Hello EN World,
A little back ground: A group of us from work who game in different venues began playing 4th Edition recently. 3-4 of us have some experience in old school AD&D. The guy who volunteered to DM had most of all the 3rd and 4th edition books and was excited to get playing. 2 guys were brand new and had never played PnP before. The DM initially had us all roll lvl 1 characters and started us off in Keep on the Shadowfell while he "prepared" his own campaign set in Forgotten Realms for us to enjoy.
The old timers were excited about playing again since it had been awhile. The 2 new comers loved the first session and dove right in buying up resources and couldn't wait for the next game session.
After about 4-5 months of regularly playing on Saturday nights for about 6-8 hours a night we have had only 1 surviving character from the beginning and he just made lvl 8. Everyone else is lvl 6 and 1 lvl 7. We have been mostly running his homebrew campaign which has been fairly lackluster and very illogical. Lots of poorly designed encounters, traps, npcs.
As a group of players we have had discussions on the side about what we dislike about the campaign and some things about his DM style that leads to a little frustration. First and fore most the campaign has not been prepared well. Nothing is fleshed out and everything seems to happen on the fly including the printing off of encounters from the Encounter generator WOTC provides just moments from encountering them. NPC's lack any personality or history, room layouts are poorly conceived, rehashing of the same encounter over and over, poorly designed traps that logically make no sense what so ever. The DM appears to be very "control freakish" he likes to manipulate the outcome of everything and almost pigeon hole us into going down some linear path instead of allowing the party to decide what we want to do. We actually think he manipulates dice rolls to his favor to dictate the outcome of combat. Like he'll miraculously hit our fighter with a 24 AC 6-8 times in a row until he is near death then suddenly nothing can hit it for 2-3 rounds of combat or some random NPC barbarian will fly out of nowhere to save the day.
While most of us enjoy caring about our characters its not a big deal if they die. We have all said let the dice determine the outcome of the game. If we kick ass, great. Adjust the difficulty next time. If we die so be it. We die and roll a new character or get lucky and get resurrected.
One of the newer guys got so into the game after a few weeks he has bought all the books and done tons of reading. He started asking questions like "How come we have all these skills but never roll difficulty checks against them?", "How come when we travel 2 weeks to some town nothing happens in between? Where are some side quests?". The newer players are even baffled and seem to recognize the lack of "depth" in our DM's homebrew campaign.
One of the old schoolers also mentioned he used to primarily DM for 15 years and made some comments on how he might be interested in running a campaign however when he hinted at it towards the current DM the current DM sort of shot it down or made a comment about how he could CO-DM. (lol).
We have all enjoyed playing the game but would like to see some things change. I'm looking for some advice on how to handle this type of DM. How would you approach him? We all like the guy, even though he can occasionally get a little annoying. We don't want to remove him from the group or not include him in the game. We just want to make our game sessions a little more entertaining. We have thought about maybe asking him to just run a pre made Adventure module to either allow him or a different DM the time to create their own campaign if that is their desire. We also feel like the campaign has progressed rather slowly. Some people feel like we should have leveled a little faster and we aren't certain if its due to the DM's lack of preparedness also causing us to slow down the game and/or give our improper rewards for encounters. <shrug> We were thinking maybe we could get a better idea of how a campaign should flow as well as hopefully give the DM some ideas on how to set up his own campaign better.
Would there be any particular adventure modules that others have played that they could recommend? Either starting new characters or taking our existing lvl 6-8 characters.
Any advice would be great. Sorry for the wall of text!
Thank you!
A little back ground: A group of us from work who game in different venues began playing 4th Edition recently. 3-4 of us have some experience in old school AD&D. The guy who volunteered to DM had most of all the 3rd and 4th edition books and was excited to get playing. 2 guys were brand new and had never played PnP before. The DM initially had us all roll lvl 1 characters and started us off in Keep on the Shadowfell while he "prepared" his own campaign set in Forgotten Realms for us to enjoy.
The old timers were excited about playing again since it had been awhile. The 2 new comers loved the first session and dove right in buying up resources and couldn't wait for the next game session.
After about 4-5 months of regularly playing on Saturday nights for about 6-8 hours a night we have had only 1 surviving character from the beginning and he just made lvl 8. Everyone else is lvl 6 and 1 lvl 7. We have been mostly running his homebrew campaign which has been fairly lackluster and very illogical. Lots of poorly designed encounters, traps, npcs.
As a group of players we have had discussions on the side about what we dislike about the campaign and some things about his DM style that leads to a little frustration. First and fore most the campaign has not been prepared well. Nothing is fleshed out and everything seems to happen on the fly including the printing off of encounters from the Encounter generator WOTC provides just moments from encountering them. NPC's lack any personality or history, room layouts are poorly conceived, rehashing of the same encounter over and over, poorly designed traps that logically make no sense what so ever. The DM appears to be very "control freakish" he likes to manipulate the outcome of everything and almost pigeon hole us into going down some linear path instead of allowing the party to decide what we want to do. We actually think he manipulates dice rolls to his favor to dictate the outcome of combat. Like he'll miraculously hit our fighter with a 24 AC 6-8 times in a row until he is near death then suddenly nothing can hit it for 2-3 rounds of combat or some random NPC barbarian will fly out of nowhere to save the day.
While most of us enjoy caring about our characters its not a big deal if they die. We have all said let the dice determine the outcome of the game. If we kick ass, great. Adjust the difficulty next time. If we die so be it. We die and roll a new character or get lucky and get resurrected.
One of the newer guys got so into the game after a few weeks he has bought all the books and done tons of reading. He started asking questions like "How come we have all these skills but never roll difficulty checks against them?", "How come when we travel 2 weeks to some town nothing happens in between? Where are some side quests?". The newer players are even baffled and seem to recognize the lack of "depth" in our DM's homebrew campaign.
One of the old schoolers also mentioned he used to primarily DM for 15 years and made some comments on how he might be interested in running a campaign however when he hinted at it towards the current DM the current DM sort of shot it down or made a comment about how he could CO-DM. (lol).
We have all enjoyed playing the game but would like to see some things change. I'm looking for some advice on how to handle this type of DM. How would you approach him? We all like the guy, even though he can occasionally get a little annoying. We don't want to remove him from the group or not include him in the game. We just want to make our game sessions a little more entertaining. We have thought about maybe asking him to just run a pre made Adventure module to either allow him or a different DM the time to create their own campaign if that is their desire. We also feel like the campaign has progressed rather slowly. Some people feel like we should have leveled a little faster and we aren't certain if its due to the DM's lack of preparedness also causing us to slow down the game and/or give our improper rewards for encounters. <shrug> We were thinking maybe we could get a better idea of how a campaign should flow as well as hopefully give the DM some ideas on how to set up his own campaign better.
Would there be any particular adventure modules that others have played that they could recommend? Either starting new characters or taking our existing lvl 6-8 characters.
Any advice would be great. Sorry for the wall of text!
Thank you!
