Quote Originally Posted by Schylerwalker View Post
His main problem is that he complains a lot and makes snide comments, especially about combat. For example, the party had gotten into a fight with a behir, and I noticed half-way through the fight its truly sickening ability to get half-a-dozen attacks on someone it had grappled. When I pointed this out to the startled character who was grappled by it at the time, the player says, in this incredibly insufferable voice, "Maybe you should check your monsters before placing them."

He always whines about party incompatibility, fights that are too challenging ("Maybe you should have looked up the ECL beforehand")
While said player is an arse about it, he's got a point. As a DM, you really should hide your suprise at things you might not have fully researched unless you want him doing this more (and worse - feeling justified doing so).

I've had a rough run recently with a DM that threw (at a 5-Member, 5th Level Party) an ECL 15+ Encounter (3 L10 Casters, L10 Fighter and a Construct). And that was after a pair of encounters before that which were ECL 6 and ECL 8. We really didn't have a chance. I spoke afterwards with him (respectfully) that we're really not in a position to fight what he's throwing at us and survive. That he needs to scale things a little more reasonably if he wants to have a campaign and not 5 players who're going to start making pun-pun's to survive - cause it was getting close to that...

Quote Originally Posted by Schylerwalker View Post
And don't get me started on the time that he brought in a heavily optimized shape-shifting druid, that, half-way though the adventure, decided he'd "had enough of the island" and decided to bug out and escape. Which he managed to do, even with me desperately throwing obstacles in his way. (He then proceeded to brag about escaping my adventure later on). The worst thing about that situation was, without the tank/blaster/healer, and an additional action per round, what should have been a very challenging fight ended up being a TPK!

Seriously, while I love the guy out of game, I really, really hate gaming with him, but I'd feel terrible saying "Stop playing in my games."
That antic would have gotten him a first and last warning that abandoning the party in that fashion. If he's going to get "bored" and make his PC leave the game, he may as well leave the group. Period.

However, for the sake of the rest of the party, scale your adventure when a PC does that. Otherwise it just stops being fun for everyone. As the DM, you could have potentially salvaged that with a little tweaking - and left Mr Druid sitting out twiddling his thumbs while the rest of the party had a great time.

In fact, that's exactly what I'd do. Since he left, he has no awareness of what's going on. I'd basically put the rest of the party through a power-levelling session just to spite him for his antics by setting him up to be 2-3 levels lower than the rest of the party...