u/WorldGoneAway

(TL;DR - My ex-wife and I had a fight before a session started, and we did a bunch of stuff during the session to continue fighting.)

In the year before finally getting divorced, my wife and I got to a point where we were fighting about almost every stupid thing near constantly.

I was running a game that was basically an ad hoc combination of D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder first edition with a few house rules, I ran it Monday and Tuesday nights, in person at my house, and I had six players including my wife.

Three years into this game, and she still didn't know her sheet, didn't really understand any of the rules, but she had an over the top unforgettable loony character, and she role-played her extremely well.

One day her and I had a huge fight about money. At the time I was working for a garbage collection company, she wasn't working at all, and she could not understand why I was making $30,000 a year and we were still struggling. I tried explaining to her that $30k per year is not very much, and it was just getting our bills paid. She straight up accused me of having some kind of expensive drug problem, or financing a secret family. We fight about this for most of the day.

We put our son to bed, the players came over, we sit down to play, and I pick back up where we had left off.

The party had been lodged at an inn while picking up side quests to keep themselves busy until a major plot event happened, and the session was going to be mostly devoted to item creation, shopping and general antics.

At one point my wife's character and the party fighter were in a shop while the fighter was trying to negotiate purchasing a magic weapon. During the role-play, the shopkeeper says that the markup on the weapon in question was not much, and that he definitely wasn't getting rich on it for the price he was charging.

My wife then pipes up-

"I bet he didn't really pay much for it and he's just shoveling money into his other family."

The way she said it was incredibly snarky and passive aggressive. I tried to ignore it and move on.

Throughout that one interaction there, she continued to make a few other jabs like that before the party fighter and the merchant came to an agreement.

I went to the party sorcerer who was working on trying to gather material components to be able to craft an item. Again my wife chimes in-

"Those aren't that expensive. None of it adds up to 30,000 gold."

I told her to knock it off and we continued to work at the price list and talk about availability. She would make another couple of quips about only being able to afford certain components when it was convenient for the shopkeeper and other such things. Finally I lost my cool and made a jab-

"Yeah? Well maybe the shopkeeper would have the extra for better components if his wife wouldn't keep spending it on stupid shit!"

"Maybe the shopkeeper should actually be honest with what he's doing with it!"

"How much more honest is overhead and upkeep?! If she would actually draw an income of her own and help him out, maybe they wouldn't be struggling so much!"

At this point the rest of the table became very quiet, fully realizing that this was something that we had been fighting about all day and, apparently, were not willing to let go.

After about a half-hour of that, the players excused themselves and went home. And my wife and I continued to fight about money for the rest of the night.

That group basically fragmented in three when my wife and I finally got divorced. She got a group with her cousin and her cousin's boyfriend; I got to keep my two friends, and I ultimately had to kick our roommate for something unrelated.

(TL;DR - I prematurely ended a long running campaign because I started sleeping with one of the players.)

About 20 years ago I got a D&D game started with a group of close friends from high school. The only person important to the story (apart from the group as a collective) is a girl I will call Sam.

Sam originally was in a group that was run by my younger brother, and the two of them developed a bit of friction with each other. After I had been running my game for about two years without an addition or a subtraction of players, Sam asked if she could join my game so she could get out of my brothers and still be able to get out of the house on Friday nights. I asked the other players if they would mind, and they enthusiastically welcomed her.

Sam was odd. Not conventionally attractive but had a magnetic personality. She was a good role player, she understood the system and the mechanics, and the character she made was very helpful to the party. She didn't consciously do anything that affected the game negatively.

However, I came to discover about six months into her tenure with the group that she was personally extremely horny.

She didn't let that bleed into the game to where the other players were aware of it, but during a time where it was just her and I in the room during a divided party moment, she specifically asked to ERP between her character and one of the NPC's.

I didn't say no.

This became a regular thing between her and I before all the other players would arrive to game sessions at my parents place, and I used it as a vehicle to introduce lore tidbits. My parents basement had a game room that my father and I had built, and there was a comfortable couch on one side of the room running the length of the table. And without going into any further detail, about three months in, she showed up early as usual, and we had sex on the couch before the other players arrived.

After that, one of the players, my best friend, began to notice changes in the way her character interacted with NPC's, and noticed a difference in body language between her and I. In one session he playfully pointed out that something had to be going on because Sam was the first one to show up and the last one to leave.

Sam never confirmed or denied it, and neither did I. We acted like it was a joke, but in all seriousness Sam was not the kind of girl that I would ever really want to seriously date, and to be fair I wasn't really the kind of guy she would wanna date either.

Finally the other players decided to sit down and talk with me away from her. They said that the interactions between her character and the NPC's had gotten to such a degree that it was difficult to not notice, and there was an unignorable amount of plot strings that only made sense to the other players if they were introduced to her separately from them. Which was true, just that they were details I introduced during ERP sessions and I forgot to find a meaningful way to let the other players find those out.

Yes, when I was a young man, I was really bad at handling things.

So I came clean, telling them that her and I were basically friends with benefits, and I had been trying not to let it affect the game itself too much.

So my best friend then pointed out to me that it was clearly a conflict of interest if the character she was using for the ERP sessions was the same character that she was using in the actual game.

At that point we started trying to untangle the plot threads that I had been dropping and trying to differentiate which ones the party knew and which ones she had sole knowledge.

This turned out to be a big problem, because she clearly paid more attention to getting off than she did the plot.

After we talked about it, I called for a hiatus until I could figure out how to recover the trajectory of the game. My friends still hung out with me, but the game wasn't held on Fridays anymore.

I never did run that game again, and I used the now open Fridays as an excuse to have Sam over. That arrangement lasted for another two months before Sam moved, and I started up a different game with the old group.

If there is a lesson to be had here, it would be... I dunno, don't put cannon lore in your ERP sessions?