Problem Players | Running the Game

video I want to talk about dealing with problem players this is something that comes up I mean certainly a couple of times a week on Twitter I have people reaching out to me they often tag me Matt Mercer Chris Perkins and they say how do you folks deal with problem players at the table and there are some stock answers I have my own stock answers and I think some of them are useful I think some of the useful ones tend to be maybe also glib and so I thought this is probably not the kind of thing we can cover in one video because the subject of problem players is as complex as the number of people playing the game may I mean each I can't unfortunately none of us regardless of how much we might want to help or how much we know or how much we've learned none of us can audit your game none of us are there at the table with you and so our ability to solve problems like that are actually quite limited a lot of this advice is either going to immediately make sense to you and you go oh yes I can do that or it's not going to make sense it's not going to be immediately applicable in which case I apologise but like I said I'm not one of your players I'm not you I can't sit there at the table and give advice and even if I were and even if I could that's no guarantee that my advice would be any good I'm not a psychologist I am NOT an expert in human dynamics and that's one of the the great benefit of Dungeons & Dragons is that this is something we all do together at the table and it fulfills that primitive monkey need to have face-to-face time that face-to-face interaction is I think one of the reasons human beings have self-awareness is our ability to look at another face and imagine what that face is thinking that's the positive side is it fulfills that need to have face-to-face interaction it's one of the reasons I don't think that like digital will ever kill tabletop I think they work very much together and you play one for a while then you want to play the other the downside of that is that it along with this thing we do sitting together at the table comes all of the complexities of human interaction all of them can happen at the tables like what Shakespeare said about the stage all of these dramas can play out at the table there's no way there's no one-stop shop no magic bullet no easy way to solve these that being said these some of the things that I have learned and again I do think this is probably going to be a multi-part series part 2 might be months from now that's the way I tend to do things but this is my first stab at the two most popular questions I get on Twitter seem to be unrelated but I'm beginning to suspect that they are related then the first one is how do I deal with this problem player and the second one is how do I get players to engage with my content and it makes me wonder if what we're really seeing is I have one problem player I have all problem players in other words there's a misalignment in both instances between what the dungeon master is hoping is gonna happen and what is actually happening and in one case it's just one player and in another case you don't think of them as problem players because it's the whole group but the reality is they're not engaging they're not playing the kind of game you want to run those of you who've been following me for a while know that I like to give my best advice first I don't mind doing long videos this video may be half hour long who knows I think any video longer than 12 minutes is a long video who knows how long this video will be but hopefully you can only watch the first five or six minutes and get the best stuff and the best advice I have to give you is if you are experiencing a problem with a player at the table I am here to assure you you are not the only person who thinks that you are not the only player and your person at the table but by which I mean that even you the dungeon master you're not the only person at the table who thinks this is a problem and you are not alone at the table even though we talked about it being the dungeon masters game and often I'll even do this it's the DMS table and we expect the DM to have some authority and in fact I think good Dungeon Master's need to have an air of authority it's important that when the dungeon master describes things in the world the players believe that these things are real and that comes from a certain degree of authority but whence comes that authority it comes from the other players it is granted to you by the other players they are complicit in the process because this is an endeavor we are all doing together and that that authority the dungeon master has is purely illusory you're only one person among four or five six seven at the table and if you have a problem player I I advise you to consider talking to that player at the table with everyone else in fact when the player is doing something obstreperous which is a phrase my grandparents used to use when they're acting out when they are trying to stomp on the other player's fun when they are trying to play their own wildly different version of Dungeons and Dragons than the one you're trying to run try turning to the other players and asking them if they are ok with this am I the only person who is not having fun right now because of this now that player is going to feel attacked and that's a terrible feeling and there are things you can do to mitigate that at the table but you have to confront the player one way or the other if you want to resolve the issue and you can do it offline which is a lot of advice that we see yet you and that player talking and you know your player better than I do and that may work but I find that being at the table and calling out this behavior at the table shows that player that they are one person among many and they get to see everyone at the tables reaction and that process of socialization has a huge impact on that player I have started conversations like this at the table by saying listen I'm gonna pick a name that isn't a member of any group I'm in right now or that I know I would say listen Steve I want you to have fun playing D&D with us that's an important way to phrase it because it begins by saying I value you you specifically by name are important and I want you to have fun playing with us and that's where we segue into the reality we've complimented that player to a certain extent we've respected them and then we say but I am NOT having fun right now and I suspect the other players are in one way another having the same experience Steve I want you to have fun playing Dean be with us but I also want to have fun it's important that we all get along and we all enjoy this process and right now it seems like you want different things from the game than the rest of us do that's a very neutral way of putting it is a very I think non confrontational way of putting it but it is still a confrontation and one of the problems and this is something you learn if you're ever a manager of employees at a job one of the problems with confronting anyone about this stuff or in front of the group is that they perceive the problem to be the conversation we're having right now these people are calling me out on my nonsense and maybe they didn't even think they were they were doing anything bad so suddenly people are talking to them and saying hey we're not having fun because of you and that experience is a negative experience the conversation they're having at the table is now a negative experience it is something to be adored and it's something to be gotten out of it immediately they're gonna want to go back to that state before the conversation started when they from their point of view we were all just having fun playing D&D they didn't know they were a problem player until about 30 seconds ago but now you've made it clearer and now they just want this conversation to be over and they will do or say the things they need to do or say in order to end the conversation because they see the problem as being in this conversation and once the conversation is over they will relax and they'll think okay I solved that problem and go back to doing what they were doing before but send them to this video so they know they get they get the straight dope but they know that that's not how it works the conversation we're having in which we talk to you about the fact that we think you're disrupting our game is only the beginning of solving the problem the end of that conversation nothing's happened yet except we've had a talk now the process is can we get along and can we all play this game together because at the end of the day if you can't then either you're going to need to play something else or somebody's gonna have to leave I thought about making a video where I just address the problem player inside hey if you've been sent a link to this video it's because your friends are having a problem and they hope they can resolve it but they're afraid they're gonna have to ask you to leave and they don't want to do it so I'm doing it maybe you should find some other people to play with I know that sounds harsh by the way maybe you should find some other people to play with but in my experience they're probably actually is a group out there for everyone I've been in groups it really lasted longer than one session where I thought these people are all Whang rods these people are all this is a very toxic group and it's full of a whole bunch of individuals all of whom are just sniping at each other and trying to score points and being sarcastic and they're all misanthropes and I don't fit in and I get out of that group but then later I think this those people are all happy playing together to me it seems incredibly dysfunctional but these people been playing together for years and they enjoy each other's company and they enjoy the game they're playing so that means that this one problem player I have in my group there's a group out there for that player the most common answer you're going to see and you're gonna get if you go online and ask how do you deal with a problem player is talk to that player communicate with them and that is a that is that is quite good advice the problem with that advice is it implies that there is a solution that if you have a problem player at the table if only you were smart enough if you were a good enough judge of character and knew how to say the right thing you could fix the problem I don't think that's true I think communication is key in all human interactions I think setting expectations is equally important but at the end of the day we must accept that sometimes these misalignments can't be corrected it's not meant to be so don't get frustrated if you feel like you're at your wits end and there is no solution in sight because sometimes I think that is the answer there's no reason to be frustrated you're already at the end of the problem in the end is one of us has to find a different group or play different games and that's another thing I fundamentally believe and this has a lot to do with my experience if I had played in different groups I am sure I would have different answers but because of the way I played and the people I played with over the years I believe that the best D&D groups are groups of friends that get together to play games anyway outside of D&D D&D is a fantastic game but I don't think it's fair to expect this one thing we do together to solve all of our gaming needs I think a healthy group gets together to play lots of games one of the things I have noticed in my own experiences and my experiences are not comprehensive or universal one of the things I've noticed in my experience is that there's often a correlation maybe it's not one-to-one but there is a correlation between players who are showing up at the table just to play D&D and problem players anytime in the past I've had a player expressed to me the sentiment that they're just there to play D&D and they're not interested in playing anything else that's when I know oh this is a problem player this is gonna turn into an issue because I think ultimately the best the healthiest groups and you can have a successful group that doesn't like this but the healthiest groups I've played with were people who were friends outside of the game they got together on a regular basis to play games one of which was D&D and within Dungeon Master got burned out that was okay the group didn't collapse we just switched to another game not even necessarily an RPG and this gets down to that principle of sportsmanship that I sometimes fear is is lacking in our culture these days that notion that okay so you don't like playing Robo rally but you'll play tonight for a couple of hours because you realize that's part of being a good sport is I will play this game that's not my favorite but then next week I'll get to play the game that I do really love and we each short sort of put up with a little bit of that you can already see how compromised what thing I just described is all about compromise compromise is key to maintaining a good and healthy group and the fact that just because things didn't go your way this week you're gonna deal with that and then next week they will go your way and you can say that you can say okay I'll put up with this I'll play this game and I'll be a good sport about it I'm not gonna grumble and I'm not gonna grouse I'm gonna I'm gonna be a good sport but then I want to play this other game and that's just part of the normal low level negotiations that are part of being any group every healthy group I've ever been a part of and I've been a part of several have had that kind of interaction that's part of my advice is try to be the kind of group that gets together and plays other kinds of games because otherwise I don't think Dungeons & Dragons can shoulder the burden of fulfilling everyone's expectations and needs every week so we talked about a couple things already we talked about the idea that talking to the player is a good idea and necessary but it's not necessarily gonna solve the problem you may be fundamentally incompatible and that has to be okay we've also talked about the idea that healthy groups I think healthy groups allow themselves to play other games so that not this one game doesn't shoulder the burden of solving all of our problems but I also want to talk about like what is it that makes someone a problem player when I hear people asking questions online saying how do I deal with this problem player what types of things are they asking about what I typically see is they're not taking the game seriously that's a big one they want to hog the spotlight or they want to take all the magic items for themselves they want to be perceived as the smart player who's solving because one is coming up with all the solutions for all the problems and the other player should listen to them because they're smart and I think this also relates to the idea of player who wants to manage the other players and tell them what to do and gets upset when the other players aren't conforming to their ideas about how the game should be played their character should be run why they would choose one character over another what they do in combat I did a video a while ago on different types of players and maybe I shoulda done a better job of explaining that all those different types of players which are part of our vernacular the tactician the actor stuff like that all of those types of players are just normal there's room for all of those players in any group I think every group needs one good tactician being a tactician player being you know a min/max right um of what the term for this guy was being an actor none of these things are pejoratives any of them can turn into a problem when that player is a wine rod being a tactician player just means you think tactically being a Wang rod means you expect everyone else to conform to your ideas about how the table should be run about how combat should be run and that's a problem it's my goal to make sure that you the dungeon master or the prospective dungeon master understand that while you do have authority at the table it is your game in to a certain extent it is your table you are not their parents you are not their boss you're just someone else in the group trying to have a good time and you have taken the burden on yourself of doing a lot of work making Dungeon Master is fun and I don't think it's hard but there is a lot of the work involved and so I think you deserve some credit it is sort of up to you to bring these things up that it is not up to you to solve them this is something the group can solve together what do you guys think about this am I the only one feels like maybe Steve is trying to run other people's characters Steve it seems like you're getting really frustrated that other people aren't playing as tactically optimally as you would like them to but I'm here to tell you that it's okay real people in the real world often don't do things that are tactically optimal we have to let each other play our own characters it's one of the reasons I use the phrase I don't think you're here for the same reasons the rest of us are not making a value judgment about why you're here though the things that you're doing might be perfectly reasonable in another group but right now you Steve are the outlier everybody name's Steve watching this video is like I'm not talking about you I'm talk about hypothetical Steve that's the advice I have I hope it is useful this won't be the only video we do on the subject I'm gonna be reading the comments I'm gonna be watching the response online and I'm going to see where did my advice fail and can I make another video that covers that stuff but in brief remember that while you are the dungeon master you are not the only person at the table there's a whole group of people there and you were almost certainly not the only person who is not having a good time because of this one problem player lead with a statement that reinforces the fact that you can you want to play D&D with that player because that helps them feel included but emphasize that you also want to have fun as do the other players and if you can't all find a way to do that together then you're gonna find a way to do it without them and just remember that having this conversation is gonna be difficult people's skin is going to crawl nobody likes being confronted nobody likes that feeling of being attacked but there's no way to do this without putting that player on the spot and they will perceive the conversation itself as being the problem to solve and that once the conversations over and they're rolling dice again that everything's fine and back to normal but you can even show them this video and make sure they understand that it that it's not they've only just begun the process of integrating into the group like I said I can't audit your group and even if I could my advice might not be very useful only you know whether it would be better to talk to that player alone or talk to that player with one or two other players there but I just want to suggest the idea that you do it at the table this is a collective endeavor and it's a mistake to think that because you're the dungeon master you are solely responsible for fixing interpersonal problems that is not true this is something we do together it is something we do to have fun and the other players also can help you solve this problem and they probably want to they're probably just waiting for somebody and this is really your only job to begin the process of fixing this and once you start talking about it you will discover that the other players at the table are more than willing to help you solve the problem because they want to have fun too this is a short video for what is a complex issue because the things we do at the table are as complex as all human interactions so look forward to more videos in this subject you post your own experiences with this in the comments and come by tonight on twitch twitch TV slash Matt Colville and we will continue the process of building the Pantheon and the culture and eventually the city and the streets and the NPC's and the shops and everything for the campaign that I will soon be running regardless of what kind of game you want to play there is a group out there for you it's just a question of finding it don't get discouraged until the next time peace out

Channel: Matthew Colville

Views: 394,392

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Id: -lEi9DAn9rE

Length: 18min 43sec (1123 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 21 2018