Share you worst campaign meltdown

[DungeonmasterCal]

None of mine melted down, though I did have one that collapsed and fell into a swamp. Early autumn of 2001, my long time group and some other old friends reassembled to being a new campaign, with me as the DM. Eager to try out the 3e rules, we opened the doors to lots of variant races and the like. I had in mind a long, epic story arc that would take the players from first level to immortality; invasion by a Yuan-ti army, opening portals to other planes to bring in aid in their nefarious schemes, etc.

Well, my inexperience with the 3e rules, my inexperience with high level characters (by the time they were knocking on 12th level I was starting to flounder), infighting within the party and gossip among the players about each other and the personal tensions caused by all that, and the constant bitching and whining by one of the players about how horrible 3e was and how much better 2e was and why the hell weren't we using those rules, I started to lose interest.

My adventures became just by the numbers games with no inspiration, and the final straw came during a climatic battle with extraplanar assassins in the party's headquarters. One of the players had been playing a barbarian, but decided to shelve him for awhile in favor of a cleric (something they needed). He and I talked about bringing the barbarian back after his "vision quest", and we decided it would make a great dramatic moment to bring the character back during the fight with the assassins. The party wasn't holding up well, and so with a crash, the barbarian storms through the door. The player who griped about 3e threw his dice in the floor and shouted, "If he brings that character back I'll never play this g*******d game again!" I shrugged and said, "Ok", then turned back to the rest of the group, only to watch them cave and whine, "Well, I guess if that's how it's going to be, maybe the barbarian needs to not come back." I was so furious, I said the assassins all killed themselves and gave out no XP for the encounter.

I tried to run a few more games after that, but lost total interest in the game. A couple of the guys want me to pick the campaign up again, but I just can't do it. And that's the reason I became so burned out I've only just now begun to take interest in DM'ing again.

*looks around*...sorry...that went on a bit, didn't it?

 

[The_Universe]

I've run games with extraordinarily bitchy players - I've also run games with relative angels. The only real meltdown (which actually caused an extended meltdown period that ended with three players leaving in the middle of a session three months after the event in question) dealt with some of the players being basically unable to deal with the risk of character death in the game. One of the characters had "died" a number of times in the game, but I had "pulled my punches" more than once in order to let the character live. The player was *extraordinarily* whiney, and tended to play his character in unnecessarily risky ways.

Other characters had died before, and taken their deaths like champs - they dealt with the consequences (relatively minor in a game that makes resurrection so easy) like champs.

To make a long story short, in a climactic battle near what was to be the final arc of the campaign, the character died (for the 4th time). I rolled in the open, and so did he - no cheating, no malice. Despite the heroic nature of the death, he was unwilling to roll up another character. In fact, he demanded that I let him play the same character with the "Risen Saint" template from the Book of Exalted Deeds (despite the fact that the character was far from Exalted). That ended the campaign - to have allowed what he wanted would have been patently unfair to the other players, who had conscientiously avoided death by their wits and skill - and I was basically unwilling to continue pulling my punches for the sake of one player (it wasn't a surprise - I had talked to the player about it).

When he left, he said he wouldn't be rolling up another character - he patently refused to continue participation without his old character.

So, I stopped running that game, and began running my current game (D20 Modern).

Three months after the events described above, three players involved in the fiasco (who had developed a mini-faction in the group) quit in the middle of a session, after one of them informed me that the session we were in was a "test."

Ugh - it was bad.

But, the game continues with a slightly different roster, and at the very least the remaining/new players have proper expectations for how the game will be run. None of them expect the game to bend to their will.

 

[The_Universe]

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.

Tell the long story! It's hilarious!

 

[kolikeos]

the first 3 dnd campaigns i played were really bad, i was a player in 2 and dm in the third.
it was mainly becouse the dm was boring us or i was argueing with him (or the other way around, me boring the players and them argueing).
it was mainly because we did not know how to play and that we were always metagaming.
my most recent game, in which i was dm, went quite well for about a year until some of the players started non-showing non-calling, which stoped the game and irritated me and the players that did come.
we were trying to recruit new players to our game but most of them got bored at character creation and never showed up again. character creation is the most boring thing in dnd, and unfortunately, it's the first thing you usually do. most of the new players never actually play because they dicide to leave right after the boring process of creating their character.
we would have continued to play as a small group but now i'm away for a few months and have no one to game with

 

[demiurge1138]

The worst campaign meltdown I was ever a part of, I was merely a player. The DM was one of my former players, and the group was the same one I had only barely managed to hold in line with constant gettings of treasure and ludicrous amounts of violence.

Mistake Number One, the DM invites a former player, referred to as F'tang to protect the guilty. Now, F'tang had ruined one of my games, was told to leave the first session of the game designed to replace it, was invited back due to group begging, then thrown out again after he basically called me an inbred moron, only not so nicely, because I designed a difficult encounter. Problem was, he's a charismatic bastard, and most of the other players, including the new DM, liked him.

Mistake Number Two, the DM keeps one of the players from my old game despite the fact that he is openly antagonistic to the DM.

So, what ends up happening is, while some of us are trying to play D&D and enjoy ourselves, F'tang, the antagonist and one other player purposely try to derail the storyline, wander off to take hours doing things the rest of us don't/can't/aren't stupid enough to do, and generally piss everyone off.

Once F'tang openly said he preferred to design characters to disrupt campaigns, it all fell apart. The DM quit. The cabal of three tried for a while to get a D&D game together, but failed (wonder why). And I managed to pick up the pieces and salvage a game with the people who weren't horrible from the ruins of the former group.

Demiurge out.

 

[Mystery Man]

not a long story.

A former player picked up a monster manual and started looking of stats for a particularly powerful monster in a final fight. It took me a couple seconds to realize what he was doing.

I wigged.

 

[MarkAHart]

One campaign of mine melted down and came about >< that close to physical violence. It also happened to be the time when a potential new player was playing, checking out the game (needless to say, he declined to return after the "incident").

Two players, unfortunately who never got along very well -- they had such differing personalities. Both played rogues in the campaign. One of the rogues decided to pick pockets on the other rogue, stealing an item the second person had received from his father. The stealing character used out of game info, and then justified his actions as reasonable. Harsh words were hurled across the table.

With almost cobra-like speed, one of the players had left his seat, moved halfway across the room, both fists cocked and ready. He held off launching into violence because it wasn't his home, but he stormed off moments later. Not surprisingly, the campaign ended right then and there. Both players managed to act like spoiled children, and the other players were not happy at the sudden end of an otherwise enjoyable campaign.

 

[sniffles]

@Dungeonmastercal: But did your campaign burn down, *then* fall over and sink into the swamp?

I've been fortunate to never be involved in a serious meltdown, though I did once nearly walk out of a game because the GM's refusal to compromise made me so mad.

My worst campaign-ending experience, though, was in a Fantasy Hero game. I didn't join from the beginning of the campaign, but after hearing how much fun my friends were having my fiance' and I asked if we could join and the GM agreed. One of the other PCs was the daughter of a very powerful dragon. We went on a quest involving her father, who'd gone insane. We took an artifact back to him that we hoped would cure him. Then suddenly the GM announced that everyone lost all memory of those events, as the result of a spell cast by the dragon. Now my character and my fiance's character had never even met the rest of the party.

Basically the GM told us that things weren't going the way he'd wanted, so he pressed the reset button. My PC and my fiance's PC had to meet the other party members all over again, and only another player's pixie PC was able to remember anything about what had happened before the reset. Then within a couple of sessions the GM stopped scheduling sessions or answering his phone or email. He apparently turned all his attention to helping his wife with her new jewelry business and taking care of their 4 kids. I haven't seen him since.

 

[Sammael]

I managed to destroy not one, but two of my campaigns in one fell swoop. This was in 2001, I think. I was running two groups at the time, and I wanted to have a very cool climactic encounter for both groups, so I figured I'd organize one really long session and bring both groups together to have their characters join forces for a dragon-hunt.

Baaaaad idea. First, we all met at one of my players' houses (all players, 10 of them, are from the same circle of my friends). Everybody was running late, so we started much later than I'd anticipated. Second, there was booze at the table. First beer, but, as the evening progressed, tequila was mentioned and the next moment, shotglasses were everywhere. Third, nobody was realy into it. One player tried to organize the hunt (it wasn't just a random hunt, both groups had something at stake), but the others really didn't care one way or the other, but weren't willing to let him make up a decent plan. Their debate as to how to enter the dragon's lair took four hours.

Needless to say, after four hours of drinking and debating, nobody was really into killing the dragon afterwards. I ran the dragon in a half-arsed manner, forgetting to use roughly 90% of his abilities. The party likewise used the "I charge the dragon" tactic. They managed to kill it pretty easily, and some of them then entered a "feeding frenzy" over the dragon's hoard. I was so disgusted by that whole evening that I never ran either campaign again. I even think I took a 3 month break from role-playing in general.

 

[Ellie_the_Elf]

Mine was nothing to do with the game itself. The week before the campaign started, two of my players broke up in particularly messy and acrimonious fashion. Both still wanted to play, and promised they wouldn't bring the various things they were fighting about into the game itself.

Which they didn't.

Until the third week, that is, when they wound up having a huge fight at the game table, which was quickly degenerating into throwing things (like chairs, for example) when the rest of us stepped in. I threw them both out of my house and the campaign pretty much ended there.

Neither of them were invited back, due to divided loyalties among some of the rest of the group and some of us who got on with them both not wanting to choose between them. The rest of us are still playing together, but after that episode we couldn't get the enthusiasm back for that particular campaign.

And I'd done so much preparation for that campaign too <sniff>

Ellie.