What campaigns have you started that didn't work out (and not for bait & switch-issues)

[Ulfgeir]

I started the planning for a campaign in Daring Comics rpg well before the 2016 US presidential election, and some of the choices I made, unfortunately did not work out that well for different reasons, which I will explain later.

The choices I made was the following:

• The characters would be starting characters, and since everyone uses New York, I settled for Miami.
• The team would operate as vigilantes, and not have official support.
• I made it so that super-heroes were relatively rare, and the previous team in Miami were not around. (1)
• I made Miami super corrupt, and full of drug-smugglers and different gangs. Think Miami Vice + The Shield.
• Lots of racial/ethnic tensions.
• I envisioned that Trump won the 2016 presidential election, and that that would lead to lots of international conflicts and internal ones.. (2) So most other heroes were buzy either protecting Washington or serving in foreign conflicts (of which there was a number). This meant that no outside heroes would come down and fix the situation in Miami.

Now for explanations (and problems):
1: in the previous team, there had been problems, as he leader (a very powerful blaster), and his second-in command (a guy in power-armour) was corrupt, and did not care if they commited lots of collateral damage. A white-supremacy group performed a terrorist action, and the previous team tracked them down to a base in an old castle in part of Eastern Europe. In the showdown that happened there, the most idealistic person in the group (Red Gazelle), a speedster with near Wolverine-levels of regenerative powers got in the way of the attacks by the leader and his second-in command. She died from this, and the groups gadgeteer got injured and is now in a wheelchair. When the group came home, the gadgeteer, the Brick, and his wife who was doing archery accused the other two of doing it intentionally. So the group split apart. (they did not get to retrieve Red Gazelle's body, which is important...)

Later, the former leader and his second-in command would go in when a young supers driven to end of his sanity by being falsely accused of a crime, took the persons working in the Crime-lab hostages. Half of the persons there, and the young supers died in that battle. Those two were now hunted by the police. Someone put enough explosives in the leaders car, to vaporize him, and he guys in the power-armour was found in a motel-room with underage girls. He is now in solitary confinement for life. The Archer is retired as she got pregnant, and her husband is missing in action. The gadgeteer is out of the hero-business, and now works for a shady corporation that has a public image that they are the best thing since sliced bread and that they are building a better tomorrow. Someone has started to take control of all the criminal elements in the city. This someone is Red Gazelle, who has come back as a vampires (and she still has her powers). The castle was a prison for an ancient vampire lord, who found her when her regenerative powers had kicked in enough so that she was alive again. She is now a complete villainess, and is very ruthless, but operates in the shadows). She was the one that took care of her killers.

2: I did not expect some of the egregious stuff that has happened since he took office, The problems with this choice is that some things work MUCH better as fiction than reality. Same with having hackers in fiction is fine, but when you get things like Stuxnet and ransomware in real life, not so fine. That is all I will say about politics.

3: Super-hero games are by default REACTIVE. The heroes wait for the villains to do things...


So what campaigns did you start that didn't work out and why?

 

[Umbran]

So what campaigns did you start that didn't work out and why?

I have, thank goodness, never had (or been in) a campaign that failed for rules or campaign design issues.

Once, I played in a game that ran for some time, but ultimately failed when the GM apparently could not take the fact that folks noticed his personal thoughtlessness.

The rest of the time... we have just basic issues of getting modern adults who don't live next door to each other together on a regular schedule for any length of time. Scheduling is just such a pain.

 

[Nagol]

Dozens, at least.

A list of reasons off the top of my head:

• intra-player discord
• change is real-life situation for myself or key players
• lack of my enthusiasm or time competition
• lack of player enthusiasm or attention/time slot competition
• TPKs (I invariably roll in the open and don't pull punches; some systems are more forgiving than others)
• miscommunication about campaign themes or style
• disgust with the rule set that looked OK on paper, but played poorly
• longer term creative block

 

[John Out West]

I once ran a horror campaign that was too stressful for the players, so they all quit. To be fair, i did say it was going to be like "Drowning in their own blood," before we started the campaign.

 

[monsmord]

I built a world and a significantly extended ruleset for D&D 1e (this was a few years before 2e) with new playable races and classes, all that. The first adventure was to give each character a special magic item tailored to them, carefully hidden in a room off a deep well (fifty feet below the lip and not visible from the top), and that well was at the center of a maze. They got to the center refusing to take any of the interesting bait left, saw the well, and immediately decided to climb down for reasons never fully explained. Thus armed, they left the way they came, never exploring 80% of the complex.

Outside they came upon a "royal honeymoon wagon" that was on its way from one kingdom to another, escorted by representatives from two other kingdoms, all part of a peace pact. The wagon was to be attacked by another force and the players help defend it, and the campaign was to be about how this other power was trying to destabilize the whole region and gain control. But upon seeing the wagon, and without asking anything about it, my players attacked it themselves, killing everyone, just to see what these cool new magic items could do.

I've never been a good DM, least of all in the summer after high school. In retrospect the whole thing was insipid, typical cartoonish high school fare, but a better DM might have been able to control it, salvage it, spin it, something. Not me, though. A couple hundred hours hand-writing manuals in notebook paper, drawing and painting maps, etc., and these chuckleheads didn't want to "play right." I burned it down, never DM'd them again. The dumbest thing on my part may have been expecting otherwise - I had played with these guys for a while, and should have seen all it coming.

It became a running joke until I finally abandoned the group (embarrassingly late in life) because IRL most remained some degree of irredeemable a-hole.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

The two that come to mind:

In 2e, I tried to do an Underdark campaign, but we were all teenagers and our interests just wandered elsewhere.

My first 5e campaign was punishingly difficult (totally my fault). But also I was trying to do an intrigue, high society campaign with a bunch of players with one setting: murderhobo.

 

[John Dallman]

An In Nomine campaign where I didn't have a good enough handle on where adventures would come from and how the characters would get involved with them. IN is kind of demanding on that front, and I hadn't realised, being too concerned with the cosmology and not enough with the flow of events.

 

[pogre]

Most of my campaign fails have come from the group not embracing the rules set. This happened with WFRP 3e and Basic Fantasy Roleplaying Game - players just did not enjoy the rules.

 

[Blue]

Hmm, campaigns that didn't finish.

I've been in a fair share of campaigns that petered out due to real life. Or back in college due to summer starting.

The second highest number would be the DM got burned out.

I was recently in a highly narrative game with homebrew rules that the DM cancelled after a few months as it wasn't jelling for the group. But he cancelled it for something else that's about to start and I think we're all excited for.

I was in an online 4e game where the characters reached a level (mid-paragon) where combats would take over a full session each. (Though to be told, we had one player who was very slow with chosing their character's powers and we would often be down one player or another and the DM would have someone run their character and it always took a bit to get up to speed on their abilities, plus we were using MapTools that had no mechanical support.) We tried to change to 5e but several people were adamant that we keep our current characters, and trying to work out those existing high level end-of-4e-lots-of-splatbook characters in the new 5e system just wasn't working for some, like the shifter runepriest.

I left a game because of issues with the DM's style, and a few months later everyone else in the group did the same all together so the game died. (Same issue just writ larger.)

Oh, and had a campaign end due to TPK.

On the other hand, I've been in and run many campaigns that came to a conclusion successfully.

 

[Retreater]

This is a pretty good exercise to reflect back on my past campaigns.
First, I will say that the vast majority of my campaigns did not play out to their narrative/planned conclusions. Sometimes those goals were too lofty ("reach 20th level"), or sometimes simple ("let's finish this adventure module.") In 30+ years of GMing, I think I've had maybe three campaigns that reached a satisfying end.
Here are the most common reasons for premature campaign endings:

• TPKs. I'm just bad at judging difficulty, I guess. One bad battle, and that's it for the campaign.
• Too much intrigue. Layers of labyrinthine plots, high level challenges in the background - these are all frustrating to players.
• Loss of players. Jobs, schedules, interest levels, etc., all take away players. When the quorum can no longer meet or when the loss is so devastating (such as a real world player/spouse death) it's hard to continue the campaign.
• People don't like the rules system. I am pretty open to trying new systems and seeing how they work. Some of my players, not so much.