How do you deal with retarded players?

I'm not even talking consequences of stupid actions, I'm talking about just not getting basic cause and effect, or understanding reasonable things in the setting.

>One of the PC's develops a supernatural skill which wallows him to communicate with horses telepathically and control them to an extent.
>As they wander along adventuring, wind up falling in with some Sarmatian inspired steppe horse nomads.
>horses are a really big part of their culture.
>Horse-teep is treated like a demigod.
>nobody in the party understands why.
>Wind up wasting about half of last session trying to explain why a bunch of people who live around horses all the time, revere horses, think that horses are a gift from the chief god of their pantheon, would revere a guy who can magically commune with horses.

Kicking them or moving on to a new group doesn't substantially help. I seem to magnetically attract retards no matter how many of them I go through, and it's honestly killing my desire to GM. What do you guys do?

There's no cure for stupid. Well, except books. But good like getting the stupid to read more.

You need to SHOW, not TELL.

You need to keep in mind that while players can be dense, they're operating under a huge hindrance because they can't see what you're picturing in your mind during the game, so they're wholly reliant on you to clue them in about what's happening. "A monster is charging at you, roll initiative!!!" is a lot easier to comprehend than "The nomads are maybe treating one of the players differently? I can't tell exactly why."

Drop them.

> Not the GM
Tell the GM to drop the retard.

I did SHOW. I had these people constantly assuming that Torreleal, the horse telepath, was the actual leader of the party. I had wives asking him for advice as to how to raise their children. I had a near endless parade of people asking him to rig various horsemanship contests that are part and parcel of these people's culture.

All it produced was confusion.

This is the group I got after dropping the last group of idiots, who had trouble grasping the concept that if you want to be evil, and torture someone for information, and then let him go after he tells you what you want without any oversight whatsoever, he'll run to the police and sic them on you.

Dropping retards is easy. Keeping them from being replaced by other people who are equally retarded is what's escaping me.

Did the villagers straight out state what he is like those portrayals of the savages announcing that the sun god has shown up when some white dudes walk in? From my experiences, do not be subtle since not every player will get your implications.

Of course my group also doesn't understand basic social implications of a medieval monarchy such as never assume a monarch is your equal.

Did anyone ever say it was because of his abilities?
OK, they're being a bit dense about this, but why not solve it by having the nomads give him some kind of title, like 'horse talker', or something?
They should get the hint then. If not, well, you're on your own.

I had a fellow player told to roll a chance dice 1-5 instant death.

He reached for a D6.

>mfw Nigga what are you doing.

Yes, I did have them address him by a title (Sha-dar, stolen from the Eddings books), and how those abilities are clearly a gift from the gods and make him a of holy man, worthy of reverence. By the end of it, I had even broken past the screen, and told them GM to players, that horse telepaths are basically worshiped by the Saurraka.

Oh man way to just bring up some PDST I had involving one particular shadow run player.
In Shadow Run there is one particular meta race called a Drake, which is a human who can turn into a small dragon form. It naturally gives you a ton of benefits, but costs a ton of BP to start as one.
There is also a HUGE negative drawback to being a drake in terms of game canon, in that everyone in the world will want to capture and dissect you. As a result you either have to suck megacorp dick, NEVER turn into a drake, or live in complete isolation and squaller.

This player browbeat our GM to let them be a latent drake. Which means that they didn't need to pay the upfront cost and got to become a drake later on in the game at significantly less cost. The moment they turned into a drake they began flaunting it out in the open and it only got worse.
Bare in mind Shadow Run is a game where you need to be covert and this character was flying around the city as a Drake. The player was literally incapable of understanding why the rest of the party would have a problem with that.
The GM told me normally they'd punish players super fucking severely for that in anyother game, but the problem with shadow run is there was no way to punish this player without fucking over the rest of us who were actually laying low and doing our best to be covert.
It got to the point where we just had to kick them out, it sucked but the game was better for it.

Ignoring whether the players were retarded or not, I have to ask, where were you going with making one particular player a demigod in this community's eyes? It seems quite a weird direction for a game to take.

>asking him to rig various horsemanship contests
That is one weird religion.
>hey, priest, can you turn this water into wine so I can win a bet?

Because I build from top-down, worlds, societies, towns, clans, people; create a locus of conflicts and then toss the PC's into the world. There's no particular plot point, or even strict necessity that the PC's wandered off into the open steppe. But I thought that if you have a game where there's this horse telepathy ability, and you have a bunch of nomadic steppe horsefuckers, they'll probably see that sort of ability as either supremely magical or divine.

I had that down before we had anything more than the vaguest concepts of character creation, and it was 3 sessions before someone even took the ability. When they ambled out onto the steppe, I kept the previously established data, even if the players were unaware of it.

It's not really that different from most classical religion, and I draw a lot of inspiration from classical Greece and Rome. The idea that the Gods are some sort of impartial and fair sources of Goodness, as opposed to power, is really something that only starts to emerge in the later Hellenic ages. They're supernatural kings, obeyed because they can do good things if you're nice to them and obliterate you if you displease them. Look at the rampant cheating in the funeral games for Patrokles in the Iliad, and yes, the various heroes invoke the Gods to help them do so.

Strewth, that sounds like a lot of effort for stuff the players might not even wander into. Good work, that man.

Ok so player doesn't understand. Character doesn't understand either. What's the problem?

A lot of it can be recycled, especially if there's a lot of player attrition. It amortizes over the years.

The problem is that I keep getting questions asking to explain it. I'm perfectly willing to explain it, but trying to tear down this wall inside their heads is wearing.

If there's a consistent pattern of many or your groups being "retarded" and not understanding you, is it possible that you actually just have a problem properly communicating your ideas?

I suppose, but I tend to be able to communicate reasonably effectively outside of roleplaying games where I GM. I've managed to communicate the key concepts of this setting interaction in about a trio of posts to total strangers, none of which was more than about 8 lines of text.

>PDST

could you give us the gist of the interaction? my only thought here is they must have all forgotten the player can talk to horses or didn't realise the nomads had a religious reverence for them.

>There's no particular plot point
This is why you attract retards. If you don't have a plot you're basically telling the players "I dunno, you think of something!" which any player with a firing neuron avoids like an AIDS-covered porcupine.

You've got all these people and cities and continents and such, try starting off with "one of them wants to do a thing which could be very harmful to a different one of them". It's not hard.

Whoops dyslexia sucks

I'm condensing, because this is a series of small things spread out over hours.

>Doing some commerce with these horse people.
>They all assume that Torreleal is the guy in charge, because when he goes to inspect the horses, they all immediately notice how they're acting strange around him. Torreleal confirms he can communicate with the beasts, even control them a little.
>Actual party leader gets a bit irritated at all of this, especially since Torreleal is starting to agree to proposals on behalf of the group without consulting the rest of them.
>Asks me why the hell they all treat him like the second coming.
>Try to get him to do it in character
>He does so, go through the spiel about Sha-Darim and how they're a gift from the gods.
>Asks to see the rulebook, fades to the background for a bit.
>A while later, pipes up that there's nothing in the skill set about being divine.
>At this point, IC communication breaks down completely and we wind up with a back and forth amateur sociology debate, mostly over the idea that just because the rulebook doesn't mention divinities, doesn't mean that a bunch of people in a fantasy world, who don't know the rules of a game, might form their own beliefs about things, which might or might not be accurate.
>This is somewhat complicated because I have a firm policy of never telling anything, GM to players that isn't 100% absolutely true about the game or the setting, but at the same time trying to preserve a bit of ambiguity as to whether or not the setting deities actually exist.

Honestly, it's that second to last part that's probably the main problem, and I've seen it with other groups. There's some sort of gap or mental leap made. I'm having trouble articulating it in abstract, but here's an example to try to illustrate it.
1/2

>In our real life world, we have people sitting around telling ghost stories
>But we know that there really aren't vengeful spirits haunting the living over some slight.
>So anyone telling a story is probably just doing it for scare factor or to entertain.
>But in most fantasy settings, there are vengeful spirits who haunt the living over slights.
>Therefore, a bunch of people sitting around a campfire telling ghost stories MUST be telling about actual, real spirits that historically existed and actually fucked someone over.

The idea that in addition to actual supernatural events, you have a layer of ignorance and superstition clouding the issues does not seem to penetrate. Horse telepathy is just a supernatural skill that works primarily off the willpower stat. What's divine favor got to do with it, I don't see any of that in the rules, so why do these NPCs act that way?

Yes, I have lots of things going on. But I don't force the players to interact with them, at least not unless they really choose to get involved with something and start to develop social ties. I've tried it the other way around, strongarming players into stuff, at least at first, and that tends to result in the exact opposite effect: they resent being shanghaied into some plot point, look for a way to escape it or deliberately twist it around from whatever they think the GM wants to do with it, and then run off laughing.

So when they got to the Saurakan lands, you had multiple different clans vying for influence, raids of cattle and horses. You had various expeditions, some trade, some for war (And often both, with the nomads keeping their options open until they saw how well defended a given locale is) with their neighboring more settled peoples. The PC's mission that originally got them there to stay was a hire from a regional governor/lord from a kingdom that loosely bordered them to buy some superior Saurakan horses to improve his own stable's pedigree. Stuff is always happening, but it's not a plot, because it doesn't necessarily concern the PC's unless and until they start interacting with it.

Maybe he's a sucker for Russian Roulette?