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Ever benched a GM?
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<blockquote data-quote="uzagi_akimbo" data-source="post: 1782684" data-attributes="member: 15945"><p>Benched several in fact. Or rather, helped bench, witnessed benching and once benched the fraggle myself.</p><p></p><p>First time ever was in a local AD&D 2E camapaign - which had started off as a exploration/land-grabbing campaign, and ended with all of the players as head honchos of differing (and often competing) realms at the edge of civilisation. Not much adventuring was taking place anymore, no loot was gained, to excitemnt was had and the "sessions" became pure administrative gatherings... the only guy who had fun, was the GM (a business major, as chance would have it ) who was detailing the world down to a tee.. Finally someone worked up the nerve and stated he was suffering "player burnout", and would like to play something else... It was a quick and unanimous vote (with an abstaining GM who had taken the hint ) - and the group stayed together. </p><p></p><p>Second and third time around where GMs who's "love interest" was one of the players, leading to PPS (pet player syndrome), making things vastly boring, because no blow would have harm said "pet", no trap would trigger or NPC play intelligently... except against everyone else, where no hods were barred. Things blew up when one player "accidentally" killed the "pet" along with some NPCs and queried by the GM replied that he thought she was "invulnerable", judging from her past "exploits" -and of course she had the best protections (loot being coincidentally tailor-made to fit for the "pet" and hardly anyone else) . Said GM blew up and stopped short of tackling the player, ditched the campaign with some less than pleasant insults and looked for other players ( I heard a similar thing happened two years later in his group - PPS again, though with a different pet..). Noone cried. Two weeks later, we had a new (and better campaign) running.</p><p>Third time, the GM was oblivious to our sensible and mature suggestions (all of the players were in their late twenties) that we felt excessive favouritism taking place - and we stopped turning up. He ha stopped GMing and gaming since - feeling deeply misunderstood and unappreciated.</p><p></p><p>We actively benched a GM, who took the seat IMC for a single adventure, and couldn't get challenge ratings under control - we got hit by wave after wave of cutting edge led and equipped monsters hurled against us from impossible ambush situations, inane traps blowing us to smithereens etc etc etc. Basically the GM was still playing in "aggressive player mode", but unfortunately with full GM resources... </p><p>We broke the adventure off by teleporting out (ingame) and confronting him (in RL) by showing him the math on his encounters and the sheer discrepancy of our projectable power of five characters versus his "encounters" (the first three rooms featured two CR 15 encounters against a level 10 party... and that was just for starters... the main BBEG we calculated at CD 19....). He admitted to have tweaked the adventure some to "add some spice".... the campaign has resumed, said unfinished adventure our common "shame", and things are back to normal. Needs to be said, that GM is a rather mature guy in the first place,</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="uzagi_akimbo, post: 1782684, member: 15945"] Benched several in fact. Or rather, helped bench, witnessed benching and once benched the fraggle myself. First time ever was in a local AD&D 2E camapaign - which had started off as a exploration/land-grabbing campaign, and ended with all of the players as head honchos of differing (and often competing) realms at the edge of civilisation. Not much adventuring was taking place anymore, no loot was gained, to excitemnt was had and the "sessions" became pure administrative gatherings... the only guy who had fun, was the GM (a business major, as chance would have it ) who was detailing the world down to a tee.. Finally someone worked up the nerve and stated he was suffering "player burnout", and would like to play something else... It was a quick and unanimous vote (with an abstaining GM who had taken the hint ) - and the group stayed together. Second and third time around where GMs who's "love interest" was one of the players, leading to PPS (pet player syndrome), making things vastly boring, because no blow would have harm said "pet", no trap would trigger or NPC play intelligently... except against everyone else, where no hods were barred. Things blew up when one player "accidentally" killed the "pet" along with some NPCs and queried by the GM replied that he thought she was "invulnerable", judging from her past "exploits" -and of course she had the best protections (loot being coincidentally tailor-made to fit for the "pet" and hardly anyone else) . Said GM blew up and stopped short of tackling the player, ditched the campaign with some less than pleasant insults and looked for other players ( I heard a similar thing happened two years later in his group - PPS again, though with a different pet..). Noone cried. Two weeks later, we had a new (and better campaign) running. Third time, the GM was oblivious to our sensible and mature suggestions (all of the players were in their late twenties) that we felt excessive favouritism taking place - and we stopped turning up. He ha stopped GMing and gaming since - feeling deeply misunderstood and unappreciated. We actively benched a GM, who took the seat IMC for a single adventure, and couldn't get challenge ratings under control - we got hit by wave after wave of cutting edge led and equipped monsters hurled against us from impossible ambush situations, inane traps blowing us to smithereens etc etc etc. Basically the GM was still playing in "aggressive player mode", but unfortunately with full GM resources... We broke the adventure off by teleporting out (ingame) and confronting him (in RL) by showing him the math on his encounters and the sheer discrepancy of our projectable power of five characters versus his "encounters" (the first three rooms featured two CR 15 encounters against a level 10 party... and that was just for starters... the main BBEG we calculated at CD 19....). He admitted to have tweaked the adventure some to "add some spice".... the campaign has resumed, said unfinished adventure our common "shame", and things are back to normal. Needs to be said, that GM is a rather mature guy in the first place, [/QUOTE]
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