Have you ever just said "To hell with this" and left a campaign?

[Ragitsu]

These stories involve the Deadlands games. I feel that where I am at, it is the most misunderstood and mangled game in town. None of these game involve any heated arguments, just me deciding to not play the game anymore. I eventually sold off all of my Deadlands material due to my enthusiasm of the game being slowly strangled.

The first campaign we tried, Crazy was the marshal. I had only had the player’s handbook for a couple of hours while Crazy had his books for several weeks preparing for the game. I decided to play a simple doctor, no magic, no ‘veterans of the weird west’, no twinked skills for gun slinging. The first problem was the marshal’s demand that I have a detailed list of what exactly was in my doctor’s bag, with solid research into the cost of these items. Sources of information were to be turned over to the marshal for his possession. This was told to me as we were sitting down to play.

The campaign started out in Minnesota, yet the C.S.A. had regular cavalry units running around shooting up things. The Union army was ‘historically incompetent and incapable of handling a real military force.’ It was up to the party hunt down Johnny Reb. (Fine, it’s part of the adventure.)

Our first fire fight, I was worthless. I didn’t have the detailed list of doctor’s equipment. To make things worse, one player T2, had a nasty tendency to bust (fumble) with his shotgun. The first time, T2 shot Stash’s character, who was more or less in front of T2. Stash moves to stand beside T2. T2 then busts again. The shotgun blast turns the gun 90° to the left and then discharges the entire load of buckshot. Stash then moves behind T2. T2 busts again and his shotgun forces him 180° to discharge the buckshot into Stash’s character. (That is how Crazy described things.)

It was at this point that I pointed out to Crazy that we were figuring the busts incorrectly. His response was, and this is a near quote, “Oh well. It doesn’t matter. I couldn’t read the rules, they were too boring. I only read the flavor text stories and figured that the dice rules were the same as the old Marvel super heroes game I used to play.”

This game fell completely apart when the party of eight characters were attacked by a full company of Confederate cavalry while the marshal said “There is nothing around to use for cover.” After a TPK, this was followed by the comment, “Why didn’t you take cover?”

Oh, in this game, one guy was playing an immortal, Highlander style. In Deadlands, as written, only demon possessed people return from the Dead. Crazy was almost livid when the immortal was slaughtered numerous times to the point of removing the head.

I left another of Crazy’s games when his Mary Sue character was upstaging the party. We were police officers in New York City and Mary Sue kept showing up at the crime scene. (We solved things in the second session, but he forced us to keep going to finish out the story properly.) Being a police officer at a crime scene, I went to question Mary Sue as he was at every crime. MS quickly went to brawling with my character, and in the two rounds, managed to take five actions each round with all his actions going before my character could react. The dozens of regular police officers refused to confront a 7 foot tall pugilist in 1870's NYC and the other PC’s were bared from interfering. This was my last night in the game. (Mary Sue had already solved the crime but would not share any information as we were the “typically incompetent and corrupt police officers of NYC.”)

This campaign fell apart when the party could not find any more clues. The player (EZ) of the character who had all the clues stopped showing up. EZ’s character was given a list of clues but when she dumped Crazy to go back to her husband and father of her unborn child, Crazy decided we had to find the clues again. However, as the rest of the players were not involved in the ‘pillow talk’ sessions, they had no idea that the clues existed.

Crazy has killed almost all of his Deadlands campaigns. Swimming across a river requires a swim roll equal to swimming in a hurricane and half the party drowns. Half of the party is stuck in a cenotes and if you have any action cards (everything was resolved by initiative), you had to make a high target number swim check to stay afloat. If you failed a swim roll, you lost your action (grabbing ropes or helping others) on top of being set back two successful checks. Some bandits were torturing a new PC in a center of a village. As the rest of the party moves in to stop this, the twenty other bandits who happened to be in camouflaged, defensive positions waiting for the party opened up for another TPK.

I have sworn to never play in another campaign in which Crazy is involved as either a player or GM. Others in my group have learned this lesson and he noticed that he was not the center of attention and left. Now, he only has his room mates to inflict his games upon. Last I heard, he is running Deadlands game with the immortals again with his current girlfriend getting all of the preferential treatment.

He also tried to run a prime directive 'game.' Some people were using the Prime d20 book, some were using D20 Modern, and some were using Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 books. While all of these are D20 games, they all have their own little tweaks to the game and are not 100% compatible. To make matters worse, he was allowing some to use Star Wars d20. (One character was a secret Jedi.) Crazy's goal was (and still is) to prove that a Star Trek war ship is only the equivalent to a Star Wars fighter. .

[hfergus]

Have I ever said "to H*** with this and left a campaign? H*** yes! Why? GMs NPCs did everything important. What did I do? GM'd my own, taking all the other players with me. I even allowed the former GM in. Did not last long, as he could not do evertything. We did not make him leave. He left on his own in disgust. He bad mouthed me around the area, but if anything, if made others try me out more than I was avoided. Apparantly, the guy had a rep.

[RexMundi]

Yep. Did that with the Pathfinder based Steam Punk campaign a friend of mine was and still is Running. Just couldn't take much more of the Mary Sue NPC's and the DM worship from some of the other players for a game I felt that was at best, Average. Sort of like getting a good seat at the bar, ordering a Guinness, and then have to listen to all the Zima Drinkers around you espouse the greatness of their beverage, while belittling your's.....such inhumanity can only be tolerated for short periods....

~Rex....goes to get more Guinness

[Darbor]

I was going to but another player quit and that made the game pretty much fall apart. One of the players, very experienced but new to me, decided he wanted to play a character that was an asshat to his fellow PCs. Incredibly the GM let him. The GM later admitted that was a mistake.

[Escafarc]

I left the group that I had gamed with for the longest time because I didn't care for the game(D&D3.x). I just wasn't having fun it felt like work to get into the right frame of mind. I just wasn't into killing the Dudes and taking their Things anymore. On top of that the games just moved too slowlly(We started playing Return to the Tomb of Horror module and after 6 weeks(30+ game hours) we still hadn't got to the "Tomb") on the last night I played with that group I stayed to help clean up and told the GM that I wasn't enjoying the game and he wasn't really open to any of the reasons so I quit going.

[input.jack]

Im amazed Crazy hasnt had his head handed to him.

[Xavier Onassiss]

Yes. Yes I have.

Usually about 5 seconds after I hear about how the game rules as written are "all screwed up" and how the GM's house rules/changes are such a brilliant solution to the "problem."

[Cygnia]

Yep. That would be the D&D campaign with the railroading GM and his nigh-omnipotent ******* NPCs, the Chaotic Psychotic dwarf who wanted to kill everyone, the Neutral Apathetic elf who couldn't be bothered to actually do anything useful, my poor flustered husband who was trying desperately to play peacekeeper and failing miserably due to the combined efforts of said GM and dwarf. When given a chance to jump the rails, my rogue said to hell with y'all and took it. The game then died.

[Ian Mackinder]

That Crazy guy is in dire need of a few dozen bitch-slaps.

Only ever walked out on a campaign once, way back in my early RPGing career. The Referee was arguably quite good, but seemed to favour one particular Player (more high-powered character, etc.). For me, it all came to a head one session, when he spent 2+ hours in private conference with this Player, leaving the rest of us just waiting around the table. I, and others, had gone in a couple of times to give a polite hurry-up, getting vague assurances in return.

After over two hours of waiting, I finally got sick of this c##p - didn't come just to sit around and wait, there were other games there I could have been in. Finally, just marched in and simply told the GM I quit (he looked surprised), then left. In retrospect, I probably should have gone into detail - but by then I was angry enough to kill him and his buddy if I had to stay near them for long.

My tolerance level may be pretty good. No walk-outs since, though there have been a few times when it was considered. A lot of times, OTHER people have walked first, which leads to either the game folding or the Ref reassessing things.

[sinanju]

Not so much walking out. More like "stop taking it at all seriously."

One GM had a habit of asking for characters for a specific genre/setting, then in the first game session we'd find ourselves somehow dropped into a completely inappropriate setting. In one SF game we were to make earthbound characters (so we knew we'd be going into space). So we made earthbound characters. I created a low-rent criminal with absolutely no high tech skills. Another player created a paranoid lunatic who wouldn't trust anyone who'd ever been out of his sight. When the GM got so desperate to get on the plot train as to LITERALLY have the keys to a spaceship dropped at our feet, we bent down to look at them, decided it was obviously a trap or otherwise too dangerous...and walked away.

On another occasion (same GM), we all went out of our way again to make useless characters. I created an overweight, lazy couch potato with no worthwhile skills, but who could recite the entire satellite tv directory verbatim. I didn't even spend all my allotted character points because, you know, he's LAZY. Spending points on things is hard work....

[Ian Mackinder]

One GM had a habit of asking for characters for a specific genre/setting, then in the first game session we'd find ourselves somehow dropped into a completely inappropriate setting. In one SF game we were to make earthbound characters (so we knew we'd be going into space). So we made earthbound characters. I created a low-rent criminal with absolutely no high tech skills. Another player created a paranoid lunatic who wouldn't trust anyone who'd ever been out of his sight. When the GM got so desperate to get on the plot train as to LITERALLY have the keys to a spaceship dropped at our feet, we bent down to look at them, decided it was obviously a trap or otherwise too dangerous...and walked away.

Well done! I'm hoping the expression on the Ref's face was memorable.

On another occasion (same GM), we all went out of our way again to make useless characters. I created an overweight, lazy couch potato with no worthwhile skills, but who could recite the entire satellite tv directory verbatim. I didn't even spend all my allotted character points because, you know, he's LAZY. Spending points on things is hard work....

Again, good going. TPK?

Freind of mine is a little like that. Don't get me wrong, he can be a very good Ref when running a specific background / system. However, if running any kind of freeform or open-ended game, it tends to slide into one of his so-called 'Picnic' games (ie. the PCs are regular-type folks pulled into something WAY out of their depth - other dimensions, lost worlds, cross-time travel, alien contact, abandoned artifacts / weird science labs, that sort of thing).

Which can still be fun - sometimes. But when expecting one thing only to have it turn into something very different, Players sometimes do object.

I think most GMs tend to favour certain adventure types over others, whichever system is being used. It is just that some of us can be more fixated on specific game elements.

[Vondy]

Once upon a time there was a pizza joint that allowed a gaming club to meet on Sundays. It wasn't a formal club, but there were four games running with about twenty gamers at the same time in the same place. The core group, of which I was a part, included several employees there, and was the largest sub-group. I've mentioned this group as my group-from-hell in the past. It was seriously dysfunctional the game-master was an angry, abusive, sadistic loon. This is not to say it was all bad. It was the first hero-system-centric group I gamed with, and I got my hero chops with it, and a few of my better Crowning Moment of Glory gaming anecdotes occured while gaming with this group. But overall, they were abrasive whack-a-moles. This group lasted about eighteen months, and during it I'd befriended some of the other gamers who played in other games. After about eighteen months it all came to a head. We'd had some mixing and matching on an ad hoc basis and there was interest outside the core group. I'd been asked by some of my new friends if I'd run a hero game for them, for they did not love crazo-gamemaster. Then it happened: bad-gamemaster snapped. He lost it. He started banging his fists on the table scattering dice and figurines, screaming curses at his players. This has been on a slow boil. I'd seen it coming. The group had become increasingly uncooperative with his railroad plots and frequent in-game humiliation and had taken things, as a group, off the rails more than once. And, he and my roommate, who I admit could be a total cad, were in a tug-of-war over a female gamer who, in my estimation, was better than both of them. So, in the middle of a game that was going *our* way for once, my roommate made an in-character quip that trancended all bounds and set him off. So, as the table rocked and his chair went flying I quietly put my things in my bag and stood up to go, which resulted him yelling, "where the hell are you going?" Ah, where the hell was I going indeed? I said to him, "You need to collect yourself," which caused inchoate sputtering and some perjoratives I chose to ignore. He wasn't worth it. Now, of course, all of the other gaming groups had stopped and were staring in stricken awe and fearful loathing as the vesuvian event occuring at the big table in the middle. I'd resolved to quit. I had no plans beyond that, but then it just involuntarily came out: "Game at my place." The group that was playing the old star trek game at the next table, who I'd befriended and were interested in Hero, packed up and followed me out. My long-term hero group, and my career as a Hero GM, was born.

[ercarlson1974]

Once upon a time there was a pizza joint that allowed a gaming club to meet on Sundays. It wasn't a formal club, but there were four games running with about twenty gamers at the same time in the same place. The core group, of which I was a part, included several employees there, and was the largest sub-group. I've mentioned this group as my group-from-hell in the past. It was seriously dysfunctional the game-master was an angry, abusive, sadistic loon. This is not to say it was all bad. It was the first hero-system-centric group I gamed with, and I got my hero chops with it, and a few of my better Crowning Moment of Glory gaming anecdotes occured while gaming with this group. But overall, they were abrasive whack-a-moles. This group lasted about eighteen months, and during it I'd befriended some of the other gamers who played in other games. After about eighteen months it all came to a head. We'd had some mixing and matching on an ad hoc basis and there was interest outside the core group. I'd been asked by some of my new friends if I'd run a hero game for them, for they did not love crazo-gamemaster. Then it happened: bad-gamemaster snapped. He lost it. He started banging his fists on the table scattering dice and figurines, screaming curses at his players. This has been on a slow boil. I'd seen it coming. The group had become increasingly uncooperative with his railroad plots and frequent in-game humiliation and had taken things, as a group, off the rails more than once. And, he and my roommate, who I admit could be a total cad, were in a tug-of-war over a female gamer who, in my estimation, was better than both of them. So, in the middle of a game that was going *our* way for once, my roommate made an in-character quip that trancended all bounds and set him off. So, as the table rocked and his chair went flying I quietly put my things in my bag and stood up to go, which resulted him yelling, "where the hell are you going?" Ah, where the hell was I going indeed? I said to him, "You need to collect yourself," which caused inchoate sputtering and some perjoratives I chose to ignore. He wasn't worth it. Now, of course, all of the other gaming groups had stopped and were staring in stricken awe and fearful loathing as the vesuvian event occuring at the big table in the middle. I'd resolved to quit. I had no plans beyond that, but then it just involuntarily came out: "Game at my place." The group that was playing the old star trek game at the next table, who I'd befriended and were interested in Hero, packed up and followed me out. My long-term hero group, and my career as a Hero GM, was born.

Wow...I can't say I've got any stories that top this one! Heck, this thread isn't even very old and already I've seen some doozies.

Unfortunately, the only game I can recall actually walking out on was a Werewolf game (2nd edition I think) that I played briefly back in grad school. It started out fun with some interesting characters and associated background stories. Then we played our first adventure. I walked away disappointed, but decided to give it another few sessions before finally not showing up anymore. To make a long story short, the roleplaying quickly degenerated into "let's fight the GM's indestructible monsters". Since we all knew we had absolutely no chance of winning the fight or even doing anything interesting, we just stopped gathering.

[concord]

only once in the early days... an obnoxious player had a falling out in character with my character... his character ended up dead because of my character... incident happened in an isolated dungeon with no witnesses... next session, relative of dead guy shows up out of nowhere and starts hassling my character then turns party against me... fled certain death while in the dungeon... ended up running into and being captured by a tribe of orcs... spoke to orcs and told them of party coming to kill them... orcs wipe out party and my character escapes during the combat... next session, relatives of the dead party show up out of nowhere seeking vengeance... before combat could start I left... didn't want to play in a game where my character was constantly fighting the other members of the party...

[Cancer]

I've run a bad game. Co-run, actually, but I take the blame. Didn't lose any players, but we admitted we had a train wreck and collectively walked away from that campaign.

Only now, a decade later, am I willing to try running again for that group.