My Player thought he had 'Tree house building proficiency'
CW: In-game kidnapping and patricide. General Fantasy violence
I’ve had this story for a while and have been considering whether or not to post it, but I've decided it was too funny not to. Buckle up, it's a long one.
So at the end of my freshman year of College I decided to run a dnd game for my friends. It was my first time running a game but not playing, and I opened it up to both beginners and experienced players and we ended up with 6 players total. 2 with plenty of experience, 2 with medium experience, and 2 with 0 or very minor experience. The focus of this story is one of those inexperienced players who we’ll call Jake. The other non-experienced player will also come up, so I'll call them Andi.
I left pitches very open for the players and took an approach of characters first, build the world around the characters. Jake’s pitch… left a lot to be desired. He said ‘I wanna play a guy who lives in the woods and is really good at building tree houses.’ And i said, ok that could be fun, what class and race were you thinking for a character like this? I was expecting the typical druid or ranger. Instead he said, ‘Fairy Monk’. First I said, ‘Fairy isn’t a race in the rules, did you wanna play homebrew?’ And we decided on a basic homebrew race but it meant that he was like a foot tall in game. I told him that may have narrative consequences and may not mesh well with monk. He said that was fine. Secondly, I asked him why his character was a monk. He said ‘oh my parents died when i was young and custody was given to my (full human) grandmother who enrolled me in a martial arts academy. She died like a year before the campaign starts, and feeling abandoned I went to live in the woods and began building tree-houses’ I begged him to spend more time talking and building this side of the character with me as it had actual things I could work with when writing the story. He was dead set on just building treehouses. I probably didn’t push as hard as I should’ve but it was my first time running and I like to think I’ve learned a lot since then. We ran a quick backstory session to help him get the character and sheet down. As part of this I gave him a music box that his grandmother left him when she died. He found a little key in it and used it to open a safe that held an encoded journal. This journal was a linchpin in my plot, and the key to deciphering it was the notes to the song the music box played. This will come up later.
Fast forward to the game start and Jake was an immediate problem. We were both RA’s at our college and had to schedule community events. We got to decide the date and time of every event we ran. Our dedicated dnd was Fridays and one player was taking full days off of work to play, and Jake constantly scheduled his RA events during our sessions, then would tell us last minute he couldn’t come and ask us to reschedule. We did a couple times before eventually telling him to stop doing that. He did not. We told him we weren’t going to reschedule for his RA events anymore and his solution was to arrive 2 hours late to sessions. While in sessions he was never paying attention, he was constantly on his phone/switch, and would interrupt our RP heavy table’s really intense Role play moments to show us the pokemon he caught, or ask us about our school projects. When it came time for him to role-play, he decided that his character was mean. Not in a ‘There’s something going on here and the meanness was a cover for a impactful arc’ just, mean because he thought it was funny. I tried to leave plot hooks for his character and to push him into character moments, but it always turned into a snarky comment followed by him laughing wildly and us all looking uncomfortable. As a contrast, Andi was still struggling with Rules and getting the flow of things down, but was diving full into playing a True neutral for their very first game. To this day I have never seen someone embody a true neutral character better than they did. And they didn’t screw over other players to do so. We all cried at one of their performances.
With the journal I gave him, he decided that he didn’t trust the party for literally no reason and point blank refused to tell them about the journal. When he did, he in RP acted like it was the party’s fault for not just asking him about it. Then he did the exact same thing with the music box. To the point that the players knew the meta solution to the puzzle for 3 full sessions, but couldn’t do anything because Jake just refused to give them the music box.
In terms of rules he made absolutely 0 effort. We ran sessions roughly twice a month for like. 8 months. And these were 4 hour sessions, roughly half of which were full combat sessions. By like session 8 he had no grasp on the rules at all. As an example, a real conversation we had went something like this
‘X is swinging at you, what's your AC?’
‘My what?’
‘Your Armor Class. It’s the thing that determines whether or not an attack hits’
‘Where on my sheet is that?’
‘Its near the top in the giant box that says AC’
‘Ok it says 14’
‘Ok X rolled a 17 so that hits’
‘I’m gonna dodge’
‘No, dodge is an action you can take on your turn, it’s X’s turn, you are getting hit’
‘And I can’t do anything about it, like make a dexterity check to move?”
‘That’s what your AC is for. It determines whether or not the attack hits. Your Dexterity is built into the number on your sheet’
‘That’s stupid’
This specific interaction happened at least twice a combat, and usually took a full 5 minutes to play out each time.
The crowning moment was a session I spent a full Month prepping for. The party had been kidnapped by the Fey (our BBEG) and were brought to a deserted island where one of the Fey offered them a deal. Escape the Maze and I’ll let you go, then summoned a giant shifting maze splitting the party. I had hand crafted encounters for each player that were designed to play on that character to push their arcs further. Like confronting them with their worst choices, or the times that others hurt them. And my players absolutely loved it. It's our most legendary session and we all still talk about it to this day. Here was my most diabolical plan and the payoff for the tension I had been building all session. Andi’s character was adopted, and didn’t know their family. Unbeknownst to the players Andi's father was a fey I had chase them around the maze. The plan was to use this to stop them from picking a spot and hiding. And once they had all encountered him, to stick him in front of the DPS’er and then throw him at Andi, baiting Andi into killing him while he was weak. Basically I made them kill their dad without knowing, and then had the fey who orchestrated it show up and tell Andi.;
Jake arrived to this 8 hr session 5 hours late. When he came in, the whole group was on edge because of the game situation. He waltzed in and sang at the top of his lungs ‘Who wants sna-acks!’with no regard to what was happening in game. I told him we would finish the scene we were in before moving to his character. For his character I had drawn a complete blank on what to give him. He ignored every hook and emotional beat within the story. Plenty of other players were confronted with moments that happened in the campaign, not their backstory. But I had nothing for him. So I decided I was going to have him encounter his dead grandmother. He found her and failed the insight check to clock that this was very fake. He decided that he was going to get her out, and that the best way to do this was to fly straight up and out of the maze with her. Remember that he is a 1 ft tall fairy and she is a regular human. He had tried this exact tactic to no avail 3 times before in the campaign. I imposed disadvantage because of the size difference and had him make a strength check. He passed and pulled her to the top.
On the top he decided he was going to fly her down to the shore. He moved her to the edge, then said ‘I’m going to take the hypotenuse to be further down the beach because that’s the shortest distance to my destination’ and gave us this look like he was so smart for knowing this fact. And I said, ok but the shortest distance to the ground is a straight line down. Then you can walk to that point. The longer you stay in the air the harder the strength check to carry your grandmother down will be. Had he not continued pushing I wouldn't have cared and given him the same DC, but he decided that he had to prove me wrong about a basic math principle. Jake proceeded to argue with me about how the Pythagorean theorem works. I was in IB and AP in high school and was in HL math for any who know what that means. And he had taken one intro college math class and was trying to tell me he knew more on the subject. Eventually he came down and took the hypotenuse, so I made the check harder, and he failed by like 1 or two. So I had him drop the grandmother like 2 feet from the ground. I was really frustrated at this point, but trying to remain fair. I described the beach he landed on and asked what he wanted to do now that he was out. He then looked at me and in full seriousness went.
“I wanna build a treehouse”
I absolutely lost it at this point. I screamed “THERE’S NO TREES YOU’RE ON A BEACH” like 5 times, and then he said the thing my friends all quote to this day. “But I have tree house building proficiency?” I screamed again, that no he didn’t, that's not how proficiency works, and that if he did there were no trees. He’s on a beach. This didn’t matter to him. Only that ‘he had proficiency and wanted to’
I had to leave the room I was so mad. Everyone else was dying with laughter. While I calmed down the experienced players explained proficiency, a basic concept of the game. I came back and asked him what he’d like to do. And he said he wanted to walk onto the boat that had kidnapped them, no sneaking, just walk aboard. I asked if he was sure, explaining that they had kidnapped him. He said yes. So the crew fired 2 ballistae at him. He asked why he couldn’t dodge and had to use AC. My players had to talk me out of killing his character on the spot.
All my tension was gone in a span of 20 minutes. I still pulled off the patricide to great effect, but everyone agreed it would’ve been so much more impactful without Jake there. I later learned about a conversation he had with Andi where he complained that we all took the game too seriously. He touted around all the homework he had to do and acted like he was gracing us with his presence by showing up despite this. He said all of this to an international student with a similar or higher workload than him, who had to maintain a perfect 3.95 GPA or risk being kicked out of the country. He was not invited to my next table and pitched a fit when he found out.
TL/DR: My player ruined the most impactful narrative moment of the campaign due to repeated disrespect of the game, players, and story and thought he had “Tree-house Building proficiency”