awesomeocalypse
First Post
I have a group of about 8 people that I play D&D with. That is, not that we all play at the same time (which would be hectic), but rather that I have about a half dozen friends and acquaintances who I know live in the area and play D&D, and so pretty much every time I play the players and DM are all drawn from that group. Most of the time 4-7 of us will be playing a given campaign, and typically, there are 2 different campaigns running (we play one of them on wednesdays, one on sundays).
I DM in one of these campaigns, and play in the other. I enjoy being both a player and a DM. However, DMing is a pretty big time commitment, and between a job and some quasi-semblance of a normal social life, I really don't have enough time to handle more than one campaign at time.
For the last couple years, the go-to DM for our other campaign has been a guy I'll call, for the purposes of this thread, "Gary".
Gary is, in many ways, the best DM I've ever known, let alone played with. He is a somewhat older guy than the rest of us, and a D&D *fanatic*. I have never known *anyone* to do the amount of prep work he does. I mean, almost to an absurd level. He doesn't just map out his campaign world or prepare pcs, he does things like actually inventing recipes for foods that will be served in the world, and then serving it to us mid-session to give us a taste of what our characters are tasting (this actually happened). He spends insane amounts of time getting "in-character" for important NPCs, practicing on his own to get in-character almost the way an actor would, and he even got a voice-changer to do BBEG voices. He has soundtracks to each session.
He also, beyond all the gimmicks and obsessiveness (which admittedly, for all I kinda make fun of them, really do enhance immersion), is just a great storyteller and designer of encounters and adventures. He has that rare knack for giving you the sense that you have all the freedom of a sandbox, while still moving through a terrific, cohesive story. He's one of the only DMs I've played with who, if I take the time to create a massive backstory for my character and really work on him, will take what I've done and run with it and make it even more awesome than I had initially imagined. Frankly, as a player my favorite adventures have nearly all been in one of his campaigns, and as a DM he consistently puts me to shame and forces me to up my own game.
The problem is that for all that Gary is a terrific DM, Gary is a jerk. Because he knows how awesome he is at DMing, and because he has essentially no life beyond the game, he has a massive entitlement complex. Not in the sense of railroading or abritrary banning/nerfing--he's very good at giving players freedom, and at not punishing them for doing what they want to do instead of what he wants to do.
No, his sense of entitlement doesn't come through in the game itself, but rather comes through more in that he's just...not nice. And he expects us to put up with it. Our group contains a few girls, but whenever they aren't there he becomes wierdly mysogonistic and kinda creepy, and I get the sense that he hates women or something. He has no tact whatsoever, and not just in the "awkward nerd without social skills" way, more like an
who just insults people because he feels like he can (for example: one of our players, whose a good friend of mine from way back in middle school and one of the nicest dudes I know, works as a mechanic, and Gary constantly makes cracks about him not having gone to college. Like, the guy forgets to add some random buff modifier, and Gary is immediately like, "not to good at the math, huh? I hear Devry is taking apps"--yeah, he's that much of a douche).
For a while, because our sessions with him were so game focused, and he really did do such a wonderful job as a DM, we put up with it. But over the last 6 months or so it really started to get worse, and Gary started to get even wierder. The breaking point came a couple months ago, when one of our players missed a session. Gary has a strict, "you can't miss more than 1 sessions in a row rule", which normally I'm fine with. However, the week after that, this player's sister was in a terrible car accident that left her in really bad shape, and so he went home to see her and obviously couldn't make it...and Gary freaked out about his "lack of commitment" and kicked him out.
At that point, the rest of us said screw it and left. The unfun things about playing with Gary just came to outweigh the fun things.
The problem is that since we're all gamers who are fairly addicted to our hobby, we'd really like to keep playing. Another one of my friends, who for the sake of this thread I'll call "Ted" volunteered to DM our Sunday games.
Ted's a good guy, a much nicer and vastly better adjusted person than Gary. But he's not really a good DM. He does minimal preparation and essentially just lays out encounters, but then he's pretty bad at improvisation and can't really handle a sandbox, so for the past few months we've just been railroaded through encounter after encounter, and people are starting to get pretty bored, including Ted.
It used to be that the entire group would gather round the table, completely rapt and into it and eager to see what would happen next. I came to really care not just about my character(s), but about the other PCs as well. I would leave each session amped up and having had a blast, and even when I was alone I'd spend time thinking about my character and what I wanted to do next with him.
Now...people are marginally invested. People are wandering, texting, whatever. Nobody cares all that much about any of the "stories" we're supposed to be playing through. It just isn't that much fun anymore.
People have asked me to DM sundays as well, but I don't really have the time to prep for two sessions a week, and to be perfectly honest, while I do love DMing, sometimes I just want to play.
Nobody else in our group really feels like DMing.
So we have a few options:
1.) Keep playing with Ted. Look for adventures and supplements that will make it easier for him to actually run a fun game without doing more prep than he's prepared for. Lower our expectations, and accept that that will be our casual, hack'n'slash beer and pretzels session.
2.) Go crawling back to Gary and hope that losing all of his players was enough of a system shock that he's prepared to not be an (unlikely, in my experience), or accept that he's a dick, but just try to get beyond that to enjoy the game.
3.) Game 50% less than we do.
Frankly, none of these sound that appealing to me. I'm wondering if you guys will have any suggestions for a different way to handle this, or ways to make one of these outcomes more palatable (.e.g if you happen to know a really fun 4e adventure that doesn't ask too much of a DM, I'd love to know about it so I can recommend it to Ted).
I DM in one of these campaigns, and play in the other. I enjoy being both a player and a DM. However, DMing is a pretty big time commitment, and between a job and some quasi-semblance of a normal social life, I really don't have enough time to handle more than one campaign at time.
For the last couple years, the go-to DM for our other campaign has been a guy I'll call, for the purposes of this thread, "Gary".
Gary is, in many ways, the best DM I've ever known, let alone played with. He is a somewhat older guy than the rest of us, and a D&D *fanatic*. I have never known *anyone* to do the amount of prep work he does. I mean, almost to an absurd level. He doesn't just map out his campaign world or prepare pcs, he does things like actually inventing recipes for foods that will be served in the world, and then serving it to us mid-session to give us a taste of what our characters are tasting (this actually happened). He spends insane amounts of time getting "in-character" for important NPCs, practicing on his own to get in-character almost the way an actor would, and he even got a voice-changer to do BBEG voices. He has soundtracks to each session.
He also, beyond all the gimmicks and obsessiveness (which admittedly, for all I kinda make fun of them, really do enhance immersion), is just a great storyteller and designer of encounters and adventures. He has that rare knack for giving you the sense that you have all the freedom of a sandbox, while still moving through a terrific, cohesive story. He's one of the only DMs I've played with who, if I take the time to create a massive backstory for my character and really work on him, will take what I've done and run with it and make it even more awesome than I had initially imagined. Frankly, as a player my favorite adventures have nearly all been in one of his campaigns, and as a DM he consistently puts me to shame and forces me to up my own game.
The problem is that for all that Gary is a terrific DM, Gary is a jerk. Because he knows how awesome he is at DMing, and because he has essentially no life beyond the game, he has a massive entitlement complex. Not in the sense of railroading or abritrary banning/nerfing--he's very good at giving players freedom, and at not punishing them for doing what they want to do instead of what he wants to do.
No, his sense of entitlement doesn't come through in the game itself, but rather comes through more in that he's just...not nice. And he expects us to put up with it. Our group contains a few girls, but whenever they aren't there he becomes wierdly mysogonistic and kinda creepy, and I get the sense that he hates women or something. He has no tact whatsoever, and not just in the "awkward nerd without social skills" way, more like an
who just insults people because he feels like he can (for example: one of our players, whose a good friend of mine from way back in middle school and one of the nicest dudes I know, works as a mechanic, and Gary constantly makes cracks about him not having gone to college. Like, the guy forgets to add some random buff modifier, and Gary is immediately like, "not to good at the math, huh? I hear Devry is taking apps"--yeah, he's that much of a douche).For a while, because our sessions with him were so game focused, and he really did do such a wonderful job as a DM, we put up with it. But over the last 6 months or so it really started to get worse, and Gary started to get even wierder. The breaking point came a couple months ago, when one of our players missed a session. Gary has a strict, "you can't miss more than 1 sessions in a row rule", which normally I'm fine with. However, the week after that, this player's sister was in a terrible car accident that left her in really bad shape, and so he went home to see her and obviously couldn't make it...and Gary freaked out about his "lack of commitment" and kicked him out.
At that point, the rest of us said screw it and left. The unfun things about playing with Gary just came to outweigh the fun things.
The problem is that since we're all gamers who are fairly addicted to our hobby, we'd really like to keep playing. Another one of my friends, who for the sake of this thread I'll call "Ted" volunteered to DM our Sunday games.
Ted's a good guy, a much nicer and vastly better adjusted person than Gary. But he's not really a good DM. He does minimal preparation and essentially just lays out encounters, but then he's pretty bad at improvisation and can't really handle a sandbox, so for the past few months we've just been railroaded through encounter after encounter, and people are starting to get pretty bored, including Ted.
It used to be that the entire group would gather round the table, completely rapt and into it and eager to see what would happen next. I came to really care not just about my character(s), but about the other PCs as well. I would leave each session amped up and having had a blast, and even when I was alone I'd spend time thinking about my character and what I wanted to do next with him.
Now...people are marginally invested. People are wandering, texting, whatever. Nobody cares all that much about any of the "stories" we're supposed to be playing through. It just isn't that much fun anymore.
People have asked me to DM sundays as well, but I don't really have the time to prep for two sessions a week, and to be perfectly honest, while I do love DMing, sometimes I just want to play.
Nobody else in our group really feels like DMing.
So we have a few options:
1.) Keep playing with Ted. Look for adventures and supplements that will make it easier for him to actually run a fun game without doing more prep than he's prepared for. Lower our expectations, and accept that that will be our casual, hack'n'slash beer and pretzels session.
2.) Go crawling back to Gary and hope that losing all of his players was enough of a system shock that he's prepared to not be an
(unlikely, in my experience), or accept that he's a dick, but just try to get beyond that to enjoy the game.3.) Game 50% less than we do.
Frankly, none of these sound that appealing to me. I'm wondering if you guys will have any suggestions for a different way to handle this, or ways to make one of these outcomes more palatable (.e.g if you happen to know a really fun 4e adventure that doesn't ask too much of a DM, I'd love to know about it so I can recommend it to Ted).
