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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeff Wilder" data-source="post: 4381978" data-attributes="member: 5122">This is an interesting question.  Up until a year or so ago, I would have said "problem players" were a relic of my teenage gaming years, or something mature gamers only run into at conventions.In the years since I was a kid, I've been in games with players who weren't really a great fit, but weren't what I'd call "problem" players, either.  Generally speaking, players who didn't fit just tended to drift off into oblivion ... whether they didn't care for our gaming style, or they could tell we weren't too attached to them, or some combination of the two, they just stopped showing for games.(As an aside, part of this tranquility might be attributed to, well, my physical characteristics.  I'm a pretty imposing guy, so the more "active" problem player archetype would, maybe, tend to be nullified.  People tend to avoid nastiness when there's a guy around who could pass for an Oakland Raiders offensive lineman.)About 18 months ago, a guy joined our group, eventually ending up in two separate games.  I'll call him Eugene.  Eugene was supposedly an actor, and clearly financially challenged.  He was quiet and brooding, but moody.  His default mode of communication, in and out of character, was sarcasm.  Part of the fun of D&D to him was clearly his character being advantaged over other characters.(This is not how we generally play, nowadays ... our sessions are very cooperative.  Until this guy, I honestly can't remember the last time we had a player who would, for example, have his PC steal from the group.  That's not to say the PCs don't have personality conflicts, because they do.  But there's no doubt amongst the players that the PCs are on the same team.)Now this sounds bad, and I suppose it was worse than I thought.  Maybe because of my own personality quirks, excesses, and flaws, I'm very easy-going when it comes to accepting those things in other people.  There are really only a few things that get me riled up, most of them having to do with willful ignorance and social injustice.So I overlooked Eugene's pilfering of food from our kitchen.  God knows I've been poor.  I overlooked his lack of generosity. (Not once, in over a year, did he bring so much as a bag of chips to share.  For himself, yes.  To share, no.)  I overlooked it when he'd make jokes in bad taste, because, honestly, I am the king of jokes in bad taste.  I overlooked that his characters were all exactly the same in personality and attitude.  I overlooked his absolute reluctance to roleplay, despite its oddness given his aspirations as an actor.But everything I overlooked was, for someone in the group, the last straw, and one by one the group turned against Eugene.  When he canceled out of one game session at the last minute because he "just wasn't up for it today," the DM recruited a new player.  When Eugene asked -- about four weeks later -- when we were playing again, he was told we'd assumed he'd quit and he wasn't welcome back.  In a second game, when I, as DM, went out of my way (at his request) to give him a backstory tightly interwound with the ongoing campaign and rife with the potential for roleplay, he rejected the hooks of the background (in character) in favor of playing the exact same psycho-killer loner-stck-with-a-group archetype he played every time.  When his PC was faced with in-character consequences, he threatened to quit the game.And that, apparently, was my last straw.  I told him not to worry about coming back.As I reread this, I haven't done a very good job at evoking the subjective weirdness of this situation.  It'd just been so long since I'd had anything but good experiences with people in our ongoing games, even players who didn't really fit in ultimately, that the whole situation was a little surreal.  This guy managed to alienate my girlfriend, who barely even met him.  (I've had many experiences with problem players at conventions, but that's a totally different type of thing.)So, long story short, I'm not sure how to answer your poll.  When I have an issue with a problem player, I address it.  But apparently my tolerance is sky-high, because it clearly takes me a lot longer than most people to recognize a problem player.Oh, as an addendum: we auditioned a new player on Sunday.  Quiet guy.  Seems easy-going and funny, and tolerant of our crudity and pop-culture nerdescence.  And, first session, he brought boxes of snacks and a case of Coke to share.  In future posts, I'll refer to him as Anti-Eugene.</blockquote>

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