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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CuRoi" data-source="post: 5419601" data-attributes="member: 98032">Ok, sorta long story so... I was actually co-DMing - mainly just trying to give advice (which was almost universally ignored) and help the new DM run encounters because he had asked me to. We eventually divided functions between story and combat. The story was his along with the NPC creation and such. I was just providing the tactical side of things for combat to make sure the much more experienced players were still challenged. He wanted to start the campaign with a TPK that would lead into the main quest. I thought it was interesting, but maybe too complex so I warned him it would be very tough to pull off. I mentioned if he really wanted to do it, he probably needed to either just tell the players at the start how they died or steam roll them with overwhelming force. Players in every campaign I have been in are very tenacious when it comes to combat. They do not appreciate a DM slowly torturing them and they rarely accept total defeat.  We talked a little about it and I didn't hear anything again until he showed up at the game with the "army" that was going to kill the party. Well, long story short, the randomly generated (I mean -completely- randomly generated...we're talking sorcerers with "Stealthy" feat and such) army of his had trouble finishing off the party. (This is about the point I took over the tactics and started making many of the key encounters.)  So we have a campaign starting off with players being slowly roasted over an hour+ long combat. Most of them die (one actually managed to escape though not the one that I figured). They then "awake" in the audience of a Lawful Good god. Wherein the next huge problem begins. We have one cleric and the god is not her deity. The rest of the party is already behaving pretty solidly neutral and being beholden to a good deity is not high on their list of life achievements. I got several angry emails after the first game. I defended my fellow DM's decision to try a complex story hook and think I calmed people down enough to give him a chance. Otherwise, I think the game would have ended that night. Frankly, it might have been best. The campaign sputtered along for a bit as the PCs acted their alignment (which as mentioned was mostly neutral.) My fellow DM wanted to punish everyone since they were on a quest in the name of this lawful good god and behaving a bit badly. I agreed that the god would probably not be pleased, however, these characters were sort of forced into service and "punishment" may backfire. The DM decided to magically brand everyone with the symbol of this god to show his displeasure. This angered the party (especially the good cleric and the druid who were at this point the only ones acting co-operatively and trying to go along with the story). It was bad enough that one character dramatically chose to die instead of live with the mark. This pretty much signalled the end of the campaign. I left town for several weeks and when I got back the camapign still somehow sputtering along (I think no one else wanted to run anything). Everyone looked burned out, even the DM, so I volunteered to run something else. The group leapt at the chance and I started up a Serenity camapign (which got some good feedback and a welcome break from DnD).</blockquote>

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