Hey, life's too short to spend at bad con games.
That One Time
- Thread starter James Gasik
- Start date
This reminded me of a story from decades ago.
I had designed a 30-ish player scenario for our University RPG club. The system was a D&D variant, in which everything needed for a character or creature was on their sheet. The setup was 4 "zones", each with a different theme and set of opponents (the diabolic cathedral zone, the lich zone which I think also had a vampire, etc) and then a central zone that could only be entered after having collected the relevant item from multiple zones (I can't remember the details any better than that). And I'd prepared a big pile of pre-generated PCs. So the idea was that players could drop in over the course of the afternoon, pick up a pre-gen (or grab a new one if their existing character died), enter one of the zones - and then whichever group(s) made it into the central zone would have to cooperate and/or battle one another for the final prize.
Each zone needed its own GM. So I'd recruited the other GMs I needed: two friends, and another guy who I didn't know very well but who was a prominent club member. At the start of the event I briefed them on the set-up, sketched out the details of each zone, and gave them the notes and creature/NPC sheets for their respective zones. And then let them loose.
So it all seemed to be going pretty well. In due course my zone got cleared out, and so was a safe pathway through to the centre for anyone who wanted one. And the same happened in two other zones. Except for the lich zone, which was being GMed by the guy I didn't know very well. And it turned out that instead of using the mechanical details I had given him, he had given the lich a phylactery and was bringing it back to life every time the players killed it, so whoever went into that zone had no hope of getting through to the central area.
The event was still a success - two different parties made it into the central zone, and there was a battle royale between them to determine a final set of winners. But I felt sorry for anyone who spent their afternoon stuck in the never-ending cycle of lich smackdown set up by they guy who couldn't follow simple directions . . .
Jd Smith1
Hero
Well, you win the thread, but take penalties for actually coming back for a second isolation session.
Jd Smith1
Hero
I can't imagine a situation where that would be justified. That's horrible.
G
Guest 7034872
Guest
I agree with JD Smith1: for services like that, you had a right to expect payment. That's just completely nuts.
Moreover, I still play with that DM (though I'm running the games now).
Jd Smith1
Hero
Check with the Church: you may qualify for sainthood.
James Gasik
We don't talk about Pun-Pun
The last time I suffered from "separation anxiety", the DM wanted us each to choose a patron deity from among those in his campaign world- due to the story, we were all outsiders and didn't know much about the world. So one by one, we each got pulled into another room to talk to an Avatar of the Gods. My Dragonborn Fighter felt his ideals aligned with the Dragon King, so I was in and out in like 15 minutes.
Then the last player, my friend Eric, went in. And time passed. And passed. And passed. It got so bad our Druid player up and left. Finally, with almost no time left for the session, the DM and Eric come out. The DM explains that Eric's character was "difficult", and Eric said, his character simply didn't see how serving any of these unknown Gods was necessary. In the end, he was given an ultimatum by the Dark God, Root, who the other Gods hated and feared, and received that God's mark.
It set up a lot of tension in the game, as it turned out Root was opposed to our efforts to save this new world from destruction. Which occasionally led to other incidents of Eric being dragged to another room to receive "instructions". Then, in the final battle, Eric's character sacrificed himself to betray Root, which, you know, bully for him, but it really made me wonder why the DM bothered in the first place.
Then the last player, my friend Eric, went in. And time passed. And passed. And passed. It got so bad our Druid player up and left. Finally, with almost no time left for the session, the DM and Eric come out. The DM explains that Eric's character was "difficult", and Eric said, his character simply didn't see how serving any of these unknown Gods was necessary. In the end, he was given an ultimatum by the Dark God, Root, who the other Gods hated and feared, and received that God's mark.
It set up a lot of tension in the game, as it turned out Root was opposed to our efforts to save this new world from destruction. Which occasionally led to other incidents of Eric being dragged to another room to receive "instructions". Then, in the final battle, Eric's character sacrificed himself to betray Root, which, you know, bully for him, but it really made me wonder why the DM bothered in the first place.
billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him) 🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️⚧️
For situations like this and where a player sits while waiting to be introduced/gotten back to, I think a lot can get chalked up to the DM not really expecting things to go that way or play out the way they did. In the post I excerpted the quote from, I'd bet the DM didn't expect Eric's character to be so... difficult. And I know, from my own experiences, that managing time can be difficult, particularly when a player (or even multiple players) are taking extra long to accomplish something that I estimated would be over and done relatively quickly.
As an example, I was DMing a session way back in middle school when we were adding a player into an ongoing adventure. There was place just ahead where there were prisoners and inserting a new PC would be a breeze, no kludging the encounter necessary. But the other players were just taking sooooooo loooooooonnnng to actually get there! Nowadays, I'd just say "Let's condense this searching and security a bit so we can get X into the game, OK?"
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