Preventing Personal Drama at the Table

[Cuindless]

This is more of a rant than anything else.

I've been running a D&D 3.5 campaign for almost 4 years now. It has taken some twists and turns. Players have left. New players have joined. It was tabled for almost 9 months when one of the core group left for a military deployment. Yet through all this, the campaign endured. Now the characters are 17th level and nearing the finish line. The cabal of evil masters is on the run from our intrepid heroes, and their planet-killing ritual is almost averted. The final fight looms when IT happened... Personal drama exploded all over the table, and now multiple members of the group aren't on speaking terms. It is enough to make a grown Dungeon Master actually weep for the loss of all that hard work.

So how do you keep this from happening? Most of the people I game with are also friends. They have relationships and lives off the table. I can't prevent that stuff from showing up no matter how I'd like to. It's just frustrating to watch a world I've painstakingly helped craft and watched blossom turn to slag because of some really petty crap. Any ideas? Does anyone know how to prevent this kind of stuff from happening?

[b100d_arrowz]

I feel your pain man, I was playing in a game once where we lost half the players in the span of about thirty minutes. My friend and I were both playing rather sarcastic characters, me the party's tracker and he the party trapfinder. We were basically insulting the manlyness of everyone else in the party, when one of the other guy's gfs walks in, takes an immediate dislike to us because of what we were saying about her bf, and "convinces" him to leave after the dinner break. Next we had her roommate, who was playing with us, storm out of the room in a rage because the DM told her not to use her computer, because half the time she was playing WoW instead of paying attention. She apparently never told her ex boyfriend that she had stopped playing with us, so we went from a group of 8 (split into two seesions) to a group of 4 in one session.

I don't know if your problems are of that tier, but from my personal experience I'd say try and sit down with them, and get the players to focus on finishing the campaign. With the campaign I just finished running, we had a few incidents where one or more of the guys would leave in the middle of the session or quietly brood in anger because of what happened. Our group spent basically all the time we weren't in class in my apartment, and there is some genuine dislike between some of the members. Usually if they storm out the next session they are perfectly fine and are able to continue playing. Other times they've left the group for multiple sessions, and one guy never came back after his character ended up getting killed by a mistake by a party member.

Something that I've done before to decent success is split the group up, and have the people who are antagonistic to one another be on different paths of the campaign, I'm not sure how possible that is with your group now, especially if they are nearing the end of a campaign. Depending on the problems the players are having with one another sometimes they just need time away as well, give them a little while to cool down and perhaps they will be able to be in the same room for a few hours again.

The biggest thing I've been able to do to avoid the bigger blowups between the players is to talk to them out of game time. It sounds trite, but talking to them and trying to figure out what they think is such a problem, and then finding a solution that works for everyone. Because really most people just want to have their problems heard by someone, I had one of my players be able to get along with the one guy who was causing all of his frustration after venting to me about it for thirty minutes.

[veekie]

Well, generally most of these are caused in the end by out of game issues. The thing is to prevent escalation, and put your foot down if inter-player Drama ensues, always settle it out of game if possible.

[aboyd]

I will commiserate.  I run a game of 3.5 D&D, going through the Into The Wilds module (Goodman Games).  It's fun and I enjoy DMing it.  But the game may be over.  Here's why.

There is a section where the PCs are exploring a goblin tree-house of sorts.  Someone fell over the edge and landed 80' down, but lived.  One of the players didn't understand.  She said, "Not a big deal, I'll just throw down my rope."

Another player says, "Your fifty feet of rope won't reach our companion; it's eighty feet down."

She replies, "Huh?  I'm just throwing down the rope, of course she can catch it."

We all pause, confused.  The curious player asks a more probing question, "So, if you throw down a rope, what are you anchoring it to?"

Now she looks confused.  "Anchoring it?" she asks.  Then more authoritatively and sorta exasperated, "I'm just throwing down the rope, okay?  It'll work!"

Now the other players start asking questions too.  "How will giving her a bundle of rope that isn't tied to anything help her climb up to us?"

Now Mrs. Rope is really frustrated and starts saying loudly, "Can I just throw down my rope?  Okay?  Is that okay with you all?"

And Mr. Curious is about to tell her that no, it's not okay to waste the rope, but I can see his response coming from a mile away, and cut him off.  My thinking is that rather than fight about it, let's allow her to do what she wants, and when the rope is down there with no way for them to pull her up, she'll start to grasp what she's done.  I can tell her brain just isn't engaging three-dimensionally yet, but once her action doesn't succeed, her brain will kick into gear trying to figure out why.

"Go ahead," I say, "throw it."

"GOD!" says Mr. Curious, angrily.

"It's not my fault you can't figure this out," says Rope Girl.  Then she looks at the other woman at the table and says, "Boys are too dumb to get the nuances that women understand."

At this point, Mr. Curious, who is also the host, shoves his chair back, leaps up from the table, heads to the kitchen, and begins muttering angrily to himself while pacing back & forth.  I literally have my arms out in a sweeping "time out" motion, trying to get a break.

Rope Girl leans back in her chair and says, "Oh.  Okay, fine.  Here's what I do.  I deliver the rope personally."  And then she walks her mini over the edge.  It was a deliberate, "Screw this game, I suicide my way out" gesture.  But like the other fallen PC, she lives.

At this point, the two remaining guys at the top have to tie their ropes together, anchor the line, and then rappel down to save the two of them.  They are VERY begrudging.  Rope Girl stands up, the game clearly over, and says to the host, "If you can't handle it, don't invite.  That's all I'm saying.  Don't invite."

We haven't played since.  That was a month ago.  Wish I could fix it.  I got the host to apologize to Rope Girl, but it didn't change her disposition.

[veekie]

What she needed was a Spool of Infinite Rope.

[RobbyPants]

Keeping in-game and out-of-game separate is a pretty good way to go.  Back when I was in college, I was running a game and two new guys joined.  They joined because they knew the female gamer in our group, and she was in another game with them.

I don't know what happened, but something happened in-character in that game that got them both pissed at her (and she at them), which lead to some sort out unspoken out-of-character bitterness, which turned into irrational in-character conflict in my game.  The two guys were planning some sort of coup to have her character killed and they refused to talk about it with me. 

It ended up killing that campaign, but oddly enough, we were able to run another campaign with different characters.  There was still a bit of tension and trust issues, but there were no obvious problems in the game itself.

[veekie]

I don't know what happened, but something happened in-character in that game that got them both pissed at her (and she at them), which lead to some sort out unspoken out-of-character bitterness, which turned into irrational in-character conflict in my game.  The two guys were planning some sort of coup to have her character killed and they refused to talk about it with me. 

It ended up killing that campaign, but oddly enough, we were able to run another campaign with different characters.  There was still a bit of tension and trust issues, but there were no obvious problems in the game itself.

Actually, this can be an issue with the more avid roleplayers. They have a very strong conception of what their character is, what they will tolerate, and what they will hate. So the cause can be pretty simple, the in character action crossed an in character line. Usually happens more strongly with players who start from freeform, rules light systems or games with a strong adversarial aspect to player relations(Paranoia sometimes can cause this if some players go into it with a serious mindset and run into other players randomly offing each other in a lighthearted manner).
Usually when such things happen it's time for DM intervention, talk to the involved players one by one to work out the cause and if they're amiable, have the coup happen, IC, but fail/succeed based on OOC reasons that somehow resolve the matter.