Things that players and GMs do that shits you up the wall

I need to whinge for a minute Veeky Forums, and because I couldn't find a thread for it, I thought I'd start one.

What annoys you about the way your current GM GMs or your current players play?

Come and vent and rant and scream or even thank your GM/players once you read what is shitting off everyone else.

Allow me to begin;

One of my current GMs describes... almost nothing. Ever. No scenery, no sounds, no smells.


>You're on the road towards the next village. The village is a couple days away.
We move on down the path.
>You enter the village, there are soldiers patrolling.
What do those soldiers look like?
>They're wearing black.
We try to sneak our way in.
>You're in an alley, what do you do?

That is all we get, ever. Absolutely no description about anything beyond a label for what it is.

>inb4 muh immershun

Fuck yeah, my immersion. I like to know what things look like, I like to have a feel of a setting. It's hard to give a fuck or be engaged when there is no description to anything.

>pic kinda related

I understand what ya mean. I'm huge on description and making the setting come to life, but its one of those things that isn't for everyone. The current game I am running is super detailed, but I had the luxury of running it before with a smaller easier group, so while the setting is homebrewed, I have a lot of it already established. Creating a city completely on the fly and make it full of character and history is tough.

This is one of those things where you should really talk it out with the GM, tell him what you want and see what he can do. Otherwise some people don't have the time or inclination to do it so you might need to find a new GM, or run a game yourself

I can't stand when players or GMs introduce off book elements without balancing them. My current group is fucking terrible at it, and they barely discuss it before going 'it's awesome, approved!'

>Far east themed campaign. Began with a focus in ninja, feudal politics, and youkai. Has now become pathfinder ball Z because the DM has allowed saiyans and the damn things have more powers than spirits and wizards, and more martian prowess than any other class. Thanks to death, attrition, and allowing extra characters, more than half the party has become some variety of Saiyan.

>War themed game, max level, characters began pretty basic One player bribed the DM into allowing third party and now the already near godlike characters can cast nationwide spells, one shot everything but the gods, and are generally impossible to stand against. I am the only player still giving a damn about their army it seems.

I don't like it when the GM takes forever to progress:
>"Okay, we go to Rivendale"
>"Okay".
>"...So we start walking towards Rivendale".
>"Got you."
>"... ... Are we making any progress towards moving towards the physical vicinity of Rivendale yet?"

I don't think making the player repeat their intentions of traveling is the best way to simulate an arduous journey.

As for players, I fucking hate it when they are pussies.
>"I think this adventure sounds dangerous!"
>"Waaaah, there's no way we could do that!"
>"I think I'll just sit here on my ass until the GM picks me up and tells me what to do next."
Bitch, if I wanted to be a player in my own campaign I'd written a fucking novella.

Stop being such a pussy. If a scenario is good, descriptions are last thing you need. Use your god-damn imagination to fill things in.

>sleep at an inn, two of our four characters are drunk
>someone is breaking into our room and we all wake up
>three of us grab for our weapons or run out of the room to chase the invader
>the fourth one just straight up jumps out of the window

Managed to land without damage aswell. Funnily enough, his thinking was not too bad, because he expected our GM to let the thief get away and jumped out of the window to block the main door. It was also in-character because he played a Largehuge McSwole tard.
But the end result was that we caught the thief right after running out of our room, and he had to spend the rest of the night and some of the next day in prison for destruction of property.

I still can't decide wether that was a smart move or not.

Implying one can understand the gravity of the scenario without description.

>character starts a riot in a crowded building
>is immediately knocked out
>had full hp

...why did he not open the window before jumping.

His character was drunk and tired and he forgot the rule "if you don't say it you don't do it".

I guess jumping through glass is just kinda a thing he does.

I fucking hate that rule. Like, sometimes for stuff a person could reasonably forget it's fine but I don't want to have my character murdered in his own home because I never told the GM that I definitely locked my front door.

The most retarded one recently was when we got attacked by some orcs in camp, killed them, and tried to go back to sleep only to have the DM start to talk to us about the repercussions of sleeping ontop of their dead bodies.

Seriously. If I don't have to tell you "I don't sleep in my armor, I do pick up my pack rather than leave my gear right here where I set it down when I leave the next day, or any other little shit like that then you should probably assume that before I went back to sleep I moved the fucking dead body.

Nah, I like that rule. It leads to funny situations like that, and keeps you involved. You can't just play the game passively.

It is good if you can reasonably assume someone wouldn't do it with the implied primary action. Jumping out of a window logically involves opening it. Unless the character is drunk.

Going to sleep implies a lot of things, including body relocation.

My GM doesn't let me sleep in plate in 5e. There's no rule against this and it triggers me.

I hate players that make "lolrandumb" chracters, such as "lolimapyromaniac XDD" or "lolimagnomebarbarian XDD".

I really hate people who don't do anything. They just follow the party.

I hate GMs who put politics or SJW shit into my games.

I could go on. I have a lot of unbridled hate.

i hate it when players instead of making a character then representing it mechanically they stat the character then justify there stats threw the backstory.

>My GM doesn't let me sleep in plate in 5e. There's no rule against this and it triggers me.
Fuck you Kevin.

But politics can be super fun. If it wasn't for politics, I wouldn't have gotten an enchanted-life-gem powered hydrofoil ship with cannons for free. Total cost of the ship was 3.5 million gold.

What I hate as a player gms have done repeatedly
>you are all orphans who society hates
>you wake up with no ear and tied up, no roll or chance to stop this
>shackling party with dmpcs
>balancing encounters around much higher level dmpcs
>going full power trip when party gets above X level/equivalent
>game is meant to teach you a lesson
>seeing other players punished for them not being liked outside of game
>game matches current political discussions

Hate as a GM
>no character motivation
>doing nothing with down time besides "I clean my weapon"
>asking to be chaotic evil good aligned games
>dragging ass to learn rules of new system
>forgetting all rules of a system between games
>inane levels of paranoia in games that have had no reason to have this
>wanting to turn in game discussion into out of character political debate

I meant the type of politics that is basically a copy of real life events. Like a DM who included a BLM protest or something, but for elves instead of blacks, would really piss me off.

I've had to kick out a player recently.

Tried to PVP. Always. Had to kill a bunch of her special snowflakes. Other players ask me to not kick her out, she's their friend. Ok, I guess, if everyone agrees, I can let her stay. They all agree.
Always wanted to do evil/dark/drow elves/eldar/pointy ears, even when it's not that appropriate.
Last campaign, she whined so much that the other players asked me to please let her play her goddam Dark Eldar Fury in Rogue Trader. For the good of the group, I relent.

Rogue Trader and friends are helping a PDF regiment fight off a horde of Khorne cultists. They're royally outnumbered. They decide to mine a canyon in order to make it collapse and reduce the advantage of the enemy. She wants to stab them, all thousands of them, so she sprints in the exploding canyon as rocks fall from the mountains. I wanted to kill her pc there, but the whinetrain has no brakes, other players ask me not to kill her Dark Eldar. I relent, again.
Half an hour later, she challanges another PC to honoraburu single combat, the other player agrees, she gets curbstomped, start whining that I suck, the other player cheats, and the campaign sucks.

I ask her to please take her belogings and follow me. Go into other room, tell her she's out. Tell her to not bother coming back.
Back to other players, they all say they're glad she's out because she was annoying and a nuisance and they weren't happy to play with her anymore. Didn't want to stand up because reasons. Of course, I had to be the bad evil GM.

2 days later, evil bitch forwards me a screen of group chat. All my players started talking behind my back, saying she din du noffin, and that I overreacted.

Trust a bitter GM: don't play with the spineless.

Are you ok, user?

>Going to sleep implies a lot of things, including body relocation.
Yeah, but usually when you go to sleep you aren't in a fight, so you don't really have any action restrictions.

I fucking hate this right here.

I start docking xp when someone tries to drag the game into current political events when it would not fit the game nor the character.

Imagine if someone made a "not Donald Trump" or a "not Hillary Clinton" as their BBEG for the campaign.

I'd do a 360 and walk away.

Anyone have that story where someone wanted to not follow the campaign to push back the attacking goblin army, and instead revolutionize the kingdom's politics, and in the end when democracy was established the goblins just took over the town?

See, I can see it in something like Shadowrun under circumstances but that could not hold the game up alone.

If notpundit! was part the head of a mega corp, someone driving some type of new laws or something that would be great.

Having a lich who is going to make Thay Great Again by building a wall around the Unapproachable East is not.

Did someone seriously just rewrite the gay marriage screen cap and claim something original?

Man, I should have a Trump BBEG with insane ideas and top charisma

Was it about gay marriage? Then that. Don't remember it that well.

Probably running as Captain in a space-freelancer game I'm in, we've had like... 3 Captain players drop due to various RL reasons not including scheduling and getting shanked at work, and while I'm happy to take the executive chair getting anything done is like pulling teeth.

>Okay here's what we're gonna do!
>BUT CAPTAIN, WHAT ABOUT ALL THESE UNFORESEEN POSSIBILITIES I PROVIDE NO SOLUTION FOR

Game grinds to a halt as I effectively have to tell them five times over that we'll deal with it as we come without resorting to pvp to get the game running again.

>if you don't say it you don't do it

I've had too many players who, when informed of the consequences of only doing what they said they were doing, decide that they want to stick with the consequences.

I've run into players who, when asked "did you open the window before jumping through ?", would think about it and then answer "no".

So the closest I've come to ignoring that rule is retconning it on the few occasions when players complain.

But if you do a 360 you're still looking straight ahead??

Run it like a Rogue Trader.

Listen to all of their whining, then order them to do it anyway.

So he moonwalks, retard.

>not channeling your inner MJ
newfag/10

And if you were just in a fight, policing bodies/etc. is an assumption that is fair to make. Especially if you aren't trying escape another fight.

Yeah, but I don't think the GM should assume anything other than that you don't suddenly stop breathing. Maybe you want to sleep on a pile of dead orcs, who knows? The GM shouldn't have to ask you wether you do something. If you are not in a fight you have enough free actions, and it is only one sentence more you have to say. Don't be lazy.

That sucks man. Although why aren't you in the group's group chat?

Maybe in future try having an anonymous vote on kicking a player out or not - if the players are too spineless to show their opinions then they deserve to suffer for it, plus it ensures you're not the "Bad evil GM".

Players that ask what they should do, like I understand getting stumped and that I think differently but I'd rather they throw out any ideas.
Following on from that, players that don't remember abilities they have, so often will some of my regular players completely forget about something they have that'd make the situation easier or solve the problem.

And something that's happened to me that I'm still sore about, being kicked out of a group without being told. The campaign ended and we had a break, I was never told about the group starting back up. GM had legitimate reasons (Me being a racist ass, typically I'm only racist in jest but I touched a sore spot one night.) but I just wish he'd at least discussed it with me, had been playing with that group for 4 years. Only found out b/c other players told me.

They simply made another one, in one I'm in, in the new one I'm not and I wasn't aware of its existence.
As for the anonymous vote, it would simply end with the disturbing player in, and me being evil for having suggested it. If I have to be the bad guy whatever happens, at least like this I get to kick the fucker out.
I don't know, I admit it stung a bit reading those fuckers side with her when they were sure I wouldn't know, and siding with me when she wasn't around.

Reasonable expectations. If your intent is to sleep on orc!corpses you will probably specify that. As it isn't a reasonable expectation.

It isn't about being lazy. It's about not having a puckered rectum until someone sticks a lemon in it.

I suppose so. I just think that it isn't that big of a deal that you have to say "we pull those orc corpses away before lying down", but I guess that's just a matter of taste. My DSA GM is pretty adamant on the "you don't say it, you don't do it" rule, and I like it that way.

I basically have the same complaint as you do. It's a struggle to even get to know what weapons our enemies are wielding in combat. Every fight is just us randomly wailing away at the enemies, because we never have any idea how wounded they are, since they never react to anything beyond dying.

I sometimes feel like he spends more time going "umm" than actually saying anything.

>I hate having functional characters that aren't hobbled by inflexible rules systems

How do you games not take forever with each player having to go through a ten-minute checklist before everything they do?

Because we are able to sum things up like that. "I grab my stuff and leave the room." is just four words more than "I leave the room." It's a thing you are getting used to. And like that I won't have to explain why I am suddenly holding my bow when sneaking through a door after hearing a noise in the middle of the night. Because I tell the GM that I grab my bow before sneaking around.

I'm a little surprised that most people don't just think bring their stuff. Won't most people just think to make clear they're bringing stuff instead of forgetting to, because they'd want to be sure to have their stuff with them?

Being in a fantasy setting and suddenly going through the fucking Umbrella Corporation's bio labs with sliding mechanical doors and holographic computers and incredibly dumb shit like that.

Seriously, run a fucking game that's in a setting where those things are actually believable if you want to pull shit like that.

Well, it is still an action that you have to actually do. It is not about "the most likely thing to happen", it is about what you are saying you are doing. If the GM assumes things you do not really have full control over your character. Maybe you intended to not bring your stuff as it would weigh you down?

I know this is nitpicky, but I just prefer it that way.

Oh, but you didn't say you put on your shoes, and you didn't say you strung your bow, and you didn't say you were breathing.

That is being specific, but not necessarily pedantic about it.

In the corpse sleeping situation "I go back to sleep" isn't "I pass out standing up still in a combat stance."

Investigating a sound when you have grounded your stuff because you are in a locked room on the upper floor of an inn may reasonably require grabbing your weapon. If you are in camp in the woods it shouldn't (as you should be sleeping weapon-in-hand) because that is a reasonable expectation.

When running games, extra-specificity in regular situations is a waste of time, and I won't punish players for that. Abnormal or complex actions? They better be specific. However, that is also how I generate any checks they may have to make to complete for a complex action. Or so that I understand why they are doing something weird. So that when they say "I hack up the guts of the minotaur and roll around in them, making a huge guts nest to sleep in because lolimevilnow" I can reasonably agree when the other, not tits-up players pass a "I kill it in its sleep" note.

What I mean is, I can't think of a reason why a player wouldn't say they brought their stuff.

>Players meet an NPC
>Players spend minutes of real time trying to metaguess the plot
>The only way to avoid them being right or feeling like they're right is to play everything at extreme face value

Guys, if you sit there and try to guess EVERYTHING about the story, of COURSE you're going to eventually get it right.

That would be abnormal and you would probably specify not bringing it because it will weigh you down.

Hope you dropped those guys too, because fuck those chumps

Sounds like they either have a serious case of blue balls they were hoping she could help with, or... I'm not really sure what the alternative is.

>Arresting the players automatically for breaking a single window in a time of jeopardy

Your DM is kind of a shit.

But user, all actions must result in harsh punishment, as mistress gm has told us.

I hate it when the DM cuts off my ear too

That reminds me. I fuckin' hate anyone who has a "DM/GM v. players" mentality. You are supposed to be working together to have a positive shared social experience.

>Jumping out of a window logically involves opening it.
In a time of panic? No, not at all. In fact, the standard narrative display of someone jumping out through a window is often accompanied by shattering glass.

Can we do that?
>play evil character in a solo game that my DM needed help developing
>find out game is lewd and the player party is involved in restructuring some harbor city's politics to circumvent the exclusion of 'humanoid races' which the harbor city denotes as the main cause of declining human birthrates
>use this time to conquer local tribes further inland and establish large separate invasion forces, send mercenary spies into the harbor city to report on the player party's political status
>get important date that the city's armies would be on parading duty and send invasion forces, take over harbor city and surrounding villages with huge autonomous tribal pushes into other civilized areas because of how massive my own tribe-grown armies are
>player party's characters are killed in the fighting

I had a player who would grind the game down to a halt over rule disputes. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the rules (or could look them up while I was actually running the game.) I'm no perfect GM, I make my share of mistakes so I'd actually asked him to point it out if I flubbed a rule. But, I didn't like changing the rules mid-session, for the sake of consistency with what the players had planned out and been expecting. So an error would be brought to my attention, I'd take note of it for the next session. Except that wasn't good enough. He'd fight with my explanation, talk over other players, and ignore it when I said it'd be fixed for next session. Eventually he threw a fit and rage-quit the campaign.

When in direct contact with an agressor? Yes. But the described event had the character been sober likely would not have been a case. If you are chased theough a window you won't open it in the same regard as tackling someone through or on the other side of a window. But hopping out to flank someone in a sober mind isn't hrough glass.

...

Everyone else, including the DM, has an infuratingly nonchalant attitude towards gaming. It's been several months since the last game and nobody's made any effort to set a session up. Anytime I tried people put in a token effort. Noone seems to care. We have several weeke off at the moment and when I suggested we try running a game in the upcoming weeks of fuckalls, two players claimed they'd spend all day sleeping in and gaming, and all night partying.

I didn't even try talking to the DM or the other players about setting up a game. It's just too goddamn depressing.

So what was the resolution? Did you invite them into your house next session, show them the printed out screenshot on a peace of paper, and then stare them all down, ignoring their excuses until they left one by one?

>Complaining about the DM not putting in more effort
>Ever

The only job of the DM is to know the rules and arbitrate. DM is not a machine that exists solely to entertain players. DMs play to have fun too.

Why don't you try to DM if you think you know how to run a good game? Damn foreverplayers, you're like communists.

My "positive shared social experiment" is a game of wits versus a mastermind's cleverly created world and the way it reacts to my actions upon it. If someone gets their panties in a twist because they play this to "have fun", then they can go get fucked and play dungeon world.

One of my players just won't stop being so fucking obtuse.
And it's not just in games I run too
>My character goes and grabs fish from the river with his bare hands, then tries to sell them
>I want to cut off people's toes
etc etc

A time of panic includes the panic of letting someone escape, which is precluded by the actions and the reason he took them. He was worried the criminal would get away, so he acted in haste.

That sucks. I feel for you. Have you tried looking for a game online, maybe with Roll20? 9/10 the groups are shit, but the 1 in 10 is worth it.

In my groups, you would be That Guy.

I have no problem with a campaign being designed against the player. But if you need to dick measure at the table there is a problem. I ain't part of your magical realm.

Panic cause reasonable expectations of extra detail, like drunkenness. But you can't just assume certain things without more context. And context is everything regarding this discussion.

>But if you need to dick measure at the table there is a problem
Careful user, you're half a step away from unironically mentioning that its [Current Year].

But you have everything you need in terms of context from right there in the story. There's nothing left to guess at. user's friend was playing a McHuge Swole stupid guy who was leaping out a two story window. Part of the narrative of that involves going through the physical window, and it's actually harder to believe that McHuge Swole stopped and politely undid the latch and moved the window out of the way.

Context can be important in certain cases, but it isn't anywhere NEAR "everything" needed in this discussion.

>agree it was an example of a good place to expect details
>later post saying "most window exits are through glass"
>reply to that post that you can't assume because there are reasonable contexts that exist where going through a window that is closed implies opening it first

It wasn't about that story anymore.

>start a game
>"Alright guys, what I'm running here is pretty subdued, not really off-the-wall shit like [person] runs."
>give description of the setting (Fairly classic D&D, playing off of the feeling of exploration, only reason it's not in an established setting is because I want the players to be in the dark about a fair bit)
>roll characters, run AD&D 2e so that it's more descriptive in combat scenes and not board-gamey
>all of the characters are jokes, two separate ones are based around one fragment of dialogue that they repeat in every situation

this situation repeats itself every couple months or so

Honestly, all things considered, even disregarding the specific story, I think the only situation where it can be presumed that someone opened up the window first is someone doing it calmly, like they were trying to escape in an un-pressured situation or they were trying to kill themselves. Therefore I would actively say that the context of the story has to prove the window was calmly opened, not the other way around.

One player just wants to kill. Even in narrative games he just wants to kill everything, always plays an assassin or a big weapon guy.

>I'd actually asked him to point it out if I flubbed a rule
>I didn't like changing the rules mid-session

Pick one.

And he says he keeps that mistake in mind so he can fix it next session. What's your point?

Point is you can't encourage a player obsessed with rules and rulebooks to corret you and then ask him to wait a whole session to make it right.
There's a reason why some people are obsessed, and the GM knew it in the first place.

Autists do not like to wait user, so if you want to take advantage of their autism in some way you need to play along with the autism.

This pisses me off too. And not just because I am/regularly play an elf racist.

> GMs
You know what's annoying? When the GM runs a game based on something e.g. Star Wars, Game of Thrones, etc but makes canon a sacred cow. They let the PCs meet canon characters but won't let the PCs ever be on the same level as them. They might get the PCs involved in canon stories but they won't let the PCs' actions and decisions affect the course of the canon story in any way that is divergent. They breed a general sense of inescapable inferiority and irrelevance in the PCs as a result.

Curse of the Crimson Throne is literally post-2016-election

I'd like to play in the GMs world, the one he envisioned. Just sayin

Guys what do
>I'm one of 5 players in a campaign; Me, my girlfriend, a friend of mine and his girlfriend, and one of the DM's friends
>DM also happens to be my girlfriend's older brother
>DM is fairly new to tabletop and this is his first campaign, though he does a good job of worldbuilding (even if it borrows heavily from video games) and genuinely tries to create a fun story with us
>My girlfriend and my friend are the kind of players that metagame their character build hard, the kind that roll the d20 close to the edge of the table and snatch it up immediately when it barely stops rolling as they call out the number (invariably in the upper teens), the kind that will try any kind of bullshit they can get away with and will just say "woops forgot" when they're called out
>friend's girlfriend just goes along with him like a passive leech; they even have nearly identical characters. Friend takes advantage of this by having her back him up when the DM gets suspicious of his consistently high rolls
>DM's friend is an aspie who throws a fit whenever I do well because we both created fighters but he, being new to the game, didn't have quite as good of an understanding on how to build a fighter so he basically ended up like a rogue with no sneak attack
>also he falls asleep whenever he's not involved in something for more than 5 minutes. Seriously, out cold.
>DM tries to lay out a clear objective but my friend invariably brings the game to a halt by insisting on her gimmicky hobbies and forced sidequests

I want to tell the DM that he needs to abandon this campaign and find a new group of friends to run a campaign with, but he's grown really attached to this world and he wants to see what little remains of the story through. Also how do I call out my girlfriend and my friend on their metagaming cheating shit? It's not like I can prove what they're doing, but you all know that kind of behavior I'm talking about

god was a shit gm to van gogh.

I don't think you get a roll to not cut your own ear off Vincent

I know, I should've known better than to attempt to harness the raging autism. I was a fool.

Get a rolling tray to 'prevent dice going off the table'. Make sure the GM is in on this so they can back you up.

There is no resolution yet. I simply don't know what to do. Tackling the problem directly could net me some well deserved but throughly insincere apologies, and then after they leave my house I'm sure they would start talking behind my back again. Otherwise I might simply cancel the game and leave the group, and after a bit of vacation from GMing start looking for a new group, maybe be a player instead of a GM for a change.
I don't know, I have some days left to decide, as of right now leaving the group seems the right thing to do.

Well, the mayor was already kinda mad at us and to him it looked like we unnecessarily broke a window. It was just for a few hours, so it wasn't a big deal.

>Oh, but you didn't say you put on your shoes, and you didn't say you strung your bow, and you didn't say you were breathing.
If I had to, I would. But in this case I didn't have to, I fell asleep on the spot because I was drunk and didn't take off my shoes or anything. Breathing is not an action, it is an automatic activity of your body, like your heart beating.

The character was drunk.

what said

Players who over think things. "What do you mean the caravan we're guarding only has cheese, goats, and wheat? Those aren't worth anything and we're getting paid... Must be hidden! Let's beat the fuck out of a fellow guard to get information, but accidentally kill him instead!"

It was unexpected, and wasted a shitload of time for what was supposed to be a railroady intro for New players, but it was fun.

>My character goes and grabs fish from the river with his bare hands, then tries to sell them
>I want to cut off people's toes

My sides have traveled so far from earth, it might take dozens of years for them to become part of the observed universe.

>cheese, goats, and wheat
>not worth anything
Motherfucker, not everyone in the world is a muderhobo.

Leaving the group is the correct choice. If they initially supported you in kicking the player and then talked shit about you behind your back, then they're spineless and have no respect for you or your time, and you should treat yourself better than catering to people like that. Because deep down, you know if this happens again you'll never be able to believe what they say on the subject.