So, are these guys your friends? It sounds like you have history with them. If I got a situation in a game where I refused to play with another person again, I’m not sure I could play with them as the GM. It sounds like he’s a bad player too. What exactly are the terms he agrees to play on? How does he destroy games?
Um, why is he the GM?
What happens if you don’t do anything? What happens if you don’t save people? If the GM is doing the ‘the world is cruel harsh place and no one cares’ you can play too.
Arbitrary rules. Is this universal? Make a radio transmitter that transmits random codes of the same types on random frequencies. You’re bound to hit something.
Rule favoritism. Lovely.
Dude, gaming is supposed to be fun.
If you’re not enjoying yourself, what the hell are you bothering with this crap for?
I prefer political intrigue games. Dungeon crawls of any kind are incredibly dull. I’d rather play Halo. The problem is the people who are good at political intrigue games usually get into something more interesting in real life.
He knows the rules. All the rules, for everything, perfectly, and makes the kind of intricate study of gaming rules that is usually reserved for detailed analyses of the laws of phsyics. Min-Maxers bow before him and build golden idols of him to worship. He doesn’t need to abritrarily pick out the rules, because he is the ultimate master of building a character so grossly powerful that it is inconceivable that anyone or anything might challenge him.
He discovered a way to get abilities equivelant of having three or four 20th level classes… as 3rd level DnD character. Generally speaking, any character he has will be as tough as a Main Battle Tank (at least), with vast and infinitely flexible magic powers, and will have the sunny, cheerful disposition of a a naive waif, but who is secretly an impossibly ruthless genius. His nicer characters have been known to give Horrors From Beyond nightmares.
He is so good at predicting plotlines and difficulties that he has been known to simply beeline for the end of a plot, sometimes before the villain has even gotten to start the scheme.
He generally will not game unless he has access to considerable magic powers, and will suggest minor tweaks in the rules which sometimes (but not always) open huge loopholes. In one instance, he went and wrote a bunch of rules for the homebrew game I made, then wrote every other character in the party up. He then presented me with the fait accompli, and I had no choice but to go along or the game wouldn’t even get started (because then no one would have a character).
He claims to be irritated that he keeps making people’s characters, but then, he’s the one who handicaps them by always making their characters, so they never learn on their own. It also grants him vast control over the game.
He’ll let us, but generally there’s no point. We may as well be the heroes, because if we’re not people will whine at us, and we’ll have more enemies, and even fewer rewards. If we won’t go along, the game ends.
Ouch!
I don’t even know him, nor do I do much table-top gaming (would if I could ever find a group…) and I already hate him. Min-Maxers always seem to suck all the fun out of it for the rest of us, don’t they?
No, most of the time, we don’t.
I love running games for this type of guy, because there’s a clause in every single RPG rulebook that I’ve read that says “The GM is the final arbiter”. Point at this clause and say “No.” as often as necessary.
Funny, I am now going to suggest rather than merely quitting, you go directly to the “blunt force lobotomy” instead. Seriously, I’ve gamed with guys like this for a few sessions max–life is too short.
Suppose it really depends on how you define min-maxers…
I mean, I certainly play to maximize my character’s strengths, and minimize his weaknesses…but I accept the weaknesses/flaws I had to take, I don’t go scouting for clearly game-breaking/absurd loopholes like most of the D&D exploits I see, etc.
There are minmaxers, which is really the only rational character building strategy for many RPGs/GMs, and there are munchkins like the GM in the ongoing saga of the OP. The latter do not last in my games, I will throw them out because I have better things to do. Same with rules lawyers and bullies.
I find myself agreeing with Zeriel a lot lately.
I am a shameless optimizer. I do it because I enjoy it, quite frankly. When I build a character, he is not going to break your game. But he is going to be a lot more effective than any sample build in any book.
Optimization is completely and totally independent of RP style. Not all lawyers and bullies are optimizers, and the reverse is also true.
I tend to use “rules lawyers” as the pejorative, as opposed to “knowledgeable players”. A GM version is “rules nazi”. Bullies are the worst, though–the kind of people who attempt to pick and choose both party and game direction by being flaming dicks out of character when in-character decisions don’t go their way. The worst example of this in my personal history was a guy who went born-again midway through a D&D game and rolled up a Lawful Stupid paladin who immediately tried to force himself to be the party conscience despite having only joined the band that session. The rest of the party, being mostly neutral whatever or chaotic good, had very little use for this.
Indeed. Ironically, in my gaming group, my wife and I are the only non-lawyers or law students period. None of them are stereotypical rules lawyers.
We also have a very, very simple system. Bad calls happen, and a GM should cheerfully reverse them when they do. If you are a player and you object to a call, you have about thirty seconds to make your case. If you can’t convince the GM that your point as at least enough merit to open a book, the ruling stands and everyone moves on. We enforce this rule collectively and it has never caused us any problems at all.
Hey last time I did a dungeon crawl I fell asleep.
Besides you were the one using real world capital markets as the reason you don’t play Eve. 
There was a point early in my gaming career where I would literally find and highlight the “GM’s interpretation is final, these rules are not” clause in every book I owned, and it only took about six games from then on for rules lawyers to stop joining my games.
The bullies were dealt with in both cases by intra-party violence ending their characters and then subsequently asking them not to re-roll unless they were prepared to stop being dicks.
The problem with tabletop gaming inherently is that gamers are often overgrown children, and it is their primary mode of ego expression. That kind of ruins the experience. I’ve had characters die in cool ways that I was perfectly willing to let their death stand.
Ok, that was dungeon masochism, not a dungeon crawl. 
Fair enough on the EVE remark. But my life will never be too interesting for some juicy RPG politics. Office politics aren’t exactly kingmaking.
Yep. I love it when players take care of themselves. One of my old friends finally got the message that he had to tone it down about when the other PCs up and hanged him. At least he didn’t ask me to interfere. He took it with a pretty good sense of humor.
Filtering out the overgrown children is the hardest part. Of course, I say the same about my EVE operation (Which is currently more fun with three people (two dualboxers, granted) than it was with twelve-fourteen)
This is the same problem with people who play pretty much any game, rp or otherwise. You just have to be selective in who you play with. The people I play with now are fantastic. We all have busy lives so we don’t get together all that often, but when we do, it is very rewarding. I never have to worry about them, either as a player or as a GM. We are very much on the same wavelength.