Failed DM Experiements

[D+1]

Best example I have is my LAST 2E game. Just prior to 3E being released I started a new campaign. Since I fully intended to go 3E ASAP I used the "10 Ways to Play 3E NOW" that WotC had put forth. I added a few house rules of my own regarding natural healing rates. I also thought it would be cool to have all the PC's wake up in a wizards lab not knowing who or where they are so that they could spend the rest of the campaign finding out and then exacting revenge. They would know nothing of the world meaning I could draw it all in one small piece at a time as they explored it.

Then they found that I had put them on an island and though there were ships to sail none of the PC's had any sailing skill meaning I had quite effectively stranded them without recourse. I was generous enough to let them learn to sail with a little bit of time.

Then they reached the mainland, several of the PC's died and of course their replacements weren't memory-wiped and I suddenly had to have a whole campaign world to present. Not to mention that the new PC's suddenly had to go along with the original PC's quest for their identities. So the whole Amnesia theme was simply forgotten and faded into the background.

Then they go into their first dungeon, their first real combats, and the carnage is appalling. With the mix of 2nd and 3rd edition rules things just don't work as I thought they would and my added house rules only make things worse. They fight in the first room of the dungeon and then drag the uncouncious members back to town to recuperate which takes something like a week or two. They return, fight in one room and again drag unconcious PC's back to town to recuperate. Another couple of weeks of game time pass while they do so. They return to the dungeon, fight in one room, try to barricade themselves in for the night to recuperate and only get beat to within an inch of their lives when I go easy on them as they flee out of the dungeon. The sole concious member of the party drags the unconcious members of the party back to town and they all recuperate over the course of a few weeks. They return again and do a little better as they fight through several rooms. Then they foolishly attempt to fight to the death in a large room full of zombies and evil clerics rather than immediately retreat. Two PC's eventually try a fighting retreat as opposed to outright fleeing for their lives. They successfully fight to the death - meaning a TPK as they get just a few steps outside the room. After no more than a dozen combat encounters and perhaps 3 sessions the campaign is effectively over.

It would be about a year of real time before I ran another game. This time it was FULLY 3E but my players were HIGHLY suspicious of the 3E rules since the influence THEY'D seen of them was disastrous.

Yet even that campaign was something of a failed experiment since for the first time I began the campaign with the specific intent of it having a limited lifespan. That is, rather than just play open-ended ad-infinitum the campaign would follow a plot to a conclusion that would end the campaign, even though the plot itself would not be planned out, but would unfold on the fly from in-game play.

It ran well as I built the campaign much like the X-files built it's plot arc - any question answered must only lead to more questions, or proof that previously answered questions were actually red herrings. But when it came time to seriously think about how to conclude it I began to get sweaty palms. One of the players had bought an unrelated campaign sourcebook and was intending to use it to run a campaign of his own. However, he saw how the background for that campaign could be combined with the one I was currently running. I decided to turn over at least "the beginning of the end" of the campaign to him on this alternate world. However, his DM style is VERY different from my own, and the players (me now among them) needed to learn all about this new world in order to answer their questions about the one they had come from.

It ultimately ended OK but it was fairly messy and the other players experienced a fair amount of frustration bringing things to a conclusion. I should have maintained the helm right to the end. But on the plus side the player in question used the whole of my campaign as the basis for his own to great success.

 

[cidak]

To set the scene. D20, Evil campaign, set in Middle Earth. Four of us travelling through the underdark to the surface. DM brutally murdered a PC the week before (two assassins attacked during the surprise round - rest of the party was 3 rounds away). The party morning the loss turns in the dead PC's head to be the reward that was out for him. (hey...we are evil)

This week 3 + one new PC come across a plant that is able to restore life and regenerate lost limbs. Party thinks cool, that'll come in handy. BTW we are level 2 and 3.

Later headless, dead PC arrives to drive off a Werewolf dogging the party. Party thinks....we could restore old member, regenerate miss bits and keep the gold from the reward. WIN!

The party gives the plant to the headless undead. The undead consumes the plant by crushing it and shoving it down it's throat and comes back to life....sort of. Still smells of death, has no head and is able to communicate via a rasping gurgling in his throat. Each member of the party looks at the other...pauses...and attacks, hacking the thing to bits.

Our DM must have spent ages setting the sequence of events, it was all typed up, the raised character had all sorts of new powers and it worked...for about 20 seconds.

Oh well, back to the drawing board.

 

[Pants]

Best example I have is my LAST 2E game. Just prior to 3E being released I started a new campaign. Since I fully intended to go 3E ASAP I used the "10 Ways to Play 3E NOW" that WotC had put forth. I added a few house rules of my own regarding natural healing rates. I also thought it would be cool to have all the PC's wake up in a wizards lab not knowing who or where they are so that they could spend the rest of the campaign finding out and then exacting revenge. They would know nothing of the world meaning I could draw it all in one small piece at a time as they explored it.

This story sounds EXACTLY like my first 3e game. The only difference being that it was actually in 3e and not a hybrid.

 

[Wormwood]

In last year's 'City of the Spider Queen' adventure, I was so confident in my d20-Fu that I allowed everything.

Every class, race, feat, spell or item from any splatbook a player wanted. Wotc, Paizo, Mongoose, Malhavoc, Fantasy Flight, Bastion, whatever. I'd take a cursory glance at the material, balking only at the most egregiously unbalanced bits.

Naturally, the party owned me.

They spent a week blasting past everything I put in their path, eventually becoming so bored that they decided to wind walk past the middle 50 pages of the module---fast worwarding to the final BBEGs.

Even then, they were obliterating opponents 5+ CR above them.

It was an effective lesson on the consequences of hubris---and importance of a DM's gatekeeping abilities.

A sadder and a wiser DM I woke the morrow morn.

 

[Wycen]

For a change of pace, this is my relation of a failed experiment as a player in a game. It was of course our first 3E game.

Myself and another guy decided we'd be twin brothers of bhaalspawn and Naline De'Arnise, if you are familiar with Baldur's Gate 2. I was a fighter, he was a rogue, eventually hoping for shadow dancer.

The DM is someone I now recognize has a history of "wonky" ideas, but at the time this one seemed fun, and was.

Basically, we played in the world of Harry Potter, though no Harry Potter existed and the names were changed. We went to a wizard's university, to discover what was happening to the students. We ran into Herietta, the smart girl, (Hermione), and my character used her to cheat off of, we had a ghost instructor and eventually discovered an underground chamber, a secret chamber, were a teacher had kidnapped students for some vile ritual. Colonel Griffinheart, the commander of the local militia rewarded us for our efforts. Then we found another deeper chamber and investigated. Out of a soupy tub rises an undead thing. It shoots a lightening bolt at us. A 10d6 lightening bolt. The party was all 2nd and 1st level characters, my fighter having the most hit points, around 20 I think. The damage even after she halved it was enough to kill everyone. Turned out it was a lich.

The guy playing my brother asks the husband of the DM to talk to her and say, "hey, uh, that was not fun for us".

I used that as the basis for my character becoming a coward. The DM decided to let her husband take over the reigns and give it a try. We thought nothing of it, if anything, it would protect us against CR 12 monsters.

Alas, we found ourselves leaving Harry Potter world and got shipped off to a few islands, ala Great Britain.

Too many things started going sour to list them all, among them being a 5th level character, but counted as 6th "because you have such good stats" with no magic item, and the same through out the rest of the party, except the barbarian being able to buy a magic sword with the mage bane property, the party now having 3 of the various arcane classes, and the straw that broke the camels back was finding the "impenetrable vault" looted and dwarven graffiti on the wall claiming "Killrock was here".

 

[Epametheus]

Geez, only took 5 minutes for the Edit option to actually work.

 

[Epametheus]

Lightning Bolt? A Lich considered a bunch of kids to actually be a threat?

Yeah, I guess I've had a hand in a "failed experiment" campaign. Or maybe I had tried to taken the reigns of a continuing failed experiment.

We started it the winter of the year that 3E had come out. It was essentially a Planescape campaign. I and another guy in the group -- I'll call him Akito; it's an alias that he's fond of -- had decided to be the co-DMs for this campaign. We also had a lot of players for it -- enough that it was agreed to run a split-group campaign.

This campaign was actually a second-gen campaign, with the first campaign being 2nd Edition (and having resulted in a horribly unbalanced party -- 1/2 the party was hopelessly broken, and the half was basically normal and thus was useless in adventures that had to be scaled with the broken characters in mind). Some people wanted new characters (which we started at ECL 8), and other people converted their old characters to 3E. We removed the magic items of the 1st gen characters who were going to be PCs, and gave them significantly lower starting wealth than the 2nd gen characters, in an attempt to balance having 8th level and 13th-18th level characters in the same party.

That in itself resulted in a rather unhappy group -- out of approximately 4 1st gen and 7 second gen characters, only 4 people (including me) actually liked their characters; one player (actually, the DM of the original campaign) actually went through two 2nd gens before he finally brought in his 1st gen character. One player was unhappy that the 2nd gens hadn't started from 1st level, some the 2nd gen characters were one-trick ponies, at least one of the 1st gen characters had been converted in such a way that she was actually weaker than the children, etc.

Akito and I had the notion that each of us would be a player in the other's group, and we had set up a storyline with two major branches, one for each of us to run. However, a rather serious problem occured with this -- Akito ran maybe two games, ever, and it turned out we actually didn't have enough people to justify splitting the group, though we tried it anyways. It was the first campaign for both us, and between half the plot basically just tossed aside and I not being DM enough to adjust to this, the campaign got kinda pointless. Eventually, two of the players (one of whom is regular DM for the group) said that they had a great idea, and asked if I'd hand the campaign over to them. I said sure, but they wouldn't have their great idea ready for a while, and so the Planejammer campaign actually wound back under the direction of the original DM. He came up with a fairly over-the-top story arc to end things with, and so ended the 2nd Gen campaign.

Now, this brings up another failed experiment -- the "great idea" that the other two had. They spent almost an entire fall "prepping" for it (going so far as to email everyone surveys and stuff), and even trying to make a big dramtic build-up for the new phase of the campaign. And so, that winter break, the group asked them to ante up.

They got off to a neat start -- we picked up again with the Planejammer party (some of whom were epic characters at this point, even if the rules weren't out yet) as a new race came out of some sort of overplane to tear the multiverse apart and return it to its source. They even blew up Sigil and the Demiplane of Time (much to the horror of the party Chronomancer, which we had made a prestige class) in the first session. And so we geared up for this cool war for the survival of everything.

And for the next week, we made new 1st level characters (I will say right here, right now, that I hate playing 1st level characters in D&D), jumped to 20 years later, and began the 3rd Gen party. By this time, people actually had characters that they liked in the 2nd gen game, and jumping from being a group of bad-asses to a bunch of twerps who were practically doing clean-up duty was horribly anti-climatic. Also, Sigil was effectively replaced with the plane-crawling city from the Manual of the Planes, and the city being as established as "you can do everything here that you could do in Sigil, except go to whatever plane you want;" this, along with a slew of house rules designed to eliminate everything that the two DMs personally disliked about 3E. About half the group, including myself, pretty much went "meh" and lost complete interest. Conflicts between group members had also erupted at this point, which surely didn't help things.

I can think of a third campaign that was definitely an experiment gone wrong, though it was still a blast to play; the DM was one of the two 3rd gen DMs, though most of the players were different.

To sum it up in two sentences:
It was a homebrew, d20 Supers campaign.
Every single player in a group of six (yes, including me) independently came up with a background that established his character as criminally psychotic.

 

[Wycen]

I can only assume the DM was still not familiar with how the CR system/encounter level worked.

This is also the reason for another game going down the drain. It was a high level save the world kind of game. It took us basically until the final session when we had a blow out to figure out the DM either had no clue how the CR system works or thought every single battle should require 110% effort from the party. We missed the hint when he said, "you know how much damage you inflicted to the purple worm? Over 400 points." We missed it when he asked, "what's a good epic level feat?" and no one in the party was close to epic levels.

As for failed DM experiments, there was the Hero game that fell apart when I learned nobody could create a character correctly, putting double disads on various powers, powers without enough points in frameworks, other no nos.

Then there was the Vampire game were I told everyone, "you can make the most disgusting character you can think of, power wise" and only 1 person took it literally, then he promptly used meta-game knowledge and detonated an atomic bomb in Mexico, killing everyone, ending the game.

 

[Berandor]

Almost all of my failed experiments deal with forcing my will on the party's.

Having the party of four surrounded by 20 archers aiming at them would not keep them from drawing weapons.

Having a majorly cool NPC who was a bit of a fool but fun nonetheless would not let them keep him with the party instead of sending him to his death.

Having a frighteningly powerful and evil NPC turn up and gloat would neither allow the PCs to glean some information by goading him into carelessness nor keep them from mocking him (leading to a dead PC, 3rd level, killed by blade barrier).

Having a player being possessed by a powerful demon would not lead to moral dilemmas instead of power-mongering.

Otoh, my christmas adventures were always great fun (probably something to do with giving the PCs presents)

Berandor

 

[ThoughtBubble]

My every game is a failed DM expirement.

"Let's play a game of D&D where the party takes lots of little jobs that turn out to be interconnected." The party studiously avoids every NPC that wants to hire them, then complains there's nothing to do. Eventually they split up, one character finds an adventure, the rest try to hunt her down, and wind up wandering the streets randomly, giving me dirty looks. That led straight into...

"Let's drop the party into a dangerous world, where they'll have to stick together in order to survive. Let's also have no definate good or evil, but instead people who were motivated for their own reasons." Part two of the same campaign. Party stays together for two sessions, during which we have an awesome moral discussion that almost turns violent. The outcome is that two members of the party stop a ceremony while a third protests and a fourth watches. In the next few sessions They're jailed, but a representitive of a mystic order offers a solution. In the mists, there's the man who first helped the city form. So, the party goes to see him, the LE vampire wizard. He's polite, and seems very happy to have guests. He informs them that, as outsiders to this place it would only take a little of each of their lifeforces to make a powerful barrier for the town.

At this point, the rogue says "Not my problem. Good luck with that," and leaves. The other characters agree to stay for the term of the spell. The rogue tries to go out on her own in the world, and eventually tries to join the order of mystics. She fails, but discovers that she's becoming wraithlike due to an item she'd found earlier. Ignoring dreams that show the party dying as long as they're nto together, the rogue decides to go look for a day job, with the now famous line "Well, I can't do anything about the visions, and I don't know anyone who could help, but I am almost out of supplies, and I can do something about that."

Which leads into the next expirement. "Let's put the PC's in a megadungeon, where they'll have to work as a team, or everyone will die." Just under half the party charges in to situations randomly, while the other half cowers in the other room until everything's dead. Due to many dirty looks and a lot of whining, we shift gears, the party escapes, and we decide to let them try taking on the dungeons at their own speed. While on a rescue mission, the party trips a trap, alerting an entire orc encampent. Not only does the party stay and fight, they do so using the worst tactics possible. Again, about half the party cowers outside while their friends are sorrounded and dying. One party memeber separates from the other two, is completely cut off and dies. The other two survive due to the timely intervention of the remaining party members, the fact that the ogres didn't target the only cleric with spells left, and the fact that I didn't understand how negative hit points worked. I recieved a great many complaints about the character death, though the player who did so was fine with it. In fact, he was on my side in the two hour argument that began due to my comment that "Tactically, you could have done better."

So, after finding out from everyone what they wanted, we morphed the game into the "Heavily RP based game." And that flopped. Only one player regularly talked to NPC's for anything other than "Give me the next quest."

So, from there we did the fighting game RPG. "Let's make a simple game where we can sit down for an hour and a half and kick some butt." The premise was 'everyone joins in a fighting tournament to rescue the mayor's daughter.' The intent of the game was stated up front, along with the requirement that each character needed to build in hooks as to why he'd be in on it, and be the sort of person who would participate, even under threat of death. So, we wound up with the Iron Fist of Justice (my favorite character ever) who could soak rifle rounds, and wasn't about to let criminals move in on his 'hood. We got the Shooting Star, an up and coming dodgey fighter who was in the tournament to hunt down the man who killed his best friend. And then, we had the pacifist, who refused to fight and had no reason for being there.

And that's about when I stopped.