I quit 4e-DM after my first day.

[ssampier]

Take your ball and go home

Good for you. You shouldn't have to stand for that.

Now you're hobby-less and friendless. Time to make new friends. I would suggest you try again with a more mature group. If you don't feel up to DMing, let one of new older friends DM. You can help out the DM until you feel up to it.

And yes, there are jerks in every age group.

 

[Celebrim]

Usually a DM learns this particular lesson somewhat later in his career.

The basic problem is that you did not communicate with the players enough before starting the game.

You also gave the players too much freedom when creating their characters.

The failure of the campaign has two primary sources:

1) The party had mixed motivations. Without overall guidelines different players created characters with incompatible motivations.
2) You apparantly envisioned a heroic adventure path style campaign, since you were trying to salvage a story line after the death of an NPC. Most of your players apparantly envisioned a villianous sandbox style campaign, and you were ill-prepared both in terms of experience and I would guess by inclination to provide such to them.

If you can resolve those two conflicts, you can salvage the campaign or at least do a do-over with a better defined social contract.

 

[Edgewood]

When I start with a new batch of players I usually give them a run down on their character creation with the following:

"They must be heroic. I don’t mean that they have to be muscular with all 18 stats. What I mean is that your character needs to have something of the optimistic hero within in him. No lone wolf/Batman/Antihero stuff please. We’re going to be playing the part of heroes. Let’s do this right from the bottom up. Does this mean that you all have to get along all of the time? No. Does this mean that you’re a bunch of goody goodies running around saving lost kittens and Grandma’s apple pie? Certainly not. But you can if you want. No, you need to be a hero. Someone who will sacrifice themself for the greater good. To do it because it’s the right thing to do, not because there is money to be had (although money and loot are fun)!!
Have your character make sense in the context. What I mean here is, don’t traipse in with someone not fitting to the setting. Making a Barbarian is great, but remember that there are rarely any barbarians in the Divided Kingdoms. If you plan to go that route, you’ll have to convince me that he makes sense.
I am trusting you with your rolls. This is the honour system. We’re all adults here wanting to have a fun time. I am counting on you to be honest."

Hope that helps somewhat.

 

[firesnakearies]

Reminds me of...

The Streets of Muskeegie

 

[renau1g]

U
The failure of the campaign has two primary sources:

1) The party had mixed motivations. Without overall guidelines different players created characters with incompatible motivations.
2) You apparantly envisioned a heroic adventure path style campaign, since you were trying to salvage a story line after the death of an NPC. Most of your players apparantly envisioned a villianous sandbox style campaign, and you were ill-prepared both in terms of experience and I would guess by inclination to provide such to them.

If you can resolve those two conflicts, you can salvage the campaign or at least do a do-over with a better defined social contract.

I think you're giving way, way too much credit to his "friends". Envisioning a villianous sandbox game isn't the default assumption of anyone who has played the game before (unless the OP forgot to mention that all their other games together have been along this line, but yeah, barring that it seems extremely unlikely). So, the players were being "asshats" as someone upthread called them. Either they just wanted to eff-around with you or were being jack-asses for whatever reason, I certainly wouldn't want to game with them. Oh, a hint for you though. If your players start acting like asshats again, don't pull punches. If they're level 1's a whole crew should be able to overwhelm them.

I had a situation where I tried to run an evil-aligned campaign. It was mostly fine, but one time the elf monk decided to be a jackass and went into a random shop keeps store and prepared to burn the place down...for no reason. We had a decently high tech option with this game, so the shop keeper pulled out a rifle from behind his counter. The player was warned IC that he better not be trying what I think he's trying. The player then threw the alchemist fire down and started the fire. The shopkeep then opened fire on him. Crit hit and he won initiative and fired again, another solid hit that sent the elf into ko-land.

We talked about it after and he was better after, but he was also told, don't do stupid stuff like that in my games, it's a waste of time and unfair to the other players.

We were teenagers then as you might've guessed

 

[Celebrim]

I think you're giving way, way too much credit to his "friends". Envisioning a villianous sandbox game isn't the default assumption of anyone who has played the game before...

I believe that is where you go wrong. You are making assumptions about the composition, play-style, and inclinations of players and groups that are probably based on your own experience.

My experience is atypical for the hobby I think because it is based on having moved a lot over the course of my life, searching for and finding or even creating play groups a half-dozen times and playing with a dozen or more groups.

In my experience, about half the groups and players out there either explicitly play (chaotic) evil as their preferred alignment or else play games where alignment is downplayed or deprecated, but were it not, would be described as chaotic evil. In fact, I've also seen at least two attempts at campaigns die in the first session because the DM said, "Make characters", and half the players showed up with evil characters and the other half with heroic ones. The problem you immediately run into is that these characters have absolutely no reason to be working together, as well as the fact that the players tend to realize that they don't have enough in common with the other players to actually form a group.

In point of fact, I've observed this situation often enough that I could give out a questionairre about the players preferred style of play, and I'd lay money that I'd be able to pick out ahead of time with very minimal knowledge which players would pick playing villains in a world where everything is shades of grey/black, and which prefer playing heroes in a world of clear black and white.

So, unless you are willing to label whole classes of people 'asshats' for how they play a game (which I know is a popular pasttime here at EnWorld) you are going to need a different explanation. And in any event, at the very least, allow me to suggest that this explanation is not a particularly useful one to the OP.

We were teenagers you might have guessed.

Why would I have guessed that unless I had some particularly sterotyped view of how 'mature' players play the game?

 

[renau1g]

wow...1/2? I've played in quite a lot of groups myself and never seen it the "default" play-style. It's funny that you say that my viewpoint is wrong because it's based on my experiences, but your's is based on your own experiences, which is the very thing you just critized me for My comment is that the OP has said "So, I've played with this group of friends on many things, DnD 3.5 and 4e, card games, ect" and therefore one could reasonably surmise that he is at least somewhat familiar with their playstyle correct? Therefore, if said DM was caught off-guard by the players actions one would then come to the conclusion that the group does not regularly play that way as otherwise the DM wouldn't get so upset they come onto a messaeg board to complain about it.

I wouldn't call those groups who do play like this asshats as that's their version of fun so whatever floats your boat, however their DM likely goes in with eyes wide open and all that so they know what to expect. Way to read too much into my post though. However, I will put forth that D&D, especially 4e is not defaulted to an evil group, heck you can't be Evil in LFR, so that's my basis for assuming that most 4e groups are not psychopathic CE individuals. The rules aren't great for it, PvP is really more who wins initiative (and who's the striker or wizard), I'm sure there's other systems out there that are a better fit for it.

My point to the OP? I'd look for a new group if they aren't willing to work with you, if they are? Cool, but as you spent a lot of prep time getting ready for the game it's not cool.

 

[jeffh]

As soon as he got to the dragonborn starting to eat people I came to the conclusion that this was a troll; both the story and the idea of blaming the game for this struck me as too absurd to take seriously. In particular, he explicitly says they've played together before, at least twice (since there were two different editions involved), presumably without such a result or he would have mentioned it. Does it make sense to anyone that he would then turn around and quit the game over something like this?

It distresses me to see so many people, including familiar names I know to be generally intelligent, take this story at face value when it seems so clearly the sort of thing one posts just to get a reaction.

 

[Celebrim]

wow...1/2? I've played in quite a lot of groups myself and never seen it the "default" play-style. It's funny that you say that my viewpoint is wrong because it's based on my experiences, but your's is based on your own experiences, which is the very thing you just critized me for

Errr...so you are saying...

"I've never seen groups with this playstyle so it can't be the default assumption of anyone" ['Envisioning a villianous sandbox game isn't the default assumption of anyone who has played the game before']

...isn't actually refuted by...

"My experience is otherwise, so it can be."?

Are you sure about that? Generally speaking, if you say something like 'isn't the default assumption of anyone', I don't think it a logical fallacy to suggest that this claim is disproved by the existance of at least one group where that isn't true. My claim was that you needed to ammend your statement to "isn't the default assumption of anyone in my experience", which may well be true, but it is a very diferent claim.

My comment is that the OP has said "So, I've played with this group of friends on many things, DnD 3.5 and 4e, card games, ect" and therefore one could reasonably surmise that he is at least somewhat familiar with their playstyle correct?

No. Prior DMs may have enforced a social contract on the players which they felt was removed when he asked his players to 'be creative'. Freed from the constraints imposed by other DMs, apparantly 3 of the 4 players opted for chaotic evil. This does not surprise me. You probably had some combination of players who self-identify/empathize with evil characters more than heroic ones, and players who want to free themselves from either real world or game constraints and act out something they don't normally experience. I've seen both kinds. I've met players who were incapable of playing evil PC's because they found it distasteful, and I've met players who were incapable of playing good PC's for the same reason.

Heck, in the early '80's I knew of several groups (composed of older gamers than myself) who would have fit BADD's sterotype of drug abusing, satan worshiping, RPGer's who tried to cast real spells in the midst of their sessions. In college, I wrote a couple of papers on the history of RPGs, and in my research I found a few graduate students who had written books/dissertations on similar topics and discovered, not really to my surprise, that these sorts of groups were - while by no means typical - not in fact that uncommon. The novelization of the movie E.T. is in my opinion quite spot on its depiction of RP groups of the period, and this includes two adult groups I knew of (one an older cousin was in, the other a teacher). Honestly, towards the end of the 80's and in the early 90's based on my experience talking to other players, I felt like I was the one oddball who didn't prefer CE characters and who didn't disparage Paladins as being an empediment to play (mind you, these players never seemed to think Assassins fit in the same category).

I read the above story and I say, "Yeah, I've been there." I read the above story and I imagine the players saying things like, "Can you believe that #$!#@ created a paladin!", or "He's just not cut out to be a DM, railroading us like that after he asked us to be creative!"

I wouldn't call those groups who do play like this asshats as that's their version of fun so whatever floats your boat, however their DM likely goes in with eyes wide open and all that so they know what to expect.

No, I don't think so. I think it takes DMing experience to go into these situations with eyes wide open, and he clearly doesn't have it.

Way to read too much into my post though. However, I will put forth that D&D, especially 4e is not defaulted to an evil group...

Sure, and neither is Cattlepunk, but KotDT is quite spot on in some ways albiet in a manner exagerrated to make the point humorously. But, just as many metal bands reported not finding 'This is Spinal Tap' to be humorous because it frequently struck so close to home that they felt too much empathy for the performers to laugh at them, so I think at times KotDT ought to strike the same sort of chords in a DM. Some times, it's funny because its true, and sometimes it's too true to be funny.

 

[LostSoul]

Why did you have an expectation as to how the PCs would act?

It seems like they broke that expectation... but I would argue that it's not a DM's job to care.