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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8579685" data-attributes="member: 42582">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 . . .</blockquote>

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