What kinds of difficult players have you had in your games?
And more importantly, how did you deal with them?
There are two great threads in the GMing Q&A Forum on this topic right now — one about munchkins, the other about farmers.
I’ve gamed with my fair share of munchkins (usually, once per munchkin), although I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a farmer (a player who deliberately creates useless characters) — and there are lots of other general “types” of difficult players.
In fairness, there are an equal number of different types of difficult game masters, too, but that’s a topic for another day.
There are lots of reasons why someone can be a difficult player, but they all boil down to 3 basic reasons:
- They have social problems unrelated to gaming.
- They have personal issues with another member of the group.
- They’re frustrated with the game.
Sometimes the best approach is simply to politely kick the difficult player out of your group (as many TT readers have done during their GMing careers), but there are lots of times when everyone will be better off if you can find a different solution.
With that in mind, please share some of your “aaargh!” stories about difficult players — and be sure to mention how you handled the situation.
As a follow-up question: Do you think that difficult players fall into general categories, along the lines of Chris Chinn’s list of dysfunctional player types?
Hi Martin, don’t forget a big one:
– They want something the game focus doesn’t provide.
Munchkins have an awesome time with gamist tactical games- it’s what they want. Likewise- the farmer player doesn’t want what the group is doing with the game. An honest assessment and communication on both sides of the table could resolve this problem easily.
I usually don’t have problems either way, mostly due to the games I play:
a) games where non-combat skills are used in conflicts and can be as powerful as combat skills in resolving situations (Burning Wheel, HeroQuest, Sorcerer, etc.), so Farmers are powerful and mechanically backed.
b) games where tactical play either directly is a focus (Iron Heroes), or else there’s no place to really game the system and it’s boring to munchkins (The Pool, HeroQuest, Dogs in the Vineyard, etc.)
c) I usually draw exact lines before play- “Everyone is royalty”, “Everyone is a mercenary”, “Everyone is involved in situation X”, so that we don’t end up with the cast of Scooby-Doo, and one player with the ex-Navy Marine/Assassin.
– They want something the game focus doesn’t provide
I’d lump this in with being frustrated about the current game — I tried to be as general as possible.
And I’m in 100% agreement about clarifying everything right up front, and making your social contract pretty explicit. The more gamers talk about that kind of thing, the more fun we’ll have — which is one of the reasons I love your blog: Because it doesn’t pussyfoot around these kinds of social issues. 🙂
Great story, Scott — thank you for sharing it. It illuminates a very good point: Sometimes difficult players don’t start out that way.
Often I think this problem can stem from different people’s concepts of “COOL” My wife and I both DM and we often run things for one another (more often she runs cause I hate prep) and she has more of the “traditional” DnD concept whereas I’ve been playing DnD and others for 16 years now to her 6 (I know, I know, I’m still just a baby compared to some of you) and I’ve gotten well and tired of the traditional character archetypes. So, very often when she describes the new campaign setting to me I’ll pick something to play that completely baffles her.
For example, she picked up the “Bluffside” campaign setting and I became completely enamored with the cordoned off, burned out, undead infested center of the city. When I presented my character to her later that week as a trouble-making son of a lesser merchantile house (aristocrat 1, rogue 5) who had been told to shape up or ship out by his struggling father, she was delighted untill she noticed my skills: Business 8 ranks, appraisal 8 ranks, finance 8 ranks, etc… etc… and my cohort, a level 5 dwarven expert (skills in masonry, engineering, etc…) whose backstory involved me pulling him drunken from the gutters and sponsoring him through college, and restoring his honor with his family. Wondering what the hell I was thinking, I explained to her that my character saw great promise in the burned out section of the city and was planning on starting excavation, clearing and rennovation, then selling off the newly purified land and anything we had uncovered while clearing it.
She dubbed this “Decidedly unheroic” and has to this day, refused to run the campaign for me, despite the huge pitiful anime eyes I give her every time I bring it up.
On the OTHER hand, she recently started a character who is a professional jockey. We had to jump hoops, twisting the game world and brokering an understanding of exactly what she wanted and I thought was reasonable before we managed to get started (her original concept called for her to be a city-based professional jocky riding a special mount of some sort, but economics and other logical gameworld concerns made us fiddle with the concept. I personally think a campaign as a jockey is about as dull as you can get, but she’s all excited about it. Which reminds me, I have a race to plan.
By the same token, we have another player who every campaign plays a greedy thief that snatches up every treasure she can get her hands on and then doesn’t share it with the party, which I find juvenile and destructive to the rest of the party. Luckily for her, I haven’t DMed a game she’s played in yet, or else she’d find herself having to deal with the consequences of her actions now and again.
In short, we ALL have different things that make us shout “COOOOOOOOOL!” like giant fanboys and if a group’s differ enough, there’s bound to be some confusion.
Thanks for sharing your perspective, Rick — and I’m with you, the urban planner sounds like a lot of fun. 😉