Ever benched a GM?

Keeper of Secrets said:

Was the GM you left a friend or was it someone you met for this specific game? Its a lot harder to walk out of a friend's house and a friend's game.

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He was originally a gaming aquintance who became a friend later. He even joined the new campaign a couple months later as a player.

jmucchiello said:

While I agree with the others who've said don't let her DM. If you have to have her write a manifesto of good DMing, in her own handwriting, which states: "I will not create NPCs that travel with the party or whom the party must ask for help who will then overshadow the party. I will not write stories about the game world. I will not get upset when a member of the party takes this paper out and waves it in my face that I am violating my promise." Sign and date it. Make sure everyone has a copy. If she's game to make the document, she might be more forgiving when you all turn on her poor NPCs she's written these little short stories about. Or don't let her DM.

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I talked with her husband last night about this if he thought having something written ahead of time would help. He dosen't think so and he has been with her for 24 years so I think he knows :\

She is one of these people who just should not game not as a DM or as a player. She is to much of a control freak to be a good player.

So we told her that instead of pouring all her energy into gaming she should just pour it into her writing. That way she can build all the worlds and characters she wants and have total control over what happens.

Crothian said:

I've been benched. Basically I was running a game the others didn't like. My DMing style and their playing style was not really in sink.

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Ditto

Yep, we benched a DM for playing favorites with his friend. He would allow his friend to cast charm person* on the party, then recast it whenever he felt like it after telling our characters to fail our saves. He would then basically play the game by himself saying what every character was doing. When we asked him to stop he didn't, then we talked to the DM, who said he had no problems with the way his friend was playing. When we told him in that case you aren't DM he left the group along with his friend. I gather they got kicked out of a lot of games that way, even when one of them wasn't GM they would work together to louse up everyone else's fun.

That ended up being the first campaign I ever DMed, somebody had to take over... and I had some stuff I'd written.

*This was back when charm person lasted a whole lot longer than it does now...

The Auld Grump

Well, we sort of benched a DM.

As per some previous posts, we had a FR campaign going quite well, with us straining for lordship over a fairly attractive land. All going well, we raid and capture a half-destroyed castle, and all of our characters spend pretty much everything we have to get it up and running, establishing ourselves as good lords of the domain.

Then, we switch DM's. A player who none of us really liked much, but kept showing up for some reason despite the fact no-one ever told him we were playing*. So, he gets the rains of the FR campaign, and we all brace for damage control.

Oh god, we didn't brace enough.

Adventure goes like this: Kid comes to castle, knocks on door. Our butler answers, the kid asks for the (relative) lords of the demense. I (A paladin) get there first, greet the kid. Who immediately says something like 'Unless you go to the caves X by Y from here, you'll all die!'

Me: 'Oh. Okay. Come inside, we have a cleric that helps children like you sometimes..'
so the kid pulls a dagger and tries to kill himself. I attempt to stop him, fail, he begins to bleed to death with some other speech about how he's controlled by some illithid - DM not letting me use Lay on Hands, because a 10 year old kid is waving a dagger at me. Kid dies.

I'm a 9th level paladin with Improved Disarm. *shrugs*


Ahh well. Regardless, we all gather (takes a week or so - half of us are out, y'know, trying to establish our rule and all that).

We get to X by Y cave, but see something led up to as a vast, minotaur-like guardian, radiating strength and power and so on. Takes half an hour to plan, six seconds to kill - a single normal hit from our fighter. So much for lead up.

Anyway we go down his oddly described ramp/bridge thing, which goes from one featureless rock to another featureless rock, both as scaleable as the other. We get confronted with 100 feet high adamantium doors.

Funny thing was, we couldn't do anything. We tried knocking. We tried searching for keys. We tried for secret doors. Nada. You see, stealthy and stuff were we.

So eventually, our barbarian makes a little fib about his rages ignoring hardness. We wait as the hammering goes on. Remember this. Enraged barbarian hammering and rending a vastly hard substance. It comes in later.

We go into a tunnel. Theres two junctions, but there's three - up but not up, sideways, no sideways, it's all about the place. Funny thing was, we couldn't understand a thing he was saying, and he couldn't understand why we were so lost. Eventually we just screamed to go in the first door, to which he said there was no first door. It took us half an hour! I remember clearly screaming 'I GO SOMEWHERE, IT!' We kill some duergar. We find an illithid in a cage, which has been trapped for millenia. We don't let it go, despite it's wishes to the contrary. We find a prismatic dragon, who tells us..er, something. It flies off. We find a 10 by 10 foot room with a sleeping monk.

Me: 'Sleeping? After we bashed down a hundred foot door, rode horses wearing full barding, two people wearing full harness, and a dozen spells that ripped this place apart?'
DM: Yep. Sleeping.
Me: I detect evil.
DM: She's evil all right.
Me: I go and wake her.
DM: Wake her? she's evil! She's a 25th level monk! She'll kill you all!
Me: Okay, I don't wake her.
Dm: But if you leave, she'll wake up!
Rogue: I, er, go and slit her throat then.
DM: She wakes briefly, but chokes on her blood and dies.
Me: Right.

After that, we released the Illithid, and he led us to a wonderful place filled with merchants giving away +5 armour for a quick laugh. We also levelled fifteen times, were given more weight in platinum than our castle, and met a man who breathed fire.

I only wish I was joking.



Sorry for the long windedness, but I suppose I had to get it off my chest


*I expect treachery from the ranks.

Extra: Oh, I forgot. There was a room with a water elemental, and the doors shut and water poured in. Also, there was some glyph of fear or something.

DM: Make will saves.
Sorcerer: 19! Plus four.. twenty three.
DM: fails. You run.
Me: Uh..I'm immune to fear.
DM: Make a save anyway, add a +4 bonus.
Me: Er..Thirty three.
DM: Fails, you..
Me: Oh, sorry, fourty three. I forgot the plus ten for the constitution and magic helmet and stuff.
Dm: Oh..your alright then.
Me: Guys, don't forget my aura. You all get +4, and you should remember all of your other bonuses too.
Barb: (Honest guy) Damn. 3.
Dm: *Gleeful* Fails!
Sorcerer: Oh, I forgot..I don't get twenty three, I get thirty eight, with the paladins bonus and my other stuff, I've much higher wisdom.
Dm: Oh, okay. Your fine.
Fighter: Er, natural twenty.
DM: Whats that add up to?
F: Er, thirty. With the fear bonus.
DM: Fails! You drown!


It goes on.

I benched myself from a Star Wars campaign I was running, and waited quite a good little while after that before running anything else. It started around the end of A New Hope, and I had been running it with essentially no notes at all - just books, and, apparently, a whole lot of crack cocaine. Things seemed to be going really well - our main Jedi character had just successfully trained Luke AND Leia on Hoth, our bounty hunter had slain Jodo Kast and taken his ship and Mandalorian armor, and the entire crew had taken dinner with Emperor Xal (my own crack-pipe creation of a system lord) and then raided his Dark Jedi training center to save one of their own - and they had ended up rescuing Vader in the process.

Later, they found Vader weeping in the shattered remains of the Throne Room of the second Death Star, and took him to Yoda to get him straightened out - at which point they came into possession of an asteroid base in the Dagobah system, which, along with Dagobah itself, was being guarded hereafter by Admiral Thrawn aboard the Executor. Having basically won the war for the rebellion by pulling overwhelming resources to their side from the Empire with the defection of Vader, I proceeded to take them on a little time-travelling excursion into the time of the Clone Wars (this is before all but the barest info about the movies, mind you.)

I thought things were going pretty well, if I did have the vague feeling of being out of control, when Henry's character committted suicide by sticking a lightsaber someplace uncomfortable - the poor little Jawa just couldn't take it all anymore. I disregarded it and talked him out of it, but I got the picture - the story had too little cohesion anymore, I was railroading a little too ofter, and it bore too little resemblance to actual Star Wars. I think I ran it one more time after that - they managed to set things right in the past and get back to the present - a present that looked much more familiar to Star Wars purists. Of course, along the path BACK to that present, they rode a damaged version of the Enterprise-H, and the Jedi Master ended up married to a parallel version of Mara Jade - but it's hard to quit an addiction cold turkey, no?

I took a while after that to analyze all that I had been doing wrong, and these days I run much more conventional games, and reserve my "creative impulses" for when the characters do stuff not in my notes - and then, I try to rein them in a bit.

Damn, after reading some of these I'm almost hesitant to mention why we benched a DM. Twas back in 2nd Ed. days, and we had DMs that alternated week to week. I didn't much like that situation myself since I prefer to get into one character at a time. One of the DMs had a real bad temper, and often disrupted the game. As in if we did something he didn't like, or questioned a call, he would have a tirade.

Thus, using the excuse of preferring to just stick with one batch of characters, we trimmed back to one DM (which was the truth, if not all of it). It made for more pleasant gaming sessions.

buzzard

I've had three campaigns benched so far. The first two were benched due to my propensity for laying waste to all known civilization through a disease that raises everyone as undead. I did this twice in a row and somehow managed to miss that. The third time we just stopped playing due to time constraints.

It's well known that my desire for a good story often short-circuits my ability to be a good DM. Pity, that, because I lack the patience to write. :\

A long time ago, we had a group playing 2e AD&D. One of the players commented that he wanted to DM, so our group let him.

The first outing by the new DM was....well, less than stellar. Okay.... it sucked big time to be absolutely honest. No storyline, big time railroad, no continuity, poor grasp of the rules, NPCs who would be more interesting as paper doll cutouts. And he talked in a monotone. Everyone else was in pain.

After the session, I spent several hours debriefing him on how to improve. What worked, what didn't, that sort of thing. I suggested that he go with a module and provided one from my extensive library. Told him to study it and get a feel for it and he could try the DM thing again.

There was some improvement in the second outing. Again, most of the players seemed to be in pain. Strange thing was, I gave him a module to play but I only recognized a few elements. As we transitioned from the first level to the second level, a person magically appeared and offered each of us a draw from a Deck of Many Things. So he provided a deck and we each drew several cards and everyone lucked in as everyone got black mark cards.

After the session, I talked with him again. The players were clearly not happy with the DM but I reminded them that he was new at it and to have some patience and understanding. I found out that he heavily modifed the adventure (not a sin... all DMs do it). Trouble was, he modifed it so that it didn't make any sense at all. He abandoned the storyline and input his own. Trouble was, the story was in his head and was not coming out in any coherent fashion that anyone could make sense out of. And, he stacked his 'deck of many things' with nothing but black cards. I asked him why and he said that he didn't like the fact that you could screw yourself with a bad draw. Sigh....he just doesn't get it.

Session three: Sigh....more of the same, despite my talking at length after the second session at what was wrong and how to improve. Again, as we moved from level 2 to level 3, that same guy bopped in again and offered us all a draw from the deck of many things again. And eveyone drew black cards....no surprise there. Shortly after, the DM went to the washroom. One of the players announced that he was going to kill off his character or commit suicide or something and encouraged everyone else to do likewise. They were one unhappy lot.

With heavy heart, I knew what needed to be done. I was the oldest player and the one with the most experience. It was for me to do the dirty deed.

So when the DM returned, I handed him his books and dice and told him that he was banished to the players side of the table. He said "So, I am fired, right?". "yeah...something like that", I replied. "Okay" he returned. He actually seemed relieved. Afterward, he told me that he knew the other players were not having any fun but he couldn't turn it around, despite what he tried. And the deck of many things thingy was to try to compensate for the fact the group was not having fun....but even that backfired on him.

He continued as a player and everyone was happy with that arrangement, including him.