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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ThoughtBubble" data-source="post: 1256965" data-attributes="member: 9723">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.</blockquote>

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