Player Revolt

[Prince of Happiness]

For me it was a DM who ran a "Ravenloft campaign setting-inspired" adventure that was all kinds of "daaaaaahhhhrk." Typical serial-killer-in-a-village story. I was playing a barbarian and I had one other player with me. After a few hours of getting absolutely frickin' nowhere with ideas and ideas going left and right (throw us a BONE, man!), I declared that my character was high-tailing it to another town, screw them all.

DM didn't like that.

Another one was when I was in the military and there was this guy who ran Mage: The Ascension, the sessions of which were basically him mentally masturbating (there were *always* dice a-rattlin' in his clammy palms) a Dragonball Z power-trip. Railroad doesn't even begin to describe it. Needless to say, I suddenly found the rest of Biloxi, MS very interesting.

 

[Lanefan]

I've been on the wrong end of 1.5 player revolts as DM.

The first revolt was when 4 players (of a 6-player game) got together and decided to kick out one of the other two. 'Course, they never bothered to inform ye olde DM (me) of this, nor the 6th player who was incensed when she found out.

Short and long-term result: I split the game and ran players 5 and 6 (soon joined by others) in their own party...but some 4 years later, this led to:

The second revolt was a joint effort between me as DM and the players, though we were acting in complete ignorance of each other toward exactly the same goal. The game was staggering...I wasn't into it, the players weren't into it, the party kept getting its butt kicked at every turn...all-round bad news. The players approached a mutual friend about DMing the same party after what would amount to a hostile takeover. Not realizing this, I approached the same guy and asked if he'd like to take the game over as DM!

Short-term result: he took the game over with agreement from all; I became a player.
Long-term result: 6 months later, those who had led the revolt wanted me back as DM as they (and I) had all left the not-as-much-fun "new" game.

Lanefan

 

[the Jester]

Back in, oh, around 1992 or so, I got the idea that it would be fun to run an "epic quest" type game, where the pcs would follow one storyline to its conclusion. They ran into an apparent dead end, but were already getting bored of how story-driven it was, or something. They decided they didn't wanna play it.

Short Term Result: less gaming for about two months, as nobody wanted to come out and tell me that they wanted to play something different.

Long Term Result: new campaign, tried new system (Amber DRPG). Back to dnd in the end, as the old favorite tried and true.

 

[Aus_Snow]

How often have you (either as a DM or a Player) been party to a Player Revolt?

Never.

 

[Agamon]

I had a DMPC that my players hated. I don't like running party members when I DM (outright hate it, in fact), but this is back in the Dark Ages of 1998, when D&D was starting to sound like a swear word to me and all I could manage to round up for my new game was 2 players (unlike now, my group was recently 7 players, I've pared that down to 5 and still turn people away regularly).

Anyway, with 2 PCs, I needed to run a NPC party member to make the group halfway feasible. The game is very character-driven and all three of the party members are integral to the plot (the NPC is a childhood friend of one of the PCs and becomes important by proxy). I start getting down on the whole D&D thing and almost stop playing when they announce 3E, which gets me excited again. Coincidentally, this is when new (and by new, I mean, never played before) players start to show up. Three new players, and I do my best to make their PCs also important to the storyline. I no longer need the DMPC, but I can't just get rid of her, especially since the childhood friend PC like having her in the party. The other players (if not their PCs) weren't too fond of her though. By 2001, the two original players moved away and a couple different players took their spots.

This was a good time to turn the NPC into a true NPC, and a bad guy, to boot. Instant hated BBEG, so it worked out well.

Well, except I would find later that I should have scrapped the game and started new when I lost the two original players, but that's another story.

As for a Revolt, they didn't outright refuse to play or anything. They would hate if she was ever the center of attention, which I tried to never do, but as a result of some player actions, it happened anyway. They would belittle her or make fun at her expense, which killed verisimilitude in game and made me ornery, but nothing revolutionary.

 

[Jin_Kataki]

I was part of a session that should of ended in a player revolt and in a way did since I don't think anyone who played in that session has played for that DM again.

We were running RHoD the DM as a player is an utter power gamer. As a DM he makes all kinds of crazy house rules that allow players to do what he wishes other DM's would let him do. He made up these nonsense gestalt rules that allowed us to play races with major level adjustments and give them classes as well. The party had a me a Hound Archon scout, A Ghael, an Ogre or troll can't remember, and some other off the wall stuff. So we are all basically 5 level characters with like 10th level equivalent power. All of us have AC's through the roof, but saves and BAB still at 5th level. So he changes all the encounters upping CR. Thats all fine and good, but what wound up happening is we couldn't hit the bad guys on anything, but practically a crit and they could not hit us on anything, but crits. So 1 encounter lasted the entire 5 hour session and ended in the bad guys finally just giving up and running away. Needless to say I never went back. Even if he had been a great DM I don't think I would of gone back anyway cause the other players were just as terrible. The guy playing the ogre or troll with an intelligence of like -3 immediately declares he is going for the wand the bad guy dropped even though his character doesn't know it is anything more than a stick since he never saw the guy use it. What does an Ogre need with a wand.

 

[Agamon]

Oh, wait, I've done a DM revolt.

Around '95, I'm running an all-dwarf campaign, that had been going well (until the premature end). One Saturday night, it's starting to get late, but not too late. We come to a convenient stop point and someone asks, "Should we stop here?" All of the players want to keep going. I'm starting to feel really tired for some reason and don't want to continue. But two of the players complain that they drove so far and want to play longer and another says he won't be able to play again for quite some time. Basically, they somehow decide that we keep going, even though I'm quite against it.

At this point, I'm starting to feel extremely tired and a bit ornery. We keep going, and the next encounter, the baddies win initiative, the cleric casts Hold Person, taking out 4 of the PCs*, the other three bad guys kill remaining PC in 2 rounds and then lop the heads off the held PCs.

"There. Can we quit now?"

Short Term Result: I ended up in bed for three days, sick with the worst flu of my life. I lose the two long distance players. We need to start a new campaign.

Long Term Result: A couple years ago, Neil, a player from that game is playing in another of my games. Someone asks, "Should we keep going?" I say, "I'm kinda tired." Neil jumps up out of his chair and exclaims, "You heard the man! We're done!" I stared at him quizzically until he reminded me of the above incident.

*Remember back when Hold Person worked on up to 4 people?

 

[Nyaricus]

Long Term Result: A couple years ago, Neil, a player from that game is playing in another of my games. Someone asks, "Should we keep going?" I say, "I'm kinda tired." Neil jumps up out of his chair and exclaims, "You heard the man! We're done!" I stared at him quizzically until he reminded me of the above incident.

Now THAT'S funny

 

[wedgeski]

I was *part* of a player revolt during a RttToEE session (spoilers for that adventure to follow).

There is a section where the party uncovers a dwarven stronghold in the mountain, and can fall foul to a trap which actually transmutes them into a dwarf (I'm not sure if this is part of the published adventure or something my DM dropped in). Well, three-quarters of the party succumbed to this trap, and our DM, who I'm sure expected us to push on, was suddenly faced with all-out revolt. We marched straight back out of the stronghold and all the way back to our base of operations to find a way to remove the curse, eating up a week of game time and actually giving the denizens of the mountain a chance to bolster their defenses (fair enough).

It was a good lesson in what might really annoy players rather than intrigue them. We dressed the revolt in some solid roleplaying (and as it happens my PC was particularly suited to putting his own abhorrence ahead of the exigencies of whatever quest we were on), but it clearly shocked -- and irritated -- our DM to no end that we were sidelining the adventure for this. To this day I still wonder why we reacted so strongly to it.

Short-term result: A perturbed DM and some uncharacteristic tension at the table.

Long-term result: None, we're all too good friends to let something like that dwell. In the end we gave up on the campaign because we were just tired of chucking our characters into the meat-grinder. It didn't have anything to do with this incident.

 

[Li Shenron]

Never happened.