GMMichael
Guide of Modos
"It was a tournament game, dude. Am I wrong!?"
Session Zero Questionnaire
- Thread starter GMMichael
- Start date
"It was a tournament game, dude. Am I wrong!?"
jasper
Rotten DM
Psst Kobold sounds blockhead and dmmike will have to buy us dinner to get the information out us.Jasper and Kobold, you *have* to spill the details on some of these.
Threatening to draw a gun seems like a good place to start.
Was it over a rule dispute?
That's one way to go about it. Certainly face to face is better than gossiping on a message board.
Still there's not much to go into details about on my end. The example pretty much calls out what happened or what could have happened in the last one. Root cause of all of it was my own sillyness in opening my home to folks and not considering the potential for nonsense I was exposing myself to. At the time my group was huge (20 ish if everyone showed up) and no store in my area could accommodate that; but the house could.
I don't blame people for being who they are, I blame myself for being too naive.
Live and learn
(Edit - What I will share though is that when you've gone through stuff like this you need to be careful what you put in your Session 0 documentation or adverts for new players.
I can tell you from personal experience - again really naive at that time - that telling people you're looking for folks that have an appreciation for etiquette and are looking for people more in line with your own socio-economic status and place in life is a bad idea. You will get vitriol, people will threaten you via online post and email and they will go out of their way to send your post to everyone in the gaming community to tell others they should stay away from your game.
.. and then freak the hell out when they fail to realize they did it from an email account tied to their work, their work is a game store, and you show up to apologize and explain yourself .. no one expects to be called on their bad behavior in response to your bad behavior and when they've behaved poorly, along with whatever image they have of you in their head; they don't expect you to behave well.
I still don't go to a particularly well known store in the Boston area since that incident and it's been 15 years. I was really inelegant and straight up dumb to post the way I did; and incorrectly thought I was fine because I wasn't discriminating against race, gender or orientation but the response was over the top. - No one needs that.)
Ramble ramble ramble. Feel better now that that's finally off my chest.
KB
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MNblockhead
A Title Much Cooler Than Anything on the Old Site
Sure, will you be in Minnesota any time soon?
Actually, the food in Alabama is much better. But I rarely get any closer to Mongomery than Charlotte NC.
MNblockhead
A Title Much Cooler Than Anything on the Old Site
[MENTION=1727]kobold[/MENTION]
Yikes. The "same socio-economic status and place in life" could certainly be read in a bad light.
The only limits I put in my call for gamers is age. Nobody under 18. In my last campaign, I explained my campaign in detail and gave my DMing background (I was new to 5e and starting to DM again after a very long time of not playing). I also explained that the game was designed for those with busy work and family lives, so it would be a once-a-month game to be scheduled each month and that I would try to design each session so that a session could be missed without messing up the party.
I also communicated with potential players by e-mail to further make sure we were on the same page. Especially as my campaign had some strong limits on the races and classes you could choose from.
Partly luck, but this approach seems to have worked. I had no problems with any of the players and additional players have been through players I met through this campaign.
For one-offs, I just meet at my FLGS and play with whoever signs up via a meetup post. If someone creates problems, I just don't invite them to the next one off.
I never run walk-in games like Adventurer's League.
Yikes. The "same socio-economic status and place in life" could certainly be read in a bad light.
The only limits I put in my call for gamers is age. Nobody under 18. In my last campaign, I explained my campaign in detail and gave my DMing background (I was new to 5e and starting to DM again after a very long time of not playing). I also explained that the game was designed for those with busy work and family lives, so it would be a once-a-month game to be scheduled each month and that I would try to design each session so that a session could be missed without messing up the party.
I also communicated with potential players by e-mail to further make sure we were on the same page. Especially as my campaign had some strong limits on the races and classes you could choose from.
Partly luck, but this approach seems to have worked. I had no problems with any of the players and additional players have been through players I met through this campaign.
For one-offs, I just meet at my FLGS and play with whoever signs up via a meetup post. If someone creates problems, I just don't invite them to the next one off.
I never run walk-in games like Adventurer's League.
Re: "Yikes" - Yeah, bad form on my part. Worse on theirs, though I'm sure if you look at it from their point of view it's reversed. Fair enough, long time ago and shared for the sake of feeling better about it as obviously, it still bothers me.
The great thing about life, is that it sort of teaches you how to live it, if you live long enough. Wouldn't do it the same way again, but I still am very careful about who walks in my front door, and obviously, like almost every other person in the world, there are folks I'd rather not spend my free time with. I just don't need to be a jerk about it.
Probably. As to horror and scale, The group size was 20, the actual number of people that would show up for any session was around 12. I found at that time that if I had a pool of less than say 10 players there would be weeks where only a few showed and the group wasn't viable without retainers.
Didn't start with the intention of getting that big, but friends bring others and stuff happens. Sorry for going off on a tangent.
KB
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