AITAH for starting table conflicts and being “that guy”?
This happened a while back when I (17M) was playing Call of Cthulu with a former friend that I'll call Sayori (17M), after his character. The table consists entirely of friends of Sayori. His character is a boo-hoo sad Japanese goth girl psychologist in the 1920s whose parents were murdered, and she killed the murderer's family and set their house on fire for revenge. This is an old character with one previous module run and 5 cthulu mytho, the only encounter with the supernatural being fighting a bunch of deep ones and learning the voorish sign. The module had us head to Ship town, which is effectively Innsmouth Revamped and a place none of our characters have even heard of.
Fast forward to conflict point. We start our investigation, a police comes along, obviously knowing some insider secret. Sayori's immediate response:
“I cast Charm Person!”
...except he didn't learn any spell with similar results. No worries, he said, and pointed to some point in the rulebook stating that it's perfectly fine for players to make their own spells up, and the DM somehow let that slide, despite the fact that the character absolutely shouldn't have this ability.
Instant karma in the form of the NPC rolling a critical success on the “saving”. Naturally, we are recieved with instant hostility. I immediately started apologising, hoping to salvage our relationship, but Sayori took the hostility personal and started acting all sarcastic around the NPC. Said NPC is, in fact, later revealed to be an ally, but this incident turned our cooperation from “Let's do this together!” to “I don't mind working with you guys in the face of a greater evil but once all is said and done you'd better watch your backs”.
Fast forward to our next destination, where we are supposed to have a talk with the local mafia boss. We disguised ourselves as investigators here with aligning interests. Sayori rolls a critical failure on investigation, so the keeper made the mob boss breathe smoke right into her eyes. Again, he took that personal and started acting all passive-aggressive and cynical, trashtalking to a mafia boss with a literal shotgun hanging on the wall. I was apologising the whole time, having to roll a ton of fast talks to keep him stable and try to get more info, but to no avail. It's obvious he knew a lot of valuable stuff, too bad he's not going to share anything because one certain guy pissed him off. All these fast talks rolled just to stop him from blasting our brains out...
At this point I got tired of their shenanigans and decided that enough is enough. I'm sick of acting all apologetic to salvage his horrid social strategies shutting down every valuable source of info, so I had my character put my foot down. Especially since he's playing a psychologist of all people, the one role who is supposed to know to read the room. We then had a lengthy argument in game that nearly had our characters go our seperate ways. The actual conflict lasted around half an hour, but is basically something along the lines of:
“Listen, I don't know what ob earth you are up to, I don't get why you are oh-so hostile to the local people, but seriously, that's not a good idea at all. I'm tired of having to frantically clean up the mess you left behind and act so lowly just to stop you from making everyone an enemy. I'm not your babysitter and I don't want your strokes of geniuses to thwart our progress.”
“They started it!”
“You're the one who charmed the police, you're the one whp couldn't keep their eyes under control in the mafia boss' office, what do you expect?”
“[INSERT TRAGIC BACKSTORY], so it's just a survival method for me to assume everyone has malice! And if they're malicious, I must be justified to return their malice back!”
...and so on. Needless to say, it did not end well.
Later when the session ended, Sayori decided to take that personal and started another argument, because I'm apparently “interfering with his roleplay”, and “that's just how his character is”. The rest of the table either took his side, calling me “that guy”, blaming me for “unneccesary drama”, or didn't care. I left the table and never heard from them since.
I was convinced I'm leaving a horrible person and a bunch of his fanboys, but recently I've been thinking, perhaps we're just not expecting the same things from a game and I shouldn't have been so carried away. So AITAH for starting all this drama?
Posted Nov 14, 2025, 1:54 PM UTC