What is your biggest RPG heartbreak?

[Azuresun]

That's insane.

I must be one of the half dozen moderate RIFTS GMs in the world apparently. I was able to run a year(s) long campaign that had the characters rescue a town from bandits, then successfully defend it, and eventually were asked to run it. They did, and it was great! We had criminal factions, mercs, slavers, vampires, all vying for the area.

The characters were ley line walker, samas pilot, juicer, head hunter, and mind melter, and vagabond. Everyone had a chance to shine. Man, I don't get how people consistently ruin this game.

I'm sorry your session was so bad.

I think it's because it so often gets sold on the hyper-gonzo "you can do ANYTHING" aspect, and the range of PC options are so wide and wacky that you do kinda want to try some of the crazier stuff. It does do a bit of a disservice to the game, since there is a very solid sci-fi / post-apocalyptic game in there, and one that benefits a lot from having a firm focus and a limited campaign premise.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

That seems to be one of the common reasons why Rifts campaigns fail. GMs are not used to ban things.
Most modern RPGs, at least the mainstream ones, try to make everything balanced to each other and there has been a push for GMs to allow everything ("say yes").
Rifts on the other hand does not work that way. Its was not made to ensure balance. Balancing is the GMs job, the book just presents option. So the usual approach of "everything in the core book is allowed" does not work. You might get lucky and end up with a group which can tolerate balance differences or them picking characters of roughly the same power and usefulness level, but it can also go horrible wrong and you end up with a extreme power difference.

Gotta say, I really didn’t ban much of anything. I mostly excised stuff I simply didn’t want to deal with.

(Nobody chose a Vagabond, though.)

 

[Dragonsbane]

The crazy costs of some game stuff lately. MCG is always overpriced but $250 for Invisible Sun and 60$ just for Ptlous PDF? Crazy "deluxe" sets that are way more money with a trinket or two... the standard price of WotC books even has gone up.

 

[Willie the Duck]

The crazy costs of some game stuff lately. MCG is always overpriced but $250 for Invisible Sun and 60$ just for Ptlous PDF? Crazy "deluxe" sets that are way more money with a trinket or two... the standard price of WotC books even has gone up.

Invisible Suns was definitely a heartbreak for my group. Cool concepts, inventive setting, kitchen sink of magic with a not-quite-steampunk atmosphere. And then you sit down to play it and realize it is an organizational mess; the balance is nonexistent; there are not just several, but ubiquitous infinite character resource generation loops; and overall it just looks like the alpha, maybe beta version of what after months-to-years of playtesting and fine-tuning could turn into a very impressive game.

 

[Mind of tempest]

The crazy costs of some game stuff lately. MCG is always overpriced but $250 for Invisible Sun and 60$ just for Ptlous PDF? Crazy "deluxe" sets that are way more money with a trinket or two... the standard price of WotC books even has gone up.

some of it is a supply problem apparently but the rest is odd to me.

 

[Willie the Duck]

some of it is a supply problem apparently but the rest is odd to me.

My impression is that MCG is going for a 'boutique' economic model -- low volume, high profit sales of high cost products for people who don't care overmuch about the price (especially if they think then they are getting a high end product). Outside of my issues with the actual rules of Invisible Suns, it's not altogether wrong. The actual product from a production value is amazing -- full color everything, high quality hard bound books, colored non-standard sized character sheets, lots of full color glossy tokens and decks of cards for spells and items and little plastic skeleton keys representing character metacurrencies and a weird six fingered hand which holds the card denoting the current thematic atmosphere and so forth.

It's an interesting model for so-called 'elfgames,' but given that the non-D&D TTRPG market seems to over-represent (compared to the general population highly compensated PhDs/Engineers/Computer People/etc. (as well as, I should stipulate, over-represent struggling teens/college students/young adults), I can see a reason to try to market oneself as the Cadillac (or similar concept, for other countries) of RPGs.

 

[Scott Christian]

Most modern RPGs, at least the mainstream ones, try to make everything balanced to each other and there has been a push for GMs to allow everything ("say yes").

This can not be restated enough. Which, if we reach out to another thread about 6e settings, cannot be understated. The say yes does not allow generic and specific settings. The say yes is also a way to keep campaigns going for many players. So it is a two-edged sword.

 

[kevin_video]

It’s not a group related but product related.

My group played through The Way of the Wicked by Gary McBride and Firemountain Games and got all the way to the end of six books - level 19, pretty awesome campaign that took us 2 years or so.

Gary launched a Kickstarter for a drow campaign called Throne of Night, that made the excellent Rise of the Drow look like a minor spelunking expedition. Full Hexploration over hundreds of miles of detailed caverns. Amazing locations, demons, a secret aberration threat from below, a ruined dwarf city and a wicked drow city and kingdom building rules. There were options to play as heroic dwarves settlers or to build a new drow house from the ashes.

I went all in with several hundred other people, I think £180 for hard copy books, PDFs, poster maps etc. it started well, if slowly. The first pdf was released and was everything I’d come to expect - absolute quality adventure. The second pdf came out even later, also brilliant and imaginative so it was worth the wait… though no sign of the first hardcover. Then the wheels came off.

After promises of better communication Gary McBride just stopped talking to us. No updates were forthcoming, we emailed him, emailed Kickstarter no response. People wrote to him at the fire mountain games registered address, no response. We escalated the complaints to Kickstarter, they said they would reach out to the author… no response was forthcoming.

We contacted the artist working on the project who said he had delivered all the art for the project on time and had been paid for it. He promised to reach out to Gary but he too was unsuccessful. Eventually stopping responding to as his part in the Kickstarter had been fulfilled. The firemountain website was closed down, as was the Facebook page. A small number of backers still post five years later keeping the hope that one day we might see any more of this p. Gary sits on the $40,000 he defrauded from his backers without even the good grace to explain what happened and apologize.

Most heartbreaking of all, and the piece that makes me want to buy a ticket from England to Beaverton Oregan and hunt the man down, is that since he went silent, Gary McBride still has a Kickstarter account and has backed over 500 other kickstarters on the site. Since he went silent! Presumably receiving all the updates from those projects and casually ignoring the emails from those he defrauded and Kickstart do nothing!

I could weep!

What I was most mad about all of this was Gary staying silent and not trusting us. I'm sure pride was a huge factor. I know a lot of people were angry and felt he took the money and dipped, saying he spent it all on the African safari, but that's not true. Safaris take time to plan and aren't all that expensive overall. The artist did the math and a large chunk went to him. KS takes 5% from every campaign so $2k was immediately taken. However, on the Facebook page, he mentioned that while he was gone he'd hire someone to look after everything. We never heard anything about that afterwards. Was Gary robbed? Was his stuff taken? Was there a fire? Did something happen to his wife and he lost control of his company? The safari was supposed to be an anniversary gift to the both of them, but did it end in divorce? So many things. So many people going without. And then he just immediately cut himself off from all of his friends. People who were always in contact with him from his hometown and elsewhere, just suddenly cut out of his life and he'd gone silent with them too, and they were worried. Almost panicking because there was no response. All they knew was Gary was still funding projects so he was at least alive. There's just such a huge shadow cast over this project now.

But I'm with you. Biggest RPG heartbreak. I just hope that my posts and uploads helped people complete their game to a satisfactory conclusion.

 

[Gnarlo]

Everquest. Yeah, it’s not a TTRPG but it’s the closest thing to online D&D I ever experienced. The chief founder Brad McQuaid said he based the world and lore on his old D&D campaign and everything about it in the early days was D&D with the serial numbers filed off Classes, races, spells, abilities…
Made many a friend playing the game, a good half dozen of which I’m still friends with 22 years later. We enjoyed playing the hell out of it for a good 5 years or so, until the developers began listening to the hard-core end-raid guilds, and then all the expansions and new content coming out were 90%+ for the end game “elites”, whom the devs themselves eventually admitted were less than 5% of the player base… More and more non raiding, frustrated players on the forums they refused to listen to because they were the 800 pound gorilla—until WoW came out. The exodus was amazing; most of our guild left within 2 weeks. I tried it for a couple months, but it just wasn’t what I was looking for. EQ’s devs woke up and realized at last that it was the rank and file subscribers that paid their salaries, not the handful of L33t raiders, and started making low and mid level content again, but it was too late, most of us had left.
I have an emulator server I boot up a couple times a year and wander around in god mode through the old zones I played in and remember incredible nights of fun But one of the biggest heartbreaks is that almost all the raiding guilds that basically killed the game for everyone else all left enmasse for WoW as well. Hell, the most vocal of the “end game all the time” guild leaders got a job with Blizzard as a raid developer after killing our fun… sigh…
Edit to add went to look up if he was still there, and found he is one of the Blizzard folks in the lawsuit charged with abuse and harassment of female employees and players… doesn’t that just fit…

 

[glass]

I probably would have skipped on a 12 player game.

I did skip out on a 12 player game (well, it might have only been 10 or 11, but way to many to my way of thinking). TBF, my Mum was seriously ill in hospital at the time and visiting her was taking up a lot of my time so another RPG night was already putting a strain on things, but when the number of players shot up that was the final straw.

Anyway, my biggest heartbreak was the DDN playtest. 5e as published is a pretty decent game, but if they could actually have made the game they were promising early in the playtest it could have been amazing! As the playtest went on, it became increasingly apparent that not only did they have no idea how to implement the features they had been touting a few months earlier, but they were not really interested in doing so. It was...heart breaking.

_
glass.