"I look inside!"
"I open it!"
"I take it!"

OMG! Shurely everyone has shared a table with one of these players. "ME FIRST!" and "I go through the gnoll's sack!" are exclamations, while the rest of the party is either recovering from combat. the trapped door, or even talking to major npc's.

I end up secretly wishing for their early death or opening the wrong box before its over...

Eh. From a DM's perspective I kind of like that guy.

Someone has to trigger all the traps.

Quote from: tanstaafl48;605552Eh. From a DM's perspective I kind of like that guy.

Someone has to trigger all the traps.

That I find very soothing! Carry On!

Cursed Magic Items are your friends.

Quote from: languagegeek;605585Cursed Magic Items are your friends.

In one AD&D 2e game, we were using the Cardmaster Deck to do a random dungeon crawl...one of my players was playing a Mage to intimidate a superstitious Beastman PC into letting him have a necklace they had just found that was registering as magical through Detect Magic.

He put it on, and the Necklace of Strangling (I believe is the proper name for it) made short work of the Mage.

We had "that guy" in one of our old 2E games: the halfling rogue with sticky fingers. The gig was up when our mage cast detect magic and noticed a very strong aura emanating from that little runt. A short time later the fighter and the barbarian were holding him upside down, shaking out all the stuff he'd pilfered. A whole bunch of gems, jewels, and about half a dozen magic items he hadn't told us about fell out of his cloak and onto the floor....

We let him live.

Yeah. For a while I ran The Enemy Within with a group, that included a really diehard D&D treasure/xp-hunter who really didn't get neither Warhammer nor basic in character play. It didn't matter much, that he was aiming at becoming a knight, his character was looting and searching, high and low, through gutter, in the pockets of rotten mutants and if something was glinting in the sewer.

Strangle? no.

Stop playing with? Yup.

Oh yeah, we used to call those guys "creekers", crack peekers. They'd investigate every crack and crevice looking for stray coppers.

I also know his cousin:

"You captured one of the guards alive, and now he's tied up."
"I cut him."

"... and that's how you can get past the sentries - finishes the captured guard."
"I slit his throat. What? He already talked, we have no further use of him."

"The low-ranking crewmembers of the spaceship are a bit hesitant, not knowing how to deal with the fact that you have just killed off all the officers."
"From now on, you're working for us. Yes, for free, be thankful we're letting you live. I grab one and start cutting his fingers off until they comply."


And to answer the thread title, no. Not the PC.

I confess...as a gm, I punish players like that.

For example, a player once captured a pirate captain and tortured the captive to learn the location of a treasure hoard. Once the pirate realized the pc had no intention of letting him live, he told the pc a false location full of deadly dangers instead of the real treasure. The pc then cuts the pirates throat.

Right after that, the pc learns that there was a huge, HUGE bounty for that pirate.   Alive.

I reward players for creativity, not "I kill it! I kill it"

When I ran the Night Below campaign, I had a couple egregious looters in the group. Their greed caught up with them when they ran into a patrol of Derro in the Underdark. They were so busy looting the fallen Derro that they let two get away. Big, big mistake.

The Derro alerted the Mind Flayer/Derro strongpoint further down the passageway. So the next day when the PCs came upon the strongpoint, it was a slaughter. In a bit of poetic justice, the PC who had started the looting was the first killed, his skull cracked open by a mindflayer, his brains sucked out in full view of the party. Cue Aliens-style panic. TPK of a 9th level party.

Quote from: Bill;605669I confess...as a gm, I punish players like that.

For example, a player once captured a pirate captain and tortured the captive to learn the location of a treasure hoard. Once the pirate realized the pc had no intention of letting him live, he told the pc a false location full of deadly dangers instead of the real treasure. The pc then cuts the pirates throat.

Right after that, the pc learns that there was a huge, HUGE bounty for that pirate.   Alive.

I reward players for creativity, not "I kill it! I kill it"

+1.  Freakin' classic, LOL!

I have less trouble with Looters in my Star Wars games, than with Murderers.

My favorite being the player that decided he could throw an Imperial Officer into the airtight sensor-baffled Smuggler Compartments for a couple of days.

He raised a shitstorm when he found the corpse in there the next day (suffocated), till the other player reminded him I said "airtight" when he threw the guy in there.

"Why didn't you get the guy out then?!?"

"Because my character didn't know you threw him in there!"

I have a dual-classed Looter/Murderer personality in my game: my 12-year-old nephew.  Even though he's from the in-law's side he's frighteningly reminiscent of how I played D&D at age 12.

Thus far he has:

- Nearly gotten the party slaughtered by causing a wild boar stampede through them ("You see Wild Boars on the trail ahead." "I take out my bow and shoot one!" - this was with his ranger for crying out loud)

- Gotten himself killed by arrowing a Gas Spore

- Constantly steps on other party members' treasure gathering. Other player:  "We're searching the bodies for coins." Me: "You find...32 silver pieces and..." Him: "I TAKE SOME OF THOSE COINS AND HIDE THEM WHEN NOBODY'S LOOKING!"

Right now, "midterm exams" are underway and the regular gaming group is playing Tomb of Horrors.  They have just defeated the gargoyle with the 100-gp-gem necklace (which, thankfully, did survive the disintegrate spell that dispatched the gargoyle)...and the nephew is poking around looking for "stuff" where the gargoyle stood.

It should be interesting when the group finds the gargoyle statue that will destroy the gemmed necklace, but give the party a gem of True Seeing in exchange.

Yes, I have occasionally felt like strangling these types of players, but probably not as often as the rest of my players do.

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