D&D General Un-Fun D&D: A Thought Experiment

[Blue]

To go from theoretical to practical, I'm thinking about games I've left. It's not a large list of games, but I can break down multiple factors.

1. Character actions don't impact the world.
2. There are unintended consequences to nearly every action except the ones the DM designed as the goals of his adventures, always negative. As in "how can I screw the players for what they did".
3. PvP
4. DMPCs. A DM proxy. I don't mind an NPC, with NPC (not DM) goals, who we let travel with us. DMPCs are not that.
5. Irrelevance... I'm not sure a good description of this one so let me give an example: It was in a superhero game, where the GM ran multiple campaigns and at one point all of them were focused on different parts of this one save-the-world plot. A lot of it was trying to figure out what was going to to try to stop it. Characters found a thread and followed it for seven sessions. Biweekly, so 14 weeks of play. It was an intentional red herring that the GM just kept stringing out. And by that point it was too late by the real calender for our campaign to contribute anything to the big over-plot that was going on.
6. Executive meddling -- this is definitely not a common case. I played in a campaign at a D&D club pre-pandemic where you pay for your seat. After being told that the next season (current was SKT) wasn't close and we could continue as long as we wanted that suddenly reversed to a short deadline to complete, along with reorganizing players so we lost several and other players and their PCs from other tables (at different points of SKT and different character levels) were consolidated onto our table.

 

[CreamCloud0]

Mine:

Nobody prepares anything
nobody knows how their build works
People stare at their sheet for minutes at a time during their turn
People roll and then "shop" their sheet scouring every little thing to see what they can add. Then forget what numbers they're adding and need to read it again.
People show up late, scramble all their things, ask to bum a pencil, forgot they should have levelled up, ask to bum a PHB

well, except, none of these are really about the type of campaign so much as the group playing it...

 

[Thomas Shey]

well, except, none of these are really about the type of campaign so much as the group playing it...

I just checked and the OP didn't seem to specific the campaign type; he specified how the game was played.

 

[Remathilis]

I just checked and the OP didn't seem to specific the campaign type; he specified how the game was played.

I was looking for things that would be unfun regardless of the players or DM.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I was looking for things that would be unfun regardless of the players or DM.

Ah, that I missed. Thanks for the correction.

 

[amethal]

What anti-fun D&D is for me:

1. People are distracted with some other activity, for instance their phone.
2. I read the DM’s campaign pitch idea, attend the session zero, spend 30+ minutes creating a character, and they die at first level to a random skeleton who rolled a crit.
3. One of the other players starts telling me what would’ve been a more optimal build for my character.
4. Any time I feel like I’m simply intoning the words “I check the floor and door for traps” because if I don’t do so, there may be a random spring or pit trap with arrows or spikes coated with save or die poison.
5. I take my turn in combat, and it’ll be 15+ minutes before I get my next turn.
6. I’m expected to “theater of the mind” a combat scene off of a vague description, but tactics, movement speed, attacks of opportunity, etc. are still a “thing.”

With number 4, what you are really telling me is that you forgot to check the ceiling ...

I mostly play Pathfinder, and you can always tell which players grew up on early D&D because they check everything - even though I don't use traps much, most of those I do use are telegraphed in some way, and the consequences won't be fatal.

 

[500 Toads]

To be fair, there is Pathfinder 2E official content with rather lethal traps and hazards ( Vorpal Executioner says hello ); and, by default, many cannot be detected without explicitly Searching (without something like the Trap Finder feat). So, if they've ever run into such... paranoia might be understandable.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Didnt you just describe AD&D 1st Edition?

Exactly what I was thinking.

 

[Lanefan]

But you dont have to play bad games with good people.

I play something around 100 different new boardgames every year. And there is a huge difference between bad game with good people vs good game with good people.

It also depends how big of a gaming community you have to choose from for each different game, as not everyone will want to try everything.

People reacting to peer pressure and adapting to surroundings is not necessary a good thing.

Agreed.

The worst D&D for me would be

• Only low level/low power play (levels 1-2 in 5e) or worse OSR play
• High deadlyness because GM thinks its fun to kill players
• Only boring options allowed. Like only human fighters or similar things.
• Huge randomness impact, like rolling stats.
• Really really dark, everything is miserable.
  • Even worse if we need to also be bad people.
• Highly complex world with 100s of characters GM expect us to know by name
  • So like every detail of the world is given and we are expected to know.
  • Even worse if its a for me completly unlogical world like many OSRs are
• Random deathtraps (including cursed magic items), because "rewarding player skill"
• Tracking boring things like arrows rations weight etc.
• Lots of mother may I / sweet talk the GM/ "guess what the GM thinks" in order to "solve situations".
  • If I want party game mechanics, then I play a party game (in which the person to sweet talk at least switches).
• Only completely unbalanced combats. Either being impossible (playing the party game mechanic mentioned above) or a walk in the park just wasting our time.
• No/extremly slow character progression (including gear).

Up to here you're largely describing the sort of game I like, though I hope for the bolded it's the GM enjoying killing characters rather than players. I can live without lots of really unbalanced combats, though they should occasionally occur in each direction just to keep people on their toes; and while I like a really detailed world/setting I don't want to have to know it all - I just want to know where to look it up if-when required.

• Everyone needs to come up with 10 pages backstories and people are expected to know them and behave according to them and GM forces their integration into the campaign.
• Combat mostly is just illusion of choice (like PF2/Dragonbane), and includes tracking of many mini modifiers (PF2) and the tactics is mostly getting up to 3 times +1 to an attack (PF2).
• No grid, movement is just abstract does not matter to remove another layer of tactic

Agreed here.

• Lots of "sexual/romantic" roleplay involved. (No GM I dont care how hot that NPC is...)

And now you're back to things I find fun in the game. Inter-character and-or character-NPC romance-marriage-jealousy-flings-quarrels-sex is IMO to be expected, not shunned.

 

[pemerton]

Would anyone want to play this type of D&D?

Didnt you just describe AD&D 1st Edition?

Yeah, I was going to post that this just seems like a summary of classic D&D; but I thought someone else must have already noticed that!