The Black Campbell

This gaming problem child can be a subset of the Mope or the Spotlight Hog: the Lone Wolf. The Lone Wolf is a gamer for whom the experience isn’t communal or cooperative; it’s their time to shine. This is the gamer that doesn’t play well with others, splits the party whenever he can, stabs his party-mates in the back, starts fights with other players, or is otherwise disruptive because it draws attention to them.

How do you handle the Lone Wolf? Depends on the nature of the creature. Is he actively disrupting the game with out-of-play comments, or taking actions in (or out) of game to annoy other players? Pull them aside at a break and explain to them that their behavior is unacceptable.

Do they keep splitting the party, then trying to keep the spotlight on them? You could go for the traditional hit them with more opposition than they can handle, but I like to keep the other players involved by having those players roll for the opposition. This can be a lot of fun for those not involved in the plot line to feel they are still involved in the social aspect of the game. (There’s also a lot of schadenfreude that can be enjoyed when that player rolls really well for the bad guys.)

Usually, the Lone Wolf isn’t going to hang in the game for too long, especially if they start noticing they are pissing off the rest of the group, or get called on their actions. But in the event they do, you may have to explain the concept of courtesy to them. In more extreme cases, it’s perfectly appropriate to show them the door.

Ah, the mope…this is the player that just pulls the life out of the game. He might be the guy that sits in the corner, quietly waiting for the moment when they get to roll some dice, or they might be the guy that is actively involved in the game, but their attitude sucks — “My dice are fucking me!!!” “Man, this sucks! Why can’t we do X?”

I’ve had a couple of these over the years. One of the worst was the guy who min-maxed his character to alway be combat-inventors…they had zero social skills and would either not put in anything to the game or would make useless asides until it was their turn to roll some dice in combat. Every character was some version of this archetype.

Another was the guy with anxiety disorder who would get involved, but his personal discomfort was so palpable it made the other players uncomfortable. Few people enjoy being around someone obviously unhappy about being there. Similarly, another player was having some serious personal issues that provided him a palpable dark cloud of suck that followed him around. You could feel him moping, perfectly quiet, in another room.

The “my dice are fucking me!” guy was so scattered he couldn’t remember the basic mechanics of a game he’d been playing for two years. Worse, the above-mentioned moment was accompanied by him dropping to his knees in exasperation. It’s still one of the most memorable gaming moments for me in 30 years of playing. He was uncomfortable with the group, mostly due to some interpersonal dynamics going on.

The last example was a goth kid that spent the whole session in a light-hearted B-movie RPG playing the — you guessed it, gothy vampire kid with his killer ferret! Every action wasn’t just an attempt to hog attention, but to piss off the rest of the players. (We’ll probably see in him the next installment, as well…)

All these players have one thing in common — they are mopes. They tend to lurk in the room, obviously uninterested, uncomfortable, or otherwise miserable. There’s no real attempt to hide it, and their attitude can be infectious. Even when it is not, the fact people around them are having fun while they are not does not raise them up; they are more miserable than ever. So what do you do about the mope?

1) Find out what is bothering them, if it is something associated with the game, group, or another factor that the group and GM can address.

2) If it’s conflict with another member, perhaps it can be sorted out with a simple airing of differences on the side. The worst ones here, and guaranteed to eventually lead to the player dropping out, is if the conflict is between spouses or lovers. When a romantic relationship collapses between members, usually you lose both players. If there’s another player in the mix as well..? Oof!

3) If it has to do with the game, the setting, their character — these are easiest. Find out what will engage the player and try that. But there’s always the possibility that the player doesn’t want to play Mouse Guard. They joined to play Pathfinder, but everyone else after trying the former thought it would be fun to do that. Compromise. Rotate the games. Maybe split the group and have a second night (if feasible) and play one or the other.

4) Maybe it’s something that can’t really be addressed. The anxiety attack player had real issues that he was on meds for. He couldn’t eat around other people, so he never joined in the food. He wasn’t being rude — that he was there at all showed an interested. The personality just wasn’t especially convivial. Worse, he girlfriend was there…and was a spotlight hog, specifically, the wannabe actress type. They didn’t last too long. In this case, do what you can to accommodate the player. If there are special food needs, address them. If there’s a seating issue, try to cover that, as well. But you can only bend so far before you are inconveniencing the others in the group.

Ultimately, the goal should be to make people feel comfortable, and you should try to make that happen — but ultimately, this is a “needs of the many” situation, and if you cannot keep the mope from draining the life from the group, it might be necessary to ask them to leave. It’s never fun, and in a hobby that has a rarified population few want to lose a player of any kind, but sometimes it is necessary.

Can you think of ways that these respective examples (or others you could provide) might be addressed? Please share them in the comments.

This player was a lot more common in the bad ol’ days of role playing, when the games were still mostly wargames with character rules bolted on. (It’s also one of the reasons why combat rules are usually a chapter long in modern games, but other skill rules fit in a page or two.) Knowing the rules gave you an edge over the dungeon master, with whom you had an adversarial relationship, rather than a cooperative one for telling a story — the DM spent his time coming up with ways to screw with you and your party; you tried to outsmart him. Knowing you got a +1 on a such-and-such test because of certain factors might make the difference between success and a TPK (total party kill, for those not playing D&D.)

The rules lawyer is still alive and well in gaming. Most of the ones I’ve run into are involved in the vampire LARPing scene, where the antagonistic relationship between characters and between the characters and the storyteller remain a central aspect of play. In modern tabletop games, the relationship between the game master/storyteller/dude who’s not a storyteller, but a facilitator for your gaming enjoyment (barf!) is more cooperative, and the rules usually reflect this by being much more minimalist or fluid. This isn’t the environment for a rules lawyering gamer to thrive…but there they are.

Often the rules lawyer now uses the rules to maximize his benefits at character creation, much like the min-maxer, but the rules lawyer focuses on mechanics that allow them to tweak the flow of play to their advantage. So they might take assets (or whatever they’re called in your favored system) like luck, where they can reroll a test, or something like Intuition in Cortex, where they can ask a question of the GM (usually a yes or no question) to skirt the plot.

In modern games where combat is more prevalent, the rules lawyer is much more effective. They know that a certain maneuver allows this benefit, they hang on the wording of a rule regarding social interaction, or how hacking “works”, and use that knowledge to browbeat the GM (or the group, if it’s a GM-less system) into ruling in their favor.

The rules lawyer was, in the past, much more of a nuisance than they tend to be now — but I admit I also don’t play stuff like D&D or Pathfinder where the benefit of lawyering might be more fruitful. In the early days of RPGs, the dungeon master was “god” in his world — and it was almost always a “he” — creating the setting, the adventure, managing the opposition to challenge the players. Rulebooks showed their wargaming past and were packed with minutiae on various tasks. It was hard to know it all well. Rules lawyers could leverage their knowledge of the rules to question the campaign’s architect. Now, it’s expected that the players will have some say in how the plot unfolds outside of succeeding or failing at a test. Plot/hero/story point mechanics allow them to “bribe” the GM to give them a certain result (and vice-versa), rules are less structured and important to the outcome of a scene (FATE can go so far as to go single test for combat with the player stating the preferred outcome), and gamemasters are more likely to working to help the players succeed than to kill their characters off. That makes rules lawyering much less necessary, or effective, than in early generation RPG mechanics.

So how to handle the rules lawyer? You can go with the time-honored “DM as campaign god” with your decisions as inviolate. Or you can set yourself up as a judge or referee, interpreting the rules to the situation — “I know it says the monster gets a -2 for the slippery surface it’s on, but the sheer size means that it doesn’t have to move around as much, so I’m not applying it…” Or you can give the rules lawyer a statute of limitations to argue their point and change the ruling and edit the story. You want to argue a rule that gives you that +1 you need to succeed in stopping the trap from springing? You’ve got a minute to find me the rule, or we move on with events. This gives the rules lawyer — who gets their enjoyment from that argumentation — time to have their fun, maybe have more of an effect on the play, but limits their ability to halt play over some point of procedure.