I want a raise...
I'm tired of people who are functionally unprepared for anything. Backstory is that we have a Game Night once a week or so for ourselves - me, my boss, and another co-worker. Occasionally, other people show up - former co-workers, spouses, all that. Last night, one of our former co-workers and his girlfriend call me up and ask if we're playing Pathfinder again. I said 'Yes' because we were. They want to play.
Ok, cool, you still got your character sheets from the last campaign y'all played in? You do? Awesome. Yeah, come on. Game starts at 6:30 sharp.
They show up at about 7:15, take forever to get settled in, and raid the fridge while we're sitting there waiting for them. Finally, they sit and we start. Since I designed this campaign to be able to accommodate a revolving door of players, it was fairly easy to take out the one No Show and deposit these two. I was in high spirits because we had gotten rid of a disruptive influence at the table - you know the kind - a guy who always uses meta knowledge, doesn't roleplay, always getting honked off about something immaterial, and just a general pain in the butt and the last few sessions had been enjoyable because the stories were getting told and, more importantly, we were making PROGRESS. Progress as in, we got more than three pages into the story before Mr. Disruptive whizzed all over everything.
So the Gypsy's Wayfarer Gate opens and deposits these two at the location where we left off in our last game and they proceed to just muck everything up. My two regulars are trying to ascertain whether they're friend or foe and they just clam up. No voluntary information. They just seemed lost as to what's going on - which is expected.
We have a standing rule that we put into place because people would just constantly flake on us: "You don't show up, you get left behind."
Instead of just trying to get caught up, they just sit quietly and start copying what my two regulars do. It takes them over an hour to walk down three streets and investigate one guard shack. So, feeling a bit of a bottleneck, I expedite things and move them ahead without delay. "Nothing on this street, nothing on this street," basically ignoring my whole plot line and a bunch of dramatic story element points to get them to their encounter with a patrol since that marks the midway point. They engage the three Soldiers and two Clerics (I added one extra of each because the two revolving door kids are higher level) and after they all roll Initiative, both of the Revolvers look at me and go,
"How do we fight?"
Me: "What?"
Druid (Her): "Like, how do we fight?"
Me: "You've got combat stats on the second page of your character sheet. All your weapons and stuff should be notated there."
Druid (Her): "I don't have any of that written down."
Spiritualist (Him): "Yeah, me neither. We didn't know where to find it."
My Boss: "he gave you the Equipment book when you made your characters. I was standing right next to him when he showed you where to write everything down."
Other Guy: "Yeah, plus it's all on the website, as well."
Druid (Her): "No, I mean, I looked, but I didn't see any of that stuff anywhere."
Me: "Alright." *goes to my Boss' bedroom to retrieve the Equipment book I lent him*
Me: *starts showing them AGAIN where stuff goes and what to put down for damage and such*
After all was said and done, the Druid asks what time it is.
Me: "It's 8:45."
Her: "We should get going anyway. See ya, guys. Same time next week?"
I mean, I realize that these two haven't actually DONE combat before because their characters came in during a big story arc that didn't necessarily have any combat encounters, so yeah, I understand not knowing HOW to fight because they've never seen it before, but not actually WRITING THE STUFF DOWN and THEN trying to pass the buck and leaving freaking sucks hard.