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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Epametheus" data-source="post: 1256137" data-attributes="member: 719">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.</blockquote>

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