That one thing. You know the one I mean.

[Tadanori Oyama]

Quick thread for some collective angry ranting. I mostly want to vent my own rage but anyone with a problem is free to jump in at any time. If you share my specific source of rage, cool. If not, I'd love to hear about your's.



So this is, in general, about the thing that annoys me most in gaming.

I don't get to be a player most of the time. Normally I'm running the game and I try to keep the game moving. I do so with various GM tricks like counting down from ten, egg timers, and the eternal "you only have a few seconds: what do you do!?".

As a player, I don't have these same tools because I do not control the nature of reality within the game. So when my fellow players sit and ponder or fret or whatever people who act slowly do in their heads, I'm stuck like a goldfish in a bowl waiting for the thirty seconds that I need to complete my turn and get to the action. Like I said, I'm not a player too often so when I do get the chance, each moment is a precious gem for me and I can only watch as others steal my darling treasures, hording them like a diabetic dragon holds diamonds under its scally flab.

I, and by extension the rest of the group, spent thirty whole minutes waiting for one person to act. Rage boils in my stomach with enough heat to send acidic vapors up my throat and out my nose, turning my six sided dice into so much liquid plastic as I grind them together against my upperlip, my eye twitching stare centered on the subject of my loathing!

Thirty fucking minutes of thinking and worrying and asking what they should do and then not doing anything when we gave them advise! The endless, pointless worrying about the fate of their character, and above all making the right choice. Even the idea of a right choice in an RPG makes me mad! It's a god damned game. Play it.

My gentle nudging fails to get them to move faster. My aggressive nudging causes them to curl up tighter. My kitchen knife based nudging upsets the other players. There's no good solution.

Ahh... I feel better.

[clockworkjoe]

I feel your pain. This is why I'm always the guy who does stupid shit in a game when playing - I want to see shit happen - if there's an evil book, I read it. If there's an elder god, I look at it and if there's a deck of many things I TAKE FIVE CARDS.

[Tadanori Oyama]

Exactly! I love to poke at things, try and get everyone to do stuff.

[Wooberman]

Just last week I had the fortune to actually play a session of shadowrun as a Human Ninja with reptilian based cyber parts (Kid stealth legs with inverted knees, Toe Razors, Balance tail, Tongue lash weapon etc).
The session ground to a painful halt as the run criteria was laid on the table. Simply to go into a Rich girl's house party, kidnap her and then drop her off at a designated drop point. The Ideas that were being thrown out were tremendous and horrifying.
The Rigger wanted to fly in with his Chinook style Heli and 'Sky hook' the chick out of the building (a la The Dark Knight).
The Merc wanted to fire tear gas grenades into the party from the Rigger's A-team style transporter then conduct a search for the mark who will be incapacitated.
These are the only ones i can remember probably because the other plans were so absurd they defied reasoning and were subsequently blocked out of my mind for my protection.
All this time the GM (Gods bless him) was trying so hard to get the message across that A- this is probably best dealt with as a stealth mission and B- Its a Rich Girl's party meaning she probably invited everyone and their cat and you could probably crash it i.e. just turn up.
In the end it took Me and the Group's other stealth character, Dwarf rendition of Walker Texas Ranger, to say 'We're just going to the party'.

Thankfully in the end it was as simple as the GM laid it out to be. We got in there without a hitch (barring me being questioned and replying with the worst Asian accent i could 'Ah goin to pahtee'), found the chick hooked up to a chip deck, Tazed her, Cloaked her (with the aid of the group's shaman) and got outta there sharpish.

Later we find out that we were caught on CCTV and with curses to the GM, The REAL plot begins!

[TigerStorm]

As a GM, it's funny (at first) when players over-think stuff and over-complicate things... for a while... then it just gets frustrating... It's hard to find that healthy balance between giving them just enough info to keep moving and reving up the chainsaw.

As a player, it's ALWAYS frustrating when other players over-complicate stuff... Especially when "it's not your turn" so you can't do what you know they should be doing...

[pwvogt]

First: our group is a group of friends. We've all known each other from early high school and are now all out of college - it's been a while. We haven't been playing most of the time, maybe only the last two or three years.

This being said, we have a player who, while he has a master's degree and generally did better in college than I did, has zero patience with learning any new rules or taking the time to actually learn his characters outside of his one favorite D&D character. This is the kind of guy who claims I nerf everything and idea he has when I GM. He's the guy in the group that, when you explain shooting at the zombie who is struggling with his best friend, he may shoot the best friend on accident, then shoots, and almost kills the best friend, he complains wildly about how "gay" it is and lame. I mean I WARNED HIM BEFORE HE ROLLED THE DICE, TOO BAD IF THE ZOMBIE DODGED IT AND HIS FRIEND DIDN'T!

Anyway, just Friday night we're playing D&D 4E. We're in an inn trying to talk to the city guard. This friend, who's playing a beast master ranger with a polar bear for a pet, decides that, while I and my brother and assisting in a silence rune to protect the room, he's bored and his pet is going to dig a hole in the ground... IN THE INN. The DM, another friend, is trying to get some important plot information to us as I'm trying to role play with the city guard, and we hear "my bear rolled a 34 strength test to dig in the room!" As my brother points out that there's a cellar and the bear will fall 20 feet, taking 2d10 damage, this trouble player exclaims "I didn't really do it!" He does stupid shit like this all the time and no one holds him to it. Not this time, my brother insists since he rolled for it, the bear should take the damage (seriously, the bear has over 100 hp, he can handle the fall for God's sake). This player gets all huffy and the DM agrees, so the bear takes all 8 damage from the fall.

We got over it later, but God, this is a burgeoning problem that is going to have to dealt with some day. The friend's good company when not trying to blow shit up in every occasion in a fake world when we're all playing make-believe.

[TigerStorm]

That's why my old group always played with the "Blue Flag Rule"... it was when someone said something, and it wasn't in character, they had to give a notice that it wasn't in character (i.e. crossing your fingers visibly while jokingly saying "I wonder if my polar bear would be strong enough to dig through the floor... let's find out...")

The two best examples of us holding ourselves to this came in the underdark when, after recieving the description of seeing a physical manifestation of Lolth for the first time, a player (who had played with us for some time but neither he nor his character knew much about the underdark) proceeded to say "So, who's the bitch with all the spiders?"

... ... ... yah... that didn't end well for him... But at least he didn't get mad when he realized that he had, accidentally, said that in character...

There was another time when I caught the GM in a Blue Flag moment... I had a shape-shifting character who had disguised himself as an attractive female to gather information and was... *ahem* ... very successful. The GM proceeded to jokingly say "Congratulations, you recieve 3 skill points in profession: prostitution" to which I replied "I add my CHA modifier to that particular skill, right?" ... He had said it jokingly but gave it to me anyway since he was following his own rule. Later on in that quest, my character had some free time and decided to put his new skill to use... (I rolled a nat 20... you can imagine the money he got from THAT one)

[codered]

I wish I could play with any one of you guys the people I play with are very subpar gammers that can't do anything right. I would dm but with my 2 jobs business and fulltime in college I'm lucky to sleep. hopefully at next years Gencon i will get a good gamming fix. untill then I will just live through all the great Ap's i get to hear from Rppr.

[Mckma]

I've found it frustrating that in the two main groups I play with, the focus still seems to be, "Let's get as strong as possible so we can beat up anyone who wants to oppose us."  Luckily the main group I game with has started to work more on roleplaying, but there is still a much more simplistic undertone.  As an example, in one game we are playing, currently based loosely on Fallout 3, my character is essentially doing his best to emulate MacGyver, and thus refuses to use guns or even kill people.  He is also highly trained in explosives.  Suffice it to say that the other people get really mad at me when I try to use the dynamite and grenades to distract or incapacitate rather than kill the human enemies.  I'll be honest, I'm kind of jealous listening to the APs where the mix of different elements seems much closer to what I would prefer.

Oh yeah, and it sucks to GM a lot (especially when you aren't really that good)...

[ethan_dawe]

How I deal with over-thinking depends on the time of night. Whenit's getting close to time to pick-up I tend to prod things along by shaking my head or even bluntly saying "that thing is nothing." Other times I let the players investigate and perhaps make the nothing into a something if I can adlib something good for it to be. Hey, does that make any sense?

[Tadanori Oyama]

Ran the second session of my Exalted game recently. I learned a valuable lesson: I should never give this group of people open solutions to problems. I'd rail roaded them through the first session (as an introduction to the game and system) and left the field wide open for the second.

Basically they had physically sealed the entrance/exit of a cavern system that contained 100 nasty goblins and their fey master. The players are aware, in character, that any one of them could take the goblins and any one of them could fight the fey to a standstill. There are three of them all together. None of the players are specialized in combat but this is fucking Exalted, their demi-gods. One of them can't be hit by mortal weapons without the system equivalent of a Natural 20. They could deal.

But we spent about three hours listening to two of the players try and come up with the perfect way to deal with the situation. Because one of them had an ability to move soil and stone with magic they wanted to work various tunnels down into the caves or extend another cave onto the first one or create a sealed "arena" at the entrance to the caves.

Me and the third player's attempts to move things forward only succeeded in moving the planning to another step. That I failed personally, as the GM, to keep a lid the players use of time makes it sting more.

[ArtfulShrapnel]

I feel your pain. This is why I'm always the guy who does stupid shit in a game when playing - I want to see shit happen - if there's an evil book, I read it. If there's an elder god, I look at it and if there's a deck of many things I TAKE FIVE CARDS.

My good friend Zachary Hero distilled this sentiment down to its essence during a Mage game.

"Interesting is better than safe."

Those are words I have tried to carry with me as I go into other GM's games.

Take the road less travelled. Talk to the scary man in the corner. Open the box. Read the ancient scroll. Roll intimidate vs. the Angel of Death. You're a fucking ADVENTURER. If you were the kind of person who chose the safe option you'd still be at home, reading books about the people that didn't.

[Mckma]

I feel your pain. This is why I'm always the guy who does stupid shit in a game when playing - I want to see shit happen - if there's an evil book, I read it. If there's an elder god, I look at it and if there's a deck of many things I TAKE FIVE CARDS.

My good friend Zachary Hero distilled this sentiment down to its essence during a Mage game.

"Interesting is better than safe."

Those are words I have tried to carry with me as I go into other GM's games.

Take the road less travelled. Talk to the scary man in the corner. Open the box. Read the ancient scroll. Roll intimidate vs. the Angel of Death. You're a fucking ADVENTURER. If you were the kind of person who chose the safe option you'd still be at home, reading books about the people that didn't.

Kind of on the same lines, an anecdote from the first Savage Worlds game I played.  Essentially we were Vikings and we were wandering through the woods when we heard these sounds.  Previously I had been playing very cautiously (despite a hindrance being curious).  We deduced it was something (I forget the exact name, but it was essentially a horde of ghosts on an endless hunt that charges through the woods).  Remembering my hindrance I decided to throw caution to the wind and stand in the middle of the path and stare them down, to see what exactly it was.  They charged by, and I failed my fear check, but got an adrenaline rush (the only positive fear result), and wasn't damaged by the damage roll.  Conversely, all the people who tried to roll out of the way were either hurt by the stampede or suffered negative fear effects.

So, while it wasn't because I made my decision that I "benefited," but I would like to think so...

[acronomicon]

My current beef stems mostly from not having a regular gaming group.  I stick to mostly playing D&D Living Forgotten Realms.  Between running into people that are absolutely convinced they know how the game should work (if I hear one particular guy screaming about how NPC's are ignoring his shamanic glowing bear, I'm going to choke him to death, resuscitate him, and kill him again),  and others that have no creative problem skills at all, I tend to get my fill of bad playing.  Thankfully there are generally good gamers there as well, so it's not a total loss.

Because I'm approaching middle age, I'm going to invoke my "These kids today" right and blame it on video games.  They're so used to having strict paths to follow, and single solutions to problems, that there's no need to think outside the box.  I don't know that it's really true, but since they're not on my lawn I can't gripe at them for that.

[nbneil]

I feel your pain Tad.  I really only play in the Rogue Trader game you run.  If you want in on a game I am running, you can jump in.  That way you at least get to play. 

I'm generally pretty tolerant of what my players do, but the thing that really gets me is they end up fighting NPCs that I planned on them negotiating with, but negotiate with NPCs that I assume they will fight.  Occasionally, I just provoke the fight either way and make it seem like they fucked up the negotiation.  The other thing that we pointed out in an Aftersession was that they were actually mad at me when I wouldn't have an NPC bend to their arguments regardless of persuasion rolls.  In the specific case, the characters captured an enemy goblin after a raid.  Imprisoned and questioned him only to find out a huge ship of goblins was coming to the colony and potentially raiding/destroying it.  They then went to sleep, woke up, sold some water to the local farmers, went to the leader of the colony, offered to sell him water, THEN told him about the impending doom.  Needless to say he was pissed and thought maybe that information was more important than selling some shit to farmers.  Some of the players were then mad that he was being suck a dick to them.  I think under the circumstances that no amount of persuasion is going to calm him down after that.  I thought it was hilarious over annoying afterward, but in the moment I was stunned that they were mad.