GM gripes about players..

Technically, you don't need the PH if you can borrow it from someone else.

This is a conversation I had with my characters during a Dark Heresy game set in a space hulk. I will use their character's names.

Titus: I look around the corner.

Me: You see two orks arguing.

Magnus: What are they saying?

Me: You don't know.

Titus: I use chameleon and move closer (rolls well and does it). What do I hear?

Me: You can't speak ork. You have no clue. You know that they are arguing.

Magnus: Ok guys, I know how we are gonna do this. I take off my clothes.

Me: What?

Magnus: I take off my clothes.

Me (completely given up at this point): Are you gonna put your flak armor back on afterwards?

Magnus: Of course I am.

Me: Alright, you have taken off your clothes, but put back on your flak armor.

Crisis: I rush across the hallway quickly.

Me: Ok.

Magnus: I tie my clothes into a rope and toss it to Crisis.

Me: Ok?

Titus: I drop chameleon, get the attention of the orks and run back the way I came.

(rolls initiative, and does it)

Me: The orks pursue you.

Magnus: Crisis and I clothesline the ork.

Me: The ork rips the clothes out of your hands.

Magnus: but we clotheslined them.

Me: But its an ork.

Orks proceed to chop and shoot, leading to a large fight. In the end, most of the acolytes were wounded. If they had decided to just shoot, probably no one would have gotten hurt.

edited 11th Jan '11 8:11:24 AM by Augustine

I have two complaints about my players from this week's game that, for once, don't involve them being psychopaths or trying to break the game, but rather just being sort of slightly underwhelming, which is not really their fault at all, it's not like they know what I'm expecting in this case. One of them is, indeed, partly my fault, if the next session of the campaign bears it out, and a minor thing at that; I gave them an opportunity to get something good, but I may have made it too roundabout.

The players are in a location, a series of chambers, the contents of which are generated by leaving objects on a dais in each room. I allowed them to select one free magic or masterwork item worth up to 1,000 gp each at the start of the campaign. Though this is not a new rule for me to use, there was a specific purpose to it this time; I was hoping they would use those items to generate rooms and see what they encountered. That didn't happen. Instead they went around putting entirely mundane things like rations and chunks of rock and cow stomachs on them.

Later on, they reached a thing called "The Truth". Each one was able to confront a challenge, not too difficult as it was an early campaign, taking place in the other's mind, at the end of which they received a weapon (and a glimpse at "The Truth", a thing so horrifying and ill-defined that I did not attempt to actually describe it); from the jungle in the ranger's mind, the psion retrieved a magic bow, and from the crystal maze in the psion's mind, the ranger got a psionic sword. Both these things are powerful weapons, but if the two were to trade, the weapons would become even more powerful, become Morph Weapons, and grant the new wielders a free Item Familiar feat. I hinted at it, subtly, but they didn't seem to pick up on the idea, and I wonder whether or not they will.

edited 11th Jan '11 5:07:03 PM by Ezekiel

... They didn't pick up on the fact that the style-appropriate weapons from inside their own minds might suit them better than their ally?

Wow.

Technically, I did make the weapons the same types of weapons already used by the characters who picked them up; the sword was an exotic elven weapon, and the bow the ranger already had was a shortbow whereas the bow they found was a longbow, like the one already used by the psion. This may have been where I made my mistake. I did it so that it would be not impracticable to wield the weapons themselves, but I was hoping that they would pick up on other things...

Oh, that makes it more reasonable. Still, the fact that it's a psionic sword is suggestive, surely?

Yeah, I'm still kind of hoping they'll pick up on that; the psion's player did seem to be thinking about it a little after the game, but I don't know whether he realizes there's something significant about it or just thinks it's funny somehow.

I'm about to start an M&M campaign. One of my potential players (who invited himself into the game, for the record) is incapable of anything resembling originality. I don't mind when people make archetypical characters (one approved character is a Magical Girl and another is a baby Greek god), but I'm not cool with an out-and-out Captain Ersatz. So far all of his pitches have been to the effect of "Captain America, but from Soviet Russia" and "Kitty Pryde the Private Detective". If he wanted to use those power sets I'd be fine with it, but he wants to use those actual characters with the serial numbers filed off. He's also attempted to describe the campaign setting as both "the Civil War" (which it's not), and "Watchmen Lite" (which it's very not).

Argh.

One of my groups has . . . issues. Note that the game is Spirit Of The Century, which features umambiguously heroic characters, mechanically encourages roleplaying, doesn't feature XP or looting, and encourages Indy Ploys over being Crazy-Prepared. One of the players (the one who hasn't roleplayed before) gets it. The other two . . .

• One has severe Alt Itis, plays a Heroic Sociopath (despite his character being the most moral on-paper), and keeps trying to maximize his character's combat power despite being in a game where the GM is encouraged to scale combat difficulty with how good the party is at combat.
• One has his character's main goal being to have sex with his wife's character, makes the point of keeping track of his inventory (which the game specifically discourages), and is generally better than the above if only because he's Genre Savvy and isn't trying to screw over the NPCs.

Damn. My condolences. You need a Gilligan.

The newbie makes it all worth it, though—she hasn't been corrupted by D&D, actually roleplays properly, really gets into the game, and so on.

@Ironeye: good. cultivate her, and keep her safe from the Munchkins.

My regular "group" is absolutely horrible. I'm the GM, and we use GURPS. I've had to have such talks as "Why you can't take dexterity at 4 when the average human has 10" "Why you can't take terminally ill for 2 years and get 75 points for it." "Why I don't give a damn what your skill is, and what the modifiers, the shot you're trying to make is impossible."

As well as dealing with two players who kill everyone they meet, and suspect everyone who tries to help the party as someone who will betray them down the line. Its impossible to have a story, when your party freaking KILLS EVERY STORY RELATED NPC.

To make matters worse, my players refuse to flesh out their characters beyond a profession. No past, no personality, just kill, kill, rules-lawyer, kill. To solve this problem, I've created a campaign in which them killing everything has caused the world to be invaded by huge horrible deadly monsters called "The Nameless Ones", that will cause many a total party kill if they don't start playing smart.

Oh, and some of the players got mad at another player for not dealing much damage. Someone save me from my munchkin-tastic gaming group...

Sounds like you need a new gaming group. Or a focus on bigger and badder ass-kicking.

See, thats the thing, I've made it as much ass-kicking focused as I can without ripping my hair out, and they are still munchkinly dicks. Which is why I'm in the process of forming a new group or two. On the bright side, nothing can be nearly as bad as they were.

I have the opposite problem with one of the player's in my D&D game. He plays a rogue and more or less refuses to take any action that would result in him sneak attacking enemies. Perhaps he's simply too dense to grasp the basic conditions of Sneak Attack (flanking being by far the easiest way to achieve combat advantage). Combine that with the fact that he feels the need to provoke every single NPC into a blood thirsty rage (directed at him) and it's a wonder the party hasn't just left him for dead by now.

Today, and also last week, I ran a game with a party of twelve.

Fortunately most of them were not there for the whole thing. Last week I only had to deal with eight.

That's not much better, though.

It doesn't help that I am now dealing with several people who have apparently decided to go Evil, and the only thing that stopped them from robbing a general store today, in the middle of a time-sensitive world-saving mission, was that the sheer lack of organization that results from so many people coupled with my stunned unresponsiveness and one of the not-evil party members showing up to tell them that they had found an objective made it impossible for them to make any progress on that.

edited 2nd Feb '11 9:30:18 PM by Ezekiel

First rule for players: Don't go evil simply for kicks. Or even better: don't go evil at all, and give the DM a break.

In my Dresden Files game, the players seem to be trying to build a party that will eventually implode. It started off well, with the only potential issue being that one party member was serving a True Dragon, but it's gone downhill from there. Player #5 didn't add too much baggage, but Player #6 brought in the Church, #7 is an evil half-demon who serves a full demon, and #8 plans to serve a Norse god (she's joining this week). Thus, half the party is taking orders from higher powers, none of which actually get along. About the only thing keeping everyone together at this point is a prophetic vision about someone letting the Outsiders into our world, which no one wants to have happen.

edited 3rd Feb '11 2:01:51 AM by Ironeye

There's nothing wrong with evil P Cs - if that is expected or allowed. But you should at least be talking with the GM before putting an evil PC into the game, especially if the rest of the party is Good.  ^*

The general rule in my groups has always been "your characters can be any alignment/religion/race/whatever as long as they can get along". Probably the most entertaining party I've had consisted of almost every alignment. There was a LE mafia enforcer type, a CE bard, an NE Nay-Theist, a senile wizard who was CN most of the time and LN when in Let's Get Dangerous! mode... plus a CG ranger, an NG warforged, and an LG samurai (the character archetype, not the class — the class sucks).

That party was awesome.

My party today gave me a hard time by proposing all sorts of evil acts in order to get some needed potions of healing. I eventually convinced them not to do so by hinting at the fact that the local Reasonable Authority Figure that they logically should have talked to by then would give them a few in preparation for their next mission. Heck, even if I didn't plan in that direction, they have plenty of people knee-deep in their debt who would be happy to provide a few things to return a few favours. Is it really so hard to come up with a cheap way to prepare for adventure that doesn't involve violent murder and me needing to sack a troop of angry townwatches on them?

And no matter how many times I tell them, you do NOT get a sizeable discount on weapons when you trade in non-magical loot, and I was already being lenient by having that regular shopkeeper selling two bastard swords. You did not get 'ripped off' on that. Can you now please just drop it and pay the 60 GP?

Ah well, they be cool bros and all that. but I'd really like it if they'd stop considering easy (as in, evil) solutions that solve problem A by creating problem B.

Holy hell, we haven't even played this week's game and already I have to complain about my players and their bizarre perception of a meaningful distinction of "bad" and "evil".

Specifically, one of them used DC villains as an example, claiming that one who wanted to destroy Superman was "bad" but not "evil", while the Joker's random destruction or Brainiac's willingness to destroy the world was evil.

Evil doesn't work that way. Wanting to destroy someone, for any reason other than being a general threat to innocents or immediate threat to yourself, is evil. Conquering something without destroying anything is evil, unless you happen to be a truly benevolent ruler. Most crimes are evil, and that is why they are crimes.

This should not be hard to understand.

<sigh>...I've got a player in my Mech Warrior chronicle who is taking stuff way, way too personally. She's playing a somewhat bitchy character, which is fine. Her character gets in a lot of trouble, all well and good. But I got an email from her last night about how the IC interactions are starting to "hurt her feelings" OOC. The fuck? I thought we were, you know, playing a game.

I'm planning to say the following line to my players next time we play:

"You are a Dragonborn fighter, raised away from your kind in slavery, of average intelligence. You are a Deva ranger, dedicated to the cause of the Nay-Theist, with an intelligence of 12, and nothing in your background pointing at a history in academics. When you encounter a really, really big zone of magical darkness covering up the landscape and advancing towards the understaffed border fortress, your first instinct is NOT to use higher mathematics to figure out just how big it is."

My biggest problem is that I'm a pushover, and my players are the sort of people who think poking at plotholes and other kinds of glitches is more fun then actually playing a role.

edited 21st Feb '11 1:38:30 PM by Kayeka