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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jeffh" data-source="post: 1512414" data-attributes="member: 2642">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.)</blockquote>

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