DM Murder

Have any of you been in situation where the DM had to be unseated, and polite conversation wasnt working? The players in our group just let our characters get slaughtered, then swept in and put a new Dm on the job, under the guise of taking a break from the "good stuff."
Are there any other tales of DM sabotage, or are we just really bad people?
In our defense, the guy is nice enough, but his game was absolutely horrible.
L.

Happened to me a few years ago. The goup wasn't having fun and instead of coming and talking to me about it they basically plotted to fight everything no matter how bad off they were. It wasn't till afterwards that they told me about this. It was immature of them and it really didn't solve any of the problems.

I'd be interested to find out what you're reasons for offing your DM were. I mean was the polite conversation just hints that his game wasn't great or did you seriously sit down with him and tell him to his face. Did you offer him inspiration or advice to make the game better?

Maybe he didn't know he sucked?
Maybe the group just didn't like the way he did things?
Maybe you were too nice at first and then became the scum of the earth by sneakily abandoning him? (maybe a bit harsh but it gets the point across)
Maybe he was a ratbastard and you wanted a cuddlylamb? vice/versa?

etc...

"Immature" is a good word for it, Crothian. I know gamers aren't always good at social interaction but being able to express your desires and dislikes is a basic human function.

If the group as a whole doesn't like the game, they sit down and politely tell the DM. No hints, no dancing around the topic, but also no screaming or accusations. Period.

Sabotaging a game is never the solution. Ever. If, after telling the DM point blank what's up, he still causes problems, simply stop playing with him.

There's no need to make this any more confrontational than it has to be.

Although gamemastering is endlessly intricate on the upside, it's so easy on the basics that I'm surprised how many stories like this there are.

I think the answer is this: when a GM forgets that there are three elements to a game, the game loses its magic.

The three elements are, the GM's preparation, the players' contribution, and the mediation of the element of chance (the dice). Negating any one causes problems.

Thus, some GMs simply are not prepared to respond imaginatively to player actions or dice outcomes, and so (1) railroad; or (2) fudge.

Both of these are, I think, cardinal sins. In the one case, the players rapidly think "choo choo" to themselves, and stop feeling involved. In the other case, the players learn they can't die (or, if the fudging is against them, that they just can't win), and stop caring about the game.

YVMV, of course. But if you find yourself saying "not in my game," a lot, check which of the above might be missing from the session. By the way, it's also possible for rampant player cheating to cause problems (although the percieved problem of "munchkinism" isn't, I submit, a problem, but a failure of imagination on the GM's behalf), but that wasn't the topic of the original post.

best,

Carpe

I was on the player side of this about a year back. We were doing RtToEE. It was done after we abandoned Dragon Mountain and moved to 3E. Anyway, the DM is a nice guy -- a very close friend, actually -- and he's a good player. As a DM, though, he's a bit competitive, but not killer.

He made a few house rules that generally nerfed our advantages -- we played a rogue-heavy party and he applied pretty hefty penalties to tumble and added facing for sneak attack (basically, all the negative stuff from UA, but none of the good stuff). There were some other changes, too, but as the Thief-Acrobat, those are the ones that stick in my mind. He also made a couple of comments about it not being fun for him unless any given fight was a real threat to us. Several times people asked him to reconsider his rulings or revoke house rules. I flat out told him I thought they were bad rules.

After spending 6 months trying to get our 9th level party of six past the Earth ziggurat room in the CRM, we'd lost three players, but managed to recruit two replacements. The DM said, "I just think 3E is absurdly deadly. Why don't you guys create 14th level characters and see what you can do?" That lasted another 6 months with somewhat, although not tremendously, better results -- we made it over the lake, but only barely. When my sorcerer -- who was responsible for teleporting the party about -- got nailed everyone, in turn, basically said, "Eh, let's forget it."

We'd never had the discussion, as players, about dumping the DM before doing so, but it turns out it'd been quite some time (like a year) without any fun for anyone. No one wanted to be the first to quit, though. When the lack of an escape route basically meant a slow, painful death for all the characters, a second restart was enough to do for someone and everyone almost sighed their agreement.

I still don't think the DM knows how miserable everyone was. The couple of discussions he and I have had about it have dredged up some hard feelings on both sides, so I'm content to let it lie.

A guy in our group drove our enjoyment of Speaker in Dreams into the ground hard enough to cause a spiderweb of cracks, and then stomped on it repeatedly without scraping the horse poopie off his boots first.

Fortunately, it was a single module, and we just haven't invited him to DM again since.

The problem in talking to him is that he lacks some fundamental ability to interact on an emotional level with other people. He doesn't get polite comments. He makes statements in a bold, declarative voice that don't really relate to the situation at all. He's not rude -- he's actually a genuinely nice guy -- but there's some kind of social-cue circuit that most of us have, and he ain't got it.

In fact, that was half of what was wrong with his DMing style. We'd hit an attacker for 12 points damage and say, "Does he look badly injured or just scratched?" and he would say, "The ___ does not look happy to have been hit by your ax," with this big smile, as though that was explaining something, or as though he were being clever. I know that some monsters need secrecy regarding their hit points -- you shouldn't always know how damaged a specter is -- but as the usual DM, I knew what the monsters were already, and I knew that they were grunts with maybe 2HD apiece unless they had class levels. So we should have been told whether 12 points of damage was a tiny graze or a stab to the gut.

The other bit that was wrong was when he either didn't read or didn't understand the module. I've complained about this before, but basically, there was one big powerful monster that we might have met in three places, and he had us meet the monster in all three places as separate monsters. And in one place, he let us unload all our big guns (highest-level spells, limited abilities, most powerful magic ammo, etc) and then arbitrarily declared that it didn't work -- because he wanted to give us a cliffhanger. (It was a cliffhanger, later, with us trying to survive with most of our good stuff used for the day because he didn't feel like having us fight that session.)

And the other other bit was his railroading. I was shocked to hear from other people that Speaker is one of the least railroady modules out there. When we realized that none of us had the right material to hurt a certain bad guy, we went looking for a magic shop -- and were informed that it was closed. We knocked. No answer. We pounded. No answer. We prepared to break in (we were saving the town, after all), and were informed that the magic shop owner had gone home and taken the entirety of his stock with him. Later, when we tried to get into a specific house, we were told that we couldn't break down the portcullis... despite the dwarf with the magical weaponry, Power Attack, and the wand of Silence to hide the racket. In fact, the DM held up his hand and said, "This is the hand of plot, telling you that you can't go in there until you go to this other place first." Then we went to the other place, and did the end battle FIRST because he, the DM, forgot to draw the side-rooms we'd specifically asked about on the map we had to use.

So railroading to an unpleasant degree, and an inability to convey or receive information in a reasonable manner. Not a good mix. Glad it was just a one-shot.

Polite conversation was going nowhere in our case. This guy literally refused to hear us. We had a big pregame meeting, and discussed that we werent really having fun, and could we make some changes. he agreed, said thanks for the feedback, then went right back to the same habits and performances, in the SAME session.
We were flabergasted, he just completely ignored us. We were absolutely clear about what we wanted and what he was doing right and wrong. We were polite, and we talked to him like the friend he was. we felt like the only option we had was to engineer the end of the game, artificially. Whenever someone ends a game, we always poll to see what we play next. Our groups unanimous decision was that we wanted to try another setting, and someone volunteered to run a game for us, while our bad DM rewrote his campaign to accomodate the tpk into the storyline.
So this happens to other people, and they deal with it in other ways, some similar and some not. Im grateful that our story was resolved well, although i wish our friend could cope with being taken from the DM chair straightforward, so that we wouldnt have to be so conspiratorial.

Crothian said:

Happened to me a few years ago. The goup wasn't having fun and instead of coming and talking to me about it they basically plotted to fight everything no matter how bad off they were. It wasn't till afterwards that they told me about this. It was immature of them and it really didn't solve any of the problems.

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Hey, if you'll insist on running Thieves' World...

-Hyp.