Why Have You Left A Game or Campaign?

[Andre]

Some folks just don't get along together. It's rarely a case of one person being a complete jerk (tho that happens). It's just that no one gets along with everyone, and sometimes one person just doesn't fit. Sometimes that person is me. It happens.

My reaction to those situtations is to try to work through the difficulties (after all, maybe I'm the problem). If, after a few sessions things haven't improved, I'll walk away. I never tell a group that they have to choose between me and someone else. I just leave the game, then some time later I'll let a few friends know that I'm interested in gaming, but only with those individuals. If they're interested, great. If not, that's ok too. We can always get together to do other things.

I've quit games where another player was only out for himself (to the point of stripping the items off of dead PCs and refusing to give them back if the PC was raised). I've quit games where another player only seemed to have fun if he was ruining the game for everyone else (like deliberately playing an evil PC when he knows there's a paladin in the party). I've quit games where another player has a habit I just can't stand (hygiene comes to mind here). I recently quit a wargaming group because one player could not resist constantly telling others how to play the game, to the point of yelling at people if he didn't like what they were doing. In every case it was simply a case of my not having fun at the game, so why continue?

Games are for fun and friends. My job is for spending time with people I don't get along with.

 

[Graybeard]

Most of the time I left a game was due to work scheduling. Working the nights the game was being played most of the time resulted in me having to leave it. One time I left due to incompatibility with play styles of most of the other players. There were four out of six other players who thought nothing of killing other party members and taking their stuff. Worst of all, the DM did nothing to stop it.

Fortunately I am gaming with a great group of people. Some I met through an online gamer meet up site and others were former co-workers.

 

[Oryan77]

I've only been a player in 1 group and I left because I moved across the country.

Now all I do is DM for our current group. I tend to roll with the punches when I'm a player. I've played with friends who ran very boring games. But I usually enjoy my time because I usually push the story along myself as a player.

I've never been a player under an annoying DM. I wouldn't mind seeing what it's like

 

[roguerouge]

I left a PbP game because my roommate was hit by a trolley, which gave me significantly less time for gaming for a while.

So I put down "transportation issues."

 

[Herzog]

I entered two types:

-too many games. This tends to happen a lot to me lately, and the most difficult part for me is to decide which game(s) to drop.

-send away by the DM.
In this case, the DM wanted to find out if he could expand his playergroup from 5 to 8. It didn't work out, and I was booted with a 'last in, first out'.

 

[Robert Ranting]

I have only ever left two campaigns, and both of them for similar reasons. In the first case, I left because of the DM. He had been my mentor, the guy who taught me how to be an effective DM and who had run most of the games I had been in during college. Unfortunately, the same qualities which made him a good DM, the ability to tell act and tell believable stories, and to read his players also made him a fairly effective manipulator out of game. Eric's grandma certainly doesn't want to hear all the messy dealings he was involved in, so I will just say that after four years of playing in his games I finally woke up and realized that his moral and ethical standards were completely incompatible with my own, so I cut off all contact with him.

The only other time I have left a game was when my girlfriend and I broke up for a few months. In an effort to reduce drama, I talked to the DM and with her, and decided that I would bow out while she remained. Truthfully, I had other issues with the game, but I would have powered through and stuck with it if my g/f and I had stayed together. As an update, my girlfriend and I have since gotten back together, and I intend to re-join the game with her later this month, provided the DM finds a good point to work my new character in within the next session or so.

Robert "It Is Always Personal" Ranting

 

[Samuel Leming]

Before 3.x:
I usually left a game because I moved. A few games disbanded because most of the players moved.

After 3.x:
Always people issues and incompatibilities. Except for one Play by Post that I left because of time constraints.

Sam

 

[Arnwyn]

I left a PbP game because my roommate was hit by a trolley, which gave me significantly less time for gaming for a while.

So I put down "transportation issues."

*choke* I want to laugh... but I think that would be totally inappropriate...

 

[airwalkrr]

In general, I am a pretty easy-going guy, but I have left a number of games for various reasons. Most of my life I have lived places where there were plenty of local campaigns to choose from, so there was little reason to cling to a game you didn't enjoy much when there were other untested waters out there.

Throughout high school I played with the same group of friends year after year. When I left for college we disbanded, though we occasionally revisited our old campaign.

My freshman year of college the first DM I found willing to run a game let me join. They were already an established group and it wasn't a style I was very accustomed to. My former group flew by the seat of their pants whereas this new group was full of rules lawyers. I decided to move to greener pastures.

The second DM I found a few weeks later who volunteered to run a FR campaign. I knew very little of FR, but thought I would give it a shot anyway. Oddly enough, the more we played, the more I realized I actually knew more about FR than the DM. And for that matter, I knew far more about the game than the DM. The tipping point came when we had gone through five experience levels without gaining any treasure greater than a handful of healing potions. I and several of the other players agreed to leave the group and we never saw that DM again.

Shortly thereafter I was looking for another campaign to join and came across a DM who wanted to start a new campaign based on Norse mythology. A few friends and I joined in and it was quite fun, but we never heard from our DM again after the first session.

For the next few years I relegated myself to my true passion of DMing. However, that player itch keeps growing. It wasn't long before I was looking for a new campaign. I met a guy who wanted to start a new campaign in his homebrew world (where every NPC was named Bob). It was fun, but the DM didn't have a handle on the rules and threw challenges at us that were way out of our league. After my second character succumbed to a sewer monster, I gracefully exited that group.

Meanwhile, one of the players in my campaign had been running a game of his own for a while and offered to let me join, so I took him up on the offer. It was a high-level Planescape affair that I was totally lost in. I also knew very few of the other players which didn't help much. The icing on the cake was that several of the other players were only interested in power-gaming to the point that they would create absurd builds using splatbooks totally unrelated to each other (these were the halcyon days of 3rd party publishers) and the DM allowed it. I bowed out after one session, my core-only wizard being woefully inadequate compared to the other characters.

I finally got a good thing going when Dungeon started the Shackled City campaign. A small group of my friends and I took turns running the adventures and got nearly half-way through before we had to disband the group due to schedule conflicts. (I didn't include this as any of my votes.)

The most recent campaign I participated in was a Savage Tides game which was a blast. I would have stuck with that one for the long haul if I hadn't moved 150 miles away.

Looking back, it seems the most common reason for me leaving groups was simply incompatibility on my part. I don't like playing with DMs who don't run the game the way I do. I'm picky like that. But then, I prefer playing as DM anyway, so it's usually fine.

 

[Altair]

"Lack of time-designing own campaign"

This made me laugh. Anyone who leaves a game because they are spending too much time creating their own... just plays DnD too much I think.