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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Brimshack" data-source="post: 4221782" data-attributes="member: 34694">I almost always learn something positive and negative from anyone I watch GMing. The last extended campaign I played in was really interesting for about 8 games. I remember the GM had a very strong sense of the rules and kept things very close to the books, and it inspired me to learn 3.5 (before this I had played 1st edition about 20 something years and little else). In time the game fell apart for about 5 reasons:1) The GM was extremely unresponsive to the players. Ideas outside the norm were rejected out of hand, options within the standard rules dismissed without consideration, and legitimate questions about decisions were brushed aside without much thought. In time, each of us accumulated a grief or two, and in time we began to discuss it with each other, multiplying our griefs by picking up on the concerns of other players.Lesson - Listen and be polite. Even if the player is wrong, take the time to show you give a damn about the other human being sitting at the table.2) There was a time when a certain player decided to make up several magic items. She had been designed for just that purpose. We had a certain amount of treasure and she had some experience to burn. The GM said he would allow it, but that if one player wanted to continue adventuring in the meantime, then the rest of the characters would be inactive in the meantime. The suggestion was that we were literally expected to sit there as players and do nothing while the other players fiddled about with some encounters. Well, after all the maneuvering in the week leading up to the game where the magic would be made 2 players were unwilling to sit tight. So the GM ran some pointless encounters (tedious in the extreme, even for the players that were acting on their own) through an entire game session while the rest of us tried to wait out the spell casting. Had the other two players been willing to sit tight, the entire party would have become much more powerful in the space of about 10 minutes. Given the over-powered nature of the campaign, this might have caught us up, but that's about all it would have done. Instead, we all had a very frustrating experience, and it soured us on the campaign, and on each other. Seriously, the hostility between the players who wanted to wait out the magic using and those who decided to explore the sewers was intense.Lesson - Do not play the players off against each other like that, and NEVER deliberately bore a player. Some in-game conflict can be fun to play out if everyone keeps it to the characters. But when the players themselves have very different goals in mind, a GM should either help to resolve the potential conflict or let them resolve it themselves. Making it worse, or deliberately using it as a ploy to undermine a player strategy is a really bad idea. Issues like that are the sort of thing that ruins the fun and ends a campaign. 3) Too many mixed signals deprives players of a means of making any decisions. This was actually almost cool, but in the long run it soured me on the campaign. The GM would have big NPCs guide us in completely different directions, and every time the group settled on a direction we were soon given good reason to reverse our course. Even the gods gave us contradictory advice, and no sooner did we have a course of action, than some minion of the gods would show up half way through the adventure to tell us we would all be killed if we didn't turn around. In the long run, it just became impossible to make a decision with any degree of confidence that the reasons for making it would not turn out to have been false. In time, I stopped caring, and so did the other players. There was simply no basis for making any decisions, and that took the fun out of the role-playing. We began to ignore all advice and do whatever we felt like, which then angered the GM. Several times he commented that we had ignored important advice, not realizing apparently that he had never provided us with advice that had not proven bad at one point or another.And part of the problem here is that virtually every game session was framed for us. It wasn't really an open campaign. So, we were constantly presented with a sort of "next week you'll go here" proposition only to find out half way through that we really shouldn't do that after all. So, in effect, every game was a GM proposition to the players (via the NPCs) followed by a "Nevermind."  Lesson: A good curve ball is the stuff of great drama, but too many at the same time leaves players with no leverage over the game. Let the players have some means of resolving the questions you frame for them. You can always unravel today's givens later, but always leave the players with reason to believe some part of their world makes sense.4) The first time we got help from a powerful NPC was pretty cool. We needed it and we all breathed a sigh of relief to have the help. But this continued for game after game. We never did catch up to the level of challenge we faced and so we always needed overpowered NPCs to help us. After watching the GM play himself for half a dozen games and hope just to help out a little on the side, we finally tried to escape the major plots and just put ourselves in the middle a small war that we could handle. When this too resulted in playing second string during a battle between a lesser deity and a great dragon, the lesson for me anyway was that there was no escape from side-kick status. I deliberately triggered a free attack on my character, getting him killed and left the campaign.Lesson: Use the over-powered help sparingly. I've done it myself, but seeing the mechanism overused so badly really made an impression. I have refrained from doing so ever since.5) This wasn't the GM. It was me and the players. We never talked to the GM. It would have been hard doing so, because the GM was not the most approachable person in any event. Still, no-one tried. Looking back on it, it's a lesson for me as a player and as a GM.Lesson - Player: If you're not happy with a campaign, say something. Don't be rude and don't tell the GM what he should do, but let the GM know what he is doing that is a problem for you. Maybe he'll be responsive and maybe he won't. But try.Lesson - GM: Be approachable. Don't just be willing to discuss problems, but make that willingness clear. That way maybe you'll know something is wrong before people start leaving your game table.</blockquote>

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