I made the GM cry....

[Agent X]

Re: I made the GM cry....

 

So naturally the bad guys got the other three pieces and then could devote the whole of their forces to hunting down and getting the 4th? Enemies undivided!

 

 

Ok, I'm evil.

Exactly. It's important for players to realize the bad guys can react to what you do and change the plot as much as the players change the plot.

[Agent X]

Re: I made the GM cry....

 

I'm happy to hear these stories because my GM sometimes acts like a player and forgets who are the main characters. But sometimes is worse, he takes revenge!

 

I remember our teen superteam went to save a dam near Denver because the bad guys will destroy it. Suddenly they appeared and one of them growed up 20 mts more or less and had the bad idea to stamp me to the ground. I woke up and flew until the height of his stomach and did a punch... maybe the GM still is calculating the stun So the big bad guy was defeated with only 1 punch and seems it didn't like to the GM because in the next adventure I found the "anti-character"!

Some data of my character Dark Moon is: STR 75, SPD 5, DEX 21

It was a "big cassual" I found a guy with STR 100, SPD 6, DEX 30

 

So this guy appeared and the leader of this mission was a NPC (don't ask why ) and the GM knew I has a disadvantage that always I follow leader orders. So the NPC said "Dark Moon fight with him". Of course with the second punch I received I was almost dead on the ground after 24 mts. of knockback.

 

I guess he cryed a lot when I stopped his big bad guy so he took revenge. What we can do with a GM like this?

 

 

GM

Nah, just find another GM.

[Chimpira]

Re: I made the GM cry....

 

Exactly. It's important for players to realize the bad guys can react to what you do and change the plot as much as the players change the plot.

That was never a problem. They knew full well that could and would occur. They were depending on the enemy to come to them on grounds of their choosing. That was part of their overall plan. They could then let the villians do all the hard work of tracking the devices down and steal them from the bad guys.

[KawangaKid]

Re: I made the GM cry....

 

My player Terry looks up at me and says' date='"This is the first part of the seal, right?" I say yeah. He continues "And they need all four to bring the dragon back, right?" It dawned on me where this was going and what was the big flaw in my adventure. Yes, I groaned. He smiled and said "Well if they can't get this, then, they can't bring back the dragon. No need for us to risk our lives anymore." I could have made up something to make them continue but instead, I shrugged, gave him extra xp and thought a lot more carefully about my plotlines from then on.[/quote']

 

Reminds me of a game I was in where the "Holy Grail" was apparently in a museum in a mall. I don't remember exactly why there was a museum in a mall, and why it wasn't more heavily guarded... or why it was on display at all.

 

Anyway, Dark Seraph comes around to steal it because it could be used in some ceremony to end the world.

 

After managing to elude Dark Seraph for a while... we realized that the "Holy Grail" apparently had no benefit (mystical or physical or mental) to the human race at all, and only served to act as a plot device... er... clear and present danger to the human race.

 

So we destroyed it. End of plotline.

[KawangaKid]

Re: I made the GM cry....

 

So the big bad guy was defeated with only 1 punch and seems it didn't like to the GM because in the next adventure I found the "anti-character"!

Some data of my character Dark Moon is: STR 75, SPD 5, DEX 21

It was a "big cassual" I found a guy with STR 100, SPD 6, DEX 30

 

So this guy appeared and the leader of this mission was a NPC (don't ask why ) and the GM knew I has a disadvantage that always I follow leader orders. So the NPC said "Dark Moon fight with him". Of course with the second punch I received I was almost dead on the ground after 24 mts. of knockback.

 

You could check to see if this is a real habit of the GM and talk to him about it...

 

...Or you could take it as a challenge and try to surprise him with teamwork, variants of your powers and buy off some of those annoying disads...

 

...And if you can't defeat the really powerful villains, at least thwart their plans. That tends to annoy these types of GMs as well.

 

I mean, if you can deal with the fact that his gaming style is the way it is, then fine. When it becomes too much for you, just walk away.

[John T]

Re: I made the GM cry....

 

I guess he cryed a lot when I stopped his big bad guy so he took revenge. What we can do with a GM like this?

GM

Knew a GM in Tucson like this. One of his fetishes was NPCs he'd gone to the "trouble" of naming, especially the bad guys. Heaven help his group if they actively tried to kill one. First, it was virtually impossible; they'd damage the guy to the point where they'd start asking "How much damage have we DONE?", and start doing the math... and realize that he was grossly fudging the situation to keep "HIS" bad guy alive. Then, when "the game was up", he'd "let" the guy die... and inevitably take his frustration and annoyance out on the entire group later. In spades. Repeatedly. Guy was a Petty, Tyrannical Sadist of the First Order.

 

And hell had no fury like this guy if you succesfully deviated from his pet storyline... not that THAT was easy, either.

 

And no, it's not like his players deliberately went out of their way to disrupt "his" game, at least not until they realized where they stood in "his" game. He was just a prick (pardon the language, but I really don't have any other applicable term for him).

 

I asked one of his players, also one of my players, "Why do you put up with this sh*#?" He just shrugged.

 

I don't get it; I'd've jettisoned the dead weight a LOOOONG time ago.

 

But, as David Lo-Pan once said, "You were not put upon this Earth to 'Get It', Mister Burton."

 

Oh well.

 

John T

 

PS - My wife just reminded me what this twit's name was (I didn't go to the effort of remembering for myself): Rex. Go fig.

[Lord Mhoram]

Re: I made the GM cry....

 

I guess he cryed a lot when I stopped his big bad guy so he took revenge. What we can do with a GM like this?

GM

 

Man, am I lucky. My first Champions GM was a control freak like that, with pet NPCs (and PCs) and railroaded plots. Ever since then, I have had great luck. Of the 5 GMs I've had since only one was bad, and he just didn't show up half the time. With no warning.

The other 4 have been wonderful.

 

Of course I married the best one.

[megaplayboy]

Re: I made the GM cry....

 

I think occasionally threatening to quit can get GMs to shape up a bit. Sometimes they don't even realize that the players aren't enjoying themselves.

[Enforcer84]

Re: I made the GM cry....

 

Man, am I lucky. My first Champions GM was a control freak like that, with pet NPCs (and PCs) and railroaded plots. Ever since then, I have had great luck. Of the 5 GMs I've had since only one was bad, and he just didn't show up half the time. With no warning.

The other 4 have been wonderful.

 

Of course I married the best one.

That's cheating

[Jhamin]

Re: I made the GM cry....

 

I think occasionally threatening to quit can get GMs to shape up a bit. Sometimes they don't even realize that the players aren't enjoying themselves.

 

Now here is a mixed message

 

I know that a couple times in my carear as a GM I have not run the game that players wanted to play. Every time I asked them how they enjoyed playing at the end of a session I was always told it was great and they looked foreward to next week.

 

Until they all almost abandoned me. Once they told me that they wanted something different from what I was doing (once it was more plot arc less episodic, another time it was more butt kicking less role playing) I adjusted my style and things picked up noticeably.

 

Treat your GM with respect if you want respect in return.

[Lord Mhoram]

Re: I made the GM cry....

 

That's cheating

 

 

Only when she gives me extra XP.

[Enforcer84]

Re: I made the GM cry....

 

Only when she gives me extra XP.

Is that what the kids are calling it these days?

[gewing]

Re: I made the GM cry....

 

I was thinking about the College D&D DM I played with in 85. Our first level party took out the ettin that walked into our night camp on the way to the dungeon that was a recurring exploration adventure.

 

He said "I wanted that to kill someone. (grabs dice) Lets see who it falls on."

 

Knew a GM in Tucson like this. One of his fetishes was NPCs he'd gone to the "trouble" of naming, especially the bad guys. Heaven help his group if they actively tried to kill one. First, it was virtually impossible; they'd damage the guy to the point where they'd start asking "How much damage have we DONE?", and start doing the math... and realize that he was grossly fudging the situation to keep "HIS" bad guy alive. Then, when "the game was up", he'd "let" the guy die... and inevitably take his frustration and annoyance out on the entire group later. In spades. Repeatedly. Guy was a Petty, Tyrannical Sadist of the First Order.

 

And hell had no fury like this guy if you succesfully deviated from his pet storyline... not that THAT was easy, either.

 

And no, it's not like his players deliberately went out of their way to disrupt "his" game, at least not until they realized where they stood in "his" game. He was just a prick (pardon the language, but I really don't have any other applicable term for him).

 

I asked one of his players, also one of my players, "Why do you put up with this sh*#?" He just shrugged.

 

I don't get it; I'd've jettisoned the dead weight a LOOOONG time ago.

 

But, as David Lo-Pan once said, "You were not put upon this Earth to 'Get It', Mister Burton."

 

Oh well.

 

John T

 

PS - My wife just reminded me what this twit's name was (I didn't go to the effort of remembering for myself): Rex. Go fig.

[Agemegos]

Re: I made the GM cry....

 

Ah yes' date=' the "bad guys need X amount of artifacts to do bad things" plot. Our GM modeled a long term campaign after this, and after we had the first item the party deemed that my character might as well teleport it into the sun to ensure the apocolypse would never come. The look on our gm's face was so sad we reversed our decision and said, "Or we could just keep it in the base vault. Nothing can get into there anyway..."[/quote']

 

I've told this story before, but…

 

I once played in a Call of Cthulhu adventure in which we were racing the cultists to acquire the piece of a large gold disk. We had two of them, and researches indicated that the disk was required to perform a ceremony the would raise R'lyeh, waken Cthulhu, and end the world. So I melted down the two pieces we had, mixed the melt with a larger quantity of other gold, divided the mixture up into a great many small ingots, and sent them to different gold exchanges around the world to be sold anonymously.

 

Then it turned out that the cultists could make another disk, and that we would have needed a disk of our own to reverse their ritual and keep R'lyeh sunken. And so my precipitate action guaranteed out failure and the destruction of the world. The GM never could explain why the cultists had been struggling so hard to acquire the pieces of the original disk and to preserve those they had: it was their conspicuous actions that drew our attention to the disk in the first place, and all they needed to do to guarantee their victory was to melt down one piece.

 

The GM ought to have allowed for some way for us to prevent them from performing the ritual (eg. finding and killing the person who knew the requisite spell, finding where they were performing it and tossing in a few grenades) rather than depending on our performing the counter-ritual. Or he ought to have let us know before we got the first part of the disk that we were going to need the whole disk. When we believed that our enemies needed the whole disk and we didn't need any part of it, destroying the disk was an obvious move, and one that the GM ought to have been ready for.

[proditor]

Re: I made the GM cry....

 

I've told this story before, but…

 

I once played in a Call of Cthulhu adventure in which we were racing the cultists to acquire the piece of a large gold disk. We had two of them, and researches indicated that the disk was required to perform a ceremony the would raise R'lyeh, waken Cthulhu, and end the world. So I melted down the two pieces we had, mixed the melt with a larger quantity of other gold, divided the mixture up into a great many small ingots, and sent them to different gold exchanges around the world to be sold anonymously.

 

Then it turned out that the cultists could make another disk, and that we would have needed a disk of our own to reverse their ritual and keep R'lyeh sunken. And so my precipitate action guaranteed out failure and the destruction of the world. The GM never could explain why the cultists had been struggling so hard to acquire the pieces of the original disk and to preserve those they had: it was their conspicuous actions that drew our attention to the disk in the first place, and all they needed to do to guarantee their victory was to melt down one piece.

 

The GM ought to have allowed for some way for us to prevent them from performing the ritual (eg. finding and killing the person who knew the requisite spell, finding where they were performing it and tossing in a few grenades) rather than depending on our performing the counter-ritual. Or he ought to have let us know before we got the first part of the disk that we were going to need the whole disk. When we believed that our enemies needed the whole disk and we didn't need any part of it, destroying the disk was an obvious move, and one that the GM ought to have been ready for.

I laughed my butt off when I read what you did, that was inspired. I agree that you have to be ready for the curve ball from players. I only ever ran one "Get the stuff" quest, and the hook was that there was several items, none of them in of themselves capable of doing much. But the more the bad guy got, the more powerful he became. Since they had to run around stopping the villain and his henchmen, it allowed me to hit a nice middle ground. But yeah, if I had run that CoC game and you had done that, I'd have gone and smoked a cigarette, come back, awarded you extra XP and then asked for a few minutes to come up with something new.

[Maelstrom]

Re: I made the GM cry....

 

As a GM, I have often been moved to tears. My players are brutes, destroying story lines with their . . . grumble . . . intelligence and experience. Phooey.

 

OTOH, one of my favorite memories from any game I ran was this: one of my players wanted to be a hit man. I allowed it, and RP'd the meeting with his employer. The employer advanced him money and weapons, and then gave him his target: another PC. An old friend from high school (in the game), as well. For five minutes, all he could do was sputter, "You bastard," over and over.

 

Ah, music to my ears.

[DocMan]

Re: I made the GM cry....

 

Sheesh. Bad GMs!

 

Rule #1 of all plots involving multiple pieces of a relic that will allow the distruction/salvation of the world: The pieces of the relic are INDESTRUCTABLE unless all of the pieces are present and the ritual to summon/dispel the reallybigbad is in progress.

 

Never any reason to NOT make magical relics indestructable. Besides, the fact that you can't destroy the pieces separately should point the players toward the clues to the time/place of the pivotal ritual.

 

Doc

[John T]

Re: I made the GM cry....

 

OTOH, one of my favorite memories from any game I ran was this: one of my players wanted to be a hit man. I allowed it, and RP'd the meeting with his employer. The employer advanced him money and weapons, and then gave him his target: another PC. An old friend from high school (in the game), as well. For five minutes, all he could do was sputter, "You bastard," over and over.

 

Ah, music to my ears.

My favorite song, too! I've been called "Bastard" 23 times in one night by the same person. I've had players mutter "f***er" at me off and on for two hours. I've had empty Gatorade bottles and plastic cups thrown at me. I've had players walk out of the room, twice, trying to regain their composure, or recover their courage, or gather their wits.

 

I've gotten characters to take actions, based on vague prophetic visions of dire future events, that have GUARANTEED those events came to pass.

 

It's fun to be Evil!

 

John T

[Korvar]

Re: I made the GM cry....

 

But yeah' date=' if I had run that CoC game and you had done that, I'd have gone and smoked a cigarette, come back, awarded you extra XP and then asked for a few minutes to come up with something new.[/quote']

 

Actually, the first thing that came to mind for me is that although the Evil Cultists can make a new Doohickey, its not as simple as getting some cold and pouring it into a mould. They have to get Certain Other Ingredients to make their new Doohickey - enough that it would have been easier to get an existing one than make a new one.

 

Thus, the players can now rush about foiling The Making Of The New Doohickey.

[Agemegos]

Re: I made the GM cry....

 

But yeah' date=' if I had run that CoC game and you had done that, I'd have gone and smoked a cigarette, come back, awarded you extra XP and then asked for a few minutes to come up with something new.[/quote']

 

Whereas teh GM in question announced that his campaign was over because in a few weeks the villains were going to destroy the world and there was nothing we could do about it. It was a published scenario, and I think that perhaps he hadn't been enjoying running it very much.

[KA.]

Re: I made the GM cry....

 

Whereas teh GM in question announced that his campaign was over because in a few weeks the villains were going to destroy the world and there was nothing we could do about it. It was a published scenario' date=' and I think that perhaps he hadn't been enjoying running it very much.[/quote']

 

Arrrgghhh!

That, to me, is the major bane of published scenarios.

It is not that I don't like them.

I have even thought of trying to write one sometime.

But considering that they are intended for a general audience, and that the writer has no idea what a given group might do, it is amazing how often they have "do or die" moments built into them.

Moments when the players must or must not take a certain course of action, or the whole thing falls to pieces.

 

KA.

[John T]

Re: I made the GM cry....

 

I think occasionally threatening to quit can get GMs to shape up a bit. Sometimes they don't even realize that the players aren't enjoying themselves.

I've found that, all too often, actually quitting in protest is the only way to get the point across, at least to some people. Some folks out there just can't seem to accept the idea that they're doing something "wrong".

 

In other words, If you make such a "threat", be ready to follow through... or continue to play a game you're not enjoying. Your choice, surely, and not one that I ever make lightly, but I've never hesitated once the decision was made.

 

John T

[DocMan]

Re: I made the GM cry....

 

A game I was playing in a few years ago... Klytus was GM. I was playing a character named Moleculon who had complete control over the molecules of his body. Another one of the players was a guy who also GMed and tended to run VERY linear plotlines. He was playing a Supercop in an armored suit named Knocker. Another one of the players had darness powers.

 

The scenario involved a group of vilians called "The Circle" run by a guy who called himself "The Admiral". The Admiral had a large cabal of men in near-identical looking power armor to do his bidding. The Admiral was in it for the game. He liked to pit his wits against the authorities. Since he considered the authorities to be stupid, he published a list of clues for the series of robberies he intended to have his minions pull off. He'd pulled off the first one without resistance, and we'd fought his people at the second robbery, but they'd managed to get away with the item they were after.

 

So we're going over the clues, trying to figure out if the list of clues adds up to something bigger.

 

And it occurrs to me that we don't need to figure out what The Admiral's ultimate goals are, we just need to find their base and stop them.

 

So I stop the discussion and tell the group that we don't have to figure out all the clues, just the next one. We go there, fight The circle, make sure we take out one of his guys under cloak of darkness, then I take the guys place and follow the rest of them back to the base. Then we bring in the cavalary and arrest them all.

 

So Knocker asks, "Why would they take you back to their base."

 

"They'll think I'm one of them. I'll look like them."

 

"You can do that?"

 

So Moleculon uses his shapeshift power and makes his costume look like a duplicate of Knocker's Armor.

 

Knocker's player turns to Klytus and asks, "Can he do that?"

 

Klytus says, "Sure. He's got the power and it's a valid stategy."

 

So I didn't shock the GM, but I shocked one of the players by finding a way to jump right to the endgame.

 

Doc

[Chimpira]

Re: I made the GM cry....

 

Arrrgghhh!

That, to me, is the major bane of published scenarios.

It is not that I don't like them.

I have even thought of trying to write one sometime.

But considering that they are intended for a general audience, and that the writer has no idea what a given group might do, it is amazing how often they have "do or die" moments built into them.

Moments when the players must or must not take a certain course of action, or the whole thing falls to pieces.

 

KA.

One of my first times running a game was a horrible failure because of my dependency on the module. After the game I asked my usual GM at the time for some advice. He told me to read the module, then, read it again, then read it again. After that, rip all the maps out, throw the mod away and then run it. I never threw the mods away but I got his point, which was to know the mod but not feel like you are a slave to it.

[Katherine]

Re: I made the GM cry....

 

Only time I ever made the GM cry was during an rather tense hostate scenario. All but my character were captured by a mutant supremcist group called Liberation. Since my character was a mutant, the leader decided to address me directly. He charismatic, intelligent and had vision. He was also very handsome. My character, a rather impressionable teenage girl fell for him. The GM was floored when she agreed to go with him with the only concession being she wanted her former teammates released unharmed as soon as possible.

 

Ah, memories.