The Worst player you've ever had/seen/been/heard of

[lytokk]

We've currently got threads going for the worst DM/GM and the worst gaming experiences, but I was wanting to give the DM/GMs here on the board a chance to vent.

Unfortunately, in my experiences, I'd have to say I've been the worst player I've ever seen. Granted, this was when I started playing D&D, so I think I get a little hand wave for that. In the first game I ever played, I stared out a standard elven ranger/wizard going arcane archer. At one point I was flipping through the Forgotten Realms setting, and I loved the look of the drow art. The one holding the two-sided sword. I started my own game 50 years in the past for the express purpose of starting a ritual that would have my elf turned into a drow. After annoying my DM constantly about turning my character into a drow, he kept saying no. Eventually my character was captured by some zhents and drow working toward some goal that was never explained. At that point I had to roll out a new character, and behold, I got to play my drow. This one was actually competent at fighting, so it had that going for it, but eventually the game ended.

Second game, Same DM. After he killed my wood elf fighter with a dire wolf, I had to re-roll a new character, and according to the DM's rules, 1 level down from my previous. The dire wolf encounter got the party's level up to 3, but I died at 2, so I came back at 1. So, I rolled up an elven ranger (what was it with me and elves back then). After a few more sessions, I'm still 2 levels behind, and a new player joins the party. Party is level 4, I'm level 2, and the new guy joins at level 4. New player has a secret race, which in conjuction with the fact I'm 2 levels behind the new guy, flipped my switch and turned me from role-player to whiney kid again. I think my constant complaining was the cause of the end of that game. Or it could have been when the DM killed 2 players in a fight and we learned he had no concept of encounter balance.

Anyway, share stories about worst players you've been unlucky enough to run games for or be in the parties with.

[KillianHawkeye]

The worst player I've ever gamed with was a guy we recently uninvited from our group a couple of months ago. He was a decent enough guy on the surface, but he had a really confrontational attitude and semi-violent tendencies that eventually caused a serious split between himself and the rest of us.

I don't know if it was because he was a stoner, or just because it was how he was wired, but he harbored a paranoid dislike of several members of our gaming group which he managed to keep secret for over a year. He also had a bad temper, and he bragged about it like it was something he was proud of and something we should just accept and get used to. Whenever something didn't go his way, he would verbally lash out at people. He hated when other people knew the rules better than he did and shot down his foolish plans or wrong ideas, and blamed us for knowing more than him rather than taking the responsibility for his own ignorance. He took every suggestion and correction we gave him as though they were personal attacks rather than the helpful remarks they were meant as. He demanded that everyone else accommodate his play style when he was the only one ever going against what the rest of the group all agreed on. He had a serious lack of empathy, and perhaps worst of all he kept all of his resentment and malicious feelings bottled up inside until they grew into anger. If he had only spoken to us sooner about his feelings of inadequacy and belittlement, we might have been able to salvage our friendship. But as it turned out, he was never really our friend to begin with.

Despite how offended I was when it all came out, I was truly impressed by the sheer level of social suicide that his actions inevitably led to. I have honestly never seen bridges burned so thoroughly in my life.

[Tengu_temp]

Let me repost something I wrote 3 years ago:

---

Over the years, I encountered a lot of drama queens, disruptive behaviour, people acting like jerks "because I'm roleplaying my character this way", general idiocy and terrible roleplaying, uncomfortable ideas and other horrible stuff, and it's hard to pick the one that was the worst. I'll go with the worst player I can remember and describe in an amusing way.

It was an Exalted Solar game. He created an apparently purposely underpowered Zenith who barely had any Zenith abilities and instead focused on sorcery. He was barely active and roleplayed his character in a very bland way, but whined that he doesn't have any opportunities to shine and play his character - and when the ST gave him opportunities, he ignored them most of the time. When people disagreed with him, he whined even harder. When we fought an equally numbered group of Terrestials, he complained that we have no chance because a full circle of Solars will always lose against 5 Dragonblooded with good teamwork (any more experienced Exalted player will tell you how ridiculous this claim is), and when we beat them without too much difficulty, he whined that the ST went easy on us.
The player left the group soon afterwards. His character became an NPC, and everyone agreed that the ST roleplayed it in a much more interesting way.

---

Since then, I've met several other horrible players. I might describe them later.

[DontEatRawHagis]

Yesterday my group had two Paladins who thought the best strategy against 5e wolves with pack tactics is to let them surround them.

The result was they were down to 10 HP at lvl 3 in every encounter.

I wasn't too good either because I didn't remember that Bane was a 1d4 versus saving throws as well as attack rolls. So I was attacking the wrong guys technically.

[Marlowe]

Our group has G.

G always plays a Fighter. Because Fighters Fight. And no other character class can Fight. And real men Fight. And G is a real man. So he plays a Fighter.

Sometimes he has Rogue or Ranger levels. Because then he can have two weapons and Fight twice as much. And/or have Sneak Attack so he can Sneak Attack when he Fights. But they are all still basically Fighters.

He does not understand Power Attack and does not take it; because how can you Fight if you are reducing your attack? He says.

Gs idea of a good Fighter is 2-weapon fighting, weapon focus (light flail), weapon specialisation (light flail), weapon focus (sling). Slings are good for Fighting, because you can add your strength, he says.

Gs idea of beginning an encounter is always to charge, without checking whether the other lot are hostile, aware of us, or even corporeal. Because how can you Fight without charging?

Gs usual position about round 3 of an encounter is flat on his back in a bloodied/strength damaged heap, complaining that nobody told him a level 6 Ogre Barbarian can do lots of damage, or that ghosts can't be hurt with mundane weapons.

Gs tactic when we confront something that he understands can Fight better than him is to sling a few stones, then retreat and let someone else do the Fighting.

G likes to run off on his own and attempt to "flank" (move around and attack from a different side from the rest of the party for no clear reason) large groups of enemies, then cannot understand why his attempts at stealth fail when he has a substantial Armour Check Penalty, no great Dex (G does not seem to realize that 2-weapon fighting has a dex requirement), not many ranks in Move Silently, and a dozen listen checks to beat.

G loves to interrupt the DM in the middle of descriptions to tell us what he is going to do, then gets angry and confused when he steps into a trap or monster that the DM was trying to tell him about. He appears to resent other players getting to ask the DM questions or their characters receiving any focus, and can hold up a session for a good half-hour monopolizing the DM with his own queries while shutting down the other players with a stream of "Just a minute here...give me a minute...just give me a minute here...just give me a minute."

Gs characters like to drink and gamble. Because that's what Real Men do when they are not Fighting. So G will like to waste another half-hour each session with a mini-game of his own where he role-plays gambling with NPC tavern-patrons. Generally, without asking permission to join their party. This will usually led to him getting poisoned and robbed.

G will blame everyone but himself when he suffers consequences for any of the above actions, and treat the healing he receives afterwards as his god-given right. Even screaming for healing while the Cleric is surrounded by Orcs that G himself brought down on us by attacking prematurely.

G keeps his character sheets on the back of crumbled supermarket receipts, and will always put skill ranks into Handle Animal for some reason that escapes us.

G will interrupt any attempt at giving him advice on how to play so he isn't a constant ongoing disaster for his team with the well-worn phrase; "I don't sweat the fiddly details I just like to get stuck in and Fight".

G has been playing D&D for almost 30 years now.

Sweet Dreams.

[ElenionAncalima]

I don't think I have ever played with a truly awful player (ie. someone who was a bad person in and out of game).

The worst player I know is someone who I think was the victim of playing at lots of really bad tables, because we seem to have rehabilitated him over time. I think we were the first group he ever played with where he was held repsonsible for both having a legal build and his in game actions.

Some gems from his early days as a player:
-Introduced himself to a new party member by threatening them with a knife at their throat...for no apparant reason. (this one I heard about from another game).
-Tried to run a level one character with a strength score of 70 through the use of adding pretty much every strength boosting template in the game.
-Gave his PCs all of the Pathfinder 3rd party universal archetypes without replacing anything.
-Responded to my character's friendly question, "Hi, my name is Arasha...and you are?" with "Someone much smarter than you".
-Finally, my personal favorite: Myself and another player had a perfect set up against a boss character. Her AC was so buffed that the guy couldn't hit her and I was dealing major damage out of his reach. This player announced on his turn to the other player, "I am going to use an area spell that can kill him. You have one turn to move or I am killing you too". The player is mad, but moves because she doesn't want to take damage. Of course her standing there was the only reason the boss was staying put, so he just moves and smacks the offending PC in the face. When the player complains...the DM just rolls his eyes and says "Why would he stay there when no one is next to him and you just announced your plans to kill him?"

At this point everyone is pretty frustrated with him and he seems confused that people were responding negatively to his character. I address these problems OOC, as calmly as I can, saying, "We have known you in game for about 10 minutes. In that time you have called me stupid, threatened to kill another party member and generally been rude to everyone else. I'm usually a big advocate of finding reasons to keep the party together, but I'm struggling to come up with a reason why I would work with your character again." Everyone else agrees, especially the player who he threatened. To his credit, he actually processes what we are saying and admits that he doesn't really know why we would continue working with him. He also makes it pretty clear that he never really thought about it that way or played in a game where he was held accountable.

He basically decides to retire the character. He is still the quintessential munchkin and does a lot of things without thinking about consequences, but he has gotten way better about interacting with other characters in a way that doesn't make you want to smack him.

[Velaryon]

G keeps his character sheets on the back of crumbled supermarket receipts, and will always put skill ranks into Handle Animal for some reason that escapes us.

This part is absolutely hilarious to me.


Anyway, I've been fortunate enough to never have the gaming horror stories that many people on these forums have. I've played with players who try to intentionally monopolize the DM's attention, players who have no idea how the game works, players who want to treat it like Grand Theft Auto and just go around murdering and stealing indiscriminately, players who want to always be a "special snowflake" character using overpowered homebrew junk they pulled from some place online and coincidentally can't find again...

But if I had to pick just one of them... well, I can't. I can narrow it down to two. Both of them are good friends and I still game with them regularly (when our schedules match up anyway) and even have a good time, but these players do frustrate me sometimes.

Let's call the first one E.

Spoiler: E

Show

E has been playing D&D since 2002. In that time he has not learned how to create a character. He cannot even level up his character without someone else helping him. He can never remember how his spells work and needs to be constantly reminded of what his character can do. This is made worse by the fact that his handwriting is terrible and his sheets are thus nearly incomprehensible. He also writes all his character notes in the margins so they're really messy sheets.

E's two greatest interests are old-school JRPG games and ancient mythologies and religions. Just about every single one of his characters comes from one or the other source. Sometimes this results in characters difficult to translate into D&D, although he's gotten better about this over the years.

Some of his character ideas in the past:
1. a gargoyle, like the ones from the cartoon Gargoyles
2. a 3/4 elf (he insisted that it was not a full elf nor a half-elf - I as DM told him to just pick one or the other race and claim whatever degree of elfiness he felt like).
3. a Final Fantasy blue mage - he actually convinced another DM to homebrew this class for him just for this one character. It basically played like a Warmage that learned new spells by getting hit with them and not dying.

Unfortunately, E is no great shakes as a roleplayer either. Not only does he make no attempt at coming up with a backstory for his character, he actively resists if the DM asks for more than about three sentences. As a player he tends to just hang out in the background and go with whatever the majority of the group wants to do. He will occasionally come up with suggestions, some of them good and others so completely bizarre and out of left field that you wonder whether he's even playing the same game as the rest of the group.

He also isn't the most focused player. He regularly carries his DS with him and plays quietly when his character isn't involved in what's going on. We deal with it because we like him as a person and because it's better than the time he went to sleep in the middle of our Star Wars game. Just stretched out on the floor and five minutes later he was snoring.

Essentially, E contributes little to nothing as a player but we keep him around because we like him and we wouldn't see him much if we excluded him from games. And at least he doesn't actively cause problems at the table. The rest of us pretty much just take turns helping him fit whatever his weird character concept is into D&D terms and helping him maintain the character over the course of play.

And then there's T...

Spoiler: T

Show

T has been playing almost as long as E. For a long time he didn't have much grasp of the rules either, but he's gotten the hang of it in recent years. We still need to correct him now and then when he tries two things that don't stack or whatever, but these come up less and less frequently.

T can only play two basic character types - the sneaky rogue and the angry barbarian. Oh, he'll play other classes, but will play them like a sneaky rogue or an angry barbarian. Even when he deliberately tries to step outside his comfort zone, he still ends up defaulting back to one of these two types.

He also goes through an average of three characters per campaign, in a group where others either don't die or die maybe once. Sometimes it's hard to tell whether his characters die to bad luck, poor judgment, or suicide-by-monster. I remember one time when I was DMing, and the group had just come back to town after a difficult fight. The rest of the party gets rooms at an inn and relaxes the rest of the day. Not T. He decides to take on another job all by himself (the party was getting their plot hooks from a bounty board at this early stage of the game).

The job he takes involves a little detective work in town and his half-orc druid knocks that out just fine. He learns that the guy he's supposed to bring in left the city several days ago, headed toward a forest to the north. A wiser player might decide this is good enough, then go back to his party and share the info. Not T. Despite being at less than half his HP, with most of his best spells for the day already spent, he buys a wagon and sets off in immediate pursuit, with naught but his gorilla animal companion for company. He ran into a random encounter and died. The rest of the party never even found his body.

Still, that's better than the times he actively causes problems for the party. T tends to play his characters with a "shoot first, forget the questions" mentality, and also either doesn't consider or doesn't care about the consequences of some of his actions. His characters are the type that will put their greatsword through the face of a random NPC that mouths off or doesn't cooperate, even when he's supposed to be playing a Lawful Good character. He's also actively betrayed the party at least one time.

Overall I don't mind gaming with these two - at least I get along with them both personally. But both provide their share of headdesk moments for sure.

[The Random NPC]

I'd have to say my worst player, let's call them R, simply wanted to do things the game couldn't handle. For example, in a Pathfinder game, they wanted to make a crafting character. We warned them that nonmagical crafting doesn't have a lot of support, and they could be outshined by a 5^th level caster, but they persisted. When they experienced the lack of depth involved in crafting, R got really depressed. When R found out how long it takes to make something like fullplate, they got angry at the system. Unfortunately, R decided that the system needed a better crafting system, and kept bugging the GM about it. Eventually, R decided to pick up magical crafting. They wanted to make a magical battery that a spellcaster could cast their spells into, and then anyone could use to cast a spell. "Like a scroll?" we asked, "No, a scroll can only cast one spell" they replied. Obviously the GM wanted R to work for that kind of power, but they got fed up at how slow the project was progressing, and left the game.

As another example of the kind of things R wanted to create, they called it the Cerberus, a siege engine that was 4 heavy crossbows attached to a platform. But because of the technological advances, the crossbows were all reloaded with 1 move action, and did 4d10 damage. In comparison, the cheapest and worst of the printed siege engines, the light ballista, does 3d8 damage and requires 2 full rounds to reload. The only balancing factor was the Cerberus cost 2000 gp, while the ballista cost 500. Except, as R was using revised crafting rules, it would only cost about 666 gp. Oh, did I mention that the Cerberus has an engine that allows it to move forward and backward, while the ballista requires a crew of 4 working for an hour to take it apart and another hour to build it again? Needless to say, the GM ruled it too powerful, and wanted it weakened before allowing it to be built. I suggested that the damage be applied to DR and Hardness separately, as it was supposed to be anti-infantry, but the suggestion was met with more depression. Basically, any time anything didn't go exactly as R wanted, they would pout.

...His characters are the type that will put their greatsword through the face of a random NPC that mouths off or doesn't cooperate, even when he's supposed to be playing a Lawful Good character....

I hope to never meet him .

[Velaryon]

I'd have to say my worst player, let's call them R, simply wanted to do things the game couldn't handle. For example, in a Pathfinder game, they wanted to make a crafting character. We warned them that nonmagical crafting doesn't have a lot of support, and they could be outshined by a 5^th level caster, but they persisted. When they experienced the lack of depth involved in crafting, R got really depressed. When R found out how long it takes to make something like fullplate, they got angry at the system. Unfortunately, R decided that the system needed a better crafting system, and kept bugging the GM about it. Eventually, R decided to pick up magical crafting. They wanted to make a magical battery that a spellcaster could cast their spells into, and then anyone could use to to cast a spell. "Like a scroll?" we asked, "No, a scroll can only cast one spell" they replied. Obviously the GM wanted R to work for that kind of power, but they got fed up at how slow the project was progressing, and left the game.

As another example of the kind of things R wanted to create, they called it the Cerberus, a siege engine that was 4 heavy crossbows attached to a platform. But because of the technological advances, the crossbows were all reloaded with 1 move action, and did 4d10 damage. In comparison, the cheapest and worst of the printed siege engines, the light ballista, does 3d8 damage and requires 2 full rounds to reload. The only balancing factor was the Cerberus cost 2000 gp, while the ballista cost 500. Except, as R was using revised crafting rules, it would only cost about 666 gp. Oh, did I mention that the Cerberus has an engine that allows it to move forward and backward, while the ballista requires a crew of 4 working for an hour to take it apart and another hour to build it again? Needless to say, the GM ruled it too powerful, and wanted it weakened before allowing it to be built. I suggested that the damage be applied to DR and Hardness separately, as it was supposed to be anti-infantry, but the suggestion was met with more depression. Basically, any time anything didn't go exactly as R wanted, they would pout.

R's inventiveness actually sounds like fun. It's a shame the rules couldn't support what he wanted to do, and a greater shame that he didn't have the patience to try and figure out a way to work within the rules to achieve some of his ideas.

[The Random NPC]

R's inventiveness actually sounds like fun. It's a shame the rules couldn't support what he wanted to do, and a greater shame that he didn't have the patience to try and figure out a way to work within the rules to achieve some of his ideas.

Honestly that was the biggest problem. R would either point out a problem with the system, or come up with an idea, and instead of doing anything about it, they would pout. The entire group was either willing to work with R, or allow changes to make R's character viable, but R just wanted to pout.

[KnotKnormal]

Wow... Hearing these stories I feel lucky. the worst experiences I've ever had gaming are

M. who no matter how hard i tried to get him involved with roleplay and contribute to party conversation, He would stay leaned back in his chair and only contribute during combat, to which the only thing he would contribute is attack and damage rolls. I even gave him a pocket DM, to give advice and information to share with the party the he never did.

and G. who would scream "B**** I'm Chaos!!!" before doing something incredibly stupid.
Setting fire to the inn they were sleeping in.(burned to death)
Punting gnomes off a damn.(publicly executed)
Dropping another character off a cliff.(murdered by party)
Trying to kill, one of the most helpful NPCs I've ever created.(murdered by party)
Stealing the Cake at a wedding for royals.(publicly executed)
Pushing a towns only blacksmith into his forge.(publicly executed by party)
Poring drinks at a party from a bottle clearly labeled "POISON"(poisoned)
Asking a king to taste his food in case of poison.(publicly executed)

this list continues on and on

[ComaVision]

The worst players I have played with are the ones that just never seem to really grasp the game. After 6+ months they'll still ask "Can I move and attack?" (in D&D 3.5). Of course, they're also incapable of creating characters or leveling characters, and tend to die the most frequently.

[icefractal]

I haven't had anybody really terrible, but there's been some less than awesome people. Someone fairly recently:
* Didn't know/understand the rules that well, especially for making a character.
* Wanted to have an extremely powerful character, meaning he'd want to recalculate / rebuild his character (or actually, have someone else do it) whenever his performance wasn't dominatingly effective.
* Also lost his character sheet a fair amount, so even more rebuilding.
* Always wanted to go off and do solo stuff, and have the spotlight focused on him continually. Would try to interrupt anything other people were doing.
* Made strange plans that were hard for the GM to understand what he was even trying to accomplish.
* Got frustrated and huffy whenever he failed at something, or the spotlight was on someone else for too long.

The last few of these were so much of an issue that we had to basically soft-ban solo scouting / info gathering, by either all going to the place in question immediately, or by the GM fast-forwarding past it.

[Velaryon]

And then there's T...

Spoiler: T

Show

T has been playing almost as long as E. For a long time he didn't have much grasp of the rules either, but he's gotten the hang of it in recent years. We still need to correct him now and then when he tries two things that don't stack or whatever, but these come up less and less frequently.

T can only play two basic character types - the sneaky rogue and the angry barbarian. Oh, he'll play other classes, but will play them like a sneaky rogue or an angry barbarian. Even when he deliberately tries to step outside his comfort zone, he still ends up defaulting back to one of these two types.

He also goes through an average of three characters per campaign, in a group where others either don't die or die maybe once. Sometimes it's hard to tell whether his characters die to bad luck, poor judgment, or suicide-by-monster. I remember one time when I was DMing, and the group had just come back to town after a difficult fight. The rest of the party gets rooms at an inn and relaxes the rest of the day. Not T. He decides to take on another job all by himself (the party was getting their plot hooks from a bounty board at this early stage of the game).

The job he takes involves a little detective work in town and his half-orc druid knocks that out just fine. He learns that the guy he's supposed to bring in left the city several days ago, headed toward a forest to the north. A wiser player might decide this is good enough, then go back to his party and share the info. Not T. Despite being at less than half his HP, with most of his best spells for the day already spent, he buys a wagon and sets off in immediate pursuit, with naught but his gorilla animal companion for company. He ran into a random encounter and died. The rest of the party never even found his body.

Still, that's better than the times he actively causes problems for the party. T tends to play his characters with a "shoot first, forget the questions" mentality, and also either doesn't consider or doesn't care about the consequences of some of his actions. His characters are the type that will put their greatsword through the face of a random NPC that mouths off or doesn't cooperate, even when he's supposed to be playing a Lawful Good character. He's also actively betrayed the party at least one time.

Overall I don't mind gaming with these two - at least I get along with them both personally. But both provide their share of headdesk moments for sure.

I've remembered a couple more important details about T that I forgot to include before.

For one, he loses character sheets sometimes. He's had to retire at least two characters I can think of because he lost the sheet and couldn't remember enough of his spells, feats, items, etc. to reconstruct it properly. It's gotten to the point where the DM's usually keep his sheet or give it to one of the more reliable players to hold on to, so that he'll still have a character next time we play.

Second, he's not always reliable to show up to the game. Sometimes he will say the night before that he's good to to, or even the morning of, and then when it's game time he's "not feeling well" or his <insert family member> needs him for something. These things happen, but it's been common with him enough over the years that I at least wonder whether he just lies when he doesn't feel like playing D&D.

[Jay R]

I've posted this in a previous thread, but it's still the answer.

In 1975 or 1976, there was a guy that several of us would not adventure with any longer; he was unsafe. Eventually, he was running his own party, all by himself. His most famed moment was with a party of first levels (because nobody survived to 2nd level).

DM: Going along the road, you see a sign saying, "Danger! Cockatrice Valley."
PC: We enter the Valley.
DM: At the Valley's entrance, there is another sign: "Turn Back! Cockatrice Valley."
PC. We keep going.
DM. The valley is filled with many stone statues, all looking up.
PC: We keep going.
DM: You hear large bodies moving around the bend.
PC: We run around the bend.
DM: You hear a heavy flapping above you.
PC: We look up.

Later the DM bemoaned the fact that he was trying to keep this PC's characters alive, and he couldn't do it.

[Sith_Happens]

They wanted to make a magical battery that a spellcaster could cast their spells into, and then anyone could use to to cast a spell. "Like a scroll?" we asked, "No, a scroll can only cast one spell" they replied.

That's called a Ring of Spell Storing.

[Amaril]

I've never even come close to some of the horror stories I've seen on here (for which I thank my lucky stars), but the worst player I've ever met, without question, was D. I played with D in a 4e group I joined a few years back, where he alternated between DMing and playing. He was a pretty bad DM too, incidentally--his NPCs hardly spoke and had no character whatsoever, all he ever wanted to run was combat (nothing wrong with that, but not my style), and most annoyingly, he would constantly suggest starting up new campaigns in new settings, run one session of each, and then the very next session want to scrap it and start something else.

As a fellow player, he was almost more irritating. He was a merciless power-gamer, which was useful because he always gave good optimization advice, but his PCs somehow managed to have even less personality than his NPCs. I don't think I can remember one time he spoke in character or made any meaningful roleplaying decisions the whole time I played with him. The really galling thing, though, was how incredibly obtuse and dismissive he was about party strategy. It seemed like every time we had to decide where to go or what to do next, while the rest of us did our best to advocate for following the seemingly practical courses of action we thought the DM expected us to take, he would stubbornly shoot down every single suggestion we put forth, no matter what it was. On the rare occasions when he would suggest something else instead, it would be something obviously ridiculous and suicidal. I remember one time, we were playing a high fantasy seafaring game in which an important location was being threatened by a huge enemy fleet that had us obviously outnumbered and outgunned, and every time we suggested going off and pursuing one of the numerous plot hooks we had kicking around, D would claim it was pointless and foolish, while suggesting instead that we attack the whole enemy fleet directly by ourselves. He seemed to think this was the only sensible thing to do. I have never been able to fathom his reasoning, and have, thankfully, moved on to a much better table since.

Oh, almost forgot to mention he was notably sexist. Figured I should throw that in there.

[Harbinger]

The worst player I ever had?

Let's call him Ralph. Ralph wasn't like the other boys. Ralph was obsessed with Call of Duty to an almost creepy, unhealthy, degree (this will be important later). He had spent well over 800 hours playing Call of Duty: World of War. This wouldn't be a problem if it weren't also all he talked about. He got angry and upset at any kind of negative mention of the game. When we wanted to play D&D we often had to coax and drag him off the computer. Still, he was our friend, so we invited him to play with us.

His first character was a WWII veteran with PTSD. This would be mildly eye-rolling, if it weren't for the fact that we were playing in a homebrewed setting based on Ancient Mesopotamia. I told he could be a guard in the city of Uruk. He seemed fine with that. His character class was a knight, though he was essentially a warrior because he didn't care to do anything other than move and attack. When we arrived in Uruk, he immediately started bossing people around, acting like he was the king. He assumed he was some kind of local celebrity. When this fell through, he told me he wanted to find "the hottest prostitute" in the city and have sex with her.

Much later, the players found the Garden of Proserpine, a garden in the Underworld with fruit that brings eternal life. They were presented with a choice, take the fruit for themselves, or destroy the garden and end the eternal suffering of a dry lich called Proserpine who had been trapped there for thousands of years. Ralph wanted to take the fruit, because he was convinced that the single fruit would end the "famine" in Uruk, which he believed was caused by dwarves. This was not a plot device I created. He made this up. When the other players disagreed, it turned into a PvP match: Ralph and a thri-kreen monk versus Proserpine (a sorcerer), a gnome archivist, and a hellbred rogue. Ralph grappled with the idea that the other players disagreed with him. He was convinced he was going to win, but when victory did not become apparent within three rounds, he became very sad and started making passive aggressive comments implying that I liked the other players better than him. When the monk (actually a very powerful character) crit the archivist and decapitated him, it became clear that Ralph was winning. It was very exciting for everyone, an intense battle. I eagerly asked Ralph what he was going to do next.

Ralph's response was succinct, as he slouched in his chair staring angrily at the floor. "I pull out my greatsword and kill myself." He then glared up at me. "I know you're just going to kill me anyway."

Much later, with the same characters (we talked him out of his pointless suicide), he was on a boat headed for the city of Babylon, when the players were attacked by water elementals. The other players were having an intense battle. Suddenly a loud voice rang out through the air.

GUYS

GUYS STOP

I'M HAVING A PTSD MOMENT

He decided that this would be the best time for some character introspection and, without missing a beat, began vividly describing an epic sea battle between Uruk and the dwarves (which he had made up). He described himself heroically leaping out of a ship and killing thirty dwarves in the water with his greatsword, twelve with his knife, and four with his bare fists. This ground the whole game to hault as he said this in the middle of the battle. I questioned him.

"Ralph, I have to ask: 1. How did you jump out of a ship in full plate armor? 2. Why are you bringing this up as the ship is attacked by elementals? Furthermore, there never was a war with the dwarves."

He glared at me for a second, then stared at the floor and said in a nasty voice "Stop undermining my roleplaying."

Even later, he was told by the leader of La Resistance in Babylon to come alone in order to join the resistance group. Not only did he disobey this by bringing another player, but he also brought along several beggars, two city guards, and an official of the very fascist government the resistance was trying to overthrow.

In the next game I ran, he played an undead gangster in a modern fantasy type game. That was mostly fine, aside from the occasional enthusiastic to WWII, except for the last session, when they were investigating the destroyed remains of Uruk from the last game. Upon finding out that the terrifying, moldering old corpse-man reciting creepy poetry as he stalked the players through an ancient dead city was Gilgamesh, and thus connected vaguely to his old character, he literally walked up to the hideous abomination and asked it if, and I quote, "You've ever heard anything about a badass city guard who gave his life saving the city." (The character actually died inconsequentially fighting a vicious were-elephant, which had nothing to do with Uruk) The creatures response was to age him until he turned to dust. At that point, he angrily shouted "RAGEQUIT" and ran upstairs to play Call of Duty.

We didn't invite him to our next game.

[Velaryon]

He actually used the word ragequit? That's hilarious.

[The Random NPC]

That's called a Ring of Spell Storing.

Right, I'd have had no problems if that was all it could do, but they wanted it to be a programmable battery, where you put in the right configurations and cast any spell. Eventually they wanted to be able to gather latent magical energy from the environment to cast the spells. It would build up spell levels over time and then be discharged as any spell.

[Sith_Happens]

Right, I'd have had no problems if that was all it could do, but they wanted it to be a programmable battery, where you put in the right configurations and cast any spell.

So basically a reverse-Spellpool? Put X total spell levels in, get X total levels' worth of whatever spells you want out? Needs a daily usage limit to keep from being massively overpowered, but besides that no more or less workable than any other magic item. Had I been R's DM I'd have just figured out how much I wanted the thing to be worth (definitely somewhere in the range of "a lot") and then told him he could craft it as normal. Which might have been what the actual DM did, what part of the process exactly was "taking too long?"

Eventually they wanted to be able to gather latent magical energy from the environment to cast the spells. It would build up spell levels over time and then be discharged as any spell.

Same procedure here, just WAY more expensive.

[The Random NPC]

So basically a reverse-Spellpool? Put X total spell levels in, get X total levels' worth of whatever spells you want out? Needs a daily usage limit to keep from being massively overpowered, but besides that no more or less workable than any other magic item. Had I been R's DM I'd have just figured out how much I wanted the thing to be worth (definitely somewhere in the range of "a lot") and then told him he could craft it as normal. Which might have been what the actual DM did, what part of the process exactly was "taking too long?"



Same procedure here, just WAY more expensive.

After about 3 sessions of "research" R didn't have a reverse-Spellpool machine. Then came the pouting.

[WrathMage]

Some of these stories are just priceless....

I am pretty fortunate that in 20 years of running TT RPGs I haven't really come across too many awful players, despite running at University societies (always a breeding ground for horror stories) and having lots of friends of friends join my groups. However I can think of 2 players who stand out in my memory as being particulary egregious. The names have been reduced to initials (which may or may not have been tinkered with) to protect their modesty.

Spoiler: HK

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The first one who springs to mind is HK, and is the more recent of my two stinkers. I had a friend who had recebtrly come out of hospital and was recovering. I offered to run a game for him as a way to keep him involved and catch up with him. The group would be my friend (HP) and a couple of my brothers (HI & VG). Also included was HK, my friend's significant other, who was apparently an enthusiastic player and really loved RPGs, as well being very big into playin their character.

Well I decided to run a one off VtM game for them, and I set the scenario and had them create characters the week before the game. Most people created normal (for VtM) characters. HK created a wanna-be Victorian Lady whose character portrait came from Twilight. This should have sounded alarm bells I think.

Day of teh game comes around and I kick off, with the set up playing out nicely, and the characters all interacting and things moving along reasonably well. The one thing that hadn't happened was combat as this was more of an investigative plot, with clues etc to think about. This carried on for about 90 minutes which i don't reckon is long in reality when HK pipes up with "Is this plot going anywhere?". The rest of teh players looked round at me and each other as I asked what HK meant. She went on to explain that as there had been no one to kill she considered this to be going nowhere, and she wanted some direction. The other players explained to her that they were looking into the (fairly obvious if I am honest) plot and that there would be action to follow. It wasn't enough for her, and she proceeded to go to another part of the city and attack the Prince!

Suffice to say the session wound up pretty quickly, with her attacking the Prince, and failing miserably, whilst the other players got the hell out of dodge. I wrapped it up after that, cut my losses and drove home wondering what had gone wrong!

Strcitly speaking this second one was me playing along side this player but it was... well yeah he was odd.

Spoiler: BJ

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This was a light hearted game of Star Wars (WEG D6). We were all smugglers or scoundrels, fringe types. GM had us on Endor (before RoJ) tracking some slavers. BJ joined the game at this point, bringing in a minor force user (GM was dubious about but let it slide).

The gamegot started and we got on with our usual light hearted jinks until we met BJ's characters... who just misjudged the tone of the game totally. He played a miserable, down-beat Jedi (not the force user he originally was... and despite the GM telling him that he explicitly wasn't a Jedi), angry at the world and everyone in it. We were a bit thrown, but went with it... fewer jokes and fewer laughs now, until we reached the slavers camp. Here BJ went mental... his character started having flashbacks to... well 'Nam by the sounds of it! He went crazy, killing left right and centre.
We got the session finished and the players (minus BJ) agreed to not have him play again. Sad thing was, it left a bad taste and the campaign actually folded without another session being played...

Wow BJ was odd....

[GungHo]

(The character actually died inconsequentially fighting a vicious were-elephant, which had nothing to do with Uruk)

The next time you tell this story, lead with the were-elephant.

[Wraith]

My worst player by a long shot was 'Red'.

Spoiler

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Now, don't get me wrong - I like Red. He's my friend, we share a lot of interests and he can be fun to hang out with. But when it comes to tabletop, his worst habit is that he tells blatant lies and expects no one to notice.

I'm not even saying that he cheats, because he doesn't. Nothing to crass as to add skills or equipment to his characters without permission, at any rate. It's just the one lie, in fact, but it accounts for a lot of his problems.

"I prefer to roleplay rather than just fight".

Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics and Red.

Example: A homebrew campaign that fell somewhere roughly between D&D and GURPs - high fantasy with the usual menagerie or Orcs, Elves and the likes, but d6 based and rather more free form than you'd expect to see in a published work - written and run by a mutual friend that I shall refer to as Gabe.

Gabe and Red were very close friends, and as such Red had virtually unrestricted access to the written rules, and so spent plenty of time trawling through them for his perfect PC. "I want to play something that I can roleplay with".

His "roleplay orientated" Character ended up as a Gestault Druid/Were-Griffon who, as a free action, could triple in size, quadruple it's physical stats, and still cast a large number of badly balanced spells. To top it off, said-PC also had the personality of sandpaper Harpy that spent most of it's time standing 20feet away from the party and venomously sniping at NPCs.

Fortunately, that one managed to die in hilarious circumstances (I like Gabe a lot, but until you've read his rules for Grappling and Subdual Damage then you don't get to complain about any other system's! ) and so he went looking for another "good roleplay character".

He chose the Death Knight monster class.
In this system, Death Knights are incredibly tough melee powerhouses that are controlled by Master Necromancers as bodyguards, and also as conduits - if a Death Knight can see you, it's Master can too, AND he can cast his spells through the Death Knight as though he were in the room with you.
Red's "Master" was not only of an ungodly power level (I don't think we ever managed to find out was his Dismiss/Control rank was, and certainly no one ever managed to Counter any of his spells) but he was also mysteriously absent and/or silent. Net result: a nigh indestructible Revenant who could also cast unstoppable Death Magic.

...And who also featured the "miserable, stoic" personality type that some people play out as "personal Code of Honour", but in this came out as "don't tell anyone else about your plot points and kill any NPC who even suggests that he might get in the way".

Were this bad enough, as we were effectively still writing this system we were allowed to play multiple characters, just to test out different classes and see how they fared, provided of course that no one was deliberately conjoining their characters' abilities for unfair benefit.

"I'd like to play another character, that way I can do more roleplay."

Ent High Mage/Water Elementalist.
Because Ents are physically massive, don't need to breathe or eat (food), and - sheer coincidence, I'm sure - took less damage from water-based AoE spells and could even be healed by some of them. And that's all I can tell you about that character, because that's pretty much all it ever did; tank damage, negate it's Weakness To Fire drawback by "always being wet or having a source of water near it" and hit massive AoE effects that necessitated it standing well away from the rest of the party.

Eventually were decided to try a very different game to see if we could curb his 'enthusiasm', so we chose a system about as far away from Dragon Lance-esque Hack 'n' Slash as you can get: Mouseguard.

Long story short, Red's character started out as a Lawful Compassionate Healer/Alchemist-type character who refused to even carry a weapon "because I won't need it, I'm a healer". A dedicated, dyed-in-the-wool Pacifist. Within 3 in-character days, I and another player had to threaten Red's character with in-game Conflict (effectively, Mouseguard's equivalent to PvP) to physically prevent him from slitting the throats of captured, unarmed, uninjured prisoners, because "after I was injured in that first fight, I'm now all jaded and traumatised".

He sulked for the rest of the evening, left early and hasn't RP'd with that group since. I don't think he's even spoken to the other player and the GM, though I seem to have been forgiven.

[BeerMug Paladin]

I've posted this in a previous thread, but it's still the answer.

In 1975 or 1976, there was a guy that several of us would not adventure with any longer; he was unsafe. Eventually, he was running his own party, all by himself. His most famed moment was with a party of first levels (because nobody survived to 2nd level).

DM: Going along the road, you see a sign saying, "Danger! Cockatrice Valley."
PC: We enter the Valley.
DM: At the Valley's entrance, there is another sign: "Turn Back! Cockatrice Valley."
PC. We keep going.
DM. The valley is filled with many stone statues, all looking up.
PC: We keep going.
DM: You hear large bodies moving around the bend.
PC: We run around the bend.
DM: You hear a heavy flapping above you.
PC: We look up.

Later the DM bemoaned the fact that he was trying to keep this PC's characters alive, and he couldn't do it.

This is so perfect, it almost seems like an urban legend one might recieve a story about in an email.

Spoiler: Talk about a guy I gamed with

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This isn't really a bad player (but is probably the closest thing I've had to one), as he was generally a source of hilarity for games he was in and was lots of fun. Even so, he would frequently swap out characters, try to solo encounters, be oddly convinced his overpowered builds were too weak so wanted to switch, asked for special custom character options to play, wouldn't write things down on his character sheet (like equipment, feats), had characters take actions based on information they had no way of knowing. (Kind of annoying to handle as a DM at times, but not enough to be bad. You just had to deal with a certain eccentric behavior. He was good at doing roleplaying when he liked a character enough to do it.) He also attacked the party with two different characters during a character's introduction to the party! He got killed instead both times.

For an example of some of the madness, here's a brief recounting of some of his actions in one campaign. This whole thing only spans a grand total of two sessions. His character was an human ranger, I believe. We were doing a dungeon dive for adventurer reasons. We came out to a cliff face and walked along a narrow path leading along the side of a rocky pathway.

This ranger decided now was the perfect time to climb up the cliff. 100 feet or so. Without the rest of the party and without any sort of climbing gear. Just up he went, with no warning whatsoever. I think it was because he wanted to know if the well we descended to get to where we were now was at the top of that sheer cliff face.

I think we were level 3 or 4 at the time. Through a series of lucky rolls, he made it all the way up, and so the DM threw a full level appropriate random encounter at him (intended to make him flee or perhaps discourage this behavior in the future). After winning, he decided to rejoin the rest of the party, so began to climb down the cliff again. Without rope or anything. Failing, he plummeted to the pathway and died on impact.

He had a backup character all ready to go. And so, we have a new character! A monkey (spider monkey, maybe?), which had up until then been his previous character's animal companion but now had a character class (rogue levels, I think) and was completely unable to talk to the party. (I pictured a body slamming into the ground and the new character bouncing out of the old character's backpack as miscellaneous other gear splashes out.)

Anyway, we were by then suffering a major party split, so I was the only other character present at the time. I figure I may as well gather the valuable things up, since I couldn't do anything else about the death. One item I had a particular interest in looking for was a strange evil artifact we had found who that dead ranger had been carrying around. I intended to keep it secure so someone wouldn't use it carelessly (and get rid of it ASAP).

The player then insists to me that the loot should belong to his monkey character, but I point out that monkeys can't really use any of the loot in theory and my character would have no reason to think the random monkey belonging to the now dead ranger is now a party member. What happens (and a huge part of why this player is not a bad player) is that we determine how this plays out in character.

Really, the only thing the player really wants is to still possess the evil artifact, so he has his monkey go grab the pack in a mad search to find it before I can get ahold of it and seal it away. I think at one point I had a monkey on my back and was having my stuff rifled through, jumping and twisting around in circles while balancing on a rocky outcrop over a fall to certain death.

He found what he wanted, and I chased the monkey, but he used the artifact and got some weird glowy purple limb thing because of it. The player never attacked me, just ran away when I made advances towards him and hung around the party. (Events are compounded further when later in the same session me and another player engage in direct PvP resulting in a death.)

Now there's a creepy monkey hanging around me and following me everywhere. He possesses an evil artifact and has some weird blacklight emitting arm. On top of that a trusted friend had just betrayed me and I had just killed them. No efforts to scare the monkey away seemed to work (after all, he is a party member).

On going back to town, my character decides to hire someone to hunt the monkey and kill it. In part to retrieve the artifact, but also to get rid of a creepy monkey. What follows is a solo-character adventure the whole group finds hilarious.

The monkey fights his tracker several times and flees. Highlights include sneaking into a merchant's working office behind a store, and getting a description of several things sitting on a desk, and immediately upon hearing, "... a small vial full of black liquid," replies, "I drink it!"

Monkey-player then starts laughing before the DM can reply and asks. "It's ink, isn't it?" DM confirms. Monkey now has wet ink smeared around his mouth and down his front.

A fight took place inside a bar with the hunter NPC smashing the whole place up and monkey generally causing a huge ruckus as it ran from cover to cover.

It finally ended as the monkey found himself trying to buy a potion in a potion shop. Unable to speak and being illiterate, the monkey communicated with screeches, furious pointing and waving a little bag of coins around that he had stolen from all over town. Apparently dancing on the countertop, performing monkey cherades is highly effective.

The merchant selling the potions pointed from potion to potion, helpfully naming all the wares in stock for the illiterate monkey to choose between "Potion of stinking cloud, potion of magic missile, potion of hold person, potion of enfeeblement, potion of inflict moderate wounds, potion..."

Monkey dancing, pointing and screeching as the illiterate player bought the potion when he heard, "moderate wounds" and drank it on the spot. The DM gave him a will save, but he failed, so the creepy monkey died.

[DM Nate]

(I pictured a body slamming into the ground and the new character bouncing out of the old character's backpack as miscellaneous other gear splashes out.)

I laughed so hard at this image I think I scared my cats.

[The Hanged Man]

Let's see.

There was the player who basically lived at the comic shop. His wife had kicked him out after he'd spent over a year without showing any inclination to even look for a job. So he would come to the comic shop and sleep on the couches in the basement during the day, then at night he'd just wander around nearby, bumming cigarettes off of tourists, and occasionally take a halfhearted stab at cleaning himself in the public showers by the beach. Any time anyone was running a game in store, he'd invite himself to it. I believe weeks went by at a time where the only food he ate was pizza and soda that other people brought for games. But somehow he scrounged the money to buy like $400 of Warhammer stuff a month, so the owners turned a blind eye to all this. The store had a rule that if you were using their tables to run your games, you had to have an open sign-up sheet for it. So the only way to make sure your game didn't include this guy was to make sure all the players you actually wanted were there with you to sign up immediately when you posted the notice.

Or there was the player who tried to badger the GM into letting him rebuild his character every single time he failed a skill roll, or encountered a scenario that he wasn't specifically geared to dominate. "You didn't tell me the game was going to be about [recent event], so I didn't know how to make my character properly." I don't know why the GM put up with it. As a result this guy made no observable contributions to the game. He was always too busy rebuilding his character to be involved in any scene. Eventually the GM started designing scenarios that were explicitly about things this guy's character used to be good at, before the current rebuild. So when he'd get upset that he wasn't correctly configured to effortlessly steamroll a challenge, the GM could say "well, you used to be set up pretty well for [recent event], but you complained and changed your character before it became useful."

Or there was the player who tried to join my online Mage: the Ascension campaign. Her character was actually from Exalted, but we entertained the idea, because this is back when White Wolf was still advertising Exalted as a "prehistory" of the World of Darkness, and we didn't know any better until after this player caused us to investigate. Her character sheet showed up with a bunch of nonsensical traits from out-of-print Vampire: the Masquerade books, and a backstory about how she had been in stasis since the fall of the Second Age, only to awaken in the Age of Darkness, befriend an Appearance 8 (on a scale of 1-5) Lesbian Stripper Elder Tzimesce Vampire, and learn secret vampire fleshcrafting magic on top of her Solar Exalted powers, which she used to give herself all kinds of exotic sexual features. Also her attached character pictures were of a very NSFW latex fetish model, with said exotic sexual features very prominently photoshopped in. We denied her application, and she formally declared Nemesis against us, vowing to rally all the forces of the Internet to break up our vile RP "Clique". We actually got a couple new players who only heard about us in the first place from her ranting.

[Inevitability]

Sounds like the player roleplayed that monkey just as he should have.

[Diachronos]

There's one player in my group who is our personal definition of a bad player. Among the things she's done are:
* Built a half-elf cleric because she was told she could play pretty much anything she wanted. When the party included a Half-Celestial Monkadin, a Drider, and an INCUBUS. Said cleric then proceeded to never prepare spells and try to punch things. If I recall correctly, it was also public knowledge at the time that the DM hated any sort of elf.
* Wheel of Time RPG: She built an Aes Sedai Initiate... and proceeded to sneak after the Wanderer (failing, of course), and when attacked by a Trolloc decided to use her dagger instead of magic to fight back.
* Current PF game: She built a bard... with 6 Wisdom, 7 Dex, 13 Str, and NO RANKS IN PERFORM. Oh, and did I mention that she insists on using her bow instead of her rapier, and didn't realize her stats like HP and BAB went up when she leveled? And her spell choices revolved around "oh, this spell sounds good for a scoundrel", only to learn later that you can't pick pockets with Unseen Servant? She was also told that she could reroll her ability scores as many times as she wanted (the DM even gave everyone a free 18)... and never tried to reroll.

The joke has become that she needs someone to build her character for her. And play it for her. Because even Warriors are too complex for her.