Players, have you fired your DM?

[jasper]

since it was brought up in the "have you chase a player away" thread.
There been a couple where I quit playing.
1E Ft ord. Dm twisted rule on saving versus damage during falls. To where it was save vs any damage. First time every I xped extreme rules twisting lawyering.
1E West Berlin. Dm change rules to favor magic users. To the extreme 1st magic user took out black bear by himself. left after this but would drop in a watch the game play due boredom (this was before I started drinking) by 5th the magic users all had keeps. Group disbanded after one mage hit 7th. Left such a bad taste in peoples mouths I could not get any players from McNair complex.
1E forget the book but it is still on my book shelf. Book is about people dying on Earth being transport to D&D and then meeting same type monster/situation where they died from.
1E anything goes Dm. Had 12th levels in same party as gods.
3E didn't fire this one because he was son of one great players/dm. We had to reenact the Buffy musical episode. Highlights was some of adults started singing the show tunes. As we had all watch the show that week.
Most of time my problem was 10 players with 9 of them wanting to be DMs.
This only works if the dm can get the adventure done in 2 game sessions.

 

[UnknownAtThisTime]

Difficult to parse all your examples based on format, but what I would really be curious about is when one player essentially fires the DM, BUT the party stays together, sourcing ONLY a new DM - and not from the pool of players.

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

One of my (now former) players decided to DM. He got fed up with one our always-bitchy friends and told him:

DM: Shut up, bitchy guy (names changed to preserve the guilty).
BG: What did you say?
DM: Shut up!
BG: Say that one more time, DM.
DM: Shut. Up.

BG grabbed his stuff and walked out as the rest of us just sort of sat in shock. Both players continued playing with the group, but it was decided mutually by the rest of the group that this DM was no longer allowed to run for our group.


The same group that dumped me temporarily in the other thread also had one very vocal member that wanted to fire every other DM in the group. His basis was that I was a terrible player because my attention span when not running the game was abyssmal.

 

[Reynard]

Difficult to parse all your examples based on format, but what I would really be curious about is when one player essentially fires the DM, BUT the party stays together, sourcing ONLY a new DM - and not from the pool of players.

I experienced this first hand as the DM. One player became dissatisfied with my DMing style and basically walked after his character died. The way the group worked at the time, it was a short jump to me getting fired and him taking over.

We did this three times, I think, before the cycle ended and I stopped playing with the (now largely defunct) group. It didn't help that 4E came out at about this time and created a pretty big schism among the gamers I play(ed) with.

Getting fired sucks. Maybe I take being a good GM too seriously, but it really hurts when people decide to leave your game or ask you to step down or whatever.

Ugg. I think I shouldn't have started thinking about this. I am off to find happy thoughts, or, failing that, beer...

 

[Coldwyn]

More or less.

I´ve been dm´ing for a group for about two years, running a weekly session of 3,5 and felt the onset of dm-fatigue. So one of the players volunteered to take over as gm when the ongoing story arc would reach its conclusion.
That was fine with me and I was looking forward to a break.

It was not a desaster per se but simply boring and and a little bit annoying, because we switched from a sandbox to running old AD&D modules nearly unconverted and he certainly lacked the skill to do that on the fly.

Slowly, the other players started to drop out and pretending to be occupied when our sceduled D&D day was due, they simply couldn´t him that he sucked as a dm.

Long story short, I had to break the news to him that he should quit being the dm before the whole group breaks apart and took over the reigns again.

 

[francisca]

I quit my middle/high school group in 1987 because the DM became enamored with DragonLance, and used DL1 as his template for adventure design. I didn't like the railroad and cut scene aspects.

At the same time, he really fell in love with the "Survival Guides", using it extensively in his homebrew stuff, and the game devolved into this:

:START
DM Reads us lots of text he wrote
cut scene
more reading
staged fight, with the bad guy escaping
on the way to pursue the bad guy, DM starts rolling every 10' to see what sort of slime mold we are stepping over in the dungeon
cut scene
DM wonders why we aren't on script
more reading
:goto START

I didn't get back into D&D until 1999, though I'd been poking about the net and occasionally pulling out the books starting in about 1997.

 

[ggroy]

I fired myself from the DM chair several times, when it was clear that I was incapable of producing a game that the players wanted.

 

[jasper]

I have been fired too. But it was due fact my wife and I started limiting run times and game nights. The game would stop at 11 pm. Maybe 11:30 if the combat could be finish before then. Also we let be known that we demanded a call/email if you were a regular and not coming. This was for people who did not show repeatly. Not for Bob the once in while gamer who got a hot date and blew us off. But for the ones who email/called on Wednesday about game night and then were no shows. Sorry after a bit it is rude to me to go ahead and set aside a block of time and then have no bodies in seats. When I could be close my books and take wife out on the town.

 

[kitsune9]

I kind of took this post as an example of a group of players firing their DM. As far as an individual player leaving the game, I've been a couple of situations like that, but I do have one example in which, as a group, we got rid of our DM.

There was this one guy who was dice aversive. He absoluted hated to run any kind of situation which involved using dice and he wanted to run 1e AD&D. Well, we accommodated him for a couple of sessions, but it was getting really old of where we would some kind of challenge and he would tell us if automatic success or automatic failure, and then every time we got to some potential combat encounter, the monsters would immediately surrender or run away. As 1st level characters we chased off trolls.

I remember the only combat that he ran, he was pretty disgusted in having to use his dice.

The group of us got together to discuss asking him to liven up the combat and challenges, so I had the discussion with him and he told me that I could quit anytime and that he was running the campaign his way. That was his last session with us as we told him that it wasn't working out.

We weren't jerks about it though as we didn't want any unnecessary drama in our lives.

As a DM, I've had players from time to time stop coming to my game (but we were all pretty much kids), but I don't recall anyone telling me directly or making it known to the group that as DM I should be replaced or such. I'd imagine that if such did occur, I would probably take it too personally and hang up gaming for several years or so.

 

[UnknownAtThisTime]

Sorry Reynard, I appreciated the story and tried to give you XP to cheer you up ... but I have to spread it around.