The DM Hall of Shame

[Silver Moon]

I've attempted to blend game systems. The Boot Hill/D&D hydrid worked great, and we're now on our 6th module of that campaign.

But the one-night I tried Paranoia/D&D.....not so much. That game belongs in my Hall-of-Shame.

 

[Kae'Yoss]

Bless them for their mercy on a silly DM prone to blithe answers to innocuous questions. Needless to say, now every time a player asks a question that comes a little bit from left field, I respond with, "Why do you ask?"

I wouldn't have been so merciful. I'd have insisted on full selling price (OK, chances are that my character would have gone ahead and donated the whole load incognito, but that's another matter)

 

[vulcan_idic]

Not sure if this is really on topic for the thread, but listening to all of these stories reminded me of the first time I DMed... we were all gamers, but we'd never played together before and it had been a while since any of us played. We had no books, only a few scrounged d6's, and the desire to play, so I just started pulling things out of my butt...

They were walking through some woods when they came across a well, but the well had a circular staircase with no railings along the interior wall of the well. They go down the staircase, and just above the level of the water there is a door. They go into a little maze of tunnels I make up as I go along. There are several rooms, including a room with monsters (Rancors borrowed from Star Wars, but I just described them and didn't name them) and a treasure room. The "doors" to the rooms were invisible force fields that were "intelligent" - i.e. you could go into the treasure room, but in order to take something out, you had to move backwards, or was it that the rogue only had to move backwards... I don't remember but it was a fun puzzle... and the other "doors were something similar. In the end they were running out chased by the Rancors with bags full of gold... only to have the bags rip and start leaking on the way up the stairs, so each wound up with only about 50 gold each for all that, the rest winding up at the bottom of the well... It was pretty fun, but a little wild going by the seat of ones pants with all of the rules and so forth run only by collective memory and only a d6 to modify all the rolls to... Anyway interesting...

 

[just__al]

My last campaign. The players having been waiting and waiting to take on a Sorceror and his Vampire father. After killing the Son (although they didn't know his clone was almost complete and growing in the Vampire's lair) they go to where they suspected the father would be. The abandoned temple of Hextor.

The father was a cleric, the party finally find him and he confronts them without buffs (this was 3.0 and he had plenty of opportunity to spy on them) and takes an insane amount of damage in the battle because I forget he could harm himself he gets reduced to gaseous form. The battle was over too quickly and it wasn't satififying for the players. That was the last time any important or at least involved NPC didn't have a tactics/reminder sheet to go with his stats.

 

[Ant]

A string of bad DMing led to the untimely death of one of my first 2nd ed D&D campaigns.

It started with the market guards wearing barding. For some inane reason whenever I went to describe the town guards I called them market guards and "banded" armour always became "barding." To this day I have no idea why I was inflicted with this on-going speech impediment nor why all of my guards took to wearing armour designed for war horses.

Still, that's not too bad. Kind of amusing actually. Wait, there's more ...

In the same campaign I heard through the grapevine that one of my players was growing tired of his character (a paladin). For some reason I decided that, instead of questioning the validity of this rumour, I'd have a mob of hill giants overwhelm the party, single out the paladin and use him as an impromptu club. Needless to say both the paladin and his player were a little put out (thankfully the PC moreso.)

The final nail in the coffin was the uncanny ability that my barding-wearing market guards had to identify any spellcaster within 100' no matter how un-spellcastery they appeared. The player with the magic user PC distinctly told me several times that he was dressed as a simple traveller, not a fireball wielding mage of destruction. Unfortunately all I seemed to be able to hear was "I am dressing as a ... fireball wielding mage of destruction!"

Long story short, the player finally snapped, his mage PC decided to prove how much of a spell-caster he really was, there was some ... unpleasantness with a knight on horseback and the mage soon had his head neatly handed to him.

Thus endeth the campaign. Fortunately, 13+ years on, I'm still DMing the same bunch of great players (give or take.) I guess they forgave me

 

[The_Universe]

Trying to add Force Points from Star Wars into an otherwise-normal D&D game. *shudder*

It really killed a lot of the dramatic potential of the action for me.

 

[Orryn Emrys]

My biggest failing as a DM used to be directly related to being unable to realize when the fun should stop.... More to the point, a campaign would, after months or years of continuous play, reach a highly satisfactory point of closure... whereupon I would insist on including at least one more adventure. The players, of course, had no problem with the idea of continuing play with the characters they'd been spending so much time with... but invariably this would prove the unsatisfying demise of the campaign.

Perhaps its simply a side-effect of my style of campaign development, but epic world-spanning tales of high adventure would reach a point of obvious retirement potential... and I'd press on regardless. Every time I did so, the campaign would end a couple months later with a frustrated loss of interest amidst an anti-climactic blunder, never even beginning to live up to the characters' prior experiences.

I eventually learned to recognize this game management faux pas, and I have since learned to curb the tendency. I think my players are even beginning to understand a little. My last major campaign ran for four years and ended brilliantly... and we left it that way... with no catch in our collective voice for floundering regrets when we recount the adventures of our mighty heroes of yesteryear....

 

[Phebius]

Once I had an NPC in the party who was supposed to reveal a big secret after travveling with them for awhile. Then I promptly forgot she existed for three game sessions, until someone said, "Hey, whatever happened to what's her name?"


The secret eventually got revealed by other means. Now I keep better notes.

 

[Kalendraf]

I think I wrote about this once in a prior thread, but it still haunts me as one of my worst days of DM'ing.

We'd been playing for a while, and the party entered the final chamber where an evil half-orc cleric was positioned on a small platform about 50' across a flooded chamber. The party had made noise by setting off some previous traps, so the cleric was ready for the fight. Being a half-orc, he had darkvision, so he could see when they approachd. As the first PC entered the chamber, the cleric summoned a fiendish giant crocodile and sent it at them.

The rogue declared he was sneaking in. His approach up the hallway was at a slight angle to the cleric's position, so he did have some cover to setup his sneaky approach. However, I forgot that he had no light source to work with nearby - just a torch quite a ways up the hallway. Stupidly, as he entered the room, I let him roll to spot the half-orc and he did. (Mistake #1).

The rogue then decided to get his bow ready for the next round. The rest of the party enters the room, and begins to fight the croc.

On the next round, the rogue takes a 5' step into a wide open square, and takes 2 shots (using rapid shot) at the enemy cleric. Both arrows hit. Despite being over 50' away, he rolls his sneak attack damage for each, and I don't think twice about it. (Mistakes #2, #3 & #4). First problem is that these shots were over 30' away, and thus were not eligible for sneak damage. Second problem was that the rogue would become uncovered after his 1st shot, so even at a closer range, the 2nd shot wouldn't count as a sneak attack. Third, his position gave him no cover or concealment, so he wasn't even able to hide in the square he attacked from. The enemy cleric was not flat-footed, so there was no chance of sneak damage at all from a ranged attack. Triple Doh!

He totalled up the damage from the 2 arrows, and it was easily enough to kill the priest. I said he was dead, and they finished the adventure shortly after that. I was really shocked how easy this priest had died, figuring it was going to be a very difficult climactic combat with all the spells he'd be able to fling at the party stuck across the pool of water. It wasn't until a few hours later I realized how badly I'd messed things up. Part of the problem was DM-fatigue, but that was still no excuse for that many errors.

Edit: Forgot to mention one other error. When the rogue took his bowshots, he was in a square threatened by the giant croc's 10' reach, but I totally forgot about that as well, and never rolled an attack of opportunity. So I really hosed up this particular encounter on several levels...

 

[DungeonmasterCal]

The last campaign I ran (and technically is still ongoing, though we've not played in forever) is my entry into this. I keep hoping the players will finally stop asking when we're going to play it... I ran a great campaign for 10 years, and then started a new one 3 years ago. It was a bad plan and poorly executed. I really screwed that one up.