Failed Campaigns

[Jd Smith1]

I long for the day when you can obtain customizable AI bot players and run the really obscure and oddball campaigns that lurk in the dark corners of your GM notes.

The need for players has always been the weakest link in the hobby.

 

[Reynard]

I long for the day when you can obtain customizable AI bot players and run the really obscure and oddball campaigns that lurk in the dark corners of your GM notes.

The need for players has always been the weakest link in the hobby.

You jest but it would actually be a good debugging tool for vetting campaign and adventure ideas.

 

[Jd Smith1]

You jest but it would actually be a good debugging tool for vetting campaign and adventure ideas.

I only mildly jest.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I have a lot that end what feels like prematurely (usually because I've lost the will to live), but the only ones that really die off early are my attempts to use systems that looked interesting, and may have started off well, but soon started to go over badly with one or more players. The alternative is systems that turn out to really be bad for the campaign I'm trying to run, and shows it early. Either one strikes me as failures of estimation on my part.

 

[Ulfgeir]

I tried to invade Russia in winter.

That is right up there with land-wars in Asia..

 

[Ulfgeir]

I had a campaign for Daring Comics rpg, where I got the idea in the early stages for the 2016 US-presidential election... The setting was that we had Miami, which was filled with gangs, drugrunners, organizied crime, racial tensions, and corrupt police. Think Miami Vice meets The Shield dialed up to 11, then lots of super-villains and add lots of extra darkness.

A previous team of super-heroes had fallen apart. Some members of that team had been killed* The heroes worked as vigilantes, and lacked official backing from the goverment. Add to this that I had that Trump had won, and that he had been even more of a disaster than he actually turned out to be. If I recall correclty, the US had VERY strained relationships with other foreign powers at the time, so that's why things were as bad as they were in Miami with most other Super-heroes being elsewhere occupied. It was a fun idea in fiction. Reality turned out to be to close for comfort. That combined with the fact that the characters in a Supers-campaign are usually reactive mad e me feel nope, this campaign doesn't really work.

Spoiler

A six-person team. The leader and his second-in command was corrupt. During a mission where they had followed a group of neo-nazi terrorists that had run away to Europe and hif in a secret bae in an old castle after an viscious attack targetting the hispanic community in Miami, they "accidently" killed one of their team-mates* (a speedster martial artists, with regenerating abilities who had found aout about what her team-mates were up to and had confronted them about it), claiming she got caught up in the crossfiree and was collateral damage. One fo the other members was also left in a wheelchair after that. He and the two other members (a husband+wife team) blaimed the leader and the other guy for what happened. The former leader and the second-in-command, managed to blow up most of the forensic-labs later in a fight with a super-powered person who had broken in there to find evidence that would prove he was innocent. So they were shunned by the everyone. The Second-in-command who didn't have powers of his won but a power-suit got arrested after being found in bed with underage girls (possibly prostitues). The Leader got blown up in a car-explision. No one spend very much time trying to find the guilty party. The guy in the wheelchair, started working as a researcher for a major corporation,. HIs super-hor days was over. The husband+wife-team vanished from view as she got pregnant.

**Turned out that the martial artist had recovered from dying, but that the castle had been home to an ancient vampire that had been asleep. He turned her into a vampiress, and brainwashed her into being evil. She came back and was responsible for taking out the two team-members that had killed her. She was the planned BBEG for the campaign, as she tried to take control of all the illegal activities in the city.
{/spoiler]

 

[MNblockhead]

I've been lucky. Since 2014 all of my 5e campaigns were played to completion.

My one campaign that went down in flames was my attempt to run a Mage: the Ascension campaign. A player in my group brought it up a number of times, suggesting that I would be a good GM for that game and he got me interested in the system. All of the players in my regular 5e group were up for a second campaign and alternating between MtA and D&D 5e.

I found the rules confusing but made a strong effort to learn them, buying various game aids in addition to the core books. I also created a custom MtA character sheet in Role (a gaming focused teleconferencing platform with light VTT features).

I think I would love being a player in a MtA game, but I hated running it. The rules just didn't come naturally for me. Added to that, I was very busy at work and trying to run two ongoing campaigns in two different systems was too much. I found prepping for MtA to be far more work. Rules aside, there were few published adventures and I wasn't that impressed with the ones I found. I plotted out a what I thought was a good overarching story, based mostly in Manhattan, with a good number of plots, stories, special locations, and NPCs. But, in the end, I found it to be too much work, I wasn't comfortable enough with the system to run a low-prep game, and burned out after a couple of sessions.

I find that I have to come to game on my own terms and grow a desire to run it on my own. Also, with my heavy work load, I don't want to spend all my down time on prepping games. I think my 5e campaigns are successful because I'm very comfortable with the rules and, while a put a LOT of time in prepping a new campaign up front, once it gets going, I find I have to do very little session prep. My comfort with the system, along with a huge number of game aids, also lets me improvise acceptably well.

The downside is that I mostly play D&D, though I do try to throw in the occasional one shot in a different system now and then.

 

[Mad_Jack]

FTL -
The one failure to launch that I recall being sad about was a PbP on the Reaper forums... We were running Sunless Citadel updated to 5th.
The roleplaying aspect of it was great - we had some good characters. Unfortunately, we'd barely made it out of the starting tavern before it just ran out of gas...
Mostly the issue was just the amount of time it took between posts. If it'd been a live game instead of PbP I think it would have been a great game.

Collapse -
I had just joined a new game as a player, and the DM completely tanked her otherwise really great game by trying repeatedly, in-game, to romantically hook up my character with another party member in order to try to hook us up in real life.
It got to the point where it was disrupting the story - despite repeatedly shutting down cold anything that even looked like it might be a ham-fisted attempt to lead things to the desired conclusion, it finally got to the point where I basically told off the DM and rage-quit.
Which was apparently the catalyst that set off a chain reaction of a number of personal issues between others in the group that seemed to have been simmering for some time, resulting in a huge table-wide screaming match in which everyone got pissed off at the DM for ruining her own game and the DM insinuated that I'd only been invited to the game in the first place so that the other player could get a boyfriend. I walked out in the middle of it.

As far as I know that was the end of that game, although I have no idea if the group survived.

 

[MGibster]

I definitely think there is a difference between "failure to launch" failed campaigns and "collapsed under its own weight" failed campaigns and "killed by toxicity" failed campaigns.

Failure to Launch: In the early 1990s, we were going to play a GURPS martial arts game in the vein of Bruce Lee and Van Damme movies. One of the players insisted that he'd be the gun guy and our characters would be his support. We tried explaining to him that we wanted more Black Belt Jones and less Schwarzenneger, but he wouldn't budge. We ended up scrapping the idea and playing something else.

Collapsed Under Its Own Weight: We were playing d20 Call of Cthulhu, and at one point were all ended up in the same asylum. One of the PCs ends up going on a killing spree murdering many doctors, nurses, and orderlies and the keeper ended up saying, "I'm honestly not sure I can think of any way for your characters to ever walk free again" and we ended the campaign there.

Killed by Toxicity: I was running a Ravenloft campaign for D&D 3.0, and having a hard time because several of the players just couldn't show up. I had a heart-to-heart explaining to them that it was difficult planning a campaign when I didn't know who was going to show up or even if enough people would show up to the game. I asked if they'd be able to commit to being at the game and on time and none of them were able to. So I thanked them for their time and ended the campaign.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The latter sounds more like a case of just a really excessively casual attitude to the game than toxicity per se, but maybe that's a semantic argument.