Saturday
Things A GM Should Never Let A Player Get Away With
Saturday morning I had the pleasure of having breakfast and conversation with Mike Stackpole, David Honigsberg, David’s friend (whose name escaped me) and my friend Van Siegling.
The game Saturday evening was the second of the two events that really spoiled the weekend for me, and this time it was the fault of two of the players involved.
The scenario was a standard “search and rescue” plot. We were playing members of an unofficial detective agency who did “jobs” for people, with hardly any questions asked. The “case” was to recover an occult artifact: we were a mixed bag of vampires, werewolves, and changelings. The recovery would be comparatively easy compared to the trouble I saw with two of the players involved.
The first of these players unfortunately was sitting next to me. He could have used the effects of a good shower, but that was a relatively minor defect compared to what he pulled as a player during the game. For one, he was a demanding and inconsiderate player. Whenever he wanted to do something he yelled to the GM that he was going to do it, demanding the GM stop talking with whomever else he was GMing to answer this guy. The guy also went off on his own, for no satisfactory reason, while the rest of us were trying to break into a compound, and therefore the GM had to interrupt our efforts every time this guy wanted to do something, and he almost immediately got into trouble and had to (or wanted to) do a lot of things.
He also, despite several attempts to tell him otherwise, kept mouthing the character’s words or else speaking very quietly (he was playing a Changeling sluagh, who can talk in nothing above a whisper.) Even the GM, sitting to my left, couldn’t hear him. Now if this had been in a quiet living room it would have been acceptable to play in character this way but when you’re in a noisy auditorium where you can barely hear the people talking at normal volume it was annoying and frustrating. And, like I said, he kept doing it even after we told him we couldn’t hear him. He seemed to take pleasure it
frustrating the other players for some reason.
The other troublesome player was more restrained, troublesome in a different way. There are what are called “rules rapists”, who know every trick and loophole in the rules and use them relentlessly for their own gain. This guy was a “scenario rapist”, who used his own additions to the scenario (with the GMs befuddled coöperation) to get away with a lot of things that I as a GM would have stopped after the first or second occurrence.
For example, the character was a computer hacker. The player described exactly how he was going to get the information he wanted in a series of repeated “I do this, therefore that happens, which means …”. It was a long string of statements that were phrased not so much as a question but more of a pronouncement, and, in the end, he got the information he wanted with hardly any effort or dice rolling. But in doing so, he took advantage of the GM. It didn’t matter that it advanced the scenario, the player had taken control of the scenario from the GM.
He would continue to do this, stating that he was going to do something and the GM letting him do it. He was really out of control.
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