ITT frequent pet peeves with your gaming group

>GM keeps having dragons be the crux of every important storyline
>Player who always tries to act like the de facto leader IC, even when we already have a designated leader
>Player who decides that an NPC is scum if they don't instantly help them or ever disagree with them

Players who abandon characters or games because they don't fit into their precise, extremely-specific, idealized idea of how it should be at that moment.

>"I hoped this game of 1860s Call of Cthulhu would be able to handle my disabled Japanese diplomat who is secretly a magical girl kitsune, but it's just not working out. I'm leaving the group."

Our group has a player who's constantly tempted to switch characters anytime his current one doesn't do so hot.

I don't mind the first one because you'd be surprised how often dragons do NOT make any appearances of note in most games. In 20 years of gaming, I can count on 2 hands how many times I've fought a dragon.

>when you volunteered your place as the play location, but the story is going nowhere, you're not having any fun and you just want the party to wipe so you can have your fucking weekends back.
>when you constantly make huge intentional blatant fuck ups to try and either get everyone killed, or at least progress the story in some way, but the dm keeps ass-pulling ways for the party to survive and softballing easy ways out.
>when you slowly start to feel nothing but contempt for your group as they drag a shitty campaign on and on despite you actively telling them you want it to end, and that you aren't having fun
>"Well EVERYONE ELSE is having fun user"

Problem #1: it doesn't exist.

They stall to get petty RP out of the way despite the rest being totally okay moving onwards into the story.

It seems like you could just, y'know, drop from the group and tell them to get a new place to game. Would that be so hard?

What do you mean by this? Can you give an example?

This

Apart from some SERIOUSLY lame 1-turn full party full attack roflstomps on poor juvenile dragons that had no reason to be randomly wandering about, I have never faced or ran a dragon

Not that guy but I have the same problem

It's like, they decide to so some RP, fine, great, sure.

But they take hours and hours describing how they fiddle with things, talk back and forth reiterating knowledge that I'd be fine with the party just knowing due to offscreen interactions, and suddenly 2 hours have gone by and literally nothing has happened.

Now on the one hand it's my fault for not quashing this when it started, and it's definitely worse in text-based games.

But it's like- come the fuck on! You're adventurers! DO SOMETHING

At least they're all talking. I've had a session where this guy was asked about his background. He decides to just read the entire thing he had written (it was pretty extensive, dude loves his backgrounds) and keeps talking for an hour and a half with random things his character did in the past. Yes, I timed it.
Worst part is, only his character and the character asking the question were there, so nobody could even interact or do anything.

I spend that hour of the session reading manga, muting my mic, and being thankful it was an online game.

My gaming group is full of great roleplayers with chronic illnesses who keep getting into car crashes and having family members die

Why can't I have some reliable neet autists with no life outside of my game

Have a talk on why his constant character creation is killing his joy in wanting to actually play them. If you don't have a "backup" character, you'll invest way more into the one you play.

Usually setting up a single time-slot and always sticking to it helps dissuade players from attenting the funerals of their aunts.

Players who ask obscure questions about minor details for the specific purpose of using it to their advantage.

This isn't really a bad thing per se, but it's reached the point that I break out into a cold sweat if someone asks about anything even tangentially related to architecture. My favorite moment:

>Hey DM, how deep is the river?
>...Uh, deep enough that ships can navigate it? Not large ships, they have a shallow draft...
>Oh, okay, that means [obscure nautical knowledge that escapes me at the moment], so let's do it!
>Cue a 12 foot tall stark naked Dragonborn emerging from the river Godzilla-style

The problem I have is that three of us - myself and two of the players - can recall all kinds of obscure lore and knowledge from all kinds of different subjects, because we're huge nerds. We are absolute fountains of useless trivia. Unfortunately, very little of it overlaps, which means that those two players repeatedly blindside me with obscure knowledge.

It's funny, but holy crap do they have me paranoid now.

Already did that fampai

I ran a campaign with fluid timeslots and it was great for a while, but it died in a flash because interest waning reduced # of games played weekly which reduced interest and so in in a vicious cycle

I'm getting close to it. These are people I've known for a long time, but being forced to play this shitty game with them each week is making me not want to know them anymore.

>the stupid guy that never remembers anything always plays hyper-intelligent lorekeepers
>the best roleplayer always plays unlikable cunts that avoid getting involved with the party
>the most likable player always plays infuriating assholes that get maimed every session after a stupid decision

>unfortunately your dragonborn doesn't share your knowledge of the subject, nor does he have ranks in swim.

The answer to this and many other questions is "Roll to see if your character would know that."

Pure, unadulterated idiocy. I've actaully stopped playing with my current group, pleading burnout, and am wondering how I can amass a new one in a relatively small town without the first gang of dunces finding out about it.

>Wait, talking in a language the provincial governor doesn't understand right in front of him will make him mad?
>What do you mean, us standing around this guy's front door and openly, and in character contemplate robbing him would cause him to lock his door and call the guards
>Huh? YOu mean that magic item an assassin tried to slip in our packs unobserved is what's causing the other assassins to home in on us no matter how we hide? I don't get how it does that, even though the diviner we consulted explicitly told us that it sends out a two way magical signal to a linked stone.
>I don't get how a magic key could cause the traps not to fire just by holding it. Doesn't it open a door?

>Player who decides that an NPC is scum if they don't instantly help them or ever disagree with them

As a player, I start getting suspicious when NPCs /never/ disagree with me. It tells me the GM either put zero thought into these characters or way too much. And either way there's nothing I can do about it in-character.

>Huh? YOu mean that magic item an assassin tried to slip in our packs unobserved is what's causing the other assassins to home in on us no matter how we hide? I don't get how it does that, even though the diviner we consulted explicitly told us that it sends out a two way magical signal to a linked stone.

I remember you from a thread a few days ago. My condolences.

>be playing 3.5
>rumors of a lost pirate treasure, magically sealed/hidden/whatever
>miss a session, when I get back we've made it to the entrance of an elven tomb that we somehow know leads into the pirate cove
>statues of elven armor everywhere
>magical torches lining the walls
>seriously, hundreds of statues
>I cast detect magic (hurr) and nearly go blind
>entire fucking party unanimously agrees that this place is trapped to fuck and back because we're not retards. We're just here for the booty.
>NOBODY TOUCH ANYTHING. Got it? Great.
>Find a collapsed wall, darkness beyond. Obviously the entrance to the pirate cove.
>I get ready to pull out some of the continual flame torches I keep around (cheap but pretty rocks tied to a leather thong with continual flame)
>Remember how I said we're not retards? I lied.
>One party member gets a brilliant idea. Before I can even say to the DM "Alright I pull out my continual flame trinkets," party tard says "Oh, the dark won't be a problem. I take a torch."
>Cue Yackety Sax playing as the entire party tries to squeeze into the hole while the rattle of animated armor grows louder.

We made it before the 100+ suits got to us, but goddamn man.

A dm who cannot maintain his rulings and pacing. In one adventure, we had to deal with his repeatedly changing how multiple skills worked, causing failed trap spotting and us getting surprised every fight. He spent 23 minutes om how a web spell worked, then gave me 6 seconds for my entire turn, despite my need to know several bits of info uncovered and glossed over during other players' turns. My breastplate equipped Fighter was the only player that had to sweat the shards of sharp pottery on the floor. None of the squishies had to check despite two being barefoot.

That is kind of shitty for them to disregard whether you are enjoying the content, especially because you are hosting. It makes sense that you wouldn't want to know them anymore; I wouldn't put up with that shit.

Run games anyway, even if some people drop

>it's about me, isn't it?

>that guy who rolls constantly when it isn't his turn and then keeps 20s/whatever the best roll of whatever system we are playing and points to them when it is his turn
>GM never calls him out on it for some reason

>"No I have like 40 hp left"
>"That guy hit you for 70 then 40 and your a magus"
>"NO ONE TOLD ME THIS I WAS ON MY PHONE"

>Hey, can I make a character from a splatbook you aren't allowing?
>How about a character that can't possibly exist in the setting?
>Maybe you can allow me to break the rules so I can make a completely broken character?