Share you worst campaign meltdown

[Reynard]

Recent thoughts of starting to run a game again have opened wounds from the last time, which was the absolute worst self destruction of a campaign I have ever experienced. It was due largely to miscommunication and conflicting DM-player expectations, I think. In any event, here's how it went down:

The campaign setup was simple, since our group has problems getting together regularly with everyone there. The characters were created at mid-level by the players, with the knowledge that they would be goffers for an enigmatic, powerful wizard type. Since the campaign was going to be so mercenary, I relaxed my usual alignmnet restrictions. Of course, there were 4 evil PCs and a paladin. I allowed some non-standard races -- Tieflings, Half-Giants and Warforged -- and used a few variant rules from UA. In the end, the party consisted of:
A tiefling assassin (NE)
A Half-Giant psion (NE)
A dwarf avenger druid (NE)
A Warfroged Paladin (LG)
plus a couple transient PCs (half orc barabrian and human fighter, both CN)

The job was simple: the wizard wanted the PCs to go out and retrieve the Seven Crowns, which were from an era long past and conferred mastery over each of the races of the world. In return, he let them keep any other treasure and paid them, in cash or items, per crown returned. Basically, they got their pick of whatever DMG items they wanted.

The first few sessions went well enough. The PCs ran pretty rampant over the campaign setting and adventure locales, killing officials, torturing captives and otherwise being bad guys. It became clear early on that I needed to do something to keep the Paladin involved and avoid in-party conflict, so i let the player in on some of the secrets of the setting and the plot, pulling the "As bad as these guys are, there is worse out there," card. He accepted it and played the part of the sheep in the wolf's den, and we continued on our merry way.

After a few sessions, I got the impression that episodic, linear adventures weren't making the players happy (though the did not just come out and tell me this) so I created a situation in which they learned just how bad their boss was (really an Great Wyrm Red Dragon) and how bad his rivals (other dragons) were, plus what the stakes were (the fate of all the world). The Paladin had more information than the others, and declined to share it, which made some decisions difficult.

It was at this point everything fell apart. While the party was retreiving a crown, one of their boss' rivals swooped out of the sky and stole it from them. The CN fighter chose to take a poke at theVERY LAREG dragon, and scored a lucky hit. The dragon decided to waste them all, but a quick teleport got them free.

When they got back to HQ, the boss wasn't pleased, explaining there was a sort of "understanding" between the dragons. To make it up, they had to deliver a token gift to the dragon that stole the ground, and bring the crown back to their boss. in reality, the boss was selling out the offending fighter for the crown. When, in the dragon's lair, this became clear, they bailed -- except for the tielfling and the dwarf, who managed through sheer player skill and character ability to steal the crown back.

Up till this point, things were tense but since I was trying to change up the format, I wasn't concerned. When they returned to their HQ this time, the boss was furious and the PCs had to escape before he killed them all. Despite some rolling behind the scenes, I never intended to do anything other than put them on the run. Which is what happened.

After that, though, everything fell apart. The players felt like I had screwed them, pitting them against such powerful opponents. All I wanted was for them to spend some time 'on the run' before figuring out how to take things into their own hands -- since that is what it seemed they wanted in the first place. instead, they aid they had no reason to bother and decided to plane shift out and find greener pastures. This irritated me to no end, but I relented and let them find "Sigil", where they could recoup and research and figure out what to do. They wouldn't bend on their characters' motivation for wanting to continue the campaign for a long time, and the paladin's player failed to share some info that might have spurred them to action. In the end, they relented but weren't into it and we played one more session that just stank.

And that's where it lay. I am sure that i didn't get all the details in, and that one or more of my players will wander by and correct me (and they are welcome to), but I have never been so angry or disappointed at the way a campaign disintigrated in my gaming career. Now I feel like I have to lobby just to get another shot -- even though I have run some really good games with this group -- and I am not sure it is worth the effort.

Anyway -- what was the worst campaign meltdown you experienced, as a player or a DM?

 

[BiggusGeekus]

It was during a Shadowrun game. Basically, half the group wanted to play Shadowrun and the other half wanted to socialize. At one point the DM stood up and shouted "we're not here to have fun, we're here to play the game!"

And then I stopped gaming for five years.

Here's one from my current group that I didn't attend but I still think it's a good story: the module was the Egg of the Pheonix. They were at the climactic battle where you had some kind of zany restriction on using magic to prevent the demiplane from shattering. The group found this out the hard way and had to make thier first roll to keep that from happening. They needed to roll an 8 on d100. My friend rolled a 07. Boom. No more game. Things kind of went bad from there.

 

[TheGM]

Here's one from my current group that I didn't attend but I still think it's a good story: the module was the Egg of the Pheonix. They were at the climactic battle where you had some kind of zany restriction on using magic to prevent the demiplane from shattering. The group found this out the hard way and had to make thier first roll to keep that from happening. They needed to roll an 8 on d100. My friend rolled a 07. Boom. No more game. Things kind of went bad from there.

Blame the GM for this one. The plane is likely to blow up with the way the rules are set, the GM needs to liberally interpret the results (I've had this happen two of five times I've run the Egg), and the resultant explosion doesn't have to kill...

 

[TheGM]

I've only ever had one meltdown.

I allowed three players from another group to join our table even though we really didn't have room. They had played with the same group for so long that they were basically inbred.

One of them (a gnome) found a relic of the Dwarves and tried to keep it to himself, though the Dwarf in the party argued long and hard about it. He called it "my treasure", everyone else "party treasure that the only person attached to it should have". I got them over this one.
One of them looked at me in the middle of an epic battle and said "This isn't any fun. This campaign hasn't ever been fun". I told him "no one makes you come".
The first one got upset (I forget why) and said "I wander away from the party" while they were being pursued. I said "If you do that, you'll get caught, and they'll string you up". He said "I want to do that". Fine. They caught him, he got up and said "Let's go" to his wife. She said "just because you're an idiot? No, I don't want to stop playing." He walked home.

The third of the three players adapted well, and still plays with my groups regularly. Between the first two though, they trashed the campaign with constant whining, rolling eyes, snarky comments, etc. One day I decided it wasn't worth the frustration of trying to make them happy, killed the campaign, told the first two they were not welcome back to my table, and proceeded to build a new campaign. The other seven characters from that campaign are still floating around the world, hoping I'll bring it back without the problems some day, but honestly this year-long struggle left me uninterested.

Since then, one of the two problem children GM'd for a while and actually figured out that it's not "all about me", that there is a group of people trying to have fun, and I've allowed him into a few games. The other one is a friend, but is not welcome back.

 

[Joshua Randall]

At one point the DM stood up and shouted "we're not here to have fun, we're here to play the game!"

Heh. I resemble that remark.

When I play D&D, I want to play D&D, not sit around and quote Monty Python or discuss Revenge of the Sith.

The DMG II suggests using a half-hour at the beginning of each session to let the players socialize, talk about movies or current events, and get that stuff out of their system. Which, if it works, would be far better than having little snippets of socialization during the game.

= = =

But here is the story of my worst campaign meltdown. This happened only a couple of years ago, in a 3.0 campaign that I started up with great excitement. All of the players were veteran gamers (we're all in our 30s). I spent a long time preparing the campaign world, and, for the most part, the players seemed to be into it.

So I run the first fews essions, and the PCs successfully completed their first mission, advancing to 3rd level in the process. At the end, just as they are reporting to the local town's lord, an NPC rushes in and informs them that a nearby village has come under attack by unknown monsters.

The players didn't care. They decided the piddling local village was beneath their concern and that they would do nothing, even after I had the lord strongly encourage them to go ("Please, save my village, I beg of you!"). I was astonished -- I had never, in my 20+ years of D&D'ing, had players so blatantly piss on one of my plot hooks.

I made the time-out motion with my hands and said to the players, "Do you guys want to continue playing this campaign?" Nocommital responses. "If you don't like this plot hook, then what do you want to do? Here's the map of the continent -- where do you want to go? Pick a location and I'll make an adventure happen." No response.

With that, I (figuratively) threw up my hands in despair and disbanded the group. Except for one stalwart player who later on did call me, and we continued the game as a solo campaign for several months, before finding some new (different) players to join us.

In the end, a happy ending, but really! I'm still astonished, to this day, at how rude and passive aggressive those guys were.

 

[Rel]

I've never really had anything too nasty happen.

Once, many years ago, I ran a Spacemaster campaign wherein the PC's were part of a group of individuals who were kidnapped from Earth and taken to a far away planet by an intelligent computer ship who wanted to turn on his masters (a race of nasty aliens bent on conquering the galaxy). It was partly a "mystery" because the computer's programming prevented it from doing anything overtly hostile to its masters. It hoped that the PC's would figure out what was happening and thwart the masters on their own. The problem was that the early part of the campaign focused too much on the PC's figuring out a way to survive on a hostile planet where they needed to secure shelter and a viable, long term food source. In the end the players indicated that they weren't having a good time wallowing in the sciences and we abandoned the campaign in favor of other games.

More recently a friend of mine ran a Mage Dark Ages game for our group. This is the kind of game (particularly in the way in which he ran it) that had a very roleplay heavy aspect to it and that part was fine. But he was also adamant (and I don't blame him) that there be lots of action in the game too. The combat mechanics combined with the magic system combined with the large group of players involved made everything come to a screeching crawl when combat came up. After a half dozen sessions or so it was clear that the system was getting in the way of our fun and we had a lengthy discussion about how to try and fix it. In the end we decided to scrap the campaign and perhaps try the concept later with a smaller group of players and a few modifications to the system (or a different system entirely).

Actually I did just think of one slightly nastier situation that happened a few years ago. We were playing in a pretty typical D&D campaign run by another friend. Most things about it were fine. We all liked our PC's and the story was a little bland but seemed to be improving. The problem was that the GM's work schedule combined with his innate laziness and disorganization meant that at least every other game session started an hour and a half or more late and every fourth session was cancelled entirely at the last minute. Finally amid growing frustration on the part of all the players, I confronted the GM when he arrived over two hours late to the session and simply said, "This campaign has been pretty good but the schedule situation is intolerable and we can't keep doing this. We need to have a different GM until your work schedule calms down to the point where this isn't a problem." He took it well and I think was actually relieved so I'm not sure you can call that a meltdown either.

 

[just__al]

For reasons still misunderstood by me, the party 9, 6th level characters were hired to take out an archmage.

Prior to this battle the Monk in the party had accidentally shot the Samurai several times and had been warned.

During the battle we actually manage to kill the archmage due to the fact that she had very few silenced spells and we managed to get her in a silenced area (still we lost 2 people in the battle up till that point)

The archmage was dead and we had her staff. So instead of trying to get our money we decided to ransack her house. We get there and the "courtyard" is crawling with Mummys. The monk, fearful of touching them starts shooting with his crossbow, hitting the Samurai in the back. The mummies are taken out, even though through all this we're also getting shot at out of the front door but we cannot see by what because of magical darkness.

I try to get everybody to fall back when the Samurai takes the monk to task. I step in to try and to defuse the situation and say "lets have this discussion later we have other problems" At this point the monk says "No, lets talk about this now, I don't want you killing me in my sleep" To the Samurai

Well, at that point, we're not going to avoid a fight and the monk, who didn't take any damage during the fight with the mummies wipes the floor with the samurai. This however wasn't the worst part.

During the fight, the Party's rogue passed a note to the DM (set as a spoiler below)

Spoiler

I drink my potion of invisibility. Then I wait and attack the winner.

At this point I try to leave but I get shot with a dart, dex poison and I'm a cleric with a 9 dex. Trying to get into the door I get shot again. I drop like a stone. The battle ends and the party's wizard throws the staff on the ground in disgust and leaves the courtyard. The gates close and the DM tells me to roll up a new character unless the party is going to try to save me.

Just total implosion. The monk is dead, the samurai is dead,the party druid died of mummy rot before they could find another cleric, my cleric was probably dead or worse, the party's barbarian died fighting the archmage but not before he killed another party member while confused. The game went about 3 more sessions before everybody decided to rotate to the next GM (we take turns). However the group shrank from 10 people to 6 shortly thereafter.

 

[WayneLigon]

...I said "If you do that, you'll get caught, and they'll string you up". He said "I want to do that". Fine. They caught him, he got up and said "Let's go" to his wife. She said "just because you're an idiot? No, I don't want to stop playing." He walked home.

You tell her 'Bravo!' from me

 

[WayneLigon]

Most of my campaign meltdowns have occured before actual play began. My record so far is about 15 minutes from concept to crash.

Me: "OK, we're decided: British High Society Victorian-England Call of Cthulhu for the next game."
Player 1: "Cool, I have this idea for a character from the American West of the time.."
Player 2: "Oh, I think a rag-picker would be cool."
Player 3: "Hey, can I be a miner from Germany?"
Player 4: "I wanna be French!"
Me: "Never %&$^% mind."

 

[diaglo]

i was looking for a group near my house.

i went and played on a weeknight. even though, i told them i couldn't do that on a regular basis.

a young girl showed up with her boyfriend. the friend didn't want to play. just watch.

long story short he attacked the DM with a set of fake vampire teeth...

i never went back.. totally weirded me out.