D&D General Bad gaming experiences and how they made you a better player/GM...

[Mort]

I just recounted a truly bad gaming experience (in another thread) but, bad as it was, it helped with my GMing.

I assume there are countless similar stories.

So here's one of mine:

One of my players had been itching to GM Shadowrun, and frankly I needed a break (running high level 3e weekly was rough!)

We asked if we needed to make characters and he said not to worry he'd have pregens.

Ok, we all showed up and picked our characters.

He consults a book - and starts us out in medias res - on a fight. OK that was actually fun, not bad!

After the fight he opens the book and reads to us what we do next - for several minutes. Ok that was weird...

Then another fight. Then again he reads to us what happens next.

Rince repeat for 3-4 hours!

We tolerated it for 1 session and then firmly but politely shifted it over to a new GM!


Lesson learned: I made sure to have my players truly interact with the environment and have meaningful choices, exposition is all well and good but not that much!

Thoughts?

 

[Bolares]

At my teenage years I had a DM that weaved incredible stories, and we loved playing with him. Until we start playing with other people and found out that the game was not about players vs DM and that PCs are way more important than NPCs, and should be the protagonists of the story. So looking back, I learned with him that I should be playing with my players, not against them. And that their characters should lead the story.

 

[TheAlkaizer]

Today, I'm a pretty assertive person. But I learned to be over the years.

But years ago, I had invited two coworkers to join a running campaign I had with friends. They came with a bad attitude, they kept looking at their phone, they were trolling. They really had very little respect for the fun of other people at the table and made the evening miserable. It really upset me, but I hesitated doing something. We played three sessions with them, it was miserable and it killed the campaign. Me and my friends were really sad. I learned my lesson.

I now have very little tolerance for behaviors like that. It took like two or three years before I had another case like that, we a new friend of mine. He exhibited most of the same behavior as the coworker from a few years back. I paused the game after one hour, talked to him, resumed. It didn't change after another half-hour. I talked to him again and told me to get his stuff and go. It was pretty awkward, but the rest of the evening was fun and the campaign went on.

I learned to be assertive and protective of the shared experience. You often have somewhere between three to six people that are reserving a full evening of their week to have some fun. That's a lot of time invested. The first time, I failed because I put avoiding having an awkward situation before ensuring that everybody would have fun.

 

[Iron Sky]

So many:

GM gives professional actor in group majority of spotlight since he's so entertaining. Everyone else expected to watch, play scraps.

Make magic user. GM doesn't like how broken power-gamed wizard is in RPG system that they wrote. Spontaneous magic nerfs and all enemies heavy anti-magic (in magic rare setting) during play.

Running a gritty game of noble politics with young group wanting consequence-free action.

Playtesting crunchy homebrew system with brand new players.

Follow the badass GMPC.

Simulationist, player-choice-focused game for narrative, follow-the-GM-plot expecting players. "What are we supposed to do next? Why don't NPCs come in and rescue us or lead us?"

Story-focused 4e.

Enable the toxic player because he's a friend.

GURPS. Half-joking.

 

[aco175]

Story-focused 4e.

I do not remember a card for this one.

I remember when I had an impossible lock to overcome and the players grew bored with trying to figure it out. They eventually left and threw up their hands. I did not have anything else prepared and instead of winging things for a while and prepare for next week, I just gave them the entrance to the lair. I guess either decision is fine and groups can learn that some places are not open to them, at least without some struggle, or we can play with the "My character with an 18 Int would know" and move on. I learned that it is ok to foil the players for a while and that there should be clues to overcome these hard things.

 

[Stormonu]

So many lessons learned over the years, so many of them blunders of my own design.

Probably the biggest was being stuck in a game with a heavy-handed DMNPC. I do my best to ensure that any NPCs I make won’t outshine the PCs or take over the spotlight (though I do my best to make them interesting and entertaining).

 

[Mind of tempest]

I do not get to play sufficiently to really get much development or have experienced other than trying to get the group towards doing anything other than arguing.

I had one note able one but it is of an nsfw topic and should me something else was wrong with my head, which at this point cataloguing everything wrong with me is my hobby.

 

[iserith]

For a long while I had been joining pickup groups or observing games (either over Discord or on Twitch/YouTube) where an inordinate amount of time was spent on sitting around in taverns or shopping. I just couldn't figure this out. While I know it's a trope, why on earth do people do this with their valuable time? Why do they read all about bold adventurers confronting deadly perils in worlds of swords and sorcery in the rule books then spend 4 hours interviewing quirky, cagey merchants and haggling over mundane equipment? How is the group letting this happen in a one-shot or with regular frequency in an ongoing game?

After more than a few instances of this, I used my pent-up rage to fuel inspiration for two one-shot scenarios that I wrote up. The first was called "Anywhere But the Sleazy Goat," in which the players start in a tavern ("The Sleazy Goat") and are incentivized to interact with the barflies therein, but at risk of being cursed with lethargy and the urge to talk about your backstory all day (new character flaw), never leaving the tavern. So this tends to push the players out of the tavern and into the world to journey through perilous Darkwood to the Ruins of the Old School where they can delve a dungeon designed by the ghost-possessed wizard Pixelbitch.

The other one-shot was called "6 to 8 Hours of Shopping" and was an attempt by me to come up with a way to make shopping a tense scenario instead of the most boring thing someone could do in a game of D&D (in my opinion). The premise was that you were part of an expedition to the Realms of Deadly Peril onboard the caravel Adventure. Since the PCs were the lowliest adventurers onboard, they got stuck with procuring a list of five things necessary for the success of the expedition. The list was randomized each game but would include stuff like a Camel of Endless Water in order to survive the burning sun and stinging dust of the Hexed Sands or the Giant-Slaying Sling of Bitsy Underfoot for use in crippling the fire giants in the volcano lair of Dr. Inferno. So they had to find and engage with quirky merchants who owned these items, while avoiding the tiefling pickpocket guild (The Children of Mammon) and dealing with "wandering merchants" (instead of monsters, get it?!), plus rivals who also wanted these items.

I've run each of these games about 15 times between the two scenarios which is a lot of mileage for the prep work. So, I guess the moral of the story is that every bad game or bad DM is fuel to make yourself or your own games better. In a way, I'm grateful for them, and whenever I'm low on motivation to prep new games, I just join a pickup group and I'm almost certain to be inspired!

 

[niklinna]

For a long while I had been joining pickup groups or observing games (either over Discord or on Twitch/YouTube) where an inordinate amount of time was spent on sitting around in taverns or shopping. I just couldn't figure this out. While I know it's a trope, why on earth do people do this with their valuable time? Why do they read all about bold adventurers confronting deadly perils in worlds of swords and sorcery in the rule books then spend 4 hours interviewing quirky, cagey merchants and haggling over mundane equipment? How is the group letting this happen in a one-shot or with regular frequency in an ongoing game?

Some players like shopping and role-playing, especially compared to combat. The one and only 4E campaign I was in, was amazing fun during either of those activities (the GM actually had a cool story and mystery to solve, and my character was well plugged in to it), but whenever combat would start, we were in for 3 hours of mind-numbing, condition-applying, HP-whittling tedium to cover less than a minute of game time and basically resolve one yes/no issue. Hit points are boring.

(Of course, it didn't help that my plot-central character was a 4E warlock. My combat turns often consisted of taking my action to no effect. For a brief period, I'd had a semi-intelligent magic item that gave me good bonuses, and liked my character, but then a new player joined and all the other folks were like, you should hand your magic item over to her, it's best in slot* for her.)

* Or the equivalent, since that term hadn't been coined yet.

"6 to 8 Hours of Shopping" sounds like a lot of fun, actually.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

Meaningless fights. Example: PCs around the McGuffin. Bad guys attack. Fight ensues. Everyone is knocked out and McGuffin is stolen. Fight was cool at start, but... looking back there was no other possibility that the Bad Guys could be defeated. Had we fared better, a third wave would have arrived. It can be cool in films, and incentivize the hero to get the McGuffin back since it was stolen in their presence... but it's dramatic for players who realize that their actions were window dressing and that the adventure could have starter after the fight with the exact same result.