The Worst Player I Ever GMed

Zack on RPG Blog II wrote about his worst DM ever and it read like a horror story. My worst DM was one who had a PC graveyard folder. If you went through his dungeon(s) and died he wanted your character sheet. These days it's no big deal to give up a copy of your PC, but back then we had no copies. This DM was proud of how thick his PC graveyard was and would thumb through it and brag how he'd killed them. First time I encountered him we played and I had a half-orc assassin character I liked a lot. I believe he was 5th level. This GM slaughtered the entire party within fifteen minutes of game play by rolling a random encounter of ten crazed titans. He expect each of us to hand over our characters and told him no. This was a one shot deal this character was involved in another campaign. He told me I could no longer play that character. It was his. It was dead. I left with my character sheet as did the others. I'm not sure what happened to him, but I am sure he is still thumbing through his PC graveyard folder.

Now onto the worst player I ever had. Now this will be in two parts because it changed. The first worst characters I ever had were actually Rob and Dwayne. They couldn't get along well enough to complete a single session without wanting to or killing one another. It was one of the main reasons I stopped DMing for a long time. It's hard to DM when your players just want to disembowel one another. But I am happy to report that is long past.

The worst player I had was always trying to find new ways to cheat. The only reason I dealt with him was he was part of a new group Rob and I started to play with. All the other guys in the group were a lot of fun to game with. I shall name this player Butthead, but Butthead was always cheating. We were playing a GURPS campaign so it is a point based system. Everyone started out with 100 point characters. I believe after a couple of game sessions the players were 110 characters, but magically Butthead's character was nearing the 200 point total. After I checked his sheet he defended it saying I had given him the points, like he was trying to pull some Jedi mind trick. I told him to go pound salt and redo his character to the 110 point level.

During game play he would roll the dice and cover them with his hand so no one could see the result but him. So I had to take a box off a Trivial Pursuit game and said all dice rolls needed to made within or it would not count. He said it wasn't fair. He said he wasn't cheating. He said I was doing it just because of him. I told him yeah I am now shut up and roll. In the box.

I was not fond of him game play either. He was playing a holy warrior, paladin type, but every time a monster or NPC would go down he would be the first to start pilfering through the pockets even if a battle was still going on. He let two of his party die so he could get to an NPC's pockets first. Since he was not a true paladin he did not lose any powers, but when he went to the church he proclaimed to be a part of the healing spells would not work on him. Through the priests I explained he had angered the god with his actions. Butthead thought I was being completely unfair. That I was picking on him and wanted his character dead. When I told him his actions had consequences to roleplay it. If you want to be the bad boy of the church please indulge or if he wanted to storm out in anger and join an opposite aligned church and show them then please do. But he was more interested in arguing.

During the one of the final sessions he continued to cheat with his character by slipping in more points and equipping them with magic items he never had access to. Even through all his cheating and pouting he met his character met an appropriate death by the hands of the lowly city guard. He did not return to play with us again. He said we cheated. The rest of his group stayed on and we had a lot of good adventures together. So if nothing else, Butthead managed to introduce me to another group of gamers I would not have known.