Harassing the GM, your stories!

[Mayday]

Everyone in my gaming group has run something at one time or another, and as most GMs know, the players never do what you expect them to do. What have they done to you? Or you done to your GM?

 

When I left for college I wrapped up the superhero storyline I'd been running against these two heroes and return on break to find that theyd re-started it, bringing back Evil Evil Blayne (the clone of Evil Blayne, a Texas redneck thug). Evil Evil Blayne was a Sherrif and the complete opposite of his clone brother Evil Blayne.

 

One of my lesser NPCs was a housewife, Evil Blayne's wife who hung out with the villains and had the superpower to make her index finger glow. (just glow, really. Blue) It transpired that while in the bathtub listening to country radio the radio fell in and electrocuted him. Sherrif Blayne suspected the wife had done him in and tried to arrest her, starting a plotline that lasted till I got home again next summer, of Sherrif Blayne and a camera crew (Channel 5 LIVE!) chasing her to the Mexican border from New York City. Several of my other NPCs were eaten by sewer monsters. One took over El Salvador (El SALVOdor) and another Costa Rica (CYBERica) declaring war on each other...

 

The other one is more of an accident and a learning experience.

 

My very first time running a game, with the same two players who had never played before was in the Dr Who system. I had this big story ready about collecting pieces of an artifact and defeating the Master etc etc. They landed on an ice world, a Time Lord and his Companion. The Time Lord rolled practical joker for a personality trait so he darts outside first. The Companion follows a minute later, a burly guy who liked to carry guns at all times, and zero sense of humor.

 

Time Lord hides around the corner of the police box and trips the Companion as he comes out then uses his last Action Point to laugh at his Companion. The Companion gets up (2 APs), pulls a gun (1 AP) and shoots the Time Lord in each kneecap, and then walks away on his remaining APs to do the adventure solo. Time Lord electrocutes himself to escape the pain while the Companion slips climbing a glacier and kills himself. Game over in ten minutes.

 

Luckily we got better.

[Blue]

If I don't harass the GM then it just isn't an official game.

 

Everybody has a GM that they refer to as "The Evil GM". He's the one that revels in your pain. He's fun to taunt. But the GM that we harass more is the one that's more easy-going. We have a long tradition of going around his adventures. It's not on purpose (usually). He sets up an encounter and we somehow find a way to circumvent it.

 

"Running anytime soon?"

"Why should I? You'll just go around my game anyway!"

[Hermit]

"Harrass the GM? No, if we does, it burns us, it hurts us, it slings us with nasty NNDs my precious..."

 

Mmmm actually, I do the GMing in my group. I don't mind when they go off track, so I don't really see it as harrasment. I gave up on completely linear stories early on.

[Syberdwarf2]

I never really had to worry about harassment as the GM. When I first started gaming, there was a tool my friends and I used; the good old "blue-lightening-bolt-of-death-from-the-sky" which as immature fledgling players playing DnD for the first time, came in handy to keep players from becoming jerks.

 

Of course, back then we didn't undersatand the advantages of not corraling your players' actions......

 

I still use it to this day, but mainly as a running gag that only the veteran gamers seem to get. Seems it was one of those anachronistic phrases that's right up there with "You're in a bar...."

[Tom McCarthy]

Harassing the guest GM

 

One of my players decided to guest GM. By his own account, he was an experienced D&D GM who had also run Champions 3rd edition adventures. His adventure turned into a multi-part mystery/rescue mission full of cryptic clues and red herrings that none of us could ever figure out. In the end, we think the bad guys were foiled and driven off, but we don't know what they'd been doing.

 

Whenever a player in one of my adventures tries to tie a clue back to that adventure, I know my mystery's going badly.

 

'Where they Swedes with Russian accents spending American dollars ?'

'Does the drunken recluse have his one room cabin boobytrapped with claymores pointing inward ?'

'Have you seen an aged Oriental martial arts master with a trained bear go by ?'

'Is it the type of weather radar that interferes with Mind Links ?'

[TheTemplar]

In the second session of the first story arc of the most recent campaign that I was involved in, the GM introduced the Supervillains team that would be the recurring thorn in our side - The Sinister Syndicate. In the very first encounter with them (which began at about 11 pm and didn't end until about 2 am) they had a mystic/mentalist character named Soul Ripper, who was a man dressed in a long Duster-type trenchcoat and wore a wide brimmed hat pulled down low over his eyes.

 

After that first encounter w/ them, the GM decided that it would be cool to tie in one of the PC's backstory's to one of the Syndicate members. Now, one PC had a twin sister, who she hadn't seen in a very very long time...so, since she was the closest thing we had to a mentalist (TK powers) he decided to make Soul Ripper her long lost sister..thinking that if he bluffed his way through it enough, he could convince us that Soul Ripper was a woman in our first fight, and that we just weren't remembering clearly because it was so late when we fought him/her.

 

Well..needless to say, he blew his Persuasion roll the first dozen or so times. SR was referred to as all sorts of colorful terms for a very long time. "The Horrible He-She", "The Androgenous Antagonist," and "The Sex-Change Artist." Finally..we started to buy it simply because the GM was so adamant that SR had been a female the entire time. Well, about three or four sessions after we unilaterally agreed that SR was and always had been devoid of Y chromosomes, the GM stops us as we're folding the Hex map and putting away the mini's and says,

"Uh..y'all (He's from 'Bama...totally seperate thread worth of material based on that alone. ) y'all remember Soul Ripper, right? Well..uh..in that first fight way back in November, she was a dude."

The uproar of laughter continued for a good 5 or 10 minutes.

 

-T

[Tech]

I have to say, Yes, I have bothered the GM a couple times when I played... don't know why, I just felt like it. Fortunately, the GM rolled with the blow. Nice GM.

 

One of my conversations went something like this:

GM: Where is your character at the moment?

Me: Mmm, I don't know.

GM: Are you with the group?

Me: No.

GM: Then where are you?

Me: You decide.

GM: Ok, you're with the group.

Me: Nah, I decided my character's walking down the street a few blocks away looking cool.

GM: Whatever!

 

[Fionan]

In a recent game I played, I could tell from the beginning of the adventure that it would wrap up in a warehouse full of vampires. I guess I was the nominal leader, so instead of following the usual trail, I almost immediately set half the group to go get a gasoline tanker truck (All they could find was propane). When they got back, we drove the tanker truck, followed by another car behind it (in case the truck didn't light), into the warehouse where it to managed to destroy all of the hench-vampires and a couple of weeks of planning on the part of the GM. Two key Vamps got out, but it was a lot better than it could've been. The GM couldn't get too upset because what we did made perfect sense.

 

Fionan.

[Catacomb]

My group loooovvveeess to jack with me so one night about a year and a half ago the actually wrote the word 'gullible' on the ceiling above my head and said it was there all night and I tried my damnedest not to look, but the problem was that it was actuallly there...punks.

[MarkusDark]

Most of the real harassment I get is during character creation or anytime a new power is wanted. I suppose it is half my fault for not being more stern but as they try to up themselves in many ways, to squeeze every last bit from their powers, and I see it as unbalancing - I just get frustrated. Especially when I hear "But X character in CKC has it!"

 

I am amazed that no matter how much I look over one of my player's character sheet, I can't find anything that he has cheesed and yet whenever he grabs, he almost always hits, whatever he squeezes goes nitey night and it took a Viper base, including a 350 pt villian (my PC's are at 270) to focus on him, with weapons specially desiged to fight him, to finally drop him to -2 stun.

[CrosshairCollie]

Originally posted by MarkusDark

I am amazed that no matter how much I look over one of my player's character sheet, I can't find anything that he has cheesed and yet whenever he grabs, he almost always hits, whatever he squeezes goes nitey night and it took a Viper base, including a 350 pt villian (my PC's are at 270) to focus on him, with weapons specially desiged to fight him, to finally drop him to -2 stun.

 

Check his dice.

[BoloOfEarth]

I played in a private eye game eons ago, in Mercenaries, Spies, and Private Eyes. The character I rolled up was mind-numbingly average and underskilled. However, when it came time to roll for money and extra stuff, I ended up independently wealthy and (oddly enough) a member of lower nobility (a British lord).

 

The GM didn't like my partner (a freelance journalist), so he decided to set us on an adventure for the British secret service. We completed the mission and left on a British ship for home. That's when the ship's captain took my character aside and told me that none of this could be reported, implying that I had to kill my partner!

 

The two player characters went out on deck so I could try and talk him into not reporting what happened. He was agreeing, but the GM didn't like that, so one of the sailors shot my partner. Blam, dead. Then pointed his gun at me.

 

I was pissed (as was the other player), so I put my own gun to my own head and said (a la Blazing Saddles) "Don't move or the Lord gets it!"

 

The GM was flabbergasted, and I said that should be the reaction of the sailor. However, he had the guy say, "You're right. One move and he gets it." So I looked the GM in the eye and said "Okay, I pull the trigger." The look on his face was priceless -- almost as priceless as mine when I rolled snake eyes for damage. Yep, the character srurvived a .38 lobotomy.

 

I decided that, from that point on, the character would refer to any new partner by the name of his first partner, just to drive the GM nuts. Unfortunately (or perhaps, fortunately) we stopped playing MSPE at that point, and I never gamed with that GM again. Too bad, it would have been a great running gag.

[Klytus]

GM's like Bolo's deserve to be harassed.

[DocMan]

A Player's Sacred Trust

 

The GM's responsibility is to challenge the players.

 

The Player's responsibility is to hit the GM with something unexpected.

 

Good players take their responsibilities seriously.

 

Doc

[Starhawk]

This sorta qualifies as a Harrass the GM story...

I was running a horror game ( Now if any of you have been in a horror game, you know that mood and atmosphere are key to a good game..Keep this in mind) that involved several ghosts, one of them with the ability to possess people. The game was coming to a climatic part of the story where a ghost had possesed a maid who then tried to kill some of the PC's. During the fight, one of the players managed to decapitated a poor possesed maid with a lucky shot with an axe. The dialog at the table went something like this..

 

GM: The maid's lifeless body crumples to the floor. Blood is everywhere.

PC 1 : I whack the body with the axe again just to make sure.

GM: Ok.... While you raise your axe to deliver another blow, the head of the maid begins to speak...You find it odd that she now is speaking perfect french! (Pause for dramatic effect)

PC 1: I find it odd that a decapitated head is speaking at all...

 

The whole table, including myself erupted in laughter. It was impossible to recreate any sort of atmosphere after that...

Just goes to show you that even when the GM thinks he/she is in total control...

[Klytus]

Starhawk, our group knows all about atmosphere. Or maybe I should say, we know how to ruin it (a lot of my stories seem to be from our Vampire games here lately....)

 

Anyway, the Storyteller (my wife) had set up this beautiful dark, creepy mood. There was this old wooden desk with a false drawer. Pulling the drawer out revealed a tangible cloud of corruption. There was something in that blackness we needed to get, but touching filed my character with cold chils, that were somehow warm and soothing to the darkness within his own soul. It was a struggle against the Beast and my own darkness to not succumb to the evil. The whole scene was dark, creepy and very well done...

 

which was instantly shattered when someone in our group called it "The Desk Drawer of Horrible Black Ickyness"

 

This all happened about 7 years ago, and my wife has still not forgiven the foul miscreant (her cousin) for shattering the mood! His characters have suffered in her games ever since.

 

Beware antagonizing the GM...

[DocMan]

I take it we're not going to mention the "Lazy Susan of Ineffable Evil"?

 

Doc

[Karma]

Our GM is pretty harrasment proof. Why? Because he simply sets out the goal, the known obsticales and lets us run with it. He of course has a few surprises, but their never so fiendish that he's spent loads of thiome on them and starts ripping out his hair if we miss them. He even fill us in OOC on what they were if we miss them so that we can all thank God we did. "I had this nifty trap that would have picked up the fifth person to enter the room and slammed him against the wall with enough force to kill him, but only 3 of you went on the mission so it never went off"

The guys so cool that he doesn't even flinch if we completely blow off a quest (and we sometimes do). How? by never creating any stats for the opposition until we take the mission (our planning sessions are always long enough that he can stat the opposition while we do it. One of the PC sayings is 'the longer we plan the harder it gets')

The only time, I think, that he felt harrassed is when he said "We should really find out who won the"'Final Battle of Good Vs Evil Vs War Vs Chaos Vs Humanity's ability to choose their own Destiny " which happens periodically in every fantasy world and which is happening to the north at this very moment (our characters had decided to stay out of it being rabidly non-aligned) so each pick a side, pick up a dice and whoever gets the highest roll thier side won"

 

And We said "Sod that, lets make new characters and Roleplay the thing out"

 

(He can handle us springing 'personal CD missions' on him, entire campaigns are a little different.)

 

Funnly enough he did not have an annurism and we actually played that mini capmaign (Chaos Won, thanks to my characters obsession with throwing the 'Holy' weapons of Good, Evil, and War into a volcano (it was Dragon Quest where Halflings can do this kind of thing and no-one thinks any worse of them.)

[lemming]

Hmm. How about the characters conspiring to exchange the brain of a border collie with one of the NPCs in the game?

 

Wilson goes with the flow pretty well I have to say.

[Klytus]

Karma,

 

What you outlined is pretty much my style of running games as well - I hate linear adventures. Trouble is, creative and/or players STILL find ways to throw a wrench in the works. Little things like ... going on a long trip in the middle of an ongoing game just as things are about to get interessting, making it so that you either have to NPC the absent players character or simply not play, as there is no way in-game to write this very important character out of the action without screwing over the rest of the party.

 

Then again, there is the whole problem of having to put everything on hold anyway because OTHER PLAYERS unexpectedly decline to show up at the last minute. This is not just GM harrassment, but it harrasses all the other players as well.

[lemming]

Something positive is a bit on topic. If you check any of the archives, be warned that it could be termed offensive to some.

[DocMan]

Originally posted by Klytus

Trouble is, creative and/or players STILL find ways to throw a wrench in the works. Little things like ... going on a long trip in the middle of an ongoing game just as things are about to get interessting, making it so that you either have to NPC the absent players character or simply not play, as there is no way in-game to write this very important character out of the action without screwing over the rest of the party.

 

Hey! I let you know weeks in advance, and the week before I was perfectly willing to keep on playing but everyone else wanted to stop. As for this weekend, I didn't schedule the Family Reunion.

 

Then again, there is the whole problem of having to put everything on hold anyway because OTHER PLAYERS unexpectedly decline to show up at the last minute. This is not just GM harrassment, but it harrasses all the other players as well.

 

Does this mean y'all didn't play last week?

 

Doc

[Fry Daddy]

Originally posted by TheTemplar

Well..needless to say, he blew his Persuasion roll the first dozen or so times. SR was referred to as all sorts of colorful terms for a very long time. "The Horrible He-She", "The Androgenous Antagonist," and "The Sex-Change Artist." Finally..we started to buy it simply because the GM was so adamant that SR had been a female the entire time. Well, about three or four sessions after we unilaterally agreed that SR was and always had been devoid of Y chromosomes, the GM stops us as we're folding the Hex map and putting away the mini's and says,

"Uh..y'all (He's from 'Bama...totally seperate thread worth of material based on that alone. ) y'all remember Soul Ripper, right? Well..uh..in that first fight way back in November, she was a dude."

The uproar of laughter continued for a good 5 or 10 minutes.

 

-T [/b]

 

Now it's my turn. The Templar and Mole were co-running a story arc that I played in (I needed a break from running) where they worked SO LONG on desigining characters. One character they used, the Templar was very proud of, was another member of the Sinister Syndicate called Bloodsport, transaformed into a character named Leo. On paper, Leo was a monster, with high DEX and SPD, and varous ways of killing you. Templar couldn't wait to throw him at us.

 

Whe he did, another character, Tempus, the swashbuckling time manipulator, made a critical hit on Leo and knocked him into GM's discretion with his first hit!

 

The look on Templar's face was priceless.....

[Killer Shrike]

I usually am the GM, and Ive had almost 2 decades of harassment from a long and semi-illustrious list of players in a plethora of games.

 

While it does piss me off on occasion, I dont mind harassment overly much. What pisses me off for real is sabotage.

 

Saboteur players are the ones that deliberately set out to ruin the game, or who dont know when 'enough is more than enough' and push a gag to the point that it destroys the game.

 

 

I brought my own Champions Universe campaign to a halt this weekend in fact after about 7 sessions. The group of players I currently have absolutely refused at every turn to actually take part in any sort of story arc. They just sat around, refused to talk to each other or any NPC, and retreated to thier little hidey holes at every opportunity. In a 4-colorish supers campaign.

 

I talked with the group several times about the conventions of the genre, the focus of the campaign, and that to move forward they would need to work together as a team. They would agree, and then the next session resist every opportunity to buddy up with any of the other characters, refuse to followup for any clues at all, and sit around with a thumb up thier rear. Their characters would show up for a supervillain fight, and then immediately leave afterwards. Even when one of the characters found something out or had relevant information THEY WOULD REFUSE TO SHARE IT WITH ONE ANOTHER. Not one of them ever bothered to investigate a crime scene, talk to an NPC, or try to predict where the villains might strike next. They were 100% reactionary.

 

I was forced to manufacture 4 different opportunities to get the group to come together and gel as a team because none of them would give any of the others any contact information, with each one resulting in a failure. They are all paranoid of thier Secret IDs being discovered, even the character that doesnt have the Secret ID disadvantage.

 

Finally in this past session, exasperated, I actually recycled the SAME EXACT scenario as the first session, with just a different location. I mean, IT WAS IDENTICAL with only a switch out of one of the villains for another. You know what happened? The EXACT same thing that happened the first time I ran it, despite the fact that the players all had agreed amongst themselves that they had really botched it the first go 'round. The players were so thick they didnt even recognize that it was the same scenario for starters until I pointed it out to them 4 hours later when I had finally had enough of this bs.

 

 

I think Im going to have to recycle this group and try for a different mix of players. This group really needs at least one player that is capable of taking action and leading. I've got 4 completely reactionary players with severe cases of either decisionitis or irresponsibility, or both.

 

In the past Ive had groups of all Type-A Leader personalities, and that could get really hairy, but it was infinitely better than the confused mass I have now.

 

Sorry to vent. Im just really aggravated by recent events.

[JohnTaber]

Hi Doc: Can I make this my tag line?

 

The GM's responsibility is to challenge the players.

 

The Player's responsibility is to hit the GM with something unexpected.

 

Good players take their responsibilities seriously.

 

- Doc

 

I love it.

 

My players are fantastic...BUT...they do like to harass me. One time in a D&D campaign they got a magical urn full of a strange powder. They did not know what it did but at least 1 and hour for the next TEN sessions one of them would ask, "So...um John...what does the urn do again?" They were hoping I would slip up and tell them. The story had a great ending when the team ended up using the urn to kill SEVERAL demons in 1 shot! It was funny...