non-play
Filip Luszczyk:
Quote from: czipeter on February 06, 2012, 08:50:18 AM
My naiveté also suggests that if someone in a group gets his fun out of playing the game instead of the xbox for example, then the non-playing ones are very much pulled towards having fun like his/her. So I still believe in setting a good example even if it certainly seems like a chore sometimes for me. If they see me enjoying the use of a system (thus conversing (and rolling dice) in some way), then they will try it at least, I think.
Indeed, I fully agree that this sounds rather naive on your part.
Filip Luszczyk:
Now, as for myself and what I got from this thread throughout the past five months:
I carefully examined my regular player pool, paying particular attention to weakest links in the chain. I considered their gaming motivations, what valuable things they brought to the table (if any) and the results we were getting. Then, for the first time since summer 2010, I started actually putting established members of the group off the screen.
-4 regular players off the screen
-4 non-regular players off the screen
+7 new players recruited
-6 new recruits off the screen
+2 old contacts re-established
Left with eight regulars and no gaming related frustration. Still gaming two or three times per week.
My specific reasons for putting those 14 players off the screen?
2 cases of confirmed mental disorders that, in the long run, impeded gaming with no real hope of improvement.
2 cases of proving a stupid dick.
2 cases of proving a stupid cunt.
8 cases of acute non-play as described in this thread.
7 cases of continual unreliability for silly reasons, almost always coinciding with the above.
2 cases of insufficient reliability for perfectly legitimate and understandable reasons, tough luck.
Obviously, there was overlap in many cases. Like, one of the most problematic players suffered from a mental disorder that affected gameplay, eventually managed to piss off most other regulars due to also simply being a dick, and I count him as a case of non-play as well (month after month it was more and more obvious that he was only playing with us or at all to gather blogging material). Good luck with other groups, I say!
In some cases it was difficult to give up on gaming with the person due to purely social reasons. I do miss those, since apparently it universally resulted in cutting or diminishing our social links. Still, it seems we didn't have that much in common after all, if ceasing to game together also impacts our non-gaming connections and activities. Either way, for now I do not regret my decisions as far as gaming itself is concerned.
Callan S.:
I think there is obviously a point where construction/the completeness of the game does not matter - the other person is just disruptive in some way or other. And maybe that's the situation that applied in this specific instance, not the one I mentioned. I'm just pretty sure that with some people if you A: played them through a boardgame, they'd be fine but B: if you rewrote that boardgame to be like most traditional RPG's, that person would become irritating and disruptive.
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