How to Deal with a difficult DM?

[MadMaxim]

Well, I've had quite a few discussions with my DM concerning everything from rules to style of play. The discussions have become pretty heated from time to time and we haven't always been able to conclude them properly. He believes that our group is more interested in hack 'n' slash than NPC interaction and roleplaying, but he has never really served up anything that could put his assumption to the test. He also believes that combat takes up way too much time in every session (each session lasts for about 5-6 hours) and that's the reason why he has to compress his campaign to make us able to complete it in a couple of months.

When I DM (in the same group), I try to mix a little bit of everything into my campaign, but I put the emphasis on combat, as it is usually where everyone gets a chance to shine and my group enjoys combat. If I've prepared too much (if we don't have time to finish it), I just try to find a suitable place to stop instead of rushing it. But that's just me and my DM...

 

[MadMaxim]

Ups... Double post...

 

[welby]

The players in my campaign and I all recently left our bad DM, after several (and I mean a lot) frustrating talks trying to explain why we weren't having fun. Rather than listening, he repeatedly defended himself and insisted that the fault lay with us.

We now play in one of the best campaigns ever, without him. Leaving and making our own campaign was a good decision for us, but I wish it could have been done without the hard feelings. As the unofficial spokesman for the players, our old DM sees me as the bad guy. I guess everyone needs someone to blame when all of your players leave you.

 

[takyris]

My group recently had somebody else DM, giving me a break for a few weeks.

Disaster.

Utter railroad through "Speaker in Dreams", which, I found out later from other folks, is actually rather open-ended as modules go. He described things poorly and then penalized us for not asking questions like "Well, is it wearing clothes? Do the clothes have pockets?" He gave us inadequate detail on damage. At one point, he actually said, "Look, this is the hand of plot. The hand of plot is telling you that you can't get into this building until you go clear the temple!"

While I was less than thrilled, it was nice to play, even in an utter railroad, and pretty stupid one at that. But when he finished, and he looked at us as if expecting thanks, and we should sat there, shell-shocked, none of us wanting to say, "Wow, that sucked," but none of us quite willing to lie to him and tell him it was fun... that was a sad moment. In retrospect, I should have sucked it up and lied.

 

[Felon]

Just recently he tossed a full fledged Frost Giant, ECl=9/10 at us. It wouldn't've been too bad if we'd been a few levels higher... But for a party of avg level 3, this was a touch extraordinaire. Luckily, we only lost the first level ranger - the 5th level cleric had two hold persons ready and we survived - more on luck than anything. And this was a random encounter!

I talked with him in the beginning - that did no good. I talked to the other players - that did little good other than letting us all agree on various elements of the complaint and feel a little better. In the end, since it's the only game in my neck o' the woods, I just learned how to accept his strange gm style. I'm now the unofficial rules lawyer though - as I struggle to keep him on the straight and narrow regarding blatant inconsistent rulings

We've handled it in a mature fashion so far. However, if a different game beckoned, or I had the chance to run my own again - I would take it with little regret.

I echo the curiosity at why you don't just start your own campaign with your fellow frustrated gamers. Maybe your bad DM will learn a thing or two. Or maybe you will

And I also echo the sentiment that it was nice of the DM to allow hold person to work on that giant.

Some DM's completely buy into the DM-vs-player mentality. I think it's valid, as long he's forthright about it. A lot of folks come to D&D from wargaming, and it's what they know best.

 

[takyris]

I think that there are two very different aspects of DMing -- Game Preparation and Game Execution.

Some DMs are out to beat the PCs in Game Preparation ("Aha, THIS will throw them for a loop! They can't even hit this with their best weapons!") but then turn into softies for the Execution, offering lots of ways out and chances to work around things. Other DMs are pretty general in Game Preparatoin but then turn into death machines for Execution ("Well, you're here and here and here, so a fireball, followed by Black Tentacles, followed by flanking here and here, and I can kill everyone in two rouns!").

Either type can be good or bad -- it depends on how well it's done in each case. One of my fellow RBDMs swears by "Make a killer encounter, but then allow the PCs to succeed when they try to work around it," and it seems to work really really well. When I've tried it that way, my players have gotten unhappy with me, saying I was just negating any real chance of legitimate victory and forcing things into a "DM lets us win" category. That's probably because I wasn't doing it very well. The other end, playing an encounter hard and trying hard to defeat the PCs, is also good -- but if you're doing that, you shouldn't also be planning a tough encounter. After all, you wouldn't want to play in a wargame against someone who got to decide what the terrain looked like, what forces you had, what forces he had, and who could come up with rules on the fly to nerf many of your abilities, would you? I wouldn't.

 

[mythago]

This is a classic psychological problem called blaming the victim.

Um, no. "Blaming the victim" here would be telling the players it's their fault the GM is a bonehead--because they're bad role-players or "provoke" him or somesuch.

It's not blaming the victim to say "Why don't you use this obvious solution"--in this case, quitting.

 

[milotha]

Um, no. "Blaming the victim" here would be telling the players it's their fault the GM is a bonehead--because they're bad role-players or "provoke" him or somesuch.

It's not blaming the victim to say "Why don't you use this obvious solution"--in this case, quitting.

So, you are implying that the person is too stupid to consider dropping the campaign. You are blaming the player then. Sometimes the "obvious solution" to a problem isn't really a solution. There might be other mitigating factors at play. I realize that many GMs don't want to consider this, as it could apply to their campaign.

 

[jeffh]

One of my players, until recently, ran a game with more or less my regular play group, because he had ideas he wanted to explore and I needed occasional breaks from DMing. I was in this game as a player for most of its existence, but I quit late last year for a variety of reasons. In concept, it was a pretty cool idea - a nice little self-contained setting with tons of flavour and built-in opportunities for adventures. And there were a few things, mainly running NPCs, that he did better than me. But there were some pretty serious problems with it.

The biggest was absolutely refusing to credit the characters with any intelligence. Far too often, the game felt like a so-called "puzzle" in a badly designed computer game, where after trying a bunch of stuff at random until you find what works, you go "How the &^@$ was I supposed to know to do that? And the answer, when we got one, was always something that would have been obvious to the characters, but that the GM refused to tell the players because they didn't ask the right questions. It was a lot like the "Are they wearing clothes?" comment earlier in the thread - it was always stuff that was every bit that obvious. What finally imploded the game was getting together for the first time in months, the players - having real lives and thus naturally not remembering much of the previous session - asking for a quick recap of why they were in the town they were in and what was going on in the plot, and the GM refusing to tell them.

Let that sink in for a second.

You tell me. What, besides an active and malicious desire to screw over the players, could possibly motivate such behaviour?
Is it fun?
Is it realistic? (Or even sane? In terms that are explicable to the characters, what could that possibly correspond to?)
Does it help the story?
Is it fair from a game standpoint?

When the answer to all four of those questions is not just no, but NO!!!, I would say you have a serious problem.

Basically the whole campaign was a mystery with virtually no actual clues, only the occasional mildly insulting comment from the GM about how we kept missing them. Well, some of the players in that game were smart cookies who like mysteries, and the clues still were, as far as we could tell, nonexistent. (At least three other players besides me felt that way, which was, at any point in the group's existence, enough to make a majority.) I said that to the GM in so many words at one point, and got nothing but a condescending grin by way of response, which was a big contributing factor in my decision to leave. If he was that uninterested in even hearing about the problems, I saw little reason to stick around. Apparently things got worse rather than better afterwards.

After the players gave him an earful regarding the above-mentioned stupid decision on his part, and some e-mail discussion ensued (to which I contributed some quotes from Usenet posters I respect, since he had ignored the exact same message when it came from me), he canceled the game - but not without one last cheap shot at the players for "not paying attention".

Sheesh.



(Sorry about the lack of constructive content. I just had to vent.)

 

[kamosa]

Basically the whole campaign was a mystery with virtually no actual clues, only the occasional mildly insulting comment from the GM about how we kept missing them. Well, some of the players in that game were smart cookies who like mysteries, and the clues still were, as far as we could tell, nonexistent. (At least three other players besides me felt that way, which was, at any point in the group's existence, enough to make a majority.) I said that to the GM in so many words at one point, and got nothing but a condescending grin by way of response, which was a big contributing factor in my decision to leave. If he was that uninterested in even hearing about the problems, I saw little reason to stick around. Apparently things got worse rather than better afterwards.

After the players gave him an earful regarding the above-mentioned stupid decision on his part, and some e-mail discussion ensued (to which I contributed some quotes from Usenet posters I respect, since he had ignored the exact same message when it came from me), he canceled the game - but not without one last cheap shot at the players for "not paying attention".

Sheesh.



(Sorry about the lack of constructive content. I just had to vent.)

I've noticed a lot of bad GM's resort to this blame the players/take cheap shots at them tactic. A good teacher never blames the students when the whole class fails and a good GM never blames all the players when they can't figure out what to do in the game.

Then later on they wonder why no constructive comments is lobbed their way. When someone throws this attitude at me, I just hold my tongue and move on. It isn't worth wading thru someones condescending attitude to try and get them to change.