Negative player behavior

[Rerun941]

Both as players and GMs, I know we've all experienced some annoying, rude, or irritating player behavior over the years. Other than kicking the player out of your gaming group or them leaving on their own... what have you tried to change the negative behavior?

What was the negative behavior?
What did you try in order to change the behavior?
Was it successful? Why or why not?

PS - No, this is not an April Fool's Day prank thread. I will not be coming back later saying "Ha! I got you... April Fool!"

[Lee Torres]

My general policy is to give the player more and more challenges, on the theory that they're getting bored and so acting up. Generally the bad guys show up in force when someone's acting up. If that fails, I'll give them enough rope to hang themselves and then hang them with it. I'm not a fan of power gamers and prima donnas.

If it's something beyond that, and they're key enough to the plot, I'll propose a break from the game, usually claiming it's something on my end so the player with the (typically) personal problem doesn't then feel ganged-up-on by the other players. If it's an issue with me personally I'll ask them to step out. Since 1977, though, that's only ever happened once.

[Grimace]

I've had a couple players with negative aspects about them over the years.

One was...odiferous, in the negative way. Several comments were made, but from me as well as the other players. Eventually we stopped inviting him to game. When he asked, we flat out told him. He started bathing more, but he had a natural sweating problem, so he was only decent to be around for an hour or two, then it was stink city again. That group eventually just broke up so I didn't have to contend with that problem player for too long.

A second one was, as it was described to me by other players, "creepy". His humor was off-kilter compared to the rest of the group. His characters were off-kilter from the rest of the characters. None of the players cared for him and I got a "raising one eyebrow" feeling. He was a decent gamer, but he just didn't jive with the rest of the group. I just told him that we were opting not to keep him in the game group. He took it okay and that was the last we saw of him.

The third one was the girlfriend of one of the always-present gamers of the group. Her only problem was how she played. I had done my pre-recruitment questioning: Have you gamed before? What games? What do you think of games? Do you like character driven games or games with lots of dice rolling? Can you be dedicated to showing up every week?

The answers I got were that she had gamed before, but only D&D. But she had gamed D&D for more than 2 years. Of course she was going to show up, her boyfriend was a player in the group. And, my biggest fear, she would actually game and not want to sit there and chit chat about all things not game related.

Well, when we started, I found out her experience with 2+ years of D&D accounted for a player that basically said "yeah, me too" for just about everything. I go round-robin for people's actions, so no one is left sitting for more than a couple minutes before I call on them to find out what they're doing. Every time she would listen to the players before her announce their actions and then say "that's what I'm doing too". Every time!

When we were into dialogue (not in battle) I'd have an NPC ask her something about her past. So where did you come from? Do you have any family? What did you used to do? Every time I asked her a question like that, she'd look at her character sheet for the answer, not find it (if I hadn't asked that question before) and then get a blank look on her face. I had to tell her "If it's not on your character sheet, make it up!" I pressed her to think beyond the character sheet, to think beyond the numbers on the sheet. She only viewed the characters as X dice, not "I'm pretty good at this" or "I'm not very good at doing that". She'd be speaking in-character and say "I've got 3 dice." I'd have NPCs say "What? What's that mean?"

Basically, I kept pressing her to play the character and not view the character as numbers on a sheet. I pressed her to, if it wasn't made up already, create things for her background. To come up with where she came from, and if she had family, and what their names were, and what she did prior to the adventure.

When we were done, two years later (playing once a week) she was a MUCH better roleplayer. All of the players agreed, even her boyfriend (they eventually got married). So that player I was able to work with, mainly because she was really rather new at gaming. She had learned the basics of gaming, but had become focused on numbers instead of the character. I fault the system she played under a bit, but mostly I fault the GM of that game or games she played in for not stressing ROLE playing. You don't have to act, you just have to play a role, not roll things all the time.

That is how I've gone about dealing with problem players over the years.