Worst game I ever ran.

[Holy Bovine]

If I was playing in this game, I'd be upset that you stopped play to instruct the players on how to respond to Encounters 2 and 3.

As GM, I think my job is to setup the situation and let the players respond to it. If they horribly screw up, next week the players will be dealing with the fallout of their own actions, mistakes, and hubris. Just from reading your description, it looks like the PCs were trying a different approach to the problem: stealth over force. You halted the game to tell them that this isn't how to play the game.

Yup - major no-no for most any situation. If the PCs didn't talk to the npc would they have never found the city? Seems unlikely as they were there, in the desert, to find the crystal. Seems to me they would start searching the entire desert and would, eventually, find it.

Should they have had an extended rest before the encounter with the dragon? Well if they just had a tough fight why didn't they just rest and get on with it in the morning? That's about the only thing I would have suggested as a DM. "Hey it could take you a while to find this city in the desert and you did get beat up there - want to make camp and start in the am?". Heck i probably would have just assumed they were making camp if they had to travel to the middle of this desert. If the players said otherwise I'd let them do it.

If your players are actually saying to your face that that was the worse game they have ever had you have some pretty "spoiled" players! One PC death for a massive dragon fight isn't a failure!!

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Yup - major no-no for most any situation. If the PCs didn't talk to the npc would they have never found the city? Seems unlikely as they were there, in the desert, to find the crystal. Seems to me they would start searching the entire desert and would, eventually, find it.

Ironicly enough if they just killed her and did not talk to her it would lead to the same problem, stumbling onto the dragon with no forewarning, as a posed to stumpling onto the dragon AFTER THEY WERE TOLD ABOUT IT, and complaining I should have warned them.

Should they have had an extended rest before the encounter with the dragon? Well if they just had a tough fight why didn't they just rest and get on with it in the morning? That's about the only thing I would have suggested as a DM. "Hey it could take you a while to find this city in the desert and you did get beat up there - want to make camp and start in the am?". Heck i probably would have just assumed they were making camp if they had to travel to the middle of this desert. If the players said otherwise I'd let them do it.

They were a few miles from the city, they incisted they move on, and rest after the find the caverns under the city...they did so becuse half of them did think that the dragon I described as int he city would not be in fact in the city.

If your players are actually saying to your face that that was the worse game they have ever had you have some pretty "spoiled" players! One PC death for a massive dragon fight isn't a failure!!

I ask at the end of every night "How was tonight, and what can I prep for next week to be better?" this week I said "I wont ask about tonight, but what do you want for next week"

I was told to my face the game sucked and was the worst one ever.

 

[pming]

Hiya.

I was told to my face the game sucked and was the worst one ever.

It's not you, it's them. They suck.

Honestly...they are "poor players", IMHO. What you do is next week, hand them all pre-generated 1e AD&D characters and tell them they are in a sleepy little settlement called the Village of Homlett, resting at the quaint and cozy "Inn of the Welcome Wench". Then play it. That's right...1e AD&D (if you don't have AD&D 1e, you can use the OSRIC 'retro-1e' rules you can find online).

I don't know if this is a youth thing, an edition thing, or something else all together, but a lot of players I've encountered over the last 10 or so years tend to think of RPG's as something you can, and should, "win". They see it as some sort of ego-boosting activity where 'winning' is assumed to be the logical outcome simply because "they're the heroes, and the heroes always win". I may be showing my age here, but back in ye olden days (re: 79 to early-90's), anyone that had a 12th level character as someone to be respected as a gamer. Getting to 12th level was *hard*, and a player probably went through a dozen characters or more before that...and it likely took at *least* a year or two to hit 12th. Your 12th level character was a hero because of the *the player*...not because it was 'assumed' as a natural outcome of playing the game.

Anyway, I'm starting to rant here and my chronic grognardia-cumudgeonitis is starting to flare up.

Suffice it to say, you dont' need to be nicer to your players...you need to take off the kids gloves and beat the ever living poop out of their PC's (fairly, mind you) far more often. Trial by fire is pretty much the only thing that's going to turn your soft-skinned players into respectable and experienced players.

(Of course, if your players are of the "it's just a game" variety, don't sweat it...they'll not be playing RPG's in a year or two anyway...they'll all quit and move onto something else; the ones that stick around are the "hobbiests").

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[ValhallaGH]

round 1 of the fight went fine with them attacking the corrupted ones and her helping BUT round 2 begain with a PC shooting her and them all saying she was there leader.

Me: "Yep, that's why she's been killing them instead of you. Because she's their boss."
That's when I sigh, facepalm, and let them kill their one hope for a major ally and insight. When I get over my frustration and anger (in the next week or two), I'll figure out an alternate source for the information, but the help will be gone forever. Also, local spirits will see them as murderous jerks ... because they've proven to be such.

one of the compaints I got for tuesday night was "You didn't come prepared, there was nothing but fights, no rp" a second compaint I got was "The dragon was too powerful, it must have been more the 5 or 6 levels above the party" and a third one was "There was no way to stop the cycst, or make any allies this time...this was too hard, why was everything a fight"

Since this is post-session chat, I'd respond with something like the following:
"Horseapples. I had One "look at that" encounter, one RP only encounter, one RP & Fight encounter, and one Level +2 Solo boss. You guys ran away from the scenery, hid from the role play, tried to murder the other role play, and then sucked it up against the boss and got your butts kicked. It's not my fault you broke from your mold and decided to be paranoid cowards with the tactical acumen of retarded five-year olds for the session.
"The cyst was a big plot hook. Look, study, and find a solution later. The Dromites on Bullets? Recruitable allies. The "boss sand nymph" you killed? The last uncorrupted nature spirit (good job with that, now they're all corrupt or dead). The dragon? Level +2 solo - you just made some very bad decisions and had medium to bad luck, which can be a fatal combination.
"Now, if you're still pissed in a couple of days then we can talk about it. If you're really, really upset then we can try a different campaign. But this was just another normal session, that was handled poorly."

 

[the Jester]

GM4PGs, I am not saying you shouldn't make sure the players understand what their characters understand; I think I stated clearly, over and over again, that (from your descriptions) you gave them plenty of information and they chose to disregard it. That makes the way things played out the fault of the pcs, not the dm.

What I object to is stopping the game to interfere with pc choices after they have that information; IMHO, pcs should always be allowed to dig their own graves in a situation like that.

Since this is post-session chat, I'd respond with something like the following:
"Horseapples. I had One "look at that" encounter, one RP only encounter, one RP & Fight encounter, and one Level +2 Solo boss. You guys ran away from the scenery, hid from the role play, tried to murder the other role play, and then sucked it up against the boss and got your butts kicked. It's not my fault you broke from your mold and decided to be paranoid cowards with the tactical acumen of retarded five-year olds for the session.
"The cyst was a big plot hook. Look, study, and find a solution later. The Dromites on Bullets? Recruitable allies. The "boss sand nymph" you killed? The last uncorrupted nature spirit (good job with that, now they're all corrupt or dead). The dragon? Level +2 solo - you just made some very bad decisions and had medium to bad luck, which can be a fatal combination.
"Now, if you're still pissed in a couple of days then we can talk about it. If you're really, really upset then we can try a different campaign. But this was just another normal session, that was handled poorly."

Absolutely agreed. They're criticizing you for not doing what you actually did. Call BS on them.

 

[Vegepygmy]

I am asking for help, and maybe I should be more greatful, but I can not see the game that went so far away from anything i ecpected as a railroad game seson... again, not one thing went as planed, and everyone hated it.

It's the fact that you had expectations and plans that make it look like maybe it was a railroad. That it went off the rails doesn't make it any less of one.

And don't get me wrong: it doesn't sound like an extreme railroad or anything, and I don't get the sense that your players were particularly opposed to being railroaded, so I don't think that's where the problem lies. I just think it's noteworthy that you can't see a game that didn't go as planned as being a "railroad," when that's pretty much the definition of the term.

 

[Pentius]

a lot of people are talking about railroading here, but I don't see it. I see a road, that is, expectations of how the game might go, and plans about how the game might go. But I'd expect those from any DM worth his salt. When you control all the scenery and 99.9% of the population, you have some heavy influence on the outcome of events. Presumably you'd know your players well enough to have some idea of where they'll go and what they'll do, too. It isn't bad to try and be ready for what will happen.

But I don't see any rails here, and rails are an integral part of a railroad. 3 of the 4 encounters did not go as planned. GM4PG made sure his players had and remembered what info their characters should have perceived, and he tried to go with the flow when they did what he did not expect. He didn't force them to deal with the cyst, or to talk to the dromites or not shoot the sand spirit. He had a scenario in his head, thought, "The players will probably do X" and then he freely allowed them to do Y instead. That is anti-railroad.


On a more constructive note, GM, I think your big problem was a lack of communication. They wanted RP encounters, you were ready, they didn't take them. They wanted to know about the dragon, you told them, they didn't get it. Sometimes these things happen. I can't really give specific advice from what info we have here, but I'd look to the disconnect between what you're saying and what they're hearing to address this.

 

[RangerWickett]

Last night during our Rogue Trader (sci-fi space capitalism!) game, my GM thought he'd run his worst game ever. We had dinner with some paranoid superstitious heavily-armed dignitaries, and during the course of conversation our party psychic brusquely asked an inquisitress with the dignitaries to pass the salt. She responded by throwing the salt at him and threatening to torture us instead of feigning polite conversation.

After some arguing, we figured out that the GM and the players had completely different ideas about who these people were; the GM figured we'd know not to antagonize the inquisitress since she could crush us like bugs, but we thought she was just some chump, and that the dignitaries were calling the shots. The GM figured it was his bad for not making it clear who was in charge. So we rewound time a bit to go through it again, and joked that our psychic PC had just had a vision of how things could have gone.

(The psychic actually can't do that. But he can slip between similar realities if he doesn't like how things are going, effectively changing the past.)

So during take two, the psychic PC again asks an inquisitress to pass the salt, but does so with exceeding politeness. Then he adds (out of character) "and if she throws it at me, I'm going to [insert non-Grandma friendly comment here"]. The GM decides that the inquisitress, paranoid as she is, hears this and thinks that the psychic can see the future.

So to test it she draws a revolver and begins emptying all bullets except one, then spins the chamber. We all try to talk her down from shooting our teammate. The GM apparently wants to give the psychic a chance to show off his nifty reality altering power to mess with a game of Russian roulette. Unfortunately none of our characters know the psychic can do this, so we assume he's about to get his brains blown out.

She pulls the trigger, and we all die in a hail of gunfire as we try to counterattack and are overwhelmed by the other side's firepower.

So we retcon again. Twice in one session kind of ruins the pacing. When we finally get through that scene and get to a combat, we end up screwing ourselves over more than the monsters. Our best gunner walks through a door, gets triple critted, and is sliced in half from groin to gullet. I throw a grenade, miss, and the scatter rules make it bounce back and explode in our faces. Another PC tries to fire his flamethrower at a monster that's eating our captain, but the captain fails his dodge and catches on fire, while the monster escapes scot free.

It sucked, but damn was it fun and memorable. And now we have a new "pass the salt or I'll [insert increasingly vulgar and offensive comment here]" meme.

 

[Tymophil]

edit: I am asking for help, and maybe I should be more greatful, but I can not see the game that went so far away from anything i ecpected as a railroad game seson... again, not one thing went as planed, and everyone hated it. Normaly they throw me a curve or two but I can guess how they will react to most things, and when things go left in one place we find things from there continue fine.

My advices :

1. Have your PCs meet recurring friendly NPCs (plenty), neutral NPCs (many), and hostile/cheating NPCs (a few). This way, the players will have reliable sources of informations, that you can use to tell them what you want them to know. Paranoid players are, after all, only all too well adapted players. Too many DMs forget that foes and threats are best used as exceptions. Moreover, Paranoid players are not that predictable, after all paranoia is a mental illness...

2. Work a lot to create the atmosphere : prepare hand-outs to point toward what is important, be very specific on what is to be considered important in the read-alouds that set the mood of a scene. Insist on what is often forgotten : colours, odors, ear rings, tatoos, etc. You can create a link between a PC and any NPC by giving them both the same tatoo, the same accent, the same cloth style, whatever... Every hint will be heard and used (even unconscienly) by the players. Create as many links between the PC and the NPC.

3. React with skill tests on every PC reaction to he scene. But prepare beforehand a few "punch lines" that wll give some textures to the informations you give them through Perception, Insight, Streetwise, History, Nature tests (try to vary the tests to force all the players to react and state their mind... To know what they have in mind and how they percieve the scene). Throw a few heroes of the past names, titles of legendary books, name of places both legendary and genuinely located in their world. And reuse them as often as possible. They should percieve your information as sound, not Ad-Hoc info that is thrown on the spot. Even when the skill tests are failed, give them information, only much broader and much less acurate, but rarely false.

I found it immensely helpful to use Masterplan and to set in most of my encounters one or two skill challenges.

They force me to write down the goals of the encounters, a few hints with a believable guise and to prepare for a B plan, if the challenge is a failure. It gives me a frame to prepare the session. Better still, I have 6 players at my table at the moment, so if I ask each of them what they do in turn, I have most likely a complexity 1 skill challenge completed... I never tell them they are in a skill challenge, but it helps me to force them to state their mind. And it gives me some milestones to feed them with more information that doesn't seem railroaded, because I most likely give new informations that derive directly from their actions in my (invisible) skill challenge.

On a final note, railroading is not evil... Unless the players notice it. I think you did not provide your players with enough hints, and the hints given where too "thin" and did not seem striking enough, to me at least.

 

[SteveC]

For what it's worth, I don't think you did anything majorly wrong here, and I certainly wouldn't alter your campaign style over it.

My suggestions are to perhaps work a little more on "what happens when things don't go as planned," when your coming up with the flow of the game.

As a GM when a player starts to do something that's going to have major impact on the game, I ask them "are you sure you really want to do that?" My players know me, so they know I only say that when there's something they're doing that might not make sense given the situation. At that point, I let them ask a couple of questions to clarify things, but if that's what they want to do, them's the breaks.

I think that out of character, you might want to have a discussion as people (friends?) about what some of the expectations for the game are: is everyone we meet a threat? Are all things the way they appear on the surface? Will you hold back with a combat if the players have made bad choices? More likely than not, this is a problem that's really a personality/ game expectations sort of thing than anything else, and one that can be quickly sorted out.

But I think any advice to majorly change how you run your game is pretty off-base, and just shows how the expectations for what makes a good game session vary widely.