Story of the worst player you've ever encountered?

When I was younger, I was a member of a gaming group that met at a local university on saturdays and we played champions, and only champions.

We had a guy join us who we can call "Greg".

Greg knew the game and knew the rules, but he had a quirk, and it ruined the game for everyone;

Greg liked to play massively, morbidly obese women. He would give them ridiculously high comeliness and dress them in skimpy clothes. Oh, they all had gravity control or flying or something that negated the massive girth.

Then Greg would play them as if they were massive slutty flirts. Constant flirting. Creepy look on his face.

I suppose I should clarify, that Greg was slightly odd shaped and just slightly creepy in attitude even when he was not attempting to play a fantasy of his in game.

It all just ended up with me never wanting to play with him, but nobody wanted to be the one to tell him to go away.

sigh Otherwise I loved that group.

But yeah, he was the worst player I ever had to deal with.

I had a player, really smart guy, knew the rules front to back and had a better knowledge of Forgotten Realms than I did. He INSISTED on playing the most annoying characters specifically to make my life miserable. His most memorable was a halfling who was convinced he was the god Torm. He would constantly talk and act like him, making him incredibly tough to deal with from an RP perspective. When other players (or me as the DM) would try and carouse him into doing things, he would insist on grapple checks, escape artist rolls, and every little loophole he could use to get his way. When someone made a decision he didn't like, he'd have his character act out (most notably, by whipping it out and urinating all over a statue that was part of a puzzle). Ultimately he was so infuriating that I gave up on running that campaign all together. I was a naive DM back then. Now, I eat pieces of shit like that for breakfast.

A few years ago I played in a game with a guy named David.

David was 34 years old, balding (but what hair he did have he kept about two inches), and always seemed to be in need of a shower.

Well, we played a 3.5 LFR game and he was "friends" with the DM so he got a little bit of special treatment.

Well, One day in particular our party was attempting to rob some gang, and we told his character, a multi-classed half-orc fighter/ranger/rogue type character, to watch the wagons while we went in for the heist.

Then we come running out with about half of the stolen goods and my character yells, "Put EVERYTHING in the wagon!". We drop the items and run back in for more.

David exchanges notes with the DM for a few minutes, who just laughs and says, "They will kill you".

When we run back out, he has disassembled the first wagon, and put it inside the second wagon. Including the two horses that were pulling the first one.

Well, needless to say, we couldn't escape and one of the other players was mad. So, another player stood up and started to get physical with David. At some point. David stood up to leave, and this other guy pushed him. David fell, and what fell with him, scarred me for life.

David fell, and David was wearing shorts. Out of Davids shorts fell this awkward looking, pasty white, dildo. It was then that we noticed David was also wearing sandals, and his toenails were painted bright red.

Everyone just stopped and stared. The DM then said, "Dave, I think you should go home."

David collected his things, tucked the dildo (which was somehow strapped inside his shorts) back up into his shorts, and left.

I stopped playing with that group.

TL;DR: Dude had a dildo and bright red toenails on during a game, and we found out.

When I was in college I was in a 3.5 group with this guy... He was in his mid 30s, honorably discharged from the Navy because of a shoulder injury, and honestly the worst player I've ever met.

He always played a dwarf paladin. Even when his character was not at all a dwarf paladin, he played it like a dwarf paladin. Seriously, he was zero percent Scottish, but no matter what character he played he did the voice in a Scottish accent. The DM was overall a pretty good guy, but was good friends with this player... Let's call him Steve.

Steve was a dragonslayer. He took a level in Ranger so he could get favored enemy dragons, and then kept levelling as a paladin. I realize that this is impossible in 3.5 rules, but the DM let it happen. The DM also let him have a rhino as his paladin mount, because it "felt more dwarfy than a horse". This made Steve's character about 4 times more powerful than anyone else's at our level, since he could demolish anything on a charge.

Steve was also super paranoid about his dice, and if anyone else touched them they were tainted forever. I've come across people with their own little superstitions about dice, but this guy threatened to break someone's arm if they picked up one of his dice that fell on the floor. "JUST POINT TO IT SO I CAN GRAB IT DON'T F***ING TOUCH IT." Seriously, dude, it's just a game...

Okay, so remember how his character was a dragonslayer? He didn't have ANY ranged weapons. We go hunting a dragon so he can make some armor out of its scales, coax it out of the cave and it starts flying around throwing spells and fire on us. I had taken Ki Blast on my monk so I was basically going all Dragonball Z on it, the Druid was throwing spells, and the Rogue was pelting it with crossbow bolts. The paladin was furious. Suddenly here's a dragon and he can't do anything to it!? He starts yelling at us to go in the cave to force it to the ground, and we're like "Dude, no, we're winning. If we get in to melee with it it'll rip us to shreds." But really we just didn't want to indulge him. The DM, to avoid a tantrum, lands the dragon on the ground. Steve charges it on his rhino and kills it in one hit, and mocks the rest of us for the puny amount of damage we did compared to him.

After that session I stopped going to the games and answering their calls.

Years ago when I was in high school, I played with a handful of fairly good people -- mostly athletic smart kids... plus one scumbag kid who openly worshipped Satan. He would show up to games wearing upside down crosses, which flipped out my mom. But the worst was the game that ended his time with us.

He showed up to the game with a bag full of clinking metal items. It was a big bag. He could have stashed a sword in there. And in fact, he did.

So as we're playing, he reaches down and pulls out a handful of ninja throwing stars. He hurls one across the table, barely missing another player, and it embeds into the wall in MY house. He says something like, "Let's make this REAL!"

We all knew he was a bit touched, and sometimes he would behave as though he thought casting spells and such were real. However, it had never been more than a curiosity. Now, it was a very scary problem.

We scrambled to disarm him, nicely, so nobody got hurt and he didn't go nuts. It worked. Thinking everything was calm, we started playing a bit more, and that was when he drew out an actual katana, so fucking sharp I could have shaved with it. He stands, takes up a position with the katana poised for a strike on the player next to him, and says, "Let's try to do actual fighting to see who wins."

The player who was inches away from being gutted literally falls backwards out of the chair scrambling to get away from this nutjob. I (stupidly) step forward with my hand out, and say, "Now, you know I'm going to have to confiscate that, too. You can have it back when we're done."

To that he says, "You have to fight me for it." Then he feints a strike, and I nearly shit myself. I mean, when you're young, you don't always feel your mortality. You often feel great, healthy, and growing. But when a very real weapon is about to kill you, it's a whole other thing. My body started to shake, and I realized that I almost instantly had beads of sweat dropping down my forehead.

What saved the day was basically everyone acting like parents of this kid. We sorta huddled toward him and in slightly paternal tones we were like, "Come on now, you know you can't do that here. You need to drop that. In fact, we'd like the whole bag, if you intend to stay here."

Someone grabbed the bag, and shouted about it being full of weapons. Our nutjob friend got all offended that we were looking in it. We were saying things like, "You can have the bag back after the game. And we can't continue the game until you turn over that sword, okay?"

He gave up the sword, we settled down and finished the game, and then after he left, all the rest of us sat around for a long time figuring out how we could avoid him forever.

Nowadays, 20 years later, he's in a low-budget Satanic metal band that has been cited (or had some kind of legal trouble) for refusing to start their concerts until audience members kill a small animal as a sacrifice. Yes, it's a direct ripoff of the old rumors about Ozzy Osbourne's concerts. We were kids back when Ozzy was a huge rockstar, so I guess it figures. It's disgusting, but I guess he found a way to be cruel to other living creatures without getting jailed or executed for it.

I've luckily managed to avoid many of the downright creepy players, but let me tell you about Ted.

A few months ago, I wrapped up a Pathfinder campaign. It was, on the whole, a great campaign, with a group comprised of, on the whole, great players.

But then there was Ted. Ted was only invited because he was a friend of the person who owned the house we gamed in. No-one else liked him.

Ted was a bit older than the rest of us, and had been playing some form of D&D since the 80s. Ted had a major chip on his shoulder and acted as if he were the youngest and the most immature of all of us.

For some inexplicable reason Ted felt like he had something to prove. He had to be more creative, better read, and more intelligent than the rest of us. Unfortunately, he was neither creative, nor especially intelligent, and he was only "well read" if you considered pulp fantasy literature from the 80s to be the canon of western literature.

Here are some memorable Ted moments, in no particular order.

• Ted legitimately thought he came up with the concept of the talky, diplomatic rogue. I thought I was misunderstanding him, but he confirmed that he thought that he had come up with that character concept. I also found out that Ted had never heard of Errol Flynn.

• Ted was always talking up how well read he was. For example, he liked to talk himself up as some sort of amateur Shakespeare expert. I saw his collection. It was actually quite nice, gilt and leatherbound (and obviously bought as a set). However, when I described the plot of King Lear, he could not recognize it.

• Ted liked to smugly lament the downfall of today's youth, how back in his day he read books while kids these days only played WoW. Ted later complains that a book that he had asked me to recommend to him was too long (it was ~250 pages).

• We began to notice that whenever the more bookish people at the table talked up a book before or after a session, Ted would also talk up the same book to his coworkers, one of whom played with us.

• I work as a copy editor in a publishing house. We don't publish fiction. Despite this Ted constantly pressured me to try to get someone from work to read the manuscript for this fantasy novel he was working on.

• Whenever the DM tried to get Ted to contribute out of session (write an adventure log, do backstory, etc.), Ted would get all "You kids don't understand, I don't have as much free time as you." Ted does not have a wife and kids. We all work full time.

• When Ted got around to writing that backstory, it invariably involved rape or child abuse. This was literally the only way he knew how to generate pathos.

• Ted liked to go on long rants about 4e appropos of nothing. I like 4e, but some of the people playing with really didn't so I kept my mouth shut. However, when one of the diehard PF>4e people in group lost his temper about how Ted was holding up the game with his bullshit, it came to light that everyone else at the table felt the same way about Ted's inane whining.

• Ted thought the entire genre of cyberpunk was liberal propaganda. Not any specific work--the entire genre.

• Whenever Ted was uncomfortable with anything (for example, women being fighters, homosexuality.... existing) his go-to complaint was that it was unrealistic. Verisimilitude never mattered to him unless the matter in question touched on one of his weird issues (or when he was challenging a DM ruling that was not in his favor).

I could write an entire book about Ted.

EDIT

Actually I have one other story about Ted. A month or so after that campaign ended, a few of those players expressed interest in playing Paranoia, which I have GMed many times before. So I was like, sure, let's do a one shot.

So I slap the PDF on dropbox and tell everyone to read ONLY the section of the book for players. Within a week 2 things happen. Ted demonstrates knowledge of something in the GM section of the book. So I start playfully giving him shit about it, oh that's treasonous knowledge and I'm going to have to kill you for it.

The second thing that happens is that he asks me if I was going to be the one DMing (as opposed to our regular DM). I said yes, so he should start directing any sucking up that might have been erroneously directed at the other guy towards me.

He then flipped his shit. Said that I was accusing him of being a suck-up, and that if anyone presented their ass to him they'd be more likely to receive a boot than they would lips. Said that I was using the fact that I was more experienced with the game against him. Interpreted my jostling him about reading the part of the book he wasnt supposed to as harassment.

He did this in a chatroom in which the other players were present. They saw this and decided that maybe playing a game that revolves around plotting and backstabbing with someone like Ted wouldnt be that much fun. The Paranoia game never happened.

Ted sucks.

His name was Ian, and he was a major dick head. His thing was he knew the rules off by heart so he manipulated the rules to allow him to min-max the crap out of every character and every sidekick. That in iteslf sucked a lot of fun out of the game, because I think it's the flaws/weaknesses that make characters interesting or more fun to play. He was just about getting high rolls, to hell with everything else. Also, he would try to play every else's character - e.g. if you didn't do exactly what he thought you should do in every single situation he would say to the DM, "No, he doesn't do X, he does Y. I said not to do X before."

He was about 400lbs, and couldn't hold a job either. I wanted to knock his teeth out, but I also have a real job that I'd like to keep. There's not much I could do to him that life won't anyway, haha.

When I was in college there was this guy who somehow attached himself to our group, and wanted to play in a game I was DMing. He was very big and not very bright and was "that guy" who always just does dumb things. Like, the party would meet an old man leaning on a staff, and he would grab the staff out of his hands thinking it was a Staff of Wizardry. Just stuff like this all the time.

He also tended to get himself killed a lot.

One day we were playing and I think he had just killed his second or third character for the day, and he stood up suddenly and overturned the entire gaming table. He looked at me and yelled "It was player against against DM -- but now it's man against man!" Grabbed his bag and stalked off.

I'm not a big guy, and I was actually worried for my safety. I expected him to ambush me on campus and beat the crap out of me, but I don't think I ever saw him again.

Yeah, I had a guy I used to play with. Phil. Phil was the resident black duster-wearing kid at school, with long, unwashed hair, and very little going for him except for his nerdy hobbies.

Phil's existence on this earth was to absorb every minute detail of every officially released 3.5 DnD book (by means of stealing them from his friends). Not to mention he was a min/maxer, who would exploit every loophole he could find to make sure his character was always the most important in any given situation. As a fellow PC, everything you'd try to do was almost immediately overshadowed by Phil, and as the DM, he'd make building a balanced encounter, or even a balanced session, impossible, and always offer up his opinion on how to run the game during the session.

Phil was his worst as the DM. I played roughly 2-3 short campaigns with Phil at the helm, and every one involved trying to turn the PCs against each other, and have all alignments shift to evil. He also favored any dark, brooding, badass characters and would give them unreasonable benefits throughout each session. I remember he once, on a whim, had a character lose a limb in battle, replace it with a metal replica, and gave that character all of the half-golum benefits and none of the downsides.

It was a shame so few people at my high school played DnD.

I once DM'd for a group of fairly young inexperienced players, now when playing with new people I found that in order to avoid metagaming too much it would be in my best interest to pull a specific player aside to explain to them what their character was experiencing unique to the group. I will never forget the day where after explaining the results of a simple spot check to the one character standing watch over the sleeping group, 1 specific player asked for his chracter to wke up so that he could, and I quote "see if player A was seeing something"

Not my own story obviously, but for bad Player/DM stories the best(worst?) I've come across is That Lanky Bugger. There's also part two and part three

I occasionally make the mistake of gaming at cons. Generally the first game or two I'm in at any given con won't have any weirdos, so it lulls me into a false sense of security. Then, BAM!, the grossest and creepiest guy sits down right next to you at the next game.

I was playing in a Shadowrun game with a guy in his 40s, balding and shaved, weird little mustache, cokebottle glasses. He was missing his upper front teeth and consequently spoke with a lisp that sprayed spittle everywhere like Daffy Duck. He wasn't fat, but he was short and stocky and that gave him a rather round appearance. His arms and legs were skinny though, so he kind of looked like a potato with toothpicks stuck in it.

He was playing a female character, which is fine. However, we were all strangers at the table so it took some getting used to each other's characters, and we understandably referred to his character as "he" once or twice, and he would snippily correct us. But we'd forget and a few minutes later it would happen again. Then one player called his character a "he" one more time and it must have been the last straw because he freaked out! "I'm a woman!" Oh, okay, dude. Sorry. Calm down. Then in mid-freakout, he points at me: "And you look like Ryan Reynolds!" I don't, like at all. I was extremely confused why, in the middle of a hissy fit, he had to compare my appearance to Van Wilder.

In the middle of the 4 hour session we took a break for bathroom and water and whatnot. Most of us were back in 5 or 10 minutes, but he was gone for a good 20 minutes. When he came back, he had a takeaway container of food, but I'm not sure where he got it because it didn't come from any of the places at the con hall food court.

Inside was the grossest fried chicken I've ever seen, way too greasy and the breading falling off in wet clumps. He mushed it in his toothless mouth, getting bits all over his face and grease all over the dice. When he rolled his dice, he got grease and chicken mush on them which then flew all over the place as they rolled. Then he got out a little lidded bowl and started slurping its contents with a spoon; I'm not sure what it was, but it looked like thousand island dressing, and it dribbled all down his chin.

Oh, and his most heinous offense of the game? When combat came we expected his combat monster to be covering the rest of us, but when we waded in he hung back. What a dick!

I'm part of a club that meets twice a week and there's that ''one guy'' no one likes. He hardly speaks a word of English, which he denies. He constantly cheats, both while playing and creating characters. Every time he plays fantasy he plays a barbarian, which he thinks he understands but when it comes down to it he hasn't even raged. Not once. We've been playing some GURPS recently and he plain doesn't understand the character creation (he created a deaf, cursed, quadriplegic dwarf without even realizing it). Doesn't play his alignment? He doesn't even understand the concept of alignment.

He's actually kind of a problem, it actually affects what people want to play just so they don't have to tolerate him. Now, I haven't been in the business long, I only started playing earlier this year, but I'm fully confident when I say that he's the worst RPG player I will ever meet in my life. At least I hope so.

I have a guy whom I have been in campaigns with for the last 5 or 6 years across lots of types of games. He always plays exactly the same type of character, although he does change the minor details. He is also a super mega rules lawyer, but he is the asshole kind that will tell you every single rule he can find if it benefits his character but won't utter a syllable if it would have a negative impact on him.

He always plays a combat based, loner type character. The sort that a bad action flick would be about. Super exaggerated, "badass" (although he does it terribly) but they always have a completely blown out of proportion sense of honor. And if anyone steps on that honor...he will absolutely stop at nothing to avenge any perceived slight at the cost of everyone else at the table.

For example...We are playing Scion (you are children of gods, it's a White Wolf system game) and he is a 4 legend Hero who is some gun-slinging rambo type dude. He is going through airport security, and all he has to do is hand over his relics, which are mostly metal, to go through the x-ray machine and he can continue on his way.

He hassles the TSA guy, the TSA guy hassles him back, and he won't let go of his relics. Everyone else quietly complies and gets through the check with no trouble, but this guy won't let it go because the TSA man was rude to him, so a 5 minute check at the security gate turns in to 2 hours and 25 minutes of me (the Storyteller) and this one guy hellbent on getting his revenge deep in the bowels of the airport.

The party wisely wound up leaving him there, they had enough of his bullshit. He nearly ruined that entire campaign because them boarding that flight was a super time-sensitive and important event.

Not counting people I only played a single game with at conventions and the like? I had this friend who refused to take roleplaying seriously. His whole attitude throughout the whole thing just reeked of mockery and ironic detachment. Not being serious is not always a bad thing, for humorous scenarios it's expected, but there's a difference between being silly and being insulting towards your fellow players and the whole hobby (despite you choosing to partake of it yourself.)

First session with a couple completely new people at the table. The GM and I know eachother and the other two guys know eachother. During character gen we decide to make thieves who don't previously know eachother. My character has the klepto flaw because, well, he is a thief.

First session we break into a mansion and my character does a few things that are less than honorable. He slips a possibly harmful but valuable item into another character's pack to sell later. And he fails a klepto roll and slips a few coins down his sleeves while loading bags full with hundreds of coins. The other guys spend the rest of the session trying to use out of character knowledge that I pocketed a few coins as reasons to stab my character in the back.

After the session is over the GM gets an angry e-mail from one of the other players. He clearly has no concept of player/character separation and thinks that I am a horrible person due to the actions of my character.

Personally I felt that playing a bunch of cutthroats that didn't trust eachother (and who hopefully would end up growing to trust eachother in the future and have that trust be all the more poignant because it was earned instead of just assumed to begin with) would be fun for the whole group to play and laugh about together. But I can't do his e-mail justice so here is a snippet of it;

"By the way I wasn't going to ambush to kill him the night we played, I had planed to ambush to subdue and try and teach him a lesson. I'm glad I did neither, I am usually rash in my decision making when someone is purposely trying to screw over friends or myself, be it in a game or outside it. Sometimes people don't think about the real world ramifications, just because he's duping our characters we as players see plain as day his behavior and attitude towards the rest of the group. We suppose to say "oh well, that is all part of the fun"? It isn't about the game really or what ever loot he manages to keep hidden from us. From the sounds of it there is plenty of loot and it isn't going to transfer over into my bank account so who cares. It is about respecting your fellow gamers and whether you're out to make new friends and enjoy a game together or not. I'm looking for camaraderie, making friends and having fun gaming together. What is [Fenyx4] looking for?"

TL;DR Guy can't separate characters from players. Thinks I'm a horrible person for playing my thief character like a thief.

"Can my character be anything? Can my character be a speck of dust? Can my character be an anachronism? Can my character be a sentient television? Can my character be an amorphous blob? Can my character be omniscient? What about omnipresent? Can my character be a DRAGON?! How about half-dragon, half-amorphous blob?!"

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I appreciate the spirit of commiseration at play here, but I gotta say threads like this always make me sad to be a gamer. I once read a story about a guy who's landlord forced him (under threat of eviction) to GM for the landlord's son, who would wear a diaper to the game and shit himself at the table rather than take a 5 minute break to use the bathroom.

Reading example after example of such terrible anti-social behavior--at times bordering on mental illness, as above--makes me want to never play anything again.

Sorry, this topic is just a black hole of badness for me.

The guy of my story wasn't a bad player (for this example at least), just a bit of a tool.

When he was playing while I was DMing, he fought tooth and nail on behalf of his younger brother (who was 19 at the time, this guy was 31ish) to get his wizard who was killed by a lightning bolt trap back to life. He was saying that [his brother] might hold a grudge against the guy who sprung the trap, and [his brother] put days into the backstory and character design. I eventually caved and let him come back...

Fast forward a few months, this guy is DMing. A goblin appears on the path but doesn't attack. The LG Dragonborn Goliath tries to get some quest related info out of it, but it runs. The Rogue and myself (a Barbarian) chase it, catch it, and attack it so we can get more info. The Goliath then charges the Rogue, crits, and kills him. We all protest, saying what a massive dick move that is, I threaten to leave the game, but the DM, who fought so hard to get his brothers wizard back to life, does nothing, and rewards the Goliath for "sticking to his character"

I no longer play with these people.

i played with a guy that would wait until we all crafted a character, and then he'd make one that was the opposite of ours. as in, you're all crusaders going to free spain? this guy is a crypto-jew and will undermine your whole campaign. oh, you're playing space rangers? my guy is a world class smuggler pirate. oh we're gonna do a dune campaign, and you're the freemen? I'll be a royal. ARRRGH. we were never a party. always fighting.