My fellow PotM community members:
Some of you may have heard that we ended up banning Taty. This is true. It was not a decision we came to easily, but ultimately we had little choice. For those of you who have been playing here for a long time, you may have noticed Taty liked to be in the spotlight. Everyone wants the chance to shine, but Taty had difficulty sharing the spotlight with anyone else. Often times with her, those who attempted to share in the spotlight with her were treated as enemies not only in-character, but out-of-character as well. This competitive behavior led to several minor rulebreaks when it came to things like PvP or having multiple characters whose stories overlapped.
Unfortunately, as these relatively minor rules violations accumulated over time, any and all attempts to explain to Taty why this behavior was disruptive and problematic were met with outright denial and accusations of conspiracies against her as a player. As time passed, she became impossible to reason with, and her paranoia and disrespectful attitude became untenable. The staff here at PotM does not believe we are either perfect or infallible, but neither is she, and really at the end of the day all we want to do is just run a D&D game over the internet. Her behavior made it impossible to do even that much.
So yes, she was banned. Not because of a rule-break, but because her behavior made it impossible to run anything for any other players. We were simply spending way too much time trying to assuage her paranoia, to no avail. In the end, we simply wanted to play the game in peace and not have to deal with her daily tirades over tells and PMs. While we try to get along with everyone and we try to tolerate dissenting points of view, we are under no obligation to deal with nonsense of that magnitude, especially over a video game. Since she could not be reasoned with, we told her to leave and removed her access.
Please understand that we rarely ever do bans for this reason (the last and only other time was over 3 years ago after the "slander board" incident), and only when we feel that we cannot handle the player anymore and that they have become destructive to sense of community. Think of it as if we were playing a "pencil and paper" game at your house and one of the players started acting up and accusing the DM and other players at the table of conspiring against them. You'd ask that player to leave your house, and probably wouldn't invite them back until they've cooled off and gotten some perspective. That's what we've done here. Hopefully, we'll never have to do this again.
-PotM staff
