Your gaming experience: are expectations matching the reality?

[diaglo]

after suffering thru the worst session yesterday in the last 4 years as a player. all i can say is...

my very, very, very low expectations were considerably not met.

the experience was so bad i called and apologized to a fellow player who had missed the previous bad session.

it got so bad... i started to make fun of the session to prevent myself from laughing out loud.

i can't even say how bad it was. words fail in comparison.

 

[kigmatzomat]

I have high expectations, and my experiences are usually worse

I GM a lot, probably too much, so when I'm a player my standards are probably excessive. I expect things like rational locations of cities based on natural resources, coherent governments (or the widely known existence of a shadow government that props things up), merchants understanding cost/benefits ratios, and being told when my character will know something that I don't. World building, for the most part.

A good enough story will hide it from me or make it irrelevant. The less involved I am in the game the more I notice the duct-tape & cardboard the world is made of. Immerse me or watch me pull at the loose threads of your world.

Hmmm, it seems bad or weak stories are the bane of my existence and the world building problems the things I focus on when I get bored. Although there are times where my suspension of disbelief is stretched too thin (wait, I'm Bob the 1st level fighter and you want me to guard the *DUKE*?!? He's cousin to the king and 3rd in line for the throne!! You must want him dead!)

I'm generally more forgiving during cons because they are adventures rather than campaigns and I don't have that much time to get bored. (Though it has happened.) I am irked that most cons are low level but I understand why, I'd just like a chance play the throw-caution-to-the-wind character that goes all out without worrying about destroying a campaign.

 

[Kalendraf]

This was a tough one to answer. I voted moderate/meets, though I likely vary between moderate to high expections, and the results vary from exceeding down to not meeting depending on the night. The results of any particular night can be amazing if everyone stays focused and the story is compelling for them and myself. On the other hand, it seems really easy sometimes for the group to get sidetracked and wind up wasting nearly an entire evening of play.

Same people, same campaign, totally different results on any given night. Overall, I think it averages out to being in the middle and roughly matching what I expect. But predicting if one night or the next will be good/bad/etc is nearly impossible.

 

[scourger]

moderate & meets

I've lowered my expectations, separated my playing & DMing, and have come to a good place. But it was a strange trip.

For my weekly group, I used to have high expectations that resulted in successes and disappointments--sort of soaring highs and crashing lows. That was fine for a while. But then our group changed. There were many factors, but the low point for me was when only 1 player out of 6 showed for a game I put on. I ran the next game because I had committed to do so to myself, to the group and to a publisher (it was a playtest). But, only 50% of the others showed overall. I decided to leave off DMing for them for a while. That was a year ago. I think the problem boiled down to the fact that the only game on which we could all agree was D&D. Any deviation from that game, no matter how slight and even other d20 fantasy games, brought out very selfish behavior with people just choosing not to participate. I later called it the "player boycott" that I countered with my "DM embargo". I stopped DMing in our weekly group. There are a couple other DMs in the weekly group, so the D&D games went on.

So, I started DMing on weekends as I had done several years back. One of my oldest gaming buddies (and friend to at least half the weekly group) had moved back into town. I started a mini-camapign with him and 2 other guys from the weekly group. The rest were invited but declined. Probably because it is a sci-fi game based on D&D d20 rules. It was a lot of fun. We haven't finished that mini-camapign yet, but we have another game going as well. It has been difficult to find weekend time lately, but I am determined to finish that mini-campaign. (Another post made me realize that I have never finished a campaing in nearly a quarter century of gaming.)

Meanwhile, one of the weekly players dropped out. About 6 months ago, our weekday group tried to get back on track. I tried to get the aforementioned friend into the weekly group, but he was rejected. That did not help my dilemma. My attempt to remarry my playing with my DMing was frustrated. So, it is status quo ante.

Now, I am just trying to keep from putting all my eggs in one basket. I considered dropping out of the weekly group to have more time for weekend gaming, but then I would be doomed to much DMing with little or no playing. I still refuse to DM during the week, so I need the weekend games for the creative outlet of DMing even though it is increasingly difficult to schedule. I wish I could find another group altogether or even some more weekend players, but all these people are my friends (some for many years (over 10)). I don't think I would enjoy gaming with others as much.

I just decided not to let ayone bust my gaming groove. I am actually now pretty happy playing once a week and DMing once a month. I know time will bring more adjustments. I hope the future will recombine my gaming into DMing plus playing in the same weekly group.

Also, as an aside, I have attended more conventions lately. I went to a small gaming con 9 years ago in the town I used to live in. I went to GenCon 2002. I've been to 2 sci-fi cons this year in nearby cities. The ones this year were sci-fi with some gaming. Here again my expectations were low, but they were exceeded in both cases. I could only get the one weekend gaming friend to go with me to the first con this year, and I went alone to the second. But, as I said, nobody is going to bust my gaming groove. I am very happy to know that I can enjoy convention gaming at a minimum if it comes down to it.

 

[scourger]

I also recently adjusted my gaming style from more power gaming to more strategy/thinking. I think I've already got about as much roleplaying & storytelling as I can manage. But I was blowing through too many characters trying to power game amongst a bunch of tacticians, character actors and storytellers.

Again, lower expectations with moderate results; but no more soaring highs and crashing lows.

 

[Von Ether]

moderate expecations with lower results for a while until lately.

For a while, I was doing a lot of gaming, but not being really selective about my groups.

*For the longest time, I ran a game at a game store on Saturdays. I felt like a T.V. set, people hopped in and out of my game simply because there wasn't anything better to do. My story centric games never went on more than a few sessions. Basically long enough for the player to do whatever shtick they designed their PC to excell at and then my games would die. d20 was a savior in that so much as people would play anything as long as it was "DnD." In the end, I ran a very combat centric game where I didn't even fudge the dice rolls. PC died on a regular basis and suddenly I became a popular GM.

Earlier this year, I "retired" so as to have more of a life.

*I played in quite a few DnD game that started out promising, intersting history a new world with a twist ... and then about the third session the GM in each campiagn would pull out their favorite old school megamodule or module series and run the group through it. Suddenly subplots that were started were forgotten since we now lived for months underground or in the mountain, etc. From there the quality of games had to be judged on how much real work the GM did in accuarately converting the module to 3.0 for the current CR of the party.

Lately, I dropped from those game to work more on my other hobby, ficiton writing.

* Now I only play in a bi-monthly Champs game. Half the time is spent in investigating the huge conspiracy arc of the game, the other half is beating up super thugs to get even more clues. Half the team doesn't even have secret idenities yet, which might haunt them soon. The GM runs an abbrevated Champs system and uses a laptop to do it. "30 mini-missles shoot out at you in the danger room *tap,tap,taptaptap, etc.* only 2 hit."

Now I look forward to my two games with excitement again. Hell, I even show up early to hang out with the GM's family.

 

[Von Ether]

A separate phenomena I wanted to include was how shocked I felt when I didn’t get the “Golden Rule” applied to me (uh, the RL golden rule, “do unto others …,” not the “I am the GM” golden rule.)

I had two really creative, yet pushy, players who always wanted special allowances for over the top PCs. I usually gave it to them and took it as a challenge to improv how these characters impacted my games. Admittedly, this got old after awhile and other players asked for “mercy.”

One player was a min/maxer, the other was always looking for a more social edge (i.e. he knows we are playing Farscape with the rest of the party being escapees and he wants to play an alien prince who can rent the ship as an incognito taxi.)

These guys wanted to GM their own little games, I was glad to join their games, expecting them to fit my playing style to a “T,” but when it was my time to come up with my creative over the top PCs, I was shot down repeatedly. In fact, the social dude did end up running some games and he was like the strictest GM I had in a long time. In many cases, he even tweaked character creation to produce weaker than average starting PCs.

Long story short, these guys could dish out the over the top and min/maxed PCs, but didn’t want to take it.