Shit your players do

>Takes five smoke breaks over the course of a five hour game.

obviously you don't know what it's like to be addicted to nicotine.

>downs six strong beers and can no longer follow whats happening.

>puts ashtray on the table

Fuck I hate smokers.

>keeps mentioning that time weeks ago when the DM made a specific ruling he didnt like.

>"I want to roll for perception" every fucking minute
>Roll dice before saying what their character is trying to do and the DM telling them what to roll for
>Try to find a reason to kill every single NPC they come across just because.
>Still don't understand how attack/damage/initiative/saving rolls work after 5+ sessions despite explaining how it works whenever relevant
>"I want to roll X" without even attempting to roleplay out their actions in-character
>Use meta-gaming knowledge
>Make /pol/ jokes in a medieval fantasy setting
I don't know why I torture myself by continuing to play with this group. Some of the people in the group are pretty cool guys, but most of them are disgusting casuals and are incredibly obnoxious to play with.

>roll without declaring and constant percept checks.

Thats my group.

>playing with idiot addicts

>On my way to weekly session
>Rush hour is kicking off
>Get text and check it at a stoplight
>Sorry guys X player just called out, only two players so not enough to play
>Takes me an hour to get back home
At least call out the day before, not the hour before

Why is asking for the king's crown always the go to example for stupid shit players do?

>Implying your trash obscure setting won't be worse if it gets any traction

Hey now, believing it's the game and not the players is the only self-worth he has, asshole.

>it's been 8 weeks and I still get asked "What do I add to my initiative roll"
>It's been 8 weeks and people still need to ask how to make saving throws
>It's been 8 weeks and only one person is talking in character

Alternatively
>Party raids a garrison full of enemies and then whines when there's guards everywhere and they can't long rest
>Party whines because "they don't want to sneak around anymore"
>Party whines because they chose to do this shit but now they're bored and they can't just fast travel out

>I'm proficient with axes so I get +2 to my damage roll

>Either get on with it and complain In Character or we won't play next time.

They can find a new GM then. I've never understood this 'player' shortage, because I have more players than I can actually regularly spend time with over multiple campaigns. I'm pretty sure every user who says "but there's no one else to play with" means "I'm too autistic to meet new people". The real shortage are people willing to run shit. If you lose your GM because you're a shit, you probably aren't finding another one any time soon.

It isn't. Attacking the king is.

>show up 30 minutes early to go over party only recap
>bring their own snacks
>order pizza with one just for me since they hate pineapple
>clean up their mess afterwards
>compliment me on my painted miniatures

Feels good man

>That feel when one player always brings me a sandwich and takes time to interact with my npcs

Fucking THIS
I found out one of my players had been doing this for 3 weeks after I told them you don't add proficiency to damage

>"I'm searching the room."
> "Roll x"
> Fails
> "Nuthin here."
> "I wanna really really search the body in this room"
> W/e
> Passes
> "You find a bunch of guts, two kidneys, a liver and bloody rags."

You failed. Don't cheese me by trying to roll again for errything

>playing starwars rpg now
>guy that was bad at dnd 5e is pretty much just as bad at star wars rpg even though he has been practically begging to play it
>he at least decided to wait to finish the current campaign, though he did so half-assed, then we would move on to star wars
>even in star wars he needs to constantly check and recheck his sheet to see what his skills are at and what dice to roll
>and he is still wrong most of the time

i hate having to sit next to him, but i just happen to be similar to his character, even though i called dibs on being force sensitive
i know calling dibs on a race or class isnt very, positive i guess for the group, but we did that in dnd, even before this other guy joined but he agreed to it back in the day. that way we could try to have a well-rounded group, even if someone else is not as good at playing clerics as you are or if playing clerics are your favorite, well too bad someone else called dibs so you can play a paladin or some other class to fill the quota

Yeah must agree on the player / GM ratio, there's just no way anyone who can run games should be short of players. Even in bumfuck nowhere you can do them online now.

i would usually only take 1 smoke break, though it would honestly only be during a full group break, like if we took a break since a session was going long so we went to in-n-out or some other fast food restaurant. if there isnt a break in the game then i will not make one. i am the only smoker in my group so i make sure to A, not bring it up and B, not make it mandatory for me
i guess you can say i am good at controlling my emotions, but honestly i am only doing it for my group, so i do take smoke breaks, but i only take them when there are full groups of players that take a break

Bless your soul. Mine will just abruptly get up and go. Grinding the game to a halt

>downs a single miller lite and can no longer follow whats happening.
He has the drinking capacity of a malnourished Ethiopian infant.

I have 4 players, each is a smoker. I run games that are 7-9 hours long, they become anxious if we spend 2 hours without a smoke break. This is disgusting

I did it intuitively until I've been told this is wrong, they aren't cheating, this just seems logical, don't hate such people.

Try to kill my Self-Insert NPC

REEEEEEEE I ONLY BECAME A FOREVER-DM TO PLAY FINN, YOU FAGGOTS ARE RUINING THIS

>defending junkies
just don't be addicted then

>Friend and I both GM for our "group"
>We alternate weeks, so a game is run every week and both of us get two weeks to prepare for sessions
>Everybody wins
>One day two players bail on friend's game
>My next session isn't ready, we cancel plans, we'll run his game next week and push mine back a week
>Next week comes
>Everybody is excited
>Same two players bail right before game starts
>Agree to push my game back another week again to accomodate

This continued for a month with these two people bailing ten minute before the game starts. This meant pushing my own campaign back for a month, and punishing my own players who are super engaged in the story and have never missed a session. Hell, now I effectively have two campaigns on my hands because I had to run one-shots for the people who bothered to show up for the other GM's game.

I have no idea how someone can casually fuck up the weekend plans of two groups of people they're ostensibly friends with every weekend for an entire month without ever cowboying up and saying "Hey, I'm not going to be able to play this game with you guys, would you mind if I join you for X instead?"

Weeks? I still have to hear the old tale about how some village woman with a frying pan was able to luckily block his sword multiple times because i needed to wing the stats... In the second session we ever had. That was literally like 7 or 8 years abo

>Oh, we're tired of D&D, let's stop playing it and play this new system.
>Okay.
>Every 30 seconds stumble over something that is different about the new system than the D&D they're used to.

i tip my fedora to you fellow gentlesir xD

>Make a CoC game that has some meta elements sprinkled throughout.
>players take way to long to get started, so I have to cut a bunch of crap
>doesn't matter, make it to the end, big plot twist is revealed, feel like it went super well.
>have a bad habit of pulling back the curtains during cool down talk so I just book it, letting them talk.
>can't meet up with the group for 2 months, but am riding a high because I rocked their world with meta shit.
>finally meet up again.
>turns out they just loved the horror aspect. One of them openly stated he was suppressing a laugh the whole ending reveal.
>rest chimes in they didn't "get it" or found it cringy, but they really want to play more CoC horror.
>I've never felt more down in my life.

How, HOW did I misread that room THIS badly! I'm mortified at how smug, high and mighty I've been feeling. I've been riding a fake high for two months and now I've just faceplanted beyond repair. Thank God I never told anyone how up my own ass I was or I'd just have to kill myself.

FUCK!

>Not kicking them from the group after the second time.

There's no excuse to cancel at the last minute more than once.

it wasn't a fake high, man. you were happy, don't go retconning your own happiness and rewriting your life as a failure. take the positive aspects and treat the rest as a learning experience.

they liked the horror, and they still wanna play, so you can't have fucked up that badly.

chill bro, it's all good!

>clearly Granny Weatherwax

Just 'cos you didn't recognise her doesn't mean it wasn't...

>Complain all night that their dice suck - they've actually been rolling D12s instead of D20's to hit.

>Complain they have too many choices in your sandbox game - you design a more obvious linear quest for them to do within it - complain they feel forced to do the linear quest

>Tell eachother what HP they're on

>'I go to the shopkeeper and try to haggle the price the with him for the item I want to buy ' - cool roll a cha check - 'oh wait can I get the bard to roll it lol'

>Complains combats are 'imbalanced' - has never died in 8 levels.

>spend entire session on phone

>Take fuck all seriously and just make shitty meme jokes and puns

>Text me in game that I'm using the same word too often

>Whine that encumbrance is too hard to track

>Whine about not getting enough loot - gets loot - whines there's too much loot to track

>Mock me mispronouncing words sometimes

>Fuck I hate my players

This is a meta broad thing but failing to understand just how much effort running a game is. There's players who treat an RPG like you would a casual boardgame/video game/tv night and therefore flake, cancel, turn up late, don't take things seriously and generally treat the GM as a disposable game dispenser. If you bring up this fact they treat you like you're a fucking tryhard or you're trying to 'make them feel bad'.

I agree, and repeatedly talked to my friend about it until he caved and got serious with them. Unfortunately it wasn't my game that players were dropping from, so I wasn't in a position where I could have kicked them.

probably on Veeky Forums

My go-to tactic to deal with ingrates like that is tell them to run a game themselves. One of two things happens:
>1. they freeze up and/or make up excuses
>2. they say "Fine, I will!" and never actually run a game, and freeze up and/or make up excuses when confronted about it
Every single fucking time. None of these dipshits ever follow through.

the things i dislike the most is that they will forget which modifiers to use and will use the wrong dice
i dont require them to act out what they are trying to say when persuading, intimidating, etc. but they need to at least say what they are trying to accomplish
another thing is when they try to persuade or seduce or other charisma checks to npc's and have leverage to do so but dont even bring it up, like if they know something about their family or friends that they can lie about but hey dont use

if you are a player than find a new group
if you are a dm come up with an excuse so you can ditch them

>that pic

DELETE THIS

i would suggest that perhaps make your games built for more splitting up? we are currently in star wars rpg which is quite easy to split groups up with, but with regular dnd 5e is harder. in swg i am a player, not the dm, but i am able to stave off my cigarette habit for the game, and even so there are other things i could plan with the other player while the other players in their group since we split up from the other group. as much as i hate the other force sensitive character and even though i called dibs he whined to also be force sensitive, i greatly dislike him because he doesnt understand the game rules. he just wants to be force sensitive.

and i thought my group was bad

>>Text me in game that I'm using the same word too often

oh man im sorry but that actually cracked me up with how cartoonishly dickish that is

it least its only a player for you, my dm does this shit to me and the rest of the group like every third session

>roll out bad rolls before rolling normally
>mfw it works 99% of the time

t. Marisha

E U P H O R I C

I have a player I can't really say I'm mad at for this but I wish he didn't play this way.

After gaming with him for literally years I'm starting to realize that he's never really made any kind of character that stands out. I can remember a lot of fun games with my friends but I can always barely remember his characters. They're always very bland, vanilla, accessories to the party with very generic backstories and personalities and nothing outstanding or memorable mechanically.

I mean, he's never done anything wrong or upsetting, I just wish he would come up with something more interesting. I realize this tonight as we're making new characters for a game and he's playing something I know he's played 5 times by now and we're trying to encourage him to mix it up and he'd rather play what he's already played.

>Still haven't learned the rules after 10+ sessions

This is me. World of Darkness books are a fucking mess and I do my best to get by with as little knowledge of the system as possible, or I risk taking sanity damage. I am not sorry.

I hope for your sake you're talking about oWoD.

Yes.

> table of contents is twenty pages into the book
> character creation is halfway through the book
> the rules are a combination of two books
> the character sheet doesn't have all the skills listed in the secondary book
> various rules are casually mentioned at random points

Please end it.

>that way we could try to have a well-rounded group
Why? Only reason you would need a well rounded group is its a Premade game ran by a new DM and not a homebrewed story.

Why not have a party with 3 clerics?
Why not have a party of all force sensitive users?

Just RP it if anything it makes for a better story and as long as your not all sinking resources into the same exact thing it should be fine

Is this my GM if it is you will know this inside joke

>Next Week

Ether way why not talk to your players about it avoiding the topic will only cause strife just voice you bottled up emotions but use the power phrase "I feel like _____" so they don't get all defensive about it.

What was the plot twist, user?

This guy is right your own satisfaction shouldn't 100% come from the party you accomplished what you wanted.

Also I want to play some more COC myself

>there's just no way anyone who can run games should be short of players
Running an unpopular game?

I just dont know where to find players for my games. I have a group in which I am a player, but they arent interested in what I wanna run.
Online is shite

>>Whine that encumbrance is too hard to track
>>Whine about not getting enough loot - gets loot - whines there's too much loot to track

These are legit not fun things to have to deal with

>>'I go to the shopkeeper and try to haggle the price the with him for the item I want to buy ' - cool roll a cha check - 'oh wait can I get the bard to roll it lol'
Couldn't they just buy all the items together and have the bard talk to the shopkeep?

The rest of them seem pretty annoying

>>Mock me mispronouncing words sometimes
youtube.com/watch?v=3Rh1k2R2rv8

lmao

To his credit, search checks are fucking stupid.

>Text me in game that I'm using the same word too often

Oh jesus this is like my worst nightmare because I do this all the time and I hope no one ever notices.

All of my players I've known for years, and they respect my wishes to try other systems, and give them an honest shot. We usually end up coming back to some form of DnD (And I'm counting Legend/13th Age in that pile) eventually, but we do have a few games we play regularly otherwise, such as Shadowrun or Fate.

The general rule is that if we have a campaign idea we're sure DnD can't run properly, we try something else that seems better for it. I've been thinking of convincing them to use Ironclaw for our next low-magic campaign because low-level DnD stuff just doesn't seem right, somehow.

I know I'm just being a salty bitch, but it's hard to not feel down when you've been lying this hard to yourself and then be confronted with reality this brutally. But I'll get over it sooner or later.

That they were actually playing alternative reality versions of themselfs, and that they could switch places if they agreed to sacrifice the other thems to this horrible realm (convoluted, I know). I was actually really excited when one of them realised his caracter was supprisingly similar to himself.

If I can set the scene, Through out the game I'd force them to navigate areas with only candlelight, when that happened we'd turn off the lights and I'd light some candles. At the end of the game they found "the doctor" who could supposedly save them from the time distortion they were stuck in, he was in a dark small windowless cottage. When they entered I started describing the garage we played in. They are in a dark room so we turn off the lights and before I lid the candles this time I put on a plaguedoctor mask I had hidden in a box by my feet. From this point onwards I never spoke out of caracter for the doctor and had the doctor act suprised when they tried to talk out of character. They quickly realised what I'd done, that at this point they were their characters in everything except wounds. I thought they were having a genuinely mind fuck moment, but I guess I mistook cringe with shock.

Guess I'll stick to normal horror from now on.

Group 1
>Only two characters ever attempt to roleplay
>These two players don't like each other because their characters don't see eye to eye and it creates a bad environment
>One of the two roleplayers almost never shows up to the sessions
>STILL don't know the basic rules after we've been playing for over 4 months

Group 2
>One is just a blatant edgelord
>Wants to torture NPCs and have me roleplay it out despite group not being ok with it
>Other player hogs the spotlight waaaaay too much
>Constantly trying to roll for other players, no matter the situation
>Tries to retcon things when he realizes he didn't prepare spells that would be useful for the adventure because "he would have known what spells to prepare"
>Thinks his character has way more political pull because his family are super low nobility
>Constantly argues rules with the other players
>Doesn't know what his spells do after a year of play

I have a buddy who is just atrocious at roleplaying, but he really wants to be better so it's just impossible to hate on him. But he has this HORRIBLE habit of confusing "annoying" with interesting. One game he was playing a multiclassing rogue that was discovering his sorcerers powers. All good and dandy, except he made a habit of blowing up the party every time he learned a new spell, (said he was still learning this magic thing) sounds funny and shit but the DM is a hard ass who will fucking burn us to the ground if we take unwarranted rests. So there he is, blowing his spell slots and damaging the team, forcing us to use potions and healing spells causing the next couple of battles to take ages as we have to fucking micromanage every action to prevent a wipe. Fuck I hated that character.

Why didn't you murder him after the first time? It's bad enough being in hostile territory without having to worry about your allies shooting you in the back.

This the guy is taking being in character to the next level its time for you to do the same.

Because ruing his fun for ruining my fun didn't seem like the smart thing to do, I eventually broke down and told him to fucking stop it or my character would be forced to deal with him. I got a long whiney email from him the next day Asking me not to embarras him in front of the group and to talk to him in private. I really like the dude, but fuck me, he doesn't know how to play.

>Because ruing his fun for ruining my fun didn't seem like the smart thing to do, I eventually broke down and told him to fucking stop it or my character would be forced to deal with him. I got a long whiney email from him the next day Asking me not to embarras him in front of the group and to talk to him in private.
Drop him like a sack of bricks and calmly explain why he is not allowed back into the campaign. Convince everyone else to do the same and be prepared to block his ass if he harasses you outside of game.

Seriously, people like this never improve, they only deflect and point the blame to everyone else for not wanting to put up with his bullshit anymore.

>not knowing the rules after 10 sessions

Try 2 fucking years of that. And these POS always insist on playing casters with no desire to memorize even the most basic bitch spells. "How does Magic Missile work again?"

Tell them if they don't know how the spell works they can't use it.

>Play exclusively with friends because randos are even worse
I don't understand people who play roleplaying games with people they hardly know. Seems kind of intimate to just invite some guy you don't know over for.

That sounds pretty cool user.

Unfortunately some people just don't engage with horror well. I've tried a couple of times to do horror games with my group and it never works out. They're more of the beer and pretzels or problem solving types, so presenting them with horror just doesn't work, they don't engage the right way with the game for them to feel the horror their characters do.

They're a great group, and playing other types of games with them is really rewarding, but horror is just one of those things that will never work.

>Story stuff is going on
>Players are involved
>Except for one dude who is texting
>I try to snap him to attention
>"Wha? Oh, is it my turn?"
I now have a rule that if you're distracted and don't call time, your character is distracted and enemies can sneak attack your inattentive ass.

Have standards for your players and boot them when they don't meet your standards. Worms.

What kind of sandwich?

>Never expresses his opinion; usually just says "I dont care either way"
>Always plays charismatic characters, but has all the charisma of a dead fish
>Complains about bad rolls
>Self deprecating when others get good rolls
>Always uses the same name for his characters or just uses names from characters he likes
>Complains about other players having unoriginal characters
Hes just a general bore to play with

>Always plays edgy loner outcast characters with super secret dark backstories which he always refers to but refuses to talk about when asked by others
>Characters never have reason to join party
>Never interacts with NPC's and will always try to go off on his own in towns to brood or in dungeons to explore
>Constantly uses party resources but refuses to share loot he found himself
>Will always try to fight enemies one on one in combat and gets mad when party members 'steal' his kills

I personally would never run an online game. The point of tabletop is to bring people together and you lose a great deal of what makes it fun, in my opinion, when you're all at your respective homes, even over voicechat.

But, that's just my opinion. I see plenty of games here go great online, so more power to you guys. It's just not a viable option for everyone.

Online works if you know the people your playing with in person kept my group together when we all scattered for college

>PC makes face
>never talks
>just follows the party around; doesn't lead
>other players talk and progress the story
>a different player says something to constitute a Diplomacy test
>"Okay, I'll roll for you" says PC
>Me: No. I asked them to.
>PC: "You're not letting me play my character! Reeeee"

I'm fine with the "I'm not a face IRL so I just roll it out" thing, but piggybacking off of other player's story elements makes me sick

They do, but it's not a big deal and they're not spergs. There is an appropriate time to give your friend shit for sounding repetitive or redundant, but in-game is not that time.

+1 Respek for your players

I'm happy for you, user. Cheers.

people still smoke not-weed?

sounds like my old bass player

he (thankfully) quit drinking and got in great shape after though

the jerk store (cool people will get this reference and how it's relevant to the thread)