Boring boring games

[jedavis]

Re: OP: Play-by-post and other internet games might be a viable solution to your lack of local games. They're slower, and not as good, but better than nothing.

As for mind-numbing games... I once played with a DM who gave us what appeared to be an impossible scenario; opposing warlords are stopping caravans. Eliminate one of them. Looks simple enough on the face of it. Orcish warlord is losing to bigoted human warlord, accepts help of mixed-race party (we have a half-orc and a mongrelfolk, so working for the human was right out), so we can get close enough to kill him, but if we do, the 200-odd orcs will kill us. So we turn our attention to getting into the human warlord's castle.

Everything we tried failed, by a combination of bad luck and DM fiat. Of course the warlord knows the rogue's a spy, and decides to have him hanged! Oh, the rogue rolled well on bluff and has a hat of disguise, and is impersonating a guard we captured and interrogated? Hmm... well, since the rest of the guard's patrol was killed, that makes the lone survivor who fled a coward, and there's a standing policy (of course!) that cowards shall be hanged! Stuff like that.

So after these initial failures (though we did manage to rescue the rogue as they were hanging him, through a combination of Summon Nature's Ally 1 and Benign Transposition), we starting spending hours hours planning (and when we executed these plans, no luck either). The DM started taking naps while we planned during the third session, and only half the players showed up for the fourth. And then, mercifully, it died.

 

[kitsune9]

The most boring games for me are the ones where DMs, for some reason or another, are making it up on the fly, and what I experience is random encounters that feel completely random with no sense or reason, a plot that was started somewhere and ended no where, role playing sessions where one player gets to spend 2 hours bargaining for his armor or the GM makes me roleplay out my interaction with an ATM machine and when I withdraw too much, I get a long speech of how banks limit transactions to $300 cash, and so on.

So here's one "adventure" I played that lasted for two sessions. My roommate is running a game and we start off in a town. We didn't know what to do so we equip up from the last adventure that I ran. One of the players hogs two hours of game time talking to the black smith about some custom freaking armor. Then we spend mindless amounts of time going around town looking for something to do. Session is over when we give up and just leave town.

Next session, we're leaving town and along the road there is a building right off the road. It looks evil, mysterious, and forboding. Perfect for exploration. It was a dungeon crawl with no monsters and very little inside. Game over and I took over the campaign after that.

 

[balam_br]

I have a long time GM and friend that love "Investigation" Games...
Im used to play this games with him cause he simply doesnt like to play a character...And some of his action games are really great.

But the investigation... it´s usually all about walking in empty places looking for clues that doesnt exist... or finding clues and having nothing to do to discover the true meaning of them... Our last game was 2 sessions without dice rolling, just got 2 or 3 meaningless itens and dont know what to do with them (like a wizard´staff, an orb and something else in a pocket dimension we are stuck on)

We quit playing and he felt angry about that... he never came back.

Sometimes, talking about the problem simply doesnt work ;-/

 

[Ulrick]

I've had my share of boring campaigns. And sometimes it just comes down to player/DM taste. While every group has its ups and down, my rule of thumb is that if you're still bored/annoyed after three sessions of joining a group, it's probably time to leave.

Three sessions seems about right. By that time you'll have the "feel" of the group.

I've played in a campaign where the first session went great. Everything seemed to flow well. But then later sessions were boring as players were indecisive about what to do, and the DM didn't like watching characters die--everytime the group would get overwhelmed (which was a lot), helpers would suddenly appear. Each session boiled down to: Indecision, character slaughter, NPC helpers appearing, indecision, character slaughter, NPC helpers appearing, watching NPCs appear to defeat the enemy for you... Nothing the PCs did ever seemed to matter.

For me, the worst sessions are when players and DMs just sit there and crack jokes for the entire time. While digressions are inevitable, I'm at the there to game. I'm even up for a relaxed beer-and pretzels game, as long as the game gets played.

Question: Why do people invest all the time an energy into creating a campaign, buying the books, creating characters, if they're just gonna sit there and not play the game?

 

[Richards]

My son and I played in a D&D 3.5 session at our local gaming store one time. It was an RPGA Eberron adventure. The first half was okay; we were hired to find out who had been attacking caravans along a particular route, so we joined the next caravan and fought off the ambushers in the middle of the night. Then we tracked the ones who escaped back to their lair.

Only there was an alarm spell cast upon the main entrance to their lair, and our ranger failed to notice it. The bad guys in the lair heard the alarm and they grabbed up all of their stolen goods and escaped through a magical portal, destroying it behind them so we couldn't follow.

Of course, we found all of this out later, after the adventure was over. We spent about two hours exploring the recently-abandoned lair, room by empty room, with nothing but the occasional trap to counter the boredom. So the party's rogue checked each room for traps, found the occasional trap, and disarmed the occasional trap, while the rest of us followed behind wondering why we had each paid a buck for this level of excitement.

I still buy my comics at that store, but neither of us has bothered with playing D&D there again.

Johnathan

 

[TarionzCousin]

It was a dungeon crawl with no monsters

Does. Not. Compute.


To [MENTION=89822]Jon_Dahl[/MENTION], I agree with thejc. It's time for you to run a game that isn't boring.

 

[Janx]

Only there was an alarm spell cast upon the main entrance to their lair, and our ranger failed to notice it. The bad guys in the lair heard the alarm and they grabbed up all of their stolen goods and escaped through a magical portal, destroying it behind them so we couldn't follow.

Of course, we found all of this out later, after the adventure was over. We spent about two hours exploring the recently-abandoned lair, room by empty room, with nothing but the occasional trap to counter the boredom. So the party's rogue checked each room for traps, found the occasional trap, and disarmed the occasional trap, while the rest of us followed behind wondering why we had each paid a buck for this level of excitement.

This sounds like a case where the DM, thinking logically, has out-smarted the fun potential of the scenario.

it doesn't pay to make the bad guys' plans too good, as that leads to a boring search of the emptied facility, a flawless capture of the party with no means of escape, or a TPK because the bad guys once again outwitted the party.

All of those scenarios occur when the GM is too clever for his own good, the party suffers a lack of fun.

 

[Richards]

Janx - Agreed on all counts. Sadly, I'm pretty sure that adventure was written that way, and the DM was just following what was written. That kind of soured me on the quality of RPGA adventures, although I honestly have no idea if that was typical of the RPGA or not.

Johnathan

 

[kitsune9]

Does. Not. Compute.

I hear ya Tarionz. It totally did not compute. After two sessions, I was like, "WTF?"

 

[SSquirrel]

My wife and I joined a 3.5 group several years back and they were all very nice when we met them. The DM was brand new to RPGs, but he was an actor at the local U and was very excited. I tried to convince people we should start at 3rd or so b/c I get really bored when my wizard casts his one spell and then has to use a crossbow all night. One of the players insisted that we "would never really know our characters if we didn't start at 1st level" and convinced the DM on this point. I had countered with "I'll know my character, I'll decide what their background is. Done." heh. So we start at level 1.

One and a half YEARS of reasonably steady weekly play later, we still aren't even level 3. We do tons and tons of roleplaying w/not a ton of fighting and there is almost no compensation. Like, ONE person at the table would get a whopping 50XP bonus as a roleplaying award. Eventually my wife started making excuses not to show and the group actually sent one of the members over to our house to dump us heh. My wife and I were talking about that group last night and she said she almost said "Honey in case you haven't noticed, we dumped you guys already". We just couldn't come up with a nice way of putting how soul crushingly boring and unfun things were and it was our only gaming outlet at the time. Part of why I haven't gotten to roleplay much in the last 5 years.

Thankfully we just joined 2 groups last week and while one of them is very flightly and we might not put up with it. 75 minute late on start time, another 30 before people settled down...on a 3 1/2 hr gaming slot. I chalked it up to first session of a game and a couple of people had shown up w/incomplete characters, which didn't help. Add in all the tangents and distractions...we're giving it 2 more sessions. With a 20+ minute drive each way, it has to be worth our time investment, esp for a Tuesday night w/friends watching our 2 kids. The Saturday game runs from 2-9 or 10 and that group is very focused. Hell we played 2-8 this week (minus dinner) and got thru 3 encounters.