The Civilized Guide to Tabletop Gaming, page 5
The Step-Up Technique
Let’s say there’s a game you got that you’re sure your group will love, but it’s a complex game. Your group isn’t very familiar with this type of game or its mechanics. This is the perfect time to level up their understanding of the game by stepping them into the full version of the rules.
Think about when you’ve experienced or seen a run-through of a demo version of a game. Play is fast, fun, and simple, and the demo rarely encompasses all the minutiae and nuance of the game. Rather, it emphasizes the basic mechanics and why the game is fun.
To do this successfully, you need to break down more complicated games into simple versions of themselves. That may mean shrinking the game’s length so players can get a full play-through of a single game in a relatively shorter time. They’ll be able to learn the mechanics and strategize. I’ll often reduce the number of game turns in fixed-length games, for example, to let players get a full play-through from start to end to see how people play and win.
It may mean stripping the game of the more complicated elements until the players master its basics. I may simplify the values of successful dice rolls to a single number so everyone can remember it and learn the mechanics. Or I remove entire game effects until the mechanics of the games are mastered by the players.
Teaching a game well might mean introducing its core mechanics through another game with similar but simpler mechanics. I might level up players into complicated miniature war games by introducing them to a basic miniature board game such as Ninja All-Stars (to master moving and attacking mechanics), moving them up to a boardless miniature game like X-Wing (to help them visualize and anticipate movements of their opponent), and then showing them the most complicated version of that style of game like Warmachine and Malifaux.
The step-up method of teaching games works because it doesn’t overwhelm players with information and focuses on mastery before moving on. It’s building fundamental game skills, and sometimes you need permission to mess with the in-box rules a little for the enjoyment of all the players.
I love this technique for teaching games, and if you go about it this way, your chances for success are substantially higher than throwing your friends into the deep end and hoping they can swim.
Help Players Develop Mastery of Complex Games
Some games, particularly those where players create and collect their own list of components (like miniatures, cards, or other elements that represent their force) or strategic games, typically have a higher learning curve that can be a challenge for a new player. This applies to veteran tabletop gamers as much as to those new to the hobby.
Timing Is Everything
As an example (albeit negative) of the importance of teaching others about games, I can mention an experience I had with one of my favorite miniature war games, Warmachine. The system is fantastic, but the game itself is incredibly unforgiving when players make strategic errors. To give some context, the game I was playing had a time limit of ninety minutes, with forty-five minutes allocated to each player. We timed moves with a chess clock. Serious stuff, I know. I spent a total of eight minutes deploying my force and resolving my first turn. My opponent took advantage of my strategic errors, and within ten minutes of his own clock time, he deployed his miniatures, took his first turn, and won the game by assassinating my army’s caster (the force’s general).
I’m not a novice to games or gaming. I’d probably not take well to being babied through play, but I didn’t exactly learn much about how I could improve, what my tactical errors were, and how I could avoid that in the future, and ultimately that’s what the path to mastery is. So when you’re playing with someone less experienced, find a nice way of helping them gain experience.
When veterans to the tabletop hobby pick up a game that’s involved, mastering it takes time, advice, and encouragement. Fostering a love for a game that your friends are a part of and that you feel passionate about means you have to walk a fine line between giving guidance and not being condescending (or at least being perceived as condescending, which is just as bad).
Here are my tips to helping you support your love of a game and develop skills for gamers who are new to it without insulting their intelligence, making them end up angry and resentful.
Give Them Primers to Develop Their Knowledge Base
When a player is unfamiliar with the kind of force she’s playing against, it helps to clarify what things she should know in order to make smart decisions. A lot of games rely on players having a knowledge base of the game as a whole. That knowledge is developed over time. You can’t expect a new player to understand what the threats may be to her or to anticipate what moves may be coming—all this when she’s still developing an understanding of what her own force is capable of doing. She can learn what works in her own force by playing the game and experimenting with possibilities, but she can’t make strategic decisions having never developed knowledge about an opposing force.
When gaming with new players, I find that they appreciate a rundown of the kinds of threats they’ll be facing from my force at the start of the game. With miniature war games, I’ll go through everything I have to give them an idea of what each unit does and what makes it effective. This way they have an understanding of how they can respond to that and anticipate those units working.
There is nothing that kills the enjoyment of a game faster for a new player than losing a game because he was surprised. Gotcha moments in games with new players are a sure path to destroying their love of the game quickly because it’s demoralizing. Losing due to your own ignorance can be extremely dissuading. So help develop a basic understanding of whatever your players are up against so they can make better decisions.
Talk Your Own Strategic Logic Aloud As You Move
Giving new players a frame of reference, showing the kind of logic and paradigm a game uses, will help develop the right mindset for the player so he can both see how decisions are being made and how to make that work for him. It may sound like this:
“I’m going to set this unit up here so I can block your unit from charging my general. Now I’ll move this unit here so I can hopefully thin down your heavy hitters with some decent shooting. And now that my shooting unit is out of the way, I have clear charge lanes for my army’s battering ram.”
This sort of advice gives the player an idea of the kinds of threats he’s facing without sounding condescending about what he should do in his move.
Break Down the Game after It’s Over (with Permission)
If a novice gamer loses to a more experienced one (as is the case in many complex games), take the time to talk to her about the game. After a game, talking about what a player could have done to win the game or improve her play is a great way to help her get better at it. Give her props for the moves she made that made you sweat.
Before you give feedback about how she could have played better, ask if she’s interested in hearing what you think she could have done to beat you. If she’s amenable, talk about it with her. If she seems disgruntled or politely says she’s not interested, don’t push it. Sometimes losing stings a little too much, and it’s too fresh. Instead, offer to talk about it when she feels like it; sometimes that’s over drinks, which is a great place for conversations of this sort.
This whole business of fostering the mastery of a game comes back to facilitating its enjoyment. It means caring as much about your opponent’s fun as your own. If you’re personally invested in a game, both in time and in money, you know how hard it can be for new players to stay with it. So do your best to spread the love—if something brings you joy, share it rather than quashing it.
Chapter Three
Essential Gamer Social Skills: Don’t Be a Dick (or Smell Like One)
There are certain skills that every gamer should be equipped with, many of which aren’t formally outlined or taught in the context of gaming. They may have been taught on the playground to us as small children by chiding parents or teachers.
In the context of gaming with grown-up toys, however, it’s easy to forget ourselves or, worse yet, let the comfort, stress, or competition related to the game affect our self-awareness.
When these skills are ignored, gaming gets uncomfortable, awkward, and unpleasant. I once played a game with one kind of dick who was impressively able to embody all of the kinds of dicks I describe in the dicks section of this chapter. This guy was moody and sulky, argumentative about every rule, beardy . eventually he rage-quit the game. It was a remarkable expression of dickhood, and in the end I stood there stunned at how ballsy he was to act like that. It wasn’t a good time for anyone, and now that dick (let’s just call him Richard) will forever be referenced in print by being described as a dick over and over again. Don’t be Richard.
In this chapter, I’m going to talk about how both sides in a gaming argument can be at fault (to differing degrees). I’ll cover why it’s not always our fault as gamers and attendees that gaming stores and conventions have a smell but why it’s our job to do something about it. I’ll talk about how you can still be competitive while also being fun to play with, and how your intent as you approach a table will color everyone’s experience—your own and everyone else’s. But first, let’s start with the most important rule:
Have Fun
This is the rule that is inherent in every game but isn’t usually included in the instructions. It’s easy to tell you not to be a dick, but sometimes that’s easier said than done, especially when you’re playing competitive games. It also happens in games where part of playing is to express frustration, menace, or antagonism to your opponents.
The guideline is simple: Have fun while facilitating fun for everyone around you. That sounds loaded—because ultimately whether or not the others you’re gaming with have fun is their choice, not yours. But here’s an easy way to gauge if you’re doing your part: Ask yourself if you are playing in a spirit that helps fulfill the expectations of fun everyone signed up for.
When you sit around a table with other players, you’re gaming with others under a (typically unspoken) social contract. It gives you permission to engage in certain behaviors, depending on the spirit of the game and the event you’re playing in. The context of this contract defines everything else.
If you’re casually playing with friends around your dining table, what constitutes being a dick is different than if you’re playing that same game against complete strangers at a competitive tournament. In your home, name-calling and trash-talking may very well be part of the fun and completely acceptable, based on your existing relationship with these people. Denying them permission to mulligan a move would probably be a dick thing to do. Those same behaviors with strangers at a competitive event, however, would be different. In such a setting, it’s wholly inappropriate to trash-talk or otherwise mock your opponents. However, it also would be considered reasonable that all the players abide strictly by the rules and thus aren’t allowed free mulligans.
Don’t be a dick: It’s simple, but also context sensitive, so be thoughtful and be aware.
How to Deal with Different Kinds of Dicks
There are, unfortunately for the world, different ways to be a dick. Here are a few stereotypes and kinds of gamers you want to avoid being as well as avoid playing.
The Beardy Gamer
I love bearded gamers, but I hate beardy ones. If you’ve never encountered the term, “beardy” is a pejorative term to describe gamers who are being dicks. The term hails from the (now out-of-print) game of Warhammer Fantasy, where certain dick players would play Dwarves—the only fantasy race with guns. They’d line up on the edge of the board and shoot at their opponents, giving their foes no choice but to advance into bullets and die. Such Dwarf players became known as beardy (as Dwarfs, in addition to guns, have beards).
Those players weren’t breaking any rules, but they were breaking every social contract associated with the game. There’s nothing sporting about the way they played—playing a game where the outcome is already determined before the game even starts isn’t fun, nor is making another human go through the motions of that wholly unpleasant experience just so the beardy player can get an ego boost.
If you encounter a beardy gamer in the wild, the best way to deal with him is to concede the game. Nothing drives him crazier than to win a game without actually going through the motions. Sometimes just stepping away from the table and saying, “I think you need this victory more than me” is enough to steal their “victory” from them.
The Rules Lawyer
Rules lawyers are a frustrating breed to play against. They will debate the rules of a game with you until you’re exhausted.
Worse still, rules lawyers tend to focus on pedantic interpretations of English words. It shouldn’t be that big a deal, I suppose, given that all game instructions are written in English. But remember, I said earlier that a lot of board game instructions have been translated, usually from German. To a rules lawyer, what would otherwise just seem like awkward or incorrect grammar is a rules-changing event of epic proportions. Rules lawyers believe that if the meaning of something isn’t spelled out in triplicate, it’s fair game for their endless interpretation.
Playing the Game
Cassidy was playing at a casual war-gaming event and ran into Richard, who had earned himself the local honorific of Esquire because of his tendency to argue over rules. She knew that she’d be in for a fight beyond the one that would happen on the table.
At one point in the game, Richard, as per the rules of the game, deployed from reserves his own scratch-built model (one that he had cleared with the FLGS as okay to play as it was built using products from the store, and the tenor of the gaming atmosphere was that it was casual, accessible, and supportive of creative modeling) and proceeded to open all of its doors, significantly increasing the size of the model’s on-table footprint (thereby taking up more space). The model pretty much took up the entire width of the table, and due to his prior clearance of using this scratch-built model as a “counts-as” model within the game, he then cited rules stating that unless Cassidy was going to attack the model, she could not move her own models within 1" of it. (Yes, the rules were written as such, but the game was never designed to have a table-spanning model.) He essentially gave himself a buffer to prevent her from moving across the table while also taking advantage of the rules allowing his own models to move through “friendly” models (which was also permitted in the rules). This essentially cut off Cassidy’s ability to charge and initiate melee attacks without being limited himself. He was giving himself a significant advantage while also putting Cassidy at a significant disadvantage.
Cassidy walked away from the table rather than continuing the game, though she mentioned Richard’s dickery to the staff before she left, which ultimately got Richard banned from playing in the store for six months.
Conveniently, they only argue about a rule when it benefits them—they won’t correct incorrect interpretations of rules that are detrimental to their opponent.
A rules lawyer tries to bend the rules in her favor until her opponents break. While it seems the rules lawyer is trying to play by the game’s rules, she’s actually trying to manipulate the rules in her favor. She’s cheating, or at least trying to, and that’s why she’s being a dick.
Rules lawyers are easily shut down if you know another—preferably simpler—interpretation of the rule in question. If there’s no neutral third party who you can consult (like your FLGS staff, another player, or an event organizer), suggest that you roll a die and determine which interpretation you go with based on luck. The key is to not engage in debate. If you do, it’ll never end.
The Incredible Sulk (AKA the Rage-Quitter)
You can’t easily identify this gamer when he first approaches the table; it’s almost as if he’s hiding in an alter ego who seems perfectly nice and fun to play with. He may remain in hiding, and usually does while he is in a winning position during a game. If, however, the table turns against him, the big green monster takes over, turning an unassuming, friendly, and perfectly normal opponent into an irrational beast.
The beast may be one of two distinct varieties, though both resemble a toddler throwing a tantrum. The first, the Sulk, may completely withdraw from the game, no longer engaging in play or trying. He pouts like a child who isn’t getting exactly what he wants. He’s full of self-pity because the world revolves (or should revolve) around him.
The Sulk may evolve (like a Pokémon) directly into the second kind of beast: the Rage-Quitter. This can happen at any point; this type of gamer gives up on the game entirely, even though there are others around the table still enjoying it. Sometimes the Rage-Quitter leaves the room in a huff, or he may sit silently at the table, making the rest of the gaming experience uncomfortable and unenjoyable for everyone. Rage-Quitters have been known to flip tables, throw dice, and generally act like a badly behaved two-year-old.
I know I keep saying such behavior is like a baby’s. Handling the Sulk or Rage-Quitter is very much like handling a toddler. Sometimes you can reawaken the rational gamer within the Sulk (probably not within the Rage-Quitter). Use phrases that give him permission to opt out of the game before the tension escalates. Politely point out the behavior is affecting others; this may pull the player out of his self-focused moment.
Give him a moment to take a grown-up timeout by asking, “Did you want to take a break and calm down?” Alternatively, I’ll suggest that the player recognize that there are others around the table and that turns of fortune are part of the game by asking, “What can any of us do to make this game more enjoyable for you?” Sometimes it’s better to wait until the monster retreats, and you can talk to the now mild-mannered player about how such a monster resides in him and to keep it in check.
Let’s say there’s a game you got that you’re sure your group will love, but it’s a complex game. Your group isn’t very familiar with this type of game or its mechanics. This is the perfect time to level up their understanding of the game by stepping them into the full version of the rules.
Think about when you’ve experienced or seen a run-through of a demo version of a game. Play is fast, fun, and simple, and the demo rarely encompasses all the minutiae and nuance of the game. Rather, it emphasizes the basic mechanics and why the game is fun.
To do this successfully, you need to break down more complicated games into simple versions of themselves. That may mean shrinking the game’s length so players can get a full play-through of a single game in a relatively shorter time. They’ll be able to learn the mechanics and strategize. I’ll often reduce the number of game turns in fixed-length games, for example, to let players get a full play-through from start to end to see how people play and win.
It may mean stripping the game of the more complicated elements until the players master its basics. I may simplify the values of successful dice rolls to a single number so everyone can remember it and learn the mechanics. Or I remove entire game effects until the mechanics of the games are mastered by the players.
Teaching a game well might mean introducing its core mechanics through another game with similar but simpler mechanics. I might level up players into complicated miniature war games by introducing them to a basic miniature board game such as Ninja All-Stars (to master moving and attacking mechanics), moving them up to a boardless miniature game like X-Wing (to help them visualize and anticipate movements of their opponent), and then showing them the most complicated version of that style of game like Warmachine and Malifaux.
The step-up method of teaching games works because it doesn’t overwhelm players with information and focuses on mastery before moving on. It’s building fundamental game skills, and sometimes you need permission to mess with the in-box rules a little for the enjoyment of all the players.
I love this technique for teaching games, and if you go about it this way, your chances for success are substantially higher than throwing your friends into the deep end and hoping they can swim.
Help Players Develop Mastery of Complex Games
Some games, particularly those where players create and collect their own list of components (like miniatures, cards, or other elements that represent their force) or strategic games, typically have a higher learning curve that can be a challenge for a new player. This applies to veteran tabletop gamers as much as to those new to the hobby.
Timing Is Everything
As an example (albeit negative) of the importance of teaching others about games, I can mention an experience I had with one of my favorite miniature war games, Warmachine. The system is fantastic, but the game itself is incredibly unforgiving when players make strategic errors. To give some context, the game I was playing had a time limit of ninety minutes, with forty-five minutes allocated to each player. We timed moves with a chess clock. Serious stuff, I know. I spent a total of eight minutes deploying my force and resolving my first turn. My opponent took advantage of my strategic errors, and within ten minutes of his own clock time, he deployed his miniatures, took his first turn, and won the game by assassinating my army’s caster (the force’s general).
I’m not a novice to games or gaming. I’d probably not take well to being babied through play, but I didn’t exactly learn much about how I could improve, what my tactical errors were, and how I could avoid that in the future, and ultimately that’s what the path to mastery is. So when you’re playing with someone less experienced, find a nice way of helping them gain experience.
When veterans to the tabletop hobby pick up a game that’s involved, mastering it takes time, advice, and encouragement. Fostering a love for a game that your friends are a part of and that you feel passionate about means you have to walk a fine line between giving guidance and not being condescending (or at least being perceived as condescending, which is just as bad).
Here are my tips to helping you support your love of a game and develop skills for gamers who are new to it without insulting their intelligence, making them end up angry and resentful.
Give Them Primers to Develop Their Knowledge Base
When a player is unfamiliar with the kind of force she’s playing against, it helps to clarify what things she should know in order to make smart decisions. A lot of games rely on players having a knowledge base of the game as a whole. That knowledge is developed over time. You can’t expect a new player to understand what the threats may be to her or to anticipate what moves may be coming—all this when she’s still developing an understanding of what her own force is capable of doing. She can learn what works in her own force by playing the game and experimenting with possibilities, but she can’t make strategic decisions having never developed knowledge about an opposing force.
When gaming with new players, I find that they appreciate a rundown of the kinds of threats they’ll be facing from my force at the start of the game. With miniature war games, I’ll go through everything I have to give them an idea of what each unit does and what makes it effective. This way they have an understanding of how they can respond to that and anticipate those units working.
There is nothing that kills the enjoyment of a game faster for a new player than losing a game because he was surprised. Gotcha moments in games with new players are a sure path to destroying their love of the game quickly because it’s demoralizing. Losing due to your own ignorance can be extremely dissuading. So help develop a basic understanding of whatever your players are up against so they can make better decisions.
Talk Your Own Strategic Logic Aloud As You Move
Giving new players a frame of reference, showing the kind of logic and paradigm a game uses, will help develop the right mindset for the player so he can both see how decisions are being made and how to make that work for him. It may sound like this:
“I’m going to set this unit up here so I can block your unit from charging my general. Now I’ll move this unit here so I can hopefully thin down your heavy hitters with some decent shooting. And now that my shooting unit is out of the way, I have clear charge lanes for my army’s battering ram.”
This sort of advice gives the player an idea of the kinds of threats he’s facing without sounding condescending about what he should do in his move.
Break Down the Game after It’s Over (with Permission)
If a novice gamer loses to a more experienced one (as is the case in many complex games), take the time to talk to her about the game. After a game, talking about what a player could have done to win the game or improve her play is a great way to help her get better at it. Give her props for the moves she made that made you sweat.
Before you give feedback about how she could have played better, ask if she’s interested in hearing what you think she could have done to beat you. If she’s amenable, talk about it with her. If she seems disgruntled or politely says she’s not interested, don’t push it. Sometimes losing stings a little too much, and it’s too fresh. Instead, offer to talk about it when she feels like it; sometimes that’s over drinks, which is a great place for conversations of this sort.
This whole business of fostering the mastery of a game comes back to facilitating its enjoyment. It means caring as much about your opponent’s fun as your own. If you’re personally invested in a game, both in time and in money, you know how hard it can be for new players to stay with it. So do your best to spread the love—if something brings you joy, share it rather than quashing it.
Chapter Three
Essential Gamer Social Skills: Don’t Be a Dick (or Smell Like One)
There are certain skills that every gamer should be equipped with, many of which aren’t formally outlined or taught in the context of gaming. They may have been taught on the playground to us as small children by chiding parents or teachers.
In the context of gaming with grown-up toys, however, it’s easy to forget ourselves or, worse yet, let the comfort, stress, or competition related to the game affect our self-awareness.
When these skills are ignored, gaming gets uncomfortable, awkward, and unpleasant. I once played a game with one kind of dick who was impressively able to embody all of the kinds of dicks I describe in the dicks section of this chapter. This guy was moody and sulky, argumentative about every rule, beardy . eventually he rage-quit the game. It was a remarkable expression of dickhood, and in the end I stood there stunned at how ballsy he was to act like that. It wasn’t a good time for anyone, and now that dick (let’s just call him Richard) will forever be referenced in print by being described as a dick over and over again. Don’t be Richard.
In this chapter, I’m going to talk about how both sides in a gaming argument can be at fault (to differing degrees). I’ll cover why it’s not always our fault as gamers and attendees that gaming stores and conventions have a smell but why it’s our job to do something about it. I’ll talk about how you can still be competitive while also being fun to play with, and how your intent as you approach a table will color everyone’s experience—your own and everyone else’s. But first, let’s start with the most important rule:
Have Fun
This is the rule that is inherent in every game but isn’t usually included in the instructions. It’s easy to tell you not to be a dick, but sometimes that’s easier said than done, especially when you’re playing competitive games. It also happens in games where part of playing is to express frustration, menace, or antagonism to your opponents.
The guideline is simple: Have fun while facilitating fun for everyone around you. That sounds loaded—because ultimately whether or not the others you’re gaming with have fun is their choice, not yours. But here’s an easy way to gauge if you’re doing your part: Ask yourself if you are playing in a spirit that helps fulfill the expectations of fun everyone signed up for.
When you sit around a table with other players, you’re gaming with others under a (typically unspoken) social contract. It gives you permission to engage in certain behaviors, depending on the spirit of the game and the event you’re playing in. The context of this contract defines everything else.
If you’re casually playing with friends around your dining table, what constitutes being a dick is different than if you’re playing that same game against complete strangers at a competitive tournament. In your home, name-calling and trash-talking may very well be part of the fun and completely acceptable, based on your existing relationship with these people. Denying them permission to mulligan a move would probably be a dick thing to do. Those same behaviors with strangers at a competitive event, however, would be different. In such a setting, it’s wholly inappropriate to trash-talk or otherwise mock your opponents. However, it also would be considered reasonable that all the players abide strictly by the rules and thus aren’t allowed free mulligans.
Don’t be a dick: It’s simple, but also context sensitive, so be thoughtful and be aware.
How to Deal with Different Kinds of Dicks
There are, unfortunately for the world, different ways to be a dick. Here are a few stereotypes and kinds of gamers you want to avoid being as well as avoid playing.
The Beardy Gamer
I love bearded gamers, but I hate beardy ones. If you’ve never encountered the term, “beardy” is a pejorative term to describe gamers who are being dicks. The term hails from the (now out-of-print) game of Warhammer Fantasy, where certain dick players would play Dwarves—the only fantasy race with guns. They’d line up on the edge of the board and shoot at their opponents, giving their foes no choice but to advance into bullets and die. Such Dwarf players became known as beardy (as Dwarfs, in addition to guns, have beards).
Those players weren’t breaking any rules, but they were breaking every social contract associated with the game. There’s nothing sporting about the way they played—playing a game where the outcome is already determined before the game even starts isn’t fun, nor is making another human go through the motions of that wholly unpleasant experience just so the beardy player can get an ego boost.
If you encounter a beardy gamer in the wild, the best way to deal with him is to concede the game. Nothing drives him crazier than to win a game without actually going through the motions. Sometimes just stepping away from the table and saying, “I think you need this victory more than me” is enough to steal their “victory” from them.
The Rules Lawyer
Rules lawyers are a frustrating breed to play against. They will debate the rules of a game with you until you’re exhausted.
Worse still, rules lawyers tend to focus on pedantic interpretations of English words. It shouldn’t be that big a deal, I suppose, given that all game instructions are written in English. But remember, I said earlier that a lot of board game instructions have been translated, usually from German. To a rules lawyer, what would otherwise just seem like awkward or incorrect grammar is a rules-changing event of epic proportions. Rules lawyers believe that if the meaning of something isn’t spelled out in triplicate, it’s fair game for their endless interpretation.
Playing the Game
Cassidy was playing at a casual war-gaming event and ran into Richard, who had earned himself the local honorific of Esquire because of his tendency to argue over rules. She knew that she’d be in for a fight beyond the one that would happen on the table.
At one point in the game, Richard, as per the rules of the game, deployed from reserves his own scratch-built model (one that he had cleared with the FLGS as okay to play as it was built using products from the store, and the tenor of the gaming atmosphere was that it was casual, accessible, and supportive of creative modeling) and proceeded to open all of its doors, significantly increasing the size of the model’s on-table footprint (thereby taking up more space). The model pretty much took up the entire width of the table, and due to his prior clearance of using this scratch-built model as a “counts-as” model within the game, he then cited rules stating that unless Cassidy was going to attack the model, she could not move her own models within 1" of it. (Yes, the rules were written as such, but the game was never designed to have a table-spanning model.) He essentially gave himself a buffer to prevent her from moving across the table while also taking advantage of the rules allowing his own models to move through “friendly” models (which was also permitted in the rules). This essentially cut off Cassidy’s ability to charge and initiate melee attacks without being limited himself. He was giving himself a significant advantage while also putting Cassidy at a significant disadvantage.
Cassidy walked away from the table rather than continuing the game, though she mentioned Richard’s dickery to the staff before she left, which ultimately got Richard banned from playing in the store for six months.
Conveniently, they only argue about a rule when it benefits them—they won’t correct incorrect interpretations of rules that are detrimental to their opponent.
A rules lawyer tries to bend the rules in her favor until her opponents break. While it seems the rules lawyer is trying to play by the game’s rules, she’s actually trying to manipulate the rules in her favor. She’s cheating, or at least trying to, and that’s why she’s being a dick.
Rules lawyers are easily shut down if you know another—preferably simpler—interpretation of the rule in question. If there’s no neutral third party who you can consult (like your FLGS staff, another player, or an event organizer), suggest that you roll a die and determine which interpretation you go with based on luck. The key is to not engage in debate. If you do, it’ll never end.
The Incredible Sulk (AKA the Rage-Quitter)
You can’t easily identify this gamer when he first approaches the table; it’s almost as if he’s hiding in an alter ego who seems perfectly nice and fun to play with. He may remain in hiding, and usually does while he is in a winning position during a game. If, however, the table turns against him, the big green monster takes over, turning an unassuming, friendly, and perfectly normal opponent into an irrational beast.
The beast may be one of two distinct varieties, though both resemble a toddler throwing a tantrum. The first, the Sulk, may completely withdraw from the game, no longer engaging in play or trying. He pouts like a child who isn’t getting exactly what he wants. He’s full of self-pity because the world revolves (or should revolve) around him.
The Sulk may evolve (like a Pokémon) directly into the second kind of beast: the Rage-Quitter. This can happen at any point; this type of gamer gives up on the game entirely, even though there are others around the table still enjoying it. Sometimes the Rage-Quitter leaves the room in a huff, or he may sit silently at the table, making the rest of the gaming experience uncomfortable and unenjoyable for everyone. Rage-Quitters have been known to flip tables, throw dice, and generally act like a badly behaved two-year-old.
I know I keep saying such behavior is like a baby’s. Handling the Sulk or Rage-Quitter is very much like handling a toddler. Sometimes you can reawaken the rational gamer within the Sulk (probably not within the Rage-Quitter). Use phrases that give him permission to opt out of the game before the tension escalates. Politely point out the behavior is affecting others; this may pull the player out of his self-focused moment.
Give him a moment to take a grown-up timeout by asking, “Did you want to take a break and calm down?” Alternatively, I’ll suggest that the player recognize that there are others around the table and that turns of fortune are part of the game by asking, “What can any of us do to make this game more enjoyable for you?” Sometimes it’s better to wait until the monster retreats, and you can talk to the now mild-mannered player about how such a monster resides in him and to keep it in check.
