I recently lost a player in my biweekly face to face game due to health issues, so I ran an ad on some local facebook groups for a replacement player.

 

One of the guys who applied claims to have played a lot of 2e D&D, so he was confident that he'd be a perfect fit.  While I don't mind teaching the system to those who have never played 2e (or even D&D of any version), it never hurts to have someone who is comfortable with things.  When I told him that the rest of the party were fourth level characters, so he could bring in a character of the same level, he immediately offered me his 1st level fighter/3rd level cleric of Thor; I explained that we play in my homebrew world and he'd need to make a character that fit in it.

 

We did a little chatting where I went over the basics - that my world is a low magic world, the idea being a "realistic fantasy" world - magic is special, clerics are using actual divine miracles, etc.  That I would send him a spreadsheet with my pantheon and a summary of their powers and such, that I had a website with details for each deity and loads of info on the setting.  And I would email him a basic primer on how I DM, information on the world, a quick list of what I needed from him - but please reach out with any questions at all.  He agreed, so I sent the content and told him to let me know when he had a character concept.

 

Usually, players are excited in this stage.  They ask questions, even though the emails I send are pretty thorough... and I don't mind.  That's great, actually!

 

He asked if I had stat increases.  2e doesn't do that feature, so I replied no, only racial modifiers (things like +1 DEX and -1 CON for elves).  He asked me about how different religions get different powers and spell lists.  I told him to check the website for the granted powers per deity, and that yes, spell lists varied slightly depending on the given deity's sphere of influence - the healing and health goddess doesn't grant much in the way of combat spells, only the nature-related gods grant the full range of "woodsy" spells, the war gods tend to grant fewer utility spells, that sort of thing.  

 

He then demanded full spell lists for each deity.  I let him know that I don't keep every single spell list for every deity; if another player has run a cleric of that deity, I can easily share the list, but if not, I go through and assign based off of the tenets of the religion.  That wasn't good enough for him, he insisted that he needed the complete spell list to pick a deity.

 

By now, I was growing frustrated and began to think that we were not going to be a match, and I basically told him as much, that if he couldn't come up with a concept without an exact spell list, that my table might not be what he was looking for.  He backed off and said he would send me a character concept.

 

In the meantime, I decided to check his facebook profile.  His email address says that he's a lawyer, his facebook shows that he likes to post photos of his so-called "mansion" (nice-ish house, hardly a mansion) and car.  Every pic of him is a selfie with him mean mugging the camera, usually with his special forces trucker hat on - apparently, he's ex-army and very proud of that.  He had pic after pic after pic of him in the same hat, looking like he was ready to eat a baby.  

 

Except for two identical posts a couple days apart - featuring an attractive woman in cutoff tee shirt, holding a nerf gun in each hand, and his caption about how this was the last woman to break his heart and he was posting this as a warning to all women.  Double you tee eff, my dude?

 

That evening, he sent me his character concept.  For my low magic, "realistic fantasy" world, if you forgot.

 

Behold: "Nomadic Baron Elric Savage".

 

His special skill is that he is a "Mattoo artist" (aka magical tattoos).  

 

He nominally worships one of the gods from my world.  But this character is from another world, and in his culture, their warriors travel through magical portals to other worlds for adventure, plunder, etc - then return home after every level up to revel in their glory.  Naturally, having these "mattoos" replaces all need for material or somatic components, as the magic is permanently inscribed on his skin (how convenient).

 

At this point, I informed him that we were definitely not the table he was looking for.  I explained that he had taken a concept from another world, using another magic system, and ignored everything about my world.  I applauded his creativity, but pointed out that he clearly wasn't interested in what we were looking for, and wished him luck.

 

He argued that he had given me something that I could plug into my world, since he knows nothing about my world.  Mind you, one of the emails gives a high level intro to the world, to how I do religion, to the various races and nations, etc - and he had access to probably three hundred pages of reasonably well-organized content about the setting on the website itself.  

 

I told him that he could have read the blurb on the religion he picked, picked a nation off the map and given me a generic enough backstory to work in any fantasy medieval setting, but instead, he had instead chosen a dimension traveling wizard/warrior/priest with magical tattoos.  

 

I again told him that his idea was cool (I actually think that it's stupid as f***, but I tried to be nice) and that it might fly well in, say, Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms - but not in a low magic world where again his spells are granted miracles from his god.  I didn't even bother addressing the ability to plane shift pretty much anytime he wants (plane shift is not available to priests until 9th level, and would have to be homebrewed to work like he wanted).  

 

I told him that I was looking to tell a collaborative story, that if he wasn't interested in doing twenty minutes of skimming to come up with a concept that fit in the world, that we weren't going to be what he was looking for.  

 

I told him that in my experience, players who last and have a good time make an effort to be part of the world, they want to flesh it out through their play.  I told him that some of them go on to become recurring or powerful NPCs that they and other players get to interact with.

 

I explained that in my experience, players who bring radical things from other games pretty clearly want to play that game instead.  That's fine, but that's not the game we are playing.  That doesn't make the player bad, it just makes them a bad fit.  I once again stated that he just wasn't looking for what we were offering, but I wished him well.

 

So of course, he clapped back telling me that this obviously an ego game, just about me and my ego.  That he hadn't picked any countries from the setting because I "scream of ego" and would have been offended.  That he was no longer interested in playing with me, didn't want to serve my ego, and this was not fun.

 

As much as it might have been fun to stoop to his level, I stayed high road.  I told him that I went to great length to support my players 

and to help them develop their stories.  I pointed out that I had been nothing but respectful (again, keeping it silent that I had never ridiculed his stupid munchkin character), but that since he was now throwing insults, he had proven that my intuition about him was correct.  I wished him luck.

 

And that was that. 

 

Mattoos. Lol.