Horror stories of terrible players

[Kerosene Helix]

I've been in about 20 campaigns. Mostly 3.5 or Pathfinder, but one savage worlds. I've been in 3 TPKs, and have 3 horror stories, which I will tell to you in order of badness.

1. Facing the tarrasque at level 6.
So our party of mainly good characters, except for me, who was true Neutral, got another player. This guy plays EXCLUSIVELY chaotic evil non-base races, and this time was no different. He effectively enslaves our party and gets us to help him explore some ruins. In the ruins we find the tarrasque. It wakes up. We all die. That one guy thinks that is total bullshit, and leaves our group because the DM is a maniac. With him gone, the DM runs another campaign with us, so I guess it's not too bad. After a few sessions with mister CE, none of us wanted to play with him, but none of us wanted to tell him to leave.

2. The Pirate Campaign TPK
My boyfriend ran a pirate themed campaign a year or two back. There were three people vying for the captain's position. Me; a fighter/rogue/swashbuckler with maxed out levels in profession sailor and the leadership feat, a blind ratling cleric, and an awakened cat. After showing our crew who was the most competent, they all followed me, but the other two still reserved rights to being captain. I just ignored them for the most part, since they were useful and I could continue being the actual captain, as I could tell my crew what to do, and they'd do it. Until the cat challenged the ratling to a duel at sunset. My character was upset and forbade the action, but they were both like "well, you're not the captain, we do what we want" I knew the cat was going to die. And so did the cat, which is why the cat attacked and killed the ratling in her sleep. Our DM rolled for weather that night and got HUGE ******** STORM. The cat, having recently won captainhood, was blown off the ship. It could not swim. So I, as the only living captain, got the rest of the crew through the storm safely, with minimal ship damage, and went on to ressurrect these two buffoons.

But as I was doing that, our resident "lawful" evil sorcerer, who had been pretending to be a wizard, (Carried a spellbook around and everything. I had gotten him some scrolls of useful-for-pirates spells, so he could copy them into his spellbook, that's when he told me he wasn't a wizard.) had decided that now was his chance to MIND CONTROL ME. He succeeded, and he made me ORDER AN ATTACK ON A NAVAL VESSEL. With my profession sailor and knowledge local, I knew we'd never make it, but my crew listened to their captain. When they captured me (by now I had gotten quite a reputation), he tried to make me spit in the navy officers face, which is when I finally made my will save to break the spell. But by then it was too late. Those of us who were still alive were sent to prison, except Captain Barnabas, who was sent to the gallows.

3. The Horrors of Jevon, the DM
Now, I like Jevon, he has recently joined the navy, and is serving his country. But he was a god-awful DM. So bad that his terribleness inspired me to DM a campaign of my own, because before then, I thought being a DM would be hard. Like, before I read Twilight, I thought being an author would be hard. Clearly, any schmuck can do it, if they're letting Jevon DM. I came into the campaign about a year into it, as so many people had already left at this point, and for good reason.

Jevon DMs with ridiculously over-powered creatures and characters, and uses meta out-of-game knowledge to beat us at every turn. Once he sees our sheets, and sees how we're built, he stats out his enemies to shut us down. His NPCs always have awful, long, repetitive cutscenes, and his characters, even the half-demon, half-troll ones that sacrifice slaves to vampires, WEREN'T EVIL. Everything was true neutral because if it had an alignment, it would be easier for us to defeat. I mean, it's one thing to be a non-evil half-demon... I can live with that kind of special snowflake... but an army of special snowflakes all doing unspeakably evil acts has GOT to be evil!

He bogged down every session with complicated placement rules, making sure we never got an advantage. His enemies attacks were repetitive and it took him forever to roll them, and he managed to make an airship battle with a colossal dragon tedious and boring, and well as the final boss fight (surprise, surprise, the Dracolich that was committing genocide was not evil!)

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! He actually raped a character. That's right, you heard me. Our bard wizard split the party to go and find a master to re-train a feat, and he ended up in this Lich's tower. Several failed will saves later, and our arcane caster has two new feats. One of which is lich-loved. As our bard chewed out the DM, the rest of us could only gape at him in horror. We tried to explain to him why this was wrong, but he wrote it up as being "part of the story" and that he was a first time DM. But this was over a year into his campaign. Nobody left after that, even though it would've served Jevon right. Everyone wanted to see this thing through to the end. We ended up recruiting another veteran DM as a character to help us win the fight, and the final boss fight, though long and drawn out, was satisfying, thanks to the well-laid out plans of no less than 3 veteran DMs, and Me, the rape victim arcane bard, and a pretty cool paladin.

[Chaosmageslevin]

I have a bunch. one of them is this MTG player I knew in college, he would put cards in all of his decks because he hated getting milled out. Another guy, loved playing one on one, so when he would play with my brother and I, he would take out one of us quick, and then take his time with the other

[himynamesnye]

we used to have a guy play with us, we were all pretty new (still are honestly) but we were doing written out games of DnD, he wasnt happy with the group so he tried to do everything himself. The trouble really started when we let him DM. He started out by putting us all randomly in a cold environment and not letting half of us buy clothing items because we werent humanoid like the towns (on top of that we had no reason to be in the cold area) and part way through made it like AoT which none of the group liked.

He then after a long time of nothing from him wanted to do a post apocalyptic map where he tried to make it hard for me because i was too op. i was a cockroach. not a half cockroach half man, just a tiny cockroach.

Recently though hes left the group because we arent serious enough, we moved away from fully scripted to try and make it up on the fly and battling queen skeletor for gold was just too far for him. Since hes gone weve actually been having a better time as the messing around gives me as new DM time to think of what to do next.

[Ryuondo]

So my first time playing Pathfinder was pretty fun. It was a really lenient game as far as characters were concerned because we were essentially spirits thrown into the cadavers of a battlefield and if you could describe why your character's corpse would be there you could play it. I ended up as a barbarian warlord stuck in the body of a deinonychus. We started with a small enough group but it eventually expanded and the players personalities started to show. The main problem was this one kid who would always eat up more than half of the time we spent playing either arguing with the DM or interrupting him, taking his 45 minute turns, bragging about how awesome his character both in and out of character, and then always running off like a coward every combat encounter. He killed nothing the entire game. The rest of the group were murder hobos and I was the only character to progress the story at all. The freaking dinosaur was smarter than the rest of the group combined by stumbling around with artifacts in its mouth, this includes the "awesome" character whose intelligence was its highest stat. Eventually the DM moved and we had to stop his campaign.

A few weeks later I took mainly the same group through a more combat oriented game, Rogue Trader. The captain (Rogue Trader) was a GM character. Everyone made their characters from either the core or the supplements except the one kid with the "awesome character" from the pathfinder game. He wanted to be a Grot. I told him no because a Grot would not do well in a crew of Humans and Orks. But he basically begged and pleaded and pouted and I relented just to see if he could pull it off. I told him every single Ork on the crew would be acting as though he were s**t on their shoes and the human characters would kill him if he even asked a question of them. He didn't care. Mission one, he spent an hour arguing with me (while we were playing) about how he didn't want to just be a die roller, a role he begged to get into when he chose a Grot, and how the captains plan was stupid because it valued the vehicles more than the personnel. He obviously didn't understand the universe at all. Needless to say he didn't play with us after that argument. He would also spend all of his time in between turns talking s**t about me as the GM about how I was a terrible GM for a basic hour long session I ran to get them oriented with Rogue Trader because it was quite different from what they were used to playing, because the mission was supposed to be finished within an hour (short simple bounty hunting story that allowed combat and non-combat interactions). He took the longest to grasp the system and ran the session time out to three and a half hours. Everyone got the system and the universe but him. Even the people who had never played 40K or its RPG's before.

Also I know the pain of having a player die every session. One of the people I played with literally had to write up a new character every single session because he would do some stupid s**t and die from it, save for his first death (session one). My dinosaur fell on him with a crit failure and then crit on my landing and then rolled a second 20 to confirm the crit. Fell talons first pulling my head out of a tarp covering a cart (got my head stuck in a rope and nearly suffocated) and disemboweled him as I fell backwards.

[NickNarwhal]

i generally ignore alignment, and consider it more of a loose guideline than something to be strictly followed (kinda like the pirate's code). situations may call for a character to act out of alignment, and sweating alignment too much just bogs things down. the only times i consider alignment to be of any serious import are A: when it comes to evil players characters (i.e. you aren't bringing that s**t to my table unless everyone is UNANIMOUSLY doing it) and B: you're playing a paladin.

this is a story about my first experience with 2nd edition, and the second biggest douche i've ever played with, both in and out of character: the paladin.

the guy wasn't playing lawful stupid, lemme get that straight. he was just playing STUPID. stupid, stubborn, prideful, and most of all CRUEL. but i'll get to that. i was the party ranger, and we were headed into a swamp to track down a missing noble and his companions, who'd gone in to deal with some lizardmen. they lost, we found out quickly enough. being the ranger, and this being 2e, i was the only character in the party who could track, and i was GOOD at it. so i'm having a blast being all scouty, following these prints and marking our own way back on the trees due to the impending rain that would be washing away the tracks soon. paladin is already being confrontational and refusing to listen to me when i tell him things like "don't run ahead, don't split up, don't make a bunch of loud noise." he walks out ahead of me, and makes no effort to be sneaky.
we ended up fighting a dinosaur of some sort and it takes a big bite out of the fighter, but we keep going. the paladin brags because he got the last hit in and continues to mouth off. we find the remains of the nobles' companions, and more tracks, but it starts to rain, which will ruin the tracks. we're also pretty bloodied up at this point, and we have what we came for: the noble and his men died, and we found the corpses. we're done. the rest of the party agrees with me that we should head back, no point in hanging around anymore in a rainy swamp full of lizardmen that can easily get the drop on us.
paladin says no. argues, insults, THREATENS me (i had to talk to the DM to get him to convince me not to actually take him on, because that would be a fight i'd win in a heartbeat) and runs off on his own. he leave, he goes after the lizardmen alone. we get ambushed, and we hear him call for help after we win our fight. he's gotten stuck in some quicksand or something, but he makes it out just as we get there and plays it off like it was nothing. we run into some lizardmen. these guys are unrelated to the bad ones, and actually point out where they're camped. since we're already this far out and have the advantage now, we decide screw it, let's do this, because if we don't paladin's just gonna get himself killed and now the lizardmen have his gear. we win the fight: the last lizardman is cornered on top of a large rock. he jumps off and breaks a leg, tries to limp away. i land a throwing knife on him, knocking him over, and i run over and pin him down. we decide to bring him back to town to interrogate him about what they're up to.
i ask the paladin to give me a hand carrying the lizardman, who has let go of his weapons and surrendered. the paladin says okay. paladin comes over and takes the lizardman's arm, and lifts him up with me.
and then he shoves his sword down the lizardman's throat.
i didnt stay in that campaign any longer, but the DM did put a curse on said player after i went on a tirade at him for doing NOTHING to punish the CLEARLY CORRUPT paladin. who also tried to run off with powerful dinosaur-controlling artifact we found on the lizardmen, allegedly to destroy it by himself, instead of splitting it with ALL OF US so we could make sure it was destroyed and no one kept it.

also, after he killed said lizardman, i had probably the biggest in-character freakout i ever had, and the entire party sans thief was pretty much about to kill him on the spot until i sheathed my weapon and told him i'd let his god sort him out.

[oopssorryy]

I have two, one DnD, the other MtG.

I had a friend who really wanted to play with my group in Dnd. Our DM had constructed a huge game that took 2.5 years to fully see the end. This was a side game that would tie into our game, the only rule was that we all had to play Evil characters. My friend played a "Lawful" Evil monk, who was a winged elf. The DM had to warn him multiple times that he had to play a lawful character, as he tried to do what me and the other CE character were doing. It all ended with me spotting a Tarrasque, not telling the party (it was asleep and camouflaged as a massive hill) and me sprinting away. Another player character followed be due to trust issues (I was fully insane and had done.... some things), and instead of just following along the friend screams at the top of his lungs for me to stop, or someone to stop me. His reasoning is that if I really wanted to stay quite, I would turn around and explain what it is that I was running from, so that the party could decide what it was. This ended with the Tarrasque waking up, and coming after him, me and the Warblade running in different directions and the two wizards hiding. He tries to get away by flying straight up in the air, while directly above the Tarrasque, not knowing that the Tarrasque is huge and can jump REALLY well. Now fun part, the night before our Warblade, the Winged Elf and I went to a bar, and partook a little too much, The Warblade and I both passed our fort saves, while the Elf did not, our DM rolled, and he ended up with the "trots". So as he watches the Tarrasque leaping up to him he ask the DM if he can "go" on it before he dies. The DM laughs and says sure as he rolls a percentile dice. The poo was rebounded back onto the Elf due to the hide of the Tarrasque just before he is eaten. My friend never shows up for another game, and quite honestly I was happy for it.

Story Two
My room mates friend actively hates non basic lands. It not an issue of him being a brand new player, as he has been playing since Lorwyn. Anytime me, my old room mate, or any of the other members of our play group uses one he complains. He had tried a Blood Moon deck, but then he found that a well crafted mana base can get by a blood moon. He gets frusterated because we all play modern so he can use his good land destruction like wasteland or strip mine, which are for some reason ok in his book. It's really frusterating to have nearly every land drop you play criticized because it's not basic. The great part is the only games he wins are Multiman because we tend to leave him alone while we deal with combo elves and reanimator, leaving him to drop forest after forest. To date he has never won a single 1v1 game, but always has something negitive to say about your deck constitution. scream

[HateKnuckle]

I RPed with a guy who had bipolar. He would have the usual thoughts of grandeur that would turn into mush as he tried translating them into real life with our group. Out of the blue he decided that we were going to make a ship out of Legos to represent the ship that we were going to cross a sea with. When we finished he took it apart and told us to do it again. A bunch of stuff like this where we spent several hours on a beach while he tried to put our Pathfinder campaign into a Minecraft world.

I play MtG with a guy who admits to sharking the hell out of people that don't know the value of their cards. Everytime he mentions it I have a crisis of conscience.

New people or people who had spent almost no money on their decks would face me at our FNM and I would feel really bad stomping their faces in. The kind of horror story where I'm the one causing the horrors.

Not really related but interesting. My ex-gf came to an FNM once with her then bf. They both had terrible decks and I actually got paired up against her bf. I destroyed him and I would be lying if I said I didn't gain a small amount of extra enjoyment because of defeating him in front of her. Childish I know but I couldn't actively stop myself from feeling it.

[Tabasco Jones]

Seph Baelzara

... this probably breaks the ToS by being potentially having "offensive language" =/

It only break ToS if someone cries about it,
to which that's the ONLY requirement for you to break ToS.
You could call someone a Stink Pickle,
and if they cry to an admin about it...
BAM Banned.

[Seph Baelzara]

You know, I wasn't going to make a post in this thread, seeing as I had nothing to add to this thread until this post came about:

Toshi Shino

Not sure if I am reading it right, but why do I detect fallacies?

You know what I hate about Gaia? It's these ******** users who think they know everything and toss around the word "fallacy" like it's candy. It's not exclusively just the quoted user, either. It's like a plague of dismissal for anyone's word, as if anyone can't have an opinion on how they think the world works.

And you know what? If there's a fallacy in this statement, ******** you who thinks so. I don't give a s**t.

... this probably breaks the ToS by being potentially having "offensive language" =/

[turn right]

Not long after I joined my current d&d group (some three & a half years ago), another player joined in.

He seemed like a nice enough guy at first, but as time progressed, his true colors started to shine. I don't recall if he played in any of our d&d adventures, but he WAS in our first Star Wars campaign.

He first played a mandalorian, then, when we hit about the middle of the game, he switched to a 'neutral' jedi. From the get-go, his characters were super amped up -- what with having three 18's, and not a single stat below 14. Also, in order to achieve his character's hit points, one would have to roll the maximum every. single. time. We were about level 8 or 9. While not impossible, it was highly unlikely. On top of that, he used way too many skill points -- probably about double what he should've used.

All that, we might've overlooked as a mistake (it was his first time playing), and the DM even went over his character to help him fix it up nice and proper. However, it was his game-playing itself that really hit it home.

From character level 1 to character level 8 (then from 8 to 14) , over about 12 - 15 five-hour sessions, his characters missed on an attack only a handful of times, and about 75% of the time, it was a confirmed critical hit.

He was very cocky, and despite being a 'neutral' jedi, he played rather 'evil', and it was even in his character backstory that he planned on betraying us anyway and become a sith lord.

Out of the game, he was also rather creepy towards my cousin, and flirted and made advances towards her despite her voiced distaste.

We trust eachother to play seriously, and treat the game and players with respect. He did neither. Suffice to say, we booted him shortly after.

[TokyoKitty16]

Horror stories about my group. . . Where to start?

D had the worst habit of making characters that were unique when it came to RP, but were useless when they were needed for their party role.

We had to break in and rob the church of Abadar, during which THREE OF THE SIX PCs ended up dying because his Good cleric was more concerned with filling his backpack with gold than running to heal our party. All three were capable of being saved, if he had gone to heal them. Two were killed by effects that would have ended if any form of healing had been done, and the third died from a (seemingly dud) trap that poisoned him with a stat-based effect that none of the rest of the party passed our Heal checks to recognized. D would have recognized it on a 1 if he had been with us instead of 20 or 30 feet away stuffing his sack.

His other biggest irritant of a concept was Ferdinand the (Half-Orc) Barbarian. Remember the children's book Ferdinand the Bull? Exact same concept. He actually had his level 15 Barbarian run ahead into an encounter and go into Rage. Then RP-wise he become frightened (no spell or effect caused it), and ran away, STILL IN RAGE, which left our Rogue to be killed, as the two were flanking partners (He had some ability/effect/whatever that caused an enemy being attacked by multiple people to target onto him).

The only good thing about Ferdinand was his Half-Orc's exit from the game. As we were working (shoe-horned by the DM) to restore Besmara to her godhood, we were all rewarded for helping her. When Ferdinand asked to become even more ferocious in battle, Besmara transformed him into a bunny. D was momentarily pissed, until we pointed out the battle in the previous paragraph (which happened in the chamber where mortal Besmara was held captive). He sighed, admitted defeat. . . then asked if he still had his equipment. The DM and party decided he had learned his lesson, so the DM said that all of his equipment had been transformed with him into the proper size and fittings, and even let him keep his stats the same. He had to adjust for size bonus, weapon damage, and lost his Orc bite attack, but we ended up with a badass Barbarian Bunny in dragon scale full-plate armor that wielded a battleaxe.

[Faux Aria]

This happened just yesterday on dueling network, I was playing tellar knights teching in whip viper and kid didn't realise bth is usesless with whip viper around.

[Lanackse-Kanvae]

V i c e y

Tablrtops: Players who lack creativity. I played my first three DnD games with two very old friends of mine. One of them recycled the same elf ranger every session right down to complaining until he got to keep his stats. He also forced his girlfriend to be in in game wife and if she talked to any other male characters he'd get angry IL.

I tend to use a point buy system (I like it as both player and DM) so the stats bitching would be redundant. However the blatant metagaming would not be accepted by any DM I've played with. It is counted as metagaming because he was bringing out of game stuff into the game and then out again.

[V i c e y]

I think my definition of bad player varies from everyone elses.

I refer to a bad player as someone who knows EVERY THINK about the game and instead of helping new players learn they complain about them.

Card games: The elitist players who expect a game to be won in less then 5 turns and if it goes longer they complain. Also they don't think past the meta of any given game and when facing a random deck they think isn't good enough they b***h.

Tablrtops: Players who lack creativity. I played my first three DnD games with two very old friends of mine. One of them recycled the same elf ranger every session right down to complaining until he got to keep his stats. He also forced his girlfriend to be in in game wife and if she talked to any other male characters he'd get angry IL.

[Teqnologyque]

There's one player in my RL group that always tries to shoe-horn his way into being leader of whatever party, and when he can't shoe-horn, he tries to bully.

I'd like to say I humbled him in the Battletech campaign I GM for the group, but he's still an a*****e, and he keeps sending me e-mails about the move I pulled on him.