There have been several attempts to categorize people who play role-playing games (or, as I'm starting to prefer, storytelling games, since the term 'RPG' has been largely co-opted by the computer gaming industry and it does make sense to make a distinction but it's no longer useful to fight it). Most of the categorizations have been according to play-style, personality profile, or goals. I've started rating mine in terms of quality, which is probably horrible of me on at least one level.

D-list Players are detrimental to your game, but not so detrimental you need to immediately kick them out. Because without players you have no game and no story and all your painstaking worldbuilding is for naught. So, because you are or were desperate for players, or because his character is now integral to the plot, or another player's participation is contingent on his, or you don't want to offend him and lose a real-world friendship, you put up with him, but it's slowly killing you and you start to dread each game.

I've got this guy who seems to think he's playing an MMO. He obsesses about his character's 'build' and seems to think that the right combination of feats and equipment entitles him to 'win' every encounter. He completely tunes out until it's his turn in combat, and even then he can't be bothered to have his modifier precalculated for his signature move and has to add it up each time (either that, or he thinks the rest of us are so impressed with his +11 that we're waiting on his roll with awe). He seems to think his ability to assemble a powerful character makes him a better player than anyone else at the table, and he talks down to and shouts over everyone else, and disregards everyone else's opinion. Yet he cannot be bothered to figure out that large swaths of color on the map are empires, not towns, or remember a single NPC or place name. A couple of times, bored with the lulls between combats, he's shoved himself into negotiations even though player and character are both handling the situation inappropriately, and seems to think that asking the same question several times will get him the result he wants.

And yet I cannot bring myself to say that he's playing the game 'wrong'. His play style, character, goals, and methods, are wildly incompatible with my GMing style and the stated goals and style of the campaign. I can imagine other games in which his approach might be acceptable or even beneficial. A D-List Player may or may not be a bad player, but he's a bad player for this game. This is often the result of a critical and persistent (and possibly willful) communication failure, the proverbial, "One who, on being told that this is a game about politics and intrigue in 17th century Italy, asks to play as a ninja." I've only had to deal with a couple of these guys in my GMing career, and I've usually been able to solve it with a take him aside after the game to voice concerns, give a warning, or an ultimatum if things do not improve. It's also helpful to try to figure out what it is that he wants out of the game and try to find a way to give it to him without breaking everything. Neither of these approaches work for my current situation, a guy I have no contact info for and refuses to communicate when not at the virtual table.

C-list Players are warm bodies that fill seats. They're more or less competent with the rules, though uncreative with their application. They show up, create generic characters, do as they're told by more invested players, rarely offer opinions unless asked, ignore all but the most obvious plot hooks, and take no initiative unless offered very narrow choices.

That sounds like a bad player, and they can be in numbers, but one or two of them in conjunction with better sorts of players are not detrimental to a campaign.

B-list Players are your 'good' roleplayers. I tend to generate a lot of world information in the form of handouts, and my criteria here is often, 'has this guy read the handout?' These guys make dynamic, interesting, flawed characters that are more than numbers on a page and rooted in the game world. They actively seek out and follow plot hooks, take initiative and set goals for the campaign, consider consequences of their actions, share the spotlight, minimize inappropriate metagaming, and collaborate strongly with other players and the GM. These guys are here because they love role-playing, they're mature and considerate enough to leave their egos and baggage at the door and help create a good story. If every player were a B-list Player, I would have no complaints.

A-list Players are awesome. They don't just create characters, they create networks of supporting NPCs and entire sections of the game world for them to come from. They don't just pick up plot hooks, they create a fistful and hand them over to you. Gamemasters create, but they typically do so within the framework of a pre-existing and agreed-upon world and/or rules system. A-list Players similarly create and add to the game world after carefully examining the prior work and with the GM's approval. A-list players do half of the GM's job on spec, create characters and take actions that make the GM's job easier, and they take on a share of the burden of storytelling, so that the GM is being entertained as much as he is entertainer.

I've got this guy in my campaign right now who's great a wailing on his mind-guitar. He makes deals for unspecified favors from NPCs to redeem in the future. He's starting a campaign to get another PC's family out of slavery when that PC's player seems to have forgotten about them. He introduces himself as a member of an order that doesn't exist, but he does it in such a way that I can't help but think that the order should exist so that I can use them for foils and leverage. He's set himself up for a crisis of conscience, and signals to me in-character that he's ready for this plotline to happen, but only if it's convenient for my story.

Like D-list Players, I've only had a couple of these guys in my career, and a lot of my non-game energy as a GM is spent trying to 'groom' B-list Players into A-listers.

Systemic Concerns

The current campaign is not going well, but it is going, which is more than I can say for everything else I've tried for the past two years. It's really hard to get a game going with a group of total strangers you've met online, and it shouldn't be, or, at least, it shouldn't be significantly harder than getting a game going with a group of total strangers you've met off the physical bulletin board of your friendly local games store.

I thought that the primary problem was our D-list Player, and he is a problem that needs dealing with, but in the process of writing the list, I've realized there are a couple of other factors that are making this a perfect storm of suck for me.

roll20
roll20 seems like a very sexy virtual tabletop, and some of its features are very nice, but the user interface just sucks. After months of tinkering with it, it's still a royal pain to try to zoom in, zoom out, navigate on a map that doesn't fit in your window, or draw a structure with overlapping shapes. When I find myself pining for a plain old whiteboard, that's a sign that your UI sucks.

Pathfinder
As much as I've railed against 'class-and-level' systems, Pathfinder has a lot to like. And it is a very pretty system and I do so want to like it, I just think that I am and will ever be unfit to GM it.

First I started thinking about it in terms of S-type and N-type games, from the Myers-Briggs Sensing and iNtuitive personality types. S-type games are very immediate, focus on resource-management, detailed accounting, controlled environments, and tend to be hack-and-slash. N-type games are more open, abstract, and offer more diverse storytelling platforms. I'm an N-type (INTP) and even though I might enjoy S-type games and activities, they're counterintuitive and draining to me and I can only deal with them for short periods before I get frustrated.

Then I read A Tale of Two Types, which pretty much mirrors my previous hypothesis. What Ciechanowski calls Encounter games I call S-type, and Goal RPGs are N-type.

But it may be simpler and more profound than that. All the times I've run Pathfinder, I've modified the generic setting. I ran a Pathfinder Urban Arcana, and helped with a Pathfinder Dragonlance. I started a 17th Century Baroque-style fantasy and now Sands of Destiny, an Arabian Nights-themed fantasy. In all of these campaigns, I wanted the vast majority of NPCs to be humanoids and the vast majority of encounters to be non-combat. But in Pathfinder, creating humanoid NPCs (instead of copying the stat-block for a monster out of a Bestiary), even for a minor NPC, is a massive amount of work. It's like building a desk from 10,000 boxes of toothpicks - you can do it, but it's going to take a lot longer than it needs to and you're going to want to give up long before it's done. Pathfinder, due to its D&D roots, is optimized for hack-and-slash dungeon crawls, and while you can use it for other types of adventures, it quickly becomes more work than it's worth for the kinds of games I want to run.

Why was I even running Pathfinder to begin with? Because it's what all the cool kids are playing. No, seriously. Because of geographic and time-zone constraints, we were forced to look online for players, and the only game with enough traction these days is Pathfinder. We could set out a shingle for 1st ed. Exalted, or D6 Star Wars and we'd never get a bite, but announce that you're starting a new Pathfinder campaign and you have to turn people away. Kids these days are used to bing spoon-fed tutorials and don't have the patience to read a manual to learn a game they're not familiar with, so you're stuck with popular fast-food games unless you can physically wrangle people to a table and teach them.

We hoped now that we have a job and a pad in a sizable town that we would be able to get a meatspace group going on, on the assumption that those are better than even the shiniest virtual tabletop. Now that Sands of Destiny is kind of crashing, and we have a better understanding of why, we're going to give it another try.