Game Night Freak-outs

QPCloudy wrote: I nearly came to a freak out once, but was able to restrain myself.

I and three other people were doing a Road to Legend campaign. It was my first time playing Descent ever. As my house was central to everyone attending, the game was hosted at my place. Anyhow, this one guy, who is a lawyer mind you, was the most annoying, grossest, and ill-mannered person I have ever met. This guy would chew so loud with his mouth open and food spittling out, the would burp and fart so loud also with not so much as an "excuse me". Also, he would argue every single this the overlord would do, which I would normally agree with the overlord and most of us were having a good time. Like, every time something bad would happen, he'd be all "no no no, it should be this or that way". There was even one instance where he requested we restart the entire campaign because the OL was ahead by something like 25 experience points. I was ready to ring his neck so many times. Luckily he is a dickweed and just ended up not playing anymore. Eventually the group disbanded because we were all just too stressed and it just wasn't fun anymore after all his bullshit. I would play with the other again in a heart beat, but seriously, fuck that dude. Ugh, I hate lawyers.

Right there with ya, with one caveat. I hate PLAINTIFF lawyers.

I've also noticed that lawyers fall into Traci's Theory of Legal Relativity: Common Sense, Law Degree. Choose one only.

I read that story and came away with "Ugh, I hate assholes."

uba: my patience with your serial interrupter would have run out a lot earlier...

SuperflyTNT wrote:
" We used to have that problem until my buddy Mickey, who has, shall we say, "a presence", laid down the edict that while the rules are being gone over, everyone is to shut the fuck up and listen, and only AFTER the rules are done may you ask questions."
Yep, that's what you do. When I'm explaining rules and someone starts questioning stuff I've not yet covered, I tend to start with "we'll get to that in a minute", move on to "be patient", then "wait". Other times I've gone with "save the questions to the end".

Oh man, I fucking hhhhaaaaate being Rules Guy, but almost everyone in my group except me either A) doesn't bring new games to play, doesn't read the rules to new games ahead of time, C) reads the rules two weeks prior to actually playing the game and forgets them all by the night, or D) either misinterprets rules all the time or fumbles around with the book while trying to explain them.

So, the role of Rules Guy falls to me all the time. If I brought the game and have to explain it, this means I try to explain the rules as concisely as possible. All I say is what you need to know to play the game and not violate the rules. This almost always fails because everyone wants to know why you would ever do such-and-such, or what happens if blah blah blah, or OK, well if rule X is thus and so, then what does this card mean? These are all questions that I can't answer because I've either never played the game before, or it's stuff you would never try doing if you actually played the game and knew how it worked. So, if I explain a crucial game rule one time, using one sentence, odds are people have their minds on all this other shit and their understanding of the actual important parts of the rules is fucked up from the beginning.

Or, if I didn't bring the game, that means I have to spend the first half of it with my nose buried in the rulebook, trying to make sure we're playing correctly. Actually, I'm doing that any time I haven't played the game before because I have to try and hunt down these special cases people asked about that I'm not even sure exist in practice. This means I'm too distracted to be able to play very well, or have very much fun, which drives me absolutely nuts because I constantly get stuck with this gig and nobody seems to realize or care what an annoying pain in the ass it is.

So, I'm already irritated and primed to start acting like a complete dick, and that's when somebody starts asking me questions while I'm in the middle of trying to play and read the rules at the same time. God help you if you see I'm busy trying to do these two things at once, then ask to see the rules, and say you "just want to see them" when I tell you I'm using them right now and what do you want to know?

I don't know that I freak out in these circumstances, but I will definitely not be anyone you want to be in the same room with, let alone play games.