We have all played with one of those players and many of us are this player. Yes the player that will spend months looking up the best way to cheese a character. They have to have the best combination of weapon, gear, skills, and will do whatever they have to, to get it. The character may be dumb as a box of rocks not meaning any offense towards the box of rocks but usually is uglier than a sack of puss. I have not actually ever seen a sack of puss but I am sure if I did it would be pretty ugly. Well for me most of the time these types of players ruin the game for me.
You might at this point be swearing at me and throwing sharp objects in my direction. It just has been to many times that I have had a game ruined by someone that feels that they need to be the do it all character. They have min / maxed to the point that things get off balance. Almost becomes like the cold war with everyone in the game trying to build the biggest arsenal.
I used to play RPG’s once a week but because of a few bad circumstances I am now down to about one per month. We couldn’t figure out why our groups kept falling apart. So I opened dialog with several of the players asking why they didn’t want to play anymore and they all had the same to say. Certain people and how they played were ruining their fun. Having fun is the base reason I play RPG’s. Having fun, hanging with friends, and escaping life for a few hours is what RPG’s are for.
Granted this can be fixed in a lot of ways by the GM. He can focus the role playing around the other characters, give them extra gear (adding to the arms race), talking to the player (didn’t help in my circumstance), and the player could be asked to not come back (hard to do when you are friends with the person outside of gameing).
The solution we found was to end the campaign and to move on. A first time GM stepped up and started to run a game but did not invite the problem player. Have any of you had similar problems and if so what kind of solutions did you use.
