questing gm
First Post
I have been DMing ever since i started getting into RPGs back in elementary school but started playing D&D in highschool. Now, with several years (almost a decade) of DMing experience, i look back and would have to say that my gaming experience has not been entirely fruitful...
My first campaingn was borrowed from another DM who wrote along with a setting. I was the one who introduced the game (it was AD&D back then) to some of my buddies in highschool, taught them the rules (even when i wasn't sure of them myself) and started DMing ever since. The campaign lasted throughout highschool but we never finished it. People move on and now that they're in college overseas, i doubt we would ever find the time and interest to continue on with the rest of the campaign.
Already in my first campaign, i was not satisfied with how the campaign went. I felt that there was not enough impact on the players and today it seems that i'm the only one who remembers what happened in the campaign when i meet my former players. Although once in a while they tell me that they missed playing D&D (we moved on to 3rd ed eventually during our highschool days, so it was only been several years ago). I felt that my players could have enjoyed the experience even more if i had put more effort into the storyline, NPCs, combat, puzzles and treasures. Things that i believed would have created a memorable roleplaying experience and allowing them to enjoy the essence of a quality campaign.
Then, i moved on to my second campaign. I was pretty hyped up when the Forgotten Realms was updated to 3rd ed and since i was new to the setting, i thought i might as well give it a shot. It was a fresh start for a fresh setting. Since my first group moved on and i almost never see them again, i managed to scrump up another group of players from our first (and sadly last) FLGS. However this time, all of them were older than me by almost a decade or so, working adults though not most of them are married. My brother (who was the one who introduced RPGs to me) and I had to teach the rules to them again, created campaigns for them and subsequently became their DMs.
My second campaign was set in the Silver Marches and it ended two sessions later because of a low-level TPK. I didn't want to continue the campaign because i felt that it was a discouraging experience to the new players. I thought that perhaps my campaign was planned too harshly for them. So, my brother eventually took over and gave them (until today) some of their most memorable experience they ever had in their gaming life (a cleaving breath hydra, a rogue with reverse time sneak attack, a beholder that was poisoned and killed in the first round etc...).
After several years gaming with these same people, they began to form up their own gaming habits from min/maxing, meta-gaming, hackers & slashers and munchkining among others. Now that i look at it, i felt that i have badly 'nurtured' these players to become players on the 'wrong side' of gaming. From that point on, i could never run a campaign for at least 10 sessions without them ruining it due to their antics (a campaign set in the Dalelands followed by a FR parody campaign and a d20 modern campaign) . It's hard to explain to them that what they are doing isn't promoting the spirit of the game because i could see one thing they seem to be having in these sessions which is the most important thing that matters...fun. They were having much more fun while i felt that i had to give up mine since my efforts to create the sort of campaigns that i liked would not be appreciated.
The only success i ever felt from grooming these new players was that one of them decides to be a DM. He has DMed us for several campaigns but we had never finished any of his campaigns. He always scraps them when we are halfway and never really tells us the reason. Perhaps we may have been acting up a little bit with 'repulsive' gaming behaviors like min/maxing, meta-gaming, always keeping ourselves up-to-date with DMs only content and irresistably spoiling them (keep in mind my brother and I are DMs so we sorta 'have' to do this sort of thing), lazy to come up with character backgrounds (and even if we do, they mostly ended up cliches or poorly written ones, except for a few).
During this time when i finally get to be a player, i figured that i should play my characters 'the way it should be' and become a role model to the other players about their 'destructive' ways. But surprise, surprise, our new DM's campaign were as merciless as when he was a player. His campaigns were filled with min/maxed monsters, hack & slash storylines and PC survivalbility rate was almost 0% if you did not meta-game in his sessions. These led to frustrations and discouragement to me to try and change the players' attitude to making rich and developed characters with balanced scores (discouraging min/maxing) and active role-playing. It always seemed that i ended up on the rotten end of the stick when i tried to play the 'proper' characters in his campaign and it was seen as a 'losing' approach to the game as a whole. I have criticized many times the way he DMs but everyone except me (but somtimes my brother too) seem to be having fun. But when we stop for awhile and when he has a new campaign going on, i jump straight into it, head first.
Eventually, i lost all faith in the 'deeper' aspects of role-playing, creating unique backgrounds for my characters, trying to make balanced scores and gave in to the arms of min/maxing, meta-gaming and spoiling myself with DM's contents. My characters were only a bunch of numbers put together and there was no reason to play LG or paladins. I began to think that only a fool would play those classes. I read through all the D&D supplements to create the most powerful combinations of classes, skills, feats, equipment and spells and use variants to make them even more powerful. All that i had remembered about RPGs and D&D in particular was lost to me. No more imaginations of creating heroes that were more memorable for their deeds rather than their 18s or running adventures that were exciting because it had a great plot rather than how many XP the players got for that adventure.
I considered leaving the group once but searching a new group was nearly impossible since the only FLGS in town closed down and the people i knew, related D&D with things like DOTA and MMORPGs. RPGs are not well accepted from where i come from and i should have been grateful that i managed to find not one but two groups to game with throughout my gaming years.
It would seem that i had not made good with my gaming life all these years, nothing fruitful has ever happened and i dare to say that i have never had a game where i could say that i was truly ever satisfied with. I wasn't satisfied since my first campaign because i felt that i never make the players feel what RPGs and D&D was all about and i wasn't satisfied with games run by the other DM because as a player i felt that that wasn't what D&D was all about...
My 'salvation' came to me when 3.5 was released. It was not because of the new rules that i could try to exploit but rather what came together with 3.5 at that time. It was Dragon Magazine issue #309 and Dungeon Magazine issue #100. Yes, it was the Githyanki Incursion. When i read the articles in Dragon and read the mini-game in Dungeon, i felt a surge of all the goodness of RPGs suddenly. It was a classical heroic epic saga, just what i was looking for all these years. Finally something that i felt with my heart for gaming. Just imagining heroes charging across battlefields against horders of enemies, saving the world from world domination and finally defeating a BBEG so powerful that it would be the greatest challenge ever faced by any hero. It had all the perfect makings of what i had in mind when i first started running D&D.
Since then, i have been planning to run the Incursion campaign and somehow i am still planning to this day. It's already been 3 years, the hype is over and 3.5 has already been supplemented by so many books that i somehow felt obliged to include them in this campaign but everytime a new book releases, the list just gets bigger. I've found something to rekindle my soul for role-playing games but i have already lost everything that made this game more than just numbers and dices.
I could never put anything concrete on paper for the past 3 years for my Incursion campaign. I have done all the research that takes up 1/4 of my hardisk. I have written ideas and plots that ended spurring ideas for other campaigns (that i also never have enough courage and dedication to put something concrete in paper) that makes runs into thousands of pages. I'm still thinking what races and classes to allow. I still don't have a proper campaign progression schedule. But most of all, i just cannot seem to find my imagination and creativity to create adventures for this campaign that invokes emotions of heroism, courage and excitement and most of all, fun, from my players.
All these years of planning, i think i have wasted my time (and sadly my life as well). Not only do i have the Incursion campaign going on in my mind, i have 3 more campaign ideas for FR, 1 for Eberron, 3 for d20 Modern and 2 homebrews. None of which have anything concrete at the moment after all these years.
This probelm was so bad that it has even affected my writing skills and creativity to write stories as an aspiring writer. I've lost my courage to put anything on paper without thinking about what would happen to it.
What is wrong with me? Is it over for me as a DM? Did i really ever had what it takes to be a DM in the first place? Have i just lost it? Can anyone give me any friendly advice ?
Currently, i'm playing in the new DM's Eberron campaign as a halfling cleric from house Jorasco and a samurai from Q'barra. Min/maxed almost to perfection...i think. Thousands apologies for such a long thread, my longest ever...
My first campaingn was borrowed from another DM who wrote along with a setting. I was the one who introduced the game (it was AD&D back then) to some of my buddies in highschool, taught them the rules (even when i wasn't sure of them myself) and started DMing ever since. The campaign lasted throughout highschool but we never finished it. People move on and now that they're in college overseas, i doubt we would ever find the time and interest to continue on with the rest of the campaign.
Already in my first campaign, i was not satisfied with how the campaign went. I felt that there was not enough impact on the players and today it seems that i'm the only one who remembers what happened in the campaign when i meet my former players. Although once in a while they tell me that they missed playing D&D (we moved on to 3rd ed eventually during our highschool days, so it was only been several years ago). I felt that my players could have enjoyed the experience even more if i had put more effort into the storyline, NPCs, combat, puzzles and treasures. Things that i believed would have created a memorable roleplaying experience and allowing them to enjoy the essence of a quality campaign.
Then, i moved on to my second campaign. I was pretty hyped up when the Forgotten Realms was updated to 3rd ed and since i was new to the setting, i thought i might as well give it a shot. It was a fresh start for a fresh setting. Since my first group moved on and i almost never see them again, i managed to scrump up another group of players from our first (and sadly last) FLGS. However this time, all of them were older than me by almost a decade or so, working adults though not most of them are married. My brother (who was the one who introduced RPGs to me) and I had to teach the rules to them again, created campaigns for them and subsequently became their DMs.
My second campaign was set in the Silver Marches and it ended two sessions later because of a low-level TPK. I didn't want to continue the campaign because i felt that it was a discouraging experience to the new players. I thought that perhaps my campaign was planned too harshly for them. So, my brother eventually took over and gave them (until today) some of their most memorable experience they ever had in their gaming life (a cleaving breath hydra, a rogue with reverse time sneak attack, a beholder that was poisoned and killed in the first round etc...).
After several years gaming with these same people, they began to form up their own gaming habits from min/maxing, meta-gaming, hackers & slashers and munchkining among others. Now that i look at it, i felt that i have badly 'nurtured' these players to become players on the 'wrong side' of gaming. From that point on, i could never run a campaign for at least 10 sessions without them ruining it due to their antics (a campaign set in the Dalelands followed by a FR parody campaign and a d20 modern campaign) . It's hard to explain to them that what they are doing isn't promoting the spirit of the game because i could see one thing they seem to be having in these sessions which is the most important thing that matters...fun. They were having much more fun while i felt that i had to give up mine since my efforts to create the sort of campaigns that i liked would not be appreciated.
The only success i ever felt from grooming these new players was that one of them decides to be a DM. He has DMed us for several campaigns but we had never finished any of his campaigns. He always scraps them when we are halfway and never really tells us the reason. Perhaps we may have been acting up a little bit with 'repulsive' gaming behaviors like min/maxing, meta-gaming, always keeping ourselves up-to-date with DMs only content and irresistably spoiling them (keep in mind my brother and I are DMs so we sorta 'have' to do this sort of thing), lazy to come up with character backgrounds (and even if we do, they mostly ended up cliches or poorly written ones, except for a few).
During this time when i finally get to be a player, i figured that i should play my characters 'the way it should be' and become a role model to the other players about their 'destructive' ways. But surprise, surprise, our new DM's campaign were as merciless as when he was a player. His campaigns were filled with min/maxed monsters, hack & slash storylines and PC survivalbility rate was almost 0% if you did not meta-game in his sessions. These led to frustrations and discouragement to me to try and change the players' attitude to making rich and developed characters with balanced scores (discouraging min/maxing) and active role-playing. It always seemed that i ended up on the rotten end of the stick when i tried to play the 'proper' characters in his campaign and it was seen as a 'losing' approach to the game as a whole. I have criticized many times the way he DMs but everyone except me (but somtimes my brother too) seem to be having fun. But when we stop for awhile and when he has a new campaign going on, i jump straight into it, head first.
Eventually, i lost all faith in the 'deeper' aspects of role-playing, creating unique backgrounds for my characters, trying to make balanced scores and gave in to the arms of min/maxing, meta-gaming and spoiling myself with DM's contents. My characters were only a bunch of numbers put together and there was no reason to play LG or paladins. I began to think that only a fool would play those classes. I read through all the D&D supplements to create the most powerful combinations of classes, skills, feats, equipment and spells and use variants to make them even more powerful. All that i had remembered about RPGs and D&D in particular was lost to me. No more imaginations of creating heroes that were more memorable for their deeds rather than their 18s or running adventures that were exciting because it had a great plot rather than how many XP the players got for that adventure.
I considered leaving the group once but searching a new group was nearly impossible since the only FLGS in town closed down and the people i knew, related D&D with things like DOTA and MMORPGs. RPGs are not well accepted from where i come from and i should have been grateful that i managed to find not one but two groups to game with throughout my gaming years.
It would seem that i had not made good with my gaming life all these years, nothing fruitful has ever happened and i dare to say that i have never had a game where i could say that i was truly ever satisfied with. I wasn't satisfied since my first campaign because i felt that i never make the players feel what RPGs and D&D was all about and i wasn't satisfied with games run by the other DM because as a player i felt that that wasn't what D&D was all about...
My 'salvation' came to me when 3.5 was released. It was not because of the new rules that i could try to exploit but rather what came together with 3.5 at that time. It was Dragon Magazine issue #309 and Dungeon Magazine issue #100. Yes, it was the Githyanki Incursion. When i read the articles in Dragon and read the mini-game in Dungeon, i felt a surge of all the goodness of RPGs suddenly. It was a classical heroic epic saga, just what i was looking for all these years. Finally something that i felt with my heart for gaming. Just imagining heroes charging across battlefields against horders of enemies, saving the world from world domination and finally defeating a BBEG so powerful that it would be the greatest challenge ever faced by any hero. It had all the perfect makings of what i had in mind when i first started running D&D.
Since then, i have been planning to run the Incursion campaign and somehow i am still planning to this day. It's already been 3 years, the hype is over and 3.5 has already been supplemented by so many books that i somehow felt obliged to include them in this campaign but everytime a new book releases, the list just gets bigger. I've found something to rekindle my soul for role-playing games but i have already lost everything that made this game more than just numbers and dices.
I could never put anything concrete on paper for the past 3 years for my Incursion campaign. I have done all the research that takes up 1/4 of my hardisk. I have written ideas and plots that ended spurring ideas for other campaigns (that i also never have enough courage and dedication to put something concrete in paper) that makes runs into thousands of pages. I'm still thinking what races and classes to allow. I still don't have a proper campaign progression schedule. But most of all, i just cannot seem to find my imagination and creativity to create adventures for this campaign that invokes emotions of heroism, courage and excitement and most of all, fun, from my players.
All these years of planning, i think i have wasted my time (and sadly my life as well). Not only do i have the Incursion campaign going on in my mind, i have 3 more campaign ideas for FR, 1 for Eberron, 3 for d20 Modern and 2 homebrews. None of which have anything concrete at the moment after all these years.
This probelm was so bad that it has even affected my writing skills and creativity to write stories as an aspiring writer. I've lost my courage to put anything on paper without thinking about what would happen to it.
What is wrong with me? Is it over for me as a DM? Did i really ever had what it takes to be a DM in the first place? Have i just lost it? Can anyone give me any friendly advice ?
Currently, i'm playing in the new DM's Eberron campaign as a halfling cleric from house Jorasco and a samurai from Q'barra. Min/maxed almost to perfection...i think. Thousands apologies for such a long thread, my longest ever...
