If he can’t accept that, then either you have a couple of choices. The player may not fit with the campaign you want to run, in which case you might have to ask him to leave. Alternatively, you might decide that the campaign you’re running needs a different focus. What sort of characters do the players have? If they know the GM and campaign well, they will choose characters to fit, but if the campaign and/or GM are new, they will make the sort of characters they want to play. A straw poll of the character types and skills can give you an indication of what sort of campaign the players are “voting” for

A compromise would be to have his character ambushed in an alley every session whilst the others are investigating. A silly example, but I’m sure you get the idea. A little bit of combat put into the more “boring” sessions in order to keep the players interest and avoid trouble.

Which route you eventually follow will depend a lot on the campaign you’re trying to run, the other players, and this players response to your troubleshooting.

Good luck

Micah: Not embarrassing anyone is a key element of handling situations like this, you’re absolutely right. How to Kick Out a Player and Respect Yourself in the Morning tackles the worst-case scenario, and it’s a big part of performing that unpleasant task well.

Mallmus: I’d say this approach would be worth trying with your friend. You’ve actually got more breathing room (since you’re between sessions), and there’s a decent chance he’s cooled off about it on his own. I’d certainly bring it up openly with him, but in private.

Occasionally someone gets pissed-off in one of my games, and when this does happen I’ve unfortunately tried to just carry on and not take it to one side and sort it… I’ll try out your advice here, I can’t see it not working.

At my last game on Thursday a player started to get pissed off because the session wasn’t turning out as he’d expected, the session previously had been high-action and high-adventure, this weeks was more toned down with investigation and mystery – he started to get frustraighted that there was more talking than fighting, which he saw as pointless… eventually he got so pisses-off that he began to sabotage the game which fortunately happened to be around 2am and time for the session to end anyway.

I could see him being persistent and continuing to deliberately ruin things because he was pissed-off, what sort of advice can anyone give for that type of player? – In this situation I feel taking him to one side and chatting to him might not work… what do you think?

So, I was rather confused when I started reading; the title leads me to believe that we’re talking about players who are drunk, and the included image looks very much like a bottle with a pool of red wine around it

Dealing with players who aren’t happy is not a fun thing to do, but the post is spot on about how to do it. Isolate, find out why, fix if possible, and don’t make the situation worse or lay blame.

“Praise in public, criticize in private.”
– Vince Lombardi

When in a disagreement with someone who makes a foolish statement/action, I try to give them a way out that saves face.

Well, only once or twice… After that, they’re just an asshole.

Whenever there is some sort of conflict, the players will naturally look to the DM. If the DM starts tossing blame or pointing fingers, the whole situation will quickly collapse.

If everyone can save face and walk away with dignity, it will go a long way to resolving the conflict.

At first I thought it was my GMing style, so I stepped down and asked someone else in the group to run a couple of games. The player had the same outbursts with a different GM, and when we had a night of board and video games the same thing happened then too.

There was nothing we could do to convince this guy to calm down and just let it go when things went against him. We had to ask him to leave the group because we couldn’t tolerate the outbursts anymore.