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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(Psi)SeveredHead" data-source="post: 5725286" data-attributes="member: 1165">I agree. I've had two such experiences.One involved a GM-written system, although the system wasn't really the problem. It was high-lethality, so when a friend of mine and I joined, I decided to be a doctor/gunslinger (based on a completely inaccurate portrayal of Doc Halliday, who was a dentist for a few years in real life) and my friend decided to be a seller of cybernetic limbs. We were not in the least bit surprised that these talents were both desperately needed in our first session.Which wasn't bad, in fact, it turned out to be my favorite session. We were living on a "prison world", which was divided into numerous factions, some utterly insane. The worst of them was the "Walrod" because we couldn't ever remember his name.The Walrod's armies attacked "our side". Naturally, a gunslinger shouldn't be duking it out with an entire army. I took control of a heavy weapon system designed by a badly wounded PC and kicked much arse, blowing up squads of weak troops. However, I was also a bit upset as my character couldn't show off his gunslingin'. (I didn't know it then, but I would only get to shoot with a pistol once before I left.) I healed a PC sniper, fixing his two internal injuries but botching his less severe arm injury, costing him his arm. Cybernetic limbs...Unfortunately, despite our PC group having reasons to stick together, our characters just wouldn't communicate. I don't know why. The sniper PC, for instance, was played by a good roleplayer. He received a secret message from someone in the Walrod's camp to go free him, in return for secret info. Naturally, he told noone about this. He went, got into a fight with three corporate agents who ambushed him, and though he won he couldn't even walk afterward due to his injuries. Only then did he call for help. *Sigh* Since the other PCs were all busy doing nonsense, and our walkie-talkies never worked (literally) due to a stupid NPC constantly holding the talk button or something, I was barely able to pick up the call for help, and went and helped him out. I don't  know about you, but wouldn't a gunslinger have been handy in that situation? I talked to the player about that, and came to the conclusion that good RPing can apparently result in in-game idiocy. (His character was a paranoid, it seems. My character should have dosed his water supply with psychiatric drugs... but didn't.)I had to do that kind of thing a second time. The seller of exotic limbs tried to do a business deal with a group who just wanted to kill things, literally. He actually took someone with him, probably just to drive the van, but they were (or became) a redshirt, rather than, say, talking to another PC. Naturally he called for help when the large group of psychos threatened him. Naturally the comm system was fuzzy or whatever. I went over there, taking a really powerful robot NPC with us, on the grounds that taking on the whole group of psychopaths by myself was really dumb. (I would have taken other PCs with me, but IIRC they were all busy competing for DM time!) We were able to talk/intimidate our way out of the situation. No healing was necessary, as the red shirt had died.By this point I had gotten the hint. The group just couldn't coordinate. I'm not even sure if this was player-driven or not, but apparently you had to write your own plots, and couldn't take other PCs with you. (Not that I could get the DM to confirm this.) Here we all were competing for DM time, while he wanted us to test out the new heavy mecha rules (hint, gunslingers don't do mecha). After a few more disastrous sessions of trying to change things (which involved shooting a crazy PC with a knock-out drug after they had killed hundreds of innocent soldiers allied with our side), I left.The other was an Exalted campaign. I believed the hype, and the rules were decent but not great. But the issue here isn't rules. This time I was gaming with a group I'm much more familiar with (the group I'm DMing for now, although there's been some turnover).We made up our characters independently (in an RP sense, there's no classes so coordinating character builds wasn't an issue) and then couldn't. Tie. Them. Together.My own character was an assassin who really hated dragonkin or whatever the heck those things are. (He recalled his past life where he worked with them against the other Exalted, causing the fall of their previous empire.) One character, Xerxes, was a warlord who wanted to, what else, take over the world? Being an Exalt, he could do it too. Another character was into collecting magic trinkets, one was a goof-off who liked to shoot stuff (he wasn't there the first session), another wanted to breed yaks, and another wanted to build stuff. The last two were non-factors in the campaign, I'm honestly not sure why they were there.We all lived in the same place, and we were all Exalts, but that's all we had in common. Each session generally involved us all competing for DM time until we were down to the last hour, at which point we'd all coordinate to beat up a city.Remembering the previous experience, I attempted to link my character to the plot-drivers. Xerxes wanted to take over the world, and what army can't use an assassin? (My character figured that taking over the world meant killing a lot of dragon-things.) So I attached my non-charismatic character to his. He played realistically, for instance, having people spy on me (my character wasn't particularly trustworthy), but in-game we could work together anyway. At least until Xerxes' player had to move away. *Sigh*So then I linked up with the collector. He would dispatch me to kill interesting opponents and bring him their items. As a player who hates items, I didn't have a problem with killing things and delivering their stuff to someone else. Alas, that player HAD TO MOVE AWAY too!At some point we did manage to have fun. A neighboring super-powered nation tried to tax us. They were led by dragon-whatevers. So while we pretended to befriend them until we got strong enough to deal with them, I got Xerxes to hold the meeting in our zoo. Filled with exotic powerful creatures. And me with lock-picking skills... not only did the meeting end up with a lot of dragon-whatevers dead, it also meant the enemy had to react, if only by attacking us. I missed actual plot.But now we were left with PCs who couldn't work together at all. After a short while, the campaign just collapsed.Due to these experiences, I hate player-driven, both as a player and as a DM. There needs to be a plot.I have been in some partly-player-driven campaigns that worked well. In these cases, sometimes the PCs wrote part of the plot, but it was never more than one or two, and the rest went along with it. Other times the DM wrote part of the plot.That's what I meant by "partially played driven". <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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