What ruins a campaign?

[Nightfall]

Seeten,

Maybe later. He's got other plans and I'm saving him for a rainy day.

 

[Amitiel]

Yeah. All that being said, I don't mind houserules that are well thought out, interesting, consistent, and ANNOUNCED BEFORE I MAKE IMPORTANT CHARACTER DECISIONS BASED ON THE ALTERED RULES!

No kidding. I literally quit a game because of a DM who 'neglected' to tell us of house rules, and worse initially claimed that 'everything is as written in the book'. Our first clue he was full of it was when he backpedalled on that statment 20 minutes after he made it to rewrite Identify to give a single fact about the magic item it was cast on but only that fact.

Real Example: I cast Identify to ID a wand we found, It was a Wand of Detect Magic, he then said I would have to cast it again to determine how to use it and a 3rd time to see how many charges but that would have to wait since a single casting took 8 hours. I was then informed (after pointing out Identify tells you everything about the object and only takes 1 hour to cast) that he preferred the 3.0 version of the spell, after pointing out that it also said that activation and charges I was informed this was how he wanted the spell to work. One single fact per 8 hour casting. I was a little perturbed but worked around him by buying scrolls of Identify.

Our second clue was after explicitly stating core races only his roomate appeared with a character from another game who was not only a teifling but 6 levels higher than us, wearing demon plate and carrying a +3 great sword. Our 'encounters' at that point consisted of him slaughtering anything we could handle and anything that could challenge him we couldn't touch with a 10' pole.

He then set off yet another pet peeve, he came to many sessions not only unprepared but with no clue whatsoever with what to do with us. He started rolling dice to see which book he would choose a monster we would watch fight his roomates character while we made like leadership feat followers. And the monster he threw at us were completely arbritrary. I left when a character got the obvious magic mcguffin sword.

It was forged by a Amethyst dragon, who in the form of a elven blacksmith invited us into his cavern home (my wonky meter was offset by the randomness by this point but I was still wary of a cave dwelling high elf with a bad robin hood accent. While taking to the roomates character and the party mage (mine had died by that point and replaced with a 1/2-orc secretly intent on killing the roomie for the demonplate) when one of the fighters 'finds' a sword in the forge. A Great sword with a number of gems in the blade, each one glowing with a differant color except one. While the fighters playing with it, the dragon runs into the forge, right onto the sword. Last crystal lights up ameythist in color. (see where this is going yet?)

Our 6th level party (with at that point 1 10th level member) was in posetion of a artifact level weapon. The weilder and anyone in 10' had immunity anything from a dragon, spells, breath weapon, ect. and killed dragons in single hits via a no save death effect. 4 very stupid dragons later. (Stupid as in charge straight at us and get slaughtered) I gave up on the game. And held a near legendary argument.

Dragons are not stupid, even white dragons aren't that dumb, merely average. If it had been all white dragons maybe I could have seen it, but the mature adult blue? With its 16 int? Knowing the last 2 dragons sent after us never came back?

1 stupid dragon I could see, 2 maybe but pushing it, 3 disbelief abounds, but 4 in a row!!! (I'm told that after I left it rose to 8 plus 2 dracoliches, who despite being dead were still killed instantly by the sword on contact.) I pray that someday he finds himself in a game I run so I can throw in a dragon just to show him what dragon tactics are all about.

 

[Stalker0]

High levels can kill a campaign. Either the DM can't handle the increased amount of game prep needed to handle high level adventures, or the feel of the game has changed so much that either the DM or the players don't enjoy it anymore.

 

[jeffh]

What have I seen kill campaigns?

• DM burnout
• A too-dominant player pissing everyone off
• A stubborn DM constantly refusing to tell people things their characters would clearly know
• Scheduling problems
• People moving to different cities

Note that not one of these is an in-game issue in any strict sense, though the second and third have pretty serious in-game consequences (the second tends to mutate the plot beyond recognition, the third renders it nonsensical). Rulings don't kill games. People kill games.

 

[jeffh]

In my experience, DM disatisifaction brought on by constant player whining has ended more campaigns than any other two causes combined.

I'd try to figure out the root cause of the player whining before I accepted that. It does happen sometimes that players want things that aren't reasonable, but not that often. The "whiners" have a point far more often than some DMs give them credit for.

 

[Nightfall]

In other news, I plan to ruin a campaign with a wizard 10/sorcerer 15/ultimate magus 10. This is not a NPC btw, but an actual PC I'm creating. The other PCs are bored and want an epic level one shot.

 

[Nonlethal Force]

Honestly, alignment arguments (especially if they involve the paladin word). I'm so fed up with the OotS debate that's going on there and the bickering that I think it's time I quit reading it. (The thread, not OotS) Perhaps that'll be the first OotS thread in history to get locked!

 

[Nightfall]

Lethal,

Eh, I don't mind it but mostly it gets old fast here in En World. If you seen one alignment thread, you've seen em all.

 

[Nonlethal Force]

Lethal,

Eh, I don't mind it but mostly it gets old fast here in En World. If you seen one alignment thread, you've seen em all.

Yeah, I hear you. And I agree.


But I must confess,
the haiku writing in that
thread gets quite old fast.

 

[Sir Elton]

A difference of Opinion between players and DM. The DM has a particular vision, the players have their particular vision.

DM (me) wants to create a great roleplaying atmosphere. My job is to create a game so immersive that the players would want to escape back into reality. ("I'm glad I have my real life!"). DM implements ARMS LAW into his Eberron game and shows it to the players; after THEY AGREED TO PLAY IT!

Players balk. Big arguement, DM goes away thinking every WotC fanboy doesn't know a good DM if he landed on them. Either that, or he goes away thinking that every WotC fanboy worships WotC and the ground the building is built upon.

DM complains to the DM's Board on WotC. And finally got so much criticism from the other Children that he thinks everyone who worships WotC and the Ground they Walk on has totally allowed their players to utterly destroy their Authority as DMs.

DM goes away, grumbling, that WotC cut the ******* from every female who DM's D&D, and ********* from every male who DMs D&D.

That what killed my Eberron game before it began.