D&D General How Was Your Last Session?

[Imaculata]

They were thrilled.

I was not.

That sounds like a fantastic session. If the players have that much fun (even if they do cheese the encounter), I am happy as a DM. Being surprised by the resourcefulness of your players is one of the joys of being a DM.

 

[THEMNGMNT]

That sounds like a fantastic session. If the players have that much fun (even if they do cheese the encounter), I am happy as a DM. Being surprised by the resourcefulness of your players is one of the joys of being a DM.

I'm being tongue-in-cheek in my post. It was a fantastic session. And I totally agree that being surprised by players is one of the greatest (or even the greatest) joys as a DM.

But.

I've wanted to run that epic fight in the Sodden Hold for years!

 

[Umbran]

They were thrilled.

I was not.

Well, next time remember - no plan survives contact with the players.

 

[RangerWickett]

I intended to run a 3-part murder mystery over Zoom. We had part 4 on Monday, and the party only just discovered the murder victim.

I was perhaps too optimistic about my ability to smoothly set up a mystery with 10 suspects. It involves roleplaying a lot of NPCs. But apparently the players are into it.

 

[Azuresun]

My Primeval Thule game:

The PC's needed a boat to get off the cursed island they found themselves in, and convincingly bushwacked the slavers who had an outpost there. It was an entertaining stomp--one highlight was a panicked enemy jumping into the water of the docks, and the dwarf barbarian jumping in after him! Afterwards, they headed towards Ikath, the "City of Serpents" known as a lawless city of vice. They took advantage of this, partying hard after their brushes with death or slavery, formally deciding to work together and looking for work. They got offers from an ambitious lieutenant of the local crime lord, an Atlantean aristocrat and a sinister sorcerer who only spoke through his bodyguard ("Mighty Raan-Soloth has deigned to offer you great rewards if you perform a task suitable even for your limited intellect.....") The warlock of Hastur had disturbing dreams of Carcosa somewhere in the middle of all that and woke up to find new rituals copied into his Book of Shadows.

Spoiler

I'm basing this on a suggested campaign arc from the PT book, where all three of them are offering the PC's the same quest--the two patrons they refuse (and their minions) will become their rivals.

One thing I really liked was how the PC's are coming out of their shells and beginning to roleplay more--it got a cheer / groan from the group when I asked how the group were waking up after their night of partying (when the patrons contacted them), and the aforementioned dwarf replied "in a stable".

 

[pogre]

But lately the campaign has become a bit of a slog, and it feels as if neither the DM nor the players' hearts are into it.

It puzzles me a bit. I've never had any issues like this with any of my own campaigns. But it seems that with this particular DM, discussions like this come up every few months or so. Now some players feel like quiting this campaign entirely, which would be a shame. But honestly, if we all have doubts regarding whether any of this will improve in future sessions, then perhaps putting a stop to it is the best thing to do.

I'm curious to hear if others have been in similar situations like this...

If I am not having fun playing - I leave the campaign. If I am not enjoying running the campaign - I shut it down.

If I ever begin to dread a session - that's a clue for me to move on.

No gaming is better than bad gaming. YMMV

Were you kind of relieved the session was cancelled?

Our biggest complaints were the railroading, the slowness of the sessions, and how our DM was prone to handing us a list of possible actions, instead of letting us think for ourselves.

From an outsider's perspective -
1st slow play is a cardinal sin for me.
2nd railroading can be alright - if it leads to real fun.
3rd a DM offering solutions sounds like a person who would rather be playing the game than running the game.

 

[Imaculata]

Were you kind of relieved the session was cancelled?

Honestly? Yes. There were better ways for me to spend my afternoon. Plus the heavy discussion put noone in the mood to play.

3rd a DM offering solutions sounds like a person who would rather be playing the game than running the game.

That is possible, but it also ties into the railroading. Our DM does not seem to understand that he shouldn't be steering our actions as players. His description of a scene should be enough for us to decide a course of action. Instead he continues by also telling us what our next actions could be. Thinking up solutions is half the fun of being a player, but he takes that fun away from us all the time, or pidgeon-holes us into doing one of his suggested actions, by making our own ideas impossible. He does not wait for us to think up a response, and immediately makes suggestions regarding our next course of action; either explicitly as a DM, or through one of his many npc's, who hand the solution to us. He seems obsessed with steering us into a preferred direction. It also feels like we get punished whenever we ignore his suggested actions.

Also quite often abilities that our characters have, suddenly stop working, or the rules for them are changed, to further rob us of autonomy and control. While I believe the DM has the right to houserule some things, I think the rules exist for a reason and should be applied consistently. If the DM find situational reasons to change how our feats work, then why did we pick them?

 

[pogre]

... but it also ties into the railroading. Our DM does not seem to understand that he shouldn't be steering our actions as players. His description of a scene should be enough for us to decide a course of action. Instead he continues by also telling us what our next actions could be. Thinking up solutions is half the fun of being a player, but he takes that fun away from us all the time, or pidgeon-holes us into doing one of his suggested actions, by making our own ideas impossible. He does not wait for us to think up a response, and immediately makes suggestions regarding our next course of action; either explicitly as a DM, or through one of his many npc's, who hand the solution to us. He seems obsessed with steering us into a preferred direction. It also feels like we get punished whenever we ignore his suggested actions.

Also quite often abilities that our characters have, suddenly stop working, or the rules for them are changed, to further rob us of autonomy and control. While I believe the DM has the right to houserule some things, I think the rules exist for a reason and should be applied consistently. If the DM find situational reasons to change how our feats work, then why did we pick them?

That is tough. I can feel your frustration. I certainly would not last long in a campaign like that.

 

[pogre]

We had an interesting session this past Thursday. The PCs blew up a tavern at the request of the owner. It was a trap engineered to take out some enemies of the owner from a past life who were coming after him and make it look like he had perished too. Some close calls with the gunpowder trap, but in the end - mission accomplished.

I had the whole tavern laid out and the players enjoyed gathering info and planning/engineering the trap.

 

[Blue]

Last session was .. decent and fun filler.

Our now 10th level campaign changed scope two sessions ago as a result of player agency, moving to a much bigger one but one where we also can't really return to where we were without undermining what we want to happen.

Last session the DM ran a beautiful start to this larger scope, getting the all-religious party involved in someone escaped from the lands of the dead profaning and collecting artifacts of the gods, and slaying the oracle we were seeing. Big plot set up. We ended the session sailing away from the oracle's isle with her dead body, fireballing some opposing ships (much bigger but slower) on the way out to delay our foe.

Then the DM is like "where do you sail next" in an open-world sort of way, but none of the characters (nor any of the players) have any information about this larger context. We randomly picked a place by name, and the DM started working on it for the next (this past) session. (It was a bit after that which we realized that we had a bunch of divination magic we could pull out but not the expensive material components for some of it, so we didn't go for that yet.)

So we had a good session exploring a destroyed and profaned temple to our shared (mostly) goddess, and ended the session mid epic battle because we ran way over on time and one of the players had work early today.

As a session, it was fun exploration and discovery, some RP, some puzzles, some combat. But in the larger scheme it feels like we can't make meaningful choices where to go next, and this place isn't giving us what we need either in terms of clues or ability to purchase specific expensive spell components to use Divination. So it's filler and we're soon again going to be at the crossroads of telling the DM where we want to sail next without being able to make it a meaningful choice.