those obnoxious party members...

[Shinizak]

So we all have them like that one guy who always min-maxes, or the one that always goes out of his way to screw over the party, or the one who won't shut up about the thing he saw on youtube. Go ahead, let your anger out in here. Share your pain.

[Choco]

Don't forget the one that insists on always playing a chaotic stupid character, and then always throws a fit when the char's stupidity gets him/her/it killed, claiming the DM is out to get him...

Cause ya know, cursing out the Queen in her own court after she ALREADY showed leniency for previous acts of stupidity is apparently not something ya should get executed for.

[Tsotha-lanti]

All my players are mature grown-ups who are there to have fun together, and generally like to get into the spirit and theme of the game, setting, and campaign.

[V'icternus]

All my players are mature grown-ups who are there to have fun together, and generally like to get into the spirit and theme of the game, setting, and campaign.

...You're no fun.

My "friends" like breaking doors unnecesarily, threatening possible allies, and looting the bodies of their fallen comrades before finishing off the enemy that killed them. (Our Dwarven Fighter hates doors. He has some kind of inner loathing for them.)

[raitalin]

Oh, man I think I've got the thread winner right here:

He cheats on his die rolls: He always picks the least visible dice and picks them up to read them.

He cheats on his character sheet: We started making our DM collect character sheets at the end of the session JUST so that he could check this guy's sheet. He routinely has too many skill points (in one epic game he was over by more than 200), and has been over by double digits on his saves.

He tries to min/max, but fails at all but the most basic builds unless he gets the recipes straight off of CharOp.

When playing a spellcaster he spams spells constantly, but cannot remember the details of the spells he uses.

When he's not spamming he holds up the game trying to find some obscure perfect-for-this-situation spell that he just *happens* to have memorized. When the DM forces him to turn in a spell list at the beginning of the session he holds up the game for an hour making it.

He has to recalculate his attacks and save DCs Every.Single.Round.

He never role-plays. I haven't heard him speak IC once. He never moves the story forward, just waits until combat.

He gets upset when he gets hit, or fails a save (which basically only happens when he tells the DM a result thinking its high enough, but it isn't) or doesn't succeed in any action he attempts.

He also likes to lay claim to any magic item that benefits his character, no matter how much it may assist another character. He also doesn't understand stacking rules, leading to his abilities being off-the-charts.

So why does he still play with us, you ask? He's an old friend of the DM, and works at the same place. Me and another player are trying to get the DM to either confront him on his play, as it detracts from the fun for the rest of us, or simply tell him we've stopped playing.

Why do people cheat at a game with no winner?!?!

[V'icternus]

Oh, man I think I've got the thread winner right here:

He cheats on his die rolls: He always picks the least visible dice and picks them up to read them.

He cheats on his character sheet: We started making our DM collect character sheets at the end of the session JUST so that he could check this guy's sheet. He routinely has too many skill points (in one epic game he was over by more than 200), and has been over by double digits on his saves.

He tries to min/max, but fails at all but the most basic builds unless he gets the recipes straight off of CharOp.

When playing a spellcaster he spams spells constantly, but cannot remember the details of the spells he uses.

When he's not spamming he holds up the game trying to find some obscure perfect-for-this-situation spell that he just *happens* to have memorized. When the DM forces him to turn in a spell list at the beginning of the session he holds up the game for an hour making it.

He has to recalculate his attacks and save DCs Every.Single.Round.

He never role-plays. I haven't heard him speak IC once. He never moves the story forward, just waits until combat.

He gets upset when he gets hit, or fails a save (which basically only happens when he tells the DM a result thinking its high enough, but it isn't) or doesn't succeed in any action he attempts.

He also likes to lay claim to any magic item that benefits his character, no matter how much it may assist another character. He also doesn't understand stacking rules, leading to his abilities being off-the-charts.

So why does he still play with us, you ask? He's an old friend of the DM, and works at the same place. Me and another player are trying to get the DM to either confront him on his play, as it detracts from the fun for the rest of us, or simply tell him we've stopped playing.

Why do people cheat at a game with no winner?!?!

Yikes.

I've nudged a die or two in my time, but this guy sounds like he's trying to create Gary Stue.

In an RPG.

I'd suggest rocks falling. Real ones, not RP ones.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

I had one guy...

We were converting from 2e to 3.0e. He always demanded to be a golden draconian... despite the fact that the game was not in Dragonlance. But he should be able to be one, and insisted on this every time.

So we compromised by letting him play with a Half-Dragon template. I smiled inwardly, and explained the concept of 'Level Adjustment' that I was grateful the game had put in place.

He ended up storming off because *I* was 'too restrictive' because I wouldn't let him play a half-dragon character without LA.

[Piedmon_Sama]

We just finally "let" a guy leave our group who's been with us for years after he got the party in serious trouble while visiting a town for no reason at all. I'm the DM and I've stretched over backwards to accommodate this guy for more than a year now. His character cares only about fighting challenging opponents and collecting loot; fair enough. He insists his character is Lawful Good, despite never helping anyone without getting something out of it and being needlessly violent in every situation, because she's "true to herself" or something. So rather than have the argument I just threw alignment out of the game. Also because his character can singlehandedly wipe out most towns and villages (the party's 7th/8th level, it's a low-level world with small magic), his character gets her way most of the time instead of being smacked down by the City Guard.

For a while this guy's PC worked well with the more straight-laced party leader (NG Cleric with political ambitions), as the two clashed humorously. But in the last couple of games this guy has been worse, attacking nonthreatening NPCs (a peasant girl and an obviously harmless City Guard recruit). It's like he sensed we were adjusting to his antics and had to go further just to provoke us. Finally, after punching out that guard (see, he still insists he's doing nothing evil because he uses nonlethal damage to assault people) for asking the party to park their wagon somewhere else, the Cleric's cohort (a genuinely LG Fighter 3/Rogue 3) snapped and attacked his character (a Dragonblood-Elf Monk). And now we've left off with the party fighting itself in front of this city, while the Guard is marshaling an emergency response.

We really took too long to tell this guy to straighten up or get out, and when someone finally told him his playstyle was making things difficult for us he left immediately. I've also left out the times he just pretended to be away (we play online) when someone ordered his character to stop wantonly smashing her way and looting through hapless NPCs. He once held up our game for 20 minutes, not responding to any of us until I finally took control of his character. If we weren't all huge passive-aggressive internet nerds I think we should have thrown him out right there.

We're still being incredibly nice to this guy, for my money, by letting him play one last session until his character gets arrested or killed (if she stops the Guard from arresting her, the rest of the party will undoubtedly finish her off). We'd be well within our rights to say he can't come back, especially considering how he blew off a session last week when someone arrived an hour late (we were all prepared to delay that session, but when the guy finally showed up, suddenly Problem Player "doesn't feel ready" and we were all in a bad mood anyway).

It's a shame because this Monk and the Cleric are the only two PCs who survived from the start of this campaign, and I really wanted (for the sake of the story) their partnership to continue, but we should never have tolerated this guy's BS for so long in order to have it. The warning, I guess, is to be firm with your players and do it early unless they start thinking they have the right to dictate the campaign to everyone.

EDIT: Just to ad, I'm like 85% sure this guy was either cheating or using a loaded rolling program. He consistently rolled 17s or higher on pretty much all his attack rolls, skills checks, saves and whatever else. The only reason he didn't steal all the glory from the rest of the party was that even cheating a monk can't outshine a combat-cleric. >_>

[Rhiannon87]

I haven't had any players as bad as what you guys have described. Everyone in the group has their annoying traits, some worse than others. A lot of people have a hard time hearing "no" from the DM, there's one guy who is terribly indecisive and plays spellcasters (slows combat to a damned crawl at times), another guy who min-maxes like crazy, and I personally bug other people by being overly emotionally attached to my character and being overly cautious in combat because of it. (Although every single fraking time I haven't been cautious, my character has ended up dead or close to it. And everyone wonders why I stay the hell out of melee.) Overall, though, we're a pretty good group... especially compared to Cheater McCheaterson and Screw-Your-Rules-I-Want-To-Kill-Stuff.

[Hadrian_Emrys]

I try to cut the min-max problem off at the pass by running high power games. The best number monkeys help the rp focused players create effective builds, and everyone is happy.

However, there was a player in my past who just got under my skin. He's not a bad guy, but his personality changed when he played a wizard. At level one, he'd spend minutes describing the awesomeness of his magic missle as his character cast it for a d4 and change in damage. It got under the entire group's skin when he'd act like the leader of the party while making one rash call after another. >_< Oi.

[Harperfan7]

There's this one guy we play with who doesn't have a player, blocks all his papers and rolls with a freaking stand-up paper thing, and has the gall to tell us what we can and can't do. He insist I don't understand the game! What a douche!

[Thajocoth]

In this online group, person M brought people R & L. Turns out, L has something against M from when M was GM and L was a player. I don't care to know the specifics, but every time I talk to L, he makes it clear he wants me to want to know the specifics, and he makes snide comments. In RP, he's detrimental to the group. Like, killing a guard mid-interrogation... L & R are a couple. After a few sessions, it finally came out that none of the other players like playing with L or R. We just stopped letting them know when we're playing.

[bobspldbckwrds]

there used to be a guy in the group i play in who used to try to get us to allow things that were strait out of an anime, or video game, and when he didnt get his way he would argue to the point of ending the session. he would dictate how to run the game to our dm, and he would insist that we were being unfair when we insisted on the enforcement of the rules. to top things off, a year after our dm had started a game that ground to a hault (in the first session no less), i mentioned that i would like for our dm to try to run that scenerio again, he got mad and called out dm because he didnt know that that game was a lost cause.

god, that was cathartic.

[Kylarra]

there used to be a guy in the group i play in who used to try to get us to allow things that were strait out of an anime, or video game,

You should introduce him to exalted. Seems right up his alley.

[DaltonTrigger]

I know this isn't as bad as some of you have dealt with, but..

I was playing in a group online that was all bright and happy. We're not the best players--most of us are relatively unfamiliar with the D&D rules, and even though another guy and I were the most familiar, even the two of us found ourselves having to consult the rulebook a few times every session. Didn't matter, we were having fun with our mediocre skills.

Another person joined and she wanted to play a bad-attitude character. Fine. The character worked at first and added nice party dynamic, and created some social situations that mandated some in-character development. I thought things would be golden.

We were going to start experimenting with a new game style where we'd take turns DMing. The other guy and I who mostly understood the rules would run small arcs that last a few sessions each and pass the game back and forth, and I was hoping to get some much-needed practice with DMing this way.

When it came my turn to be DM, it was miserable. Every mistake I made she'd be complaining about it. Or even if I didn't make a mistake. She'd heedlessly progress through a dungeon, ignoring the little hints I'm dropping about important things (saying she refuses to be taken by the DM's hand and railroaded) then complain when she supposedly doesn't have an opportunity to win encounters by playing smart instead of simply rolling the attack dice.

ICly she started picking on my character (also a female) a lot--calling her names, giving her attitude and insults, and hitting on her boyfriend right in front of her. Expecting that this is just her character being a jerk, I played along. My character responded by calling her a whore.

Little did I know this person takes their character far too seriously, and actually thinks her character is completely innocent. She started telling me over AIM that I have no reason to call her a whore and that I better keep my attitude in check before she kills my character, and so on.

I put up with this kind of crap for 3-4 sessions, but then I just got fed up and quit. D&D isn't worth enough to me to have to deal with a person flipping out on me over IC arguments, and berating my attempts as a newbie GM when I'm still trying to learn.

[Flickerdart]

I'm playing a human Paladin in a group with a number of players, including two Trolls, a Swordsage, a Ghost and a Drunken Master. The story goes that we've been chosen from a mercenary guild to form an elite tactical team and deal with a number of bandits rallied under the banner of an ex-member of the guild, second in power only to the Guildmaster.
Now, you'd think that there would be some tension between the Trolls and my Paladin, or maybe with the Ghost, undead as it may be. But no, it's been fairly civil all around. The (also human!) Drunken Master's player has, for some reason, decided that he has a personal vendetta against my character.
You see, both background-wise and mechanically, my Paladin is the only one with decent people skills and tactical knowledge. He is also the most vocal (and even has a cape with the country's flag on it), making him the de facto leader of the team. But it's been decided that we pick an actual leader for combat purposes, and that's when the guy pipes up.
Note that he is a street thug who joined the guild to make sure he has enough money to eat. His "strategy" involves everyone running in and hitting things. He has never led anything before. And not only is he trying to disgrace the Paladin in front of the NPCs, he's also egging the other players on against me. It's getting really tiring, but he insists it's "in character" and thus fine.
I intend for this Paladin to fall, though. Hard. And they know it. I guess murder is a good place to start.

[Lupy]

My little brother only plays with us because my Mom asks me to be nice to him and we needed a fifth person (although Mom finally let me swap him for another friend). The reason isn't that he's not a good role player, but that in our low power campaign (the party, except for the Wizard, have the worst builds ever and usually need encounters a level down from the recommended for each difficulty rating) he breaks every character he plays. He made a dual wielding min-maxed fighter (and he always rolls high too), and killed off an entire encounter once with minimal help from everyone else (if he was by himself he'd get level-up encounters). Then that character died, so I got him to be a Warlord, thinking that it would minimize the damage he could cause (as a bandaid/buff machine), but he out melees our Paladin and Fighter, so that was a no-go.

Our party wizard has ADHD, and and the Paladin's player isn't friends with him anyway, but when he takes his medicine they're okay with each other, but when he forgets it the Pally-player goes nuts...

[Berserk Monk]

So we all have them like that one guy who always min-maxes, or the one that always goes out of his way to screw over the party, or the one who won't shut up about the thing he saw on youtube. Go ahead, let your anger out in here. Share your pain.

Hate to break it to you, but I usually am that guy.

[SoD]

I don't have it that bad, the worst I have is one guy whose character stats, individually, are merely quite good. But when you look at allo of them, all are quite good, most have an 18, and all are above average, and nobody watches him roll them.

Solution; everyone rolls stats in the presence of another player.

Oh, and we had one guy who wanted to play a CE character. For this reason; so he could justify killing Captains character. When I asked why he wanted to kill Captains character, he said "Because Captains annoying."

Yeah. He doesn't play with us anymore.

[averagejoe]

There's this one guy we play with who doesn't have a player, blocks all his papers and rolls with a freaking stand-up paper thing, and has the gall to tell us what we can and can't do. He insist I don't understand the game! What a douche!

The GM?

[Harperfan7]

The GM?

The what?

[tcrudisi]

The worst player that I was ever in a game with:

The DM was new to 3.5 (and this was only a few months ago) and, since we were being introduced over the internet (but playing face-to-face), told us to create anything that was legal in 3.5.

What does this guy do? He creates a gestalt character. To go further, he makes it a Shifter (race from Eberron) Druid / Wizard. Even worse, he didn't understand team-work. He was from 1st ed., so he was under this assumption that if you killed it, you got all the xp from it. And of course, he was always the first to loot the bodies and would never share.

Finally, by the 3rd session, I had to know: I asked him if he had ever heard of Pun-Pun. He had. In fact, that's what he was building towards. Yes, the dude, who had never played 3rd edition before, was building Pun-Pun. His friend told him how to make it.

To make it worse, he constantly interrupted everyone, even the DM. He could never wait his turn, and would try to take several combat turns at once, skipping everyone. Needless to say, after that 3rd session, I never went back.

[Lamech]

The DM was new to 3.5 (and this was only a few months ago) and, since we were being introduced over the internet (but playing face-to-face), told us to create anything that was legal in 3.5.

This brings me to my worst experience with a player. DM did basically that. And he didn't bother to ask how we built our characters. Well... he also told us to optimize as much as possible.

So what are the builds? A rouge who sneak attacks for a couple hunderd points of damage. Me a psion who can use extra action tricks, and of course metamorphic transfer B.S. A cleric 2/radiant servent of pelor 10. (energy drain on cleric levels) A ranger who uses multishot and rapid shot. (I don't think thats allowed, but it only did around 300/round) A warblade did around 100 points of damage/round (Along with stun type stuff, but she never used that. New player.) Aaannd... a pixie warmage. (Gestalt with pixie class so level 12 warmage, but still.) Oh and no metamagic tricks. The last one was a new player. Ended up crying because she felt useless and confused... yeah.

And the DM somehow expected under CR'd monsters to last more than a round against that party. As in CR 7-9 crap. I guess we we're all the min-maxer's.

Moral of the story: Don't tell people everything goes and look at everyone's builds.

[Zain]

i've got nothing compaired to some of these but One player, a Merelf, fighter (I ruled that merelives can breath air), in a group i DM, In a setting i had wrighten for them dicied to be CN and do anything that he wanted to, his reason being that hes CN. In the end the cleric(water Domain) disided to try controling him, and i ruled that he could do it, so whene ever the player said "i attack the person next to me" the cleric said "i control you"

The merelf then learned to play his charter not is Alliment

[Justin B.]

I'm currently in a game with my girlfriend, her father, and a group of his friends. Most of the players are totally awesome. We have a few young kids with us who didn't really know the game very well, but they are getting the hang of it and it's really working.

The only problem is one of the older players who my DM decided to invite. They invited him under the assumption that he would not be staying long because his track record for commitment is apparently pretty terrible.

The first session he shows up late, which is fine because he lives a few hours away. However, he shows up with a near carbon-copy of my own character in appearance and attibutes (if not build, he was pure ranger, I was Ranger 1/ Cleric 3 who did all the Ranger-y things like sneaking and hunting). While I thought we might run into issues of stepping on each others toes, I soon found out that it wasn't going to be a problem because the character had no real grasp of what a Ranger might be doing. He was constantly dropping to 0 hit points, he never rolled a single hide or move silent check, and you could forget about him scouting.

So, this Ranger, who was incidentally built for archery, decides to go suicidal in the middle of a battle, and ends up dying. I felt kind of sorry for him. However, in talking to my DM later on, I learned that my DM thought that he had hated the character, and wanted to build something more simple. His characters have previously all been Dwarf Barbarians. The next session, this player shows up with a Half-Orc Barbarian. No one was surprised.

During the first few sessions with the Ranger, the player was annoying as all hell. He still is, to a much lesser extent. But his unfunny jokes and poor comedic timing are less grating now than they were before. Now, he just simply sits and waits for combat to start up, which is fine, I don't really want him interacting in any way with NPC's, it'll just make my job as the party leader that much harder.

He's also an extremely rude cheater. He uses difficult to see dice and always picks them up to read them, and rather quickly after they've hit the table. He's terrible about interrupting, and the other night he simply walked away from the table for a whole damned hour to talk on the phone. It was unimaginably rude and irritating, because it just happened to be right in the middle of a combat where a second tank would have been perfect.

As well, as the person most knowledgable with the system at the table, I'm constantly being forced to check his math and add up his buffs for him at the table. I am the most qualified, and nobody wants to see him cheating. His poor math skills have lead to huge modifiers for things before.

Overall, not a very good player, but I'm seeing some change in him about the dice rolling and the character buffs, so if we can just get him to stop pestering me every five seconds and walking away from the table, we may be alright.

[Chiron]

There was one guy we used to RP with. Never managed to play the same thing for more than two sessions because he always badgered the DM into doing things HIS way and thus solve any and all problems with much shooting and violence in about 10 seconds. The sort of forceful personality who would be better off BEHIND the screen than in front of it; and you could tell, that was where he wanted to be, but he also hated not being the one busting heads, so usually when he did DM, players died, lots (No, we weren't playing Paranoia).

Maxminning was always the aim of the game, and it really used to tire me out something awful. I'd usually just take a CC of someone else's character because I couldn't be bothered spending fifteen hours going through sourcebooks to create a 9th level character that could kill a god in two rounds.

One particular session we were playing Warhammer Fantasy, and another member of the party was suffering from a case of mistaken identity, and a bunch of embezzlers had mistaken him for their missing leader and had passed along details of where they'd hidden their ill-gotten gold. Now. This character was well within his rights (doubly so considering the way he'd been treated by the rest of the party) to just pocket the loot and be done with it. But, our problem player decided to berate this guy for half an hour until he was on the verge of tears and caved in under threat of the game being called off, for good, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Things finally took a turn for the better when the problem player decided to get REALLY annoying and start dating the DM's ex and describe to him in graphic detail the minutiae of their relationship. There were fisticuffs, there were broken friendships, and we are much happier for it. Still, that guy is the reason I took an extra five years to get back into DMing.

He is also the reason I appreciate my current group so much.
We have a couple of 17-year-old max-minners who go through characters like underwear. One of them is mostly okay, but when he's in the presence of his friend they're both a handful, and we've butted heads more than once IC, but thankfully it stays IC. We get along fine away from the table, but when he's in character I just want to slap him sometimes. So, one incident involved me, the wizard, sticking a bar of Lye soap between his buttocks (of the filthy, dirty, unwashed druid who liked to live in garbage) and then having a group of sailors he'd angered earlier in the evening dump him in a barrel of rainwater but-first. In retalliation his character stole the wizard's spell-book which left the wizard ready to kill him (but for his poor attack roll). It was at that point I decided I'm not going to indulge him so much when he's being obnoxious.

I am somewhat worried about how he's going to behave in the upcoming campaign, as the practice of arcane magic is punishable by death and we already have a confirmed sorcerer for the party. I just know his character backstory is going to be: "I hate all arcanists because my family was killed by them. I like to collect their ears." *sigh* I'm going to enjoy using Rule #0 on that one.
I do have contingencies however. When he inevitably DOES try and turn the sorcerer in, there will be a few scenes of stygian horror, and the inquisition will reward his devotion to the church of the prophet by putting him under a compulsion to spy for them, with the knowledge that he will be made a 'seer' when his servitude is completed (which involves stripping away his personality and turning him into a monster in an excruciatingly painful process that takes about a week).

Myself, I have been a problem player at times, but rarely with any form of consistency.

[Halaster]

Well, it seems I'm one of the luckier guys here, but then I'm pretty relaxed and don't mind a lot of issues I've read about here.

For example, there's a player in my most frequent group right now, who does absolutely no roleplaying, except for his character getting drunk whenever he's bored (i. e. not fighting). I don't mind though, since his character is an axe-wielding, dumb, drunk Viking-equivalent anyway, and he doesn't really bother anyone.

The last thing that really got on my nerves was a D&D 3.0 group, which consisted mostly of inexperienced D&D players, 3 of those, all with previous experience in other systems, me (experienced, but not a rules freak) and our paladin player (total rules freak). So we agreed that said paladin player should advise the noobs with character creation and drop the occasional strategy hint, particularly in combat. What he did though, was to dictate anyone's actions, even mine, though I knew my options and just felt that roleplaying-wise the most optimal one wasn't always what my character would do. One of the noobs quickly noted the same problem - as he learned what his character could do, he got a feel for what he liked to do and did that. The pally player was all over him in no time, telling him what to do all the time and really riling him. We used the first opportunity we had (another player leaving for job reasons) to call off that game.

[Mr.Bookworm]

The what?

It's this optional rule where you let some random idiot control the entire game. Usually fails miserably.

[TomKatt]

Ive got a player who apon something not to his liking happening likes to threaten every one in game with his overpowered psionic mind blast thingy... saddly this is the second char hes had in this campaing and the last one was a gnome mage it was fun having my kobold butt heads with him, i didnt even have to kill him he did it to himself.

The stupid part isd he just killed of his GF's char moron prolly wont get any for a week... but the Kobold LIKED the NG cleric... and doesnt like the C/N almost evil pysionic, ive already swapped overpowered attacks with him... YAY for 6d8 breath weapon, unlike him though every time i get my antics messed up i dont threaten the party with acid breath.... i incidently won that one and dropped him to -3 mwhaha and now im just going to trap his gear and wait till he gets paralyzed by a needle trap in his backpack and then coup de grace

[pasko77]

The what?

lol, that made me laugh hard!