Walking away from a game...

[Mort]

What has made you pack up and walk away from a game? I don't mean in the middle of a session (necessarily anyway middle of a session would be a pretty good story) just that you decided, I'm not coming back.

For me, the last time I wallked was when I was misled going in:

My friend invited me to a deadlands game he had joined and got me in e-mail contact with the GM. Over e-mail I asked (paraphrasing because it ws some time ago) "what kind of game is it, high powered, low powered etc.?" and "what kind of characters are you looking for?"

I received a response stating it was a low key, heroic deadlands game with minimal magic or other "power" backgrounds, plus some more specifics. I created a tracker/gunslinger and e-mailed it to the GM. He e-mailed back that it would fit perfectly!

On the way to the session, my friend mentions he's playing a doomsayer, a class with some decent magical mojo. This strikes me as odd, considering the GMs e-mail, but so far, so what, the GM didn't say no magic just light on it (plus my friend had a way of talking GMs into concepts they would regret)

Get to the session and, well, everyone has a high powered super magic character some with more than one background (including harrowed, veteran's of the weird west and more), my friend's character was actually the least powered of the bunch (excluding me of course).

I'm not one to whine about being underpowered, so I tried to stick it out. Made it about 3 sessions, but the GMs initial e-mail proved to be so off about the above and about everything else, that I just couldn't take anymore and dropped it.

Thoughts? Your experiences?

 

[Zhaleskra]

I did it once because an argument between two players that I don't remember whether it was in character or not got out of hand in a Rifts game at a gaming club.

Had I not been friends with the GM, I might have walked out of my first experience with Rolemaster at the same club. It took him well over an hour to work the pregen he'd given me into the adventure. Club structure made afternoon and evening sessions 5 hours each.

 

[jdrakeh]

I walked away from a Dark*Matter game due to a real dick move on the part of the GM. Long story short, I'm a recovering addict, the GM knew this and, for some reason, decided to make my character a drunk by fiat. By which I mean that he decided my character was a raging alcoholic, without my knowledge (I did not purchase the Flaw for this). I did not find out about this decision of his until after play began...

The very first session started in a bar where, despite my not having said that my character was drinking alcohol, the GM made me roll to see if my character was sober. Then, despite my making that roll, he had me roll again - this time with massive penalties - to see if my character could drive after leaving the bar. My character failed the roll, totaled his car and, immediately thereafter, was arrested.

The GM then gloated triumphantly that he had "beat" my character. When I told him where he could shove his game, he accused me of not being a "good sport" and launched into a soliloquy about how I didn't understand his genius and that he was "taking RPGs to a new level" by using the players' own foibles against them (without their permission, of course, and in complete violation of the actual rules).

I never gamed with that guy again.

 

[kitsune9]

My own personal experience of walking out of a game (after the session had ended) was that my expectations versus the expectations of the GM were completely different things.

When I had moved to San Francisco, I posted on various boards at game shops to look for a gaming group. This one lady called me up and told me that she played AD&D and was the GM for a couple of other guys and that she was looking for more players. Her and I got to talking about the game, but she told me that she also had a homebrew game that she had worked on and I told her that I wasn't interested in homebrews but wanted to play AD&D (D&D 3.0 was coming out in August that year).

So we had a meet-and-greet up at a small cafe near her apartment. My first impression of her was that she was disgusting and her loud behavior actually kind of frightened a young lady and her two daughters so that I had told her we needed to take it elsewhere. Her other two players were very effette men who basically waited on her hand and foot and despite the fact that we should have been playing AD&D, she whipped out her mish-mashed homebrew game in which everyone had strong homosexual or bisexual tendencies. Now I have nothing against these lifestyles given that I live in a tolerant SF Bay Area, but don't tell me what I am and am not with my character that I created. Also don't tell me that my character does X when I want to do Y. Also when I say that I want to play AD&D or some other game, we better be playing said game.

Then on top of all this, these guys literally obeyed this woman's commands. As part of being players in her group, they had to cook and clean her apartment. Talk about domination or magic jarring their souls. She told me that I would get my turn "soon". Luckily, I made my Will save against charm person (believe me, I had a +5 modifier with her looks) and didn't return to the game.

My second example was that I was on the DM side and one of my roommates was also a gamer. Him and I would drive out to a small town where he had some close friends whom he loved to game with. However, his friends were total cheaters, played Chaotic Jerk a-hole characters, and were basically boorish and unruly to deal with. When he was with them, he cheated just as blatantly and as badly as they did. After a few sessions of hanging out with these folks, I just called it quits and left the game.

 

[kitsune9]

I walked away from a Dark*Matter game due to a real dick move on the part of the GM. Long story short, I'm a recovering addict, the GM knew this, and for some reason, decided to make my character a drunk by fiat. By which I mean that he decided my character was a raging alcoholic, without my knowledge (I did not purchase the Flaw for this). I did not find out about this decision of his until after play began...

The very first session started in a bar where, despite my not having said that my character was drinking alcohol, the GM made me roll to see if my character was sober. Then, despite my making that roll, he had me roll again - this time with massive penalties - to see if my character could drive after leaving the bar. My character failed the roll, totaled his car and, immediately thereafter, was arrested.

The GM then gloated triumphantly that he had "beat" my character. When I told him where he could shove his game, he accused me of not being a "good sport" and launched into a soliloquy about how I didn't understand his genius and that he was "taking RPGs to a new level" by using the players' own foibles against them (without their permission, of course, and in complete violation of the actual rules).

I never gamed with that guy again.

That's not taking a game to a whole new level, that's just being downright sadistic and cruel. What if you were a father and had lost one of your children in a drowing accident? Would that show up in your character background?

I think you handled it pretty well, I think I would reached across the table and punched the guy in the nose.

 

[Diamond Cross]

My Gm had a philosophy.

He thought it was okay to do anything he wanted to for the sake of the story, but use anything he can against the players.

For instance, everytime you stopped at an ATM, you got robbed. If yhou had a lot of money and put it in the bank, the bank got robbed.

He would often take over a player's character and change it to suit his purpose as well, without giving the player an out or a chance to revert to the original form.

Basically he believed in giving the players illusion of control.

One of the worse things he did during a game of the original MSH RPG is because he wanted one player to have a supreme struggle, he'd just magically come up with enough karma, that the opponent didn't have, to match his players' spending of it. If je wanted to spend fifty, he'd have fifty. If he wanted to spend seven hundred, the GM'd spend seven hundred.

Just because he wanted his story to be told.

After a while, that gets real old.

 

[ExploderWizard]

So we had a meet-and-greet up at a small cafe near her apartment. My first impression of her was that she was disgusting and her loud behavior actually kind of frightened a young lady and her two daughters so that I had told her we needed to take it elsewhere. Her other two players were very effette men who basically waited on her hand and foot and despite the fact that we should have been playing AD&D, she whipped out her mish-mashed homebrew game in which everyone had strong homosexual or bisexual tendencies. Now I have nothing against these lifestyles given that I live in a tolerant SF Bay Area, but don't tell me what I am and am not with my character that I created. Also don't tell me that my character does X when I want to do Y. Also when I say that I want to play AD&D or some other game, we better be playing said game.

Then on top of all this, these guys literally obeyed this woman's commands. As part of being players in her group, they had to cook and clean her apartment. Talk about domination or magic jarring their souls. She told me that I would get my turn "soon". Luckily, I made my Will save against charm person (believe me, I had a +5 modifier with her looks) and didn't return to the game.

Wow.

I once walked out on an AD&D game mid-session. Every player at the table did actually. When the DM stands up and proclaims " This is my campaign and you will do exactly as I say!" what else is there to do at that point?

 

[jdrakeh]

That's not taking a game to a whole new level, that's just being downright sadistic and cruel. What if you were a father and had lost one of your children in a drowing accident? Would that show up in your character background?

The thing is, if I had wanted my character to be a drunk and if I had taken the Flaw for that, I'd be totally cool with drawing on my own experience in that area (I'm pretty comfortable with who I am, today). What made this situation bad was that the choice was made by somebody else, sprung on me by surprise, and used specifically to piss me off (oh, wait, I mean "take RPGs to a new level") by exploiting my emotions.

... I think I would reached across the table and punched the guy in the nose.

It did almost come to that, actually.

 

[jedijon]

Ahh, the gory details!


I've left 4 groups. The first was for fit - one player was a super weirdo and spoke only in limmericks and another was too cool for school.

The next was a group where everyone else was unemployed, and likely unemployable; several were incredibly excited about their characters, however.

The third was due to some family life/personal choices I became aware of on the part of the DM that I could not condone.

The final was my recent segue from an online experience - in the 4 weeks I attended there was no actual roleplaying just a lot of arguing about how to make the software work. The remainder of the people seemed like they deserved each other though. So, I guess they're better off without me.

 

[Wiseblood]

These are flipping horror stories. How will I get to sleep tonight?