Curios, did you ask for player buy-in for that many? When the DM needs to divide their attention that many ways, work in character arcs for that many characters, when combat is soooo long between actions. That impacts them greatly as well.
I probably would have skipped on a 12 player game.
We were 1E/2E players. We did that plus henchman. And as for backstory. It either unfolded throughout the course of play or u had none. In any game I played players did not give the DM a complex background or much of one. It developed or it didn’t.
the most complex background was I am from specularum or I am from minrothad. And then I worked with that if it was important.
Being in a campaign for 3 years and being 5 or 6 sessions from completing the main story line with 16th level characters (the highest I ever played) and then 2 people moved away. We never got to finish.
Being in a campaign for 3 years and being 5 or 6 sessions from completing the main story line with 16th level characters (the highest I ever played) and then 2 people moved away. We never got to finish.
Oh this reminds me of a GURPS game I played in that was so weird. We were travelling on the backs of some sort of somethings, and then these things would slash out of the sky. And the GM would NEVER tell us what the hell was going on, even now, 20+ years later. I should call him again and see what the heck was going on with that game. If I recall the last time I asked him, about 5 years ago, he had forgotten what that game was about
In terms of the game itself, Exalted 3e, beyond a shadow of a doubt. Story time:
I loved Exalted when it first came out. It was a really fresh take on fantasy RPG's, with a setting I can still lose myself in, years later. But the rules system was always....White Wolf levels of quality, and the setting went to some very dumb / off-putting / puerile places as second edition wore on. I was seriously hyped for third edition, anticipating a sleeker ruleset that shed the cruft.
First, there was the Kickstarter, which is almost an object lesson in how not to run them. Delay after delay after delay, a virtual communications blackout about how things were going, no spoilers to keep the fans eager beyond things like a low-res version of the same setting map that the artist had posted on his own website months earlier. The promised fiction anthology came out in advance of the rulebook and it was mostly bad. Rudimentary setting errors (like if the most powerful political figured in the setting was an Emperor or Empress), and stories that seemed to be just generic fantasy short stories with a few names changed. And then there was the dreadful conduct of one of the authors when addressing concerns about a previewed power having....really uncomfortable implications and that's all I'm going to say about that!
Then the book finally came out, and I jumped right into a campaign with it. And it was....a glorious, noble failure. As for why--
--Complexity was up across the board. Two different types of experience, HUNDREDS of powers, most of which were uninspired dice-fiddlers, all with sloppy mechanics and overwrought descriptions ("You are the most awesome sword dude in the history of sword duding! Sword dudes and dudettes attracted to your gender want to do you, the rest want to be you! Reroll 1's on your Melee dice."). And heaven help you if you were playing a crafter, in which case you had to narrate how you were making dozens of trivial dice rolls to make arrows before you could produce that magic sword you really wanted. And now your artifacts have their own powers, martial arts styles have their own dice pools....
--White Wolf'isms that people had been complaining about in 1992 hadn't been touched. Bonus points at character creation worked differently from experience points, meaning you could easily fall into traps at character creation. Dexterity was still the god stat.
--The new setting was better (for me) but still grossly underdeveloped. Countries got maybe three paragraphs each, and were separated by France-sized expanses of "dunno, make something up". And though it's a matter of taste, some of the retconning of 2e's tendencies to over-detail the setting went way too far ("Some mortals know minor magic that can create potions, make prophecies or summon a ghost, at significant expense or risk." was brutally ripped out of the setting and reduced to "One mortal in a million knows how to turn one loaf of bread into two."), and it got downright absurd when it insisted characters didn't know how their own powers worked or that they were even doing anything supernatural, even when they were summoning energy swords or a horse out of thin air.
--The art was very often baaaaad. Poser 3d models from the depths of the uncanny valley, inconsistent art direction that led to one character changing ethnicity, and notably, a piece the artist just copied from a children's book on dinosaurs.
It badly needed an editor to take a scythe to it, and a round of playtesting, and to me, it stands as a living testament to why authors should kill their darlings.
And in an entirely different way, Fading Suns. Love the setting, have an involved campaign in mind, I've tried it three times and every time, one or more players drop for reasons unrelated to the game.
There was a kickstarter called e20 by G. M. Sarli which was supposed to be the d20 system evolved. Sarli was involved in some of the SW SAGA books. Started great. I even designed the logo for it. The product never came through. He didn't finished the PDF version. The author claimed misdiagnosed mental illness issues for not completing.
I was really hoping to do all the interior layout of the book and the cover. A missed opportunity. So a professional heartbreak.
We could but we all live in different time zones and it’s been over 20 years. There were so many small details that we will have forgotten. I can’t even find the character sheet anymore.
The most recent was the hardest - The Witcher. Everyone was excited, and then, like as we played, the system pulled the oxygen slowly out of the room. After two sessions we couldn't even continue.
So, at least it was just a book giving me a heartache, and not my players.
For a while in my gaming circle there were two ongoing weekly D&D games: mine, and the Other Game. There were a few crossover players, but mostly folks played in one or the other.
Over time, the players in my game became more difficult to schedule. Eventually I had to fold my game. I tried to join the Other Game (again, made up of my friends), but they already had six players and decided seven would be too many. So I wound up with no D&D group for a while.
Now that was heartbreaking... Still stings to this day! As a result, I always make my campaigns open to new players or drop-in guests.
There was a kickstarter called e20 by G. M. Sarli which was supposed to be the d20 system evolved. Sarli was involved in some of the SW SAGA books. Started great. I even designed the logo for it. The product never came through. He didn't finished the PDF version. The author claimed misdiagnosed mental illness issues for not completing.
I was really hoping to do all the interior layout of the book and the cover. A missed opportunity. So a professional heartbreak.
