster game i almost joined a few months back where one of the players (clad in over-the-top regalia of lame geekdom ... you know the type) whips out a huge bowie knife and starts waving it around a packed game store ... and it was just a character creation session. needless to say, i didn't come back to start that adventure.

he was rolling up a drow ranger.
 

Begginer DM Replay:

worst player i played with, was a complete idiot, only in action the rest of him was okay:
#1
"I want to randomly fire an arrow into the crowd.."
our party was scattered, killed, sent to jail, and chased by guards, that was th first D&D campaign i ever played in!
#2
"i want to do a happy dance after EVERY successful action..."
He did so in-game as well as out of game... and Died from it after striking an owlbear for 1 DMG
#3
"i want to attack the Silver dragon!"
Well our wizard was just about to cast a teleport spell at said beast, so he and the dragon were teleported to the sun and... yeah you know the rest.

I've had no good Players...
 

Best: Eh, hard to tell. The good ones blend together more than the bad ones.

Worst: Girl in my previous group who would play certain stereotypes repeatedly and couldn't separate in character romance with out of character romance, to the point where we could predict her eventual cheating-related breakup when she started flirting with player characters instead of the fiance-DM's NPCs.
 



Worst: Player who once he had decided how something was supposed to be, not only couldn't consider any alternatives, but thought anyone who disagreed with him was obviously either crazy, stupid, trying to mess with him, or all three. His roleplaying alternated between being a jerk who tried to form his own party using NPCs to refusing to roleplay at all because his character wasn't someone who did that sort of thing. He also made sure everyone knew that his character could easily defeat their character.

The second worst was someone who created childish characters who were constantly getting themselves into trouble, who once got his character killed at first level so he erased the name off the character sheet and wrote in the "brother's" name, and who couldn't manage to stop being condescending to female players. (I loved when he tried to explain dice to one of them and she turned and said quite loudly, "Yes, I know. I've been gaming with SiderisAnon for three years.") He finally got booted after he lost his temper and threw a character sheet at me -- one that was still in the folder.


Best: This is between two players, but they both had the same great qualities. They created unique and interesting characters, roleplayed exceptionally well (including accents and mannerisms), and were great at getting the group to work together. Both are people that can have a slot in my game any day. Unfortunately, real world schedules don't allow.

The runner up is a player/DM who is vastly entertaining because I can never figure out what he's up to. He's very intelligent and creative and you always know he's got something up his sleeve. I like a player who can keep me on my toes, even more so a DM who can do that.
 

Into the Woods

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