The Learned Helplessness Party and the Insurance Company GM
My husband and I were once invited to join a campaign by a GM (who I will refer to as the Insurance Company GM or ICGM for short for reasons I will explain later). He had a bunch of relatively new players in their first D&D 3E campaign and he claimed that they seemed particular ineffective and inactive in the game. (Alarm Bells should have been ringing.) He was hoping to bring someone in to help them along, learn the rules, enliven the game etc. He talked a lot about game balance, sharing the spot light, what makes a good GM etc. We thought, hey, this sounds great. We’ve been looking for a game to join recently and this guy seems really reasonable. Well, this turned out to be one of the most frustrating experiences in my 20 year gaming career.
The Cast and Crew
Let me tell you about the party. This pretty much sums up the campaign. The problems with the party didn’t surface all at once, but after a couple of sessions, it became apparent that all was not quite right in Mudville.
The Cheater: He played the loner rogue. He sat off in the corner from the rest of the party. He rolled nothing under a 25. You know the players. The ones with the sparkly dice that are hard to read. They only rolled behind some obstruction. The dice are only on the rolling surface for one nanosecond before being scooped up and some incredibly high number shouted out. A natural 20. Oh look! Another 20! He never rolled a 1. Ever! No one called him on this. Not the GM, not the other players. This made him incredibly useful compared to the rest of the party.
The Contrary Drama Queen: No matter what the rest of the party wanted to do, this player wanted to do the opposite. If we are all going right, he went left. He kept trying to side track the party with the ICGMs red herrings. He thought he had everything figured out, but he was always wrong. He played the mage that spent the whole combat casting protective spells and never did anything to help out another player. If you needed help, you never turned to him. He appointed himself recorder of the party treasure. This meant he wrote everything down on his character sheet and considered it his. He never distributed the treasure at the end, and if you argued with him to get anything, he would give it to you, but still leave it written on his character sheet. Thus, any item distributed to the party got duplicated. If the ICGM noticed this, the Contrary Drama Queen got to keep the item and the other player lost it.
The Indecisive One: This player was always late. Couldn’t find or level their character sheet. Played a Sorcerer that was forced into multi-classing as a Wizard. Couldn’t make up their mind to do anything in combat after spending the first two rounds casting protective spells. In defense of this player, she tried very hard, but had given up trying to do anything, because every spell she cast was ineffective due to ICGM rulings.
The Golden Boy: This was the ICGM’s chosen one. NPCs handed him magic items galore that were specifically tailored for this player. He got offered prestige classes unavailable to the rest of the party. None of his stats we below a 15. He was offered kingship of the land, the rest of us were lucky not to get deported, in fact, some of us were. He had two +3 special weapons of his chosen weapon, the rest of us were lucky if we found a cursed weapon. He was the big buff cowardly fighter. OK, the big bad nasty steps up, and the fighter … runs away. In defense, he was a young teenager afraid of dying, and didn’t want the spotlight that the ICGM kept forcing on him. This was
We built our characters using the point buy system. Everyone else had rolled, and rolled incredibly well. We were about 20-25 pt characters, they were about 40-45 pt characters. Everyone kept asking “Why do you only have a 14 in that stat? That’s your primary stat.” We were also 1-2 levels behind the rest of the party.
My husband: Played a cleric tailored to defeat undead. The ICGM had said that undead were the main foes of the campaign. As it turned out, he couldn’t recognize an undead if it came up and bit him on the *ss. Yes, all undead we special and unique. They were unrecognizeable, and the ICGM never told you that you were fighting one until the combat was over. Oh, and asking if they were undead didn’t help. He never saw a single magic item in the whole campaign.
Me: I played a 3.0 Ranger, only modified to be less useful than the one in the book. Yes, that is possible. My favored enemy was undead. I suffered the same fate at the cleric in terms of recognizing undead. My abilities were even more useless. I never found a single magic item in the game except a cursed weapon.
NPCs: Next to the Golden Boy, they were the stars of the show. They solved every plot. Took all the credit. Saved the day. Got all the glory. We got less than squat.
Insurance Company GM (ICGM): Have you ever dealt with an insurance company that rejects every bill on the first round as a matter of policy? Well, this guy rejected every action that you attempted, no matter how minor. You had to spend minutes to hours to do anything. I once spent 30 minutes attempting to get a drink at the bar in our home town with nothing happening. Anything you did necessitated a roll at some absurd DC. No spell you cast ever worked as described in the book. All NPCs made their saves. ABOVE ALL: Nothing the players did ever affected the outcome of the campaign. The plot rolled along, and we were only allowed to do as we were told. If you attempted to deviate from the course, your actions didn’t work. Why, because any action you took was not down the proscribed path. Oh, but the NPCs were allowed to do anything the ICGM wanted them to. We were spectators in the campaign. As a result, the players had learned helplessness. They had ceased doing anything because nothing worked. You were better off sitting at the table and having the GM tell you what you did and how everything turned out than doing anything. It was like a bad storyteller game on drugs. No, that would have been better than this campaign.
Low Points of the Campaign
- When we were traveling out in the open on the night of the year all the undead rise up and are at some mystical peak of power. I said. Let’s stay inside tonight. Anyone who stays inside is safe. No, we traveled on because the ICGM had a timetable built into the campaign and we had to be at our destination the next day. Mind you, he didn’t give our characters any reason to travel that night. He basically said, and that night you travel no matter what you say.
- When the ICGM intentionally killed off three separate characters on three separate occasions. Why? Well, to show the cowardly fighter that death wasn’t permanent in D&D. The characters were all killed not due to their own actions. In compensation, the killed characters were rewarded with special gifts for dying and brought back. It was the only campaign I’ve been in where you were better off dead.
- I complained to the ICGM that I was 10th level and didn’t have a magic weapon. I was told that this was being a power gamer. The next session, the Golden Boy was out sick, so we only had me as a fighter type. The combat put us up against a creature that required +2 or better weapons. That’s OK, because the ICGM played the Golden Boy’s Character and basically fought the combat with himself. We all stood around and watched. None of the mage’s or priest’s spells could affect it.
- The time that the whole 10 hr gaming session took place in the mage’s guild. The Cheater and my character were not allowed in the door to the guild. I spent the whole day sitting at the table doing NOTHING. I was so bored. I was so feed up. In the next session I kept trying to get my character killed, but I was too ineffectual to even accomplish this. Some NPC saved the day.
- This finally culminated in an adventure on some demi plane. Any spell casting instantly summoned an 8 HD creature that instantly attacked the spell caster and drained 1d4 Dex. It could only be knocked back for a few rounds before respawning again. We didn’t know this, and we were magically teleported there. The first thing the mages did? Cast all of their protective spells. Thus we had about 7 of these things pursuing us across the plane. The priest wrote a sign that said “I DO NOTHING”, and set it in front of his sheet and left the table. That was the last session we ever ran in that campaign.
Oh, when he first started to talk he asked everybody to roll a d20. I guess its official if everybody rolls a die 
. This person had been a jerk all Con and had been "playing against the table" for almost every round he played in. Also, a friend at the con organized a midnight round and put a sign up sheet with his name and my name on it. This person scratched my name off of the list while putting his and his friend's name on the list. He told my friend that my character was too low a level and they didn't want to game with me. My character was only two levels below the average. I have often run this character at 2 below the APL and never had a problem him weakining the party. This list incident happened first day of the con before he pulled the "tell everybody what happens and then walk off" stunt.
