Share you worst campaign meltdown
- Thread starter Reynard
- Start date
Impeesa said:Whew. I've only hit the highlights I can remember, and I don't think I've accurately conveyed the depth of annoyance the GM felt. Oh, and it's not over.
there has been a session without me (gasp!). As it turns out, the other remaining original player, my girlfriend, and another flaky girl who played on occasion had all conned the GM into running a private game for 'just the girls.' They wanted an opportunity to get more familiar with the game, etc. Apparently they felt persecuted by the guys (i.e. me - they described me as 'intellectually intimidating'), saying we treated them like dumb girls, just telling them what to roll, never giving them the opportunity to learn for themselves. Interestingly enough, this girl and I were both introduced to the RT system at the same time, so many years ago, and if anything she'd been favored by the GM with more in-game involvement and more opportunity to learn. She just hadn't been interested.
Long story short, I got a bit angry at her, and suggested that if they wanted 'girl time', convincing an older guy to exclude me from my favorite game ever was not the best way to do it. After the dust settled, she took me up on my suggestion of just running some girls-only Vampire. GM admitted to not telling me because he thought I might tell another guy (also a nice guy, but much more confrontational and incidentally the other guy besides me who was there for the last proper session). My girlfriend was rather upset at having offended me so deeply, particularly because she was unable to rationalize why she'd handled it the way she did.
--Impeesa--
Oh, I was annoyed, I admit, but we've got a reliable core group now, and I'm over it.
My reasoning behind the 'girls night' was to try and re-start the game by getting them interested, and without them we were low on players... Bad decision on my part, sorry.
(Note that the events of the 2 'girl only' sessions never happened in the overall continuity, even I can learn from my mistakes)
I think this disturbed me in the end too, since I couldn't rationalize why I even agreed to it. Perhaps my brains leaked all over the floor, and I was busy scooping them back into the bucket when they asked me.
As for work schedules - umm, dude, I work graveyards and you work some crazy swing shift deal. Both of which end this fall, so you can expect a resumed game come Sept.
- Dark
Rabelais
First Post
I'd been gaming with this group for about a year. The GM had a tremendous head for details, but NO execution whatsoever. He could tell you the name of the Tavern keeper 2 villages away, but couldn't run a combat, AT ALL.
Not really a problem so much, but after awhile it kinda got irritating.
Z
Time passes...
I meet some people at work, they're gamers and seriously excellent people. I tell them about this interesting campaign that my GM is starting, and long story short, they get invited. We're about 3 sessions into the game, tasked with finding the mystical thingybobber of doodadness at the "Bear Stones"
Great! We know exactly where they are... They're stones in the shape of a great bear that we'd seen at the 1st session... Tremendous luck! Well... we go there. We search high and low for the entrance into the hidden cave yadda yadda yadda. No luck. We find some mention in a tome that our mage had, that the hidden cave would stay hidden until the noonday sun hit this specific spot at the Spring Equinox... wonderful! that's only 4 days away! Yay us! We're going to finally be able to recover the mystical thingy.
Until the GM makes us roleplay all 4 remaining days until the equinox. All... four... days... for
FOUR HOURS!
Well, it's afternoon on day 2 now... what do you do?
"Um... well, I think I might go swimming in the pool next to the stones...
"I uh... jeez, I already went hunting, we're pretty well off for food. I guess the ranger will do a turn around the area to check on the traps I set yesterday, and make sure that the bad guys can't sneak up on us...
so on... so forth... for 4 hours Real Time. It's like you're in the Indy 500, going 200mph, and then all of a sudden you're behind a float in the Rose Festival parade or something. Disconcerting, very irritating...
Z
Time passes...
The next session, we've finished recovering the doodad, take it back to the doodad's rightful owner. Who then turns out to be an agent for an Evil king. He tootles his horn where the ENTIRE FREAKING ARMY of Boris Badinov jump up and start to attack us.... seriously it's like 1000 guys in full freaking armor. We had just passed that area about 15 minutes earlier... OUR RANGER NOTICING ABSOLUTELY NOTHING... To make things worse, one of the players is playing a turncoat, who backstabs one of the players for X amount of damage.
Our players are supposed to be captured, and sent back to be "interrogated" Pretty much at that point we decide that it's better to go out with our boots on.
We took perverse pleasure in the GM's attempt to use non-lethal force to capture us. Finally though, we managed to Butch and Sundance our way into getting his army to kill us.
Mercifully, the campaign pretty much ended there. I haven't talked to the GM in 6 years.
Not really a problem so much, but after awhile it kinda got irritating.
Z
Time passes...
I meet some people at work, they're gamers and seriously excellent people. I tell them about this interesting campaign that my GM is starting, and long story short, they get invited. We're about 3 sessions into the game, tasked with finding the mystical thingybobber of doodadness at the "Bear Stones"
Great! We know exactly where they are... They're stones in the shape of a great bear that we'd seen at the 1st session... Tremendous luck! Well... we go there. We search high and low for the entrance into the hidden cave yadda yadda yadda. No luck. We find some mention in a tome that our mage had, that the hidden cave would stay hidden until the noonday sun hit this specific spot at the Spring Equinox... wonderful! that's only 4 days away! Yay us! We're going to finally be able to recover the mystical thingy.
Until the GM makes us roleplay all 4 remaining days until the equinox. All... four... days... for
FOUR HOURS!
Well, it's afternoon on day 2 now... what do you do?
"Um... well, I think I might go swimming in the pool next to the stones...
"I uh... jeez, I already went hunting, we're pretty well off for food. I guess the ranger will do a turn around the area to check on the traps I set yesterday, and make sure that the bad guys can't sneak up on us...
so on... so forth... for 4 hours Real Time. It's like you're in the Indy 500, going 200mph, and then all of a sudden you're behind a float in the Rose Festival parade or something. Disconcerting, very irritating...
Z
Time passes...
The next session, we've finished recovering the doodad, take it back to the doodad's rightful owner. Who then turns out to be an agent for an Evil king. He tootles his horn where the ENTIRE FREAKING ARMY of Boris Badinov jump up and start to attack us.... seriously it's like 1000 guys in full freaking armor. We had just passed that area about 15 minutes earlier... OUR RANGER NOTICING ABSOLUTELY NOTHING... To make things worse, one of the players is playing a turncoat, who backstabs one of the players for X amount of damage.
Our players are supposed to be captured, and sent back to be "interrogated" Pretty much at that point we decide that it's better to go out with our boots on.
We took perverse pleasure in the GM's attempt to use non-lethal force to capture us. Finally though, we managed to Butch and Sundance our way into getting his army to kill us.
Mercifully, the campaign pretty much ended there. I haven't talked to the GM in 6 years.
DaveMage said:
This reminds me of my first Vampire the Masquerade game. Actually it was Vampire/Werewolf/Mage/add the next flavor/Highlander/Streetfighter. Basically anything using the Storyteller system back in the 90's.
It was fun for a long time, but eventually I got tired of saving the world and never being able to defeat the Big Bads. And if you are going to use satelites based weapons and nukes against me, you better understand the implications when you fail.
But I digress. My character was a mage-gargoyle, (this was before it was explicit that you could NOT be anything more than a vampire OR mage OR werewolf). My background was that another gargoyle created me. However, another PC's vampire thought, up until I stopped coming to the game, that my character was created by him. It didn't help that my background gave me the desire to kill his character.
Throw in the DM's special treatment of anyone lacking testicles and I finally just realized I could be spending my time doing other stuff.
I've seen a lot of player/DM meltdowns but only a couple of campaign meltdowns. Most campaigns just kind of die. Some should meltdown but linger on to die witha whimper instead of with a bang.
Here's my worst. I was running a game for our weekly group while waiting for another game to which all had agreed to become available. It was delayed at the publisher. No other offers were on the table, so I thought I was providing a good alternative for all. The last night, I showed at the host's house to discover he was the only player present. The other five had other priorites all of a sudden. He wisely decided to go out with his girlfriend rather than play alone. I went home, watched TV and never ran that game again. In fact, attendance was so poor for the next game that I decided not to DM for that group at all for a year. The irony is that the two worst boycotters pestered me to resume another, older game for months. Dumb jerks didn't realize that their boycotts prompted my embargo. They both quit, so I began DMing weekly again. It isn't as good as it was, but it isn't bad either.
Here's my worst. I was running a game for our weekly group while waiting for another game to which all had agreed to become available. It was delayed at the publisher. No other offers were on the table, so I thought I was providing a good alternative for all. The last night, I showed at the host's house to discover he was the only player present. The other five had other priorites all of a sudden. He wisely decided to go out with his girlfriend rather than play alone. I went home, watched TV and never ran that game again. In fact, attendance was so poor for the next game that I decided not to DM for that group at all for a year. The irony is that the two worst boycotters pestered me to resume another, older game for months. Dumb jerks didn't realize that their boycotts prompted my embargo. They both quit, so I began DMing weekly again. It isn't as good as it was, but it isn't bad either.
I once triggered a meltdown, though I wasn't the cause of it. I was just the person that set it off...
R had been running a game for a while when we were in college. Now, R had some ideas on How Games Ought To Work Out. Well, great, if he'd been running a group that had played together for a few years, but... not only was this a newly-thrown-together group, we had a couple of players who were fairly new to the game, including J. We'd gamed for a while, and it was only slightly fun for me. I kept with the game because a couple of friends, J & W, were also in the game.
I was playing the ranger. We started seeing stone statues that looked, uh, surprisingly realistic. This made me nervous, since no way in how can five 2nd-level characters deal with anything that can turn stuff to stone. My ranger tried to get the other PCs out of the region...no luck. So, sure enough, here comes the basilisk. I get to roll the first saving throw...which comes up a 1. So now I have a stone ranger. The party has nowhere near enough cash to spring for a stone-to-flesh spell, and since it's my character's first adventure with the group, no IC reason to shell out cash they don't have. I'm sufficienly fed up with the GM at this point that I get up and say, "Well, that's it for me" and headed out.
J & W found me later and tells me that they'd left the game, too. Evidently, W was also getting annoyed at R, and J didn't know anyone else in the group and wanted to avoid T, who'd been unsubtly hitting on her in-game after I left!
R had been running a game for a while when we were in college. Now, R had some ideas on How Games Ought To Work Out. Well, great, if he'd been running a group that had played together for a few years, but... not only was this a newly-thrown-together group, we had a couple of players who were fairly new to the game, including J. We'd gamed for a while, and it was only slightly fun for me. I kept with the game because a couple of friends, J & W, were also in the game.
I was playing the ranger. We started seeing stone statues that looked, uh, surprisingly realistic. This made me nervous, since no way in how can five 2nd-level characters deal with anything that can turn stuff to stone. My ranger tried to get the other PCs out of the region...no luck. So, sure enough, here comes the basilisk. I get to roll the first saving throw...which comes up a 1. So now I have a stone ranger. The party has nowhere near enough cash to spring for a stone-to-flesh spell, and since it's my character's first adventure with the group, no IC reason to shell out cash they don't have. I'm sufficienly fed up with the GM at this point that I get up and say, "Well, that's it for me" and headed out.
J & W found me later and tells me that they'd left the game, too. Evidently, W was also getting annoyed at R, and J didn't know anyone else in the group and wanted to avoid T, who'd been unsubtly hitting on her in-game after I left!
FreeTheSlaves
Adventurer
Please do elaborate, this "test" has an entertaining sound, albeit not at the time I'm sure.The_Universe said:
The_Universe
First Post
There really isn't a lot to tell, as I didn't press for details as to the conditions of the test after I was informed that the group and game had not past it.FreeTheSlaves said:
Presumably there were conditions for things that had to happen or had to not happen for the player(s) in question to continue their participation, and since I and the remaining players were unaware of those conditions, we didn't really have a lot of chances to *fill* them.
I wish it was more entertaining than that, but it really wasn't. It was equal parts silly, derisive, and cold - but it's done, now so there's not really a lot of point to me griping about it.
