The Wiki-to-PDF project, one half of which deals with problem players, got me to thinking about this story.
Not long after I moved to Salt Lake, I ran a D&D game for several players and one half-player. Our half-player made the evening memorable, but she was pretty forgettable — we wound up referring to her as Wife Unit, and the nickname stuck. (I know, I’m a bad person.)
I suspect you’ll recognize Wife Unit — she was a perfect example of a half-player: a player — of either sex — who isn’t really there for the game, and thereby makes everything weird.
Although I’m framing this with the Tale of Wife Unit, half-players can be of either sex, and they aren’t always spouses — it’s a general term. (I’m also not talking about my own wife, Alysia — she isn’t a gamer.)
Wife Unit was (appropriately enough) the wife of one of our other players. When I started up my D&D game, he mentioned that she was into D&D and wanted to play — excellent, the more the merrier.
Cue what turned out to be her final session. After arriving an hour late, they realized that they’d left a bunch of candles burning at home — but unfortunately, they’d also just locked their keys in the car. So we waited for the towing guy to come take care of that, and then for them to drive home and back (about a 90-minute round trip).
When we finally sat down to game, it became painfully clear that Wife Unit wasn’t a gamer. There’d been signs at past sessions, but never quite like this.
She obviously hadn’t built her own character, she didn’t even bother to look at the results of her die rolls (or understand them, I suspect) and worst of all, she just sat there. And stared at the rest of the group. And said nothing unless spoken to.
It wasn’t hard to imagine that she was frustrated by the past three hours, what with the car doors and the candles and the driving, but so was everyone else — it didn’t stop us from getting into the game.
No, the issue here was something else entirely: Wife Unit wasn’t there to game. And based on how the evening played out, my guess is that she not only wasn’t there to game, she would have preferred if her husband wasn’t gaming either.
Which made for a weird night. It’s hard to maintain momentum when one player kills it every time their turn comes up in combat — and stares at you in stony silence the rest of the time.
She wasn’t a bad person, and I enjoyed interacting with her and her husband when we first met. And it seemed like he overstated things when he said she was into gaming; my guess is that she was there solely to be supportive, but disliked it so much that she dragged everyone else down with her.
And that’s what I’m getting at: My gripe here is with people who don’t come to the table to play. They’d rather be somewhere else, doing something else, with other people. And that can make for a weird evening.
Even if it’s born out of a desire to support a spouse, a girlfriend, a friend — whoever — it’s kind of a shitty thing to do. There’s a passive-aggressive element involved that really bugs me.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any advice to offer based on my experience with Wife Unit: After that session, we never saw her or her husband again. Not all half-players will bolt after one night, though — and even in this case, we would really have liked to keep gaming with her husband.
The other players and I had gotten as far as discussing the situation, so I know we were on the right track — some kind of discussion should always be the first step in any situation like this.
My instinct would been to talk things over with her directly, starting with the question, “Was everything okay last night?” There might have been stuff on the sidelines that we didn’t know about, after all.
And that would have led, I suspect, to the ultimate complicated player situation: asking her not to come back. With the help of the TT community, I covered that topic in detail in How to Kick Out a Player and Respect Yourself in the Morning. But what about the lead-up, the part where you try to resolve the situation before you have to kick someone out of the group?
So how about it — what’s the best way to deal with half-players? And what advice do you have for tackling the knotty problem of a half-player whose significant other is also a player?
Well, I had a similar situation, though not as bad. And the relationship situation was even more complex. She was the sister to the other two players in the game. And of those players was my girlfriend (now my fiance, soon to be wife). So yeah, quite a mess.
Rather than a half-player, she was more of a three-fourths-player. There were some situations where she excelled. She could be an excellent roleplayer, especially when she could play up her character’s two favorite traits: talking to strangers (especially dangerous ones) and stealing stuff. But she could never get into the tactical aspect of D&D. She never even fully grasped all the options she had on each turn. I had to re-explain how feinting worked for her every single gaming session.
So the first solution was to make cheat sheets for her. I created lists of her combat options, step-by-step instructions how to use options, etc. Then I made sure every session had a situation or character specially for her to interact with. This helped some, but not a lot.
What I realized is that she didn’t play D&D to play D&D. She played to do something with her siblings. She would have been just as content going on a bike ride or watching a movie. So I simply presented the idea that we’d do other things with her, and then let her out of the obligation to play with us. She took this amazingly well, and our game improved greatly because of it. So the best solution is to try and talk about it, even if it means that someone needs to leave the group.
Another option that I didn’t take her is to try a different system. With her skill at role-playing, a more rules-lite system might have helped improve her contributions to the group. Something to consider is that your problem player sometimes is only a problem D&D player, not a general problem RPG player.
I’ve had several through the years. The most recent was a players wife who use to come and nap on the couch during the game. We tried it, it go creepy so I asked that she not do that anymore.
Is there such a thing as a 3/4 player? Someone who is at the table and nominally suppose to be playing but really adds nothing to the game. I’ve had many of those, the most recent of which was someone who consistently showed up after being up all night in WoW with a raid. He would fall asleep at the table and was generally useless. The party and I had it with him after he was largely responsible for a total party kill mostly due to being too tired to care or pay attention.
lebkin: Yep, that sounds like a very different kind of partial player — I think 3/4-player works pretty well. The interest is genuine, and even if the activity (gaming) isn’t their first choice, they’re invested in it.
Streamweaver: Yep, I know exactly what you mean — I’ve gamed with plenty of folks who fit your description perfectly. Not always for the same reason, but either way it gets old fast.
This is where communication really needs to happen. Sadly, communication skills can be rare among gamers, or hindered by the “wannabe inclusive” impulse we seem to have. It’s like pulling a splinter: it hurts, but it’s worse if you don’t.
When I saw this topic, I originally thought it was about the gamer who shows up to socialize, and turns everything into a “this one time…” story. That requires confrontation… another thing we’re notoriously bad at.
My most recent problem with this was a little rough. The guy was a player, and liked D&D. But he was a single guy and liked to party as well. Our games were Sunday afternoons, around 1:00.
Every Sunday the guy showed up hung over. He even said on the first day that he was hung over every Sunday, and not to worry about it. But having a guy that had to excuse himself for extremely long and ill-timed bathroom breaks or simply looked like he wanted to die actually destroyed the gaming group.
There were only four of us, me and the three players, and eventually we just decided to drop the game. We discussed changing the schedule, but nothing came together. Party-man had to party on Saturdays, of course.
I had a supers game with another mismatched set: you couldn’t have the wife (a good roleplayer) without the husband (a whining, paranoid antihero).
The husband made a point of arguing the “realism” of every single rule and GM call. Whenever he wasn’t hanging back, terrified that his “secret identity” would be discovered, he was avoiding contact with plot points and interaction with other lifeforms to the greatest degree possible. And yet, his wife was great fun!
We seriously debated tactics to split them up, including planting evidence that one of the couple was having an affair.
I used to have the player who would show up and then fall asleep. Problem was she was my girlfriend (at the time anyway. I wisely ditched her for a better role player (and all around less broken human being) after some bad internal monolog when the opportunity presented itself). She only came because
1: She saw it as something “artsy” people did and she was doing her best to convince everyone that she was an artist while being hindered by a complete lack of discernable talent.
2: She was one of those girlfriends who insists on clinging all over her boyfriend for fear he may realize that life might actually not be miserable if they’d go the hell away.
Nieve fool that I was, I started the new campaign putting her in a pivitol role (she was the one the NPCs gave “The Quest De Uber!” to) because “All she needs is an opportunity to shine.”. Later the players all told me they “didn’t get what they were supposed to be doing” because she had never shared information with them. Technically, this is MY fault as a DM, but it goes to show that a disinterested player can’t really be roped back in with effort to involve them.
On less bitter fronts, I’ve had friends who “just came over to hang out while everyone else gamed” and they got a character sheet and were told to put up or shut up (I have a hard enough time keeping ym group focused) and they either stopped coming ir started playing.
And, I’ve been the half gamer on occasion when my schedule didn’t fit with the gaming group so I’d show up halfway through the session (at my house) and try not to distract them while they finished the game (usually futile).
We’ve had a few. The most interesting was the wife of one of our players– she played one campaign and played an excellent ranger.
About six months later we started the current campaign, and she “created” a monk. She quickly lost interest– the monk couldn’t be played like her old character, and she didn’t want to learn a new one. Her husband made enough suggestions that she wasn’t really playing her character anymore. After a awkward argument or two in front of the rest of the group, she left not to return.
That’s a strange case– and lends to lebkin’s argument that sometimes a player’s not good for a specific game, rather than in general.
I think this goes both ways…a lot of the examples given here are definitely problem players, but in my Exalted group we have a slightly different problem.
My wife wants to play, and she’s interested. She doesn’t like the tactical elements that much but that’s no big deal really, no one else is digging on them either. But she doesn’t quite know where to start getting involved, despite multiple attempts by myself and the players to include her character. As a result she gets bored and frustrated. Plus, we have to bring our 1 1/2 year old daughter (and another player brings her 2 year old son). It doesn’t really bother the other players. But when my wife has to stop paying attention to the game to get our daughter something, or feed her, or whatever she needs, for 10-15 minutes at a time she loses track of what’s going on and has difficulty getting back “into the groove.” This cycles into the feeling of not being involved and, in some way, the boredom.
I just kind of wanted to illustrate that there can be a *lot* more going on than “this 1/2 player is teh suxxors” In many cases the player can be very well meaning and even willing to participate, but finding a difficulty of some kind. The only solution we can come up with is for her not to play so as to not ruin the game for everyone else, but she really likes the idea behind roleplaying and I wan to make it work for her.
I’ve been through this issue a couple of times recently, and many of the stories here I’ve seen echoed elsewhere.
In my opinion most of this comes back to two conflicting themes: the general lack of a populous base from which to draw players, and the overwhelming cultural norm to avoid conflict and accept mediocre communication.
That’s a pretty touchy-feely assessment of things, but I really believe it’s true. I totally bombed stepping out of the group I was in prior to the one I’m in now, and if I would have just been more direct with the others involved I could still be gaming with them enjoyably. As it is the group I’m in now works well, but mostly because everyone is pretty understanding with each other.
I guess that bring up another point: I read an article once about a study on what provides for the best conflict resolution skills. The overwhelming answer was pre-existing friendship. The point being that if you’re already friends with someone you’re a) more likely to communicate openly with them and, b) more likely to let little things slide off rather than irritate and fester.
So I guess one suggestion would be to become friends with someone before you start gaming with them. 😉
(brcarl) In my opinion most of this comes back to two conflicting themes: the general lack of a populous base from which to draw players, and the overwhelming cultural norm to avoid conflict and accept mediocre communication.
I’m not sure I agree that these are the driving forces behind keeping half-players around, but this is one of the the most precise, succinct and accurate summaries of why many gaming problems occur — and persist.
Want to write a guest post for TT based around that sentence, brcarl? (Drop me a line if you’re interested.)