Games gone awry

[Chimpira]

Re: Games gone awry

 

Unless of course the GM turns it into one by spoiling some players and screwing over others. And insisting the players' every thought be known to the GM? Did you come from the Big Brother school of game mastering?

 

 

I have had a GM that needed to know everything that was going on and to tell the truth, the game was pretty good. I, on the other hand, encourage my players to come up with strategies away from me. If they want to talk it over, I am more than glad to go get some air and see what they come up with.

[Yogzilla]

Re: Games gone awry

 

Four weeks. Only four weeks.

 

I once killed off all the PCs in an immortals campaign within 2hrs of it starting. Not on purpose, mind you, but the GM *still* won't let me live it down. Sigh...

 

-Yogzilla

[lazarus]

Re: Die, Customers, Die!

 

Shadowrun. Character was a former suit, on his first run. He gets spooked and shoots someone in plain daylight. Bad move.

 

Then, next session, or one later, can't remember, had a mage, who by sheer unluck got blasted to smithereens, and getting the rest of the party booked.

 

Also, I want to run an evil campaign. Just to see what the characters would do. I'd _love_ to have my game world blown up on me.

 

Laz

[lazarus]

Re: Die, Customers, Die!

 

As a GM, all I care about is being able to give the players the information they need and can get, and running the baddies and the world. If they're willing to plot in front of me, they will, otherwise, they'll pass notes.

 

I'm of the Ravenloftian style of GMming, which involves heavy use of cue cards passed to players

 

Laz

[tkdguy]

Re: Games gone awry

 

I once killed off all the PCs in an immortals campaign within 2hrs of it starting. Not on purpose, mind you, but the GM *still* won't let me live it down. Sigh...

 

-Yogzilla

 

The next time your GM harasses you about it, just face him/her and say, "In the end, there can be only one"

[Magmarock]

Re: Games gone awry

 

I have had a GM that needed to know everything that was going on and to tell the truth' date=' the game was pretty good. I, on the other hand, encourage my players to come up with strategies away from me. If they want to talk it over, I am more than glad to go get some air and see what they come up with.[/quote']

 

 

I encourage my Players to come up with strategies away from me, too. But in order for a GM to run a game omnipotently (which is the way the games are designed to be ran) they eventually must let me know what they are doing. Why? Because I am not running the game against them. I have no agenda other than to provide a fun game for all. I am not trying to "win" anything. I am also not trying to make the PCs lose.

 

This runs along the same lines as what was discussed in another thread, where a Player refused to let the GM know what spell he was casting (or what his action was).

 

Finally: There is a big difference between creating challanges and playing against the PCs. I get it that some GMs don't know the difference. But that doesn't excuse poor behavior on anyone's part. Revenge, comeuppance, just deserts, whatever you guys want to call it, it has no place in OOC gaming.

 

There are better ways to handle it and I am surprised to find I am in the minority here.

 

Mags

 

EDIT: Spelling

[sinanju]

Re: Die, Customers, Die!

 

Were your characters neutral or good-aligned? I can see a group of particularly 'grey' neutrals going off like this...

 

This was in GURPS, so no particular alignment. We started the campaign intending to be the heroes. But the cumulative frustration eventually drove us to turn on our "clients" with malice aforethought.

[sinanju]

Re: Die, Customers, Die!

 

Shadowrun. Character was a former suit' date=' on his first run. He gets spooked and shoots someone in plain daylight. Bad move.[/quote']

 

Speaking of Shadowrun, well--Cyberpunk....

 

Same gaming group. A new guy had joined the group and started a GURPS Cyberpunk game. We were assigned to find and capture a thoroughly cyber-ed out street gang leader; huge, tough, cybernetically enhanced, with lots of allies.

 

We investigated and discovered that he was living/working out of a long-abandoned mall complex. The GM clearly expected us to go in and root him out mano a mano.

 

Our first plan was surveillance. Stage Two was to park a van on each of the four corners surrounding the mall, with a spotter (and high-powered sniper rifle), and a braintape recorder and cloning equipment. The moment he shows himself, we gun him down. Probably won't kill him, but if it does...well, we braintape him, clone him, play the tape into the cloned body and turn him over to our clients in a non-cyber body.

 

Then we had a better idea. Our characters were all quite well off financially. One player asked the GM, "So this mall has been abandoned for years, right? Can we pay the back taxes on it and take ownership?"

 

We could. We did. Then we sent the COPS in to clear out the squatters. Why risk our own lily-white asses if we didn't have to?

 

That was the last we saw of the GM. (He wasn't the only new player we scared off with our aggressively munchinish, rules-lawyering style. My first attempt at GMing a game blew up in MY face, too. But I hung around anyhow and joined the dark side....)

[TheQuestionMan]

Re: Games gone awry

 

[The Next Generation] We had been playing our characters for over six real years. We have managed to aquire over 500xps. Several PCs had a unifying goal since the campaigns inception. Then the GM (and Co GM) decide that the PCs will never be able to achieve their goals.

 

My Characters whole reason for existance, his motivation for 6yrs has been the destruction of the Horrors Minions in the Black Woods, restore the Forest to it's natural state, and reclaim our homeland.

 

There has been turnover of players and new players and characters, but the goal has never changed. The party and I laid the ground work for it. Some became Knights and honourary members of other Knightly Orders. We earned favours of the Nobility of 4 Nations. We fought horrors named and unnamed. Became folk HEROes of the common people.

 

We lived and died. Loved and lost. We agonized over the nessecary murders of of sleeping mercenaries in the employ of the enemy. A campaign that we had invested so much effort to achieve our goal. Suddenly became meaningless. The agravation the frustration was ... there are no civil words to express how I felt.

 

At first I simple showed up, socialized and went off on tangents (and you know how I feel about those).

 

So last session I retired my character. The most powerful and versitile Wizard in the party. The one whose Spells they relied on to survive. The healer, social manipulator, merchant, etc... etc... And one of the party's main Warriors.

 

This did not go over at all.

 

Cheers

 

QM

[Reaverofpeace]

Re: Die, Customers, Die!

 

Magmarock, you have to understand a couple things, we didn't hide what we were doing, in fact the GM had to have known we would of gone after this. Infernous had orchestrated the slaughter and ritual canabalism of a town once. Helped someone be convinced the end of days had arrived, and I had made plans to kill all the PCs besides my loyal minion. (Who was basically mind controled to the depths) As for taking a risk, I had the demon and devil hordes of my lord ahriman scared crapless by taking an advanced Pit fiend out with one blow (I had a weapon that could once a month auto kill someone). Also he didn't care if he was killed, it was all for the glory of Arhiman.

 

Also to let you know I originally was going to play a neutral character, a Thri-kreen monk, then the GM decided he wanted to do Pirates when by his rule my character would be dead in a week. So my next character was a I don't care I wanted to try something I did when I was much younger. And Infernous was born.

 

As for leaving the game, we were going to until he gave his friend Devastator Spider Poison as an after thought. Also I make it a habbit to keep playing even if I am annoyed. So instead of hampering my character with morals he didn't have, I did what was required to complete his goal.

[Chuckg]

Re: Die, Customers, Die!

 

Footnotes:

 

* The 'once a month auto kill weapon' was the Shield of Absorption, straight from the 3.0 DM's Guide, right off the rack. It wasn't a munchkin custom job.

 

(Granted, I think the design on that thing is totally effing broken and it's one of the first items I outlaw in any D&D game that I run, but the point is, it was in the basic rules.)

 

* Ah, the Devastation Spider venom. The DC 94 Fort Save auto-killing poison that let werewolf boy solo the freaking great wyrm gold dragon and kill-steal the rest of the party all at once, that the DM's buddy just *happened* to find lying around in the bazaar somewhere. I'd forgotten about that.

 

* Yes, that was indeed 'slaughter and ritual cannibalism of a town'. It was a *very* CE game, and, well, let's just say Angelus would really have enjoyed working with us.

[Chimpira]

Re: Games gone awry

 

I encourage my Players to come up with strategies away from me, too. But in order for a GM to run a game omnipotently (which is the way the games are designed to be ran) they eventually must let me know what they are doing. Why? Because I am not running the game against them. I have no agenda other than to provide a fun game for all. I am not trying to "win" anything. I am also not trying to make the PCs lose.

 

This runs along the same lines as what was discussed in another thread, where a Player refused to let the GM know what spell he was casting (or what his action was).

 

Finally: There is a big difference between creating challanges and playing against the PCs. I get it that some GMs don't know the difference. But that doesn't excuse poor behavior on anyone's part. Revenge, comeuppance, just deserts, whatever you guys want to call it, it has no place in OOC gaming.

 

There are better ways to handle it and I am surprised to find I am in the minority here.

 

Mags

 

EDIT: Spelling

I am never playing against the players. As a GM, my one responsiblilty is to make sure everyone is having a good time, after that everything else is gravy. I have had players go out of their way to destroy everyones fun and disrupt the game just because they felt like it.(I do not care for that type of behavior either) But the scenerio that was presented before was handled in the game and the characters stuck to their alignments. If the characters went against alignment just to screw up the game, I would be behind you 100 percent. They were playing a game that they did not like and decided to find a way that was totally in character to end it.

[Magmarock]

Re: Games gone awry

 

They were playing a game that they did not like and decided to find a way that was totally in character to end it.

 

Which is perfectly ok, without all the OOC bulls**t behind it.

 

The real question is, were the Players going to continue playing with the same group afterward? If yes, then there is no problem as long as all is copacetic between the Playrers and the GM. I got the impression that Chuck and his friend were planning a destroy and run maneuver- ruining the game as an OOC coup de grace on the GM before taking off. If I misunderstood this, then I apologize.

 

I just feel that OOC problems should be handled OOC... and with a fair measure of decorum.

 

Mags

[JeffreyWKramer]

Re: Games gone awry

 

I've been in campaigns in which the game went awry due to bizarre or incredibly stupid PC behavior. I've also been in games in which the GM was railroading the players so much that they might as well not have shown up, and had their parts run by NPCs. Either can suck.

 

I try to avoid obvious railroading, and I like to be surprised when the players come up with innovative ways around situations I've set up. At the same time, I don't tend to enjoy working up a scenario and then having the players do something completely illogical which trashes the scenario. I've found a happy medium by generally not over-scripting my adventures when playing with experienced RPers, so I can more easily go with the flow. I set up situations, try to anticipate likely possibilities, then go with the flow, improvising as necessary.

 

When I run a game, I see it as my job to make a game in which everyone has a good time, and which in which the PCs are the main characters. I think the problem with some GMs - particularly the railroaders - is that it's more important to them to tell the story they want to tell - preferably exactly the way they want to tell it, with minimal actual input from the players - than it is for them to work with the PCs to mutually create a story. In that situation, the characters are mostly incidental - the story is something that happens to them more than being about them - and I don't blame players for disliking that. When I feel railroaded, I tend to get pissed, especially if the railroading seems arbitrary or requires that my character act out of character or behave as a complete moron in order for the plot to progress. I do understand that it can be hard to design challenging situations for characters with diverse and amazing powers - I'm sure everyone here who has been a GM can think of times when your mystery plot got hosed by intelligent use of telepathy, or when your dangerous trap failed because you forgot one of the PCs knew the Fly spell - but that's no excuse to jerk the players around. Learn from your error and move on.

 

When I play, I try to make characters that are appropriate to the game/campaign's genre, tone and goals, and play my characters in a manne which respects the genre, tone and goals. I avoid playing in campaigns/games in which I don't like one or more of those elements. That is one of the biggest reasons some games go awry, really - the players don't like or don't play in a manner appropriate for the game. That's what went wrong in the example at the start of the thread, with someone breaking Icicle's neck. The player in question likes to kill stuff, and apparently likes playing psychopaths. That works in four-color superhero campaigns about as well as playing a purple-skinned, flying alien would work in a western campaign.

[Magmarock]

Re: Games gone awry

 

Sometimes the D&D module writers don't anticipate what they are putting into the adventure might derail the game.

 

In my most recent session of Epic D&D (well not quite epic yet, we are all only 16th level) my rogue failed to see three magical traps before they were set off- and then proceeded to fail all of her saving throws one by one. The Sigils were of Pain, Dischord (anger) and Hopelessness. The last two Sigils were with a 60' radius and most of the PCs failed the roll on Dischord, while my rogue was the only one to fail Hopelessness save. So she was in pain, pissed off and completely overwhelmed with the feeling that we would not persevere, no matter what we tried.

 

We had fun roleplaying this out, by the way, lots of bickering between the PCs as they picked on each other's adventuring and fighting styles and during this we had to fight two Shield Guardians (I think that's what they were called). At one point, one of the other PCs yelled at my PC and she burst into tears!

 

So there I was, trying to Disable the Trap (Sigil of Hopelessness) before anyone else tripped it again, standing far ahead of the group and down the stairwell with a rope tied around my waist (they wanted to be able to pull me back if I failed and tried to lay down to die or something), bawling my eyes out (and cracking up the Players OOC). She didn't succeed, and one of the other PCs had to Dispell the Sigil before we could go on with the adventure.

 

But roleplaying all that out took about 2 1/2 hours out of the session, which is something the game designers didn't count on, I'll wager. What fun, though!

 

Mags

[pinecone]

Re: Games gone awry

 

My worst WTF moment was a basic senario..."PRIMUS has a dingus, if the bad guys get the dingus ,bad stuff happens" So they decide to steal the dingus...so far still normal....during the raid the Gleefully kill at least 5 PRIMUS agents....I mean they Happy when the Helecopter blew up...I still have No idea how they thought they were going to come out of that..."So you raid the convoy, steal the dingus and kill some agents....now what?".......

[Alex Raven]

Re: Games gone awry

 

Kawanga Kid...I was playing Son of Satan in Mark's Champs game at Pacificon. Do you remember when Tang made all of the copies of Mark's badge on the color copier? We were all paranoid because there were five "Mark's" sitting at the table out of 12 players. I think I still have that badge some place...

[Blue]

Re: Games gone awry

 

Did I mention that hunger derails games?

 

We've got one guy in the group who is hypoglycemic and consumes large quantities of food. Aside from that fact that he's skinny as a rail (the bastard!), he also experiences an amazing level of impatience and impetuousness when he's hungry.

 

So most games he brings several meals. But on the occasion he runs out of food before the dinner break, he'll do insane things that derail the session. Stuff like firing into a crowd or throwing a grenade at an enemy who is tangled up with other players.

 

Has yet to kill any players, but he's done damage nearly every time this happens.

[John T]

Re: Games gone awry

 

In character, I've handed someone ("X") we were trying to rescue TO the villain ("Y") we were trying to rescue him FROM, because we hadn't realized that "Y" WAS the villain...

 

I've made legitimate (no OOC knowledge) leaps of logic 1/4 of the way into a scenario that jumped the group right to the end LOOOOONNG before the opposition got there...

 

I've had players attack their own teammates, vaporize critical NPCs and blast national landmarks because I pressed their paranoia buttons one too many times...

 

Fun stuff.

 

John T

[travellerne]

Re: Games gone awry

 

"Ah, but I checked the _Book of Vile Darkness_. See these rules for 'aspected' areas?"

...

"Several hundred is a manageable number, if we fight like evil backstabbing bastards and not like paladins."

...

"Was that a rhetorical question? We're Chaotic Evil, and right now they just became worth more to us dead than they ever were while alive."

...

"A permanent, undispellable planar gate to Ahriman's realm, directly underneath the capital city of the world's largest empire. Ladies and gentlemen, civilization as you know it has ended."

 

Man, I wish I had some players that diabolically clever! Really.

TNE

PS: Actually I've had a few but that was for a Star Trek game.

[travellerne]

Re: Die, Customers, Die!

 

Then we had a better idea. Our characters were all quite well off financially. One player asked the GM, "So this mall has been abandoned for years, right? Can we pay the back taxes on it and take ownership?"

 

We could. We did. Then we sent the COPS in to clear out the squatters. Why risk our own lily-white asses if we didn't have to?

 

Brilliant! That's true cyberpunk thinking at it's best.

[KawangaKid]

Re: Games gone awry

 

Kawanga Kid...I was playing Son of Satan in Mark's Champs game at Pacificon. Do you remember when Tang made all of the copies of Mark's badge on the color copier? We were all paranoid because there were five "Mark's" sitting at the table out of 12 players. I think I still have that badge some place...

 

Oh crikey. I remember that one now...

[Guest Worldmaker]

Re: Games gone awry

 

So' date=' Chuck, go ahead and get mad, but I know that somewhere under all the belligerence, huffing and puffing and chest-thumping there is a [i']human being [/i]who knows what I am saying is true.

 

Objection... assumes facts not in evidence.

[Guest Worldmaker]

Re: Games gone awry

 

Now' date=' a DM who *is* playing fair with me... my God, in the campaign I'm currently in, I've sent the DM notes helping him debug his scenario even as I'm playing it, to the point of giving him [i']tactical advice on how to best counter my character[/i]. This is because a DM who plays straight with me deserves the best I can give him.

 

And a DM who fucks me over deserves the worst I can give him, and if I'm inspired enough, my worst can be quite worse indeed.

 

How utterly arrogant of you. If a DM is "fair" (a term for which only your personal definition applies, I'm sure), you "reward" him by assuming he needs your advice, wants your advice, and will take your advice. No doubt if he refuses your advice (by, for example, telling you to sit down, shut up, and let him run his own goddamned game), he's suddenly being "unfair".

 

Had you pulled your shit in my game, I would have tossed you out of my house ass-first and your name would have been mud in the local gaming community.

[Guest Worldmaker]

Re: Games gone awry

 

So in your world the GM can do anything he wants, treat the players like dirt, and nothing would be wrong? But if a player does anything but meekly accept it or run away he's suddenly Beyond The Pale?

 

Looks like a double standard to me.

 

Oh, bullshit.

 

She's not saying "A GM can do anything he wants and all a player can do is take it". She's saying "Treating another human being like shit is a bad thing to do, and you two treated this guy like shit."

 

Climb down off your high-horse, sport. You have no standing to act morally superior.