Failed Campaigns

[werecorpse]

My failed campaign white whale is The Great Pendragon Campaign. I overprepared and got too much into the minutiae of the estates owned by the player character knights. There are a number of supplements available to help with this but they are mechanically weak and create a mini game that distracts from the roleplaying aspect. By the time I realised this we were deep in the confusing and unsatisfactory weeds of the mini game and the larger roleplaying game (which people enjoyed) was choking.

Id love to figure out how to have a much lesser involvement of the estates but cant work out how, unless I abandon them almost entirely. I hope to revisit it someday but even after a few years I and my players are still a bit burned.

Also started a Savage Worlds zombie apocalypse game that died too early imo.

 

[The Green Hermit]

Gandalf,
Is super knowledgeable
Uses magic that is not flashy and is based on song
Has inspiring presence and personality
Can fight with a sword.

Gandalf is a Bard

He does sing with the dwarves, so . . .

 

[Marc_C]

Savage Worlds with Interface Zero. Great start but had a random TPK (damage/soak) at session two. Players never wanted to play SW again.

 

[Mind of tempest]

any campaign I am in as I swear they either turn in to me keeping the player from killing each other or I never feel the dm's setting or other commitments come up hence why I have not played in must be three years.

 

[TheSword]

Hmm. Let's see. Recently attempted to run The Enemy Within for WFRP, but had a player move away after the first session. With an already small group, that meant the end of the campaign. This is a bucket list campaign that I would love to run one day.

If there was ever a time, the next year is it, with part about to come out. One day you will get there.

I ran parts 1-4 about a decade ago with the hogshead reprints bit Something Rotten in Kislev was the deathknell. Just a terrible unconnected story and ending.

I think whichever of my current campaigns finishes first, that will be the group to get the full Enemy Within treatment.

 

[TheSword]

My Kingmaker campaign imploded at the end of the second book: around Level 8. After six months of weekly play.

There were a couple of reasons. I’d invested a lot of time into the open world/hexploration element, particularly for VTT which took it out of me. I’d also been a bit optimistic with content as I tried to bring in a lot of elements from the computer game. So it was taking up a lot of time in prep.

That all would have been fine except for three other elements. First the players built seriously optimized PCs. Almost to the point of ridiculousness. Sorcadin with 23 AC at 5th level plus shield when they needed it, a sorcerer that was maxing out blasting, and a moon Druid. You know those encounters in a Hex-ploration that PCs are supposed to recognize as too tough… well they would curb stomp them. Run them down like a steam roller.

The second reason was that one player decided his character was going to kill an NPC - a random bit of murder hoboism which was quite out of character for the rest of the party and even his character. Which I think took all the party by surprise myself included. It was his choice of course but I found that random act of murder particularly galling for some reason. The player isnt normally like that, maybe they just had a bad day.

Finally one player (a different one), just kept complaining. About everything from 5e rules, to how much treasure they got, to how much better everyone else’s character was. Just ongoing. That was the final straw and I brought the campaign to a suitable conclusion much much earlier than intended. I won’t DM VTT for that combo of players again. Though randomly we have played face to face together for years without ever seeing it like that.

Sometimes I think that one campaign you’ve always wanted to run can turn out to be a curse because you get so emotionally invested in it, it can’t help but disappoint you.

“When the gods want to punish us, they answer our prayers.”

 

[R_J_K75]

I don’t know how many systems he had on hand and how many he bought over that time, so I can’t speak to that. But like I said, he understood each system very well- mechanically- and ran good games.

He definitely had his quirks, though, no question. But the only thing I would say was an actual issue was his temper. Certain things set him off- usually social etiquette breaches- and he would go off. Most things, though, he was super chill about.

In a way, he was like Ms. Manners combined with Granny Goodness…

Hmmmmm…maybe the problem was US. Perhaps we were a little too much like a herd of cats, and we kept unintentionally messing up his campaigns. Metaphorically pushing cups off of tables,,,

Campaigns are strange in the sense it just takes the right group of people playing to follow through the OG concept. I love a DM that knows the rules well, (I am not these days) ; but would prefer a DM whose willing to make ad hoc rulings and improvise.

 

[Reynard]

My failed campaigns gave usually failed because I had a high concept without a lot of structural support and it fellapart once the PCs started interacting with it and revealing how flimsy it really was. Sometimes they failed because the rules were the wrong choice (as in my OP), but that was rare. Occasionally it has been due to player issues -- scheduling, incompatibility, incongruent expectations. But usually it was my fault.

One campaign -- trying to run the Dragonlance modules during the 3.x era -- failed because of player incompatibility. And my current Rime of the Frostmaiden campaign is wrapping up early partly because my schedule is tightening but mostly because I have some players (lifelong friends) in it who piss me off every time we play and life is too short.

 

[Marc_C]

I started a pbp d20 Modern campaign on the Gleemax forum. I had four players who made characters. When time came to play I described the opening scene at the specified date... and no one answered. I looked at the thread everyday for a week. No one responded. Turned me off pbp.

 

[BookTenTiger]

I played in a game once that started with FATE Accelerated. The world was a kind of urban fantasy but much more sci fi, with our world having gotten combined with more of a fantasy world in some kind of cataclysmic event.

By the time we were raiding a nuclear disarmament facility and shooting police in order to steal uranium for grey aliens to power a portal, we felt like we'd lost track of the campaign.

Guardians of the Galaxy had just come out, so we decided to keep the same characters but shift to FATE: Atomic Robo and become space-faring rebels against the facist grey aliens.

We started hopping around from planet to planet, fighting the good fight. But for some reason we got caught up in a plan to create a weapon of mass destruction that would be basically a crime against sentient life...

Eventually we decided to just wrap up the whole campaign with a single game of Fiasco. We wound up having to destroy a facility that was cloning one of the characters and turning her into a giant spider creature.

Even though we managed to "complete" the campaign, it's still seen somewhat as a failure in my group. It's also a great example of the need for Session 0. I never want to be put in a position again as a player where I am having to kill innocent people to complete an objective. Still leaves a bad taste.