Forums » Smalltalk » Ever met "That Guy" while Rping?

I have too many stories to count.

I have a long history of modding dreams on Furcadia, so I generally was privy to every problem someone had with another player in those dreams. Sometimes it was arguments between two "that guy"s at once. In one dream it got so bad that I had to basically create a character that was purposefully OP and unfair in order to keep other OP and unfair characters from ruining everyone else's fun. I took a hit to my reputation a little - fighting god modding with god modding. But it kept things a little more easy to manage for a while. When I left that dream, I had to retire the character.

On furc, a great many power players, god modders and "that guy"s are old guard players. People who have been playing for 15+ years. It's easy to get a big ego around a character that has been around for a long time (I'm guilty of this myself) and everything was a little more ruthless back then.

I avoid hard line "no consent" players. RP is cooperative and requires mediation, discussion, compromise. Full "no consent" is often treated as a badge of honour but just as often manipulated to make player character killing for dumb reasons seem acceptable. I don't want to imply that all no consent players are bad - on the contrary I think that they often have great plots and interesting characters but I have learned, over the years, to be more wary of people who make a big deal of attempting to enforce their no consent play style on YOU.

Oh those guys. Yeah I have ran into a few myself. I played on furcadia, but never really had a problem there. Probably because I only rped with a set group and we always stayed in a dream owned by a friend. So if anyone did try to stir up crap like that, well it wouldn't exactly be hard to do something about it.

Now I have had a couple of those guys on rpr, but I am only going to talk about two of them. The reason is because I'm 99% sure the account is gone on one and I literally can't remember the name of the other so I clearly can't name them.

1. This one was maybe...two years ago? Something like that, anyway here is a tiny bit of relevant backstory. I have a goddess character...hey stop rolling your eyes, let me explain. Now page 1 of her profile is nothing, but a warning stating exactly what kind of character she is. Most of her rps are actually requested by other people and the rare times I suggest her, I make it clear what she is before putting the ball in their court.

Anyway I ended up suggesting to some other person who was playing a god of death if he wanted to rp with my goddess. I thought it would be interesting since the profile looked interesting. On top of that my character is a goddess of life so there was clear and easy opportunities for possible conflict.

Well I suggested that their character was going around killing people before they were meant to die since it would fit his personality. Then my goddess would intervene and things would get interesting. They liked and agreed with this idea. Anyway we arrange for a npc teenaged girl to be killed by him before she was actually meant to die. Then my character shows up after the murder and points out that he is breaking all sorts of rules and remind him that by killing this girl before she was meant to die, he was also altering the fates of many other people. He respond with the "I don't give a crap" tough guy kind of attitude. So my character responds by pretty much ignoring him and bringing the girl back to life since she had only died because of a renegade god.

Well this really pissed off the other roleplayer who started accusing me of godmoding, of literally rping as myself I guess..I'm still not quite sure what they meant there, they were pretty much using my name Katia and my goddess's name interchangeably to tell the truth. Basically they were ranting and raving with me basically being the deer in the headlights going what the hell?!

I briefly tried to defend myself before finally ignoring them and saving the logs in case they decided to be spiteful. I even showed the logs to a very talented friend of mine who basically went like this: Ha ha ha, no and then called them an idiot.

Luckily nothing actually happened, I deleted the logs and I don't even know if the person is on the site anymore since I can't remember their name or the name of their character. *shrugs*

This took a while so I'll just tell story number 2 some other time.

Unfortunately, I've had a few experiences, though they're a little varied from the godmodding aspect.
I had someone call be a 'heartless witch' (but not so pg) just because I wouldn't RP sexual themes with them. I also had someone once accuse me of only RPing with male characters because I wanted to 'hook my character up with someone'. I'll admit in a heartbeat that I love romance stories, but the very same day they accused me of this I was RPing with a child, so I don't think their accusation held much. Unfortunately it was by a person in power, which had ramifications and gave me no opportunity to explain that I just enjoy RPing with male characters more (I RP with female characters occasionally but I've had some bad experiences with them; so much drama).

My biggest suggestion is this; talk it out. RPing is a game, and it's supposed to be fun for both of you. Try to keep a level head and realize it might have just been a miscommunication. If the other party refuses to talk, then just say 'I'm sorry, I don't agree with what you're saying' and back out of the RP. Sometimes a clean cut is best. But if the other person(s) involved isn't willing to talk, then there's truthfully nothing that can be done. As long as YOU are willing to try and work things out, you've done your part and nobody can blame you for that.
Sometimes, godmodding happens on accident. Sometimes people don't even realize they're doing it. So, just as you would like to have a chance to explain if you accidentally did it, give the other party a chance to explain too. If that doesn't work out, then it's best to just leave the RP. There's no point in being in an RP that you don't enjoy!

I've never had mine of these experiences (yet) but I am someone who will go out of their way to not hurt someone feelings (which can be a bad thing sometimes) and this is actually what caused me to start RP! Someone in a lobby was rp'ing, I hurt their feelings, and I RP'ed with them to regain their trust!

Dang... All these stories are like... woah :uuu

I had quite a few of "those guys" in my times, many of which have mold my stance on certain types of characters, or ships fandom wise but for fandom, but specifically the "those guys" that radically changed my views of rp are two I met outside of RPR

The first peep was a RP'r I met through Omegle (how I got introduced RP'ing lol). It was for a fandom rp, and it was also an "dark AU" that called for "depressed!A" and me being me was like "hmmm... never seen that dynamic before.... I'll do it"

Welp, I eventually get into the RP and it starts off fine and eventually it transgresses to email back and forth that it amazes me that I had so many threads between them and I because I absolutely hated it. The rp was so stale in story and development because my partner and I agreed that I, Character B, was supposed to help A get better because while A was pessimistic and cynical, B was optimistic and charismatic as a person.

So what was the problem? Well, A didn't do anything. They're rejected everything B did, and at first I was like, "okay well the character is depressed, so it's highly unlikely for them to jump at the first opportunity of improvement" and whatnot, and so I made sure B was respectful and doing little steps to slowly break A's dome of dreary solitude. That didn't happen.

Literally every suggestion or plot point to move the RP in some direction was just flat out rejected and A's replies just seemed to be the rewrite of the last reply and all you got out of this character was that they're depressed, their family hates them, and they hate the world. You know nothing of what they liked, did, or anything that could make for an activity or conversation because all the arrows just pointed back to "depressed, family hates them, hates everybody" because that was about every reply.

Like you have a story line with an exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and then your resolution... And me and this peep where like so many replies in and we were still at the exposition because they wouldn't move the plot forward much less provide anything for a plot even though they were the one to start it.

It was maddening, and I broke off the RP, and for a while, that experience had me stay away from "dark material", but I've since met fantabulous, dynamic characters who happened to have depression or so

Now, as for the other RP'r, they're definitely one reason I'm lax about time limits on replies. Like above, I met this person off RPR, though not on Omegle but Chatango (mostly filled with spam and exceptionally rude people over the years it's just really strange how that occured). Well, this occurred not to long ago, since this was just around the time I got hired at my first job, and so I explain before hand that I didn't have the leisure to be on all the time, since he told me he had summer break.

Anywho, the rp was great, no complaints because this guy could plot and create perplexing characters. The only problem with this guy was that he was a grade-a jerk butt. How this happen was one night, I had some few hours to kill before I had to go to bed since I had to wake up early for work, he and I resumed our RP-- up until I said I had to go but that I'd talk to him later. But, as soon as I said that, he started going ballistic at me.

It started with a simple "what?", to a "what do you mean you HAVE to go" to uncensored, full blown threats and accusations that is was just like... Woah man, take it down a notch. I just said that I had to go and he's calling me names from where the sun don't shine. I didn't even respond, I was literally just watching him type and cuss me out before I decided that I owed him no response because I sure wasn't going to apologize for having a job and needing to go to bed. So I promptly blocked him, and amusingly enough, he had his friends try contact me telling me he "was sorry" and all that load of alligator tears. I blocked them too because forget that. You can't just randomly curse someone out... and then act all sorry and get your friends to be like "can you please unblock them? they want to talk to you"...

Especially over something small like having to go to bed like... I don't care how nice you RP, you got some issues to deal with man like... what gives?

So, after experiencing him, and then knowing my own habits, I'm not going to chew someone out for slow replies or having to suddenly go because class started or their mom had them go out for groceries :p Chiz happens and I just happen to have RPs with peers where we're spitting a reply every other second and others are like "I'm not dead I swear. Here's my reply lmao"

So, those are my stories of "those guys"

Deidei, you're a roleplayer after my very own heart- due to health issues, sometimes I can post several times a day and sometimes I can only post once a month, and some people just Do Not Get that.

I think my most recent That Guy was in a group roleplay earlier this year. It had a clearly stated maximum word count in the rules, because people on Gaia are absolutely nuts about the "post length = post quality" thing and sometimes get waaaay out of hand. The GM mentioned the rule a few times in OOC chat for good measure, and everyone agreed to this word count before we got started.

Then along comes That Guy.

Every single post That Guy made was at least twice the maximum. Some were three times the maximum. Someone else mentioned their average wordcount - in an ooc post with several other people's as well that made no effort to single them out - and That Guy went off. Just screaming at everyone. How dare someone mention the fact that they are not just breaking the rules, but hammering the rules into tiny bits and chucking them out the window? Don't we know how much effort they put into their posts? How dare we question their superior talent and writing skills? How dare we publicly humiliate them like this?

Needless to say, they flounced out of the roleplay entirely, and they claimed they were being driven away by a hostile environment while they were at it.

I mean there's going 100 words over the limit, and then there's going 1000 words over the limit, and one of those is just plain rude.

Awww, I ain't doing nothing, it just seems right to me uvu

But yikes, that guy sounds like a total buzz kill. Just because a reply is longer doesn't make it any good. Honestly if I have a reply that's long (usually my max tends to be 6 paras), it's usually because I'm setting in a background for the plot, before I zone in on my character-- but when that happens, I always assure my peers to never, never, never feel pressured to reply the same length of a reply. One paragraph of a response is just great for me.

But honestly, your guy seems to be that guy who thinks he's all that and a bag of chips because he can write longer and like... I like, always think back to this one guy I RP'd with who had this list of rules, and one was that he only rp'd with people who were "grammatically correct and literate" and could write a "5+ paragraph response" and I was like "sure okay I can do that". And then when I RP'd with him... I only noticed 5 periods, as in, Mr. 5 or More Paragraphs only wrote 5 sentences. It's just that each sentence was so long, but grammatically correct, that it appeared to be a paragraph, but it wasn't.

I still RP'd with him, but it was hard not to laugh at each reply because again I'd only notice about about 5-7 dots in his reply because by technicality, he only wrote out one paragraph. XDDD

The attitude is distressingly common on Gaia, where I do most of my roleplaying. This person was posting 1500-2000 word replies; for perspective, your first post up there wasn't quite 900 words. And we're talking when their character was sitting alone in their room not interacting with anyone or anything. A lot of search threads will say you have to write at least 1000 words in every post, and I'm over here with my 300-word posts that have action and character insight and move the story along like "what?"

There's a reason I don't do group roleplays anymore, and only play with someone after careful vetting.

Actually can we take a moment and discuss this? The only time I post really long posts is when I have to describe the world for the rp and even then I don't even think I write anywhere near 1000 words in one post. That is like writing a freaking 2 page essay for school....

That is astonishing. My max post length for anything is about a sentence more than a one-liner (when I can't think of anything other than doing the obvious, one reason for doing this I blame on is because I used to be on a chat RP site with a character limit, so you'd either have to post multiple times or leave out unnecessary detail), and up to three paragraphs if I can think of a lot more to post or i'm GMing. GMing is iffy though. There should never be a reason to have to MAKE someone post that long of a reply just because it's "literate to do so". Length does not EVER equal quality. (I can prove it too, but I digress)

^^^This. This right here is the truth. I would rather have short concice replys that move stories along than flowery language that discusses one action like sitting. And I'm kinda like RodoWodo nowadays: I'm only really descriptive in terms of settings, major actions, or scene transitions.

I don't think I could handle word count limits on Gaia; I'm barely getting a hold of paragraph RPs here and everywhere else.

Even my super long setting-up-the-roleplay, covering-twenty-years-of-skipped-time, contains-two-or-more-of-my-characters posts rarely break 1000. My normal posts are between 200 and 500 at an outside maximum.

I have no idea where the trend came from, but it's been going strong for years there. Luckily, there's now a slowly rising movement of people who realize the entire thing is complete bull, so hopefully the idea will die in quiet obscurity and I can stop worrying if my posts are 'long enough' to please my partner(s).

Oh boy, I finally met "That Guy" and I can honestly say in all my years of rp and just being a nice person in general.. I've never wanted to be outright rude to someone but this guy makes that so much more possible.

I get characters are god characters and can be OP but when you actually go out of your way to make sure you're better than everyone else.. it sucks to be on the receiving end of the rp. You want to tell them to stop being pretentious but then you don't want to come off as rude.. *sigh*

Sorry for the short story, I have a pinched nerve making me lightheaded

Many many years ago, back when I was still pretty new to Roleplay, and for some reason collectively had only feral characters....

I was Roleplaying a baby wolf pup, I can't recall if he had a family or not now, or how I even wound out meeting "that guy". I just remember I had been rping on the wolf pup probably a few months or more; but one day out of the blue someone came in and literally put "bites" or "kills" or maybe both; I of course called foul, only for the modifier of the dream (as it was in furc, I guess you can think of them as the GM of a game), came and said I could not have dodged, I could not have escaped; and that I had to except my faith and that my character was now dead; because I was a puppy and could not have survive any attacks, even if just one word god-modding-nonsense. I later learned that apparent "that guy" was playing a demon/hybrid thing, which supposedly would have made my chances none existent even if I wasn't a puppy; and that apparently "that guy" was friends with the dream GM... ..;;;;

What made it even worse, is I had the character sitting around in the ooc (out of character) zone which the dream owner (not the same as the dream mod) said I could do, even if my character had been killed; so I could still at least non-rp with people there. "that guy" apparently decided to "kill", "bite me" there... and I was told I had to delete my character immediately as he was now dead not only in that dream, but all dreams [apparently all dream owners were friends back than, and actually kept tabs on this]; and I was not allowed to remake him ever, or ask to be reborn under a different name.

Needless to say... "that guy" and that specific GM... killed my love for RP for a while

Not saying I haven't had other screwed up experiences... but that was the most obnoxious of them

I would hate to be That Guy's English teacher when it's time to grade essays.

Well this explains why Furcadia is now a dead pile of crap.... with guys like that running the show it isn't a surprise how empty it was when I tried the game.

I've run into "That Guy" so often I'm starting to think I'm a magnet for such people.

The "best" example I have I RPed with a couple of months ago. It was a post apocalyptic plot that was meant to become a romance and I was under the impression that everything was going well until after one of my posts my RP partner sent me a message simply saying how my character is awful.
Their character was being very forward and seemed to be trying to provoke something intimate in the very first scene where our characters met but it was explained clearly by the other RPer himself that it was because his character was wild and understood little about how to act around other people. My character was the opposite of that and rejected the other, deciding to wait for them to grow close first. The issue with this was, apparently, that my character was being cruel by acting according to his personality and the dynamic we set at the very beginning or the RP.
Since I wasn't really happy with having the person I'm writing with openly insult my character I explained the logic behind my posts but that only triggered the other person to being insulting me in stead. Obviously, because I didn't allow our characters to be together in the first four pages of the RP I'd ruined it, I'd made the RP into something like Dora the explorer and I knew nothing about putting mature content in a RP. ( It's worthy to note though, that in those four pages our characters had met and attacked each other, then were attacked by a hostile group and one of them was bleeding and passed out so I have no idea where I was suppose to include anything romantic. )
What astonished me the most though was how the other RPer had been extremely nice and talked to me every day while we RPed, I even asked him at one point if he liked how it was going so far and he said yes but after the argument started he revealed how he'd hated it all along. This all came out without any warning, he hadn't even once before that complained or asked me to change anything.
Despite everything I wanted to save the RP and agreed to change my characters personality start over and write the first post this time. However my RP partner ran off to the forums to look for someone else to write with as soon as we started arguing and when I put up the first post for us to start over he replied once and I never heard from him again...

This turned out more like a rant, sorry for that. I'm angry while writing this because the latest version of "That Guy" has just decided to ignore the planed plot/subject of our RP and made it into their characters life story where my character is not included...

Instant-romance pursuer sighted. Approach specimen with caution - or don't approach at all.
Specimen berserk button found! Stimuli determined: Realistic Socio-Psychology!
Maybe they're an adrenaline junkie who deals with stress by mooning over someone. Daredevils! What would we mundane plebians know about #truelove ? As Rihanna once sang, "We found love in a hopeless place~" (If you can't tell, I'm making fun.)
I wouldn't put up with that very well. Even the smallest scales of roleplay involves one other person, which means basic communication is needed. If they're not having fun, they should speak up about it. If they don't, well, don't mislead someone into thinking they find it pleasant. Sounds to me someone desperately tried to be sweeter than Bubbles Utonium and blew up like a phone in a microwave instead when the other person didn't use their mind-reading psychic powers.


You dodged a bullet, mate.

But on a serious note, have a genuine hug.

Joking or not I believe you've described him incredibly well!

You've just made my day, thank you for the hilarious reply and also the hug

Yikes, I can't say that I haven't met "that guy" yet but for some reason I can't remember it. Also I have to admit my own main oc is actually a god without actually being one because of his... Life? I don't know. Though when I use him it is never god modding because he actually limits himself on what he does, he chooses to never use his full power out of pity for other beings... I just realized how much of an asshole type of thing that came out like... Damn o.o

Anyway yeah I know I have met on of them before and maybe I've seemed like one because of the weird way to kill my character, which makes sense, but I do fights in RPs once in a purple moon so yeah. Never got accused except in my early days, though we've all been there I'm sure.