Harassing the GM, your stories!

[Nucleon]

Poor Killer Shrike...

 

By the Stars, Shrike. Are you sure these people are even alive?

 

Nucleon is torn between the tragedy, and the sheer comedy of your post.

 

The first thing that you ask is this; Did they had any input in the setting of this game? They seems more like Shadowrun players.

 

Have they ever played as a team?

 

Does anybody in this group you would define as a potential leader/roleplayer? If so, I would humbly suggest you prepare an intrigue around him/her, with his/her consent and help.

 

In the starting phases of the campaign, reward roleplay and whatever you like as a player reaction with ½pts. They will catch the drift and will going to do it for fun's sake later.

 

Well, if nothing works, I see no reason for that particular campaign to continue. As a GM, you must be able to get at least some inspiration, or else it's a chore, really.

 

Geez.

 

(And I hope those "aggravating recent events" are well under control, Killer Shrike. Good Luck anyway.)

[Killer Shrike]

Re: Nucleon:

 

Yes, they had input, yes I explained the conventions of the genre, yes they have all collected comix at one point or another, yes they can all ROLEPLAY thier characters well (and generally do). What they cant do is take charge and move forward collectively. The group is missing any person with even rudimentary goal-accomplishment and leadership skills. So they get nothing done.

 

Gah.

 

The amazing thing is they all claim to be having fun. Im sitting there like, "having fun doing what? you didnt accomplish even the most basic shreds of anything worthwhile".

 

Ther group has had some membership shifts and has not gelled together under its recent incarnation. Its time to recycle players.

[Enforcer84]

Too bad. Actually the first game I was in since college was like that, we had a core group of good fellows and three guys who needed to go.

[Mutant for Hire]

We never really harrassed our GM in the Werewolf game I was in once except on a contradiction of goals. He had gone to all this effort to create an epic storyline where we battled to help save the world from the powers of darkness, and we were all playing werewolf soap opera between ourselves. We were having a blast except we had to be reminded to save the world now and then...

[Stargazer]

we harrased Nucleon ALOT!!! in our old Shadowrun games:D

boy those were great:)

in champions we try a bit to go with the GM (still Nucleon)...even tho sometimes its fun to see him sweat and see is high blood pressure go

but he knows us well!! (weve known each other for about 15 years) and sometimes he will make us think we've harassed him when in fact he made us do exactly what he wanted:) sneaky little cosmic god he is

[fauxgemini]

Shrike,

 

Oh how to well do I know your problem. This is more of a General RPing issue. But I have many of the "But my character does something else" players in my games.

 

Thankfully enough there usually tends to be at least 1 or 2 motivated PCs that gel the group.

 

It's funny:

 

Imagine running a dark supers game once at a con. Called it "Syndicate Inc." And here is this one player who went out of his way to contact me before the con to design a character. Get all his detials worked out. Etc.

 

Game starts. PC's get attacked by a rival faction of they're employer. (Some drug ring gone bad.) and a combat happens. While the pcs are dealing with the 12 zombies that showed up...he..he crosses the street, goes up the fire escape and proceeds to look around for anything 'interesting'. All in combat rounds, all while the PC are getting in a real beauty of a fight. And he gets pissy faced when the group tells him off about what he's doing.

 

I asked him what would be interesting and he said. "You know, like some new guns or stuff..." *blink* *blink*

 

His character has the BEST DAMN WEAPONS/Skills in the game world! He was friggen Jet Li with uzis. Sheeze.

[Smeazel]

Originally posted by Killer Shrike

I've got 4 completely reactionary players with severe cases of either decisionitis or irresponsibility, or both.

 

Yeah, I've had players like that - although fortunately not an entire group of them at once. I think the most extreme example was a D&D campaign I ran my freshman year in college. There were other players off and on at various points, but two main players who were in the entire campaign. One of the two constant players not only barely participated, but actually frequently fell asleep during the game. He claimed to be having fun - and I guess if he was really that bored he would have just stopped showing up - but he did so little that he couldn't even keep himself awake. Fortunately, the other player was motivated and proactive enough for the both of them, but... sheez.

[White Heat]

Originally posted by Smeazel

Snip... One of the two constant players not only barely participated, but actually frequently fell asleep during the game. He claimed to be having fun - and I guess if he was really that bored he would have just stopped showing up - but he did so little that he couldn't even keep himself awake. Fortunately, the other player was motivated and proactive enough for the both of them, but... sheez.

 

Yeah. I've had players like that. Still have one, in fact. By the way, I'm the one who's married to Klytus.

 

My cousin, the one who dubbed my false desk drawer the Drawer Of Horrible Black Ickyness at least took active roles in whatever game he was currently in.

 

The one who springs to mind from Smeazel's post has been an irritation for years. She's the one who can't be trusted with any clue the significance of which she does not immediately grasp, because if she sees no point to it, she'll just forget that you gave it to her. She derailed an entire Vampire campaign for weeks once because she failed to report that someone they were looking for was thoroughly Jewish -- they never thought to check the Synagogue without that knowledge.

 

While she doesn't sleep during the games, I learned long ago to hide the newspaper and the magazines before she gets there, because otherwise she'll just collect one and start reading -- in the middle of a game! AAUUGGHH! And yet, she claims she's having fun. I dunno, guys, what do you think?

 

She thinks I'm harrassing her, however, because every now and then I'll attempt to give her a G.O.D clue, and dang it if she doesn't every time tell me there's some reason why her character would not choose to do whatever it was I suggested to her.

 

Yeah. Pardon the rant. I'm better now.

[DocMan]

Um... never depend on your players to do something expected?

 

Of course, some players do take GM overrides in better graces than others. I guess it depends on your point of view. I know that some players feel that the GM is taking over playing their character. At least the player in question does. I tend to look at it this way: If G.O.D. wants my player to do something other that what I had in mind, I've just stumbled into a MAJOR IMPORTANT PLOT POINT. To not go with G.O.D.'s flow is to suck up failure like a sponge.

 

Of course, once I understand what G.O.D. wants me to do, I reserve the right to spin my characters reactions as I believe most appropriate.

 

Doc

[jeep_the_great]

As the only GM it seems in a 25 mile radius, I have had the misfourtune to have many a games screwed up by players. The worst by far was a game of Space 1889. I had a master criminal who was running from the police at the start of the game. He sent his lacky ahead to try to find a escape route. The lacky returned with the tickets, and personal effects of an elderly man. It turned out to be the and old friend of one of the other player characters. As the master criminal boarded the either flyer to Mars, the plan was to allow the players to have about 10 minutes to meet the other characters and fome a relationship (since they would be adventuring together). When the criminal said his name (using the doctors ID), the other player spoke up as saying she knew the doctor but he did not look like him. Instead of saying they have the same name and that this thing happens often, the master criminal decided to make the female character think that she did not remember him as well as she thought and tried to convince the others that she was an imposeture. A short 10 minute get together turned into a 3 hour adventure putting the "doctor" against the other characters. He even treathen to blow up the ship so the captain turned it around in mid flight and returned to Earth. He set the bomb but because of the rush he was in it did not go off. He was arrested as so as the ship landed and they never went to Mars again (because i have not ran that systme since, even though many of my player like it and want me to.)

[Stargazer]

this one is actualy the gm doing it to us:)...

 

in a shadowrun game a few years back...

our team gets a message that a Mr.Johson wants to meet us in the usual restaurant/cafe type place...

we go of course and when he gives us the run..we refuse..thinking its way more then we want to handle..so the Jonson gracefully send sus on our way while calling for team 2 (NPC's) as we walk to the elevator, we see team 2...our most fierce competitors...(one of them did a mean job on my character once, thnx doc wagon i was still alive)

 

so being the proud idiots that we are we decide to tail them just to put some sticks in theire wheels...

 

well we ended up doing the run , 1: for the other team..who was very happy that we took most of the damage and trouble for them, and 2: for free!!!!!! that damm Nucleon manage to con us into doing it!!! the sly little devil...

 

only after the session did we all realize that he manipulated us...but i think we got our revenge a few times and many different games after

[TheTemplar]

Originally posted by Fry Daddy

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.....

 

ROFL! Ah, a BIG thanks to you for bringning that one up, FD. Actually, from that very same campaign that I ran while FD was a player, an even funnier incident (at least I think it was) occured.

The Villain group, based on the 12 signs of the zodiac, were led by a powerful mentalist named Ophiuchus, the Serpentine 13th symbol of the Zodiac. He was roughly 1200 pts of Ubermenschy evilness. However, he only had a 20 STR. During one of the big climactic fights between the Zodiacs and the PC's, Ophiuchus rose from the throne on his dais over the colosseum-like arena where the PC's had been fighting for his entertainment. He pointed out over the battlefield and ordered the other zodiacs to attack. However, at that exact moment, the aforementioned time manipulating Tempus hit Ophiuchus with his Entangle. It's actually a localized Time Stop around the target character, and therefore takes no damage from attacks and was, as I recall, a 6d6 or 7d6 entangle. He got about 8 or 9 Body on it, with a 7 defense. ROLLING MAXIMUM DAMAGE on 4d6, I would have been able to take off 1 Body per phase. Needless to say, the sight of this very pompous supervillain frozen, pointing off into the distance was enough to put everyone (even me) in stitches. But does the harassment stop there?? NOOOOOOO.......

The heroes didn't win that fight, and were unceremoniously thrown back into their cells. Later, after he had finally managed to break out of the Time Stop, Ophiuchus went down to the detention area (this is all happening on a super large space vessel..the arena was more or less a holodeck.) to taunt them for losing. However, no sooner had he entered the room when one of the players (I can't remember if it was Mole or Tempus) stood and said, "Ophiuchus! Salute!" and all the players stood in their cell and pointed off into the distance and froze.

Yeah..they thought it was pretty funny until Ophiuchus's enraged went off and they all started bleeding out the nose from repeated bombardments of 10d6 EGO attacks.

 

Hehehe....the GM always laughs last.

 

-T

[Mayday]

We had a girl who claimed to enjoy herself but would always pick up a book or fall asleep the second she put her dice down. She didnt even wait to see if she'd hit or not, and Murphy's Law, she never missed so we'd have to wake her up again to roll damage.

 

I think that she was one of those Social category people, as opposed to an Achiever, Killer or Explorer (Bartle's Quotient) but it was very annoying at the time.

 

At one time the group I was in, a pickup game of random players, we turned out to have no obvious leader. I'd considered my character too young and inexperienced for a leadership position but made the change to her confidence levels and she turned into a very good team leader I'm told.

 

Maybe the team of 4 reactionaries, it isnt the players but that they are locked into a character mindset and just need to reboot their character concept slightly. Batman started out the Loner, but he also led the Justice League.

[Tim]

In a Forgoten Realms Campaign I was in when the reboot from 1st to 2nd ed. happened. The GM decided to run us thru the Shadowdale trilogy of modules based on the books.

 

During the Battle of Shadowdale, One character scores multiple criticals against Banes avatar. The GM ignores this, to let the senario run its course.

Elminster fights him and disappears as is supposed to. The Mage PCs (including one with Spellfire) are arrested for killing him.

Here is were it went completely off track. The group's Paladin (me) will not help break the others out of Jail. The group's thief is tired of losing Horses (we had lost about 5 sets so far in the campaign) so also does not go in. We both say we will meet them downstream (they are to take a boat) with the horses.

Needless to say, the breakout attempt fails. The mage PCs are not released (they are supposed to be). The next morning the mage PCs are put on trial, and one gets the bright idea to cast a low level fireball to disrupt the trial and escape. The GM rolls on the wild magic table and gets MAX Effect. The mage then goes on and is the ONLY one that fails his save and dies. The spellfire weilder heals Shadowdales mayor (who was in neg hp, dying but not dead) then holds him hostage.

The game paused at this point as there was no way the PCs could escape from the entire town. The GM took 3 hours of brainwracking to figure out how to get us out of this mess.

 

TimS.

[oberon]

I have fallen asleep in several sessions over the years. Not because I was bored, but because I was extremely tired

 

My groups have never really had a problem with that. Unfortunately, I have developed a reputation for characters suddenly becoming temporarily insane when I'm playing tired. Most memorable was 1st ed. AD&D, playing a gnomish thief/illusionist. We'd vanquished the Big Bad, and our reward was identical items, one good and one bad, we had to figure out which was which.

My character had a box with two identical looking potions. Everyone else had gone before me, and finally figured out which items to take (after about 45 minutes) and I was very tired and a little bored at this point. My character doesn't bother trying to figure which is which, but mixes them both and downs the concoction (one was poison, the other spider climbing).

The GM decides to teach me a lesson, and rolls on the potion miscibility table and, lo and behold, my thief ended up with permanent spider climb

I was ROFL, while everyone else was looking at the dice in disbelief.

 

 

oberon

[Enforcer84]

I tried that trick once, got a blue skinned ranger with a 23 strength. It was cool. I was a watered down version of the incredible hulk. The look on the GM's face when I made the roll was priceles...

[lemming]

Sam Bell had a bunch of random magic pools that could reward you greatly, but worse and worse side effects could happen.

 

I think my pixie wound up being an invisible, 8' giant with heat vision. (And a bunch of other wierdness)

 

Better than the 1/2 giant that dissolved into a pool of goo

[DocMan]

Re: Harassing the GM, your stories!

 

Better than the 1/2 giant that dissolved into a pool of goo

 

Animate goo or just... goo.

 

Doc

[Chaosliege]

Re: Harassing the GM, your stories!

 

I was running a D&D game for some friends of mine a couple of years ago and as an inexperienced GM, I was trying to get the players to go to a specific location. I had an encounter set up at a farmhouse and made several attempts to get the players to go to it of thier own free will. No matter what I did, the players just didn't seem interested in the farmhouse. I finaly became so frustrated that I just said "If you dont go to the 'F'ing farmhouse, the game is over". Since then it has become a running gag that sometimes you just have to say "Go to the 'F'ing farmhouse".

[Chuckg]

Re: Harassing the GM, your stories!

 

OK, here's a story I told before in another post, reprinted...

 

These are Bad Players.

 

Well, there was the time I was DM'ing a Shadowrun game:

 

OK, the party numbered about four people -- rigger, street sam, physical adept, and mage (voudoun style). Their mission was fairly simple... hijack an incoming load of drugs. They'd managed to find out exactly when and where it was coming in, and chose to try and lift the crate out of the bonded area of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (Sea-Tac).

 

So, they go get a van, slap the logos of one of the many service & supply companies that are going in and out of the back gates of Sea-Tac all the time, and put on some blue overalls w/ nametags. Just another bunch of janitors or cargo handlers or what have you in on their way to work.

 

However, they don't get any work orders or ID's forged.

 

So, the gate guard stops them and asks them for some ID, and they have nothing. Now, I was RP'ing the gate guard as fairly lax and a bit sleazy... all they'd have had to do was offer to slip him 50 nuyen or so, or just make a good fast-talk roll, and no problem.

 

But the rigger's player gets way impatient, and there hasn't been any action that entire session -- so as soon as he sees the guard is suspicious, he crashes the van through the gate.

 

And then one of the two gunsels tries to cap the guard by firing out the van's back door, before he can call in a security breach. Well, the guard was wounded, but not dead.

 

And thus, a simple gate guard encounter has become major security breach in progress, shots fired, officer down -- at a major international airport in Earth-Shadowrun, in 2062.

 

So, a couple blocks into the airport complex, they meet the fast response squads. Road's blocked several ways, cops kneeling down behind the hoods of their squad cars w/ long guns from the trunk, the usual. *And* the tires on their van get shot out.

 

The rigger's bright idea at this point?

 

To come out of the van holding up a piece of equipment (it was actually his remote-control rigger deck) and yell "BACK OFF! I'VE GOT A BOMB!"

 

So, in addition to 'site security breach in progress', 'shots fired', and 'officer down', we add 'bomb threat' and 'terrorist attack in progress'.

 

I did mention we were at an airport, right?

 

Anyway, the next thing they see after this, as they're busy running down the street w/ the airport cops following them nervously, is the Knight Errant Firewatch team that Sea-Tac keeps handy as their "big gun" anti-terrorist incident team. For those who don't play Shadowrun, Knight Errant is a subsidiary of the megacorp Ares Macrotech, and the leading private security provider in the world. And by 'leading', I mean 'they're a private corporate army able to compare in size, firepower, and sophistication to some leading First World military forces'. Screwing with the KE Firewatch boys is about as productive as picking a fight with SEAL Team 6, and for about the same reason.

 

Now, granted, it might be argued that I was a 'bad DM'. I've wondered that myself about this incident at times. But really... what the heck can I do? They're basically kamikaze-charging an entire damned major airport, in a cyberpunk setting, in a timeline where they've already had at least a *dozen* major terrorist incidents, each one worse than 9/11.

 

IOW, site security for "essential locations" comes in only two varieties -- nonexistent and massively paranoid.

 

And by pretty much abusing the privilege and fudging die rolls, I manage to capture every single member of the party alive -- as opposed to Knight Errant's usual policy of "Fire a warning magazine, reload, burn the entire clip again, reload again, shoot the corpses a few more times just for the hell of it, and then wait for somebody to invent the 'Speak With Dead' spell."

 

With the entire party in the hoosegow facing 20+ years, I figured that the best I could salvage right now is to change the campaign from 'free-lance shadowrunners' to 'Suicide Squad 2062'.

 

The players all quit on me. I was a 'killer DM', you see.

 

*sigh*

 

They. Tried. To. Kamikaze. An. Entire. Airport.

 

*sigh*

[Chuckg]

Re: Harassing the GM, your stories!

 

Now these are Good Players.

 

Last week, in my Chicago Champions game, I put Gargantua up against a team of 4 350-pointers.

 

A teleporting girl with shadow powers, a sort of iron fist-like martial artist/brick, a beginning powersuit guy, and a stretching guy.

 

I thought I'd have an epic clash of titans here, a multi-turn battle that they just baaareyl survive with teamwork. (It is Gargantua, after all)

 

They kicked his ass by Segment 10, Turn 1.

 

You see...

 

... ok, between blinding him with the darkness field, being lucky enough to have him lose his balance, an entangle to just use up a half-phase action, the stretchy guy *crawling inside his ear to bang on his eardrum*, and everything else, he was taking STUN from places he didn't even know he had places.

 

But the piece de resistance was the Fastball Special done with our martial artist/brick, by the powersuit guy.

 

You see, he tells me he's doing a called shot.

 

I ask where, expecting something like 'Vitals' or maybe 'Head'. (After all, Gargantua has a -10 DCV size modifier)

 

Instead, I am told...

 

... well, let's just say that Gargantua had to say goodbye to his two best friends, and I don't mean the ones in the Winnebago.

 

A Pushed Flying Haymaker, called shot, to the dangly bits.

 

By a STR 50 martial artist.

 

*wince*

 

Gargantua took 106 STUN (x2 STUN for location, remember) and was knocked so far into -STUN that his next Recovery was at the "GM's Discretion" line of the chart.

 

(The part where everybody else had found a way to take a big piece out of him first definitely didn't help him any either.)

 

It was... well, I expected clash of titans, I got comedy issue. It was totally unexpected. This game has never yet had a session go anywhere remotely near where I expected.

 

Fun, though.

[lemming]

Re: Harassing the GM, your stories!

 

Animate goo or just... goo.

Just goo. That's when I wrote up the pixie.

[Houston GM]

Re: Harassing the GM, your stories!

 

What moral quandry?

 

One of my GMs liked to fabricate complex moral quandries for our group. He wanted to see us feel a lot of angst as we debated hideously complex ethical issues.

 

However, he failed to realize that a situation that was a moral quandry for him (as a person) might not be one for our characters.

 

The GM (roleplaying one of his angst-ridden NPCs) was explaining one of these "morally gray" situations to us:

 

A demon had reborn itself into the world in the form of a newborn child. Until it matured, it had none of its demon powers. It had none of its demon intellect. It remembered nothing of its demonic life.

 

He was describing this situation to my character, a paladin of Horus.

 

GM (as a priest of Thoth): "I don't know what we should do with this child!"

 

Me: "That's easy. It detects as evil. I'll kill it."

 

GM: "But it's an innocent child."

 

Me: "No. It's an immensely powerful demon masquerading as an innocent child."

 

GM: "You're going to kill a child that has done nothing wrong?"

 

Me: "You'd prefer to release a demon that was destined to do great evil into the world?"

[DocMan]

Re: Harassing the GM, your stories!

 

Just goo. That's when I wrote up the pixie.

 

I can see that. Animated goo would be a roleplaying challenge. Inanimate goo, somewhat less so.

 

Doc

[bubba smith]

Re: Harassing the GM, your stories!

 

intieging stories here