Grown. Men. Another Rant

What I really wanted to call this post was "Butthurt - A Rant" but I wasn't sure if I'd get away with that term as a topic so I softened it.

Grown. Men.

Grown. Freaking. Men.

I surround myself with grown men in the hope of avoiding high school-style drama. (No offense to you high schoolers.) I have failed utterly.

We in my gaming club embarked upon another campaign after the Blood in the Badlands campaign ended.  It was a short campaign published by Games Workshop entitled "Sigmar's Blood," which went fairly smoothly so we decided to start another in September of 2014. I wasn't the GM this time so I got to relax and just play for once.

...or so I thought.

The campaign officially started on 1 September. By the 5th, the campaign was ending and the GM gave up. Here's what happened, as best I can determine from the venting I'd heard from multiple parties.

The first step in the campaign was for each of us players to select our starting position on the campaign map. I went first, picking a nice capital city with towns and fortifications around it. Then the next player picked one, and so on... Each team was supposed to control a capital city.

But one guy, who is a constant magnet for gamer drama, chose to pick his starting spot directly adjacent to where the opposing team would have to set up. (This being Tony from the Blood in the Badlands) This would force early battles and possibly end the campaign outright in victory if he successfully attacked the enemy capital. This was never meant to happen, but the GM didn't consider that possibility when creating the rules for starting deployments. To be fair, Tony did offer to take the move back if people expressed concern over it.

Well, most of the players didn't express a problem with it, and I wasn't too comfortable with it but I wasn't involved so I kept silent on the matter as well. I had hoped that doing so would avoid any drama. Unfortunately, there was drama. I just wasn't involved.

So the two "evil" factions had deployed but neither of them had chosen to deploy at the capital which was being threatened by Tony. The problem was that one of them HAD to, so the GM contacted them both to see which one would take the position. Neither of them wanted to. (Understandably.) So the GM applied some pressure, and one of these two guys ragequit the campaign. (That being Dave from the Blood in the Badlands stories.)

Dave then vented to me about it. Now, I understand his frustration with Tony. They'd played before and Tony had a reputation for gaming the rules and using exploits to gain victory. He's not a bad guy, and we've been friends for longer than most of you pups have been alive, but I do know him to be someone who has a hard time distinguishing between sportsmanlike gaming and power gaming. Even this wouldn't be so bad, but I've tried several times to talk with him about this problem and I've just been unable to get through.

Because Tony and Dave have had some friction between them during games in the past because of this, Dave was annoyed that Tony had deployed in such a way that if Dave took that capital, they'd be forced to play each other. A lot. So he started texting me to vent about this, and how he didn't want to be in the campaign anymore as a result.

So the GM was frantically trying to resolve this issue while the rest of the players waited for the next stage of the campaign to begin.

Meanwhile, I got in contact with Tony to see what he thought, and he was all annoyed that nobody had come to him to talk about the problem. Well, I could understand that easily except that he's notoriously difficult to talk to about this stuff.  Still, he was right.

So then the GM E-mails me to vent, saying basically all the stuff I've already heard from Dave. And yes, Dave dropped out of the campaign. The GM wanted to end the campaign, and the shortest campaign in my gaming club history came to a tragic end.

I'm trying to be light-hearted about this, but it isn't easy. People who are full-grown adults and ought to have better awareness shouldn't have these problems. I hang out with intelligent, clear-thinking people, and yet sometimes you put them together in a room and it devolves into a drama-ridden whinefest of epic proportions.

So, as the unofficial "head" of the gaming group, I decided to see if I could salvage things by posting a thread on our forum board.  People were encouraged to air their grievances, BUT  there was a price.  Before one could criticize anyone else, they first had to admit to one of their own missteps or failings.  My hope was that it would give people a better perspective when being critical if they were reminded that they weren't perfect either.

It worked, more or less.

Some of the guys made peace. One guy had decided he was too good to game with the group, and another guy had become obsessive over the collapse of the campaign and, even though the dust had settled and things had calmed down, he wanted to revisit the whole thing.

Was my approach successful? Yes, and no.

No, in the sense that I feel like there were still some issues that didn't get aired out, and the focus centered on the louder drama.

Yes, in the sense that everybody had, for the most part, laid their cards on the table. For better or worse, things were out there and people were reacting according to their personalities. The majority of the group was fine, and looking forward to the next campaign. Those who weren't fine... well they never were going to be so at least that's out there now, and the expectations can be put to rest.

For my part, I've learned that sometimes trying to be a mediator for everybody only makes things worse, because it's just another form of trying to please everybody. That, as most of us have learned, isn't possible. By forcing the issue I extracted myself from being in the middle of all the griping and whining and my own stress level decreased. One or two guys still have a badly skewered understanding of what was going on, but I've learned that it's not a problem I should be worrying about fixing. They are, after all, grown men and will either figure it out on their own or they won't.