DEALING WITH UNRULY PLAYERS IN DELTA GREEN

In my experience, there are two types of players that come to Delta Green. There are players who honestly want to play, and those who want to screw around or want to be in charge of games they're not running. Luckily the former outnumber the latter 10-to-1. Still, nothing can ruin a Delta Green game more than an unruly player who attempts to seize control of the game from the Handler. The difference between a great game and a mediocre or terrible game is cutting such poor players out, early. This is something few Handlers are comfortable with, but as a Handler, it's up to you. 

There are no rules, rule-sets, concepts or restrictions that will keep bad players from doing what they want, so put that out of your mind. The tightest role-playing ruleset in the world is entirely powerless in the face of a defiantly unruly player. This is not a system problem, this is a player problem. And there are only two outcomes possible: either you tell them why what they're doing in the game is wrong, and they correct that behavior. Or you tell them and they don't. Either way, you need to point it out, no matter how uncomfortable it may be.

Think about it this way; if you were playing Monopoly and one of the players was randomly moving pieces around the board, taking multiple turns in a row, hiding dice, or lying about results no matter what you said to them, would you continue to play with that person? That's the same situation, except, unlike Monopoly, in most role-playing games, one of the participants of the game is tasked with making certain the game runs smoothly. As a Handler, it's your responsibility to deal with disruptions at the table. 

Players who min-max (as if such a thing were really even possible in Delta Green), who correct the Handler, who speak endlessly out-of-turn or out-of-character, ruin surprises or otherwise challenge the Handler's authority in some stupid attempt to look “cool” should not be long tolerated. If you are confronted by such things and tell them to quit it and they don't, they should not be at that table past that point. Every moment you let a player run rampant on a game is another moment that's likely alienating the players that are there for the right reasons. By accepting disruptions you are effectively saying: that player is in control of the game and I am not, though I am supposed to be. (Please note, I remain uninterested in the whole "but we're all just players in the game!" comment that inevitably turns up here, as if that absolves anything. Yes, of course that is true, but as Handler, you are also in charge of the table — like it or not. The game does and moves the way you want it to, or it doesn't move at all.)  

The good news about defiantly unruly players is that they are easily dealt with.

I’ve had a couple of these types in decades of gaming. They didn’t last. Here are a few examples.

Let’s call the first troublesome player Mike. 

Mike was a gun nut. He wouldn’t shut up about guns. He’d correct, he’d revert to the pedantic diatribe about bullets whenever any shots were fired, he’d draw other players into endless reams of gun lists in the selection of their firearm.

I had had enough of him fifteen minutes into the first session. When the creature showed up in the second act, it boiled in from some other dimension and lunged at Mike, who had some amazing, incredible firearm which took forever for him to settle upon (and then we had to buy attachments!) He shot this thing in the face with a critical and blew its head off. The thing proceeded to grab Mike’s character, pick him up over its head and snap his back in two, before vanishing back to where it came — with Mikes’ character.

Mike’s protest was “but I blew off it’s head with my \*POINTLESS FIREARM\*!” My response was “how do you know where its head was?” In any case, mechanically, Mike’s shot had little or no chance in killing the thing. The other two Agents who ran made it out alive.

Mike never came back, in the game or to the game session. Here's the important point: Everyone was happy about that.

Another good example was a person we will call Percy. 

Percy would shout out what he thought the monster was, and use his prodigious memory to spit back huge reams of information on the creature in question. Number of Hit Points, Armor Points, Attacks, etc… He took a decidedly stupid proactive “let’s do everything we can to end up in front of the monster,” methodology which would be the exact 180º of any skilled agent. 

Even worse, he knew this, and didn’t care.

Percy and his group came upon a seaside town, they came across a book about a group of fishermen who summoned a creature called “The Sons of the Deep”. He read the description in the book (took the SANITY loss) and calculated they were up against, at most, a Deep One or two. Percy decided to be proactive, he’d end the threat.

After setting up a vast booby trap at the summon area, they cast the summons. I still can’t express how unnecessary and stupid this was.

When the Starspawn showed up, things quickly soured. Needless to say, it was a total party kill. When Percy began to rant and rave about the book being inaccurate, I explained it was written in 1704, and had been translated from some horrific hybrid language of Latin, English and Spanish; it used euphemisms and code. Some of the tenses and numbering might have been off. What it had actually said was “The Son of the Deep”. 

Percy also bowed out of the game shortly thereafter, his seat to be filled by an INCREDIBLE player who was just happy to be at the table, to the relief of everyone else. Oh well.

The point of these stories is to say to Handlers: the game is yours. The rules in Delta Green are stacked against the players — most effectively I might add and very much on purpose. It is very easy to tie troublesome players up in knots with little more than a clear enforcement of the rules. And if they refuse to play the game you want to run, they shouldn't be there where they have the opportunity to ruin the game for everyone else. Do not be afraid to enforce the one thing that can make or break a Delta Green game: mood at the table. Trust me, the players that are there for the right reasons will appreciate you for it. 

You, the Handler have taken on the role of uncaring fate. Act like it.