Just for laughs, here are a few of the means by which RPG campaigns can be ruined for all concerned, or that just plain piss me off. Some of these are GM faults and some player faults. Many of them are things I have done.
1) Take forever to resolve your action.
This pisses me off to no end - you're in a large combat with tons of stuff going on, everything is going quite nicely, and you turn to a player and ask what they're going to do. And wait. And wait.
Firstly, they dither over exactly what to do. Then they require the situation clarified. Then they painstakingly calculate just where to aim an attack for maximum effect (or to not hit allies). Then they roll the dice one at a time. If you're not lucky, they have to ask how to resolve the attack for the 500th time...
Just get on with it! You should be paying attention, and know the situation. You should have a fairly good idea of what to do before you even start. And you should know the rules by now! As for calculating the optimum placement of grenades/spells/whatever, if your character doesn't have time to measure out the distances, you shouldn't do it either. You should have a fairly good idea of how big your fireball is going to be, and point to a spot on the grid. That's it.
That said, I have no problem with new players taking their time, and at the start of the campaign my patience is necessarily extended. But, by the third week, you should know what you're doing.
2) Under- or over-play your character.
If your character is just an extension of you in the game, or worse has no personality at all (having all the wit and charm of the bishop in chess), you're doing the game a disservice. The days of "Bob the Fighter" should be long behind us - give us something to make him interesting. It's not hard.
By contrast, the goofy Malkavian, the compulsive thief and, yes, the drunken dwarf are equally old and annoying. If you over-play your character in this manner, all you're doing is declaring that the "Stephen Show" is more interesting than whatever your GMK has come up with. (Naturally, I admit to this one - my behaviour in Roger's game, particularly the first session, was disgraceful.)
3) Don't bother with description.
This is more for the GM, but can also apply to players. If there's "a guy" at the door, there's something wrong. Is he tall? Short? Well-dressed? Smelly? Again, give me one detail to bring the character to life. If I'm in a room, what colour are the walls?
This is particularly important in (potential) combat situations. If I'm to have my action ready to go, I need to know how many opponents I see. I need to know the general layout. And I need to know if there are police sirens in the background.
4) Don't bother to learn the rules.
If you're playing a typical D&D campaign, you have exactly 2 sessions to learn that you make an attack roll by rolling d20 and adding modifiers. After that, I start to lose patience. Similarly, in Storyteller, you need to know that you have to roll a bunch of d10s and try to get high numbers.
Ideally, the GM should know the rules of the game well before the campaign begins. The players need not, but need to make the effort to remember what to do from minute to minute. And they need to learn what their various powers do within a few sessions.
And that's not to say you need to know every detail of the rules. I'm not going to get upset if you don't know how to calculate magic item creation costs off the top of your head, no matter how long the campaign lasts. But I will get pissed off if you don't know what a Base Attack Bonus is after 5 months of d20.
5) Don't make it clear which rules are in use, or change the rules midstream without notice.
Many games start with a functional rulebook, then add supplements that progressively make characters of a particular type more powerful than others. Under such a game, I need to know which supplements I can use before creating a character. And if I am led to believe it's core book only, and some other player is told to use whatever he wants, be ready to see me walk out the door.
New editions of games can change things around a lot, and can have changes that seem subtle but are actually powerful. If there's a new edition, it should not be introduced to an ongoing campaign without discussion in the group.
6) Ignore PC knowledge and powers.
If one of your PCs can cast detect evil, your adventure needs to take that into account. You need to either find a reason for it to not work or, better still, build the adventure on the assumption that it will be used. If you don't do either of these, your game will suck.
7) Let the PCs away with anything/screw the PCs over
The GM must take control of the game, but at the same time must accept that the players are the centre of the game. If the GM let's the PCs do whatever they want, the game loses all its challenge, and there ceases to be a point. But, if the PCs are denied knowledge that they rightly should have, are forced down a pre-generated plot, or otherwise feel unfairly treated, the game similarly becomes a farce. You have to keep a balance here.
I've gone on too long, so I'll stop. Any others?
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