Failed DM Experiements

[NCSUCodeMonkey]

Well I don't know about 'failure,' but I just tried to introduce shadowguides from White Wolf's Wraith: The Oblivion into my 3e campaign and the whole mechanic just got...ignored. I dunno, I think I made the mistake of introducing the concept to a group of relatively new roleplayers at a point in the campaign that was a lot of combat and not much else. I don't think there's much wrong with the rules themselves, but no one really took advantage of all the sick/wild fun that I've always imagined that shadows would bring to a game.

*shurg*

NCSUCodeMonkey

 

[Steverooo]

Read all about it!

The sad tale has been immortalized here, in a story hour...

http://www.enworld.org/forums/showthread.php?t=61288

 

[jasper]

I took a 12 pack of beer, butter rum, a roll player female(newby), and male role player. Toss in a pie fight /slap stick bar combat. result the couple got married in real life and now have kids. Oh the horror the horror of dms experiements gone wrong!

 

[osarusan]

I was running the Dragon Mountain mega-module, which I had spent about an entire month planning. It is the largest dungeon I have ever attempted to run, and if you've never seen it, just take my word that it is ridiculously large. Also, if you don't know, the players have a limited amount of days before the dungeon planeshifts to another Material Plane. Well, my players spent ages being distracted by every little thing and taking the most inefficient route to the dungeon, so they arrived there on the day it was supposed to planeshift. I decided to give it 15 extra days just for game's sake, but they seemed to notice that it hadn't planeshifted yet, and took their sweet time in the dungeon too. When the mountain finally did planeshift, they had spent so much time fighting the monsters that I had sent to "encourage" them to speed up that they were too low on resources to continue, so they left the dungeon. I was totally unprepared for them to just give up on it halfway through, so I ended up winging an entire new Material Plane on the spot, run by a civilized orc theocracy in Arabian cities, where the primary danger was giant insects (think Starship Troopers) and efreet. Well they ended up deciding that this world was the most fun place I had every created, and here I am sweating on the spot to come up with things while we keep playing, winging it all as I go.

They never went back to the dungeon...

 

[Joshua Randall]

they ended up deciding that this world was the most fun place I had every created

That doesn't sound like a failure - it sounds like a success!

And once you adopt a Zen-like calm in the face of perpetually winging it, you'll be having fun too.

 

[barsoomcore]

Well they ended up deciding that this world was the most fun place I had every created, and here I am sweating on the spot to come up with things while we keep playing, winging it all as I go.

Isn't that just the way? You've spent ages prepping something, the players junk it and force you to stand on your imaginative head and absolutely make up so much stuff your brain starts to melt and you can't possibly keep it all straight, and they're all like, "This rocks! Let's play this instead!"

Sigh.

 

[DaveStebbins]

We rotate DMing duties in my group and one of the other DMs, the one who's been playing almost as long as I have, gets bored with the status quo and likes to try new things. Unfortunately, he's the only one in the group who is bored with the status quo. This has led to:

A game night where we all had new characters and he wanted to set up role-playing scenarios where we became acquainted. Unfortunately we didn't know which of the encountered NPC's were the new characters, and he was deliberately trying to be sketchy and unobvious in his descriptions, so when we came upon conflicts in progress we killed the new PC about half the time. Clues to which side 'should' be joined were obvious to him, but went straight over our collective heads, so the frustration level ran quite high for everyone.

Then he noticed that we each tend to prefer playing certain classes and decided we needed a taste of something different. He set up an adventure where the souls of the PCs were forced to share the bodies of NPCs, so we each had to play a specific character with a different class which he made up for us. Only about half of the group enjoyed this and he found out that there were reasons why some of us like specific classes.

Not giving up, he designed an adventure where each PC was forced to take the party lead in turn so everyone would have a chance to shine and no one would be 'just a quiet helper.' When one person who preferred being a quiet helper was forced to lead, they ended up leading the party into a TPK through various mistakes, indecision, etc. I think the look on her face when she said "I'm sorry guys, I did my best. That's why I don't take the lead," finally convinced the DM that maybe some status quos are better left unchanged.

This DM also tend towards mild railroading and fudging rolls, though I don't know if anyone except myself has noticed. I myself haven't received much negative feedback in the recent past (if I remember errors from the old days, I'll post again) which means either that it's not being offered, or that I'm just too dense to pick up the hints.

 

[ForceUser]

I tried to run a Vietnamese-themed OA game, but my players ultimately expressed frustration at the setting. It was just too challenging for them to play asian PCs in a wholly asian campaign; they wanted a campaign on more familiar ground, I.E. whitebread D&D.

 

[der_kluge]

Great thread. Good to see I'm not the only DM that has failed on many levels.


The biggest failures, for me, are probably my PBEM games. My biggest success was a 3-year long Al-Qadim game that I finally decided to let go off. Was just taking too much of my time. But that was definitely the longest PBEM I ever ran, even if posts were fairly infrequent.

One PBEM I came up with was set in Planescape, and the backstory was thus:
One of the PCs was a chronomancer, and another was a priest of a Time god. The party was a group of time-traveling problem solvers, essentially. The God of time had given them a mission to stop a wizard from creating some horrific artifact that eventually would be used to alter the course of the Blood War. So, the party sets off for Mechanus to intervene with this wizard, and as luck would have it, they arrive right as the device activates. The result of this is that the PCs' bodies get dejected back to the Astral, and their souls get sucked into various magic items in the wizard's lab. This happened 50 years ago. Now the [intelligent] items are scattered throughout the planes in various owners hands. A couple of the PCs (which were all premade by me) had Githyanki swords, but were of sufficient level (15th, IIRC) to deal with any pesky Githyankis coming to claim their sword back. So, the party starts with the PCs waking up in the Astral in the holding cell of a Githyanki prison. None of them have any gear, and none of them have any idea who, or what they are.

Miserable failure. I think it lasted all of a month. The ship got attacked by an Astral dreadnaught, and the party finds the nearest conduit out of Astral, and ends up in the pitch-black, insanity-inducing caverns of Pandemonium. I think that's as far as we got.

 

[Pyske]

I can empathize with having problems with PBEM games. I have yet to have one work out for more than a couple weeks; I've more or less given up on the medium.

With one of my early attempts at chat games, I was trying to encourage less "guns blazing" and more thoughtful plotting and stealth (this was in Shadowrun, for those who care). So, I simply cranked the power level and severity of all weapons.

The first firefight was an ambush that one of the PCs walked into. (I really, really tried to steer him away. No luck; he was bound and determined that it didn't matter who was hunting for him, he was sleeping in his own home that night.) Killing a PC in the first fifteen minutes of a game with a group of strangers did not make a good first impression, and no-one opted to come back.

This seems to be consistently true when I try to run more lethal games. No matter how much I warn them, I always manage to alienate the players when one or two don't adopt the cautious style of play that I'm expecting.

Another experiment that I tinker with from time to time are game contracts. I think trying to get all the assumptions out on the table up front is a good idea in the abstract, but in practice, people don't seem to want to deal with that much overhead for getting into a game. Usually it winds up that people glance it over and promptly forget about it by the second session. For example, there are a couple times where players come to me with a concern about someone else cheating. They are completely flabbergasted when I point out that I told them up front that I allow fudging of die rolls by players... it's as if I never mentioned it.

. . . . . . . -- Eric