Campaigns that 'Jump the Shark'
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Dark Jezter
First Post
My campaign didn't jump the shark until Ted McGinley joined the group.
Inconsequenti-AL
Breaks Games
Klaus said:
That beast killed an old campaign of mine... Damned thing! Read a lot better than it played, IMO.
Mandeville
Explorer
Inconsequenti-AL said:
Same here. I did not mention it because I had the player roll up new PC's and started again. So the game didn't really jump the shark, it just died.
delericho
Legend
I had a campaign that jumped the shark.
It was Vampire: the Masquerade campaign that was designed to start in Rome circa 150 BC, and progress to 2150 AD, jumping about a century at a time. Even so, it was intended to last for 5 years of real time. There were three key problems:
1) It was far too ambitious. I carefully set up some plot hooks that didn't resolve for 4 real-time years. This worked brilliantly, except that I'd forgotten to account for player memories. I had written extensive notes on what was going on, since I knew what to expect. The players, of course, had not. (Not that I'd really expect them too. It was a weakness in campaign design, not in the players.)
2) I was far too generous with XP. The campaign began with the PCs as newly-minted neonates, and was intended to progress to the point where they were extremely powerful elders by the end. Unfortunately, by the end of the 2nd year, they'd already reached the point where nothing could challenge them, which led to big problems down the line.
3) Three new players joined the campaign after the 2nd year, and one of the initial players dropped out a year from the end. This completely changed the tone of the game, as the campaign didn't really take full account of the impact of the new players, and became very focussed on the remaining characters from the initial group.
All in all, it was an interesting experiment, and it had a lot of good elements, even at the end. However, I think it would have been much better to stop after the 2nd year and done something else.
It was Vampire: the Masquerade campaign that was designed to start in Rome circa 150 BC, and progress to 2150 AD, jumping about a century at a time. Even so, it was intended to last for 5 years of real time. There were three key problems:
1) It was far too ambitious. I carefully set up some plot hooks that didn't resolve for 4 real-time years. This worked brilliantly, except that I'd forgotten to account for player memories. I had written extensive notes on what was going on, since I knew what to expect. The players, of course, had not. (Not that I'd really expect them too. It was a weakness in campaign design, not in the players.)
2) I was far too generous with XP. The campaign began with the PCs as newly-minted neonates, and was intended to progress to the point where they were extremely powerful elders by the end. Unfortunately, by the end of the 2nd year, they'd already reached the point where nothing could challenge them, which led to big problems down the line.
3) Three new players joined the campaign after the 2nd year, and one of the initial players dropped out a year from the end. This completely changed the tone of the game, as the campaign didn't really take full account of the impact of the new players, and became very focussed on the remaining characters from the initial group.
All in all, it was an interesting experiment, and it had a lot of good elements, even at the end. However, I think it would have been much better to stop after the 2nd year and done something else.
iwatt
First Post
I played in a 2e campaign that jumped the shark.
The DM decided to take a break from using his own dungeons/encounters and decided to use the House on Gyphon Hill. Talk about a railroading module. In the last battle, it didn't matetr what we did things were supposed to ahppen ina certain way. It ended with everybody, including the DM, dissapointed and with a bad flavor in their mouths.
Another campaign that jumped the shark was a 3E campaign in which the DM kept putting us into new modules that totally ignored what happened before. First we go to Maztica in search of treasure. That was pretty much fun and we even introduced metalworking to some friendly tribes. We then decided to return to Faerun to follow down all the thousand plot hooks and background stories fo our characters (which the DM had forcefully encouraged us to develop).
For example:
- One PC had a wizard whose master had been slain. He's escaped to Maztica for a while waiting for things to settle down.
- Another PC (from Cormyr) had his father assasinated. His superior and mentor in the temple had him sent in a fact finding mission to Maztica while things were quietly investigated.
- The two other PCs had mysterious goals but were closely allied to the prevoius two PCs do to very good RPing in which the frienship bonds were developed.
So we return to alkathla (sp?) and are confronted by all the drastic changes that happened in 1372 (Azoun dead, Shades returning, yadayadayada). We're about to retunr to Cormyr since my PC got wind that his mentor and my PCs family had dissapeared. Suddenly, we find the brotehr of the wizard (a 8 year old kid) suffering from some weird amnesia and possesion. So we shelve the Cormyr trip and tarvel to Thethyr (wizards homeland) to investigate WTF is going on. We get ambushed by ogremages that kidnap the kid. we can't track them. Finally we track down the kid as been the sacrifice for some foul ritual. We fight our way through about 20 regenerating golems (pain in the ass) and are left without any resources (no spells, about everybody at 30% hps) and discover the kid was just a lure so that Semmemon could drain soem power from our wizard to bring to faerun some Evil devil.
So basically we're now confronted with the fact that we've somehow let loose a terrible evil. So as good guys we decide it is our job to fix it. Up until now this is great fun, and we're all enjoying ourselves inmensely. we're perosnally involved in the story and have a great desire to even up the score. So we start ersearching on what we let loose and on this semmemon character.
We somehow find ourselves confronted by this wizardly chick who tells us that it wasn't seemon but an impostor who did the foul ritual. Semmemon will aid us in finding this dude if we just do a favor for him. So we decide that even though this Semmy guy is clearly evil, it is our best chance at corecting what we've let loose.
So we infiltarte Darkhold, and are confronted with the fact that this palce is chock full of slaves. My character ahd been toying with the idea of becoming a Holy Liberator, and I though this was a great chance to justify the class: freeing the salves and kicking some Zhent Ass. So I decide that once we get what we came for I would do some serious emancipating. Here I elarn that one of the other PCs is a former thayan slave and is very determined to aid me in the free the slaves campaign.
Here is were the campaign JTS on us. As we get the mcguffin for Semmenon, we are chase down by some toughies, we evad them and somehow walk into a portal that teleports us to Daggerdale.
We're all thinking: OK let's get the info on Semmemon and then let's go kick some Zhent ass (assuming that the Devil was still out of our reach, due to our research). But what happened is that the DM got his hands on the City of the Spider Queen and became obseesed with running it. So he decided to give up any plausabilty and railroaded us straight to running it. Without even giving us a chance to gear up or even use our crafting feats (which we as a party had heavily invested on by the way). So we played a couple moer sessions and finally we just gave up. It just annoyed the crap out of me that such a fun campaign had been derailed because the GM HAD to run a module.
Sorry for the long exposition
IT just irks me to no end that we ended giving up this campaign for this stupid reason.
The DM decided to take a break from using his own dungeons/encounters and decided to use the House on Gyphon Hill. Talk about a railroading module. In the last battle, it didn't matetr what we did things were supposed to ahppen ina certain way. It ended with everybody, including the DM, dissapointed and with a bad flavor in their mouths.
Another campaign that jumped the shark was a 3E campaign in which the DM kept putting us into new modules that totally ignored what happened before. First we go to Maztica in search of treasure. That was pretty much fun and we even introduced metalworking to some friendly tribes. We then decided to return to Faerun to follow down all the thousand plot hooks and background stories fo our characters (which the DM had forcefully encouraged us to develop).
For example:
- One PC had a wizard whose master had been slain. He's escaped to Maztica for a while waiting for things to settle down.
- Another PC (from Cormyr) had his father assasinated. His superior and mentor in the temple had him sent in a fact finding mission to Maztica while things were quietly investigated.
- The two other PCs had mysterious goals but were closely allied to the prevoius two PCs do to very good RPing in which the frienship bonds were developed.
So we return to alkathla (sp?) and are confronted by all the drastic changes that happened in 1372 (Azoun dead, Shades returning, yadayadayada). We're about to retunr to Cormyr since my PC got wind that his mentor and my PCs family had dissapeared. Suddenly, we find the brotehr of the wizard (a 8 year old kid) suffering from some weird amnesia and possesion. So we shelve the Cormyr trip and tarvel to Thethyr (wizards homeland) to investigate WTF is going on. We get ambushed by ogremages that kidnap the kid. we can't track them. Finally we track down the kid as been the sacrifice for some foul ritual. We fight our way through about 20 regenerating golems (pain in the ass) and are left without any resources (no spells, about everybody at 30% hps) and discover the kid was just a lure so that Semmemon could drain soem power from our wizard to bring to faerun some Evil devil.
So basically we're now confronted with the fact that we've somehow let loose a terrible evil. So as good guys we decide it is our job to fix it. Up until now this is great fun, and we're all enjoying ourselves inmensely. we're perosnally involved in the story and have a great desire to even up the score. So we start ersearching on what we let loose and on this semmemon character.
We somehow find ourselves confronted by this wizardly chick who tells us that it wasn't seemon but an impostor who did the foul ritual. Semmemon will aid us in finding this dude if we just do a favor for him. So we decide that even though this Semmy guy is clearly evil, it is our best chance at corecting what we've let loose.
So we infiltarte Darkhold, and are confronted with the fact that this palce is chock full of slaves. My character ahd been toying with the idea of becoming a Holy Liberator, and I though this was a great chance to justify the class: freeing the salves and kicking some Zhent Ass. So I decide that once we get what we came for I would do some serious emancipating. Here I elarn that one of the other PCs is a former thayan slave and is very determined to aid me in the free the slaves campaign.
Here is were the campaign JTS on us. As we get the mcguffin for Semmenon, we are chase down by some toughies, we evad them and somehow walk into a portal that teleports us to Daggerdale.
We're all thinking: OK let's get the info on Semmemon and then let's go kick some Zhent ass (assuming that the Devil was still out of our reach, due to our research). But what happened is that the DM got his hands on the City of the Spider Queen and became obseesed with running it. So he decided to give up any plausabilty and railroaded us straight to running it. Without even giving us a chance to gear up or even use our crafting feats (which we as a party had heavily invested on by the way). So we played a couple moer sessions and finally we just gave up. It just annoyed the crap out of me that such a fun campaign had been derailed because the GM HAD to run a module.
Sorry for the long exposition
IT just irks me to no end that we ended giving up this campaign for this stupid reason.
