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Old 07-15-2016, 03:54 PM   #1
Disliker of the mary sue
 
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Default Gaming disasters

We have those games where everything falls apart or we played with people who are less then ideal. I figure we should discuss our persona experience. don't name names, and if the said troublesome person reads or is on this forum probably don't bring it up. Let not make internet drama just talk about our experiences, how they affected us, what we learned for the future and maybe just vent these things off to others.

Well to start with let talk about my forum rp days.

One time I accidently broke a game on my first post. Basically my charecter was blowing up a grave stone, but the problem was the grave stone was in area blocked off. Which the thread starter forget to leave a map with what places are locked because of dark magic. This made the whole thing fall apart fast in OOC chat.

In a Sailor Moon rp, I was playing a villain and attacked the scouts and managed to get a good blow or two. The guy who plays tuxedo mask comes in a day later and says he should have been involved in the fight. This leads to a argument in the ooc chat about he wanted to go back to that point while the others wanted to just move on. The thread started fell on the side of tuxedo mask and the group fell apart from there....yeah forum rps are delicate things.

I had this one Dm that I still have issues with..I will say I am biased and I probably screwed up things on my end too...but it was not a pleasent event.

We first met when a guy who is now a good friend of mine got a bunch of people for dnd, that fell apart and he started his own game. There were probally two bad signs at the starts. my friend who was dming mentioned later his charecter creation was a pain in the ass since he wanted to be a immortal undying Kitsune and while he negotiated to let him play it with a lot of la he later regret letting him bring his fursona into the game.

Well he invited me to his game and what should have been a bad sign at the start was he would not let me play a cleric or mage class, only a warrior or barbarian. He said I was not "experienced" enough to play a magic class... I decided to try out the barbarian since I had a warrior last game. Here is where I will admit my fault, I was very new to roleplaying since previous games either died fast or were those dnd encounter things where it less a roleplaying experience and more of a tabletop war game of sorts. I was thinking a barbarian is an uncivil, reckless and rude to an extent...I will that probably put me in a bad mind set to begin and that probally leaked into my actual interactions. But basically in the game he more or less kept us on a railroad and when I deviated he usually had some much higher level npc to threaten me back on the tracks.

I tried to make this work...but one day on a particularly bad day since I had gotten in a car accident which caused us to have to cancel a vacation. We were playing a normal enough game, when we transported back to home town we were considering ending the game there. We had gotten enough exp for a level up, this will mildy important to my complaint later. We considered ending, but we figured lets go on a bit further. Apperently there was a tournament of fighting going on in town, the dm asked if any of us wanted to sign up, I actually did not since in a meta sense I was a level one charecter who was still trying to figure out combat rules. but the dm pretty much heavily implied that my character would do so since she acted all combat happy and thought highly of her skills and basically pressured me to do so. So he has fight against shock of all shock his fursona I mentioned earlier. He kills me easily and then let the bomb drop that he was kicking me out of the game and had the whole group do an intervention on why...basically I was argumentative with the dm (which I will admit...) I not going to say I was an angel..I wasn't. However one we were going to stop the game before another player said lets keep going, implying that he would have let me do the level up process on my sheet and then kill me immediately next game, two I would have preferred he tell me in private that he wants me out...I would probably still be mad..but I wouldn't the public humiliation aspect of having this drop on me in front of the other players...I cried in front of everyone..unable to keep my emotions in check....like I said it was a bad day already....

Those are my bad experiences with roleplaying.
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Old 07-15-2016, 04:05 PM   #2
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When a GM spends so much time fleshing out an area, and the players don't want any part of it. Either the players avoid it, and the GM is ticked off, or the GM forces the players into it, and the players are ticked off.

Either way, someone (or many someones) are ticked off.
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Old 07-15-2016, 04:43 PM   #3
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Default Re: Gaming disasters

Quote:
Originally Posted by Lindmark71 View Post
When a GM spends so much time fleshing out an area, and the players don't want any part of it. Either the players avoid it, and the GM is ticked off, or the GM forces the players into it, and the players are ticked off.

Either way, someone (or many someones) are ticked off.
Usually my negative experiences are just the opposite. The GM takes NO time prepping, and their view of both GMing on the fly, and a Good Game are "Here's a fight that will last 5 hours, none of the players will survive, and if they do it's only because of my DMPC. Oh, and what's this I hear about people wanting more than combat? Why do you need anything even resembling a plot/story/whatever you want to call the bits that tie a game together? Combat is all you need isn't it?"

Edit: Translating this, it is a GM who rolls out a generic battle mat, throws down some miniatures and says "Here's the plot, kill them before they kill you." And the fight takes 5 hours, and is never finished even then.
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Old 07-15-2016, 04:48 PM   #4
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GMs confusing RPG games for personal therapy sessions.
Getting way too graphic with the rape scene our characters stumble upon but nevertheless can't stop in time.
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Old 07-15-2016, 04:51 PM   #5
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Newly met GM that seemed personable and nice... only to quickly intersperse the first session with "calm-rants" about how the Waco cultists were ultra innocents murdered by the Government, and gays were debauched child molestors that dared to have ADULT dating websites his godson could access via the internet.
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Old 07-15-2016, 08:45 PM   #6
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D&D player who managed to get his young frost giant character(!) killed. The DM let him take over another character. We wound up in one of the dungeons from, IIRC, a Dragon Magazine competition; part of it involved finding a grocery store with a portable UPC scanner. I lifted the scanner, of course. Later, we encountered a library, where we were divided into two teams and challenged to find all the books on a list in the shortest time; the team I was on, of course, won, as all the books were labeled in UPC rather than written language. The problem player's character started pitching a fit, prompting the Librarian to begin summoning powerful assistance. My mage cast Timestop on him, and two others trussed him up and took him outside before he could get us all killed.

The player stood up, punched the host's refrigerator hard enough to leave a dent, and stormed out.

On a more amusing occasion, we had a DM with (undiagnosed) ADHD. At one point my barbarian had found a sword that was smarter than he was, as well as being cursed; once drawn, it had to at least participate in the destruction of a living or undead creature, or it would cause him to go berserk on the nearest target. If there were no monsters nearby, he would berserk on the party. If alone, he would berserk on himself. It's a clue to the character's persona that he didn't see a problem with this.

Our party had aided some powerful extraplanar creature, which rewarded us all with one wish. Each of us, predictably, made a wish that the DM could cause to blow up in our faces entertainingly. At last, we were standing there, trying to figure out how to fix all the things we'd screwed up, when the creature said that one person hadn't made a wish. Turned out he took the intelligent sword for another party member. We began talking over one another, suggesting things the sword might wish for (that would, not coincidentally, help us). Finally, in character as the sword, the DM exclaimed, "I wish you'd all shut up and let me think!" Dead silence dropped across the table as it sank in what exactly the DM had said, and that he hadn't even thought that one through. After a bit of discussion, it was decided that for the next in-game day, none of the characters would be able to speak aloud.
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Old 07-15-2016, 09:43 PM   #7
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Reminds me of a wonderful bit in a game I was in. PC had a magic ring that we had never been able to figure out what it was. We get in a bad situation and the player says I wish I knew what this ring did, and then goes "never mind it's a ring of one wish right?" The DM goes see and it was so powerful that it even worked in this world.

My worst disaster was the DM that had a story to tell and nothing we did could change anything that was happening. The game only lasted a few weeks and none of us will even let him run again.
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Old 07-15-2016, 10:45 PM   #8
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It looks like I'm going to be the first GM to post about their own game. My gaming disaster was my home brew Pathfinder campaign two years ago. To be fair, this was my first time GMing. So I was still learning how to do things.

My first mistake was running this campaign at all. At the time, I was trying to graduate an entire semester earlier that I had been planning to. So I was trying to finish three graduate level courses on top of finishing what was supposed to be a year long project in half the time. Luckily, I did manage to graduate, so at least that stress paid off. But I realistically didn't have the time to devote to a homebrew campaign. And that exacerbated my other mistakes.

Initially, I was writing up walls of text for dialogue and description because that is how Paizo's adventures are written. Stylistically, I feel that this was a poor choice because reading walls of text to players, with no room for interaction, is boring. Worse, it is boring material that is very time consuming to produce! At least I quickly switched to improvising off of bulleted lists of key points. That made my acting a lot less wooden.

Even when I wasn't writing walls of text, my campaign was badly designed. This campaign was before I read GURPS for Dummies. So I was still trying to write my adventures/campaign in chronological order. There was no foreshadowing at either the adventure or campaign level, very little continuity between adventures, and no tangible progress. The links between adventures were so weak that you could literally run my adventures independently. Compounding this issue was my decision to set every adventure in its own country. Not even the setting was consistent! Worse, researching the various countries was time consuming. In retrospect, I should have set the campaign in a single country.

On an individual basis, my adventures were passable. They were designed to be combat heavy dungeon crawls. I did this because combat encounters are the fastest to design in Pathfinder. But I don't feel too bad about that one because I openly admitted that was what I was going for in my sign up sheet. So the players knew what they were getting into. If I were to revise these adventures now, I would add in more social encounters. I would also include player choices more meaningful than "do you go left or right."

Using the random encounter tables was a big mistake. At the beginning of the campaign, I was preparing literally everything in advance, including the random encounters. Namely, I was trying to tie the random encounters to the plot (ha!). But this meant that I was wasting my limited time on developing these unimportant encounters rather than the story ones. Not planning them in advance saved me a lot of prep time.

But the other issue was that the random encounters were overly deadly. On one occasion, I rolled a result for a roc. The party had to run from that one. On another occasion, I rolled up 6 trolls as a random encounter. This nearly resulted in a TPK because the party couldn't consistently deal acid or fire damage. Meaning that the trolls regenerated faster than the party could damage them. Even if I hadn't forgotten to give them a large token on the map, I think the party would still have suffered a TPK. I'm OK with there being challenging encounters that the players have to run away from. But I don't like it when these aren't part of the actual plot. So I don't think I will be using the random encounter tables again.

That all being said, my players enjoyed my game. Apparently, my mistakes were a lot less obvious on the other side of the screen. Considering that a lot of them were meta mistakes, that isn't too surprising. Maybe I'm more critical of my own mistakes than my players are. Hopefully, my next campaign will go better.
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Old 07-16-2016, 03:50 AM   #9
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My first group were school friends first and gamers second so we never had any major problems.

When I moved cities it took a while to find a decent group. The first group I found were really disorganised and plenty of times I would show up only to find the game cancelled with no explanation or just two of us show up (me and the GM usually). One time I didn't show, they killed my character so I had to spend half the session rolling up a new one.

The second group I found was really immature, one guy in particular kept accusing everyone of being homosexual and making anti-gay jokes. I was getting sick of the group fast when mister anti-gay was rude to my then girlfriend, now wife and that was the last straw.

Third time lucky, my current group is awesome. Their preferred system is Pathfinder (mine is GURPS) but that is fine with me, I will play whatever is going, plus they did indulge me a short GURPS campaign.
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Old 07-16-2016, 09:12 PM   #10
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I've had a few:

Recently, I lost two members of my face to face gaming group because I didn't think through the implications of a campaign. It sucks, but I've made my peace with it. It could have been worse. I managed to keep one of the new players who gave me a second chance - and I pulled it off. So that's something.

I ended up with a stalker after making a friend on these same forums. They was totally uninterested in joining my gaming group, but rather they wanted to pry me away from my group so we could play. I got screwed online royal (bank account was hacked, online accounts, etc.) and I learned a very valuable - but it was costly. Somehow, it didn't burn or sour me toward online or social media friendships.

My brother ran an AD&D game about 17 years ago that was so horrible that I've never played in a game he's ran since. I won't go into too many of the details, but suffice it to say I rolled FOUR natural 20s in a row to attack a lich that randomly showed up using arrows that could affect it. I did nothing. My girlfriend had similiar rolls with her sword and also did nothing. We quit. My brother wouldn't talk to me for a year after that, but I calmly explained why I wouldn't play in any of his games again after we started talking again. He's still a little miffed by it, but he gets it (I hope).

Those are the ones that stand out.
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