"That Guy"

Dungeons and Dragons is a roleplaying game. It is extremely open-ended, allowing for a player to be pretty much whatever they want (within reason) and allowing for a DM, or Dungeon Master, to write whatever kind of story they want.

The drawback of how open-ended it is, however, comes when "That Guy" joins the party. "That Guy" is pretty much what he sounds like: The guy that somehow, some way detracts from the experience and gets on everyone's nerves, but the party tolerates him anyway for reasons they can't explain.

I recall a group a few months ago where “That Guy” was a relatively new player to our group and we’d agreed that the game was going to be about mid-high fantasy DnD heroics… So this guy shows up with a drunken old man lout of a Fighter. Meanwhile, the some of the others were all playing some young kind of anime-nerd hero type for the lulz. My character wasn't, however, I was a Half-Orc Ranger stylized as a pirate admiral who was a total mama's boy and wrote letters to home every month. His name was Bilge. 

However, this story is not about Bilge. It's about "That Guy".We tolerated him and how often he’d talk about how drunk, smelly, and generally obnoxious his character was. He would use metagame knowledge (knowledge the player has that the character doesn't)  to make fun of our characters in his roleplaying, laughing at us when we got knocked out, et cetera. 

It was worst when he started calling us cowards when we failed our fear checks, and the DM would take pity on us and give us a look that said “Just let it slide.” and would let us take rerolls. We never understood why he let us reroll the check simply for being called cowards, but we weren't complaining.

We’d bitch about it in between sessions and we grew to hate the guy as a player. His character would go onto long diatribes about dungeons and gold and how useless we were and we’d get into hour long arguments before the DM would constantly remind us to keep it in character. Anyway, this campaign went on for a year and the storyline is climaxing and a big NPC gets captured, and "That Guy" gets us to go on a suicide mission and storm a castle, and he’s pretty much yelling at us IRL that we gotta do it.

When we finally agree, he leaves the room with the DM for a few minutes, and we all assume this is all some metaplot about how he’s gonna fuck us over and steal our shit. They come back as though nothing happened. Session continues but we’re all on guard, assuming something is up. We storm the castle or whatever, and have fun, not really noticing that this guy has stopped being so obnoxious. He wasn’t referencing how he reeked of whiskey or onions or whatever, though he wastes 5 minutes explaining how his character shaved his beard. Whatever, we just assume the DM talked to him about it. 

Epic battles ensue, fast forward to face off with the final boss, some Undead Warlock or something, and it isn’t going so well.

In fact, we’re getting spanked. Our Cleric is down, and Mr. Fighter has a haste and out of nowhere he goes “I rush over to the Cleric and slap him. ‘Get up, you damn coward!’” At this point I groan, but the DM actually says “Cleric, you’re back up with 50 HP.” Then Mr. ‘Fighter’ says “I turn to the Lich… My sword glows a bright gold. I use Smite Evil.” Suddenly it clicked for all of us.

"All right, chums, up! Let's do this."

That fucker had been playing a Paladin, a holy knight, a crusader, the entire time.

We realized that his insults were his Lay on Hands (which explained why the Cleric was healed), and his calling us out as cowards was his Anti-Fear aura, which allowed us to take rerolls.   

The reason he made such a big deal out of him shaving and cleaning himself up was that he had finally reconciled himself for his past mistakes (which we were all too distracted by his annoyingness to remember).

We all had thought of him as “That Guy” but he actually had been out-roleplaying us for almost a year.