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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gothmog" data-source="post: 1404883" data-attributes="member: 317">This was in 2nd edition, around 1996-1999.  A high school friend of mine ran a really craptastic super high fantasy campaign that was VERY railroaded and showed strong favoritism to certain PCs (his wife and another friend).  A few highlights:- He regularly gave out potent (we're talking at least +4 items) to the party, but only to specific members.  If another person tried to claim it, it would zap that character for enough damage to drop them to 1/2 hit points.  It didn't help his wife and the golden boy player had around 15 powerful items each, while most other characters had maybe 2 or 3 lesser items.- He was a plot nazi.  He is a writer by training, and he thought adventures should play like novels.  So he would get an idea in his head how he wanted the adventure to go, and we could not deviate from that path or come up with innovative ways to handle problems.  We could only do what he envisioned.  If your character deviated from his defined plot, you were punished (usually by grudge monsters, but sometimes he'd also take all your equipment), only to be saved in the nick of time by the other party members.- The thief in the group was only supposed to check for traps, disarm them, and backstab someone in a fight.  Any other "thiefly" type acts (stealing from NPCs, forging a document, etc) was doomed to failure and ALWAYS resulted in the most powerful authorities in the area being called down on her.  She even was imprisoned in the royal dungeons for 3 whole adventures as a "punishment" when she tried to lie to the king.- BBEGs were only vulnerable to the favored PCs.  One particular event that stands out was when we were fighting the general of an army of goblinoids/giants/demons, and one of the non-favored characters hit him for enough damage due to an innovative trick to kill him (we know, because we checked his notes after the session).  This is after we had whaled on the guy for about 160 points of damage.  Instead of allowing him to die, the DM told us that his character had "killed his armor" and now he just had a few magical protections.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f615.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":confused:" title="Confused    :confused:"  data-smilie="5"data-shortname=":confused:" />  The DMs wife HAD to deliver the killing blow.- Everything was "because its magic".  Why does the geography make no sense?   Because its magic.  WHy do rivers flow uphill according to maps?  Because its magic.  How can every NPC we try to deceive know what our true plans are?  Because its magic.  High magic became the way he could be mentally lazy and not have to think about how and why things happened.  Not to mention flights of dragons, griffins, huge cabals of high-level wizards, artifacts, and 7-9th level spells became so common in the campaign (not from PCs mind you) that magic became completely boring.  This campaign is one of the big reasons I see most high-magic games as boring and uninspired now.- The DM would literally spend more time on the game than anything else in his life.  He would proudly proclaim he spent 6 hours at work every day writing up backgrounds and adventures, then spend another 4-6 hours each night painting minis or on further adventure prep.  He had aspirations of his campaign becoming a series of epic novels some day.  If you EVER criticized his world or said something didn't make sense, he would be irate for days.Eventually this game came to a halt due to some hard feelings and general player disgust.  My friend later divorced his "witch" of a wife, and apologized for treating everyone so badly (both in the game and in real life).  He's a lot better and happier now, and we've let bygones be bygones.  The sad thing is that the players in that game (except for the DMs wife) were really good people and great players- much more toward the RP end of the spectrum than hack-n-slash.  Such a wasted opportunity.  I still game with 4 of the 8 players in that game.</blockquote>

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