Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)

  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account
Aib Ld said:
And I am glad because these two are the worst players I've ever seen. They're not the annoying kind, they are the 'theater kid' kind. Refusing to play the game like using mechanics and rolls, not paying attention and repeatedly asking whats the plot to other players, refusing to read the rulebook to repeatedly pausing the game, thinking they can get through sessions by only roleplaying and doing lame one-liners that kill a scene, and so on.
Click to expand...
Sorry you had to put up with them as long as you did, but on the bright side your campaign is going to improve dramatically by their absence. My personal preference GMing is that I'd rather run a campaign for 2 quality players than a "full" campaign of half good players and half quirky speds. Your description is also a near 1-to-1 exact description of how I would have described the worst player I ever had as well, so good riddence to them.

Just curious, but did these two players happen to primarily be DnD 5e players or viewers of 5e streams like Critical Roll and others? This is behavior I've noticed repeatedly to one degree or another from that demographic to that point I've started to be wary of letting anyone play whose sole TTRPG experience is playing 5e DnD.

Capsaicin Addict said:
I absolutely detest people who fail to at least study the mechanics of their own fucking character. It's especially bad with casters, but if the game grinds to a halt every few minutes because someone doesn't know how their shit works, it stops being fun.

This is why I encourage people to build quick reference sheets and make sure their math is done before the game even starts.
Click to expand...
At my table we are constantly playing new games and rotating in a couple new players, so I understand people need time to adjust to new rules and new table etiquette, so we have a pretty good policy of a 2 month grace period. Inside that 2 month zone everyone's willing to let shit slide, after that you're gonna start catching shit from the other players and me the GM. If you don't know how your sheet works you're gonna get called a retard till you either learn or get used to being the tables punching bag, if you drag your turns out because you weren't paying attention we're just going to start skipping your turn until you can take it in a reasonable amount of time. It's not fair to the rest of the table that your single turn is almost as long as the rest of the combat round combined.

Especially in the age of the Windows 11 screenshot being an instant image crop, if you're too retarded to remember what your spells do then don't bother trying to remember, crop the spell right out of the rulebook into a Word file and just have it there for when your turn is coming up.
 
Last edited:
Konigsberg said:
Just curious, but did these two players happen to primarily be DnD 5e players or viewers of 5e streams like Critical Roll and others? This is behavior I've noticed repeatedly to one degree or another from that demographic to that point I've started to be wary of letting anyone play whose sole TTRPG experience is playing 5e DnD
Click to expand...
Both. Which makes it worse.
I wasn't wary because I thought 'at least they got out of DnD and willing to give other games a try'. Which was a fatal mistake in hindsight since they dragged their DnD memes and playstyles with them.
Which was also yet another mistake since I gave them a grace period of a week and they still didn't change.
Looking back, I sure bended over backwards to a lot of insane stuff.
 
LovisXVI said:
Maybe it is the kind of people I have run for, but I associate the theater kid roleplayer as one who is overly concerned with the plot and the character, rather than someone who is sort of just not paying attention. Sounds like they were just bad players to me. Personally, my main gripe is when people can't be bothered to engage with the roleplay or game things out so much that it slows the whole thing down to talmudic rule discussion.
Click to expand...
For me a theater kid is a player who is overly dramatic/not emotionally stable, very little attention span, needs everything to be focused on them/their character, and views mechanics as unnecessarily limiting their snowflake speshul character.

A theater kid never pays attention to anything that isn't their own character or related to how they want things to go with their character, regardless of the game, campaign, or rest of the players.

Aib Ld said:
Both. Which makes it worse.
I wasn't wary because I thought 'at least they got out of DnD and willing to give other games a try'. Which was a fatal mistake in hindsight since they dragged their DnD memes and playstyles with them.
Which was also yet another mistake since I gave them a grace period of a week and they still didn't change.
Looking back, I sure bended over backwards to a lot of insane stuff.
Click to expand...
The frog boiling is hellaciously real.
 
Ghostse said:
For me a theater kid is a player who is overly dramatic/not emotionally stable, very little attention span, needs everything to be focused on them/their character, and views mechanics as unnecessarily limiting their snowflake speshul character.

A theater kid never pays attention to anything that isn't their own character or related to how they want things to go with their character, regardless of the game, campaign, or rest of the players.
Click to expand...
This. They're the kind of person who thinks they're on Critical Role and forgets that the G in RPG is for "Game". Hogging the spotlight, etc. Then there's the Critical Role specific fanboys who just assume that a group of players, or group of characters at the start of a campaign is going to have the same level of banter as the actual CR people while forgetting those people have been playing together for years, and even their campaigns run for years, all while being professional voice actors who have made a living for a decade doing improv.

These days theater kid and obnoxious CR fan are practically the same.
 
Aib Ld said:
Both. Which makes it worse.
I wasn't wary because I thought 'at least they got out of DnD and willing to give other games a try'. Which was a fatal mistake in hindsight since they dragged their DnD memes and playstyles with them.
Click to expand...
See that's what I initially thought as well and got the same results. A lot of people who primarily play DnD 5e and watch DnD 5e streams seem to never grow out of that playstyle or what they see on those streams; no matter what other games they play. Even worse their entire understanding of what role-playing a character is boils down to "me but I'm a quirky dickhead with horns/scales/webbed feet etc.". I don't understand how that game and streams seems to churn out these hordes of unfunny "That Guy"s but it does.

Maybe I'm an old fart now but I seriously do not recall having to overcome this hurdle when my friends and I transitioned away from DnD 3.5 and Pathfinder into other games, nor do I deal with this problem with people who have literally never played a TTRPG and have only ever heard of DnD through pop culture osmosis. There's something in the water over at 5e DnD and it's turning the players gay and retarded.
 
1774935568918.png
This guy gets it.

https://keganexe.itch.io/blister-city only 999814 community copies remaining
 
Konigsberg said:
Maybe I'm an old fart now but I seriously do not recall having to overcome this hurdle when my friends and I transitioned away from DnD 3.5 and Pathfinder into other games, nor do I deal with this problem with people who have literally never played a TTRPG and have only ever heard of DnD through pop culture osmosis. There's something in the water over at 5e DnD and it's turning the players gay and retarded.
Click to expand...
It's the modern internet, and as you said nerd pop culture.
Stranger Things
Critical Role
Big Bang Theory
etc.

Combine that with the occasional sprinkle of autism never checked with an ass kicking in highschool, with a heaping pile of assholes seeing something other people enjoyed and then invading it and demanding everything change without even looking at what shit was to begin with and this is what you get. Remember all of the screeching multiple times over the past couple years about Hasbro fucking with the OGL and people swearing they'd never touch D&D again and move onto other systems? Yeah that didn't happen. They tried some other shit, maybe a one shot or some other sort of demo game and either got scared by the actual game part, or wrote it off as Temu D&D.

There was a video I saw a number of years back, featuring faggots talking about how before 5e, they'd go to a game store and see people playing different games, not knowing what those games were, and go into a panic. "But with everyone playing 5e, game night is solved!". Some of them don't even consider that other genres of TTRPG even exist.

There was another video which fortunately I do have, from 2019 that shows another angle of this problem.

So this fat bitch claims to be 25, and that D&D isn't just for "beardy boys in a basement". Sure, fine. "All you need is a few friends and a dungeon master" why can't one of your friends or even yourself be the DM? Mentions that it's escapism, yet today(well even then), so many of these new soy nerds wanted to include everything from the real world that they possibly could, from politics to their skin conditions(that's no longer escapism). "It's got its problems with diversity and inclusion" no it doesn't. I've said it before in this thread, but the unga bunga orcs and savage elves were shit from before she was even born let alone playing D&D. "There's groups out there working on it" yeah they've been fucking it up for years now. "It's what's made me the most friends in life" ok that's fine. "It isn't just for nerds and never has been" well no shit? It's just that for decades nerd culture wasn't trendy so people wouldn't go near it, or they'd just mock it.

Yet another video I recall from this same time period, might have even been the same fat bitch, revolved around how she wanted to get into D&D in highschool and was finally playing 5e in her 20s. But somehow none of the nerds would let her and her female friends into the groups to play. Now things might have changed since I was in highschool, but I can't imagine "ew yuck no girls allowed" if they were actually genuinely interested in shit being a thing in 2010. In my day, anyone saying that shit after junior high would have been called a faggot(see my previous comment above about autism going unchecked). At the same time of course, nothing was stopping the dumb bitch and her friends from going to a store and just buying the books themselves and playing as their own group... in other words they were full of shit. In 2010 you could have easily looked up where to buy D&D books on google since it wasn't some arcane mystery tomes that just manifested in every nerd's belongings. Hell, you could have easily just found the damned PDFs in 2010 on google.

The only reason this sort of person really wants in now, is because it's the trendy lifestyle nerd chic bullshit. That's it. They saw Critical Role, and saw a "game" where everyone is the star under the spotlight, without realizing those are professionals doing a job to entertain an audience and it isn't representative of most games.
 
Konigsberg said:
There's something in the water over at 5e DnD and it's turning the players gay and retarded.
Click to expand...
It came out around 2014, which puts it in the unfortunate timeframe of being sandwiched between peak millennial hipster geek chic, political brain rot, mass enshittification, and the rise of Twitch streaming. That leads to...
p1138 said:
But somehow none of the nerds would let her and her female friends into the groups to play.
Click to expand...
...entryism. Find a hobby full of overly agreeable dorks, socially pressure your way in, claim everyone there before you le problematic for clout and authority, then beg the faggot toy company that owns the license to pander to the lowest common denominator doomscrolling glue eaters with unresolved daddy issues and sexual neuroses. Add onto the fact that the company considers the branding more valuable than the game actually attached, and you have the groundwork for an extremely sanitized ruleset with a fanbase full of ADHD mouth breathers, people who think they're funnier than they are desperately trying to reenact other peoples' memes, and failed podcasters under the delusion that people will pay into their Patreons for 2 hours spent making dick jokes and putting on the worst accents you've ever heard.
 
Halbschwanz said:
Add onto the fact that the company considers the branding more valuable than the game actually attached,
Click to expand...
Considering how these consoomers(and they definitely are) want to treat D&D like a "lifestyle brand" it's obvious that Hasbro would operate that way. They've claimed in the past that D&D is "under-monetized" and I agree, it is. Of course they release one book a year, don't seem to have any concept of wanting to release an AD&D 5e, pissed off potential licensing partners for content, most of their audience can't complete an adventure from 1-10 anyway let alone a campaign that runs longer(and they know this), with insane amounts of money spent on shit that no one cares about, while the company drools at the thought of nickel and diming people over magic items in a proprietary VTT, a failed TV network with a bunch of money wasted on celebrity guests for a fucking cooking show, and you get a franchise with a ton of fans who buy shit... but they don't buy official D&D shit.

As gay and retarded as Paizo is, they've usually got a chapter of some adventure coming out once a month. Doesn't mean you need to play them all, but at least before more recent faggotry in recent years it meant there was some variety in the shit they were publishing.
 
p1138 said:
Yet another video I recall from this same time period, might have even been the same fat bitch, revolved around how she wanted to get into D&D in highschool and was finally playing 5e in her 20s. But somehow none of the nerds would let her and her female friends into the groups to play. Now things might have changed since I was in highschool, but I can't imagine "ew yuck no girls allowed" if they were actually genuinely interested in shit being a thing in 2010. In my day, anyone saying that shit after junior high would have been called a faggot(see my previous comment above about autism going unchecked). At the same time of course, nothing was stopping the dumb bitch and her friends from going to a store and just buying the books themselves and playing as their own group... in other words they were full of shit. In 2010 you could have easily looked up where to buy D&D books on google since it wasn't some arcane mystery tomes that just manifested in every nerd's belongings. Hell, you could have easily just found the damned PDFs in 2010 on google.
Click to expand...
Lying whore.

Holy fuck, I can't think of ANY gaming group I was in that would have refused entry. Most of those guys (myself included) would've crawled over broken glass to have a girl join us and not treat us like some weird species of bug. Would we have been socially incompetent? Probably. But straight up refusal? Bull fucking shit.
 
Capsaicin Addict said:
Lying whore.

Holy fuck, I can't think of ANY gaming group I was in that would have refused entry. Most of those guys (myself included) would've crawled over broken glass to have a girl join us and not treat us like some weird species of bug. Would we have been socially incompetent? Probably. But straight up refusal? Bull fucking shit.
Click to expand...
Yeah I wish I could find that specific video. I did find an image of a tweet that was promptly shat on and deleted out of embarrassment when looking for the video though.
1774959643551.png

With replies pointing out that dollar tree has had polyhedral sets for years, Or just buying a d20 for 50 cents from the bulk bin at the counter of practically every game store that isn't just focused on cards(even a spindown would be better than nothing), or better yet if someone at the table really doesn't have some dice for whatever reason(lost them, left them at home, whatever) I've never seen a blanket refusal to just loan some dice. Especially since a lot of groups have that one guy who has a full crown royal bag with at least 40 partial polyhedral sets in it they've been gathering for 20 years, and is always far more dice than any D&D table will ever need.
 
p1138 said:
Yeah I wish I could find that specific video. I did find an image of a tweet that was promptly shat on and deleted out of embarrassment when looking for the video though.
View attachment 8784308

With replies pointing out that dollar tree has had polyhedral sets for years, Or just buying a d20 for 50 cents from the bulk bin at the counter of practically every game store that isn't just focused on cards(even a spindown would be better than nothing), or better yet if someone at the table really doesn't have some dice for whatever reason(lost them, left them at home, whatever) I've never seen a blanket refusal to just loan some dice. Especially since a lot of groups have that one guy who has a full crown royal bag with at least 40 partial polyhedral sets in it they've been gathering for 20 years, and is always far more dice than any D&D table will ever need.
Click to expand...
I have had people refuse to use my dice, but that's because my luck with a d20 can be mercurial at best.
 
The Ugly One said:
In CoC, you are useful with your useful skills, and even if you aren't useful in combat, combat is brief. The game is fun for everyone.
Click to expand...
This! I had a player for about 75% of a modernish (1990s) CoC campaign who absolutely hates detective work in every TTRPG genre but his chick wanted to play badly so he just flew his helicopter. I had to invent a lot of chopper chases to keep him from scrolling through his phone so my game started looking like a Lovecraftian Cannon Films production. And he almost got a hard on from being the designated fly boy. Like when they went after a cargo ship/Cthulhu temple because her Deep One Hybrid crew (armed with WW2 weapons thanks to Truman) was trafficking Juans and Juanitas from Costa Rica and some where sacrificed along the way.
 
p1138 said:
Now things might have changed since I was in highschool, but I can't imagine "ew yuck no girls allowed" if they were actually genuinely interested in shit being a thing in 2010.
Click to expand...
For the love of J-Lo's big fat horse's ass on toast, in my time a girl who even wanted to play TTRPG's or wargames was a treasure! If they were good at it, that was a fuckin holy grail! The whole Incel infestation is much more of a modern phenomenon than in the hoarfrost days....
 
MazonLabs Recruitment Rep said:
For the love of J-Lo's big fat horse's ass on toast, in my time a girl who even wanted to play TTRPG's or wargames was a treasure! If they were good at it, that was a fuckin holy grail! The whole Incel infestation is much more of a modern phenomenon than in the hoarfrost days....
Click to expand...
The problems with female players only start when some of the lads start SIMPing hard or when they inject their social justice causes and 1-4th wave feminism bullshit into a game where it doesn't belong. Like when Jessica complains that the James Bond RPG she wanted to play is sexist, that Westeros doesn't have same sex marriage and adoption or her Negress Cthulhu investigator must drink from the grape drank flavoured fountain in 1920s Atlanta.
 
CrunkLord420 said:
I don't know what fancy dollar stores you guys got but mine only got the 10 pack of d6.
Click to expand...
I am a Chessex supremacist; they produce high-quality, affordable dice in large numbers. You can buy a set of 36 d6 for 7-16 dollars, depending on the colors. When I was doing Shadowrun, I got two sets of them and that was more than enough.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom