● Argue during gametime, effectively wasting everyone's time.
● Write long emails to everyone using Reply All and write them in a nonsensical argumentative manner USING ALL CAPS AT WEIRD TIMES. These were so annoying to read that people would eventually refuse to even bother reading them.
● Argue over distribution of magical items and try to redistribute magical items to his new characters, even though they were never there during the original distribution.
● Plot to steal magical items from other PCs.
● Disrupt well thought out group plans because it wasn't "his plan", usually by going off by himself and somehow ruining the element of surprise.
● Rules Lawyering to the point of people jokingly dying of boredom. (People joked about their PCs committing suicide.)
● Standing there and doing nothing during combat, waiting for something bad to happen to an ally - so that he can steal their magical items.
● He would say he wanted to do something dangerous, the DM would warn him that this could backfire, it would then backfire and he would complain about it backfiring. He would then try to rules lawyer his way out of the backfire - which never worked.
● Metagaming - he would routinely try to use out of game knowledge or knowledge his character does not possess to try and gain something he is not supposed to have or even know about. He would also try to use this metagaming knowledge to get other PCs killed, take their magical items, deliberately disrupt the game.
● Insulting other players to the point that people wanted to punch him.
● I told the DM at one point that if he disrupts the game one more time I will punch him in the fucking face.
● Soon afterwards the DM expelled him from the game.
Years later I was hanging out with my sister downtown and we ran into a friend of hers from a different gaming group. They got to talking and I sort of tuned out and looked at my cellphone. Then they started talking about what to do about a disruptive player in their group.
I looked up and asked "Whats his name?"
"Darryl."
Same guy. Still doing the same shit he always does. He never changes. They later kicked him out of their group too.
Since then I have encountered Darryl twice in other games. Still doing the same things. He seems to bounce from game to game, his gaming style more suitable to an evil campaign where anything goes and rules lawyering is encouraged.
Got any horror stories about disruptive players? Share them below in the comments section.
UPDATE
I posted the above post on a Facebook group for 5th Edition DMs and got a slew of responses. Too many to list them all here. Here are a few of the ones that caught my attention.
#1.
Simen L Stangeland - The GM's girlfriend... Who got to play a vampire at least four generations higher than the rest of us, and got to whine her way out of ANY negative situation. The kicker was that she was the one to gather the group in the first place...
#2.
Midori Hirtzel-Church - A guy who tried to copy all the other players' characters in order to be the biggest badass in the game, and told me I should consider him, "adoptive family" when we'd known each other less than a month. I asked him to leave after that last incident.
There was the time I ran a game at a con and these two guys walked in, sat down, and warned me that they were going to "break [my] game." Not even a "Hello," just jumped right to that. One of them pointed to the woman who'd walked in with them and told me, "We challenged her, and now she doesn't run games for us anymore," like it was something to be proud of. I felt bad for her.
Then I proceeded to run rings around them.
#3.
Kimball Kinnison - Ended up cradle killing a game when i handed him a pregen and he only wanted to upgrade a vibrodagger (star wars) if it could cut through walls. And then also wanted to argue that his character was force sensitive because "everything in star wars is"
#4.
Jeremy Lowder - I once participated in a game where our fighter refused to fight during combat. He ended up quitting because he felt that the DM was making fun of his characters portly nature, and thus his own heavyset frame.
#5.
Bill Adcock - At a con game I ran the other weekend, I had:
- a guy who didn't actually look at his character sheet until a half hour into the session, and then declared that his character would be "back at the hotel smoking opium" the whole time.
- that player's wife, who thought I was making fun of *her* weight when she ended up with a character that had "heavyset" listed as a physical descriptor. They also brought their eight year old daughter (this was a post-midnight horror game) who spent the game standing next to me complaining how tired she was
- their polyamorous +1, who was there to show off her new cleavage tattoo
- a guy who hadn't played in 20 years, but played a lot 20 years ago and presumed to dictate to me how the rules work in this edition.
It was a rough night.
qwew
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