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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Peni Griffin" data-source="post: 3433944" data-attributes="member: 50322">The most important thing in any group of people is to have compatible faults.I'm serious.  Think of the most annoying traits your friends have had through the years, and you'll find you keep picking people with the same faults over and over again - because those are the faults you can deal with.  The drama queen, the guy who wants to get on his horse and ride off in all directions, the rules lawyer, the person who can't quite grasp 'em, the one who's easily distracted - depending on whose around them, they can all be great players or they can all be agony.I've been reflecting lately on the composition of our group, because about a year ago we lost a long-standing player and suddenly we're ideal.  There's me - major drama queen, can't shut up - my husband the rules lawyer and game mechanic, Ben the other rules lawyer and game mechanic (honestly, you can see the tactical displays come up on the lenses of their glasses - they don't even have to talk, just pass the books back and forth), Wendy who'd rather be LARPing if her health allowed and can't quite track all the rules, Dan who hadn't played since 1E and is shy enough that he wouldn't be here if he weren't married to Wendy and keeps trying to bring realism to the game like that's ever gonna happen (I do that too), Ryan with his complete lack of any sense of proportion.  We're all, in our own ways, difficult to get along with.  We've all churned through long chains of incompatible people before making this group.  We're all dilatory and take forever to play one combat and talk about nongame things and forget to update our character sheets till the last minute and riff off of eachother's ideas and mesh into this astonishing having-a-good-time machine that, btw, blows the monsters away.We used to have one more player.  He'd been with us longer than Dan and Wendy have, and I couldn't describe his flaws as any worse than ours - he couldn't pay attention, he wasn't flexible, and none of us could tell exactly what he wanted from the game.  He made quirky characters who seemed to be deliberately ineffective.  He claimed to be all about roleplaying but got bored outside combat and never played out character arcs no matter how hard we tried to riff off of him. When he DMed he railroaded, and when he tried to run us in Hero system he wouldn't help Wendy, who didn't even own the books, to understand how he was interpreting the rules.  He kept showing up so he must have been having a good time, and we'd all been rejected often enough that we didn't want to kick him out, but something about his faults and our faults just didn't work.  Eventually he made us throw him out over nongame stuff that I'm not discussing in a public forum, and suddenly - we were the perfect group.</blockquote>

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